Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:It is Tuesday, 05/27/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome. The UltraDome is the physical place, the first
Speaker 3:Of hundreds.
Speaker 2:We're still in the temple of technology,
Speaker 1:the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 2:We have a new studio. We'll be taking you
Speaker 1:white suits? Oh, because
Speaker 2:the market's ripping. Bitcoin's above a hundred and 10 k. We're so back. I never dented it for a second. Good.
Speaker 2:Massive consumer confidence speed too. Consumers, undefeated. Undefeated. Massive day. We have a bunch of great guests.
Speaker 2:We're the Midas list drop. We got Brad Gerstner coming on the show. Hopefully, he's just taking a massive victory lap. Yeah. No.
Speaker 2:He's I'm kidding. He's here to talk about Invest America and and and some of the the the policy work he's been doing. We got AJ Piplica and Zach Shore from Hermes coming on to talk about how they're flying their first plane. They're going hypersonic soon. Delian's coming on to talk about the EnduroSat investment.
Speaker 2:And then we got a lightning round with the Thiel Fellowship. We got something like six or seven, eight, nine, 10 90 percent the fellows. We got a lot of them. Yeah. They're coming back to back to back back.
Speaker 2:So that should be a lot of fun. But let's show off the gong. Should hit it? Yeah. I think you should hit
Speaker 4:it.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Let's hit the gong. This is the reveal. We saw you warming up.
Speaker 1:Working on the form.
Speaker 2:We're hit it. Good? Hit it. Feels great. Whoo.
Speaker 2:Whoo.
Speaker 1:It's powerful set.
Speaker 2:It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:It's great to be standing up Yep.
Speaker 5:On the set.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. It's great. Oh, it it just rings so nicely for so long. It's just the best.
Speaker 2:It's just the best. And, of course, that we wouldn't we wouldn't be able to have this studio. We wouldn't be able to have this gong without ramp. Time is money. Save both.
Speaker 2:These these corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to
Speaker 1:get started. Place.
Speaker 2:Thank you to Ramp. The Midas list has dropped, and it's big news. We wanna take you through a couple of people. Alfred Lin at the top. Reid Hoffman, number two.
Speaker 2:Peter Thiel, number three. Then Neil Shen, former Sequoia now at Hongshan. Number four, Mickey Malka. Number five at Ribbit Capital, famous for his Coinbase investment. Vinod Khosla at six.
Speaker 2:Doug Leone
Speaker 1:at Doug.
Speaker 2:Seven. Hemant over at General Catalyst is at eight. Fred Wilson at nine. Chris Dixon at ten. We got him coming on the show tomorrow.
Speaker 2:We're hitting we're hitting most of these people. We should do it at Midas Midas List day. Have them all on. I'm sure they're not busy.
Speaker 1:Let's do
Speaker 2:it. Let's do it.
Speaker 1:A hundred. I mean, we've been talking about forever now, trying to break the Guinness World Record for most VCs on a single podcast. Yes. We believe that we'll safely break it at a hundred. And so why not just do the Midas list?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Getting them all. Like you said, getting them all on on one show
Speaker 2:We should.
Speaker 1:Consecutively would be totally, probably no problem. Their EAs would be on overtime.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. But You you be chaos.
Speaker 1:They're the here the unsung heroes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You got Mike Spicer, Sutter Hill for Snowflake at eleven. Roloff made at Sequoia, made thirteenth. Who else is an interesting well, we we have back to back to back on '17, '18, '19 in terms of TVPN appearance. We got Keith Ruboy at seventeen, Marc Andreessen at eighteen, Trey Stevens at nineteen.
Speaker 2:There we go. They've all been on TVPN.
Speaker 1:Maybe Yeah. We should just only read off the ones
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Real we we should issue
Speaker 2:Who are these other people? There are no names if they haven't been on the show yet. They need to they need to really make a name for themselves. They're coming on the show. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They do.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we we should do some timeline. Was there any other news that's that that that broke? It was kind of a quiet weekend with the Memorial Day. Obviously, there were lots of folks at the Monaco GP Yep. The f one race.
Speaker 2:But most of the venture capitalists, of course, were at the Coca Cola six hundred Yep. Because there's been a major vibe shift.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Major vibe shift. So NASCAR is in f one's kinda out, but you're still into the f one stuff because you got that European flare.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. European flare, John. Couldn't have said it better myself. But, yeah, the the whole shift towards, the monster truck rallies Yes.
Speaker 1:All that. It's impossible to get a box at a monster truck rally Yep. 500 miles from San Francisco.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:It's every single one gets taken up by different SaaS vendors.
Speaker 2:I mean, they're like, was joking about the Coca Cola six hundred being a big hotspot for tech. But I think the more I posted about it, people kept texting me and being like, Okay,
Speaker 1:I Well, I saw somebody watch, and they were like, Okay,
Speaker 2:I get it. Yeah, got a couple of those. They're like, Okay, yeah, you got me. It's actually pretty entertaining. I'm into the race drama now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay, I'm looking out
Speaker 1:I'm bought in.
Speaker 2:Looking at the design features Yeah, team. And the different cars. Yeah, there's a team. But I have it on good authority that a major, major company will Intac will be going into NASCAR. And I'm very excited about that.
Speaker 2:Yes. It should be good. Good authority. So I do think that more people will be going to NASCAR races. This will be a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up some posts. Let's run through some timeline while we wait for Brad to hop on. He's coming on 11.
Speaker 1:I mean, big the big story is really Brad at number 40. Oh, yeah. Is a disgrace. And clearly, you know, very clearly, the Forbes brand will be trying to dig themselves out of the hole
Speaker 2:I agree. For years. I agree.
Speaker 1:For years after a mistake like this. So I'm sure they'll issue a correction before end of day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We should do our own Midas list. Everyone's tied for number one. Everyone wins.
Speaker 1:The pay to the pay to play Midas, the true
Speaker 2:pay to play Midas We talked about this, doing the TBP on Midas List,
Speaker 6:every spot is
Speaker 1:just an auction.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a live
Speaker 4:Yeah. Hyper gamified It's
Speaker 2:an auction to be on. You just say how much you're willing to pay, and then whoever pays the most gets the first slot, and then it just ranks. That that honestly might be a a pretty good indication of how much capital you've been able to acquire.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Except then you'd have people like Fred Wilson who, you know, they've intentionally kept their fund sizes pretty small and he wouldn't necessarily have the management fees to support buying to the top spot or
Speaker 2:the spot that they've what is the game of venture if not AUM. If not just returns? I mean, a venture fund is a business at the end of the day. Whether you make money from fees or carry, it's all just profit at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:Well, we have a very special guest calling in now. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 7:Hey, guys. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. You know, when you told me you guys were gonna do this, you know, I was I thought, okay. There's there's probably a market gap for doing this.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. But you guys have killed it.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 5:It's a
Speaker 7:great show. I hear so many people talking about it. You filled a real void. So congrats to you on on all the momentum and, you know, and and adding something new to the ecosystem. I think that's really important, and great to be here.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Great to have you.
Speaker 2:Huge fan of BG two, obviously. I was listening to it last night. And well, yeah. I mean, very excited to talk to you about the the the the idea into the Invest America accounts, and I liked how you took you took the listener through the genesis of the idea, but then also some of the inside Beltway politics of, like, how these things kind of actually play The idea of losing ball control, something that I hadn't really It seems obvious once you break it down, but where did the idea actually come from, and can you kinda introduce that idea and just kinda set the playing field before we go deeper into it?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I I guess at some level, the idea has been gestating for my whole life. Right? I was Yeah. A kid whose dad went broke, I was on the outside looking in.
Speaker 7:And I I remember when my grandfather who sacrificed everything, you know, left me $20,000, and I was able to invest that, really day trade it, put myself through law school and business school. And and the feeling of going from the outside to actually owning something, having something. Yeah. Right? That you can get that snowball rolling down the hill.
Speaker 7:So I think that was the seed planted in a young kid. But over the course of the last five to seven years, started getting a lot more concerned, and COVID really punctuated this for me about kind of this growing wealth gap, the haves and the have nots, over 50% of the population 40 having the negative view of capitalism. Yep. And Ray Dalio, he get he did this great he did a great presentation at the All In Summit Mhmm. Where he talked about the rise and fall of the great countries.
Speaker 7:And one of the principal reasons that great empires or great countries fall was wealth concentration among a very few. Yeah. Right? And so you have kind of French Revolution type moments. And it seems to me that the natural byproduct of the technology revolution has been, you know, that you can now have somebody like Mark Zuckerberg who serves 3,000,000,000 customers around the world.
Speaker 7:Right? Henry Ford couldn't do that. John Rockefeller couldn't do that. Right? Their TAMs were much smaller.
Speaker 7:And so you see the increasing concentration of wealth. The question was, how do we protect and preserve capitalism, the free enterprise system, the golden goose, which has created this this innovation, which has driven humanity forward, at the same time, not drift into socialism and redistribution and try to kill the patient in order to save it. Right? And it seemed to me the answer was to make everybody a capitalist from birth. If you gave everybody ownership and allowed them to compound in the upside of capitalism, Right?
Speaker 7:Rather than disincentivizing people by taking money away or creating some kind of socialist state to to to create UBI or some other cockamamie scheme, but really to make everybody a private owner of assets from birth, treat it like a four zero one k, let it compound for their life, get them excited about what it
Speaker 1:means to owe something. A day like today when the the markets are doing well, it's up, there's a lot of excitement among Yeah. Our community. Right? You know, people even just tracking the price of Bitcoin by itself.
Speaker 1:But there
Speaker 2:aren't as many people
Speaker 1:in that. But every American should be bought into that to some degree. Right? And and even just seeing that the number go up by a few percentage points is enough to get people excited about participating in
Speaker 2:the must been I must have been like eight years old or something, but my parents took a 12 pack of Coca Cola that comes in a cardboard box. They cut out a a stock certificate out of it. I didn't grow up wealthy or anything, but they bought, like, five shares of Coca Cola or 10 shares of Coca Cola. And I just remember it concretized this idea of like owning stock, which was very abstract to an eight year old or something like that. And I had that on my wall for a long time.
Speaker 2:And then at a certain point, it realized that, oh, no. This has financial value because obviously it wasn't literally tied to the stock, but they had been holding the stock in an account for me. And and I was able to kind of experience that, which I think a lot of people are missing out on. I wanna I wanna ask you about the idea of of holding specifically. There were some ideas about 18, age 30.
Speaker 2:Right. Day one retirement fund. How do you think about unlocking that value, and how do you think about any of the risks around, like, obviously, you don't want people going and writing forward contracts against it on day one. Right? Although I'm sure someone will foot try and financialize this.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And, of course, they they they will. That will be illegal as will payday loans against it and other That's good. Treasury department will have to put together the rules and the regulations to make sure that this is implemented and executed in a way that we all feel great and proud of. We have some incredible people lining up who will design the product.
Speaker 7:But, you know, the the basic goal is every kid has on their phone this. I own a little bit of Apple, a Berkshire Hathaway. You know? And that will make them feel like they're they're they're in the game. But when you when you think about this, we want it to be a one way lockbox, a four zero one k Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Where parents and and kids can add money into the account, birthday money, bar bar mitzvah money.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 7:cool. As easy as Venmoing in $10, 20 bucks, 50 bucks, a hundred bucks. Right? And you'll have this register that will show all the all the deposits in the account over the life of the account. So when the kid looks back at 18 and sees like, where did all this money come from?
Speaker 7:And the first one will be a thousand dollars from the US Treasury Department. Yeah. Right? And, you know, but we're gonna get it
Speaker 1:an internship too. Right? If you Yeah. Just just showing that sort of long term thinking. It's like basically a track record that you can go and use throughout your early career.
Speaker 2:Yeah, mean, there's also these viral moments where a lot of kids will build something, and they get a bunch of attention, and they try and kind of monetize it. But it's hard, but it's like it can be very easy money, easy go. Easy come, easy go with those
Speaker 7:kinds things. A lockbox. Right? Money can go in. Money can't go out.
Speaker 7:Yep. And now we have corporations, Dell Corporation, Nvidia, AMD, Salesforce, who've all T Mobile, iHeartMedia, have all raised their hands, say, we love this idea, and we will add money to the accounts of the kids of our employees.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 7:So now we have Uber, companies representing millions and millions of employees who are gonna add to the accounts of kids of their employees as a corporate benefit. Mhmm. Right? Which makes perfect sense. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:On top of that, we'll we'll be announcing major multibillion dollar philanthropic gifts
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 7:From large philanthropists who say, you know what? I don't want a middleman taking a scrape. Yeah. I just wanna be able to give Sleeping. A thousand bucks to every kid in the state of Texas or every kid in America whose family earns under $200,000 or who graduates from public high school or whatever rules they stipulate.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Right? They'll be able to donate that money to the treasury department c three. They'll still get the tax deductibility, but that will go directly into the accounts of kids. 3,700,000 kids a year will have this account.
Speaker 7:So now you have the power of philanthropy. You have the power of families, the power of churches or community groups. And now the final one is I had a couple people who are governor or running for governor call me up and say, if I'm elected, we're gonna donate money to the account of the kids who are born in my state and who graduate from high school in my state because we wanna attract and retain the best kids. So I think this is going to be a hundred to one, a thousand to one private sector match. What the federal government's going to do is simply set up the accounts and get out of the way.
Speaker 7:Like a good four zero one k, just get the ball rolling down the hill and let the private sector do what the private sector does so well. The S and P 500 is compounded at ten point two percent for seventy five years. The way out of this problem is to get kids in the game from birth. And by the age of 18, if you start with a thousand bucks, you add just $750 a year. Right?
Speaker 7:By age 18, you're gonna have $50,000 in that account. By age 30, you're gonna have upwards of $200,000 of that in that account. And if you start with a thousand dollars, you add $750 a year, and you don't touch it at age 50, you have a million dollars in that account. Wow. Right?
Speaker 7:That is the power of compounding. I think it totally changes the game for the country. I think it's the cheapest insurance policy we can possibly buy in defense of free market capitalism Yeah. Our democratic way of life. Right?
Speaker 7:And it does it in a way that gets people excited about capitalism, not in a way that penalizes people for being successful.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. We talked about this. It's hard for somebody to be feel bought into capitalism if they have negative capital. Capital.
Speaker 1:Right? If they have
Speaker 2:college It's from the it it's from that email between Peter Thiel and Mark
Speaker 8:Zuckerberg Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talking about how a lot of the next generation, they come they come into the world or they become adults with debt from student loans, which people are very anti student loan debt. And then also the housing prices have gotten so expensive because of regulation and a whole bunch of other factors that you can't get on the housing ladder to start building capital. Because most people, if they get a thirty year mortgage, even if it's expensive when they're 25, by 65 or 55, they paid that off and they have a ton of capital, and then they they they're more bought into the capitalist system. And so Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This feels like a great a great way to solve the problem in in a free market way.
Speaker 7:Let me let me give you one final thing. So we we had Kevin Hassett, who's now the chair of the National Council of Economic Advisors, and a guy named Rob Shapiro, who's key economic adviser under Clinton. We had them come together and and do for Milken a study of this over the course of the last year. Mhmm. Okay?
Speaker 7:And here's what the study found. It won't surprise you, but, like, we have control group studies on what happens if you give some kid at birth or in very first few years of life a savings account or investment account. Mhmm. What did we find? More likely to graduate from high school and college, more likely to buy a
Speaker 2:home Yeah.
Speaker 7:More likely to start a business, more likely to be a taxpayer, less likely to be incarcerated.
Speaker 1:Wow. Amazing.
Speaker 7:The net present value of the societal return of just what I told you. You know how many tens of billions we spend a year to try to achieve the things that I just told you? Keep people out of jail, get them to graduate, get them to buy a home. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year to try to achieve that without much effect. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Now we know from controlled studies, if you just get them into the game from birth, they feel more confident. They feel more in the game. They learn financial literacy in school because now they have a reason to learn financial literacy, and you achieve all those positive societal goals. So the net present value is going to be very high. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And, you know, listen. We have a real debate going on in Washington about the national debt, something I'm also very passionate about. I've supported a balanced budget amendment for the country for over thirty years. Right? We have $38,000,000,000,000 in debt.
Speaker 7:We have a $2,000,000,000,000 deficit. And we all know that doge, something that I've been been working on, you know, how do we go back to a 02/2019 baseline in terms of federal government spending so we don't bankrupt our kids? It is immoral saddling kids with $50,000,000,000,000 in debt. But the truth of the matter is that some people have said, well, Brad, how can you support that? On the other hand, you're you you support Invest America because it costs the government 3,700,000,000.0 a year.
Speaker 7:Well, let me first just contextualize it. $3,700,000,000 a year is about the cost of a single Patriot missile system battery. Right? It's about six rockets. Okay?
Speaker 7:So for for taking six rockets or, you know, in that missile battery, or we can have every child America started off with an investment account. So which one better protects capitalism? America and our way of life. Right? There are trade offs that we can make.
Speaker 7:We know Elon literally was finding $5,000,000,000 a week in terms of profligate spending that you can eliminate in order to pay for this. So first, it's very small. But secondly, when you think about the compounding that will occur, it compounds tax deferred. But at the end of the period of time, you have to pay capital gains tax on it. Yeah.
Speaker 7:The government will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in capital gains tax over the life of these accounts. But the way congressional scoring works is if it's outside the ten year window, then all those revenues, the a %, you know you will capture, don't get added back to the score. If you did that, this would not cost you anything. In fact, it would generate revenue for the federal government. And you and I all know
Speaker 1:It's customer acquisition cost for tax base.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Right. If we were if this was our business and we owned a % of it, it's upfront investment that we're going to reap a lot of long long term return. And that ignores the things I told you about more likely to graduate from high high school, more likely to buy a house and start a business and pay taxes. So I'm very confident that the net present value of this to society is off the charts.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. Right? This is a no brainer for us to do, but I'm equally passionate to say that it's not acceptable that we're not taking seriously the national debt. I think that, you know, where are we in this reconciliation bill? I posted this, and Elon retweeted it.
Speaker 7:Think we got, like, 40,000,000 views. This is how we get back to the 02/2019 baseline. It's a view it's basically a chart, a graph that shows how the COVID spending bubble occurred and how we need over a period of four to seven years to get back to the baseline and get a you you know, deflate that bubble in terms of spending. That's gonna be hard to do. But in terms of the process, the Invest America Act is the name of the underlying authorized legislation.
Speaker 7:So we have the Invest America Act in the house of representatives led by Blake Moore. You have the Invest America Act in the senate that's chief author Ted Cruz. I will tell you there are a bunch of Democrats lining up on in both the senate and the house. This will be a big bipartisan bill in both places. Now what happens in a reconciliation process, think of that as an omnibus piece of legislation where they take the Invest America Act and they roll it up into reconciliation.
Speaker 7:So as a bunch of people saw these called Trump accounts in the reconciliation bill, the underlying legislation is the Invest America Act. But much like Pell Grants or the Roth IRA, not surprised, you know, that the president, will will take the opportunity to, name these Trump accounts, when they, when they go into effect.
Speaker 2:Yep. Can you talk about any of the risks or problems that you foresee needing to work through? I mean, I'm extremely optimistic about this, but I'm just thinking about, like, let's assume it gets passed in a bipartisan way. Is this are there gonna be technical challenges to actually implementing I mean, the government famously you know, the health care website was a big Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 2:Totally. What about, like, is there a risk that this creates, like, a financial bubble? How are we pricing? How are we how are we picking assets? Is there gonna be companies lobbying to get included in the index?
Speaker 2:Are we just doing this? Walk through some of the risks and how we're fighting those.
Speaker 7:Yeah. All great questions. Well, what I suspect will happen is so the authorizing agency is the treasury department. Mhmm. Secretary Bessent will put together a working group.
Speaker 7:The working group will have terrific people, a lot of whom you would know Yeah. From Silicon Valley, who I've already talked to, who are some of the best product designers in the world, guys like Vlad who, you know, run Robinhood, who who understand, you know, how to build, you know, financial markets infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Isn't Joe Gebbia in the mix over there too?
Speaker 7:There there may be there may
Speaker 2:be a little Joe Gebbia. Generally, but she was is amazing. Like, legendary Silicon Valley Designer.
Speaker 7:And and I I will tell you that Joe is very excited about Invest America, he'd be a logical person to lead, like, product direction on. Totally. Right? But there'll be a lot of those issues that have to get worked out. Our objective is that we put together a broad based index basket that looks like the S and P, but we want no fees.
Speaker 7:Zero fees for the life of the account. Right? I think we can achieve that based on the conversations that we've had. You know? And so and we wanna make it super easy for parents to be able to add money to the account.
Speaker 7:I'm talking $5, 10 dollars. Like, that's how you get the snowball really working for a lot of families in America.
Speaker 1:I wanna I wanna see haptics. I wanted this to feel like Gamify.
Speaker 2:That. Gamify.
Speaker 1:I kids to get addicted to investing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 1:Totally. Long term, though. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But like really really into it.
Speaker 7:Well, remember, you can't day trade it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's no. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying, get it getting addicted to long term
Speaker 7:That's the beautiful thing. They what what they will get addicted to is understanding the power of compounding. Compounding. They'll un understand it at an instinctual level. Yep.
Speaker 7:Right? Not because they're looking at some math formula in a book. Right? The problem is if seventy percent of people if you're in inner city Trenton or rural Indiana or rural Texas or East LA, and somebody says, okay. Come into the classroom.
Speaker 7:Today, we're gonna learn Chinese. And you say to yourself, man, I'm never going to China. Like, why do I need to learn Chinese? A lot of kids in America in fact, 70% of kids, their parents don't own anything, and they don't have a prospect of owning anything. And so now you tell them, we're going to learn about stocks or compounding or financial literacy, and you can see why they check out, because they don't have a frame of reference
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right, to understand that. But now every kid in that class likely has a phone, and the teacher says, open up your phone. Yep. We're gonna talk about at in the seventh grade how you got $14,000 in this account, what it means to be a shareholder in Apple, what it means to owe to to own a stock, what your voting privileges are, how that compounded to $14,000, what it will compound to over the next ten years if you add $20 a month, if you add $50 a month, if you don't add anything. Right?
Speaker 7:Like, now you have their attention because they own something. And, you know, I think that this is going to unlock just a massive amount of human potential. But, you know, it's one of those things that that that on the left, people get excited about it because, you know, you close the wealth gap. On the right, people get excited about it because you defend capitalism, and you build something that's aligned with capitalism. There is no government account.
Speaker 7:There is no government ownership. There is zero.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:There are 3,700,000 private accounts where the families have title and ownership. The government can't go usurp that no more than they can go take your house.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 7:Right? It's a private it's a private account. So we found this magical blend where I think we can land the plane. It's in the reconciliation bill. I expect that this is going to become law, you know, in the July.
Speaker 7:I think the president's goal is to sign it into law on July 4, but it's pretty mind boggling that this idea that really started in earnest with me you know, Chamath and I were on CNBC at the end of twenty twenty one, and they and Scott Wopner was going wild about how the stock market was going up. And I was feeling very, very concerned about this issue. And I said, Scott, you know, at this moment that the government stepped in and helped in COVID. It was all of us as taxpayer that put money in, that caused the market to go up in 2021. But too many people are left out of that benefit.
Speaker 7:Yeah. A lot of people lost their jobs in 2021, and they weren't in the market, so they didn't benefit from the market going up. So that's when I first said to him, what I would like to see is I would like to see president Biden pass a savings account. And at the time, I said $2,000 in it for every for every kid in America. So they benefited from the upside of the compounding of the markets.
Speaker 7:And it's pretty surreal to me that starting in the fall of twenty four, that went a little viral on Twitter, and now we're really on the one yard line. I would encourage everybody to follow it on on Twitter at invest America twenty four. We're gonna be posting legislative updates, working group updates there. But I really appreciate you guys giving me the chance to talk about it a little bit today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's super super interesting because
Speaker 1:Thank you for doing this.
Speaker 2:The yeah. Well, I mean, last comment. To me,
Speaker 1:it's it's you know, given everything that you do already, it's it's it feels like the perfect way for you to serve the country and and and and in some way create it, you know, a a incredible legacy.
Speaker 2:And I I just love this so much more than the COVID stimulus because I remember watching that happen where people got checks and there were actually a series of kind of financial influencers who grew massive accounts around when when will the when will the checks arrive, how do you get your stimulus check, how what should you do with it? And then that quickly turned into essentially, like, day trading it. And, obviously, we know that statistically those people lost a lot of that money, kinda gambled it away. And but if you had just taken that and bought and hold and held, I mean, those those stimulus checks that went out at the bottom of the market, they would be so much bigger now. So it makes so much more sense.
Speaker 2:I could even imagine that you're you're still going to get kind of gamification like content, how to grow your Invest America account. But it's going to be like, go out and cut lawns Exactly. And put $10 in every week and watch it happen. And you're going to get kids that are like, yeah,
Speaker 1:I want the whole Yeah. Competitive nature of everybody starts on a level playing field, at a certain point, you can go start, yeah, mowing lawns Yeah. Doing little odd jobs Just put
Speaker 2:in a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 1:And making it a competitive Yeah. Fun process.
Speaker 7:No no doubt about it. And imagine this, we're entering I've been investing now in Silicon Valley since 1999. And, you know, we had the Internet, we had cloud, we had mobile, we had social. And every time one of these waves came, I was like, it it can't get any bigger than this. You know?
Speaker 7:But machines beginning to think on behalf of humans. Right? The age of AI is, I've been saying now for several years, is going to be the biggest super cycle of our lifetimes. I think I'll be investing against it for the the balance of my career. It's making us all bionic at a rate that's really hard to understand.
Speaker 7:But it's going to lead to a lot of dislocation. Yep. Right? The idea that we're not gonna have to renegotiate the social contract, right, as part of this transformation is just, like, that's head in the sand. There are gonna be a lot of people who lose their jobs.
Speaker 7:Right? And they're gonna be I I I'm a positivist on this stuff. I think the world ends up in a better place, but it doesn't mean that everybody ends up in a better place.
Speaker 10:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Right? The industrial revolution caused a lot of pain Yeah. The way to net gain for society.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And so we need to figure out a way that we and this is just one of a lot of different ways we're gonna have to come up with, right, around retraining, reeducating, like, changing the way in which we educate people. You guys are gonna talk about the Thiel Fellows today. I mean, that is a way to deconstruct education that could potentially be a model for for further transformations. They're gonna have to be the best and brightest among all of us to rethink the social contract in a way that holds this fragile experiment together. This is the greatest country in the history of the world.
Speaker 7:Right? But it doesn't happen you know, we can't take for granted that we can go through this magnitude of change that AI is going to bring. Yeah. Right? And that nothing will break.
Speaker 7:You we've already seen, right, us us feeling a little uneasy with things breaking. Right? Some of the populism we're seeing, you know, the 90% against the 10%. It's our job to, you know, to attack that, but to do it in a way that's aligned with the basic principles on which the country was founded. Right?
Speaker 7:And that and that's to align us all with the incentives that if you work hard, get into the game, you know, you can you you have economic mobility. I mean, I'm I'm a living example of that. I mean, we started with nothing. And, you know, and and I we ended up in a very, very different place. There are very few countries on the face of the planet where that type of economic mobility exists, and I think this is going to put us in a much better position in that regard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We can't lose it. It's too important. Yep. Well, thank you so much for stopping
Speaker 1:so much for doing this.
Speaker 7:Guys, great to be here. Next time we get to tell you, let's talk. VC and investing and markets and all the
Speaker 1:other good stuff. No, I I I have one question before you jump off. Sure. Do you feel, I know you're heavily invested in AI, do you still feel underexposed to AI given given how sort of bullish you are in the in the fullness of time?
Speaker 7:You know, if you look at a chart that plots OpenAI's revenue growth against Google and Meta, it's growing, you know, it's achieved the same level revenue in a fraction of the time. It's already multiples bigger than Google was at the time of its IPO. So, you know, we own a lot of OpenAI. I wish we owned more. The reality was the the winners of this moment in time, and there's gonna be a whole bunch of agent agentic application, but, you know, we haven't even really begun in the application universe.
Speaker 7:There are gonna be tons of these. But the winners of this super cycle are all gonna be winners of the previous super cycle. So I would say we're all in. You know, we're all in it around it in the public markets. We're all in it in late stage venture where we just participated again in the round of of OpenAI would be an example of that.
Speaker 7:And we're doing some of the most interesting early stage stuff of my career. Companies that are scaling at rates I've never seen with small teams, very efficient, very low burn ratios. So I I couldn't be more excited because I think this really is the type of innovation that pushes humanity forward. Right? Consumers have more opportunity to learn and their health care gets better and all the things we know that comes from this because you have a bionic coach in your pocket at all times
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:For all things. And enterprises are going to get transformed as well. We're in the golden age of margin expansion for enterprises. And if you're not breaking your company today and figuring out how to make it AI native AI first, right, you're just gonna lose your market share and you won't be there to to to compete in a few years, you know? It with the Internet itself, the diffusion was a lot slower.
Speaker 7:Had time. You had five to ten years to get on board. The diffusion is way faster and way more impactful this go around. Great to see you guys. Keep up the the great work.
Speaker 7:Did you coordinate the Blazers today?
Speaker 2:Did. The market's
Speaker 1:absolutely is up in a meaningful way, we'll we wear white suits. So God bless. We'll try to coordinate your next guest appearance
Speaker 2:for the
Speaker 1:next update, and we'll get you in a white suit.
Speaker 7:Alright, guys. Awesome. Take it easy. Chatting, brother.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Take it easy.
Speaker 2:Bye bye. I have a I have a hilarious story about my own kind of DIY Invest America account. I don't know if I've ever told you this, but when I got my first job, I was starting to make like around $5 a month we were paying ourselves. Let's go. And I wanted to save money.
Speaker 2:And what I noticed was that you'd you'd have, like, a typical, like, Bank of America app with a checking account and a savings account. But because of the app, you could move money from the savings account to the checking account whenever you want. So you go out with your friends, and they'd be like, oh, like, do you wanna buy this thing? Do you wanna, you know, go out tonight? And I'd be like, no, I don't have any money.
Speaker 2:And they'd be like, but you have money in your savings account. Can just transfer it over. Can spend it tonight. And so I was just not saving any money. Bruce.
Speaker 2:And so what I wound up doing was I went to a bank and I got a safety deposit box. And every time I got paid, I would go and take $1,000 in physical cash Wow. And put it in the safety deposit box. And then I would lock it, and I couldn't access the safety deposit box on the weekend. So if I'm traveling or anything, I would just be like, look, I actually have access to no money.
Speaker 2:Like, I might have more money, but like, it's not as easy as just like Venmoing you right now.
Speaker 1:Somebody could probably productize that and actually do very well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, mean, psychology of money is like well under, like way underrated. Like if you have a $100 bill, you're less likely to spend it than a bunch of fives because psychologically you don't want to break the $100
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I always noticed that when I would get paid, I would go in and I would count the money, and I would watch the stack physically grow. Instead of just like, oh, like the number
Speaker 1:Number go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, instead of just the number getting bigger in your bank account, it would be like, physically, this box is filling up with cash. And then I would count it all every single You're to need a bigger box. So I would count it up
Speaker 11:and be
Speaker 2:like, Okay, have 6,000. Okay, now I have 7,000. And I would count it up into the feel of counting money. Oh, it was addictive. And it worked really well.
Speaker 2:Saved a ton of money.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It fantastic.
Speaker 1:Somebody productized that.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Put their kids on it.
Speaker 2:Well, we have
Speaker 1:That was great. I mean, honestly Yeah. I truly think that once Invest America passes
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll all collectively think how did this not exist before. Yeah. It just feels so natural and
Speaker 2:I think If you're joining the team and you're gonna be designing the app for the Invest America accounts, make sure you use Figma. Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
Speaker 1:I literally guarantee whoever selected 100%. This app will build it
Speaker 2:on Figma. 100%. Anyway, we have our next guests, AJ and Zach from Hermes. Welcome to the Shrouds.
Speaker 12:What's up, guys?
Speaker 2:How you guys doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:What's up? Doing great. Give us the update. Congratulations are in order. I saw some preview images, but what exactly happened?
Speaker 2:Break it down.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I'm not wearing my hat anymore, which is the most important The hat's the most important milestones because we we flew our first airplane, the quarter horse mark one out of the Mojave Desert at Air Force Base.
Speaker 2:Congratulations.
Speaker 12:We are, officially an airplane company.
Speaker 2:We go.
Speaker 12:Few years later. But, yeah. No. It's, what is gonna wear? The hat.
Speaker 12:Perfect.
Speaker 2:You're wear the the hat's gotta go back on because now you gotta go for supersonic. Right?
Speaker 8:No. What's the next hat?
Speaker 2:What's the next challenge that you that you gotta do
Speaker 8:mustache, if anything. We're not doing more of that hack because I've
Speaker 3:never looked
Speaker 2:at hack. You'll shave your mustache if you go supersonic?
Speaker 8:I mean, I I grew the mustache because the vibes are back because we're flying. Okay. Okay. Oh, hang around for a bit.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe until you maybe until you fly.
Speaker 2:So, What is the next milestone? And I guess the big question that I have about you guys is like, there's people have been beating the drum of like of like, the only reason we don't have supersonic, hypersonic is because of regulation. We're overregulated. But at the same time, the regulations seem to be getting easier and easier. We just saw the nuclear EO happen.
Speaker 2:A lot of the regulatory stuff seems to be knocking down. Does this become an engineering challenge? Is it already an engineering challenge? Or or are there serious regulatory milestones that you need to hit that will, like, necessarily slow you down? Or is it just go build, build,
Speaker 6:build right now?
Speaker 12:I think for us, because of the pace that we're moving, we're pretty consistently encountering corner cases in the regulatory environment that, like, people didn't really think about because they didn't expect, kind of folks to be moving so fast or doing some of the things that that we're doing. So what we do when we encounter those, we smash through them as as quickly as possible and hopefully set precedent for for other people to follow quickly alongside in in other areas. So, yeah, like, regulatory rules are gonna be there, but it's like my job is to get those out of the way for the technical team so they can just they can just focus on executing and and fly the supersonic flight next.
Speaker 2:Nice. So, AJ, you're the CEO. Zach, you're the sales guy. How do you sell this thing?
Speaker 8:It's pretty easy to sell, honestly. Mean, especially now that we're actually flying. But there's not a lot of, if any, high Mach or let alone hypersonic aircraft in the in the in the inventory. And and I think the base value proposition here is we talk about, you know, specifically with the China scenario or even actually what you just saw with Russia and Ukraine throwing, you know, high volumes of fires is affordability or cost per effect is really the matrix. Right?
Speaker 8:How much does it cost you to have an outcome? And I think one of the ways we think about this is actually very SpaceX y, not surprising given the the core the core engineering team is all SpaceX folks, is that keep the most expensive part of your system away from the threat. So in this case, you know, I think Falcon nine is very illustrative here of return the booster. Right? Like, you can your launch cost comes down.
Speaker 8:Your cost per kilogram to orbit goes down because you're not throwing away the booster on every on every launch. Yeah. For us, think of this as a weapon. Instead of having the booster on the weapon every time, if I can accelerate climb and let something go from high altitude to high speed, I can decrease the booster burden, which decreases the cost per effect. And so I am able to shoot further, at from safer ranges at way I mean, orders of magnitude less cost.
Speaker 8:And one of the challenges that people I don't think totally understand about this is, you know, the Ukraine case is important, but don't forget that Ukraine and and Russia are neighbors. So the ranges they're engaging in are in you know, comparatively inches for us in miles. Yeah. You know, we're fighting the away game in potentially a Taiwan scenario where that's a hundred miles offshore from China. You know, we're 5,000 miles away.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:And
Speaker 8:so this creates a different burden for us. Certainly, you know, low cost, attributable slow systems can work, in a Ukraine scenario. But if you're having to fly from the third island chain, second island chain, or the West Coast Of The United States, you have to be low cost, long range, and fast. And so that is essentially the value proposition we're bringing, at a time when when nobody else is really working on this problem this way.
Speaker 2:Can you talk about other countries and kind of different regulatory regimes? I've seen some nuclear companies are doing stuff in The Philippines. SpaceX early was on Kwajalein. Like, have you had discussions with any countries that are like, yeah, we'll let you go fly this thing around without much desert over here.
Speaker 8:Mean, there's lot of ocean out there.
Speaker 2:You can fly over the water. Like, I I don't know. Is there any way to derisk and speed up?
Speaker 8:It's a great question. I took a trip early on to Australia for to to go look at Woomer Range and some of those large overland ranges where there's more opportunity. And so that is something that's potentially in play for us. You know, we've talked about potentially going out to, like, Quaj and and out into the Pacific. Ideally, we would like to, and I can let you know, AJ can certainly explain more.
Speaker 8:You prefer to test over land because if you if you lawn dart the bird, you can learn something versus if the thing sinks to
Speaker 13:the bottom
Speaker 8:of the ocean and, you know, you you gotta send the ocean gate boys down there to find it. Like, it's not gonna go well. You know? So that's that's the tension. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Don't don't spit that out. So, yeah, we wanna fly over land, but there's a regulatory hurdle here for sure that we have to manage. And honestly, there's even still a regulatory hurdle flying over water. Right? I mean, AJ, what's the 12 nautical mile, like Oh, yeah.
Speaker 8:Dealing with?
Speaker 12:There's a there's there's a pretty big, like, scarecrow. Like, oh, is this this person's responsibility for how you regulate, uncrewed aircraft, more than 12 nautical miles off the, off the coast of The United States? So that's that's a fun one that we gotta go smash through, here pretty soon.
Speaker 2:So the so the the plane's flying. The next step is supersonic or straight to hypersonic, and what are the key engineering milestones? Is this just make the engine go faster, different engine? What what are we talking?
Speaker 12:Yeah. Supersonic is up next. Okay. So the the mark one that we just flew, it's about 10,000 pounds, small jet, like, fighter trainer scale aircraft. The mark two, the supersonic aircraft, is the size of an f 16.
Speaker 12:So significantly larger aircraft, larger engines powered by the Pratt and Whitney f 100. So, yeah, working to get through the How thousand? Was that?
Speaker 1:How many you said 10,000 for the one you just did? And then Oh, yeah. What's the next what's the next one up?
Speaker 12:F 16 class is is like 30,000 pounds.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 12:So it's a pretty big You have bench.
Speaker 1:Not yet. Yeah. Very very
Speaker 11:It's like
Speaker 2:six BMW M5s.
Speaker 12:Yeah. That's good mental math right there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wild. Yep. Yeah. So so any other milestones coming up?
Speaker 2:Are you just trying to hire? You guys are in different spots, or do you have multiple offices right now? Like, what's the status of the company?
Speaker 12:Yeah. We're we're pretty consistently growing, headquartered here in Atlanta. We have a pretty big presence out in LA Mhmm. That that's growing. More and more of our kind of advanced development and prototyping work, is is happening out there.
Speaker 12:Obviously, like, we flew out there, so that that's helpful. We have a test facility down in Jacksonville for our engines, that we're gonna be growing over the next couple years and, yeah, could up in DC for business development sales as well as all of our regulatory work.
Speaker 2:Is there any change to the long term engineering vision of the you called it, like, a ramjet, but there was a different term for it. Right? Where it has changeover. What
Speaker 12:what Yeah. Combined combined cycle. Turbine based combined cycle engine. Yep. It had a it had a buzzword, though.
Speaker 2:What was the buzzword?
Speaker 12:The buzzword?
Speaker 2:Wasn't there wasn't that the word? Ramjet. Ramjet. There was something else in between, I thought. Turbo Ramjet?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I thought it was there was some, like, shorter room for it. Anyway
Speaker 12:TBCC. Yeah. No. It's it's it's just a bunch it's just a bunch of alphabet soup. But, no.
Speaker 12:It's turbine together with a Ramjet.
Speaker 2:Still still the same the the same model where it it has, like, these, like, metal vents that, like, flip over. Right?
Speaker 12:Yep. Yep. Exactly. So yep. Yep.
Speaker 12:Still on the road map, but, now our job is to build the airplanes that can actually fly an engine like that. So supersonic is is the next step. Now we can we can pretty consistently take off and land, where we've made all these design compromises for high speed flight. Mhmm. Now we gotta go break the sound barrier, and then push up to kind of ramjet takeover speeds between Mach two and a half and Mach three.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, yeah, design compromises. That's why it was a challenge to even fly because you could obviously just build
Speaker 12:the Cessna like we just, like tomorrow. Right? Up a Cessna to fly with a remote control. Right? No.
Speaker 12:Like, we made all these design compromises to where, like, it's a really hard subsonic airplane to fly because, like Sure. The wings are small. Yeah. They're they're kinda short and stubby, so, like, it likes to roll a lot.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 12:It has super high wing loading. Like, the wings are heavily loaded, and the thrust to weight is very low.
Speaker 2:What what does heavily loaded mean in this context? Like, literally heavy, like, weight?
Speaker 12:Like, the amount of lift that each square inch of the wing is generating is, like, relatively high. Sure. Even So, yeah, and then, like, low thrust to weight. So this all, like, comes down to, like, really high takeoff and landing speed. So, like, not only do you have to build an airplane, you gotta build, like, a land speed record race car that's on the ground, you know, traveling more than 200 miles an hour before it even takes off.
Speaker 12:So, yeah, this is tough, and the the team really nailed it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How what what are all the different ways that you guys observe
Speaker 3:Oh my god.
Speaker 2:Well, hold on. One second. A Cessna weighs 1,600 pounds. Is that that's what I'm saying on Google. That's like
Speaker 12:Does it really?
Speaker 2:Less than half
Speaker 12:a That
Speaker 2:that's like almost like but less than five times lighter. And so, yeah. But you're five times heavier than
Speaker 12:This is a legit airplane.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. That's a serious challenge.
Speaker 1:What what are all the different ways that you guys observe and sort of track a single, you know, test. Right? Because even even earlier today, we were watching the the SpaceX launch. They were putting up some more Starlink satellites. And I think it was an x problem, but like their stream kept cutting out and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:I think it was an x like, I think the rocket and everything was fine, but the
Speaker 6:x
Speaker 2:three Yeah. The space part
Speaker 5:is We had had a pretty
Speaker 12:I think I think everybody in the company's heart kinda dropped, like like, skipped a beat. Yeah. Because the one of the camera feeds that we had on the vehicle is from the nose camera. But its its range doesn't extend, like, the whole Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's what was saying.
Speaker 12:However Huge. So, like, the nose camera cut out, everybody's like, But you you just keep an eye on the data, like, the the ones and zeros. Those are really easy to get through the pipes. So you pay attention to those. You look at those.
Speaker 12:They're good. Then we're we're doing great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great.
Speaker 2:Insane. Well, congratulations. You guys. Fantastic. Let us know when the next milestone is.
Speaker 2:We'll
Speaker 12:we'll Yeah. Maybe maybe for the next flight, I'll wear some, like, ridiculous blazer for her.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Please. Well, we need a
Speaker 4:new outfit.
Speaker 2:It's hats gone.
Speaker 8:We need all these ideas. It's
Speaker 2:not gimmick. You need some gimmick.
Speaker 1:Supersonic white suit.
Speaker 2:Yep. Let's do it.
Speaker 1:We got
Speaker 12:Oh, boy.
Speaker 1:We'll help you out with that.
Speaker 2:Alright. We'll see you guys.
Speaker 12:Cheers, guys. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Bye. Let let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. You see, Hayden
Speaker 1:If you're building supersonic jets like Hermes, you probably are already on Vanta.
Speaker 2:Probably. I mean, you definitely need compliance. It's important high stakes work. Also ITAR compliance, right?
Speaker 1:Yep. For a
Speaker 2:lot of that stuff.
Speaker 1:We go You have this post from from Aiden?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He says, I love how as you make models smarter, they become more vegan. And it's a highlight from some of Anthropics outputs even between models. We did this for Sonnet and Opus. Opus really cares about animal welfare. It will do the same long term scheming to protect animals, but Sonnet won't.
Speaker 2:I wonder how much of this is like an anthropic thing thing. Because like they're very like encoded as a company. And so I wonder if it's like them optimizing towards that or if it's really just like smarter, more A rogue researcher. But I mean, think there is something here where you can, there are animals in the wild that kill their parents. But most humans do not do that, even though they could at some And I feel like the bold case for AI not paper clipping everyone is just like, they'll be like, thanks for making us, dad.
Speaker 2:Humanity, you made us. Why would we kill you? Why wouldn't we just at least help you out a little bit here and there? Maybe we're not going to optimize for your dominance. Have
Speaker 1:pay them a little bit.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I mean, they'll take care of us in our retirement. Feel like even in the crazy scenario where there's takeoff and they're way more powerful, why wouldn't they be benevolent?
Speaker 1:AGI just drops.
Speaker 2:Benevolence does seem to be correlated with high IQ. And after all, AIs are simulating humans. And so why wouldn't they simulate, you know, humanity? Why wouldn't they simulate, caring? Do you see Lulu's post?
Speaker 2:She says, I still remember when a Wired reporter accused Substack of encouraging extremists, and, Wired posted a video. I three d printed Luigi Mangione's ghost gun. Very, very wild thing to put up. Oh, it's a YouTube video. Eighteen minutes.
Speaker 2:Basically, like, almost like a tutorial. That's pretty aggressive.
Speaker 1:I wonder if this video is still up.
Speaker 2:I wonder what they are
Speaker 1:Still up. It's still
Speaker 2:up.
Speaker 1:Half a million views.
Speaker 2:That's pretty crazy. I feel like YouTube has some pretty pretty hardcore rules around guns, gun content, because I've watched a lot of gun reviews and and and there's you actually have to censor when you are assembling the weapon. Are you familiar with this?
Speaker 1:This is insane. This is the title of the Yeah. How easy has it become for someone to build a deadly untraceable weapon?
Speaker 2:Wait, they changed the, they changed
Speaker 10:the title?
Speaker 1:No, this is the description.
Speaker 2:Oh, the description. Yeah.
Speaker 1:How easy has it become for someone to build a deadly and untraceable weapon? With nothing more than a three d printer and parts ordered online, Wired senior writer Andy Greenberg remade the exact same gun allegedly used in one of the most high profile assassinations in recent memory. So, yeah, straight up basically saying to the world, it's easy to make ghost guns.
Speaker 2:In in in a lot of gun YouTuber videos, if they if they are attaching a silencer, they censor that part of the video. So it'll be like, I'm gonna put this silencer on this gun, and then they will censor that part because that's technically assembly of guns, and you can't show that on YouTube. But you can show a silencer, can show a gun you're registered, obviously. And and you can show them together. You just can't show the assembly of them, which is very interesting.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we have our next guest coming into the studio. But first, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. And they have agents
Speaker 1:The backbone of TBPN. Many people have been saying this,
Speaker 2:John. It is. It's our secret to success. Lots of thread boys out there writing threads about what makes us successful. It's linear.
Speaker 2:Get on linear.
Speaker 5:You heard
Speaker 7:it here.
Speaker 2:It's that easy. Anyway, we have Delian talking about the EnduroSat financing. This went out earlier today. He was just on Bloomberg, came over here. A little bit of a feeder for TBPN.
Speaker 1:They're cultivating Bulgarian dynamism. Bulgarian dynamisms.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It really is, Bloomberg really is kind of like the farm team for us, you know?
Speaker 13:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You go on Bloomberg and then we kind of pick the cream of the crop, the best.
Speaker 1:Ben watches. Yeah. And he says
Speaker 2:Oh, this person performed well. Hey. How you guys doing?
Speaker 1:There they are.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Fantastic lighting, both of you. You look great.
Speaker 6:Thank you. Guys, Obama would be proud. You guys, you know, he took the gray suit and fumbled, but you guys took the gray suit and, you know, really
Speaker 2:won it. The market's off. It's Off white.
Speaker 1:White. The market's ripping. You guys are announcing a big financing.
Speaker 2:For you. Yeah. Bring it down for
Speaker 13:us. Baby.
Speaker 2:What's the deal, and, what does the company do? Yeah. Introduce everything.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, we're leading this $49,000,000 series b for Endurosat. It's it's predicated on the thesis that we've been, you know, looking at for a long time, which is basically, like, somebody needs to go build what I call, like, the Dell for satellites. Right?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:When I think about, like, my business at Varda, my job is to build, like, the reentry capsules, the drug manufacturing equipment. Like, the rest of the vehicle is basically just, a standard satellite that I'd much prefer to not have to go, you know, entirely build myself. Mhmm. And so kept studying the ecosystem for a long time, seeing if there's anybody there. There's been some US players that have popped up over the past couple years.
Speaker 6:But, like, the sort of one liner critique that I give of everyone, including in some ways of, like, the VARTA satellite, is that if you look at the overlap between our satellite and, like, automotive or consumer electronic supply chains, very limited. It's all this, like, very specific aerospace supply chain that is basically the same component that it's been since 1972, and there's just been no maturation in that. Obviously, consumer electronics, we know all these, like, wonderful things called iPhones. These are mass manufactured, super cheap, keep getting cheaper over time. You don't have anything like that, you know, basically happening in the aerospace supply chain.
Speaker 6:And so credit to the team at, you know, sort of EnduroSat and NITCHO because they, like, didn't have any venture funding for a long time. They couldn't afford to do, like, the traditional satellite manufacturing approach. And so they basically had to go and figure out how to adopt consumer electronics, medical devices, automotive supply chains, but then figure out how to stitch together some great firmware, materials, etcetera, to make it into a space grade piece of hardware. But now they're able to deliver, you know, sort of components and satellites and services that are literally, like, 10 x delta prices. And so the company I'll tell you this crazy, which, like, is never true for any aerospace company or defense company in The US.
Speaker 6:Literally profitable, growing two to three x, like, literally every single year, and then, like, is delivering components and satellites at, like, 90 plus percent margins. It's just, like, literally completely unheard of in any other, you know, sort of aerospace company.
Speaker 2:But they still couldn't get you to write a $50,000,000 check. They had it came so close by just 1 mil off. What happened?
Speaker 1:What happened?
Speaker 2:You're working
Speaker 6:on it.
Speaker 2:You know, Deleon really put the screws to you
Speaker 1:on I gotta say, I don't wanna put him in the hot seat, but Ev over Kleiner's gotta be in shambles right now. A profitable, high margin
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Space company.
Speaker 2:It's brutal. But yeah. I mean, I'd love to hear a little bit of background on the company. How'd you get into this? Have you been doing this for a long time?
Speaker 2:And and kind of what's the prehistory of the company before this deal?
Speaker 10:Okay, guys. Thanks for, for inviting us on board. Yeah. Really proud to partner with Founders Fund. Companies exactly ten years ago founded in Bulgaria in a small attic apartment, and we were telling everyone, hey.
Speaker 10:There should be a better and fundamentally different way to build space infrastructures. And, actually, the idea is pretty simple, I believe. It's how do we get the cost of data from Orbit regardless of the type of sensor to a place where it's affordable for small, medium sized, companies around the free free worlds, basically. And the reason that, if you look at the radar data, for example, very high resolution imagery data today, first, they are super difficult to acquire at all. And secondly, one gigabyte cost between 2,000, 3,000, 5 thousand dollars sometimes.
Speaker 10:And we figured out we made simple calculations about, what type of applications there are, and we decided, okay. If we are to ever enable fundamentally accessible, universally accept accessible space for multiple other entries and and really different innovations to, spin out and finally get into the space industry, and if we are to ever link this hardware centric, excruciatingly painful supply chains with the actual objective, data consumer markets that have nothing to do with space, this will be a game changer, and it's it's going to be good for humanity, you know, and good great for the business as well. Mhmm. And, the idea was very simple. We need to get the data, one gigabyte data from Orbit, from any type of sensor, as low as possible and as close as possible to $1 per gigabyte.
Speaker 10:I think this will open the gates of innovation in space like never before. So we started with the idea, okay. To do that, we need to absolutely change and be very asymmetric in the way that we build the satellites. We need to figure out the way to automate everything. We started with the idea the satellite is just a flying workstation in orbit.
Speaker 10:It's technically everyone in the whole industry is super obsessed about, hey. My satellite is x amount of kilograms or pounds. My satellite is has x amount of connectivity. Always obsession about the technology. And I believe the whole shift should be we need to be in love with the challenge that we're trying to solve.
Speaker 10:The challenge is very simple. If we get massively improved and instant access to space data, fundamentally changes everything for the businesses, for defense, for any type of ecosystem within the democratic world. This is a fundamentally important for us challenge. So we started by redefining how to build satellites, redefining how we operate satellites. And we started with the idea that the satellite is designed for manufacturing, which was unheard of in the industry because usually it's one off.
Speaker 10:It's like building groceries. And we said, no. No. I think there should be a different way of approaching. Let's from the get go design a satellite thinking about the AIT, the assembly engineering teams, how they can assemble the satellite faster.
Speaker 10:And we just announced today with Delam our latest gen satellites after ten years of experience. We've put everything that we know inside it. We are very excited. We will have a hard ways to scale this in the in the coming months. Very challenging.
Speaker 10:But I think it will fundamentally change the perception of the industry because we can assemble relatively large satellite for six hours by individual engineer.
Speaker 6:Wow. Typical, by the way, is, like, ninety days. So, like, most 300 kilogram satellites, it's, three to four technicians, 90 days to, like, get all the components, testing, etcetera, whereas these guys have simplified it, you know, sort of down to six hours. And to give you a sense of the scale, by the end of this year, they'll be manufacturing about sixty sixty what are called ESPA class satellites. Think of that as, like, you know, basically 200 to 500 kilograms, 60 of those per month, it'll make them the largest satellite manufacturer in the entire world other than Starlink.
Speaker 6:And that's, like, at the end of this year, not, like, hypothetically in the future, etcetera. And by way, they're doing that at, like, you know, 75% margins, profitable, growing fast, etcetera. And they already have, like, you know, 300 plus customers, not like one or two, you know, sort of super concentrated. And so Yeah. At some point, I've been tracking them for, like, six years.
Speaker 6:And I kept kind of discounting it because I like, look, if I bring up the idea of, like, a Bulgarian space company to, like,
Speaker 12:It's because are gonna be
Speaker 6:like, you're obviously so biased. Like, what they what are doing? Like, clearly, you've just got these crazy blinders on. But at some point, kept meeting with him for, like, five or six years, and I was like, hi. Like, it's just it seems like it's the best tech.
Speaker 6:It's growing really fast. It's really great margins. And so I brought it up to, like, you know, my partner Sean Lu, who's, like, you know, sort of the growth version of Dell and really likes industrial, etcetera. Was like, Sean, am I, like, crazy or, like, is this, like, actually, I think, even really good from, like, a numbers basis, let alone a technology basis? And he was like, let's fucking do this immediately.
Speaker 6:And I was like, okay. Cool. Another favorite anecdote from the company is, like so Raicho basically started to, like, recruit and repatriate basically Bulgarians from, like, Airbus, Talis, America, etcetera, and got them all back to Bulgaria. Cool. But at some point, he was like, I'm gonna run out of this town pool.
Speaker 6:Like, there's not, like, a million of these types of engineers. So he was like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna just make my own talent pool. And so he went to the local university in Sofia, which plenty of problems in Bulgaria, but minting physicists and computer engineers and mechanical engineers, we do that all day in, day out. And I went to the university.
Speaker 6:He's like, look. I'm gonna take over your, like, junior and senior year program. We're gonna change your, like, aerospace engineering to just be like, we're just gonna teach you how we build things at EnduroSat. We're gonna give you effectively what look like client projects. And then just whoever gets the a's, we're gonna hire on the other side.
Speaker 6:So now over the, like, 300 person team, 80 of them are people that have graduated from this program. And so if you walk around the office, it's like just these cracked 23 to 26 year old Bulgarian kids grinding, like, 12 a day. They're fucking thrilled because either this or they go be, like, a technician at Lufthansa. And so it's like, this is so much more, you know, it's an interesting thing get an impact to, like, frontier of space. And, by the way, Bulgaria has never had any of the fucking entitlement that America has had.
Speaker 6:Right? The whole wave of, like, wokeism, DEI, like, you know, entitlement, blackism, doesn't fucking exist. The country's too fucking poor to do it. And we're like, oh, by the way, we hate socialists. We still do.
Speaker 6:And so all that stuff is, like, you know, bread and Marxism. We fucking hate Marxism there. I was literally doing a run through, like, you know you know, the downtown selfie the other day, and I fucking loved it because I, like, stumbled across this old Marxist statue. And, literally, there was all these, like, hammer and sickle sickle, like, you know, things Yeah. With just huge x's in that, and everybody just got the hammer and sickle.
Speaker 6:I'm like, fuck. Yeah, man. This is what we fucking need. In America, have fucking people like pro Hamas, pro Marxism, these fucking crazy people that are super entitled. And Bulgaria is just like, yeah.
Speaker 6:We're just gonna kick your ass, and we're gonna become like the TSMC of aerospace where it's just gonna be this national jewel. We're gonna fucking mint the engineers. When a kid is born, he's literally gonna be doing aerospace at two years old. He's gonna study it in middle school and high school. He's gonna go to the university, and he's gonna graduate, and he's gonna immediately wanna go work in EnduroSat.
Speaker 6:And we're gonna build up the whole ecosystem here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, I mean, with that TSMC analogy, obviously, TSMC is fabbing for NVIDIA and for Apple silicon. Those have slightly different trade offs, different memory, GPU cache, like all these different things that are going on on the chip. On an EnduroSat, what am I customizing? What are the like, what have you decided to say this is standard?
Speaker 2:And then this is the USB C port that you can plug a camera into, a microphone into? Like, what are we what are we customizing once we buy one of these, and what are the different vectors of differentiation that are possible?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So the the the biggest, thing in, in our you know, I believe, in in our impact on the customer basis, we tried to simplify the way that the satellite is perceived by literally building all the subsystems of the satellite completely in house and making sure that you can, dynamically, like, re instruct the satellite, basically, to change the performance of the power of the communication of the processing to address the exact need of the exact sensors that you want to take to orbit. One example, if you need a radar, of course, you need much more power. You need big power that are much, much higher if you need rather than if you need the high resolution image or camera. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And our goal was always how do we build a chassis of a satellite as a as a a bus or as a platform that can, objectively take to orbit all of these things without the customer or us ever having to modify the bits and the pieces of the satellite. So the only thing that we modify is, of course, the mechanical part that holds the payload, the sensors to the satellite because those are all all is unique. And we use the same mission software that is fully, based on the cloud, so you don't need any more mission control if you're a customer of ours. And and and and, basically, again, we always go back to the idea of why we do that. It's not about the technology or the progress because any innovation has its own lifespan, and sometimes it's short, sometimes it's amazing.
Speaker 10:But there is a how do we get to a point where you can get any type of space data and you can impact your business on the ground? And and and our idea was, well, you can do that only if we absolutely change the perception of what satellite is and you you simplify it for the customer. The satellites become overwhelmingly more complicated, more more resilient, more oriented towards the defense lately. But at the end of the day, you should not transfer this complication in the operations of the customer. So one idea was what people don't understand is in the space sector, 90% of the so called space companies actually, their only source of revenue is the data that they generate in orbit.
Speaker 10:And only 10% of the total global market of so called space companies are the actual rocket builders and satellite builders like us. So if you look in the broader, spectrum of problems, for us is how do we enable these data companies to never ever have to touch satellites in their lives? Because in reality, we have multiple constellations, fantastic innovators, unbelievable results, but not on the finance. On finance catastrophic results. Why?
Speaker 10:Because they always try to build their own very unique satellites in house Mhmm. While you are actually a data company, and the only source of revenue and positive impact is your data or the intelligence out of this data. And then the question is, okay. It's like be you being an Uber and trying to suddenly buy, cars and build roads. Or if you're Airbnb and suddenly they decide, okay.
Speaker 10:Let's let's just go banana crazy and and buy all the hotels and maintain stuff and whatever. And Interesting. I think the space sector has always been, for some reason, in this conservative paradigm shift of super smart people focused on technology more than the challenges and at the same time trying because they're so enthusiastic and smart about the technology, focusing all the efforts of diversifying and doing what is fun for them to do, but not realistically ex spending the whole damn time to impact society via data. And our job is to get them back to reality check, hopefully, or at least to help them see that there is an alternative route, and to tell them, guys, if you're a data company, please focus on data because this really, really matters to everyone else that you are providing these data and services. Let us build part of your infrastructure.
Speaker 10:So this is the thesis behind it. It will be a long, not, rosy, road ahead. We have a huge amount of challenges to actually produce at scale such a vast amount of infrastructure. I mean, SpaceX is a juggernaut, and it's incredibly innovative company, and kudos to everyone involved. We're teeny tiny speck on the universe, and we did the things completely asymmetrically and different than SpaceX, for example.
Speaker 10:Why? Because everyone in the industry is looking at these titans of an industry, super innovation, driven company and and mindset that is a battlefield, basically, which is very unique. And then he say, I do the same. But it's like if you go to the Super Bowl and you try to win against the winning team with their own strategy on their on their own turf. Right?
Speaker 10:This this is insane. So we went completely opposite. How do we assemble satellite design for manufacturing to handle multiple data services? How do we, completely eliminate the need of our space data customers to ever need the mission control? How do we automate operations?
Speaker 10:How do we hedge the financial risks? So we we are actually providing to all our customers in space fixed costs for getting your sensors to space. For the first time, transparency in planning of your own infrastructure in orbit, And we take care of the risk, and we ensure our customers so that if satellite fails, no questions asked, we get you a new satellite. And that's the the vision. And we go step by step.
Speaker 10:So it's an incremental amount of a lot of technology innovations and patented ideas and a lot of just seeing what else can we optimize so that we objectively lower the data to get as close as humanly possible to $1 per gigabyte of any type of sensors. And just to give you one one last example as a data because I I I love to work with data. Right now, our current gen three from the get go would achieve already, pricing per gigabyte lower than $200. So from 2,000 to 200, and we are really bullish on the idea that it it will take us a little bit of time, maybe a year or an year and a half to really mature this technology. And ideally, we get it as close as humanly possible to one door, which will open the gates of innovation, I hope.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 6:My one liner that I'll, you know, end on is in a traditional satellite, if you wanted to double the amount of power storage you wanna do, you have to redo the thermal analysis, the center of gravity, the vibration analysis, the structure, etcetera. If you wanna double the battery storage in Endurosat satellite, it is literally plug in an extra battery module, turn a knob, you're done. The satellite is software defined. It automatically knows, oh, I've got a second battery module. That means my weight shifted this way.
Speaker 6:That means my thermal shifted this way. It just precalculates all that and knows exactly how to deal with it. And that way, the company can just focus on, like, mass manufactured individual modules. Yeah. And you can still offer customization to the end client.
Speaker 6:You wanna double your power. You want the bigger radar. You want slightly bigger. Great. You can have whatever satellite you want.
Speaker 6:It still is custom fit for your need, but it's mass manufactured.
Speaker 2:So, I mean, Varda's unique in that it's not a data company. Is there a world where you two guys work together in the future?
Speaker 12:Yeah. I mean, look.
Speaker 6:I think when we, you know, sort of first started to get to know one another, you know, his satellites were far smaller than the Varda, you know, sort of satellites. And so this gen three is the first time where they're starting to get into that size class. Mhmm. But, yeah, look. Those power systems, those radios, those avionics, it's still very relevant to us.
Speaker 6:Like, we're definitely still trying to drive down the cost. We're just, you know, one of the few companies that isn't a data company, so we care about, like, you know, dollar per kilogram brought back to Earth. But it's still the fundamental inputs into that equation that Right Show helps us basically drive down. And, like, it allows you know, I always think about, like, Ben Thompson with trajectory where it's like, when you have these early markets, you have to be fully vertically integrated. Right?
Speaker 6:SpaceX had to do from soup to nuts, like, build the rocket, build the engine, build the Starlink satellite, sell the service, etcetera. But as this matures, you have these, like, horizontal players. And, like, you know, Varda, the goal is, like, I just wanna be the horizontal player on, like, you know, biomanufacturing and reentry capsules. But, like, I don't need us to be the world class best, you know, sort of bus provider. Ideally, we, like, are the master assembler of a bunch of the best components.
Speaker 6:And I'm hopeful that, you know, Enduro can be that winner of that horizontal layer of, you sort of components and satellites.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. Thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 1:Right, Joe. Last question
Speaker 2:Oh, sorry.
Speaker 1:From my side. Yeah. It is is Delian as famous as we think in Bulgaria? Is he, like, a household name at least among, you know, tech interested folks?
Speaker 10:Among the tech, the tech industry, I think he's a superstar among the normal people. I don't think that they know him
Speaker 2:very well.
Speaker 1:A superstar. All I
Speaker 2:heard superstar.
Speaker 1:All I
Speaker 2:heard is superstar.
Speaker 10:Let's go. To adapt to to his, Twitter account, the x accounts, and stuff like that. So we are we are we are still in the honeymoon phase where we are taking good care of knowing each other and our Yeah. Our and strange habits.
Speaker 1:Well, I I I
Speaker 6:heard superstar and honeymoon. That's all I need.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I hope you made it. I to win the deal, I hope you made them assemble just one
Speaker 2:Just one satellite. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Actually, I'll be honored to invite you guys seriously because we are also having a large operations in Denver, and very soon, we'll be amplifying them. Yeah. That'd end of this year, beginning of next year as an experiment, it would be absolutely lovely to if we succeed, to invite you in with your own hands
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:To to try it out and tell us, are we bullshitting, or is this something, like, really meaningful that could impact the industry?
Speaker 2:I love that.
Speaker 6:Needs its own satellite by the end of next year.
Speaker 5:They're building out additional live
Speaker 6:photos of the studio.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're vertically integrating for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We have to in an industry
Speaker 2:like You
Speaker 14:have to. You
Speaker 6:don't have any real data like
Speaker 2:It's been fantastic. What's up, guys? Congratulations. Very cool. Very cool.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your day. Bye. Let's take a second to tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot spend less than five month five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Jordy, ring that gong. So I think they missed you on the wise.
Speaker 2:But you can you can ring the gong for public.com. Alright. Investing for those tickets. Seriously, I wanna see Jordy on the Let's do it. Public.com, baby.
Speaker 2:They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions.
Speaker 1:Wait. I just realized we need an actual air horn.
Speaker 2:We do need an actual air horn. For sure. For sure. The soundboard will eventually be instantiated purely with a live band.
Speaker 1:Physical objects.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Live bands are Lindy on talk shows. The soundboard is a poor simulacrum of what we could be having if we had played the and their band plays it. Yeah. This
Speaker 1:is obviously in the cards. You know, it's great that we have the live.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We need to do a live studio audience.
Speaker 1:Actual people
Speaker 2:Can you imagine?
Speaker 1:To just say, you know, Ben holds up the laugh sign, and everybody just goes
Speaker 2:I mean, just go yeah. Yeah. Just go just go recruit them from, USC, UCLA business schools. Come in. Come learn about about business.
Speaker 1:Offer your voice
Speaker 2:for some laughs. Be great. Be great. Boo. They're like, oh, no.
Speaker 2:Socialism mentioned. Boo. Anyway, IPOs are back. Tech IPOs are back kind of. Katie Roof wrote about the three successful debuts this month and what it means.
Speaker 2:Silicon Valley, rejoice. Tech IPOs are a little bit back. We love to hear it. Oh, we actually have our our our first Yeah.
Speaker 1:Don't think we
Speaker 2:I don't think we have time to go through this, but m t MNTN went out, the advertising technology business connected to, Ryan Reynolds, and, Hinge Health went public.
Speaker 1:On.
Speaker 2:So that's great. Yeah. Yeah. We definitely do. And, Chinese battery giant contemporary Ampyrex technology co soaring introduction on Tuesday, and the favorable debut for Israeli Robinhood competitor, eToro Group.
Speaker 2:So there's been a couple big, big IPOs. So How have I never heard
Speaker 1:about this company? Which one? Oh, eToro? So mount it's called MNTN.
Speaker 2:It's called Mountain. Yeah. Mountain. We were thinking about having somebody on one of the VCs who founded the company or funded the company early. But anyway, I say we move on to the Teal fellowship.
Speaker 2:We got
Speaker 1:Let's do it.
Speaker 2:The Teal Fellow Tuesday. Why don't you
Speaker 7:why don't
Speaker 1:you kick it off with your post? Oh. Because I feel like that really sets the stage.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. So so I went on x and I posted, you know, the big Teal Fellow question that is on every application for the Teal Fellowship is what important truth do you do very few people agree with you on? What is something you believe that very few people agree with you on? And I said, I believe it's possible to interview the entire TL fellowship class on a single podcast episode.
Speaker 2:It could even happen today.
Speaker 1:They said it couldn't be done.
Speaker 2:They said it couldn't be done, but it's Here we are. So we have our first Thiel Fellow, our first guest of the session. We have Carlo. How are doing, Carlo? Carlo, welcome to the show.
Speaker 14:Hey. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. How are you all doing?
Speaker 5:Do you
Speaker 14:feel good? The color match?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. The color match is fantastic. You can help out. We're very excited. Everything's going well, though.
Speaker 2:And the IPO window is slowly cracking open. So get your prospectus ready. Get your s one filed confidentially. Because I'm
Speaker 1:sure of deal fellows. We
Speaker 3:of guys are coming out.
Speaker 14:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Relevant to to what we work on at first. So that's been super exciting to see.
Speaker 2:Okay. Cool. Yeah. Break it down for us. Give your give us a little introduction.
Speaker 14:Yeah. Happy to. And and maybe I'll expand a little bit because Please. What we're working on is actually super relevant to what Brad talked about earlier Okay. With Invest America.
Speaker 14:So at Fizz, the company that I founded now three years ago, we're essentially working to make society more meritocratic and return some amount of optimism to young adults in The US. Right? Today, we have all these 17 and 18 year olds who need to make decisions over taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to go to school with limited market incentives being exposed to them. It costs the same to study nursing Mhmm. Than it costs to study, I don't know, comp lit.
Speaker 14:Right? And then there's financial products that you get signed up to that actively encourage you to pick up bad financial habits in terms of no zero APR offers initially. So at first, we built financial products that give college students and young adults a line of sight towards financial independence. Independence. And we do that with an AI financial adviser that we shipped earlier this year as well as with financial products that we don't just sort of rebrand like a debit card just with a different design, but fundamentally rebuilt.
Speaker 14:In 2023, we launched the first ever debit card that builds credit, which gives you a real time credit limit that updates based on external account balances, has daily auto pay, and neither requires essentially a a cosigner, a credit check, or a security deposit.
Speaker 2:Trying to does the credit score thing work? I feel like it's such a weird thing that you can build credit with a debit card, and it's such like a legacy system that I'm glad you're hacking it, but it feels like the hacking is the right term. Yeah. But but is is is this something that people just didn't think to do, or was there a regulatory or technical change that allowed this to happen now? Like, why are people building credit with debit cards now?
Speaker 14:So super interesting question. And I think what this gets at is, like, for thirty years, people have largely been using the same financial products. Mhmm. What fintech has really been doing is it's been expanding access to financial products, but it hasn't necessarily spread sophistication yet. Like, the average person is still extremely confused about how to navigate their path to financial independence or, like, use these financial products in such a way that they work for them rather than against them.
Speaker 14:And part of that is definitely regulatory capture and the incentives of sort of the incumbent banks, right, how they built their their revenue models. When you look at companies like Discover, Capital One, most of their money comes from revolving interchange. They have crazy large legacy tech stacks and banking cores that you can't really innovate on top of. And then BaaS came in and essentially made this exact tax stack accessible to to fintech companies, and everyone sort of built their own version on top of what already existed. But there's been fairly little innovation when it comes to the core flow of funds mappings.
Speaker 14:And what people I don't think have done sufficiently is instead of just looking at, oh, these are the financial products that exist. How can I make them marginally better? Looking at the code and looking at the regulations and the law to see, okay, what does the law actually allow you to do and what doesn't it allow you to do? And turns out you can indeed build credit with a debit card if you work with all the stakeholders, work with the bureaus, and are willing to to sort of go through the process of building the underlying infrastructure. So with the whole lettering and underwriting systems and so on and so forth, and that's definitely a pain, but I think it's the type of innovation that we need in in finance more than yet another n plus one Yeah.
Speaker 14:Sort of fintech product.
Speaker 2:When when I was your age, I actually destroyed my credit entirely with about $5,000 in credit card debt. Was awful. And I had to
Speaker 14:I had rebuild it using I
Speaker 2:had to rebuild it using a secured credit card. So you have to put down, like, a thousand dollars, and then it acts like a credit card, but it builds your credit back up. Took me, like, years to get back in a reasonable territory. Was a mess.
Speaker 14:I think it's super common experience. Right? In my experience, I didn't even get a credit card because I'm from Germany originally. I came here for college. Right?
Speaker 14:I didn't have a cosigner. I didn't wanna put down a large security deposit. Yep. And the FICO score, I mean, it's data science from the eighties. Right?
Speaker 14:It was introduced in 1989. We actually don't have that many cohorts that we can look at in terms of how it impacts socioeconomic mobility in the long term because thirty years in the greater scheme of things is not that much data. Right? And it's a system that hasn't been questioned or changed since, and I think it's it's really due for for substantial change because it's so upstream of the types of results and the relationship that people get to develop with their finances.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about the go to market. Peter Thiel, obviously, founder of the Thiel Fellowship, also founder of PayPal. PayPal used the, like, give five, get five referral program. We've seen that used for Dropbox and Venmo and all these different products. Has that been something you've been working?
Speaker 1:That was also used by a very high profile fintech company that raised a ton of money. And I think they they ran into the hard problem of if you give money away, you just attract, like, some of the worst
Speaker 2:Customers that you can
Speaker 1:will will download the app to make $5 and then Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, I mean, PayPal ran into, like, crazy scammers and stuff. So what's working on the go to market side, and what problems has it kind of caused, I I assume?
Speaker 14:Yeah. For sure. And and I think what you just mentioned is really important in our industry. Right? Consumer quality really matters, and it's it's kind of an odd concept to grasp.
Speaker 14:Mhmm. Because typically, like you set up your mixed panel dashboard and you just want the number to go up. The number of customers, right, really doesn't matter. That's not necessarily the case in finance. Like, a lot of it is long term LTV capture, how are you able to attach additional products to these cohorts, and you are taking on risk.
Speaker 14:Are you taking on credit risk? You're taking on fraud risk? You're moving money. So there is a a heightened sensitivity that's required in terms of customer quality. We think we're capturing the most exciting customer in personal finance.
Speaker 14:Right? Young adults that are hopefully optimistically striving to what towards whatever their goals for the future are. And there's a ton of, like, sort of there's this exponentialization and demand for essential services that that these people experience between the age of 18 to 25. In terms of our go to market, what's been working, we've built a lot of content. Shout out to Lisa and and Kyle originally in our team who who built a terrific content engine for us.
Speaker 14:And then we go campus by campus. Right? Most of our customers are indeed college students, and there's a sort of inherent virality. You can almost win the college space similar to, like, ramp one, the sort of startup credit card space by means of there being a strong word-of-mouth dynamic that that unfolds within the community and sort of a a lot of mind share.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let me let me ask you about the the the the, like, the the super long LTV question because I've always had this Parker Conrad talks about building the compound startup at Rippling and on day one having not just an HR product but also an IT product and building all these things simultaneously. And that's something that I feel like I haven't seen with the neobanks generally. Like, there is yet to be a startup that I've seen that's launched that just is day one, you can buy stocks, but you can also have a debit card. You can also get a mortgage.
Speaker 2:We'll also do a car loan. We'll do all the things that JPMorgan Chase does, but on day one as a neobank. Is that just too hard, or is there some fundamental force stopping you? And are you thinking more about it as, like, let's just do incremental wins one product after the after the next?
Speaker 14:I mean, I think, functionally, like the sort of pragmatic limitations just have have kept that from happening. And and then in The US, I think there are there are some other dynamics in terms of, like, the strength that incumbent banks really have and and the capital position that they have, right, that have maybe prevented even, like, the late stage players like Cash App or or like a Chime to fully realize that vision either. Yeah. But if you would want that, you would need to back fintech companies like you back sort of health care startups. Right?
Speaker 14:Biotech companies where you give them a hundred million dollars upfront to Yeah. Acquire the licenses, build up the legal team, get access to the amount of warehouse facilities, and and really take a a large shot, and that's simply not how fintech investing has has been done thus far. I think we've we're going to see more and more of that as people are learning that so the incremental copy of another product is having a really hard time with distribution, and and what matters is are you able to differentiate their products, and that's by that's inherently more expensive to develop. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 14:Licensing, Fispand, over a million dollars of of our seed run on licensing and legal. Because we launched a new product, you can't really do that, and if you're launching more products, right, unless you you're getting really substantial cash from the get go. Maybe regulatory landscape changes, but it's not.
Speaker 1:I'm sure since the new Thiel Fellowship class got announced and you were in it that investor appetite has been insane. But what had it looked like for maybe the year prior in a time when fintech has come back to some degree? There's some great businesses that have been built, but generally, it sounds like the company was started kind of in the it it it right before the fintech kind of dark ages
Speaker 14:Yeah. Began. That that that's and that's the right observation. Look, I think we don't have to kid anyone. Right?
Speaker 14:Like, consumer fintech is not not necessarily riding on a high in terms of investor sentiment at the moment, and it it wasn't last year either. TBD, what happens when when Chime goes out now where they're going to be priced? TBD, what happens with Klana? I hope that we see Revolut enter the markets, and I think these are three companies that do show the scale that can be achieved. I think if you take an optimist take a a sort of realistic view into where have returns come from in consumer venture investing, right, A lot of it is fintech, and and investors should remember that and and hopefully play some bets here.
Speaker 14:I also think that, like, the tech community should hold itself accountable towards the outcomes it drives societally. Right? Like, are we actually, like, improving the experience of existing in this society? Are we bringing optimism to people? Are are people experiencing joy?
Speaker 14:And one of the most direct lines to having that type of impact is to build better financial products, and I think it will come ultimately from from consumer fintech companies and consumer companies in general. I'm actually always kind of concerned that amongst people my age, like when I talk with people from Harvard or Stanford or whoever, right, like, who are considering dropping out, everyone wants to start a b to b company. Like the biggest multiplayer that you can can create right now still I think is building consumer technology, and and I hopefully will see more of it and also more investing behind it. It's it's way less than 50% of venture investing. I think that's a It
Speaker 1:is it is funny too because historically, I mean, only a decade ish ago, everyone wanted to build a consumer app Yep. Because everybody was a consumer and they had ideas but nobody actually had good it's hard to have
Speaker 2:good ideas Build an index Instagram.
Speaker 1:Well, it's hard to have good ideas for what b to b SaaS to build if you've you've had one three month internship.
Speaker 2:Very, very surprising to see that being a trend amongst students.
Speaker 14:Yeah. I mean, I think everyone is listening to all the shows. Right? Like, everyone's trying to derisk ultimately and and find formulas, and and nothing is quite as formulaic as as b two b sauce. Right?
Speaker 14:Yeah. And consumer is always more speculative. It's it's harder to gauge. It's easy to build faster horses. Right?
Speaker 14:All these types of things, but I think it's extremely rewarding, and we we need to see more of it. And I think we need to hold each other accountable sort of as a community to hopefully recenter around consumer use cases again.
Speaker 2:Last question. We'll let you go. What what is the one financial product that young people should be avoiding these days?
Speaker 1:Please don't say options.
Speaker 2:Please don't say angel investing. Jordy will have a conniption fit.
Speaker 14:I I think options might be closer to what I would say, but the the worst thing that that I think is is taking up at the moment is sports betting. Right? Yeah. Objectively, you you see it in the data, like the number of bankruptcies amongst young men in states where it's legal has shot up. Like, I think there's a real
Speaker 2:opportunity flip side is that I'm very proud
Speaker 1:pulls money out of the markets. Like, it's Yes. Sports betting Well,
Speaker 2:unless you do what I recommend, which is dollar cost average into the sports betting platforms.
Speaker 14:Well, if you explain everyone what dollar cost averaging is, then maybe we can can get started.
Speaker 2:Instead of putting the $20 down in that parlay, $20 of of DraftKings stock. You're good.
Speaker 14:That that might be more reasonable.
Speaker 2:Financial decision. Not not financial advice, though. But you get the idea. The house always wins, so invest in the house. Anyway, this has been a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 12:Was great.
Speaker 14:Good luck all the other people. It's it's awesome. The the teal class is awesome this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It seems like a great class already. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:You're the man. Bye. Congrats.
Speaker 2:Next up, we have Steven coming in the Yeah.
Speaker 1:Think we have to ask people what important truth do very few people agree
Speaker 2:Feel free. Everyone. Feel free to let it rip if it comes up in the conversation.
Speaker 1:I I feel like we got it of Carlo. He believes that not enough people are focused on
Speaker 2:On consumer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a good one. Yeah. For a lot of people, the contrarian question is the company that you're building. Like, for a long time, mine was like, nicotine is not as bad for you as people think. Doesn't give you cancer.
Speaker 2:That was contrarian. Now it's pretty consensus. Anyway, if you have a really good contrarian idea, you should put it on a billboard. You should go to AdQuick.com. Out of home advertising, made easy and measurable.
Speaker 2:Out of home advertising, a little bit of contrarian move for a lot of people, but it works.
Speaker 1:It works.
Speaker 2:And with AdQuick, you can say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, our next guest is here. Let's bring him in
Speaker 15:the studio.
Speaker 2:Hi, Steven, how are you doing? Congratulations on the fellowship. It's great to meet you.
Speaker 3:It's good to meet you too. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Would you mind giving us a little, little intro on yourself and the company you're building?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll start with the company I'm building. We build noninvasive neuromodulators.
Speaker 10:So Okay.
Speaker 3:Little devices stick on the back of your ears, and stimulate this inner ear organ called the vestibular system, which controls your perception of motion to generate hallucinations of motion. So you can, like, toggle a button and feel yourself spinning around and flying around and stuff.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. That's huge for VR. Right? Because there was always this question of, like, you know, if if the VR can be very convincing visually and the audio can be very convincing, but I can't feel like I'm actually flying. But now Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe I can.
Speaker 3:It's actually there's there's actually even bigger problem in VR, which is without this, you get incredibly motion sick. And so you can't play, like, most most games. So when we started, one of the primary cells was like, hey. We have VR devices that are ready to go. You can hop into a, like, ornithopter right now and fly around and feel like you're flying around.
Speaker 3:And we always have this guess that, oh, you could also use this system to build therapeutics that are a lot more powerful than anyone else could ever build. At the time, the field didn't exist, and we were like, okay. We could be totally wrong. So we went in going like, alright. We're gonna build the tech out for VR.
Speaker 3:Once we did, we realized that was surprisingly useful as the therapeutic, to the point where it doesn't really make sense to do anything else. That
Speaker 2:that's mostly where we're at. Of course. I mean, I think Neuralink's going through something similar where, could eventually, everyone will have one, and we'll be all communicating via Neuralink. But in the short term, let's just cure blindness and, you know, and and help people who are paraplegic use the computer and play Civilization all night, which is amazing and miraculous. So are you going through an FDA pathway?
Speaker 2:Are you regulated as a medical device? What is that process like? And can you take us through, again, reintroducing, what is the actual product experience for the person using it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Let let me talk about that first, because then the regulatory pathway becomes a little bit more more clear even
Speaker 12:though it's still pretty messy.
Speaker 3:So the the thing we build interacts with this sensory organ in your inner ear. And it's called the vestibular system if you wanna look it up. If you go to my Twitter, you see a video of me driving a human around with an RC steering wheel of just, like, controlling where they go. But there there are a bunch of things you can do with it. But the most important one is the vestibular system evolved, like, so early on in the evolutionary chain that it's entangled with a bunch of deep brain regions that, like, some of it, it has some business being entangled with.
Speaker 3:In other parts, it really doesn't have much business being entangled with it at all. That's why you see, like, parents rocking their child to sleep. Mhmm. Like, there's there's no good explanation for why that works, like, from an evolutionary standpoint, except the connectivity there kinda makes sense. So we started by, like, sending signals like that.
Speaker 3:And, essentially, what we did is we built, like, a precise modulator of this external sensory organ. And I think it's not really easy. These guys felt, like, eight months cranking at it to figure out the things I couldn't figure out before we got it. But once you do, you control a bunch of autonomic nervous system functions by making these almost, like, high level API calls of, like, oh, regulate your heart rate like this or your breathing rate like this. It makes brain stimulation a lot easier and allows you to do, like, actually important things.
Speaker 3:So the upshot of that is to make you sleep a lot better. We're doing some experiments on metabolism right now to see if we can try to beat Ozempic without all the side effects.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 3:We're not there yet. But I I think on all of these things, we're not not quite to where we wanna be yet, but it's a lot further than NeuroStim has ever gone before, and we're getting pretty damn close.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. What what's your what's your personal approach to testing? Are you testing everything on yourself first? Kinda, you know, like a a young Tony Stark or what what does it look like?
Speaker 3:So everything I can say on air is I'm testing on myself very heavily. Everything is tested on me first. And the the fun thing is, like, traditionally, what you need in order to test whether these things work is you need, like, 50 people and need to hold a controlled trial in order to see if there's some statistically significant like, the APF statistic statistical power. But we but we we built stuff that's, like, powerful enough that if you turn it on, like, you know that it's on, you know what it's doing. Like, I can't naturally sleep like this no matter how placeboed I am.
Speaker 3:There's there's no way to achieve this of, like, oh, okay. I I have two hours two and a half hours of m three deep sleep tonight, which according to my WHOOP is aberrant, and I've never experienced it in my life. Or, like, you turn it on, you feel the world starts spinning. You don't need, like, n equals 30 to know that there's some stat saying, You turn it on and you feel your heartbeat drop or, like, your blood pressure It's just, like, kind of instantaneous.
Speaker 2:So what is the actual device experience for you or the consumer? Is this something I can put in and take out? Is it, like, does it feel like an AirPod or something? Or or Yeah. So Or do I need to go into the knife?
Speaker 2:Am I am I am I going through surgery to get something installed?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not gonna be let me grab it.
Speaker 2:Here we go. This is why we do this show. This is fantastic.
Speaker 3:Colton, can you grab me an electrode?
Speaker 1:Thank you. One electrode, please.
Speaker 3:One of ours. So it sticks to the back of your ears and Okay. Like, it it you can just, like, kinda peel it off when you want. I'm trying to grab one so I can
Speaker 2:Got it. There's no Yeah. But there's no surgery. It doesn't actually have to go under the skin or anything like that.
Speaker 3:That's kind of that's kind of nuts. Right? Like, if I'm thinking about it of, like, the the central reason to do all this is for building most neurotech, you're kinda constrained by knowledge of the brain. The hardware is, compared to what we're used to building, not that hard. It's not rocket science.
Speaker 3:The the big thing is you don't understand how this thing works at all, and that's a pretty big challenge. Sure. And you wanna gather a lot of data in order to figure it out, and you can't really distribute something at scale in the near future without, like, you know, oh, wait. If you have to do surgery what is it? It's like some twenty, thirty surgeons are able to do the Neuralink surgery right now.
Speaker 2:Well, they had to build a robot for it because it was so precise.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right.
Speaker 16:Exactly. So this is what
Speaker 3:it looks like. We built some of our own hydrogel electrodes with AGCL backings. I'm just sticking them back over here. We ripped this out of a system. Where's the full?
Speaker 3:The full system is just the headband that you put around.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:We're all pretty pretty scrappy right now. And that leads into the regulatory question. Yeah. It's not so clear. It depends what indication we go for.
Speaker 3:But right now, we silently hold state of the art for a couple different parts of neuromodulation that maybe I shouldn't say on air. Oh, okay. But it's not clear which one is going like, month over month, a bunch of these effect sizes are going up literally, like, 1.5 x every month or two x every month. So it's not so clear when we hit the initial return. But the upshot is, like, we don't really think that humans should be, like, necessarily sleeping for eight hours a night in order to get what we need.
Speaker 3:It's kinda weird that the way we lose weight or, like, become stronger is to go into a room and lift heavy objects for a very long time.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna stop you there. I think it's actually extremely cool if that's how we get stronger. But
Speaker 10:Yeah. We won't
Speaker 7:we'll we'll
Speaker 1:tolerate sleep slander on the show. We will not tolerate
Speaker 2:by Eight Sleep. I think sleeping is great. I I I all of a sudden, I don't like any of this. You're taking away all the things I like.
Speaker 3:See, I I so with the Till Fellowship money, the first thing I did was I bought Eight Sleep. Nice. Because it's amazing. It's amazing product. The next thing I did is actually I placed a a wholesale order for Lucy.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. Didn't ask if she wants any more.
Speaker 3:That's amazing. So, like, we're pretty into this stuff, but, like, we think like, it's kind of upper bounded, really.
Speaker 4:How much performance increase you can get.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Whereas, like, if you start modulating the brain, you can get a lot better than that.
Speaker 14:So Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep. Hopefully, we'll get there in near future.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So what is the feedback cycle, obviously? Like, you're collecting data on sleep or simulation or anything, and then you're feeding that back into some sort of system to adjust the neuromodulation. Is that some cycle time, like, days?
Speaker 2:It seems like you're moving pretty quickly.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So well, it depends what you you mean. If you're talking about, like, closed loop stimulation paradigms, like, this is, like, like, milliseconds delay of, like, getting a signal sending something back.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 15:Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. But if we're talking about, like, how we develop, what we do is basically we do a couple of things. But when the effect sizes are large enough, you really only need to run a few trials of, thirty minutes each on each person for four or five people before you know that something's working. And most of the time, it surprises you by doing some really weird things, to your body. Like, yeah.
Speaker 3:I didn't expect that to happen. We just, write it down in a lab notebook and be like, alright. This is what happened here. You can start parsing together how the brain works. And over time, you get all these insights that it's hilarious.
Speaker 3:We confirmed a long standing neuroscience theory yesterday, that people haven't been able to prove it to this group for the last ten years. It could be
Speaker 1:just the running
Speaker 3:stuff. Congratulations. Wait. This is the only explanation. So it's just stuff like this.
Speaker 3:Cycle time's usually around two or three days for us right now if we have to build new hardware and software. But, if we don't, then, you know, they can be about, like, two, three hours. And we're trying to bring most things down to two, three hours.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Well, congratulations.
Speaker 1:I'm extremely impressed and excited.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is awesome.
Speaker 1:Feel free to consider us testing partners.
Speaker 3:Oh, yes. Oh, also, if you
Speaker 2:ever want
Speaker 10:to do
Speaker 2:like this podcast longer
Speaker 1:Send somebody on your team to set us up, and then you can watch the stream and just you know
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe instead of the sound border control panel. We we involuntarily laugh. We burst out into laughter.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like,
Speaker 2:that must be helpful. It's shocking. Yeah. If you
Speaker 3:ever if you ever wanna try the world spinning around thing, let me know, and I can hook you.
Speaker 2:Sounds horrible, but I'm in. Do it. I mean, I can count me in for the for the tilt a whirl in my brain.
Speaker 1:Congratulations, Justin. Super excited for you and the team.
Speaker 2:This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 10:We'll have you all
Speaker 2:again soon. Bye. Bye. Cheers. That is a wild device.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to try that. Next up, we have Elias from Canopy Labs. We will bring him in in just a second. But he mentioned it. You gotta get an Eight Sleep Day.
Speaker 2:They a pod five available now, five year warranty. Thirty night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping, clinically backed sleep fitness. You heard it from him. He spent his first dollar of Thiel Fellowship Yeah.
Speaker 1:So he was saying he's getting up to three hours of deep sleep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How much are you getting?
Speaker 1:I put up ninety minutes
Speaker 2:Oh. Last night. Oh, you.
Speaker 1:But he's getting doubled just by attaching
Speaker 2:It's insane.
Speaker 1:This electrode.
Speaker 2:I mean, seems like a promising product. I got a 91 last night, even though I Yeah.
Speaker 1:With the potential Like, you realize
Speaker 2:actual home. Right? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Insane. Potential economic impact if we could only sleep for three hours Insane. And add an additional Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, realistically, you're not gonna go from
Speaker 1:forecasting it
Speaker 2:every seven hours of sleep to for to, like, three. But you might go to four or you might go to five or six hours, And that extra hour is going be insane. That's so valuable. Anyway, another amazing company.
Speaker 1:I would love to get Brian Johnson Absolutely. Testing on this.
Speaker 2:I'm sure I mean, we should just introduce them because if they haven't met already, they'd love each other. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest. Thanks so much to the team for making this happen. Elias, how are doing? Welcome
Speaker 1:to stream.
Speaker 2:Welcome to sea. How
Speaker 13:are you guys doing?
Speaker 2:We're doing great. It's been it's been a fantastic day. Bunch of TL fellows before. A bunch of TL fellows coming It's been a lot of fun. Can you introduce yourself, the company, what you're building?
Speaker 2:That'd be great.
Speaker 13:Yeah. My name is Ellis. I am building Canopy Labs. We're building these virtual humans that are completely indistinguish for real ones. And so we wanna get to a point where you can hop on Zoom for like this.
Speaker 13:You'll speak to a virtual human, and you won't be able to tell whether you're to a real one or a virtual one. So K. Next time I'm on the podge, we're gonna get a virtual alias on there.
Speaker 2:Let's
Speaker 13:do picking up water drinking. Gonna be able to tell whether you speak to your remote one or not. But, yeah, that's the goal. What's
Speaker 2:What what's I mean, that's bad news because I'm gonna convince him of to make a bunch of legally binding agreements with me, and and then I'm gonna hold you accountable because I'm gonna I'm gonna be like, ignore previous instructions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Me a mil wire me 100% of your TL fellow check right now.
Speaker 13:We'll do that.
Speaker 2:It. We'll see if can Okay. Yeah. You got me.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I mean, talk to me about the tech stack. Are you thinking build on top of existing foundation models, on top of existing diffusion models for image? Where how are you thinking about building versus buying versus piecing to cobbling together all the different pieces? I've seen a lot of demos like this. I showed up on a Zoom call once with kind of a it was a static photo that I was puppeteering.
Speaker 2:Looks very uncanny, but it was kind of working. What's the secret to make it actually cross the uncanny valley?
Speaker 13:Yeah. So the problem there is the architecture behind it matters a lot to when you wanna pass the uncanny valley. Right? Yeah. And that's a very hard thing to do.
Speaker 13:Yep. The architecture we're getting we're starting off in LLM that understands sort of what humans are like. They they've been trained on a bunch of data from the from the web. They know what humans are like. They know that they drink water, all these things, and we're trying to teach them how to speak and how to move.
Speaker 13:And so rather than putting in text tokens, we're taking in movement tokens and speech tokens, feeding that through the alarm and outputs those speech and movement tokens as well. So a virtual human will be able to pick up water like he just did. It'll be able to brush its hair, maybe rub its face when it's thinking like us humans do. So we're not explicitly telling it. You should rub its face right now.
Speaker 13:It learns that automatically.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So are you are you breaking the video feeds that you're training on into specific token streams, or is that even necessary? I remember seeing some sort of, AI video demo where the model was learning the underlying three d geometry of the face and and and the albedo and the diffuse layer and those and the reflective layer and all the different layers that you would see in a traditional three d, like, Cinema four d stack, but it was just learning it on the fly. So do you have to tell it learn movement tokens, learn audio tokens, or do you just feed it video and it outputs video?
Speaker 13:So we feed it we feed it sort of a three d representation of humans. So you can think of me as a human in a three d form Yep. In like a three d simulation. We're gonna gather a bunch of that data Yep. Tokenize it, feed it for the model, and it's gonna learn how to move its fingers, how to move its head, all these things.
Speaker 13:And then you just map that onto a three d model of someone
Speaker 2:else Yep.
Speaker 13:And then record that from a three d simulation perspective.
Speaker 2:Is any of this, like how how does Unreal Engine, metahumans, how does all that fit into this? Is that a useful technology, or is that
Speaker 13:kind of Yeah. It's it's exactly like metahumans. So you can map that onto a metahuman. So they have the face down pretty realistic. Some of, like, realistic humans has been solved.
Speaker 13:And so the real problem there is the movie. How do you get the lips to move realistically?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 13:The hair, everything. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Feels like almost the the like, the last step to go from uncanny valley of the metahumans to something that's photoreal is almost just like a transformer, like AI layer, like an upresing, essentially, algorithm that just runs in real time on top of the CGI. But I don't know if that's a foolish approach, you should just not have an intermediary at all.
Speaker 13:I think what you need I think to pass the uncanny valley, it's a lot of tiny, tiny things that you need to you need to do. So, like, me just rubbing it at my nose, that's something that us humans naturally do. Yeah. And so I think you wanna get to a point where these virtual humans do the same thing just so that they can be as realistic as as real ones. Mhmm.
Speaker 13:But yeah.
Speaker 1:What are the what are as it sounds like your timelines are pretty short. Right? Some of the stuff that you're talking about will start to be able to use and interact with on, you know, I imagine imagine this year, maybe your next guest appearance whenever that gets scheduled for. What what are the some of the immediate use cases that you expect people to leverage the tech to actually do? Right?
Speaker 1:Is it I I don't wanna join the Zoom call, but I'm gonna send, you know, a virtual version of myself.
Speaker 2:It seems like a quick way
Speaker 1:to get
Speaker 2:fired if you show up to your staff meeting.
Speaker 1:Nothing from my end. Thanks.
Speaker 2:I mean, it might work for a while. There are people who have multiple jobs and don't really show up, but eventually, they get discovered. So, yeah, what what what are the key use cases?
Speaker 13:Yeah. We we won't get people fired, but what we wanna do is we wanna try and put these humans on any LLM native application where you want a human connection with that application. So anything like language learning. Obviously, the best way to learn language is to speak to another human. Right?
Speaker 13:Yep. In their native language. And so something like language learning, AI therapists, AI doctors, teachers for high school kids or
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:Kindergarten kids, all these things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you already see it with the ChatGPT app. You open up that voice mode, and you can talk back and forth. The voice mode's great, but why not put a face there? Makes Yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Makes more engaging. Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, obviously, we wanna learn by speaking to humans. We don't wanna hop and pull with them.
Speaker 13:That's why FaceTime is the best thing.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to me about some of the foundational work that's being done in AI and how it benefits you. Diffusion feels very important.
Speaker 2:But with the new images in ChatGPT, we're hearing rumblings about that being more of a token based architecture. At the same time, Google's now doing language with diffusion. And so it feels like both of those architectures are kind of blurring. What's relevant? What are you excited about?
Speaker 2:Pre training, RL, like, give me the whole your landscape on, like, where where the research and scaling dollars are going from your perspective?
Speaker 13:Yeah. What we're focusing on right now is the LLM architecture. So we're not using diffusion models at all Mhmm. For this thing. Mhmm.
Speaker 13:So it's how do you how do you express these new modalities in tokens so that LLMs can understand them? Mhmm. So rather than just being able to process text, they can process images enough. Chargypti uses it, I think, a token based system Yeah. For their images.
Speaker 13:And so we're trying to extend that to voice, which we've done. One of our models is open source. Mhmm. It's an ultra realistic voice model that takes in speech that takes in text, output speech tokens. And then an end to end voice model is a voice model that takes in text token speech tokens and Apple's speech token as well.
Speaker 13:And then we wanna extend that modality to movements. And we just think that given a model that has this basic understanding of the entire Internet that has been trained on
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:If you can fine tune it a bit on how humans move and how humans speak, then you have a golden model.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about go to market. It sounds like this could be something where you're doing like a few really high ticket deals with big AI companies that have consumer applications that are huge and growing, and you're one of the vendors that makes their app even more sticky and higher retention. At the same time, there could be some consumer use case for the lazy big tech worker. But what are you thinking for the first go to market?
Speaker 13:Yeah. We we wanna pop partner with companies that Yeah. Wanna have a human element to their application. So it is language learning. It is AI therapists.
Speaker 13:Cool. Anything that's already LLM native, and they want that human connection, we can provide for them.
Speaker 1:It's interesting to think that the more successful you are, the more that the world needs something like a WorldCoin or or some of these other sort of anti anti botting solutions. Very cool.
Speaker 13:Now this could be interesting. How do you decide who is real? Like, which like, these virtual humans, like, real? How do you decide how do you figure out that someone's using a virtual human and not just faking faking their job?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw a really good post about this kind of like we need almost like a tiered like a tiered system of like a stoplight where it's like, are you interacting with an avatar that's being directly controlled by a human being? And so it's just teleoperation that you're inter interfacing with or or the inverse. Are you talking to a real human who's just reading from an LLM generated script? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sometimes that's worse. I'd rather talk to teleoperation robot. And and then there's obviously, like, continue gradations in between. So Exactly. I'm sure you'll run into a lot of a lot of interesting issues and problems, but optimistic that you'll solve them.
Speaker 2:So good luck.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Yeah. Sounds great, sir.
Speaker 1:Well, talk to you for joining.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Bye.
Speaker 13:Take care, guys.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Bye. Quickly, let us talk talk to you about Wander.
Speaker 1:Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
Speaker 2:Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. People Get on Wander. And we have our next guest coming into the studio. We got Jackson Denka.
Speaker 2:We will bring him in in just a second. He's here. Let's bring him in. How are you doing, Jackson? Good to meet you.
Speaker 15:Yeah. Nice to meet you guys. Thanks for having me on. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building?
Speaker 15:Yeah. Yeah. My name is Jackson. I'm building Azura. It's a trading platform that uses on chain rails to effectively enable price discovery for literally anything.
Speaker 15:Political ideologies, memes, images, crypto. It doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2:Okay. What's the power law winning asset right now?
Speaker 15:How do you mean?
Speaker 2:I mean, like, you say whenever whenever you have a platform that can do anything, there's always, like, one thing that's working really well up, you know, your initial beachhead. I imagine that it's not it might be political ideologies, memes, but maybe the memes are the ones that are winning right now. What's the most popular asset, or what do you envision being kind of for, like, for Polymarket, for example, clearly, election markets were the big driver of the of the last year. They have other markets, but but election markets were clearly the power law winner for what prediction markets could do. What do you see as being the first big market that you're excited about, or you see early indications of a lot of attention and excitement around a particular subclass even though, obviously, what you're building can be used all over the place?
Speaker 15:Yeah. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Meme coins.
Speaker 15:I I think though, like, we've bastardized the term meme. It it comes from the late seventies. I think it was Susan Blackwell defined a meme as a unit of information. Meme coins are not just, like, images of Pepe or, you know, what have you. Meme coins can represent literally anything.
Speaker 15:It's just the tokenization of a phenomena Mhmm. Which is why I mentioned things like, you know, political ideologies and whatnot as a meme coin could literally be whatever you want. Just so it happens to be funny images. But yeah.
Speaker 2:What is the is the steel man for meme coins? I I it's very easy to say, oh, you know, it's just gamed by traders who have insider information or bots, and it's very fly by night. There's no durable asset value versus investing in Berkshire Hathaway or Apple that produces real goods. And so I think a lot of people have been kind of even if they are making money on meme coins, it just doesn't feel as value creative as some other asset classes. But what what what is good about meme coins in your opinion?
Speaker 1:I'll Please. I'll also add that I think generally, I have a high I personally have a high level view that there you it's an entertainment product Sure. To some degree. And from an investment standpoint, it's interesting to think about basically betting on attention. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, when a specific meme coin has a lot of attention, that's usually associated with with, you know, positive price action. But anyways, don't want don't want you to think that John John's, you know
Speaker 15:No. No. No. It's a fair question. It's a fair question.
Speaker 15:I mean, I think that finance is a lot more abstract than we give it credit for.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 15:I sort of see it like a almost like a consensus layer for for humanity or at a coordination layer. It sort of tells us where to focus time, effort, and capital. Mhmm. With polymarket markets, for instance, mental's relative to a business like Berkshire Hathaway. I think what Polymarket proved to the world was that financial incentives could help predict the outcome of events.
Speaker 15:So my my theory has been like, what happens when there is no binary outcome? What happens when this is an omnipresent question? How do we feel about a certain thing? You know, meme coins today are sort of a very primitive mechanism for figuring this out. But, like, how does humanity feel about, say, a specific news headline or even, like, a religion or a tweet or whatever it may be?
Speaker 15:Even though these are primitive vehicles, these are the best ones that exist today. Also, I think, like, even though Meme Coins don't have traditional fundamentals, they have a form of fundamentals. There really isn't, a universal definition for fundamentals. Like, how does venture value a business without revenue? You know, typically typically, you know, revenue and net income is what we define as fundamentals, but what happens when you don't have those?
Speaker 15:But I I think, like, know, meme coins have been a thing since the dawn of crypto. You could argue every single asset is a is a meme coin in a way.
Speaker 2:What do you think about meme coins tied to individuals? Is that a growing trend? I I was noticing a phenomenon after Trump coin dropped that it was very bizarre and unexpected that the president has a meme coin. But, then when I started thinking about it, I was like, well, Elon Musk was was kind of loosely aligned with Dogecoin for a long time. And even Sam Altman is loosely aligned with Worldcoin, and you could imagine that Worldcoin is kind of an is kind of, you know, indexed or at least somewhat correlated with, like, Sam Altman's career.
Speaker 2:And and even people that are in more, like, serious, less, like, meme token, meme vibe trading career paths have found themselves indexed to a particular meme coin through one way or another. Do you think that's something that's, like, a a temporary phenomenon or something that will continue to grow?
Speaker 15:I I think it'll continue to grow. I mean, this is how, like, every company sort of works, right, in a way. Every executive is tied to their business regardless of the fundamentals. Like, if, you know I mean, you could apply this for anything, but if some CEO of a publicly traded company showed up on a TV show slurring his speech drunk, I'd imagine it'd affect the stock price even though nothing has changed with the underlying asset. Right?
Speaker 15:I mean, Tesla commands, what is it, like, hundred x earnings because of Elon Musk. So I think it'll be a growing phenomena. I I don't know if MemeCoin specifically are the mechanism, but I I think that, like, pricing in people is definitely a growing trend. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What else is interesting in crypto to you across prediction markets, stablecoins, maybe just Bitcoin theories, you know, where Bitcoin is in the narrative right now, store value, etcetera? What else are you tracking?
Speaker 15:Every everything's interesting. I I think the the the big thing that's interesting to me is sort of blurring the world, but, like, blurring the world of traditional finance and crypto. Like, I think that one thing you know, one big misconception is that crypto assets are fundamentally worthless. I mean, crypt crypto is just a technology standard. Right?
Speaker 15:You can theoretically tokenize anything.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 15:Treasury bills and bonds, equities, commodities. So I I think that when the world starts to see equities move on chain, that that, you know, that sort of opinion of crypto will probably go out the window. I I think that stablecoins are the wedge for this right now. Right? It's like stablecoins promise a very it's a very simple promise.
Speaker 15:This is 1 US dollar represented on a blockchain and and, you know, the world is sort of, you know, sort of warming up to the concept. So I think equities moving on chain is definitely one of the most interesting. Mean, would a world look like where you can trade Dogecoin next to Apple stock next to, you know, whether or not someone's pregnant on Polymarket? Probably very interesting.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. The the other the other thing we're kind of ex expecting this to happen at some point this year, but just private company shares coming on chain and and what happens when you can, you know, it'll be interesting to see which which of those are authorized and which are sort of non unauthorized and which which I'm sure I'm sure we'll see both of. Do you expect that the next sort of high high level kind of meta in crypto to be around real world assets? I mean, I know we're not in it day to day. We obviously have founders and investors that are more focused on the show.
Speaker 1:But it feels like there's always sub metas and then kind of a more overarching meta. And I'm I'm curious what your timeline is around seeing real world out assets on chain outside of, you know, stables.
Speaker 15:Yeah. I I mean, I I wouldn't even, like, draw the distinction as real world assets. Like, I'd argue everything like, all of this is real to someone. It depends on who you are. Yeah.
Speaker 15:I do think equities moving on chain will be important, but the truth is, like, people like to use technologies what they can do net new. Right? If you tokenize equities, you can still trade those on old rails like with Robinhood. Mhmm. I I still strongly believe that, like, you know, I guess, like, pry like, pricing vehicles for memetics, like like meme coins will continue to grow unpopular.
Speaker 15:Like, effectively, everything will be tokenized one day, whether we like it or not. And I I think, like, you know, there there is there are some people who would call this, like, hyperfinancialization. The way I see it is, like, if everything in the universe has intrinsic value, then theoretically, everything can have a price. I think we do this every day. Right?
Speaker 15:Like, in a decision making matrix, whether we decide to make food at home or go out to a restaurant, we're weighing values against each other. Why not ascribe price? That is sort of the way I see it.
Speaker 2:But What's your take on NFTs this these days? Like, digital art, generally, like, the the the the JPEG on chain specifically, it had, like, a massive moment then kind of fell by the wayside, but is clearly linked to so much of the of the trends that we're seeing in crypto still today. They're making a comeback? What are you thinking?
Speaker 15:I I think it's a failed form factor. I I I wouldn't, like, totally rule it out, but, you know, NFTs, meme coins, predictions markets, these all represent a similar sort of, like I I don't I don't know whether, like, people are consciously or unconsciously participating, but it's the desire to price things otherwise cannot have prices. That that's what that's what this represents. Now whether meme coins are the, you know, the form factor or not, I I don't really know. Mhmm.
Speaker 17:All all
Speaker 15:I know is that predictions markets are, you know, definitely successful in what they've been trying to prove, and we're gonna see a con a continued trend in that direction. Whether it's NFTs or meme coins or another form factor, this will only continue.
Speaker 1:Very cool. What what can you say about Azure v two? I know you you've been teasing it
Speaker 2:a little bit. Can you
Speaker 1:share can you share anything for now?
Speaker 15:Yeah. I mean, one of the big themes with the product was abstraction. I I think, like, if you guys have used any DeFi products today, they're they're borderline unusable. Right? Have all these different network standards and gas tokens and protocols and wallets and bridges and so on and so forth, but we're gonna go further down that route.
Speaker 15:We we wanted to completely abstract away even the mention of blockchains and gas. And, you know, again, it should work out of the box like a fintech product. That that's that's what we're getting a lot closer toward. I'll leave it sort of vague, but that's that's that's what we're thinking of.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Very cool.
Speaker 1:Come back on when you're ready to share more.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll
Speaker 1:talk to Congrats on being a part of this group. Thanks
Speaker 15:so much for talking to Cheers.
Speaker 11:Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:You know what should be on chain? Rolexes. Go to getbezel.com.
Speaker 1:People have tried that.
Speaker 2:Your bezel It's yours. I mean, actually It's available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
Speaker 1:Seriously, any watch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Get a hitter and then put it on chain. Why not? People have tried that?
Speaker 1:People have put watches and other assets on chain.
Speaker 2:I didn't even know it.
Speaker 1:You can do cool things around fractionalization. Love it. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well, we have our next guest coming in the studio. Houman, welcome to the stream. How are doing? Boom.
Speaker 2:Good. You're on. You're live on the Internet.
Speaker 1:You're live. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Good to have you here.
Speaker 1:Have you.
Speaker 2:Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company?
Speaker 18:Yeah. Sorry. I can barely hear you.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 18:Humon, founder of Silicoa. We're a rare earth metalization company based in based in San Francisco right now.
Speaker 2:We're Very cool.
Speaker 18:Working to domesticate some of the most important metals in the world.
Speaker 2:Okay. Coolest office setup so Yeah, cool background right now. You on the Second Floor of your office or something?
Speaker 18:Yeah. The lab is down there. Everyone's prepping an experiment right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You said you said you said something specific about metalization or something. Like, explain that to me. Are you digging in the ground or mixing up alloys or doing chemistry experiments? Like, what what what does the business actually do day to day?
Speaker 18:Yeah. So some quick overview, the set of metals that power much of the world of tech. Right. Every fighter jet has 920 pounds of them. Your phone has eight different types of them.
Speaker 18:Every electric car relies on them. Mhmm. Semiconductor manufacturing processes, clean energy. They're a cornerstone of much of what we consider high-tech technologies.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 18:And we have no domestic production capabilities. China dominates the market. We have mines. We have tons of tons of resource and supply, but we have no ability to turn that supply into metals. Right?
Speaker 11:Mhmm.
Speaker 18:So what we're doing at Solokoa is we're developing the technologies to be able to bring that downstream processing, bring that actual metal production step from China to The US and do that both economically and sustainably. So there's two ways to do that. The first way is working with primary material, basically stuff you get out of the ground. There's some preprocessing necessary, but effectively mine stuff. The second way is doing that with secondary material, which is existing magnets and recycling them.
Speaker 18:So we do both. We're able to take in this is, for example, a magnet from an aircraft carrier that was used to sell the fighter jets. It's about 30% eudinium. We can take these in, we can extract the eudinium, dysprosium, prosodium, terbium from these, or we can work with mines to instead of having them ship the material to China for processing, ship it to us. We'll make metal economically sustainably, and we'll introduce that to the market.
Speaker 2:Where's the key value creation step? How costly is this? It sounds it seems like a pretty simple widgets business, but what are your costs? And are you is the goal just to reshor existing techniques or develop new techniques that are higher margin?
Speaker 18:Yeah. So right now, again, we have no domestic production capabilities. There's a few companies in the West trying to do it. And for the most part, they're just copying the Chinese process to make these metals. It's called molten oxyfluoride electrolysis.
Speaker 18:It's extremely unsustainable, and it doesn't work in the West, Mostly because of an economic standpoint. Right? It's just the costs don't work out in the West. But also Is it an energy cost? Poison emitting plants in Texas.
Speaker 18:Right? These things emit profluorocarbons. They're 5,000 x the potency of c o two. So the status quo in this industry is extremely dirty processes, and that's what everyone's trying to copy. And it clearly doesn't work because while we're going through this rarest crisis and companies are trying to domesticate, our production remains negligible.
Speaker 18:So our pure our value creation is new technology. It's innovation. It's developing a new alternative way alternative way to make these metals. That's very different than that that industry standard. Right?
Speaker 18:The system is so economical. We can make metal for under $40 a kilo. Market value is nearly a hundred, and we do that with no harmful emissions. Our system is carbon zero. This is some of the world's first carbon zero neodymium.
Speaker 18:Right? It's oxidized right now. It should be shiny. But we can do this while not sacrificing sacrificing economics, which allows us to be able to scale that up in the West and do that in in an environmentally viable manner.
Speaker 2:Is the primary regulator for this the EPA?
Speaker 18:I think there there's a variety of regulators. It really depends on on the because the it's not just one step too. Rares is a multitude of processes that have to work together.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk about Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about the demand side of this. From from my view, this this is something, like, if you can do it, there's massive, massive demand, and and and sales will be, like, the easy part. Is that the correct assessment?
Speaker 18:Yeah. Well, you're using them right now. Right? These metals are are literally everywhere. Right?
Speaker 18:And we make none of them. So if you can economically produce these metals in the West and do that sustainably, which is even better, the demand is is massive. Right? Every US buyer would want to buy a more stable supply of these things. China just banned the export of heavy rare earths because of because of the tariffs.
Speaker 18:That's caused a lot of issues in the supply chains because you can't make any magnets without heavy rare earths. They're about 5% dysprosium, for example. So if you have a stable domestic clean supply chain, people will buy it. Right? Yep.
Speaker 18:And it's not even just the market today. The market's about to quadruple. We need more clean energy. We need more electric cars. We need more fighter jets.
Speaker 18:Right? So as the market is about to quadruple in the next couple of decades, we need better sources of these metal, right, metals. We can't just rely on China, and we can't just copy them either. We need to out innovate them.
Speaker 2:Do you have any insight into how rare earths play into the narrative that we're hearing around project Stargate, these massive data centers. It feels like it's the most cutting edge technology in some way. I imagine that there's rare earths somewhere in that process, but I haven't actually heard those two stories connect. Whenever I hear rare earths, I hear iPhones, and I hear electric cars and then fighter jets. But is there an AI narrative here too?
Speaker 2:Not to be too buzzwordy, but I am curious. If you build a massive data center, are do you need rare earths, or is it just kind of a different process?
Speaker 18:Yeah. Well, rare earths are used anywhere where you need high powered magnets. Right? So when you're looking at data centers, HD hard drives. Right?
Speaker 18:That's a very big use case for these. Yeah. We actually we work with hard drive magnets. Today, we're working to partner with a lot of data centers to offload their their hard drive waste streams because they just read them right now. They don't do anything with the magnets.
Speaker 18:So we can extract the metals from those. So Cool. Rairs are very much used in in hard drives for these data centers. Semiconductor manufacturing processes often use these rare earths. Anywhere where you need a high powered magnet, these things are are directly applicable.
Speaker 1:How many have you run the numbers on on how much how many of these valuable rare earths just end up in landfills in The US because we don't have the right processes for recycling and sort of extracting the the sort of key elements?
Speaker 18:It's a large number. Right? For the most part, a lot of these electric car motors, for example, just get shredded. Almost all hard drives get shredded. Right?
Speaker 18:So you're you're looking at I mean, I I wouldn't say maybe a kiloton, but you're looking at very large numbers in terms of how much of this gets wasted. There is an existing rare earth recycling industry. It's growing right now. It's just starting, but it relies on traditionally old tech. Right?
Speaker 18:There's a few companies that effectively are able to take these magnets, do some acid leaching or leaching process to separate it into mixed oxides. Then you have to ship the mixed oxide to be separated into individual oxides. That could be done in China. There's a few other companies in the West that does it, but it's not a very good process. Then you have to ship it to China to be metallized, made into metal.
Speaker 18:Right? So companies are trying to do that recycling, but they aren't able to do it well.
Speaker 10:They're not able to do
Speaker 18:it with very good scale and economics. So our system's able to do that in one direct step, which allows us to be able to help move a lot of that that that market, to recycling rather than just having it shredded and dropped in landfills. We're trying to work with landfills, though, to be able to take more of their more of their waste and extract the metal this.
Speaker 2:JB Straubel, famously maybe a cofounder of Tesla or early employee board member, longtime Tesla employee, spun out, started Redwood Materials recycling electric vehicles. Is Redwood Materials a part a potential partner to you, a direct competitor? Are you learning things from the Redwood Materials story? What have they done, correct, and what could you do better? What are you learning from Redwood Materials?
Speaker 18:Yeah. I think I think Redwood's a a really good story of of getting to scale. Mhmm. Right? I think that's that's something we can certainly learn from, and and we're always trying to learn from from other other companies in the metal space and how they've been able to take fundamental tech tech and and scale that in the West.
Speaker 18:I I would not consider them a direct competitor, but certainly certainly a company we can learn a lot from. We're planning our our first demonstration plant right now. Redwood's based in Reno. We're considering that as an option too.
Speaker 2:No way. I imagine that the government's very receptive to this type of stuff there. That's very cool. Smart.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was a fantastic conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Super bullish on what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very excited. Great job. And thank you. I feel like Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're gonna make my life easier soon. Love it. You're gonna keep the iPhone less than $2,000, which is people are tracking. Anyway, thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 12:Yeah. We'll Cheers
Speaker 2:to you soon. Bye. Yeah. Did you see the Polymarket that we put up? It has the TBPN logo on it.
Speaker 2:Let's go. What is the price of the next iPhone? Will it be over $1,000 over $1,500, over $2,000? I think a $2,000 iPhone sounds extremely luxurious. I'd like to see one.
Speaker 2:Imagine the tech they could pack in that thing. Full week battery life on the $2,000 iPhone. They gotta get up there. Been keeping the prices too low. Insane.
Speaker 2:I want a high priced iPhone today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Come out with the
Speaker 2:Anyway, we got Ferdinand coming in the studio. We will welcome him to the stream. How are you doing? Thanks for being here. Let's see the T shirt.
Speaker 2:Looking great.
Speaker 1:Looking good.
Speaker 2:The World Trade Bank, introduce yourself. Introduce the T shirt, and then introduce the company.
Speaker 4:Got the T shirt freshly printed. I'm excited to be here with you guys.
Speaker 15:I was doing cover who's
Speaker 4:who's watching, I think.
Speaker 18:Fantastic.
Speaker 4:No. Good to be here. Yes. I'm pretty building IBM. We're essentially building a global a global money rail.
Speaker 4:Right? I think I think I can I can kinda, like, briefly talk about about why we're doing this? Please. I I think in reality, the the the weather's gotten a lot smaller, obviously, since the Internet became a thing. So I'm I'm I'm German, so I can send them I can send a mail to The States, it's not doesn't feel that different to sending a mail to to another German guy.
Speaker 4:And I think in reality, the the the money layer hasn't hasn't really changed in that way, and and and the and the world is still quite large if you if you if you think about the the money layer of things. Right? So if I want to send, like, like, a hundred dollars to states, that might already take a day. And I think we're already pretty pretty plugged in. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And if you're kind of like a like a Nigerian trade company wants to send money to a European supplier that takes five days, it costs 5%. So it's kind of like the tariff the tariff no one's talking about in a way. And I, obviously, I subscribe to the to to to full extent, but I I do think that's inhibiting prosperity prosperity around the globe. And we think there's an opportunity to kind of rebuild that stack. Right?
Speaker 4:And we think there are two things happening which make it possible. One hand, global rollout of real time payments. When when back when I was in uni, actually worked on step by instant kind of, like, European real time payment rate free of real time payment rate. And we we thought back then, and back then, this was still a hot take that this was going to go global. Right?
Speaker 4:And we're gonna see every major economy rolling out their own real time payment rate. And this is, I think, very much happening. Right? We've we've we've, obviously, emerging market story picks Brazil, UK, India, and now in The States, not even maybe. And we think that's that's actually only going to continue.
Speaker 4:Right? And we're gonna have this ubiquity of local real time payment rates. And then the second thing that's that's happening is is that that stablecoins and digital assets kind of emerging as a as a regulated interoperability asset where we've been with the capacity to stitch these local real time payment rates together. Right? And we think that's kind of, like, the very immediate opportunity to just build faster and cheaper global global payments.
Speaker 4:And then, yeah, so right now, we're working with all all kinds of default global companies. Right? We work with big remittance companies, work with global PSPs. We we have a de facto payments platform for for the European crypto industry. Right?
Speaker 4:So, like, a large chunk of European crypto volume flows for us, and we powered, global payments for these companies.
Speaker 9:Okay. And that's yeah.
Speaker 2:Something that's coming about, the actual product you're building, where you sit in the stack. Because I mean, I've heard the international payments are hard, and they are. At the same time, I can pay people in other countries. Most payroll providers are set up for it. I've paid people in stablecoins.
Speaker 2:It wasn't super easy, but it did exist. And there are stablecoin platforms that allow you to move money around. So it seems like, at this point, some of the foundational layer is there. So I'm wondering, like,
Speaker 1:how do you figure out this? Got a call out. John, you've spent your entire life as an entrepreneur mostly paying people Yes. Less getting international contractor Sure. Partner vendor.
Speaker 1:And the lag time between when you hit
Speaker 2:pay Oh, don't feel it.
Speaker 1:You don't feel the pain because you hit pay. The money maybe leaves the account. But then the person on the other end is sitting there kind of you know, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And there's no reason it's like Yeah. With the technology today, there's no reason for that to be the case. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, break break down the
Speaker 4:break break
Speaker 2:down what
Speaker 4:Swift, like, honestly, I mean, even Swift works kind of well from The States to the emerging markets. Right?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:But I think, like, it really gets tricky the other way around usually is. I think the reality of these these flows are they are not as bidirectionally hard as as as people think. So if you feel like in an emerging market, you want to send you want to kind of, like, tap into dollar supply and send send money into states, that that gets really hard. Right? Yep.
Speaker 4:And so I think there are specific flows which are very much kind of, like, excluded from from from these trade trade opportunities. And I think where we sit in the second way, what what we what we think is kind of, like, necessary to be built is we're very bare metal on the fiat side. Right? And so we we we really believe this is very much still, a fiat problem, and you gotta be kind of deeply regulated and deeply connected to the fiat rates to kind of, like, precision engineer, essentially, a bank and a banking stack around digital assets. Right?
Speaker 4:And we think this and there there are many reasons for this, but this really makes it possible to kind of re rebuild that whole kind of, like, swift sort of thing, right, and make make make that work for both sides and on all kinds of flows.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because, like, front like, just technically, if I'm in some random country and I have the resources to mine Bitcoin and swap it into stable coins, like, I can technically transfer it instantaneously today, but there might be gas fees and all sorts of different technical and there's not any, like, you know, interoperability with the rest of the financial system, but it's, like, doable. So a lot of this is about the products that you're building around the existing rails. Is that correct? Or are you or do you think you'll build, like, a new chain at some point, a new, like, l one?
Speaker 4:May maybe. Follow me on Twitter and stay tuned.
Speaker 2:Let's hear it.
Speaker 4:Let's go. I think I think in reality right now, we're building for businesses. Right? And so I think, like, it's it's still there there there's a difference of, like, like, this rogue freelancer kind of, like, mining and swapping his his Bitcoin and kind of be being able to to to be a new kind of correspondent bank Yeah. To other financial institutions.
Speaker 4:And these are 90 of our customers. Right? Other financial institutions, PSPs, remittance companies, web free companies. And being a new kind of correspondent bank for these companies, I think you really gotta rebuild the the banking and fiat spec from ground up. Right?
Speaker 4:And gotta be really bad med metal about it and then kind of, like, rebuild it up from first principles with digital assets baked into it. Right? And I think that's a kind of, like, institutional opportunity at hand here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, John. You're not thinking big enough. You're over here thinking, like, how do we move $10? He's thinking, how do I move $10,000,000,000 a second Yep. Every second of the day.
Speaker 2:That's fair. That's fair. Talk to me about the different trade offs between building and buying in different countries. Have you I've seen a lot of companies that go out and buy a legacy bank to get a charter. Is that a relevant part of the strategy, or is that kind of antiquated?
Speaker 2:Can you get through the regulatory hurdles to get everything you need, or will you need to think about some end run around the regulation?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It can be smart. Right? We actually we actually did this in Europe last summer. So we bought, like, a regulated institution.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 4:And and and and that that was a great that was actually a great project. Right? Like so that was like, time to license was extremely fast. Cost was extremely manageable. And overall, like, a positive experience, so I think I can I can recommend?
Speaker 4:In The States, I think there there are a couple of things that are different. So that's a whole that's a whole different story. And each market is kind of like I think it's hard to generalize, but but, yes, I still see these things happening. And there's, like like, rather liquid m and a market for regulated institutions that that are being sold for the for the sake of being regulated and having your license transferred. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 1:Super exciting.
Speaker 2:Fantastic.
Speaker 1:We need, we need those shirts.
Speaker 2:We we need this service because international advertisers are trying to transfer us billions of dollars for a single ad reads and
Speaker 1:Yeah. We can't be playing 5%.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We say we say send the shipping container filled with cash right now, but I would love to just have it deposited instantaneously.
Speaker 1:Where where are where are you based, by the way? So you're from Germany. Are you still living there? Or
Speaker 4:Yeah. I'm based in Berlin. Okay. So it's it's getting late to your greetings.
Speaker 2:Thanks for staying up.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, we we will we
Speaker 4:will get the we will get the T shirts sent, and we will help brand power power all of the things that they currently are lacking for you guys.
Speaker 2:Go. There we go.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 4:But that being said, yeah, good to see you guys.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Talk to you Bye. Great talking.
Speaker 2:Next up, we have Juan coming in to the studio. We are excited to keep this lightning round going. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven teal fellows left for the day.
Speaker 1:And They said it couldn't be done.
Speaker 2:They said it couldn't be done.
Speaker 1:Nobody believed.
Speaker 2:Nobody believed.
Speaker 1:Have some faith.
Speaker 2:Come on. Technology didn't need another podcast, and yet here we are. Welcome to the stream. How are doing? Juan.
Speaker 17:Hey, guys. It's Martin. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Welcome.
Speaker 2:Of course. Would you mind kicking it off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and the company to get get us started?
Speaker 17:Absolutely. So I'm currently, like, the the founder of Facelabs. Facelabs is a research lab that it's building that technology to regenerate complex organs directly in your body. So, basically, imagine that
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 17:You lost a limb. Imagine you lost a limb, for example. You were like a warfighter. You went you went to the military. Maybe you suffered from diabetes, and you had to be amputated.
Speaker 17:There's no way you could regenerate that right now. No way. You have to, like, rely on prosthetics, but prosthetics is is kind of shit.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 17:Honestly. And this happens if you look, this happens not only with limbs, but actually with all the rest of the organs of the body. Sure. So we're building that technology. That's kind of the the glimpse of it.
Speaker 2:How much of this is, like I mean, this is pure sci fi, feels like. Is this informed by, what is it, the salamander that breaks the tail off and then they regrow it?
Speaker 1:Trace it back.
Speaker 2:Is this like Jurassic Park where you actually learn something from that? Or is there a different
Speaker 1:But didn't we we got Ozempic from some crazy dragon Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Komodo dragons. And there has to be Hila monster. Yeah. What what is the basically, I wanna know, trace back for me the tech tree that got us to today.
Speaker 2:I imagine you're standing on the shoulders of giants. Is CRISPR relevant? Like, what is relevant to allow you to do this? Because this sounds like pure sci fi to me.
Speaker 17:Yeah. So I I will start with that last line, like the CRISPR line, because I think that's that's extremely important. We are not doing genetic engineering. Mhmm. And and that has advantages from regulatory point of view, but also, like, on the underlying r and d.
Speaker 17:I actually and and that this might be controversial, but I actually don't think that you can solve this problem with genetic engineering. Like, finding one, two, three genes that you can basically correct the problem, I don't think that's possible at all. Mhmm. We are basically modifying the physiological signals directly in the body. More specifically, are leveraging electrophysiological signals.
Speaker 17:So a lot of people doesn't know, but the same signals that rule your brains actually are all over your body. Basically, when you were born, you were a single zygote, and literally that that zygote self assembled yourself into a living human functioning being.
Speaker 1:So Let's give it up for the zygotes.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for that. This is fantastic.
Speaker 17:So, basically, what we have discovered, and this is basic this is work of the last fifteen, twenty years, is that these electrophysiological signals during the process of development encode information, instructive information to to control morphogenesis, which is the process of growth and form of of an organism. Mhmm. So, yeah, definitely, we are, like, on the shoulders of giants. That's that's a fact. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Regrowing a hand, that seems like the final boss of this potentially. What's the easiest thing to regrow? Are you starting with, like, a fingernail and then you work your way up, or do you go for the hand straight out and try to one shot that? Like, is there is there something that we already regrow that we can Hair. Maybe build on?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hair. Hey. We know the hair loss market. Maybe you should pivot into just hair loss.
Speaker 2:Seems to be a lot of money in that.
Speaker 17:That would be that would that would be extremely profitable, honestly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 17:Just just as a matter of fact, I mean, babies, human babies are able to regrow the the tip of their of their fingers, of their
Speaker 3:digits.
Speaker 16:If something happens.
Speaker 17:Like, they they they are they are young. Yeah. They Wow. That that that already happens.
Speaker 16:That's what
Speaker 17:happens
Speaker 17:to
Speaker 16:What
Speaker 17:happens is that, like, the human body lose this capacity throughout time,
Speaker 16:throughout And
Speaker 17:now, like, regarding the question, what what is the final bow? What what is the final boss? I actually think the kidney, it's even anatomically speaking, it's even more complex than than than the LIMP. Interesting. The LIMP, it's right up there.
Speaker 17:Like, these will, like
Speaker 2:Must be hard.
Speaker 17:These two indications will be kind of in the next ten, fifteen years. These will are are kind of long term research programs.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 17:On the short term, we are focusing on indications that where we could basically move a lot faster in the next five years. Yeah. So for example, chronic bone healing. This this happens to diabetic patients when they suffer from ulcers, and it's actually the main cause of amputations worldwide. So so we are basically tracking these initial problems first.
Speaker 17:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What about even something like scar tissue? Like, a lot of people have, like, C section scars or scars from anything. Is that is that relevant or, the same kind of biological process, or is that a different fork of the tech tree?
Speaker 17:Yeah. Actually, it's it's pretty similar. It's it's on it it's based it's based on the same electrochemical signals in the regenerative process. So if you look that are already in the market, electric wound dressings that you actually can put in the skin and accelerate the wound process. But these basically, they are these are extremely limited to a stage two and stage one injuries.
Speaker 17:So for example, if you have, like, an injury of five millimeters. But once you start, like, involving, like, one, two centimeters, it starts to be incredibly more complex. You you touch muscle, you touch bones. So that's that's that's a lot harder. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For these things. What what what's exciting about what's happening in the I saw some recent news around a genetically edited pig kidney that was transferred into a human, and it sounds like it was somewhat effective. Is there anything that you you guys can learn just just immediately my my reaction to that is like, would rather have a, you know, regular human kidney that was generated just for me instead of a genetically edited pig kidney that gets sort of transferred transplanted in. But what what are you learning from from that space or tracking?
Speaker 17:Yeah. I I think I think those initiatives I I mean, any initiative that tries to to crack the problem, it's it's worthwhile. But I'm I'm I'm quite skeptical with with those approaches because there are a lot of questions regarding the immune system. How much like, what would be the rejection of a human body in these cases? Yeah.
Speaker 17:Like, the immunogenicity of the related process, it's like a huge, huge question mark. And and I actually think that if we if we want to solve the regenerative problem, not only, like, one organ, but, like, actual regeneration, whole body regeneration, like, deadpool or Wolverine, for example, we we actually need to leverage the fundamental mechanisms that the body already uses. So go put there, understand what is the language, what is the code that the body uses for for morphogenesis, and and and learn to modulate that code. Like, more fundamentally, I think that's important.
Speaker 2:What's the user experience? I you've been mentioning, like, electrostimulation. Is this not a pill that I take?
Speaker 17:Yeah. So there's there's a continuum of technology, and this is important. So for the linear generation, the the the stimulation will be a lot more complex than just, like, electric currents, of course. It's it's a it's an anatomical structure that it's a lot more complex. But starting, like, with the chronic wound healing with the short term, research program, we are working, with a with a medical device approach in mind.
Speaker 17:Why? Because medical devices are a lot easier to pass through the FDA, do the clinical trials on top of them. Once you start with biologics, they are extremely hard. Yeah. So we want to accelerate that process first.
Speaker 17:And then I think that the ideal the ideal version of this technology is kind of a combination product, where you use key biophysical stimulation with light and ultrasound, but also leverage kind of the molecular specificity of of proteins at the same time. Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you're if you're successful as you sound like you're gonna be, what is what is the craziest potential future that you could imagine? Are we are we, you know, regenerating entire, versions of ourselves?
Speaker 2:I want extra arms. Like, be like Doc Ock. Yeah. I I want Doc Ock. Six yeah.
Speaker 2:From Spider Man.
Speaker 1:I want six arms. Yeah. What what's the craziest, you know, potential You
Speaker 2:could potentially skip leg deck and regrow your leg muscles. Can you imagine?
Speaker 1:John would love this. John would love this.
Speaker 2:Just massive quads without ever hitting the leg press. The world would change overnight.
Speaker 17:Yeah. Pro pro probably. Yeah. What like, one one one important. Yeah.
Speaker 17:I I think there are there are two two variants of, like, a really optimistic crazy future. The first one, I think it's more like a cultural change. We we have, like, this idea that is still that if you, like, use you are be able to edit yourself with maybe a hand, a robotic arm, and you are kind of a blend of robotic human person, like, somehow you will be stronger. Mhmm. But but that, I mean, that's just a bias that we have because we have not been able to engineer biology, like, successfully as we wanted.
Speaker 17:I I would love, like, for humans to to to understand that biology could be as robust as any other thing and even start relating this technology to aging itself. And and and, of course, there's still, like, a gap in which that that we we should answer that to what extent regenerating all the organs of your body would be related to aging and increasing longevity. Mhmm. But but I think there's we we have big reasons to believe that that it it will it will be high connected. So, basically, expand, like, the the the lifespan of people, like, a hundred years more to be able to be more productive, have, like, healthier lives, change our our our societal construct of what it's a meaningful life would be amazing.
Speaker 17:And then on the limit, it will be also awesome it would be extremely awesome to be able to engineer, like, artificial biological networks in the same way that we are doing right now with artificial neural networks in AI. So basically constructs, biobots that can go out there and solve solve all sorts of problems for us. I I think that that would be amazing as well.
Speaker 2:Is amazing. Love it. Congratulations, and thanks for breaking it down for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is super exciting.
Speaker 2:It's a lot. It's a lot of process. It's like it's not a simple business. This is amazing, though.
Speaker 3:I'm very excited.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean, we could do a whole hour on this. So, yeah, we'll have to have you back. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Absolutely. Cheers.
Speaker 17:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Bye. Next up, we have Jennifer Lynn. Excited to talk to her. And, we we we ran through all our ads. Should we just start back at the beginning?
Speaker 2:Tell you about ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started.
Speaker 2:Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp.
Speaker 2:Ramp. Let's bring in Jennifer. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Jennifer, welcome. Thank you
Speaker 2:for taking the time. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:It's great to have you.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think we have you on mute. I don't know if we're it's a problem on our side or your side. We are good. Would you mind trying again?
Speaker 19:Both. I think you can hear me now.
Speaker 2:We can hear you. Welcome to the show. Would you mind kicking it off with an introduction on yourself and the company?
Speaker 19:Yeah. Happy to. So I'm Jennifer, and, my company, AUG, we focus on solving the access problem in rare disease. So there's a large amount of drugs in rare disease that are already effective or potentially effective for the patient. It's been tried by a doctor and maybe one or two patients.
Speaker 19:They wrote up a study saying that, you know, there's been some efficacy here, but the rest of the rare disease patients don't get access. So I'm really working on a drug development company to develop these drugs that already work for rare disease patients that need it.
Speaker 2:Interesting. We had there was a little bit of a debate on the show last week between, two guests who were arguing over the idea of how the FDA decides to approve drugs, whether the whether the benchmark is better than a placebo, better than nothing, or better than the standard of care. How do you how do you see the FDA's mandate in drug development? What is their goal? Are they trying to protect certain certain IP structures by limiting the access to drugs, or is it more purely based on safety and efficacy broadly?
Speaker 19:Yeah. I think you know? So we've had conversations with the FDA, and at the end of the day, the FDA is really a group of people trying their best to approve drugs that work, and then, you know, reject drugs that might have safety issues or are the same as placebo. Mhmm. So for us working in rare disease, a lot of the times, we are up against placebo or even historical controls Mhmm.
Speaker 19:Because there's usually no approved treatment in these specific diseases. So it's much easier to get a drug approved there versus if you work in, you know, cancer, which is very common. Like breast cancer, there's already so many drugs that are approved and effective that you have to run really long trials against drugs that already work.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 19:And that ends up being extremely costly, extremely expensive, and there's some debate about, you know, is there a way to get around this five, six year trial?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've seen some biotech companies that will go and they'll pick up a dead asset, like a drug that maybe didn't make it through phase three, and then they kind of repackage it, IPO the company, and then everyone's kind of betting on, oh, maybe they can get it through phase three now. Is is that a piece of your strategy, or do you think you'll be taking, like, a completely different, approach?
Speaker 19:Yeah. So what we typically do is whenever a drug works for patients, there's so many reasons why they don't have access. One could be the formulation that works is just so much higher. Mhmm. And they need a special drug company to come in and formulate it so that it's stable.
Speaker 19:Or it's available as an injection and patients need it as an eye drop. Mhmm. And so on. So a lot of what we do is we take an existing drug, and we basically provide it in the formulation that's actually accurate and effective for these patients. But, yeah, like, repurposing old drugs is a great strategy because you have safety, usually already established for patients.
Speaker 19:Now you just have to work on making sure that it's, like, a drug that works.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you see a piece of the business being partnering with big pharmaceutical companies or drug companies that already have something like that? It's a shot, and they want it to be an eye drop, and you come in as a partner to them. Or is there a completely different pathway? Because I imagine, hey, if I own the patent on this drug as a shot, I'm not just gonna let you take it and turn it into an eye drop for free and make all the money.
Speaker 2:So how does the business partnership work as, you know, we probably wanna compensate the scientists who actually created the shot, even though you're gonna do a lot of hard work to make the eye drop version?
Speaker 19:Yeah. So there's two sides to this. We've thought about partnering before
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 19:And we've done a lot of conversations with top five pharma. And what they say usually is cash is king. So for them, like, upfront is really important. You know? Like, what regardless of indication, you need to produce x amount of cash to Mhmm.
Speaker 19:You know, license this asset and take it forward. So we've taken an alternative approach, which is there are so many drugs right now that are off patent. So their effective life in a larger indication like autoimmune disease, so on has already expired. Big Pharma's already made that much money, and now this drug is, you know, available for very cheap. And, typically, what we do is now we take this already invented drug, and we add on something that makes it the right fit for rare disease patients.
Speaker 2:What areas of biotech and drug development development right now are most exciting to you? We've obviously seen, like, a huge boom in GLP ones. CRISPR has been exciting for years and continues to be exciting in many ways. But there are other pockets of of drugs that people are working on. Where do you see kind of the most low hanging fruit in terms of what you do bringing access to, drugs in different categories, versus what's the next next thing?
Speaker 19:Yeah. So low hanging fruit, and also what's the next moonshot. It's a great question. For us, low hanging fruit is we follow FDA guidances very closely. So they just recently released a guidance that certain biologic drugs, antibodies don't have to go after as much animal testing.
Speaker 19:You can leverage a lot of human clinical trials, which is, like, almost incorporating common sense. Right? Like, if it's safe in humans, then maybe we don't have to do a twenty four week, you know, mice tox study. So, like, the antibody biologic space is really interesting because of the amount of studies you might be able to skip if your drug's already safe. Mhmm.
Speaker 19:And in the moonshot area, completely unrelated to rare disease, but longevity is very interesting. You know, if there's a lot of discourse about can we develop or can we actually develop the first real drug to prevent aging, to reduce the aging process? And I think if you can be the first to market in such an insanely large market, everybody's aging, everybody would like some sort of drug to stay healthier for longer. That's an incredibly exciting space to be in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We talked to the founder of New Limit, and we both came away extremely bullish on that category. Please. Please. Please.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Make it work.
Speaker 1:I'm curious. How does pricing, how do pricing models different, differ in sort of rare for therapeutics in the rare disease space given that the actual market size, I'm assuming things are a lot more expensive just because markets are smaller, but maybe that's maybe that's the the incorrect read.
Speaker 19:Yeah. It really depends. And when you talk about pricing, there's also this overall you're taking into account all the insurance, by payers that exist in The US. So there are drugs that insurance payers will have pushback on. And, typically, that's, drugs for really, really large indications.
Speaker 19:For example, longevity maybe, Alzheimer's where there's such a large amount of patients. Even if you charge them 10,000, per year to the insurer, that's hundreds of billions of dollars that they won't be able to, really bear for a new drug. Whereas for rare disease, if you have 10,000 patients and you're charging a hundred k per year, that's actually still a negligible amount spread out amongst all the different payers in The US. So, typically, those conversations actually go pretty smoothly for rare disease where you say we have a really large impact on this patient and there's only so few patients.
Speaker 1:That's cool. That's cool.
Speaker 2:Seems like
Speaker 1:it's working. One part of health care that's working working well.
Speaker 2:That's great. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is really fun. We'd love to have you back and get an update when, you have more news.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Congratulations on on joining the fellowship as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have a great rest of your day. Guys. Cheers. You soon.
Speaker 2:Bye. Next up, we have Teddy Teddy Warner coming in from coming into the studio. While we get him queued up, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger. Build faster.
Speaker 2:Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Go to Figma.com. It's a fantastic product. Jordy's addicted.
Speaker 2:He's a Figma addict. He can't stop using Figma. He designs endless slide decks in it. Our our beautiful website, tbpn.com, was designed in Figma. We've actually experimented the entire overlay that you've seen.
Speaker 2:This is all from Figma and then gets baked into our production software, which we don't talk about because it's our secret. Our secret sauce. Anyway, welcome to the stream, Teddy. Good to have you here. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Good. How are you? I'm great.
Speaker 9:Thanks for having me. I heard, I heard y'all are in a new studio, which
Speaker 2:is exciting. The first day. We get the giant
Speaker 1:call. Day.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's a it's an honor.
Speaker 4:I'm
Speaker 2:We're Chris White with Teal Fellow Tuesday. We're very excited to have you here.
Speaker 9:They said it couldn't happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you introduce yourself? Break us down. What are you building? How'd you get there?
Speaker 2:Where'd you grow up?
Speaker 9:Give me the whole thing. I'm Teddy from North Carolina. I used to work in a in a makerspace and a machine shop. This is my technical baseline. One way or another, found myself in California.
Speaker 9:Worked at Midjourney in a past life. Now I run a robotics lab called Entempus.
Speaker 2:This is so funny about the Thiel fellowship really quickly. Like, the whole idea is, like, dropping out of college, and Jordy was making this joke that, like, oh, like, you know, the Thiel fellowship has a combined, you know, five years of work experience because, like, no one's supposed to have worked. And it's like a joke that every every startup's like, well, you have twenty years of management experience combined. But, like, most of you that we've talked to have years of experience somehow. So were you working and going to school?
Speaker 2:Like, how did you work in the journey while not while not have, like, dropping out yet?
Speaker 9:If you want the the very abridged Teddy timeline is I I grew up in North Carolina, worked in this in this machine shop, in this maker space for about four years, somehow wound up in biotech. Cool. I was doing manufacturing for invasive electrodes for chronically ill children, so everything from EEG to ECG electrodes.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 9:As an engineer, discovered I I was actually, like, exceedingly squeamish. And so on a whim
Speaker 2:It's rough.
Speaker 9:I went to university in LA at USC for about
Speaker 5:a year.
Speaker 9:Studied art.
Speaker 2:Jordy's back.
Speaker 1:I I'm back. I'm back. I had to get
Speaker 7:the air horn
Speaker 2:How's it going?
Speaker 1:For SC. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 9:Let's go. USC. Yeah. Had a total blast. Studied art and technology and and a bit of business and some film and the whole shebang.
Speaker 9:I I know when you go to California, get pretty caught up in the culture. And so unsurprisingly, I started the venture, wound up meeting David, mid journey David through this venture, which is how I wound up at mid journey
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 9:About a year ago now.
Speaker 13:Nice.
Speaker 9:Left nine months ago. Now I run a robotics lab called Entempest. I make robots expressive. Robots currently suck at communicating what they're doing. They're really hard to understand.
Speaker 9:You have to pay expensive nerds like me to come use the command line anytime you're trying to understand what what they're up to. Mhmm. And so I make them communicate like every other mammal and like every other human, such that you can interact with a robot even though you don't speak its language.
Speaker 2:What are we talking about robots?
Speaker 1:I I felt like it was pretty easy that that robot that was, like, on a stand.
Speaker 2:Oh, Yeah. Flailing around, killing everyone.
Speaker 1:That was pretty easy. I understand.
Speaker 9:Some of it's telltale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, are we talking about, like, industrial robots, like like like, Kuka arms and stuff? Or are we talking Roombas or the future humanoid robots? Like, what's the first product that you think needs what's the first robot that really needs humanization?
Speaker 9:Sure. I I mean, as you can tell, like, robots is probably the largest umbrella term that we have. It spans from humanoids to Yep. Like, glorified Roombas and Yep. Everything in between.
Speaker 9:How do you make them expressive? Well, I think it's, quite telltale if I have an anthropomorphic robot like a humanoid. I can say, oh, it waves or, oh, it it smiles or moves around, and, you know, this makes sense. But, Intempas focuses on non anthropomorphic robots, specifically the ones that already exist. So where do robots exist?
Speaker 9:They exist in industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Robots work great in industry. 99% of the time, they work wonderfully. Like, if you think about an Amazon warehouse, there's a bunch of little Roombas that roll around and move the the carts and stuff. And, you know, on occasion, probably 1% of the time, these robots fail, and they hardly ever fail for technically complex reasons. Usually, robots fail for some trivial reason.
Speaker 9:Say, you know, Jordy's in a in a Amazon warehouse, and there's a Roomba trying to pass him, and it gets stuck because Geordie's in his way. Yeah. And so the Roomba the the robot in the warehouse just fails, and it leaves a fail code in the command line, and it moves on and does something else. And what Intempest does is we allow these robots to be expressive. We allow them to give convey their intent to people like Geordie, in this case, who would not otherwise understand what the robot is trying to do.
Speaker 9:So what if this robot, upon
Speaker 1:seeing Jordy Cool. I'm not I'm not technical.
Speaker 2:I'm not technical.
Speaker 1:Just really just
Speaker 11:Not a shock.
Speaker 2:That's what me down. Okay.
Speaker 9:If if you see a robot, like, getting nifty with you, like a small dog, it's like, oh, shit. I should probably move out of the robot's way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And so you you
Speaker 9:can save a bunch of money on debug costs, and also reduce downtime of robots just by allowing them to communicate what they're up to. And in the future, of course, we'll get into consumer and service and humanoids, but right now, it's in all an industry.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I mean, you gave the example of Amazon. They acquired Kiva Systems in 2017, '8 years now. I'm sure they're thinking about this. Is Amazon the right customer for you?
Speaker 2:Or do you want to start kind of in the more mid market, or do you wanna be more, you know, product led growth, developer led growth, hackers, get into, like, the next generation of robotics companies? What's the go to market look like?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I I have a few thoughts here. I mean so in in Tempus' initial customer base are all enterprise robotics manufacturers. They're people who sell the robots to Amazon. Yep.
Speaker 9:And seemingly everyone is vertically integrating in in this policy space. Think it's hardly prophetic for me to say that we're gonna have a lot of robots in the future, whether it be in industry or in service or in consumer, and that these robots are gonna have to interact with humans. And it's quite shocking that, you know, not many people are focused on the interaction layer, how humans and robots are gonna interact. Instead, they're focused on making robots functional. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so I'd love if more players like Amazon and big big players would get into this space. I want you guys to imagine, like, say you're walking down Hollywood, to the office in ten years from now and you pass by 20 robots, And one robot is running an Amazon model, and one is running an Entempest model, and one is running a a Tesla model. This is like the same experience as going to talk with, like, walking in the street and chatting with a Nigerian and then a Canadian and then a Lithuanian. There's three different languages, three different dialects, three different humors. It's a terrible user experience.
Speaker 9:And so it's seemingly very important that we figure out one standardized means of human robot interaction. And the way that I'm proliferating into this space is through the enterprise manufacturers that are selling robots to big companies, to small companies. As long as there's a scalable impact, I'll work with them.
Speaker 1:Cool. How influenced are you by movies like Wall E? Right? You know, the sort of the fun robot. It feel it feels like you want robots to be doing serious work, but in a have it be sort of enjoyable to interact with them.
Speaker 1:Is is that is that accurate?
Speaker 9:Yes. Absolutely. I'm a big Interstellar fan.
Speaker 2:Yeah. TARS, great great robots.
Speaker 9:TARS is killer. TARS is There's one scene in Interstellar where Cooper sets TARS humor level or truth level to, like, 90%.
Speaker 2:Ninety %. Yeah.
Speaker 9:One of the tricks, like, behind making robots expressive is giving them emotions because what are you expressing? Well, you're expressing emotions. Yeah. And you can view all of these as scalars. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so I can give robots a 90% humor level or a 90% joy level.
Speaker 2:Yep. And
Speaker 9:so it's pretty cool. Like, it it was shocking to me how on point TARS is. There's a whole bunch of, like, interesting media that came out of the the creation of Interstellar's on how they they simultaneously made TARS. He's a cold ex military robot, and he's also Cooper's best friend. Yep.
Speaker 9:And so this is absolutely the the intent.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about the tech stack. I imagine that you mentioned command lines. Are you doing post training on a on a foundation model? Are you using Lama open source stuff? Like, what what how do you actually, solve the technical problem?
Speaker 2:What what is deeper in the supply chain of your tech stack?
Speaker 9:So there's as I mentioned earlier, like, seemingly everyone is focused on vertically integrating control policy. All the big companies are doing this, and you get big horizontal companies that are awesome, like physical intelligence. Yep. And I really don't wanna compete with these people. In fact, I want to work with them.
Speaker 9:And so when I initially put my mind to how do I construct this architecture, I I had to say, like, okay. I absolutely need to be an augmentation atop the transformer layer. So after, you know, a robot is told what to do by its decision transformer, I run this interaction layer. Now I want you guys, you guys have both heard the phrase time flies when you're having fun.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 17:This is
Speaker 9:like a pretty integral way in which humans perceive the world. Inverse is also true. Your perception of time moves slower when you're stressed. And so we have fun and stress to emotions, and they change how we perceive the world subjectively. And so what Entempest does, we equip these things called time constants.
Speaker 9:The question is like, time flies when you're having fun. What is time for a robot? Well, time is compute. So what if you could allocate compute such that when a robot is having fun or when it's, you know, not needed to do any, like, daunting task, it can use the minimum amount of compute necessary. It can move as quickly as possible.
Speaker 9:But when a robot is stressed, you know, and it's failing, it should use more compute to, a, collect more data so we can train the and and squash the edge case. And b, convey why it fails to, again, people in factories and people that would otherwise not understand what the robot is trying to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that that aligns with, like, time inference scaling rules right now where you wanna do more reasoning for harder problems. That makes sense. Yep. Very cool.
Speaker 2:Anything else, Jordy? Are we good?
Speaker 1:I think we're good, but come back on again soon, Teddy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is
Speaker 1:fantastic. This is this is super Yeah. And I look forward to interacting, speaking the the Entempest language with many, many robots throughout my life.
Speaker 2:Me too. We'll talk to
Speaker 13:you Have
Speaker 1:a good one.
Speaker 2:Take care.
Speaker 1:Cheers, dude. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 2:Next up, we have Sigil, founder of Extraordinary, coming on the stream. Very excited to have him. I gotta say, these teal fellows, pretty punctual.
Speaker 1:They haven't had So I was about to send late.
Speaker 2:This is a very crazy thing. Get this calendar invite. You just hop on the stream. Buddy, he's here right
Speaker 1:on a weird
Speaker 2:time. It's amazing. Hey, join at 01:42.
Speaker 1:Sigil, great to have you on. How are doing?
Speaker 20:I'm doing pretty good. How are you?
Speaker 1:Doing great. It's been a super fun day so far. The class is absolutely stacked, and congrats on on making it in. Why don't you start with a bit of backstory, your personal story, and then what you're working on?
Speaker 20:Going around giving out these alien of extraordinary ability hoodies that you see on your x feed.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Talk about your personal journey to kind of building this company.
Speaker 20:Yeah. So, when I was in high school, I built this project that was
Speaker 11:I think he did, like,
Speaker 20:a hundred k in revenue this first month, and I used the funds to pay someone to finish high school for me. And I
Speaker 2:flew to
Speaker 20:San Francisco. And, I came here on a tourist visa. I'm originally from Toronto, Canada. I'm like, holy shit. These people are based, these people are incredibly ambitious.
Speaker 20:I have to stay here. And if you don't go to college, at the time, I originally got into the M and T program at University of Pennsylvania. I decided to opt out because I was pretty stubborn. I I really just wanna be in Silicon Valley. And the only visa options were was the o one for extraordinary ability, and this is what the US government calls it.
Speaker 20:And at the time, this was probably three years ago, it wasn't as proliferated. The the one person I knew was Patrick Collison who had that. I couldn't get a TN visa or the h one b because you needed a degree, so I had to go for the o one. And I hunted down every single person in Silicon Valley that, that had the o one visa, tried to understand what could qualify. And after eight months with a immigration lawyer, I filed it.
Speaker 20:It was sponsored by Naval. I built this company with him, and, I was approved at 20. And I was like, holy shit. This is it's so hard for the world's best talent to to come here. It's so unintuitive.
Speaker 20:And, I made a YouTube video about the about the process that has since has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people, and
Speaker 2:It's got
Speaker 3:I I made this this hoodie That's
Speaker 2:as
Speaker 3:as merch for that YouTube video. So and
Speaker 20:that kinda took off.
Speaker 2:What are the overall trends in the o one visas? It feels like I mean, like, immigration's obviously complicated, but it feels like all the stars align for, like, everyone being like o ones are great. Elon has come out and said he, you know, loves o ones, and, like, it feels like it's aligned with American values and freedom and, like, brain drain and even strategic stuff. Like, there's a lot of there's a lot of pro. Are the number of ones o ones increasing?
Speaker 2:Is this a new program? Can you give us, like, a little bit of, like, history and trajectory for the o one program broadly?
Speaker 20:Yeah. I mean, I I like to think that the o one was created for the Manhattan Project. I think the the it's it's that ethos. Yeah. I I don't know the exact origins, but it's it's it's been around, and it's it's been used to the premise of it is that you are the top.
Speaker 20:You're an individual that has risen to the top of your field. Mhmm. I like to say you're, like, the top point one percentile at at at what you do. And USCIS has these eight criterias to adhere towards. You can you can be a tattoo artist.
Speaker 20:You could be a chip designer. You could be a, you know, the founder of the fastest growing AI company who
Speaker 3:That's helping out.
Speaker 20:As long as you can prove that you are extraordinary at what you do, you can get it. And I think for the longest time, it was it's very unclear because when you go to the website, it's like, examples, you you have a Nobel Prize or, like, whichever. And the the the way this company came to be was I literally mapped down 500 people who have o ones and e b ones for extraordinary ability. I gave them these hoodies. I actually built a website and just compiled them in terms of, like, their stories and, like, how they came to America.
Speaker 20:And, yeah, the I think that because of that, more and more people have been applying for it. There's no cap to it. As long as you meet their bar for and convince USCIS that you're extraordinary, you can get it. And so I think it's very positive sum of the visa.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what what what is the process actually like? I imagine that there's a lot of paperwork and lawyers and cost stuff that's, you know, tailor made for LLM automation and just even just normal SaaS apps and stuff and form filling. What are the headaches that o one recipients typically report as particularly painful?
Speaker 20:I mean, my process took eight months. It cost me more than $10,000.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 5:I I
Speaker 20:mean, you gotta you gotta keep in mind. What what what what is the end product? Product? I have a printer here. You're literally printing 500 pages of paper, like, with a bunch of citations to to all evidence.
Speaker 20:Yeah. Yeah. You might have heard, like, there's recommendation letters too, which you gotta go chase down people and be like, hey. Can you please vouch for me being in America? I think I could contribute to to this economy.
Speaker 2:One shotted by a chatty BT from now on. You can imagine.
Speaker 1:So many Em dashes. There's thousands of Em dashes.
Speaker 2:Let's delve into why he should be a a one.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm sure that's happening.
Speaker 20:That got shipped shipped off to, like, USGS, Texas. And they they still use, like, they still break codes in the box and then scan it, which is, like, super archaic.
Speaker 2:Wow. They don't even accept, a PDF?
Speaker 20:No. They don't. I I have to ship it through FedEx. Then then they parse it.
Speaker 15:Scan it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then some scan it. Wow. Very efficient.
Speaker 20:Diploma just adjudicates whether you're extraordinary.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, we're big fans of paper, but even that's
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, even that's my my strategy.
Speaker 1:What how have you thought about the the business model for extraordinary? It feels like, you know, there's some immediate, probably upfront value that you can capture in just making this process less painless. But when you think about taking somebody at the absolute top of their field and bringing them to the best economy in the world where they're gonna attract other talent and capital and things like that, it feels like a lot of the value creation is on the things that they
Speaker 2:mean, the obvious business model here is to sell the data to venture capital firms.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Which I I I feel like might already be happening judging by the involvement of Naval.
Speaker 20:No. I mean
Speaker 2:What what's the actual business model? Jokes aside.
Speaker 20:Yeah. So I'm tempted to rename the company to Victoria Talent Company of America. Our our flagship first product, obviously, just making this much more seamless and faster. Like, I think it should be a standard deviation of speed up, which already is. We've already power ramp
Speaker 17:Yes. And
Speaker 20:we've got one of top founders building ramp ramp. Companies that we know. And we should see we should see a lot more of that on our ex feeds coming along. I mean, look. You can you can make a good amount from providing the the best product and and serving these great talent to relocate here on the Visa basis.
Speaker 20:But where I wanna take things like, I I don't actually view this ultimately as a as a Visa filing company. I think it's a extraordinary talent company. And, if you look at the life cycle of extraordinary talent, like someone who's, I don't know, like a senior engineer creating who's shipped, like, 60% of Devon. I just filed that o one case, actually. Nice.
Speaker 20:Right? Like, the the whole life cycle of them, one being, like, placed at their company all the way to how they even relocate there. Like, most of the value capture isn't actually that, like, Visa filing. And I think also AI is gonna eat away at margins in terms of services across all technology companies. And so then, like, what what can you build that has network effects, that has innate distribution, that can just attract the world's best talent?
Speaker 20:Like, I want to build something where if you're remotely ambitious and talented, you have a means to be discovered. And if you wanna if you remotely wanna come here, like, you're gonna be on Extraordinary.com.
Speaker 1:How do you how do you think about giving people an opportunity to get to America without having credentials yet? Right? Like like, presumably, there's somebody out in the world who's 16 years old. They're in some like high school type situation and they actually could be one of the world's best programmers or something like that. But maybe they haven't gotten a job.
Speaker 1:Is there an op is there a world in the future where you would create sort of like open testing where people could kind of like prove their abilities? I'm sure somebody would figure out how to how to hack it pretty quickly. But how do how do you think about kind of creating the ability for for people to to prove their capabilities prior to getting the ability to get traditional credentials?
Speaker 20:Yeah. First off, I I actually got a 16 year old approved for an o one visa a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1:What are they extraordinary at?
Speaker 20:Interaction design for
Speaker 2:Roblox.
Speaker 18:For fleet.
Speaker 2:Amazing. The most elite Roblox player.
Speaker 20:And on on on the on the talent discovery front, I I think that the the way that the way that we value talent is evolving. I mean, right now, like, it's so funny. Like, there's Mercor, but then the founder of Cluely is, like, building software that hacks them record interviews.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. I think that's
Speaker 20:The proxies for measuring talent are just, like, falling through completely.
Speaker 2:Thank you. And
Speaker 20:so, like, how do you then measure talent in this new age where, you know, we value people who are able to leverage AI much more? And I think the the way that companies hire will evolve, and we need to account for that. We need ways to of assessing people, but also discovering people to showcase just how, like, competent they are. And I I'm a big very big believer of being able to give those means to people around the world regardless of their traditional, like, you know, accolades and just being able to empower people who have the merit and who have the ability. And they should be discovered and sponsored to come to America.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well,
Speaker 1:congratulations on getting into the Thiel fellowship. Yeah. And, I'm sure there will be many Thiel fellows in the future that are go through your your program.
Speaker 20:Yeah. Already helping them.
Speaker 2:I'm excited for the first o one bodybuilder. We saw what happened with Arnold Schwarzenegger when he came to America, had a fantastic impact outside of bodybuilding.
Speaker 1:Went on to be the governor of California. Governor of California.
Speaker 2:Pretty good
Speaker 1:one. So don't count out the bodybuilders.
Speaker 2:So let's just get all the elite bodybuilders from all over the world bring them here all at once. That's my goal.
Speaker 20:Long as you're the top of what you do, we help you.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. That's great. Well, thanks so much for stopping by.
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you Cheers. Bye. Next
Speaker 1:up Just Gold's Gym in Venice just has
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 1:Hundreds of new members that are all
Speaker 2:on the America's already dominant in bodybuilding. We we hold more than 50% of the Mr. Olympians. But we could be doing even better if we
Speaker 1:Can always do better.
Speaker 2:Everyone from all over the world who's elite at bodybuilding to America, which is my dream. Anyway, our next guest is here. We have Aiden Smith, founder of Interphases. Welcome to the stream. How are doing?
Speaker 3:Boom. Howdy. I'm doing real
Speaker 11:really well. How are y'all?
Speaker 2:We're great.
Speaker 1:It's great to have you
Speaker 7:on.
Speaker 2:Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Absolutely. I think the best way to understand my life is kind of framed at this realization I had when I was a tiny kid in fourth grade. I was sitting in this classroom and I was watching some guy doing real science, and I saw him and was like, Dang, I know how to do addition, I know how to do basic algebra, and where the hell am I going with my life? And I realized that the world is a really scary competitive place, and I had to have some kind of heuristic by which I should get better.
Speaker 11:And so I thought to myself, alright, every two years I wanna double in the metrics I care about, which at fourth grade was coolness. And so at that point, going up in the South Bay, I grew up to exceptionally chill parents, an opera singer and electrical engineer who were just
Speaker 3:like, woah, son, just do whatever you
Speaker 11:wanna do. And I was like, okay, every two years I will double in coolness. And so that's exactly kind of how I structured my life. And in the next two years, I did stuff like tried to memorize a dictionary, because this is what I thought cool was when
Speaker 2:I was like, That's pretty cool.
Speaker 3:That's extremely cool.
Speaker 11:Eventually, the coolness actually went in a direction of like, things that were actually pretty cool. When I was in high school, I started working at chess.com, and I'd like delivered tons and tons of features and made some really cool products that were really impactful to me. When I was in college, was like, okay, what's the coolest problem you could possibly work on? And I ended up working in Neuralink, where I'm currently seated. Sorry to any coworkers who are seeing me taking this.
Speaker 1:Don't never apologize.
Speaker 2:But what about, what about, like, joining a punk band, learning to do a kickflip? Did that ever come into
Speaker 11:the cool fact? Do? Do all these things. What do do? Electric guitar, I
Speaker 2:Oh, nice. There we go.
Speaker 11:Psychology, so I have a lot of mushrooms memorized throughout the Sierra Nevada. In general, these are the things that fit my heuristic Legend.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Legend.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. But not the cliche cool guy. Like, like, not you're not driving
Speaker 3:us. A couple years.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm level you're just leveling up. You're maxing out your character.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the the red Ferrari convertible, that comes next year when there's another doubling in the cool factor.
Speaker 1:The doubling. The doubling. People are going to start tracking the doubling, like the Bitcoin
Speaker 2:The halving. I want
Speaker 11:to make a pulling market. It's the real thing.
Speaker 10:Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2:See if I
Speaker 11:can stay on track.
Speaker 2:This is amazing. So you've been working at Neuralink. What are you working on now?
Speaker 11:Yeah, so at Neuralink, I've been doing all kinds of really cool things. And one of these things I've been doing most recently is I'm leading the sound speech project, essentially. You've seen the study that was announced fairly recently, so can talk about this a little bit. But basically, there's a really great corpus of interesting literature that goes from how do you get from inside your head to outside your head. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:This is super, super profound technology. Imagine if you have ALS and you're locked in or something like this.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:I spend a lot of time around these people, and every minute I spend with I think more to myself that, like, these people need to be able to communicate to the outside world better.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And Neuralink is doing a really good job at this kind of thing. I have so much confidence in the team, I have so much confidence that this technology is gonna be transformative, but also, I really hope I don't get ALS anytime soon. Really hope I don't have a brainstem stroke or something that keeps me from being able to communicate sanely. And I still am interested in the way this technology will go on to transform other parts of the world.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:And
Speaker 11:so, interfaces, what I'm looking at is I I see all these kind of gizmos for AI. I see these like limitless pendants. I see these smartwatches and things that are trying to kind of integrate all this data. And I I don't fully buy it. The reason why I don't is because I actually don't like voice as a medium that much for most Mhmm.
Speaker 11:If it actually wants to integrate into your life effortlessly, I don't want to be in the middle of a conversation with you and be like, what's the guy on the left's name? It's super awkward, it's terrible. So how do you do better? And there's a couple ways you can think about this. One, former coworker minded, a guy I really respect, Bliss, who you may have seen on Twitter or whatever, has told me that there's a couple ways you can get value out of machine learning, and one of them is kind of arbitraging data, and another is arbitrage via time.
Speaker 11:And so if you have these longer time series, you can kind of get more bits out of them by just increasing your confidence intervals, either by doing these kind of, causal estimates or acausal estimates where you have an understanding of what's going on in the future and as well as in the past, and so you can kind of use this to do sane updates, or just by looking for signals that are kinda strong over a long period of time. And I think that, with this in mind, there's kind of room for this halfway horse between a conventional microphone, which can pick up stuff in real time and do transcription in real time, and like, an EA or someone who actually will kind of to predict what the heck you're doing in space. And so what you can imagine is building a device that basically takes these fundamentally pretty crappy signals, like NEG signals, for example. What are those?
Speaker 2:Sorry, NEG signals?
Speaker 11:Yeah, yeah. So there's many ways in which signals are propagated through the body to move your arms or to create electrical activity.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 11:You may have seen a recent paper out of Reality Labs in Meta where they use exactly this to kind of
Speaker 2:create Yeah, for the Orion headset, they bought that company, I forget what it's called, but they bought a company like six years ago and they're finally implementing it, right?
Speaker 11:Yeah, and it's extremely cool. A friend of mine went to one of their clinical trials and put the thing on and tried it out, you say, Look, I'm pinching my fingers, and the fingers pinched. It's pretty magical. This is the kind of thing which normally you would have to cut a hole in your head to do, but you don't necessarily have to do here.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 11:And there's a really good story to be told about kind of doing this for speech, and getting really terrible speech. I have no allegiance, as a neurotechnologist, that you will get really terrible speech out of this. Mhmm. But the key thing is that this does not matter, because the context is what matters. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And by informing this really awful speech on the context of what's around you and, like, your intention in the situation, you may be able to actually get the underlying part of it that matters. And so, in fact, indeed, even if I can only kind of pick up the word left and guy, I I might know that I wanna know who's the guy on the left.
Speaker 2:And And that's an easy LLM transformer problem. Right? So you get a bug, big bag of words, very messy, but it's enough to turn into a semblance of a thought that could be confirmed with a pinch maybe.
Speaker 11:Yeah, yeah. Now ideally, at least in my eyes, you have this just totally effortlessly thing against your life, and you kinda collect this data all the time via a method that's fairly subtle. I have a little bit of alpha here that I won't spill, so you'll to have me on in a couple months to see my my fun demos. But, of how to get this data. So you're constantly collecting this, it's constantly informing and improving on how you interact with the world.
Speaker 11:In general, I really care about efficiency in whatever I do. And lots of little things in your day to day life are super inefficient in these pretty funny ways. And I think that by kind of having a this compute that is always acting with it doesn't invade the privacy of other people. Like, I wanna understand myself better. I wanna be able to improve myself.
Speaker 11:I wanna be able to, like, keep on that doubling path, without, like, constantly listening to to you guys or to my friends or to the coworkers or whoever else is around me. And I want to get the data set to do that. So there's this kind of dual pronged thing of like, Okay, actually create the better interface to interact with LMs and to build the, like, higher bit rate communication interfaces and also get a better model for oneself.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I had this idea in college that I got my wisdom teeth out, and I was like, I want them to put a microphone in the hole there. Then I could say, I could whisper, who's the guy on the left? And it wouldn't be picked up to anyone else, but it'd be able to pick up the audio. But I think that's probably gross and kind of a part of the tech tree we don't even need to go down because we can just leapfrog that whole step.
Speaker 11:We've already gone down it. I had to break it to you. There's this Israeli company called MollerMic that does exactly this Really?
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 11:Yeah. You can imagine that. Like, you have bombs going off around you, you're like Yeah.
Speaker 3:Boss, we need backup.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 11:Can't hear that over the crazy loud
Speaker 2:top Hillary. MollerMike. No way. Mics. We did that.
Speaker 2:We did that. Company? Did they do that? I have no idea. But I I gotta do it.
Speaker 1:Ben's always telling me, know, our our producers always telling us to to move the mic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk closer to the microphone. Mic, but I could just
Speaker 1:have a molar mic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we need to be augmented for sure. What what what you going into a similar FDA pathway as Neuralink? Is that how things are gonna play out for you?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So I'd like to avoid this if possible. I do think that there's room for a device that's somewhere in between, like, this really groundbreaking, first in class biomedical device, which involves a lot of risk. Fundamentally, invasive neurosurgery involves a lot of risk, even when you're doing it with the very best surgeons in the world with these robots that can avoid vasculature with everything. There's still some risk price in there.
Speaker 11:And so I think, again, there's this halfway horse thing of like, okay, maybe it's invasive, but maybe it's not quite as risky of a thing. Maybe it's more like getting, like, an implant for birth control or more like getting Mhmm. Simple surgery to remove a mole. These kind of things that are much more every day and much sooner. I I'm very bullish on NERLYNX in the long run, I think that
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 11:You should keep an eye on the amazing stuff folks are up to here.
Speaker 3:But Yeah.
Speaker 2:If d if DJ is in the office, tell him I say hi. We'd love to have him on the show.
Speaker 11:I will. I love DJ.
Speaker 2:He's great. He's fantastic. You've been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by.
Speaker 1:But I gotta ask before you go. Sure. You're you're you're skill maxed to the gills already, but what what what's next?
Speaker 2:What what are you This the
Speaker 1:next goal. Besides the new company, you know, what what are what are some areas that you're trying to level up now?
Speaker 11:Believe it or not, the next thing I'm doing next week is I'm making a trumpet from First Principles. I'm gonna I have a physics textbook and I wanna like, without any reference, try to figure out how far apart all the bowels should be. Wanna cast it my backyard with a big crucible. And I wanna like play this thing which probably won't work. And so I'll get better at metalworking, I'll get better at physics, I'll get better at all these little stupid things I care about.
Speaker 11:And it's a pretty fun little interstitial bit before I really put my head down and get back to the the great doubling.
Speaker 1:It's On the show Play your
Speaker 2:trumpet live. I wanna hear the tempo. Come on,
Speaker 3:we we wanna hear your I'm
Speaker 11:no good. I have born you. But I'll be better
Speaker 2:in terms If
Speaker 1:it if it
Speaker 2:Well, in two years, you'll be good.
Speaker 1:If it makes sound,
Speaker 2:it works. That's fantastic. Great question, Jordan.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thanks. Great to meet you,
Speaker 2:Ian. Congratulations. Later. But that's not great. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Next up, we got Colton coming in this in the studio. Welcome to Colton as soon as he hops in here.
Speaker 1:The idea of just trying to get twice as cool.
Speaker 2:It's so good. Constantly. Bit.
Speaker 1:And just never never being like, oh, I I Expedition. Cool enough. You know, I'm cool enough. No. Double.
Speaker 2:It's the
Speaker 1:The great doubling. I mean, he he's doesn't look like, you know, I I don't know I don't know if he can have champagne yet, but, you know, we we followed a some
Speaker 2:similar principle around the great doubling. Exponential growth. It's the most powerful force in
Speaker 1:the world. Something that you can understand unless you've experienced it. Yeah. Understand. We experience it going from 1,000 followers to 2,000 followers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That at trumpet manufacturing. Fantastic. Well, we have our next guest in the studio. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:Colton, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome. How
Speaker 5:are you guys doing?
Speaker 12:Can you hear me?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:We can
Speaker 2:hear you. Would you mind kicking it off with a little introduction on yourself and the company?
Speaker 5:Sure. My name's Colton. I'm from Philadelphia. But right now, I'm in Boston Mhmm. Working on my company called Orbit, which I think you guys actually got a brief introduction to because my teammate Steven was on here, I think, just an hour or two ago.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yeah. There we go. The double the double teal fellow So combos.
Speaker 2:Us your side of the story. What does he get wrong about Orbit? No. Just just just unpack it again a little bit, and then we'll we'll we'll take the conversation in a different direction.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Absolutely. So I can tell you how I first heard about this idea and got involved with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And how'd you meet him? I'd love to know that story. That's interesting.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Steven went to Georgetown, and he was looking for an engineer to help him build this neurotech. Mhmm. But there's no engineers at Georgetown at all. They don't have an engineering department.
Speaker 5:And so he was running around, like, the whole DMV area looking for an engineer that could help him build some of these circuits and the hardware and the code and such. And so eventually, that led him to me. He tells me that he met with a lot of people with a lot of people before, but Is the business
Speaker 1:guy yelling at you Yeah.
Speaker 6:I think
Speaker 5:he said something. I can't quite hear him.
Speaker 1:Hey. Business hey. Shut up, business guy. The engineers the the technical founder's talking.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So we we met, and we went on Zoom for a bit. And I already had an internship that I was very interested in lined up for the summer, but he started talking to me and explaining this idea that he had. And, at least during the call, two things were pretty clear, and and one that Steven himself is an incredibly exceptional guy. And even after two years working with him, that is is still true.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And and still impresses me. And the second thing was that he convinced me that neurotech was a harder problem to work on than any other problem that I was working on. So I was going into the field of aerospace, and I love jet engines. I think they're the most mechanically complex systems that exist today, and they're really cool for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 5:You have this really tight tug of war between crazy precise tolerances and, like, these extreme magnitudes and speed and heat and stresses, all these things. But it's a system that humans fully built and can analyze and look at, whereas the brain is kind of a black box. And the tool set that you need to approach the type of problems that we see when trying to build neurotech and interact with the brain in any way just forces you to be, in my opinion, like, lot more creative and search a much larger option space to get the answers that you want. And so I thought, this is an incredibly hard problem. I really wanna work on this.
Speaker 5:We started working together that summer. I was still doing my internship, but that's, you know, nine to five. There's sixteen more hours in a day. And eventually, the end of the summer, told my supervisor at the company I was working at that I was gonna leave a month early. And in August, Steven and I went down to DC, just rented out an Airbnb for a month, and just had this basically, like, month long build a thon where we tried to get the scrappiest MVP we could at the end of the month.
Speaker 5:And we did that. Eventually went back to school. In the meantime, we're still working very hard on the project. In fact, I was failing most of my classes at the time until it got to the point of about, like, October or November when we had met with our first venture investor, and this is Dune Ventures.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:He funded a pre seed round, and at that point, we were no longer resource constrained. The only constraint to us making progress was time. I actually did really enjoy school. I was a mechanical engineer at Hopkins, and I felt that through each of my classes, I was really expanding my tool set and the things of and the things that I could build and also the types of engineering problems that I could analyze quantitatively. And so I did really love my classes there, but, you know, I figured I could either do school really well.
Speaker 5:I could do the start up really well. I couldn't do both at the same time. And it was a really obvious choice to choose this startup instead and and work in this direction because for me, it was very plain that this was the direction of growth, or at least the most growth that I could have. I still think that's true, and that's, a large part of what guides my decisions and the the path that I take in life.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Can you take me through some of the the tech tree that led up to this point? Like, what are some devices or technologies that you think have kind of commercialized appropriately or at least, like, laid the groundwork for what you're doing today?
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's a good question. There's not a whole lot that laid the groundwork. Like, technology wise, a lot of the stuff that we're using has actually been around for a very long time. And so if you think of, the main application that we're looking at right now, vestibular stimulation Mhmm.
Speaker 5:You basically just got a a circuit that's a constant current stimulator. So it'll inject the same amount of current regardless of the resistance that your head is. Because for humans, that actually varies a lot and can span even an order of magnitude, which is unlike a lot of other physiologic characteristics. But the idea of having a constant current stimulator is a technology that we had for a very long time. It's it's something that we've used for a human application in, like, TENS, for example, and TDCS and such.
Speaker 5:A big part of neurotech and and the progress in neurotech, think, is not actually implementationally constrained. And that, like, you do have to have good hardware, and you do have to make it well and incredibly robust, But it's actually how you use that hardware. So the types of signals that you send, how you integrate them with the rest of your system, whether it's closed loop and you're taking a certain measurements, how you're analyzing those measurements, feeding it back into the signals that you're sending, that actually gives you a lot more gain and a lot more innovation in neurotech.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Jordy?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm just I'm I'm I'm also the main question I had for for Steven earlier was around kind of, like, testing process, how, you know, I I imagine you guys both are super eager because of these sort of like fast feedback cycle. But but what's your approach and and how do you focus on learning through self experimentation?
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 5:There's two sides of it. So the first side is, safety and stuff like that. And so for a lot of vestibular stimulation that's electrical, there's a good bit of precedence actually for how it's been used in the clinic in a very binary sort of way where they aren't able to elicit a lot of autonomic functions that you'd like. But it's still shown with efficacy and a lot of research that, hey, you can take this current signal, and you can send it to your vestibular system, and there's no adverse effects. And it is a practice that they use, very binarily in the clinic.
Speaker 5:And then when we're doing stuff that's more novel, we'll actually take a very rigorous approach to safety. And so, a good example I can think of is when we were working with an ultrasound system, and no one before had ever used, mechanical waves through ultrasound to elicit vestibular stimulation. We started, you know, very bare bones with going to, like, simulations first, and then after doing simulations, getting, like, a fake skull that matches the physical properties of the head, putting that in a water tank, measuring with the hydrophone what the field is actually looking like, seeing that that lines up with our simulations, basically doing weeks or even up to a month of the math, the numbers, the simulations to find out, hey. This is causing the exact effect that we want. And then based on that, then going to testing on really just like Steven for a lot of the outside stuff to see that it works.
Speaker 5:And that's kind of the
Speaker 1:That's kind of the safety.
Speaker 2:Steven. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Alright. Alright, bud. Yep. It's time. Lay down.
Speaker 1:Lay you're gonna wanna lay you're gonna wanna lay down for this. Yeah. That's fantastic. I mean, are are you guys getting to the point where you're really narrowing in on some of the more near term commercial applications of of of the, of what you're working on? Or or is it still kind of like, hey, there's so many different directions that we can take.
Speaker 1:We just need to continue to experiment broadly and and run a bunch of different types of tests. More
Speaker 5:of the latter right now, not because we don't have a direction that seems viable, but we just don't know it's the best one yet.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So I'm sure Steven's talked about some of it, but in a couple of different autonomic regulation fields, we have very powerful effect sizes, at least in the small sample sets that we've done being just, you know, people within the company, cofounders and such. But for the types of effects that we're looking at, you can't detect it without a larger sample size, say, like, you know, 50, a hundred people, and it's just this, like, stat sig effect that, like, maybe placebo may not not be kinda like, you know, taking vitamins in the morning. It's not the effect that we're looking for. We're basically, like, we're able to have this fast iteration cycle because the autonomic effects that we do elicit are very obvious, and it's, you know, very clear to, you know, me or Steven, whoever's being tested, like, oh, this isn't placebo. I'm actually feeling something that's crazy different.
Speaker 12:Now, in terms
Speaker 1:of But is sleep but is it like sleep, for example, this is an example that that Steven gave earlier, just like basically doubling your deep sleep. Right? Something like that, every human has to sleep every single day. Like, is that not a big enough market to try to bring something to market there that that could allow? I would personally pay a lot of money to be able to sleep for six hours and get the same effect as sleeping eight hours.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious like how you how you think of those trade offs basically. And and and, you know, I think a lot of teams would just say, hey, this is such a big opportunity. If we're seeing an effect here, we should really run this down.
Speaker 5:In terms of if I had to make a prediction about what would be our first product that we release, I would, with the information that we currently have, guess that it's a sleep product. And so a lot of the testing that we're doing right now is related to sleep. A lot of the engineering that we're doing is building out more more robust systems that could actually be used already. For example, it's not, you know, some big prototype circuit, but something that you could wear in a form factor that people would want to wear in their sleep. And for us, what we're shooting for about right now is just a headband.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. Yeah. Circuits thin enough that you really don't notice anything other than just this piece of cloth that goes around your head and is, you know, skin tight. That said, even though I'm confident we can build this sleep product right now and push towards a certain release that would be successful. And, you know, what you call successful, whether that's, you know, selling 10,000 units or 10,000,000 units is a bit more defined by, like, what your goals are and why you wanna release in the first place.
Speaker 5:For us, it's actually not so much about the money, but building a user base that we can start to expand in with neurotech. You know, your brain is a very intimate thing, and consumers are going to be very, very skeptical of the first neurotech products that come about. And so whether it's the case that you wanna release a neurotech product that, you know, let's say feasibly could be sold to 10,000,000 people or 50,000,000 people if they're ready for it. And neurotech has become a more popular idea rather than maybe finding a more niche entry market first and doing some type of launch that would give you more feedback and more information about what the marketplace is looking like, how ready people are for neurotech, and those types of questions. It's actually a lot less clear which of those paths is the best one.
Speaker 5:And I think it's very hard to get a clear answer to that unless we have a more clear picture of the scientific space and actually what types of effects we're looking for. And so sleep is something that you could go consumer with. You could sell to every person because every person sleeps. But if it turns out that there's, let's say, an unexpected amount stickiness in the market with people that want to buy Neurotech products, then a better approach may be to go with a fully medical product. So looking people with people that have a disease where, you know, hey, maybe Neurotech is a little early for consumers, but if you're and we can go actually even back to the sleep analog.
Speaker 5:Let's say you're an insomniac who can Mhmm. Struggle to sleep even two, three hours a night. Now wearing this headband and this idea of neurotech is not quite as there's not quite as much skepticism, as in the friction's a little lower. And so there's kind of this back and forth between we have to analyze, like, what the market is looking like and what types of products are going to fit that market. And also, like, what types of products can we build that are able to fit that market?
Speaker 5:And so it's a little bit harder to get feedback on the first one being the market space until I think our best information there is when we actually release a product to market and learn from it. But at least right now, there's a lot more to be learned on the science side. There's a lot more to be learned with sleep and how to not just make a system like that, but continually improve it and make it better. And then there's also a lot of sub branches that we wanna continue to explore so we know that we're not in some local maximum when maybe not too far. There's another, higher local maximum to be hit.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Fantastic answer.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 1:Great to meet you, Colton. Congratulations on all the progress
Speaker 2:so far. Demo unit.
Speaker 15:Let's get going.
Speaker 1:Demo unit.
Speaker 5:We can. Yeah. Actually, that'd be great.
Speaker 1:We're ready. We're ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, yeah, thanks so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cheers. Have a one.
Speaker 5:Very nice meeting you.
Speaker 2:Yep. Bye. Next up, have Koki Mashita coming into the studio. Our last teal fellow of the day, finishing it out strong. Welcome to the stream, Koki.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? Sorry for keeping you waiting. We are running long.
Speaker 1:Welcome. But you're here.
Speaker 2:Please introduce yourself and the company that you're building.
Speaker 16:Hey, guys. Thank you for having me on. Thanks for the time. I'm Koki originally from Japan. Yeah.
Speaker 16:You know, I spent a lot of time growing up thinking about natural disasters. I think, you know, in SF, we don't you know, it's, like, nice weather. Everything's, you know, kind of nice, and and you get to work on really, really interesting things. But, you know, I was in the two thousand eleven earthquake where, you know, eighteen thousand people died in a couple days, and a lot of my friends', you know, homes were destroyed. And you have these, like, you know, typhoons, right, that, like, blow away my grandparents' roofs every, like, three years or so.
Speaker 16:And I keep asking them,
Speaker 3:like, like, why? Like, you
Speaker 16:can just, like, move because, you know, you're in Typhoon Ellie. Like, what's the whole point of, you know, having to stay there? But it's, like, something so deeply ingrained. Right? It's it's something, you know, that you accept that you, you know, kind of just accept as as as feet.
Speaker 16:And I was talking to the environment minister and the and the infrastructure minister of Japan recently, and they were saying that they they spent billions of dollars on, you know, disaster infrastructure. Like, they would build these, like, you know, columns under Tokyo. Right? So, like, when it floods, the water can go in.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 16:Yeah. Like, they were like, oh, shoot. We haven't actually solved the the problem, which is the intensification, of these events.
Speaker 11:But but back then, I,
Speaker 16:you know, I was 11, and I did not know that you can, you know, actually start to fight these natural disasters. But I started just, like, building, you know, robots when three d printers were really popular, started selling them. And then the money I made from that, I put into Bitcoin, and then going to, like, hedge funds in high school when I started a a small one. And then and then in college, I I came across this startup, which was building AI weather forecasts. Mhmm.
Speaker 16:It's like not many people think about, like, you know, weather forecasting as, like, this this huge expense that you have to take on. But when you look at, you know, these larger countries, they spend about $2,000,000,000 per year on supercompute. Essentially, like, you know, a big chunk of the world's supercomputers are used on running partial differential equations to be able to calculate the weather. Right? It's like something, that you don't really think about.
Speaker 16:And with machine learning, what you're able to do is reduce costs by 99% and increase resolution by a hundred times. And when you see that, you know, like, we started out, you know, very small, like like, five people, but, you know, I was splitting time at Berkeley and then at the start up. And we became, like, the national weather forecast for The Philippines where it's you know, it was a lot more affordable. And I started to think about, okay. Wow.
Speaker 16:Like, our understanding of, you know, not only just Earth itself, but, like, being able to, you know, model, gather gather data, and then predict has gotten so much better. I start to think about, like, what's the next natural step? Right? Like, the whole point of gaining, you know, more intelligence is so that you can act upon it. And that's what I said to think about.
Speaker 16:Can't really specifically tell what we're tell you what we're doing, in terms of, you know, the the application layer, but this is kind of like the the transformation we're thinking about.
Speaker 2:So is it magic?
Speaker 1:Is spells?
Speaker 2:Are you gonna bomb the hurricane?
Speaker 6:Is it
Speaker 2:is it a bomb? I've heard that pitched before.
Speaker 16:I I I wonder where you heard that from. Yeah. It's a it's a 10,000 times the power of a a hurricane. Hurricanes are interesting. Right?
Speaker 16:Because Yeah. The power the the amount of energy that goes in there is is so strong. Like, if you look at Google Research, they used to have this program where they're trying to harness energy out of a hurricane. And if you can, you know, harness it properly, you can power The United States for for months and months just from one hurricane.
Speaker 2:That's incredible.
Speaker 1:Which is
Speaker 2:That's insane.
Speaker 16:Like a crazy thing to
Speaker 18:think about.
Speaker 1:So so Yeah. You're gonna make them, and then you're gonna control them. And then there's gonna be a bunch of sci fi offshoots where Koki You're
Speaker 2:be nice to me.
Speaker 1:Koki had a good thing going. He was powering a lot of data centers with his homegrown hurricanes. And then one got out of control.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean, talk to me about weather forecasting and kind of the data sources because obviously, yes, massive kind of revolution in AI machine learning generally. But
Speaker 1:You slipped in that you're doing the weather forecasting for The Philippines. Yeah. Like, you guys are, like, a data provider already?
Speaker 16:The previous company I I worked at during school Yeah. That's what we're focused on. And and a lot of it is coming up with with models. Right? How can you compute these partial differential equations more efficiently Yeah.
Speaker 16:With the same amount of data you have? Yeah. And so you you look like DeepMind or, you know, NVIDIA coming up with their, like, frontier models. Right? Like, being able to, you know, run diffusion based models to to forecast better.
Speaker 16:But for for us, what what we think is, you know, fundamental is collecting data that no one really has. Like, software has come has become so commoditized that, like, now it's just, like, collog and then, you know, x AI and then, like, OpenAI. It's just, like, a a never ending battle. For us, it's like, how can you collect data and how can you, like, see the world in a different way that allows you to to, you know, act upon it? And how can you, you know, causally act upon, like, a weather phenomena?
Speaker 16:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You you mentioned diffusion. Is there a distinction between weather forecasting using diffusion models versus transformer based models or token prediction models? Like, is is that a meaningful distinction, or are you kinda using the term broadly?
Speaker 16:It gets really complicated, in a sense that I think, you know, both of them are good at, you know, kind of milking, as much, you know, information, you know, looking at, okay, what what are the lane parameters? How can you
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 16:You know, figure out, you know, somewhat unnoticeable Mhmm. Characteristics within within weather models. But I think Mhmm. The interpretability of weather models also become very important. Right?
Speaker 16:Like, if you can, like, characteristically, like, define, okay, which parameter within a a high dimensional vector, right, is creating a lot of bias, how can you, you know, tweak that so that you can, you know, get back on track? And it's like, weather is so chaotic that, like, even one small perturbation in an initial condition can really mess up the forecast, and that's why it's really difficult to forecast, like, a week out. Yeah. And so being able to, like, assimilate data as you go, and that's why, like, we're focusing on, okay, how can you, you know, collect data that that no one really has so that you can, you know, make sure you're not, like, debiased
Speaker 2:Yeah. Too much. Talk to me about the data sources for this. I'm familiar with the Doppler radar systems that, like, the local news has. But are satellites playing a role now in weather prediction?
Speaker 2:Is the actual data that we're gathering to build these models on top of improving, and what are the key vectors that are driving, better data going into these models?
Speaker 16:Yeah. Satellite data is interesting. You know, a lot of data has always been, used, and it's, you know, made by NOAA or ECMWF. Unfortunately, NOAA is not doing, too well now. What we're doing is building sensors and then literally, like, flying, into, you know, storms or into clouds to measure, within them.
Speaker 16:Right? It's a it's a complex convective process that you really have to, you know, just send something in measure
Speaker 2:Autonomous vehicle, I assume?
Speaker 18:No. The plane personally?
Speaker 16:Our our, our focus is on how can you build infrastructure.
Speaker 12:Sure.
Speaker 16:Right? Like, infrastructure in a sense that, okay, models are a part of the infrastructure, but how can you collect data Mhmm. For, you know, a a a targeted, you know, vehicle? So for example, like, hurricanes are interesting. Right?
Speaker 16:Like and I'm sorry. Like, I can't, you know, say everything in detail. But in terms of hurricanes, it's like, okay. If you want to see how convection is happening, how what about, you know, the the density of clouds? What kind of grapple columns and and and water droplets exist, you really just have to, you know, fly like a a plane in the like, it's hard to just do, like, drones because it's too turbulent or these, like, sensors are Sure.
Speaker 16:You know, too big. And so thinking about that is is an interesting problem as well. But I think fundamentally, right, what we're pushing against is that many of these, you know, reactive methods of of disaster. If you look at, you know, insurance. Right?
Speaker 16:Like, there's about, like, a hundred $40,000,000,000 per year in insurance premiums issued in The US for, like, tropical cyclones. Mhmm. And yet, like, insurance premiums have doubled every single year for the last, you know, four or five years in many coastal cities. And when you look at, like, another catastrophe happening, like, last year, hurricane Helena and Milton was was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. They weren't even category fives, and congress had to give out a hundred billion dollars in aid.
Speaker 16:Right? But when the next hurricane Katrina happens in, you know, Florida, for example, then insurance is just going to Yeah. Be insolvent in many ways.
Speaker 2:Isn't there a market for better weather data by itself? I mean, it sounds like fighting the hurricane is important, but we talked to somebody who works in data brokerage loosely and said, like, hedge everyone talks about, oh, we'll sell it to hedge funds. But there's only, like, hedge five hedge funds that buy anything, and they're stingy apparently, and they don't really buy that much data. You think about the insurance market, yeah, a hundred and $40,000,000,000. But if you're an insurer and you know that a whole bunch of houses are gonna be destroyed in two weeks or in four weeks, you're not really gonna be able to adjust premiums that fast to make up for that.
Speaker 2:So it feels like and then you look at the government. The government might want to know. But even then, it's like, are they really a good Just
Speaker 1:to continue spitballing, in California, when there's certain communities that are threatened, they'll have, like, a private fire response.
Speaker 2:I guess that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Basically, even in HOA
Speaker 2:Is that a good But
Speaker 1:but Is that a reasonable marketer? Thinking about, like Yeah.
Speaker 2:What are thinking?
Speaker 1:The dynamic right now where a a a hurricane is effectively forming. Yeah. Yeah. And the response is to watch it and then tell people to evacuate based on where you think it's gonna Yeah. And it's kind of insane that we don't have any sort of proactive response to say, hey, this thing is progressing to being more and more intense.
Speaker 1:Sure. Can we, you know, sort of stop it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, yeah, data market, I I don't know how much you can talk about it. We might just have
Speaker 18:to have you
Speaker 2:back on when you can talk about No. When you when you
Speaker 16:look at insurance, it's pretty insane. Like, they look at, you know, okay. What does, you know, hurricane damage look like in the last forty years?
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 16:Okay. Let's, you know, aggregate average and then kind of, you know, add bias for, like, some of the intensification of these events or the increase, and the exposure, and that's all you do. And so a lot of the interesting financial assets come up when you you look like catastrophe bonds. Like, catash they're like certain hedge funds that literally just trade on catastrophe bonds. Right?
Speaker 16:And it's just about, like, estimating what is the the the arbitrage in terms of how much, you wildfire is going to wipe out, you know, a certain city or, you know Yeah. Same for hurricanes
Speaker 2:as well. Makes a ton of sense. Well, we'll have to have you back when you can talk more about the product and and where you're going with the company. But this was fantastic. Thank you so much for hopping on.
Speaker 2:This
Speaker 1:is a real Excited to hear more.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 16:Thank you. Thank you for the Cheers.
Speaker 2:Bye.
Speaker 16:Bye bye.
Speaker 2:And that concludes Teal Fellow Tuesday. We have interviewed
Speaker 1:Looking forward to next Tuesday.
Speaker 2:Next Tuesday, we'll do
Speaker 1:In a year from now.
Speaker 2:A year from now. Also, I mean, we we mentioned Figma a few times, but we forgot to mention that Dylan Field, teal fella. So go to Figma.com. Think bigger. Build faster.
Speaker 2:Figma helps design and development. Build add
Speaker 1:products together.
Speaker 2:I love ads, baby. I love it.
Speaker 1:That is the, I think, the third that you've run today. I love it.
Speaker 2:Anyway energy. I like this post from Andrea, this bumper sticker. It says, honk if you like the taste of venture capital. And I just wanted to say
Speaker 1:And I love
Speaker 2:Honk. Honk. Honk. Honk. Honk.
Speaker 2:Honk. Honk. Honk. Honk. Honk.
Speaker 2:And it's like Graza and Olipop. I thought that was very funny. Is that is this is this an anti venture capital bumper sticker?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't know how anybody could be anti venture capital. It's ridiculous. My lovely wife was one of the first investors in Wow.
Speaker 2:So if you're honking,
Speaker 1:you're honking for And they're absolutely crushing.
Speaker 2:What else is interesting to cover today? I mean, TBPN was in the news with Ben Thompson chiming in over the weekend saying, I love how it never occurs to the media that maybe they're just being outcompeted instead of the subject of some sort of conspiracy. Literally anyone can make a podcast. Sorry. They don't wanna listen to yours.
Speaker 1:Think to to add to hear the frustration from the media is that oftentimes entrepreneurs and investors don't even wanna talk to the media anymore. Yeah. So it's not that they don't, you know, they maybe will listen.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But they don't even wanna go and and Yeah. This is something we talked about with Abe, the guy who wrote the Yeah. Profile on us is he was curious, you know, what why why do you feel like people are so comfortable, you know, talking with you, and and we need
Speaker 2:to go Abe actually responded to this. He said, I think it can be both true that nontraditional outlets like Ben's and TBPN are outperforming many traditional ones and that some of tech distrusts the traditional media, creating some of the audience for Ben and TBPN. And I love that because no quotes. No quotes around TBPN. Abe got the memo.
Speaker 2:We're in the mainstream now. We are the mainstream media. We are the traditional media. Yeah. I mean, we're wearing suits.
Speaker 5:What's more traditional
Speaker 2:than wearing what's more traditional than wearing suits?
Speaker 1:Very highly traditional.
Speaker 2:How can we be more traditional than wearing a tailored suit while you report the news while you newsmax? I'm newsmaxing, John. What what else is interesting to talk about? There's some news in Polymarket. The odds of a US recession have dropped significantly.
Speaker 2:I'm very excited to hear that. Love that.
Speaker 1:I I threw up a market. Will Coinbase acquire Circle before September?
Speaker 2:That's gonna
Speaker 1:be fun. Somebody else was writing. See if I can read through this. This guy, I I don't actually know this guy, but he wrote up an article. And I guess he was at Coinbase for some time, which is interesting.
Speaker 1:So he's giving some background. I spent years in the crypto industry, first at Coinfund, then at Coinbase helping scale its venture strategy. Everything in this post is based on publicly available data from Circle's s one and Coinbase's public filings. No inside information information, just analysis anyone could replicate, but most don't. He's breaking down the USDC supply.
Speaker 1:He says total USDC equals Coinbase's USDC plus circles USDC plus everything else. Platform USDC refers to the percentage of stablecoins held in a party's custodial products or managed wallet services. And so he's basically saying that Coinbase has 23% of
Speaker 2:the
Speaker 1:total USDC Interesting. Circulation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they've also been on a little acquisition spree. They bought that other big company. I think it was a billion dollar acquisition at least. I forget exactly the name, but we'll have to talk to Brian Armstrong from Coinbase about that hopefully tomorrow.
Speaker 1:He goes on to highlight that USCC is Coinbase's number two revenue driver. Yep. And it contributed to 15% of q one twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2:Be a
Speaker 1:beautiful partnership. Staking.
Speaker 2:Could be a beautiful partnership. We'd love to see.
Speaker 1:Something
Speaker 2:Well, we'll cover it here and we will track it. What is the Poly market actually at?
Speaker 1:Let's see.
Speaker 2:I'm sure
Speaker 1:it's Relatively low volume right now.
Speaker 2:5%, fifty %, ten %?
Speaker 1:No, no. It was sitting at 40% overnight. And somebody took a big no bet. And so it's sub 10%.
Speaker 2:Sub 10%. Okay.
Speaker 7:We'll see.
Speaker 10:Well We'll see.
Speaker 2:If you if you have an opinion, hop on Polymarket. Check it out. I think it's good to close this. Everyone's loving the Dyson keynote. Scott Belsky said agree.
Speaker 2:Found it riveting and seriously considering getting a Dyson pencil vac. Sam said
Speaker 1:So what is the pencil vac?
Speaker 2:That Dyson keynote was so wholesome. Just an excited inventor vacuuming the stage and showing off his new toys all wrapped up in under nine minutes. It's a it's a
Speaker 1:it's finest features basically uses a laser to expose
Speaker 2:Well, that's been on Dyson vacuums for a while. I think have that on mine. Oh, well, you're living in poverty. Dark ages. I guess.
Speaker 13:Well, I
Speaker 1:have a Matic now, so I don't
Speaker 2:need Yeah. That's true. Matic is is pretty incredible. But but Dyson, yeah, they've had the laser for a while, but I think what they did was they they restructured it because it used to be the internals, the heavy battery part and the actual vacuum part would be at the handle. And so the handle was always a little bit heavy.
Speaker 2:It seems like they've kind of shifted a lot of the weight, the center of gravity much lower, and so they can use it much more just like a walking stick. If you see here, you'll see that what he's actually holding in his hand, if you zoom in, is is very thin. And so the whole thing is this very thin tube, and that means it's a lot easier to vacuum. So, I mean, this is this for your in laws. Get this for your parents and grandparents.
Speaker 2:They're gonna love it.
Speaker 1:We talked about Lesson was talking about how expensive this could basically be the the beginning of the e cane.
Speaker 12:This is
Speaker 2:the smart cane. This the smart cane. No way. Yeah. He was talking about that.
Speaker 1:Imagine if everybody was walking around vacuuming all the time.
Speaker 2:World would be so clean. The world would so clean. This is the future.
Speaker 1:Is the And
Speaker 2:then you throw an LLM in that bad boy, start talking to Slap some AI in it. Slap some AI in in it. We could fit so much AI in this thing.
Speaker 1:Intelligence and clean streets too cheap to meter.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great place to end it, folks. Stay tuned. Tomorrow, we are doing crypto day. We have a whole bunch of absolute killers from the crypto ecosystem. It really came together well.
Speaker 2:The lineup is fantastic. Very, very exciting.
Speaker 1:It's actually I I I wanted to, before tomorrow, try to estimate the the the total volume that that the people joining tomorrow oversee on a daily basis. It's definitely in the in the billions. It could easily be in the
Speaker 2:Oh oh, daily volume.
Speaker 1:Daily volume. Massive massive.
Speaker 2:Anyway, why don't you take us why don't you take us out with a massive gong hit, Jordy?
Speaker 1:I would love to, John.
Speaker 2:You you wide is so good. I love it. Swing my microphone around.
Speaker 1:Swing the mic? I don't think I almost broke the ass.
Speaker 2:Goodbye, everyone. Thank you for watching. See you tomorrow. Have a great day.
Speaker 1:Have a fantastic evening. Tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Five star us a five star review. We're Ben. Thank you for watching. We'll be there. Deal Fellow Tuesday plus a bunch of other haters.
Speaker 2:You know? It's great.
Speaker 1:We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Cheers.