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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, 01/13/2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome.
Speaker 2:The temple of technology,
Speaker 1:the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. That's correct, Bobby Cosmic. There are eight guests today. We might actually have nine. Let's pull up the linear lineup.
Speaker 1:We got Sherwin Pishavar coming on the show to give us an update on what's happening around the world. Glenn Fogle, Horatio from Booz Allen's coming on the show. We're talking about AI in the enterprise, in the consulting world. JD Ross is coming back for with coverage. We got some news there.
Speaker 1:Sandstone has some fundraising news. Our land of lightning round is gonna be popping off, and then we're cap it off with Scott Nolan in person breaking down, dropping a two truth nuke on the state of nuclear power.
Speaker 2:Don't forget about Bob Slaughter.
Speaker 1:Bob Slaughter. That's a good name. We're coming in light him
Speaker 2:around as well. Looking forward to that.
Speaker 1:We're gonna tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And, of course, for those who might have forgotten our linear lineup is, of course, created by Linear, the system for modern software development.
Speaker 1:Linear's a purpose built tool for planning and building products.
Speaker 2:Everyone wants to know, did John get a haircut? Yes.
Speaker 3:I did.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Did yesterday.
Speaker 2:Cleaned it up a little bit.
Speaker 3:Yeah. A little bit.
Speaker 2:It's getting wild.
Speaker 1:There's some some some length still. We'll see. We'll see if we like it. Anyway, I think Siri needs an app. I think that that's under discussed.
Speaker 1:The news is that Apple and Google have a deal. We talked to Ben Thompson about it yesterday. A billion dollars going from Apple to Google. Now my real hot take is that I think it's gonna flip at some point, and I think Google or someone else is going to pay Apple to route LLM queries to them because with the universal commerce protocol, agentic commerce protocol, with ads and LLM responses, there's going to be a whole bunch of moments where a an LLM query is actually profitable. And on average, think they will be profitable.
Speaker 1:I think the price of inference will continue to decline, and the value of each query, the monetization of each query will increase until there's a flipping, and then all of a sudden, every LLM query that's generated is on net across the entire across the entire category, generating profit instead of generating losses, which is what's happening right now. Of course, just like with Google when you search for, you know, how old is Leonardo DiCaprio or something, they're not making a lot of money on that. They're not running a lot of ads on that. But when you go to search for insurance or something like that, they they charge a pretty penny for those ads. And I think the same thing will be true for LLMs broadly.
Speaker 2:It is kind of interesting they don't I just looked it up. They don't run ads on how old is Leonardo DiCaprio. You'd think that they could figure out some type of ad to serve a kid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You think Brian Johnson would be buying an ad
Speaker 2:like Like some peptide.
Speaker 1:Because you're like, looks great. What's he doing? Oh. And then He's 51.
Speaker 2:Leo was born in the seventies
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Which is crazy when you say it like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's looking great. He was at the he was at the Golden Globes having fun celebrating his movie. Goofing around. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He was goofing around. He was caught on like some mic looking at somebody. I don't know. I saw some random clips.
Speaker 1:Anyway but the real the the real thing I wanted to debate with Tyler was I was arguing that Siri needs an app. It's crazy. Siri came out in 2010. Hasn't had an app for its entire life. I mean, I I it actually started as an app back in the day.
Speaker 1:It was Siri is from the Stanford Institute of Research and Intelligence or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What what it was like a $200,000,000 acquisition?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And don't know. Seems like good value. Before we keep digging into Siri, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security.
Speaker 1:Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. So it was an app that you needed to install on your iPhone. There were a few of these speech recognition apps that you could go, and you'd open up the app, click a button. Siri, because I think the fact that they were on the on the West Coast, was able to get the deepest integration in Apple, sort of win the home button over time, win the Siri button, and eventually they they teamed up and actually oh, I have triggered Siri on my MacBook. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:And so eventually, you know, Siri gets baked into the in the operating system level, and the rest is history. The first couple of years are pretty good. People are excited. You know, you can it it was somewhat magical to be able to just press a button, ask for the weather, ask for a stock chart, ask for, you know, what's on your calendar, dictate a text message. A lot of that was pretty great.
Speaker 1:The user numbers are interesting. The the I don't know that how much they disclose this as sort of a rumored number, but there's the the the estimates are around 500,000,000 active Siri users globally, which is huge, like absolutely massive. But there's 1,500,000,000 iPhone users. So having only a third of your user base use your AI feature seems a little bit low, if that's the case.
Speaker 2:Ian Mackey says, in the X Chat, Siri was born out of SRI.
Speaker 1:SRI. Yeah. Yeah. SRI, which I believe is Stanford the Stanford Research Institute or something like that. I I think that's where SRI comes from.
Speaker 1:But they're clearly not getting enough out of it. People aren't using it. Everyone in Texas, I never use Siri. Obviously, some people do use
Speaker 2:Well, some people are using it now because we're saying Siri.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And triggering it.
Speaker 2:Said we triggered it for
Speaker 1:We triggered it.
Speaker 2:I figured Anyway, that
Speaker 1:so obviously juicing it up with an LLM like Gemini makes a ton of sense. Of course, Gemini is a sponsor of this show. Gemini three Pro, it's Google's most intelligent model yet. We got state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. But this deal between Google and Apple makes a ton of sense for a few reasons.
Speaker 1:Google's actually profitable, has the money. They don't need to take a huge amount of cash from Apple. They can give them sort of a deal on it because
Speaker 2:It was really fun. Billion dollars. Ben kept throwing around big numbers yesterday. Yeah. Like, let's be honest.
Speaker 2:We're intact. It's not a lot
Speaker 1:of money. Yeah. It is. It's actually true. Ramped up because at first, it was the $30,000 DaVinci Resolve, the Blackmagic Ursa immersive camera.
Speaker 1:That's $30,000. He's like, that's nothing. Just put this And that's true for a tech company. And he was like, you know, Apple's paying Google $1,000,000,000. That's nothing.
Speaker 1:It's like they're both nothing by Yeah.
Speaker 2:The the whole thing with
Speaker 1:Apple's the the Alphabet's a $4,000,000,000,000 company now.
Speaker 2:Live the the infrastructure, the hardware to do a live Apple Vision Pro broadcast being $30,000 or something in that range is like the fact that they could copy and paste that around every stadium and suddenly have like a probably a a a like, I imagine they could scale that to hundreds of millions of dollars of, like
Speaker 1:You think so. Pay per view and stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Not not even pay per view, but just a subscription. Yeah. It's like the
Speaker 1:Even just selling headsets. I mean, the headset's $3,500. Yeah. You only need to sell 10 headsets to offset the price of the of one immersive camera. Like, you should be able to do that.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we we we we covered the Apple Vision Pro in detail yesterday. Ben Thompson joined the stream. You should go check out the the video if if you haven't watched that. And he actually gave us a shout out. He mentioned his appearance in the Strathecari daily update today, which is very fun.
Speaker 1:But so so my my take is that I think over time this will flip, and I think over time Google will be paying Apple for all of the LLM routing that happens because Google will be monetizing those queries. You will go to Siri, and you will say, what's the weather? And Gemini, under the hood, will tell you the weather, and they probably won't monetize that very well. But then every once in a while, you'll say, hey, Gemini, order me a new TV, and it'll say, what size do you want?
Speaker 2:And it'll just Order me rain. Rainmaker.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It changed the weather.
Speaker 2:And and they will get
Speaker 1:either an affiliate fee or a transaction fee, or there will be an ad that's placed in the stream of content that comes back. And I would imagine that right now, Apple's saying, don't do any of those ads. Don't monetize these queries. But over time, I imagine that they will. But the big thing that I wanted to discuss with Tyler, he was fighting me on this.
Speaker 1:He says that app he says that Siri does not need an app. I think that Siri will need an app. I think that the the LLM chat interface is so dominant at this point that everyone has the experience of going back and forth asynchronously, like it's chatting to a helpful assistant, like you're texting with a friend, you want to be able to scroll up and see
Speaker 2:previous be very annoying if you had a real life assistant, and they were like, you can only call me.
Speaker 1:Well I won't. Tyler, explain. Explain your position.
Speaker 5:So it's not not the Oh. No.
Speaker 1:You flash banged him.
Speaker 2:Hit him with
Speaker 6:a flash bang. Sorry.
Speaker 2:Was trying
Speaker 5:to help John.
Speaker 2:Opinion denied, Tyler. We
Speaker 1:have a flashback now on the stream. What good timing. So did Tyler, once the flashback wears off, please tell us.
Speaker 5:Okay. So it's not that I disagree. I'm not like anti app. It's just like the fifth most important thing that they need to, like, do.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Like, I don't care like, okay. Would you rather have the same Siri, but there's also an app Mhmm. Or a new Siri? There's no app Yes. It's Yes.
Speaker 5:Yes. A better model. Like, obviously, you're picking the latter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're picking the better model. But what I'm saying is that as soon as you integrate a better model that has more do you see a flash bang
Speaker 2:again? I'm too powerful.
Speaker 1:I'm watching this. So so as soon as you as soon as you have deeper responses and more back and forth and more knowledge retrieval. Siri has they they had Wolfram Alpha integration. I think they had a Wikipedia integration for a little bit, but it was more just like pulling up a Wikipedia snippet, and then you would either open that. If you wanna go deeper, you would open that web page in Safari and look at the actual Wikipedia.
Speaker 1:Now there's new context and new content that's being created on the fly by these models because you can ask questions that don't exist in a single Wikipedia page. Gemini, under the hood in Siri, will instantiate that for you, give you those paragraphs, and you might not be able to read through all of that in one screen time session. You might get a text message, need to answer it. You might get a phone call. You might have to put your phone down to, you know, keep doing what you're whatever you're doing, and you wanna come back to it.
Speaker 1:And so, yes, you could just say your prompt again and reinstantiate it all, but that takes time. These models are slow, especially if you're firing off a deep research report.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, like, yes. Like, these are I I agree that these are important things, but these are, like, far from the most important thing. I could just say, okay. If I'm asking about chips yesterday,
Speaker 4:I Yes.
Speaker 5:We have this long conversation, and then I I say, okay. Yesterday, we're talking about chips. Let's continue that conversation. That's that whole thing solved now.
Speaker 1:Yes. So so that is a that would be amazing. But the current chat apps don't even have that functionality. If you go to a new empty You chat box
Speaker 5:could very easily implement that. You there are on all the okay. On Claude, on chat if you can search through your past chats.
Speaker 1:Do you know how bad the search is? The search is not LLM power. Not It's
Speaker 5:not the search.
Speaker 1:It's not
Speaker 7:that good.
Speaker 1:It's not that good.
Speaker 5:Okay. Well, they
Speaker 8:could It's not it's not
Speaker 1:actually an LLM query. It's not it's not just you're talking about something like you're talking with a friend. You have to use keywords again. You're back in, like, traditional search world. You you don't just go to the same empty box and say, hey.
Speaker 1:Remember when we were talking about the the fall of the Roman Empire? We pull that pull all that up. It doesn't do that.
Speaker 5:Okay. Sure. But that's I don't think that's that hard to implement. You just models.
Speaker 1:But we're talking about Siri here. It can barely pull up the weather. Like, we're going from we're going from, like, a d tier product Yeah. To now we're baking in a new model, Gemini.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But it's gonna take
Speaker 1:it to, like, b
Speaker 5:The implementation of the of the model is way more important than if the app works. If if I can, like, search through it correctly. Yeah. Like, I The the implementation of the model is, like, not a trivial thing. Like, you have to get a lot of things correct.
Speaker 1:What do you mean? Like, what about it?
Speaker 5:Like, I if you
Speaker 1:You mean, like, the APIs and the hooks and, like, the tools that it will be able to use within the iOS ecosystem?
Speaker 5:Yeah. For it to be, like, smooth
Speaker 2:for it
Speaker 5:to be, like, a good product, like, it has to be, like, fast.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, to give to
Speaker 5:get that are more important than
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Being able to search through yesterday's message.
Speaker 1:Yes. And I think that's why the the the language is, like, is Gemini derived models, Gemini distilled models, because they do want to be able to run something that's like Gemini, but on device. And obviously, they have great hardware for that, Apple Silicon. And then also, they've actually built out really solid APIs across the entire iOS stack since they have a shortcut functionality, which is woefully underutilized. But that was initially designed to be work working with it was initially designed to plug into Siri.
Speaker 1:So you should be able to order an Uber with Siri or order DoorDash with Siri. All of that didn't really take off in terms Siri usage, but the APIs are there. So I think the implementation should be fairly simple, or do you think they need some sort of RL environment?
Speaker 5:I don't know. I mean, it's just like so okay. If you're doing a deep research Mhmm. Are you even like, are we even sure that that is do you wanna be using Siri for that? Like, maybe it's just better to do it.
Speaker 5:Whenever I do deep research Yeah. I never do it on the app. I'm always on, like, my laptop.
Speaker 1:Nerd. Nerd alert.
Speaker 5:Because it's just, way more information dense. There's a bunch of links that I wanna click on No. Order to that on
Speaker 1:the portal. Definitely fire off deep research reports on their phone. Maybe they go read them later on their laptop. But we live in a mobile first world and Apple and that's the Apple customer base. Apple Siri customers are gonna ask long questions that get long answers, and they're gonna wanna come back to those from time to time.
Speaker 1:And where else will they do that other than an app with the neatly organized also
Speaker 5:I I agree. Remember.
Speaker 1:Like, part of what's cool about these apps is that if I pull out the sidebar, I can scroll through and I can remember, oh, wow. I was looking at, you know, the the NBA's history and, you know, their attendance over different I I don't even remember firing this off. When did I ask about this? But, like, I I did, and now I can go back and enjoy the fruits of its labor. And I can enjoy
Speaker 2:it Yeah.
Speaker 5:But I I I think there's so many more things that are important. Like, okay. Even okay. So they're using Gemini. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, what would you rather have? Would you rather have Gemini 2.5 Yes. And an app Yes. Or Gemini three and no app?
Speaker 1:It's not a trade off. They're getting the best Gemini, obviously.
Speaker 4:Okay. Clearly.
Speaker 1:And then also the the app is coming. That's what I'm
Speaker 5:bad at implementing AI.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:Do you agree with that?
Speaker 1:They have been to date. Yes. Okay. Yeah. No one debates that Apple intelligence was sort of botched.
Speaker 5:So I I think there's definitely a case we made that they need to prioritize certain things, and the implementation of the actual model, like them using the best model that's gonna be fast. It's gonna Yeah. Like, maybe on on Siri, people are just having fairly short responses. You don't want paragraph and paragraphs unless you ask for it.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Stuff like this is, I think, much more important than having Yes. That specific app.
Speaker 1:Yes. And I wouldn't be surprised I mean, truthfully, developing the type of app that I'm discussing about Siri, like, it should be able to be one shot by Clugco.
Speaker 5:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Like, it's super simple. Right?
Speaker 2:Let's pull up
Speaker 1:But but but what what are the probability that you think an app comes out this year?
Speaker 5:For Siri?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:I think it's probably pretty high.
Speaker 1:So what's wrong with my logic then? No. I'm not disagreeing with you.
Speaker 2:Just Someone in the chat said they already have a Siri app internally Oh. That they've testing.
Speaker 1:Interesting. We're having
Speaker 2:a No idea if that's true.
Speaker 1:Okay. Wait. I wanna move on to whatever you wanna say.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:First, I wanna say tell you about fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.
Speaker 5:Okay. Let let me say one
Speaker 1:more thing.
Speaker 5:Yes. Okay.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying like I'm about to
Speaker 5:flash bang you. Okay. If you're like writing this, who's the audience? Like Apple. Right?
Speaker 5:You wanna make a change?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Okay. So it's like I I I Ben Thompson comes on yesterday.
Speaker 1:All I'm saying is that is that is that I'm excited for I'm excited to be able to access Gemini with a button. I feel like that's what this deal is giving me.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That has nothing to do with an app.
Speaker 1:But but also, after I access Gemini with this button, that triggers trigger flashbang, then I wanna be able to see my list. Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Wait. You have a you have a sound cue for Lambda now?
Speaker 2:Yes. I do. Pull up this clip from Gary Tan testifying in the senate.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Let's see. About
Speaker 10:Who here actually uses Siri? I personally do not because I know that it does not have the cutting edge technology that don't get along well with her. Exactly. That Anthropic or OpenAI or many other American labs could provide. And imagine if Apple opened it up so that similar to when you open Windows, you have to choose a browser.
Speaker 1:Oh, my finger.
Speaker 10:What if choose your AI agent?
Speaker 4:I love it.
Speaker 10:Then there are a billion consumers in the world who would suddenly have access to not just one self preference Siri, but a variety of American labs. And that would open up investment, that would open up prosperity.
Speaker 2:That's a
Speaker 1:good pitch. I like this. The Trupo with the end card. When is that from? Is that recent?
Speaker 2:Ian is on an absolute tear.
Speaker 1:Let's see. Oh.
Speaker 2:Note over here.
Speaker 1:You, Ian.
Speaker 2:Hi. He says current Apple's currently hiring 300 Siri focused roles.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're going big. They're they're gonna do everything. You don't think one of those is an app developer.
Speaker 5:Okay. No. In fact, what is let let me just finish this. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 5:So You think that's intentional? Before you
Speaker 2:You think that's intentional? Like, bit you know, kind of a reference to the movie 300?
Speaker 1:Oh. In their last hand against against the 10,000 ChadGPT employees. I will let you respond, but first, I'm gonna tell you about graphite dot dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub hit ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Let's continue.
Speaker 5:Okay. So Ben Thompson came on yesterday.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:And he said he wants one thing. Okay? He doesn't to to change the Apple Vision Pro, he doesn't want, oh, a new productivity feature or oh, I wanna be able to FaceTime my friend while watching the NBA game. All he wants is to edit to remove all the edits from the NBA game.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. You have
Speaker 5:to choose one thing. You have to prioritize one thing.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So if the audience is Apple, like, what I want them to know is, like, you guys need to pick the right model. You need to implement it well. It's not I don't care about the app. Okay.
Speaker 5:That's, like, way later.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, I I I hear you. They've had a variety of products. None of them really hit.
Speaker 5:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Is there one that was good?
Speaker 2:They need
Speaker 5:to choose one thing.
Speaker 1:That's that was good. I don't know. But I'm ready to move the goalposts. Ready to move the goalposts. We have the goalposts.
Speaker 1:So my new definition for Apple AGI Apple and Apple Intelligence? Apple Super Intelligence? Apple Super Intelligence.
Speaker 2:It's just a functioning search function feature in iMessage.
Speaker 1:That would be very good.
Speaker 2:That's AGI for Apple.
Speaker 1:That's ASI. No. My my definition is I wanna be able to go to the new Siri and so I I got an iPad, and the iPad just accidentally installed, like, every app that I've ever installed on my phone on the iPad, which wouldn't be that bad because on my phone, I have one home screen, and then I have a second screen. And then the third screen is just the app library. And it just has a search box, and then the app library actually very intelligently organizes things into productivity, utilities, entertainment.
Speaker 1:It does all that for me. I don't need to organize it. I don't choose where things go. It knows if it's a creativity app or a travel app or a news app. It puts it in its correct category.
Speaker 1:I don't need to manage that. So it's great. I have a whole bunch of apps on my phone, and they're all organized. For some reason, the iPad was just like, let's do pages and pages and pages of all these apps on actual screens, and there's no rhyme or reason to them. And I wanna organize them all into a logical format.
Speaker 1:But I think I'd have to go and, you know, at least remove all of them from home screen one at a time. It would be, like, thousands of taps to get rid of all of them. Probably take me, like, ten to twenty minutes. It's annoying. It's not gonna happen.
Speaker 1:I just won't do it. But it's a good test of agentic AI to be able to with a single prompt, one shot. Hey, clean up the whole desktop. Because we're seeing that today with Claude Cowork. Cowork is the name?
Speaker 1:Could not coworker.
Speaker 11:Claude Cowork.
Speaker 1:Cowork. Okay. Claude Cowork. A lot of people are having fun installing Claude Cowork and then and then saying, hey, go clean up my desktop. Organize it.
Speaker 1:Now, who knows if this is valuable? I don't think you care about clean desktops.
Speaker 3:You're a
Speaker 2:mess guy. I did see a a post. Somebody was like, wow. Claude CoWork cleaned up all the files on my desktop. This is gonna change everything.
Speaker 1:It's a game
Speaker 2:changer. And I was thinking, you know, every once in a while, I'll clean up the files on my desktop, but it's never once changed anything everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. Usually, I just make a folder with, like, archive.
Speaker 2:And in fact, don't don't find it.
Speaker 1:And I do that again and again and again.
Speaker 2:Like, if it was really important, we'd probably have somebody on the team that was, like, just really good at organizing desktops.
Speaker 1:Sure. And now we do. Cloud Cowork.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess we Organizing.
Speaker 1:But I wanna be able to but I do think as trivial as that example is, I think it's a good example of what an agentic system should be able to do if it has the proper hooks into the OS layer. Cloud Cowork can do it on desktop. What's the iOS equivalent of that? It's gotta be Apple Intelligence. They have their walled garden.
Speaker 1:The walls are staying up. They're not letting Cloud Cowork go around your your iOS installation and hook into all your different local APIs. That's the domain of Apple Intelligence. That's the domain of Siri. Siri is now powered by Gemini.
Speaker 1:It should be able to do this. Let's see if that's what they launch. And that's the model implementation that you're talking about. And that's what I agree with you on. I just think there'll also be an app.
Speaker 5:Okay. Yeah. But I like, the former is less important than
Speaker 4:the latter.
Speaker 1:Yes. I agree.
Speaker 2:We're moving on. The Germiner called all this back in November. So, anyways, this isn't even new news. But we should It's now official. It it is We gotta give
Speaker 1:it up for Mark Gurman, though. The Gurmanator. Athlete.
Speaker 2:Gurmanator's back on the calendar. We're gonna have him on as
Speaker 1:Can't wait to catch up. Possible. Let me because John Turnis is in the news too. We'll get to that. First, let me tell you sent about Sentry.
Speaker 1:Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.
Speaker 2:150.
Speaker 1:That's a lot.
Speaker 2:That's a Apple
Speaker 1:ran a blind test of Frontier models and picked Gemini. Interesting. And there's this old photo of the the Tim Cook meeting with Sundar Pichai from Google in a dimly lit cafe or restaurant probably in Cupertino or Menlo Park somewhere. I was hoping they would do a jersey swap at this event because, of course, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang swap jerseys at Walmart.
Speaker 2:Very clearly mewing here. I think they're both mewing at each They're both mewing at each other. They're just having a mew off.
Speaker 1:Yes. That that's how they really
Speaker 11:They're even
Speaker 1:talking. Wanna do business together. Anyway Let's
Speaker 2:go over to the New York Times. New York Times has new profile. Fantastic. Specifically, Callie Huang and Trip Mikkel. John Turnis, a low profile but influential executive at Apple, could be next in line to replace the company's longtime chief executive, Tim Cook, if he steps aside.
Speaker 2:They say around 2018, Apple considered adding a tiny laser to its iPhones. The part would allow consumers to take better photos, more accurately map their surroundings, and use new augmented reality features. But it would also cost Apple about $40 per device, cutting into the company's profits. John Turnis, Apple's head of hardware engineering, suggested adding the component to only the more expensive Pro models of the iPhone, said two people familiar with the discussions. Those devices, Mr.
Speaker 2:Turnis' reason, tended to be purchased by Apple's most loyal soldiers. Hostages. Hostages. Who would be excited about new technology? Average consumers on the other hand probably wouldn't care.
Speaker 2:Threading the needle between adding new bells and whistles. Let's give it up for bells and whistles. It's Apple's products while watching the bottom line has defined the careful low profile style of mister turn us. And we have to take a minute to talk about the nominative determinism of turn us. Surround.
Speaker 2:Turn us around. Mister turn us around. AI strategy is we need somebody to turn us around. Mister turn us could be the man for the job.
Speaker 3:Do it.
Speaker 2:He joined Apple in 2001. He is now considered by some company insiders to be the front runner to replace Tim Cook, Apple's longtime CEO. Apple last year began accelerating its planning for Mr. Cook's succession according to three people. Mr.
Speaker 2:Cook, 65, has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload. Should he step down, Mr. Cook is likely to become the chairman of Apple's board. Interesting.
Speaker 6:Look at this.
Speaker 1:They're also doing some numerology. Turnis is 50 and that's the same age that Cook that Tim Cook was.
Speaker 2:Wow. He took over for Steve Jobs in 2011. I we see you Interesting. We see you New York Times
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Doing the the hard hitting analysis.
Speaker 1:Like mister Cook, mister Ternis is known for his attention to detail and his knowledge of Apple's vast supply network. Both men are also considered even tempered collaborators, capable of navigating the bureaucracy of one of the world's wealthiest companies without ruffling feathers. His rising profile caused debate amongst Apple alumni and rank and file employees about whether he would lead like Tim Cook, who succeeded by making the company more predictable and incremental. Or mister Jobs, who laid the foundation for the company's success with risky bets and visionary
Speaker 2:in the chat says Apple needs a social network. Do they have it already? I feel like iMessage is
Speaker 1:iMessage is social network. If you remember Ping, they had a social network that they acquired, I believe, from Jeff Ralston, the former YC partner. But it was it was like Spotify where you could see where other people are playing. You'd go on Apple Music and or it wasn't called Apple Music back then. Was Ping, which was linked to iTunes.
Speaker 1:You could see what other people are listening to. And then every artist would have a profile where they could share content. It was a very music driven social network.
Speaker 2:Follow me on Ping.
Speaker 1:Follow me on Ping. Ping me. Ping me. Never never really took off, though. Other than that, I think iMessage is a very, very strong social network.
Speaker 1:And I mean, certainly, if if if Meta owns WhatsApp and includes that in the family of apps, and messaging is obviously a huge driver of social networking activity these days. People sharing content through there. Snapchat is a messenger. Instagram is you look and you see there's more shares on this reel than likes because people are sending it to each other. That's what people do.
Speaker 1:That's how
Speaker 2:people Yeah. And I think I think the people have long had the idea to build a family focused social network. Mhmm. And I don't think they'll ever be successful because group chats on iMessage function
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Totally. Do that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very well. You just
Speaker 1:can't keep up with Apple on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Before we move on, Figma. FigmaMake isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast.
Speaker 2:Mister Ternus' rising profile. Sorry. You got that. If you
Speaker 1:is You wanna make an iPhone every year. Ternus is your guy, says Cameron Rogers.
Speaker 2:But but but how much should we read into this? Wait. Because
Speaker 1:They already do make an iPhone every year. But Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's all it but but it it says some I mean, obviously, is we don't have the context here.
Speaker 1:But What he didn't say was if you wanna build the next
Speaker 2:You wanna
Speaker 1:build the future. Yeah. The futuristic, you know, if you wanna get the Apple car project off the ground, turn this to your guy. He said, if you wanna make an Apple an iPhone every year, like clockwork, keep the trains running on time at Apple, Ternus is your guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:People we we read that other quote about Ternus where they're saying, like, has he has he done any hard has he made any hard decisions? No. Like, someone was clearly taking shots at him. It feels like there's a little bit of, like, politics going on over at Apple, people jockeying for the next role. But whatever's happening with John Ternis clearly is working because it's one profile after another.
Speaker 1:And he's the name I keep hearing more and more, certainly above Craig Federighi, Eddie Q, some of the other folks who are sort of household names in the Apple ecosystem. They're not getting profiles like this written. Everyone needs to meet and learn about John Turnis. So Apple's plans for artificial intelligence are also a big question. Is he AGI pilled?
Speaker 1:Is he AISI pilled? What are his timelines? Is he a doomer? We gotta get to the bottom of this. Hopefully, the hopefully, New York Times is asking the hard questions.
Speaker 1:We we will find out. While other giant technology companies have spent tens of billions of dollars developing AI, Apple has largely been on the sidelines, and it pushed off making major changes to its products with new AI technology. It'll be up to Apple's board of directors to decide who will eventually replace mister Cook, who also sits on the board. The rest of the company's eight board members did not respond to requests for comments, and Apple declined to make mister Ternis available for an interview. They couldn't get The New York Times in the room with Ternis.
Speaker 1:The Financial Times and Bloomberg previously reported on aspects of this. So he's the youngest member of Apple's executive leadership team. Success. Getting some young blood in there, sort of a doge situation, I guess. The the the boys, the the the Ternis child at the at the helm.
Speaker 1:No. He's 50. He would be Apple's first chief executive in three decades to have spent his career working in hardware. Unlike some of the other candidates to replace mister Cook, mister Ternus has worked on many of Apple's devices as well as the global operations that manufacture those products. He would take over as a relative unknown outside of Apple.
Speaker 1:Inside the company, he's known more for maintaining products than developing new ones according to six former employees. And mister Turnis, who has been an engineer in Silicon Valley for all of his adult life, has limited exposure to the policy issues and political responsibility.
Speaker 2:That that can that can be viewed that can be viewed as as a knock. Right? Like, he's not just given Apple's history as an innovator
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, like, where you know, what's the highest leverage place that he can spend his time? Probably, you know, focusing on the products that are already hits Yeah. That have real product market fit.
Speaker 1:The political responsibilities can't be complicated. I mean, he knows the supply chain. All he has to do is make a solid gold iPhone, send one to 1,600, and call it a day. Make sure it's very ornate, and you'll be you'll be good to go. He's a California native.
Speaker 1:He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Penn, where he was on the varsity swim team. For a senior project, he designed a device that allowed quadriplegics to use head motions to control a mechanical feeding arm. Wow. It's like a Neuralink back in the day. In the four years after his graduation from Penn, he designed headsets and other products at a virtual reality startup.
Speaker 1:Wow. Throwback. Then he joined Apple, first working on screens for Macs as the company transitioned away from the colorful iMacs
Speaker 2:late nineteen nineties. I'm sure we'll get a chance to talk talk to mister Turnus at some point, but I would love to know what people's VR timelines were when he was working on VR in the nineties.
Speaker 1:They were like ten years max. Ten
Speaker 4:years max.
Speaker 1:In the next decade, for sure. He was a man of the people, adding that the decision to sit with his team likely helped mister Ternis manage and motivate his staff. When he was working at Apple, their team, the team he was on, moved office floors, switching from a closed office plan to a mostly open seating with few offices. When he was promoted, mister Turnis had the option to move into one of those fancy offices, but he said no. I'm sitting with the crew.
Speaker 1:I'm riding with my boys. I'm hanging out in the open plan, which is, you know, tells you a lot about who he is as a person. In 2005, mister Ternis had been promoted to lead Apple's hardware engineering team for the iMacs as it made the g five series, which helped inspire who helped Michael Hillman hired mister Ternis and worked with him at Apple for more than a decade. That team was working on using magnets to hold the computer's glass screen in place. Interesting.
Speaker 1:The technique was unusual for its time and faced skepticism, but Mr. Ternis still pushed for it. When presented with such an out of the box idea, he would champion it, said Mr. Seaford. Mr.
Speaker 1:Ternis spent extended periods of time working with manufacturers in Asia. He traveled between the continent and Silicon Valley and learned how difficult it could be to have a manufacturing supplier deliver on Apple's design expectations. Apple also paired Mr. Ternis with an external consultant to advise him on leadership. He got a leadership coach.
Speaker 1:He became a key lieutenant of Dan Riccio, his predecessor as Apple's head of hardware. By 2013, his role had expanded to include overseeing the Mac and iPad teams. In recent years, he has shouldered more responsibility for updates to Apple's products, spearheaded the iPhone Air, which was released last year with a new slim design and was a key leader in Apple's transition from using Intel chips to silicon to Apple silicon. And, of course, the iPhone Air, not a really hot seller, apparently, not doing that well financially necessarily. But from an engineering perspective, people are very
Speaker 2:Apple employee Yeah. Friend of mine said he got the iPhone Air. Was the worst iPhone he's ever bought.
Speaker 1:Really? Yeah. Wow. Roasted.
Speaker 2:Absolutely brutal.
Speaker 1:Well, before we talk more about the iPhone Air, let me tell you about Labelbox, delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box. The Labelbox, Apple. You know you need some training data. You know you need some high quality training data for your Frontier AI.
Speaker 1:You need some data to train on Siri. Get on Labelbox. Get in the box. So the iPhone Air, obviously, it even might you know, reviews are mixed. Reviews are not great.
Speaker 1:Some people complain about different things. Some people love it, but it hasn't been flying off the shelves. But when you see the x-ray
Speaker 2:Remember that story of the founder who said this is the strongest iPhone ever made. Nobody can possibly break this. It's impossible. What happened next? And that was quickly broken in half by a gondo founder.
Speaker 2:That was an iPhone Smashed.
Speaker 1:Smashed. But you can imagine the innovation that went into making the iPhone Air so small could be used for a foldable phone, which was probably coming, could be used for more miniaturization if they do some sort of lapel pin or something else. They they're clearly have packed a lot of power into such a small form factor. So is he a nice guy? Yes, says mister Rogers.
Speaker 1:He is a nice guy. He's someone you wanna hang out with. Everyone loves him because he's great. And here's the quote that lives in infamy. Has he made any hard decisions?
Speaker 1:No. Are there hard problems he's solved in hardware? No. Wait. Roger
Speaker 2:How can you say how can you say he's he's
Speaker 1:He's never made a hard decision, says Cameron Rogers, who worked on product and software engineering management at Apple from 2005 to 2022. Cameron Rogers, hater of the year right here. Who is this person? But Cameron Rogers is not a fan. Clearly, not not pulling out the glaze for turners.
Speaker 1:It's absolutely brutal to say.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Remember, the same guy who said earlier in the article, if you wanna make an iPhone every year, Turnus is your guy.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You got it.
Speaker 2:And again, I read that and I was like, okay. That sounds good surface level.
Speaker 1:Cameron
Speaker 2:Rogers Apple does make an iPhone. Every year. We should have Cameron on the show.
Speaker 1:The hater in chief, chief hating officer. It's crazy. I mean, certainly, you cannot be at Apple for two decades and never have made a single hard decision or solved a hard problem in hardware. Like, that seems impossible.
Speaker 2:It's funny. There's I got there you. Is a hardware engineer at Apple Yeah. Today named Cameron Rogers.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But it is Different person. Different.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Well, in a 2024 commencement speech at Penn's Engineering School, mister Turners told graduating students that in the future, they would be proudest not of specific projects, but of the journey to make them all happen. Quote, now while you're on that journey, there's going to be many times in your career when where you have to take on something new, he said. And sometimes you might wonder whether or not you can actually do it, giving a little inspirational talk at Penn's engineering school commencement speech.
Speaker 1:Very fun. Well, good luck to him. I don't know. I think he can figure it out. I would be shocked if he's really never solved a hard problem.
Speaker 1:Seems like he has some beef with this Cameron fellow. And well, I don't know. We'll we'll see Cameron Rogers. Maybe Ternus needs to respond. Drop a diss track.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:I would love to see that.
Speaker 1:Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more, all with amazing customer service. OpenAI, they've acquired Torch. It's a health care startup that unifies lab results, medications, and visit recordings. Bringing this together with ChatGPT Health opens up a new way to understand and manage your health, says OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Okay. Whole thing is of Torch. Torch was a four person company.
Speaker 1:Oh, small.
Speaker 2:They the cofounder of Torch, Ilya Mhmm. I believe one of the other founders previously built Forward. Yeah. Ilya was also an early Uber GM. So trained at the Travis Kalanick School of Mogging.
Speaker 2:Cool. Anyways, forward little backstory. Health care startup founded in 2016. They wanted to rebuild the health care system from the ground up. Sounds Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Sounds cool. They originally were trying to do this kind of like the the the general belief was that healthcare was too reactive instead of proactive, right? You go to the doctor when you're sick, not to just kind of generally be healthy. Mhmm. They had an app.
Speaker 2:They wanted the the sort of physical spaces to feel like Apple stores. Right? They wanted this Apple like experience for health. Subscription only model, they didn't accept insurance initially. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Bunch of folks, Founders Fund, Khosla, Eric Schmidt, bunch of legends Oh, yeah. Were were in the round. 2018 to 2022, they expanded to dozens of locations. They had body scanners, real time blood work, a bunch of different software that they had built out. 2021 reached a valuation of over $1,000,000,000 raised a $0.02 $5,000,000,000 ish Series D round.
Speaker 2:At this point, from that point on, they they sort of pivoted to focusing on this thing called care pods. Mhmm. And these were like autonomous. Yeah. Like, AI driven medical kiosk.
Speaker 2:So honestly, probably, right idea, maybe a little bit too early. Eventually, in 2024, they shut down very abruptly. Mhmm. It sounds like they basically just ran ran out of money. Came back very quickly with Torch.
Speaker 2:And now they are, of course, being rolled into OpenAI. So you can I think the the right way to read into this, OpenAI just launched OpenAI Health? They're now acquiring Torch. I would assume that they want all they want all of your they want all of your health data. Like, they really wanna help you with your health.
Speaker 1:They want your blood. They're out for blood.
Speaker 2:They want your blood.
Speaker 1:They want your blood work.
Speaker 2:Maybe maybe they could say like, hey, this month you instead of Paying. Instead of paying, you could be a blood boy
Speaker 1:for us. You're giving blood.
Speaker 2:Our researchers are working really hard. They're Need your
Speaker 1:blood. I'm ready to upload. Upload me. Just let me know. Let me know what
Speaker 2:I'm gonna read the the message that Torch wrote. Torch says, Everyone deserves the best answers modern medicine can give them, and yet we've all had people close to our hearts who didn't get the answers they needed about their health. We have more data about our bodies than ever before, but it's never been harder to bring it all together. Patients see only a fraction of their own records, while clinicians have too little time to parse the growing stream of data patients bring in from wearables and consumer health companies, you know, like Function, etcetera. AI is the most important new tool we've had in decades for turning the chaos into clarity.
Speaker 2:But AI can't help you if your health data is scattered across four hospitals, two labs, seven apps, and three web portals. We started Torch to build a medical memory for AI, unifying scattered records into a context engine that helps you see the full picture, connect the dots, and make sure nothing important gets lost in the noise again. So
Speaker 1:Mike has a little life hack here. If you're an early stage AI founder, re rename yourself to ILIA and get an M and A offer? Enough to work. I like it. Let me tell you about Shopify.
Speaker 1:Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Great. Every time I see one of these one of these new features drop from Claude, co work, or OpenAI, ChatGPT, health, it just feels like the Siri thing is, like, bigger and bigger, back to what Tyler was saying about implementation of the model because Apple has Apple Health. There's a whole promise there of what Apple Health as an app can do. You want that to be AI enabled.
Speaker 1:They so they need to update that as well. And there's there's so many different okay. Shopping, agent to commerce. Like like, there's Apple Pay. Is Apple Pay integrated with with Siri and the new AI function?
Speaker 1:So they really do need to go around and update all over the place if they want to stay. They have some dominant positions carved out, but every AI company is trying to eat off Apple's plate as much as they can. But there's really, really strong lock in to most of the Apple ecosystem. So they they it's not over if they don't move right now and get the app out and get updates out. But it's very clear that if if, you know, Apple or or ChatGPT Health is rolling out, you know, it's gonna take time for people to ramp up, start integrating things, start using it.
Speaker 1:But if that behavior develops and it's another two, three years until Apple responds, like, yeah, they are gonna be a laggard in that category. There's a Claude Cowork reaction thread going on from Zvi Moschowitz. Lots of people kind of mixed reviews. Eleanor Berger says research preview. This is the future, not the present.
Speaker 1:For now, if you want a local agent, Claude Code is still the best you can recommend, even if it's for non coding tasks. Some people are saying it's buggy. Have you had a chance to try it out, Tyler? Can you install Claude CoWork today and
Speaker 12:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean, so I downloaded it yesterday, it's but kind of we we talked about this earlier in the gym. Like, I actually don't know what to do with it Mhmm. Because I'm like already technical. Already have Cloud Code. Yeah.
Speaker 5:My sense is that this is We We get it. My sense is it's basically just a UI
Speaker 2:we get it. We get it. You're texting.
Speaker 1:Hit them with a flash bang.
Speaker 2:It's too powerful. No, okay. But it's like
Speaker 5:a UI wrapper around cloud code. Yeah. So it's like not providing maybe an insane amount of like brand new functionality.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's a huge swath of consumers who are just never gonna really open the terminal. Even if it's even if it's even if Claude even you go to Claude and say, how do I install Claude code? I heard it's hot. And Claude code says, literally, hit command space bar, type t e r m, hit enter, it'll open the terminal, and then copy and paste this line, and then tell it what you want just like it's Chad GPT or Claude. People still won't do that because it's like, oh, what's
Speaker 2:the It's like it it you need, like, 15 gigs for it too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You do need some space in your hard drive, but that's not a huge issue for most people. It's a
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's it's not fully frictionless.
Speaker 1:Whereas, yeah, whereas an app might might sort of hold your hand through that a little bit more. And so I I I'm I'm optimistic about this, but I do think that the marketing and the messaging and actually, like, the the ThreadBoy influencers are gonna be pretty important here, where if you see someone demo something cool with Claude co work, you that's gonna be a key to open it up. A lot of people you know, in the early days of ChatGPT rolling out, a lot of people were sharing prompts. What's a good prompt? You know, prompt engineering.
Speaker 1:Like, oh, you take this prompt and do this. A lot of people need inspiration. It's the same thing with mid journey. Like, if you just give someone a blank box and tell them, it can this is an image generator. I'll just say, like, dog.
Speaker 1:And then you just give them a picture of a dog, and they're like, yeah. It looks like a dog. I can go to Google Images. What's special about it is, like, I want it to be my dog, and I want it be fighting Darth Vader, and I want it to be on in Downtown LA, and then it creates something that you can't just find on Google Images. The same thing will be true on on Claude Cowork.
Speaker 1:There are tools for just cleaning up your desktop. There's I I think Alfred is one of them. There's a few others that just do automated sort of deterministic cleanup of desktops. But people will eventually be sharing Claude co work workflows, prompts, best practices, and just giving people the idea, as simple as that sounds. The capability is there, but there's this capability application overhang where Yep.
Speaker 1:You need to actually tell people, hey. This is something that you could use Claude
Speaker 2:to work for. Mike says, think the position as Cowork is actually really sharp. I agree. I I think that it's kind of a mouthful, Claude Cowork. But going back to what I was saying last week when when people when when some lab leaders have been talking about the potential of AI, they just say, oh, AI is gonna do this.
Speaker 2:AI is gonna do that. Obviously, the the at least near term reality is humans are gonna use AI to do things. Yep. And I think Anthropic, trying to be more human about it and saying, hey, you're working with this thing. It's not it's not claudimating you away.
Speaker 3:Are people
Speaker 1:having fun with the clawed cons, the portmanteaus. First, before we read through these, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software development, web apps, servers, and databases running one place with scaling, monitoring, security built in. Nir, friend of the show, says his job? Oh, it got claudimated away.
Speaker 1:No one has no one I can't believe no one has said this, not even a single name. 1,000 likes. People are into this.
Speaker 2:Paula says he hates AI. Oh, he's claustrophobic.
Speaker 1:Claustrophobic. Okay. These are getting a lot of likes, but not exactly belly laughing for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not quite.
Speaker 1:I'm glad people have a fun. I do think Claude's a funny name. And you know, it's it's Yeah.
Speaker 2:John John Palmer was really pushing like, hey, now's the time.
Speaker 1:To rebrand.
Speaker 2:To rebrand. I mean, a naming exercise can be, you know, a very expansive project. But I do think it's probably too late. We're right Claude is going all the
Speaker 1:way. Yeah. They've all sort of worked out. I don't know. ChatGPT?
Speaker 2:Bard in hindsight, Bard was kind of under
Speaker 3:I feel like Bard.
Speaker 5:I think
Speaker 2:a digital Bard. Bard. Yeah. Bard was
Speaker 1:funny. But Gemini works. They're building up the brand there. And Claude works as well. ChatGPT, such a mouthful.
Speaker 1:So so such an insane name. So clearly, you know, named by a developer, but, you know, it just broke through in such a way. And then they did buy chat.com, so, you know, it it winds up working. Claude Code for the rest of your work, American Middle Class Desk Jockeys watching the asteroid hit the dinosaurs. We will see.
Speaker 1:We'll we'll we'll see how much this moves productivity, how much this move GDP. That's the big question for this year is how much will people actually be able to, you know, use this to do the work they do every day? I've been in jobs
Speaker 2:John, where organizing desktop files was actually a $1,000,000,000,000 industry. Yeah. And
Speaker 1:I mean, I I I have I have been I was an was an intern once, and my job was basically to open up an Excel template every day, copy paste some some numbers, sort of make sure all the formula's held. And over the internship, over the couple months, I wrote more and more Visual Basic so that my job went from eight hours on the first day to four hours to eventually, it was like fifteen minutes. I would just, like, get there and just hit a script. I would just click a button, and it would just do everything. And now it's just with, like, normal software.
Speaker 1:Now you probably have to you have to, you know, reality check. So, I mean, there's make sure there's no hallucinations. But in general, like, some of these jobs can be automated. The question is, like, if someone uses this to automate their own job, will they just be sitting there, you know, watching reels in the small corner? And when their boss comes by, they alt tab so that they're looking, oh, I'm still working really hard.
Speaker 1:Nothing's been automated. These I I models are slop. I I definitely still need my job. You know, where where does the value accrue? Who who's who's reclaiming the value?
Speaker 1:Because, I mean, we we did talk to a friend who was saying that, like, you know someone who's a, has some sort of desk job, has been effectively automated by Chattypu T, but just spends all day golfing now. And the boss doesn't know that the job's been automated because the boss
Speaker 2:might see a bull market and water cooler talk.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's possible.
Speaker 2:As people automate more and more of their work and just decide to yap.
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of water, let's go over to Augustus DeRico, the rainmaker himself. But first, let me tell you about app love and profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily users and grow your business today. Augustus says, I'm AI pilled after seeing what the new grad philosophy major I hired to fly drones from a mountaintop has automated at Rainmaker with Claude. He's very happy.
Speaker 2:We keep asking Tyler, hey, can you automate this? And he says, sorry, sir. It's it's it's not it's not possible yet. It's not possible yet. I don't I don't believe it.
Speaker 5:I never said that. I'm
Speaker 2:kidding. Boris
Speaker 1:Cherny, who is Runs Claude Run Claude
Speaker 5:Run Claude Claude
Speaker 3:Claude.
Speaker 2:Remember, he popped over to OpenAI for, like, two weeks. Right?
Speaker 5:No. That was Cursor.
Speaker 2:Oh, he popped over to Cursor. Wait.
Speaker 1:So he went to Cursor. He churned and went back to open went back to Anthropic?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Is He's literally churning
Speaker 2:moment last summer.
Speaker 1:Churning his churning in terms of his jobs. Yes. Churning through jobs. Interesting. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Good nominative determinants. Well, how much code did he write to develop Claude co work? He apparently used Claude code entirely and did none of the coding himself. Fantastic. Very, very cool.
Speaker 1:So he said, since we launched Clog Code, we saw people using it for all sorts of non coding work, doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email, canceling subscriptions, recovering wedding photos from a hard drive, monitoring plant growth, controlling your oven. These use cases are diverse and surprising. The reason is that this underlying Claude agent is the best agent, and Opus 4.5 is the best model. Today, we're, so excited to induce introduce Cowork, our first big step towards making Claude code work for all your noncoding work. The product is early and raw, similar to what Claude code felt like when it first launched.
Speaker 1:And that's the big question, Tyler, is Claude code was very bare bones, rough around the edges when it launched. It's now so full functioning that everyone loves it, it's building whole new products. What do they need to add to co work to make it an even better product? I don't know. I I I I feel like in the in the app ecosystem, in the chat app ecosystem, the level of value that comes from product design, UI, UX is still underrated.
Speaker 1:Obviously, no one doubts that the models are great. But if you use the Clawd app and you have it play have you you have it you generate a deep research report or something like that, you click the play button to have it read it to you. You can't fast forward or rewind. You can't change the speed. And you also if you close your phone, it just stops playing.
Speaker 1:So you need to be sort of, like, touching the phone to keep it working, to keep it open while you listen to this report. And that just feels like, oh, that's like not a good user experience. And ChatGPT has solved that and has some more they can do background audio. And these are all sort of simple APIs in iOS, but it takes time and consideration. You have to decide where the buttons go and what they look like, and Cloud Code can do a lot of that.
Speaker 1:But it takes time, and someone has to make the decision.
Speaker 2:My my neighbor, Murph, in the x chat says, I'm interested in Noah No Work. Like, Cloud Code Work.
Speaker 1:Noah, no work? I like that.
Speaker 2:Something there.
Speaker 1:That's great. Anyway, MongoDB, choose a database built with for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build, what's next. NetCap Girl, Sophie, says, okay, Claude. Take this unstructured data and turn it into dashboards that will give executives deeper insights into critical business functions.
Speaker 1:Make no mistakes.
Speaker 2:Jira ticket says all reliable because Sophie posts some version of this.
Speaker 1:Wait, really?
Speaker 2:Once a day.
Speaker 1:No. Once a day?
Speaker 2:Basically. No way. He's gone viral with the same concept.
Speaker 1:Wait. But like, has it always been about Claude?
Speaker 2:No. No. No. Oh, just about It's constantly being repurposed. Playing the hits.
Speaker 2:Gotta play the hits.
Speaker 1:Critical business functions.
Speaker 2:Atlas says, Claude, here is a picture of my crush. Claude, here is her phone number. Make her my GF. Make no mistake.
Speaker 1:That's also his bim playing the hits. Everyone has their role to play in the post singularity hangout sesh. Turbo puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. There's a billion dollars inside Opus 4.5 model weights, and you just need to type the right clogged code prompts to get them out, says Frankie. Very true.
Speaker 1:Lots of opportunity. Actually, knowing how to code is no
Speaker 2:Jawan says, there's no point in learning or doing anything anymore. Just learn English and acquire a good mental model of things and just type, bro. Just type.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll see. I mean, you have to actually be inspired to come up with something that people want, talk to users or something like that. Claude code is so successful, they had to make Claude code not for code instead of just Claude.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's
Speaker 1:Claude code not for code instead of just Claude. It is it is funny that there's these opportunities to, you know, retool the brand around because we're now three levels deep. There's Anthropic, there's Claude, and there's Claude Code and Claude Cowork. And you could have just said Claude Code and Claude Cowork are now just Claude. It's one thing.
Speaker 1:It works in the terminal. It also works on your desktop. It's it's one thing. But it's interesting that they that Anthropic clearly sees some sort of divide between technical and nontechnical users that they that they assume that will persist, at least for a reasonable amount of time. Let's see.
Speaker 1:Introducing Claude Cowork. It's giving an AK 47 to a monkey, which is one of my favorite favorite meme images ever. If you scroll up,
Speaker 2:you'll see The best formats.
Speaker 1:It's one of the best Of
Speaker 2:all time.
Speaker 1:Formats. Yes. You could definitely do some damage on a computer or in a corporate environment you really turn it loose on the network. We will see. I'm sure there will be more total just ridiculous mistakes than malicious intent, but it will be interesting.
Speaker 1:So Deja Vu coder goes on to say, initially, I thought it's computer use, but looks like it's Claude code shaped with more UI UX focused towards nontechnical people, especially those who
Speaker 2:Real quick.
Speaker 1:Have terminal
Speaker 2:Goldrock in the chat is headed to an interview with Goldman Sachs. One, let's give it up for Goldman And two, let's all send some good luck towards our boy.
Speaker 1:Yes. Sholto also posted, of course, because he's involved in this.
Speaker 2:Oh, he is?
Speaker 1:What else is going on? Yes. Oh, Ramp also has a coding agent. They built their own fax. Herbert shared this.
Speaker 1:The tri ramp engineering team built a coding agent last month called inspect, and it's now dominating our internal use cases. I can't tell you how fun it is to continually have my mind blown by our technical folks. Very, very interesting to actually people are very confused by this, but I you know, it's a very special team, very special company. And so it makes sense in this in this particular context to build something special. And they also have agentic spreadsheet product at this point, and they've been having a lot of fun developing new software very quickly all over the place.
Speaker 1:Okay. Before we move on, CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And Rune is back to vague posting.
Speaker 1:He says that the elves have left for Valinor.
Speaker 2:Please sir, can I have a crumb of context? Just a crumb.
Speaker 1:The I require context hat goes on.
Speaker 2:Elves, people We need one. We need a hat here. I require context hat.
Speaker 1:Yes. I I don't know exactly what he's referring to. It is a vague post, but we'll have to dig into it. Maybe we'll have to have him back on the show.
Speaker 2:Well, QT Cash is speculating Mhmm. Saying given that Rune is likely referencing his own Quirin comment talking about the downfall of OpenAI, what does mean for the future? Quirin says, apropos of Suskever now having left OpenAI for good, I've gone back to my thinking about the long term consequences of Altman's coup and something I began to wonder in 2021 when the news about Anthropic broke. What if the elves have left Middle Earth? What if OpenAI has lost its mojo?
Speaker 2:If so, what would that look like and how would we know? What's the rot narrative?
Speaker 1:Interesting. Oh, wait. So Zoomer also says he's talking about the California tax proposal fed shenanigans. You're misreading the tweet. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So the elves could just be our our most loyal
Speaker 2:And this is the power of egg posting.
Speaker 1:Yes. People find interpret it a bunch different ways.
Speaker 2:Sprinkling, you know, some tea leaves.
Speaker 1:People Yes. Find their own I mean, regardless, you know, OpenAI, have they lost their mojo? Certainly not when it comes to vague posting. Tyler, what do you think?
Speaker 5:Okay. Yeah. So so there's like the two different ways to look at it. It's either about California or OpenAI?
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 5:But so I think he probably meant it as like, okay, this is about California, billionaire attacks. But like all the news about that has broken like earlier this week. Mhmm. Like all the everyone's leaving. Right?
Speaker 5:Mhmm. It's it's kind of late to post that. Yeah. But it's a perfect time to post as you kind of see at least the vibes on X, like really hard going against OpenAI pro Sure.
Speaker 2:And profit. For sure.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I think it's like, if someone asked about it, he's like, it's about the billionaire tax. But, you know, subtly
Speaker 1:Maybe. It's actually It could also it could also be so the elves could also be Shalto and Dorakash, and Valinor could be the gym because they did a workout together with Atlas, Creatine Cycle. And they're looking in fighting form. Well, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses.
Speaker 2:And the backbone of TBPN.
Speaker 1:Yes, it
Speaker 2:is. So there's some there's some Oh, do.
Speaker 1:Yes. Let's do it. In the restream waiting room, we have Shervin Peshavar, and we will welcome him to the TBPN UltraDome. Shervin, how are you doing? Good to see you.
Speaker 3:How are you?
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. We're good. Good to see you again. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show. Maybe you could start with just give us the highest level of what's going on in your world, what's going on around the world.
Speaker 1:How are you interpreting the news of the last few weeks? This has been going on for more
Speaker 2:than Yeah. Can't imagine what a roller coaster
Speaker 1:it's been. Are you introducing this at the highest level possible?
Speaker 3:At the highest level possible, this is one of the greatest displays of courage by by humans, young Iranians Mhmm. And Iranians of every age. By the millions are in the street the last couple weeks, you know, demanding their their freedom. They've been living in an open air prison for the last forty seven years. The the work that, you know, the crown prince Reza Pallavi has been doing has succeeded in having millions of people calling out for him to return for for there to be a process towards a democracy, towards a transition process.
Speaker 3:The people are demanding their freedom. And just in the last forty eight hours, the numbers are staggering. The 12,000 people have been killed by the army, the military, the supreme leader Khamenei, who is one of the most evil humans on the planet, has ordered the the the mass killing of people. So you have an open air prison where people have no freedoms, and now you have an extermination camp happening. So you have the horrific videos coming out.
Speaker 3:These people are defenseless. They have nothing to protect themselves except their hopes and dreams and their demands for freedom. They're calling out for Reza Pahlavi to return, and he's the son of the last king. He's a big believer in freedom and democracy and has a plan for reconstruction. And many of us, including myself, have joined, you know, his efforts and his movements.
Speaker 3:And now the difference is you have president Trump, you know, outwardly saying to the Iranian people, we have your back. We're locked and loaded. That gave the people the courage to come out and protest for the last couple weeks. And this is not a protest movement anymore. This is a revolution.
Speaker 3:They want a complete change in the government. When what we're, you know, working on is essentially a process to have an interim government led by Reza Pahlavi, who millions of people are asking for. Mhmm. And the time to act is now. President Trump said that that he has their back, and at any minute, that can be he reaffirmed that today.
Speaker 3:You know, prime minister Netanyahu has said the same things of and that, you know, the connection, by the way, is very biblical between the Jewish people and the Persian people. Cyrus the Great, twenty five hundred years ago, earned a spot in the Bible by freeing the Jews from slavery in Babylon, returning them to their homeland in in Jerusalem and rebuilding their temple. He's celebrated by the Jews. He's celebrated by the the Persians. He's celebrated by the Christians.
Speaker 3:You know, the first declaration of human rights, and then biblical symmetry twenty five hundred years later, it's the Jewish people who were helping the Persian people free themselves from the shackles of slavery from these terrorists that have held them in an open air prison for the last forty seven years.
Speaker 1:This the
Speaker 3:whole world has been reshaped by the huge mistake of 1979 of allowing these extremists, Marxists, Islamists coalition to take over, and we've seen the effect they've had. They funded all of the terrorist organizations throughout The Middle East Mhmm. Including Hamas and Hezbollah. And now we see the invasion of Europe and The UK UK and and, you know, potentially America as well by by extremist ideologies. And that that that that needs to end.
Speaker 3:It needs to end now. You see people that come out of way now.
Speaker 2:What's the next domino to fall? Like, what what what does forward movement look like for the revolution?
Speaker 1:Do you wanna get to, like, tens of millions of protesters? Is it just growing the protest movement? Is there an election process? Is there some specific mechanic that we're waiting to to look for?
Speaker 3:We're beyond the tens of millions. The tens of millions were in the streets in the last couple weeks. It's the biggest biggest numbers ever. The the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has been calling for people to come in the streets at certain times, and they've been listening. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:We have an open channel of communications because of Starlink. These freedom technologies, as I call it, I've been working on it since 2010. Had a dinner with the Secretary of State back then, and I said the last bastion of dictatorship is the router, and we need to be able to use satellites to bring beam Internet communications to people so that dictators and tyrants can't block Internet and So
Speaker 5:what are they doing?
Speaker 2:So so the regime is making efforts to neutralize Starlink. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:That's right. I I actually when I started this project with a band of rebels, we in 2022, we I went to SpaceX Starlink, bought, you know, tons of of of Starlinks, and we figured out three different routes to smuggle it into the country to get it to the protesters. At the time, there were only nine starlings in the country, and now there's thousands. Interesting. And those starlings are the way that these videos that we're all seeing from the protests are are reaching the world.
Speaker 3:Otherwise, now now they're using military jammers to block and jam the Starling connections. And luckily, you know, Elon and his team are some of the smartest humans on the planet, so they've figured out how to how to, you know, Ukraine get around was a great laboratory for that as well. And when the Starlinks went there, it changed the whole dynamic of the war. And I had played a role in making some introductions there. And and now the what we're seeing is is is is the same dynamic in Iran.
Speaker 3:Now there's tens of thousands of Starlinks. They're getting around the jamming. President Trump reached out to Elon. It's in the news yesterday for more help with Starlink. So, you know, this is something as an industry, as Silicon Valley and tech, that we should be very proud of.
Speaker 3:These technologies that we work on are are what I call freedom technologies. And they're they're part of the arsenal of taking down really these criminal and terrorist organizations and tyrants that have taken over sovereign nations with nuclear bombs or attempting to get the nuclear bombs. So, you know, the the the these are the technologies that can be used increasingly so to let humans have the freedoms and the democracies that we're so blessed to have in America. You know, I I escaped Iran during the Iran Iraq war. Had bombs falling me on me as a kid.
Speaker 3:And my father had to escape Iran because he was a journalist, radio television for the the last shah, and he put bravely put the foreign language broadcast to let people know how to get out of the country to save a lot of lives. And the supreme leader then, Khomeini, put him on the execution list. So I didn't see my dad for two years. Bombs were falling every night. And I remember as an eight year old kid, all my drawings were of war, of tanks and guns.
Speaker 3:And I had this fantasy as an eight year old, I was really into remote control planes. And I and I thought, what if I could use these RC planes to bomb Khomeini's house? And now forty seven years later, under the forty seventh president, that possibility is very real.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What is the dynamic between the armed forces that are killing protesters? Like, how do you wake up and put on a uniform and then go gun down your countrymen? Like how is that how is that sustainable? At what point at what point do those people start to turn?
Speaker 3:We've seen this in other revolutions. You know, people you know, you can't you can't kill 50,000,000 people. At some point, people begin to defect. And I was with the crown prince just a couple days ago, and, you know, one of the stories was that there's, you know, thousands of people are calling in sick from the military and the police. That's a form of a labor strike.
Speaker 3:And and, you know, they don't wanna kill innocent people. They've been shipping in mercenaries who don't even speak Farsi or Persian, and they've they've been using mercenaries as well to to to kill innocent people. These are occupiers. They're not Iranian. They're they're they're they're their souls are not Iranian.
Speaker 3:They're Islamic extremists that took over a country. We should have never allowed it to happen. And a a free democratic Iran going back to the roots of who we are would be the greatest peace and economic dividend in the world. We've been working on something called the Cyrus Accords, which we want to basically join the Abraham Accords and have an Iran and an Israel that are at peace, an Iran and The Middle East that are at peace together, a new digital silk road where all these economies are working together, jobs are being created. And some of the greatest engineers in the world are Iranians, as we all know.
Speaker 3:Silicon Valley is full of incredible Iranian American entrepreneurs. The calculations I have, if you add up Uber, Google, eBay, all the different companies that were, you know, either founded or early on built by by Iranian Americans. It's it's in the trillions of dollars of of contributions to the American economy, and that's only worth a million Iranians. Imagine with 92,000,000 brilliant Iranians, what could be unleashed in the world. Instead of exporting terror, we'll export hope and innovation.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. How how have economics played a role or or the the local economy played a role in in this current revolution? I know that's part of what's the frustration with the state of things. Think was the regime offering some effectively stimulus checks or something of that sort? I saw something like that.
Speaker 2:But what's going on that I'm sure that's kind of feeding into the movement?
Speaker 3:Well, the currency has collapsed as of yesterday. The conversion rate to the dollar was zero. The the the currency has collapsed, inflation has gone off, has that gone out of control? That's right.
Speaker 1:I don't think this is the interview for soundboard.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean We're COVID. It's okay. But the the the water system has collapsed. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The the power system has collapsed. This is a perfect storm. Yeah. And we're we're days away. If action is taken and the the head of the snake is cut off, I I I predict there'll be 50,000,000 Iranians in the street celebrating.
Speaker 3:And, you know, Reza Pahlavi returning interim government that would be recognized by by all the governments in the world that are aligned with freedom and democracy and the Iranian people. This is a this is a moral cause of our time. These are the brave hearts of our time. These these young people by the millions are sacrificing their lives for freedom that they might not live to see. Think about that for a second.
Speaker 3:That, you know, that that is the the kind of spirit that started America and started the the western democracies of the world. My great grandfather started the first constitutional revolution from Tabriz in nineteen o six and recruited an American named Morgan Shuster. If you read the book, the strangling of Persia by Morgan Shuster, he's a Midwest American, brilliant man who has a statue in Iran in his honor from back then. And they tried they were inspired by Jeffersonian democracy to to to bring democracy to America. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And that paved the way for all the modern rebuilding the Palawi, the original Palawi, Reza Palawi, and then his his father, Mohammed Reza Palawi, continued. And in night by 1978, Iran had the fourth largest army in the world. It had one of the greatest economies in the world. Everyone were was coming there, Sinatra, and it was a beautiful beautiful place. And, you know, there was a coalition of Islamic extremists in the beginning of the woke Marxist socialist era that we're now seeing in places like New York and Mamdani.
Speaker 3:And they're they're they're they've exported this strategy because it was so successful for them to take a major strategic asset and and and country with major resources like Iran and and own it, and then use that asset those assets that that God blessed Iran with to export that ideology and that terror. So this is the fight of our times. If we defeat the Islamic regime, we will unleash an era of peace and prosperity for the world.
Speaker 1:What's the what's the history of protests in Iran? I've it feels like there's been small moments, 2009 with disputed elections, 2017, 2019, 2022. Feels like every few years, there's a moment that could grow. It hasn't in the past. Walk me through some of the history and then help me understand why this time might be different.
Speaker 3:That's a great question and also a good framework to think about what's happening exactly at this moment. Like, the next forty eight hours, I think, is do or die. Mhmm. Each time those protests got to a moment where it could have turned into a change, significant change in the government, like like 2009, the February '10, you know, the president, at the time, president Obama, made a major major critical mistake, and he didn't back the protesters the way president Trump is backing the protesters. And and when you don't back them, when you don't give them the courage that they will have the support of America and other other democracies in the world that care about freedom and and care about this, you know, destroying terrorism that is a threat to our way of life, it it fizzles out.
Speaker 3:And then they learn, the Islamic regime learns, and they become even more extremists and abusive and, you know, causing, you know, the hangings by the thousands, and imprisonments, and rapes, and to scare people, and terrify people. They keep power through fear. And the thing I learned when I went to try to spread satellite communications in those revolutions in Libya, I went there two weeks before Qaddafi was killed, went to Benghazi, went to Tripoli a month after it was it was freed, went to Tahrir Square. I wrote something called fear is finite and hope is infinite. When the people lose their fear is when freedom movements actually succeed.
Speaker 3:And the and the people, as you can see by the millions in the streets, even with all the killings, they're still coming out. Last night, they all they still came out. Mhmm. They've lost their fear, and that's when these types of tyrants fall.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So if there is support from the air, from the skies, like Starlink, that we we began that project patiently in order so this when this day came, that there would be open communications with the world and coordination, but also support from the sky in terms of taking out some of these tyrants. You know? And we took out the nuclear capability before because that was an existential threat, but but these these evil leaders are are as as bad as a nuclear bomb. They're just a nuclear bomb in a in a human form.
Speaker 1:I feel like a lot of people who grew up and came of age during the war on terror don't have a lot of optimism about regime change. They tend to think that, even if there's someone, some interesting person, a lot of energy to come in and lead, there's like, the infrastructure is so important because a government's just not just one person. There's, you know, ministers and leaders and all sorts of a chain that that needs to form. And if you don't have a full government ready to go, how can you just rip and replace, drop in someone new? Their their minds go to the debaathification in Iraq and all the chaos that happened there.
Speaker 1:How how do you think Americans who've who've, you know, sort of been blackmailed on regime change in The Middle East should be thinking about positive outcome here?
Speaker 3:Well, one experience in Iraq. First of all, Iran is not Iraq. Yeah. It's 92,000,000 people. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You know, 87% are don't even consider themselves religious. Mhmm. You know? And so it's a very different nation that is yearning for freedom, loves America, loves you know, Western culture, wants their freedom. And let us not forget, America saved the world in World War II.
Speaker 3:Then the Marshall Plan rebuilt all of Europe. Look at Japan's success. Mhmm. And and and and so, you know, and then you look at Reagan and tear down this wall and the pressure that he put on in the Soviet Union and then all of the clandestine efforts to that happened to weaken the Soviet Union. Are are are is Germany today a bad place to to to live?
Speaker 3:No. It wasn't until Yeah. You know, potentially extremist Islam invaded invaded Europe. Is Poland a bad place? I was just in Poland multiple times for for my work and my investments.
Speaker 3:It's a thriving economy. Mhmm. So, you know, we have to look at the positive examples of what's possible when you unleash freedom. You have economic boom and you have humans that are thriving and contributing to our world. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming and giving us the update. Best of luck to you and everyone involved and stay safe and best of luck. We'll talk to you soon, Sherwin. Thanks so much. Thank you.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to
Speaker 2:you soon. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We gotta go over to the OpenAI device. There's new leaks, alleged leaks.
Speaker 1:We'll see. It's a new audio wearable meant to replace AirPods, so it aligns with what the information has been leaking. The code name, Sweet Pea. Interesting. It looks like a mega Yeah.
Speaker 1:Metal egg stone with two little capsules behind the ear aiming for a two nanometer chip, maybe a custom chip for phone like actions. Big ambition, 50,000,000 units in year one. That's a lot of devices.
Speaker 2:Yes. Foxconn has been told to prepare for five total devices Mhmm. By 2028. Wow. All not known, but a homestyle device and a pen are still considered.
Speaker 1:I wonder how serious going to Foxconn if you're OpenAI. You go to Foxconn and you say, prepare for five devices. What does that really mean? Does it mean, okay. Help me prototype, do some demo runs, build me one or two, and and maybe we'll do one of the five.
Speaker 1:Maybe we'll do two of the five. Is Foxconn really reorienting everything about this? Are they totally prepared to make five? How serious that serious is that? I don't know.
Speaker 1:All all I know is that it's exciting. I like I like hardware. It's fun. It's a I'm we're seeing it. We're seeing glimpse of this with the kids with with the board and with the the what was what was it called?
Speaker 1:Camera box? No. Sticker box. Yeah. Sticker box.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think, I mean, OpenAI, it sounds like Johnny's team Yeah. Are the ones that are kinda pushing for this form factor according to obviously, this is a rumor. But picking a form factor similar to AirPods, have insane product market fit, which last time I checked, they're like a $20,000,000,000 revenue line for Apple. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Very it could be a standalone business by itself. And again, if you look back to, the infamous interview, with Gerstner, Sam was saying, like, we have a device coming. Yeah. Hey. We have a device coming.
Speaker 2:Don't worry don't worry about
Speaker 1:the That's a lot of revenue, potentially. I mean, I I I don't know. If they sell them what do you think the price point for a for a OpenAI device would be? $300? $1,000?
Speaker 1:$9.99? 3,500? Like, the Apple I
Speaker 2:feel like feel like they have to I have I feel like they have stay in the range of
Speaker 1:Of AirPods.
Speaker 2:Right. AirPods.
Speaker 1:And AirPods are between 100 and $300, basically. So low single digit hundreds. Well, Andrew Curran has a projection for what it'll look like. If they ship this, I think they got an absolute blockbuster on their hands. I would rock that.
Speaker 1:We're already wearing in ear monitors. I don't know if you can see over here.
Speaker 4:Just upgrading This to
Speaker 2:goes so hard.
Speaker 1:It goes
Speaker 2:so The reason I like it is because the the computer part is actually on the back. So it frees you up to just stay
Speaker 11:Totally.
Speaker 1:Locked Super cool. And also, love that there's a display that you can't see, but everyone else can. So everyone else knows, oh, he's doing a deep research report right now. Oh, he's he's locked in.
Speaker 2:Let's check-in on John. John, can you turn around for a second?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1:okay. Three green lights. He's he's printing. He's making money. Alright.
Speaker 2:He says this will be as successful as humane, friend, rabbit, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. Yeah. Let us know in the chat if you're bullish or bearish on the OpenAI device. Lot of risk, but lot of resources, a lot of good people over there. Anyway, whatever whenever they announce it, you know that they're gonna livestream it.
Speaker 1:They're gonna get on Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. In other news, we gotta go to Apple Creator Studio. Tyler, can you break this down for us?
Speaker 1:What are they doing? Who's who are they taking shots at? Apple Creator Studio.
Speaker 5:It it seems they're basically just rolling all of their, like, software. I don't know if there's actually any new software, but they're just, rolling it together into some Okay. Subscription. It's kind of like a Creative Cloud.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:The same Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 5:So because I mean, they already have the the kind of Yeah. Same like, there's Final Cut
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Premiere. So Jaws Jaws here says, meet Apple Creator Studio. It's giving creators every kind of every kind, easy access to powerful intuitive tools for video, music, imaging, and productivity, all supercharged by intelligent features that that speed up and elevate their work. Were they previously selling Final Cut Pro separately? I think they were.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Usually yeah. I remember as a kid paying 2 I was like, well, I'm gonna spend $200 on a piece of software, and that felt like Yeah. $200,000.
Speaker 1:And you got some for free. Like, you get iMovie for free, but then app, but then Final Cut is an upgrade. And I I was actually thinking about purchasing a Mac mini or something, and I was going through the checkout flow. And one of the options that they put right there is, do you wanna buy Final Cut Pro for an extra 200 something bucks? And so it seems like they're maybe doing away with that.
Speaker 1:Let's dig in. Apple has just introduced Apple Creator Studio says Aaron here, analyst at Mac Rumors. Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor and MainStage, plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers come together in a single subscription. They have the games subscription. They have a don't they have a health subscription as well?
Speaker 1:There's music. There's news. Apple has, like, seven different subscriptions now that I think about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can I would love to know what the average iPhone
Speaker 1:Mhmm?
Speaker 2:Customer spends on software monthly, like, and and what what Apple's take is on it? Both both They're printing.
Speaker 1:Their services business is is everything at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess you could just divide services revenue.
Speaker 1:Well, services revenue, they don't really break it all out. Whenever they talk about services, they talk about Apple TV, all the wonderful TV shows and movies that they're producing. But then a lot of the services revenue comes from the App Store, 30% cut. You're laughing. What's funny?
Speaker 2:Dave says, Jordy, you dork. You didn't pirate.
Speaker 4:You didn't pirate it.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I Yeah. I My father wouldn't you wouldn't You wouldn't you wouldn't steal from the grocery store. Don't don't steal from
Speaker 1:You wouldn't pirate
Speaker 2:a car. Big computer, big Apple.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Respect. Respect big tech from day one. Respect cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer.
Speaker 1:Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. I mentioned it earlier, but Dwarkesh Patel and Shalto Douglas did a gym workout with Creatine Cycle. There's a new series. He's gonna hit the gym with AI researchers. This is what the modern media landscape needs for sure.
Speaker 1:I love it. Very, fun. And Dwarkash says, in his defense, Shalto was almost an Olympian. Very, very good.
Speaker 2:Quentyn Atlas looking absolutely diced Diced. In this.
Speaker 1:It's insane. It's insane. Oh, quick shout out to Donnie Honig who says, TVPN is the only show I like hearing the ad reads on. They just make it so fun. Well, you're welcome, Donnie.
Speaker 1:Here's another ad read. Eleven Labs, build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. Thank you
Speaker 2:for this We gotta talk about eleven Labs growth. Maddie highlighted
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Highlighted it yesterday. He said zero to a 100,000,000 ARR was twenty months, a 100 to 210, 200 to 200 to 330 was just five months. So little, quite the acceleration. Really, really good. And he is looking sharp
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Here on Bloomberg.
Speaker 1:And and also, just it's such an interesting story because when this came out, I it was it was the textbook critique of, like, the other labs are gonna steamroll you. Like, they have all the researchers. They have all the compute. They have all the money. Oh, it doesn't matter what you raise.
Speaker 1:They raised a 100 times that. This is a side project. They're gonna be able to whip this up in a cave with scraps. You're gonna get steamrolled, and that just hasn't happened. And I think it goes back to the focus on, you know, pure play focus.
Speaker 1:We've seen Anthropic with the focus on code do really well. This focus on voice and the focus on taste, sort of the mid journey of audio is my new frame of mind here. That it's less of a commodity, more opinionated than I think people realize when it seems like just put the weights in the bag, and you're good to go. Anyway, do we have our next guest here? Let's let's read through this back and forth between Tim Sweeney and Palmer Lucky because they're going back and forth.
Speaker 1:PC Gamer reported that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney argues banning Twitter over its ability to AI generate adult images of minors as just gatekeepers attempting to censor all of their political opponents. Tim Sweeney fired back and said this is a vile lie by PC Gamer. I criticized a government official for pressuring Apple and Google to block a speech app owned by their political opponent, deplatforming 500,000,000 users on the pretense of stopping a small number of users from distributing disgusting content. And Palmer Lucky chimed in and said, PC Gamer loves to make things up about people they don't like. And he's going back to report that PC Gamer put out about Airborne.
Speaker 1:This is an insane headline. Tech billionaires, including Palmer Lucky, set up dumb new bank for those who didn't get burned enough in the twenty twenty two crypto crash. You could write a headline like that. That's insane.
Speaker 2:Why why does PC gamer
Speaker 1:Just so hard. They literally use the word dumb. I I mean, I guess this is opinion piece or something, but it's all about the stablecoins, and they call them a bond villain. Wow. They really don't like him.
Speaker 1:This is crazy. Palmer replied. He said, quote, the point of SVB and thus Erobor is risky bets on fledgling startups that are unlikely to be backed by traditional finance, which has all these pesky rules and regulations. Why are you lying? The point is literally the opposite.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You don't wanna you you don't wanna recreate SVB Well because it didn't turn out.
Speaker 2:We don't wanna keep our next guest waiting.
Speaker 1:Don't. So before we bring them in, let me tell you about vob.co, where d to c brands, b to b start ups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. Well, we have the president and CEO of Booz Allen Hamilton here. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:TV P and L. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 6:Hey, guys. Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Good to see you too. Great to have you. I I love your I I wanna talk about the partnership with Andreessen Horowitz. But first, I want you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey because it's a classic overnight success that we love here on the show. Overnight success.
Speaker 4:I love it. Thank you for
Speaker 6:the special effects. I was wondering if you're gonna use some.
Speaker 5:Of course. I'll use
Speaker 2:a lot. As much as you want.
Speaker 6:So born and raised in Argentina. I came here to go to school. Find my way to Wisconsin Eau Claire, of all places. Loved it there. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I went to grad school, joined Booz Allen. This summer will be thirty five years. I was a summer intern with Booz Allen.
Speaker 7:Wow.
Speaker 6:And it's and here I am, you know. And thought I was gonna be here for two years, but fell in love with the people, with the work, with the culture, and I kept getting challenged. And Yeah. Every time I wanted to leave, they promoted me. So I stayed and
Speaker 2:That's amazing. A virtuous
Speaker 6:cycle It's for been great.
Speaker 1:Were there any breaks? I know that a a lot of my friends who were interns in consulting or banking would leave for a couple years, do an MBA, and then maybe come back. Was there any of that? Or were you just there the whole time?
Speaker 6:No. Wow. Right through. I'm a I'm truly a lifer.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. What what advice are you giving to the next generation of folks who might be interns right now at Booz Allen? Is that opportunity still there? Do you see the the lifer path as being one that you recommend to the new interns?
Speaker 6:100%. 100%. Look, I mean, I I think you first of all, I I tell everybody, you gotta find an organization that where your personal values and what you wanna do matches the organizational values and what they wanna do. And when you find one, grab on with both hands because that alignment is what keeps you going. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And and then I say to people, look, mean, early in my career, wanted to get promoted and this and that and the other thing. And then I at some point, I I said, you know what? I just wanna learn stuff.
Speaker 1:And then they were like, gotta be the CEO.
Speaker 11:What a
Speaker 2:it's kinda
Speaker 6:I started getting promoted faster.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's kinda rough. If you're really good at getting promoted, it's kinda rough to to kinda you you've kinda capped out a little bit here. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:Many not many promotions left.
Speaker 6:I I, you know, I I I come to work because I I love what I do. Mean, and this has been true for the last thirty five years. And, yeah, at the beginning, you know, I I was in a bit of the rat race. I got off of that and literally, I I just said, let's go learn stuff. You know?
Speaker 6:I what do I not know about? Let me try and go learn how to do that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And How how have the last few years
Speaker 6:keeps me here.
Speaker 3:How have
Speaker 1:the last few years of the AI boom been? Has it turned it more into a rat race? Has there been more greenfield projects that have been less of a rat race? How has the how has the AI boom transformed your business? What you're working on?
Speaker 1:How you're spending your time?
Speaker 6:So this has been awesome. Not first of all, you should know I have a background in statistics. So I was, like, doing early work on neural networks. Oh, okay. If I'd been born twenty years later, I would have been a data scientist.
Speaker 6:But we didn't have cool titles like that. Yeah. But I was a big data guy when big data was tiny compared to what it is now.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for big data. And about a dozen years ago
Speaker 1:We love big data here.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You know, about a dozen years ago, I took the strong form view that said, you know, AI really is gonna revolutionize everything. We need to get, as Booz Allen, at the at the leading edge of that. Mhmm. We built essentially the largest we're the largest AI provider to the federal government.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Most of our business is with the government. Mhmm. We've been the largest cyber player Mhmm. In the federal space going back now maybe twenty plus years.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And I I I've always thought about it as AI and. Right? It's it's intersection of AI and cyber, AI and space, AI and autonomy. And that that's what we've been trying to build. And and, you know, Booz Allen really, people think of us as a consulting firm because we we were one once.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. That's the company that I joined.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:But if you look at us now, our business is we're in the business of taking leading edge technology and bringing it to government missions. Mhmm. Everything from military missions to space to payment systems to public health. Mhmm. We're tech into all of that, which is why we build these amazing partnerships.
Speaker 6:How You know, because
Speaker 1:Yeah. Has the last year changed your relationship with the government that that, you know, if you start 2025, I think about Doge and a bunch of political energy around reducing cost and maybe reducing budgets and doing more with less, which, of course, software and technology can help with. At the same time, saw a headline that the President Trump thinks the defense budgets to be $1,500,000,000,000 and that feels like, expand and we're in a different mode. So has that been whiplash or have how have you processed setting up your business to deliver what you need to to the government across those sorts of narrative arcs that have, rolled out over the last, you know, twelve months?
Speaker 6:So if you think about our business, there's two pieces to it. There's work that we do for for national security. Yeah. That's about three quarters of our business. Wow.
Speaker 6:And then there's work that we do for more of the civilian agencies.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Think about things like the VA Mhmm. Human Health Services
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Treasury, IRS, those kinds of agencies.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:The administration has been pretty consistent. On on on the more of the civilian side, they've been looking very hard for ways to reduce cost. Mhmm. On the on the national security side, they've been looking to reprogram against top priorities. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And so this idea that that we're going to spend more on defense going forward, if if you know, that obviously needs to be approved by congress and all of that. But the president has been pretty consistent about wanting to rebuild the military Yeah. Ensure that that our military continues to be the preeminent one in the world. And and we view bringing technology into that and working with the commercial technology providers to make their technology useful Mhmm. Into those missions, which is not a straight translation by any means, as a big part of what we do.
Speaker 6:So we develop tech that sits on top or together with their tech. And together, we build things that neither one of us could do.
Speaker 1:So what does that mean for hiring? I imagine that you're you're partnering with the foundation lab companies, not necessarily trying to go up against Mark Zuckerberg and pay a billion dollars for some fancy AI researcher. Let Google DeepMind, let OpenAI, let Anthropic and other labs build the foundation models, and then you can go and implement them. So what type of person is really excelling? How technical are they?
Speaker 1:Are you hiring computer scientists, MBAs, both? Who's thriving?
Speaker 6:We're hiring largely think of it as AI researchers. Sure. We have a very large quantum
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:Interesting. Team where we hire astrophysicists.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 6:You know, and and and and so we're we're really at the leading edge of these technologies working side by side Yeah. With with all of our partners. I I joke about the fact that I knew Jensen back when he was only worth a couple billion
Speaker 2:dollars. And
Speaker 6:he and our companies have been working together on some of these things since, like, 2017. So we we've been at this for a while. I mean, you talk about Mark and and Meta. Yeah. We took LAMA
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 6:And working with them, translated into something that could be ported onto the International Space Station.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:Alright. So it became Space Llama, which is it made for some pretty cool memes.
Speaker 4:There it was.
Speaker 6:But now on the on the research side of the International Space Station, there is a a for the first time, a large language model there. Mhmm. So that instead of going through all of these paper manuals, every time they need to fix something, they can actually do natural language queries and and and do all of that. So that's the type of work that we're doing. If you think about it, most commercial tech
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Is oriented towards the idea that you're gonna be in a data center that has perfect access to energy, perfect access to fiber.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:You know, it's twenty four seven uptime. When you start dealing with some of the missions that we support
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You're at the edge, you're in the desert, you're in space, you're underwater, you have no connectivity, form factor matters, power matters. And we need to take the all of these amazing technology and these trillions of dollars in investment Mhmm. And make it useful in those settings. And for that, we build additional tech that is proprietary to us that that combined with theirs really does wonderful things. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And we started working with some of the companies that are a 16 c Yeah. Portcos and discover that, you know, there's a lot we were doing there for the with the companies that were already oriented towards our market. Mhmm. But I know you had been on the show Yeah. On on Friday.
Speaker 6:You know, they have 1,100 companies or more in their portfolio. The vast majority of them are not thinking about these missions, but they're building many are building technologies that are highly applicable.
Speaker 1:Sure. Okay.
Speaker 6:So So if we grab their tech and our tech and put it together in a different way Yeah. We expand markets, create differentiation. Yeah. It's all sorts of good stuff that happens.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You mentioned you knew you knew Jensen when he was just worth a few billion dollars. When did you meet the Andreessen team? How long has this partnership been in the works? And then I'd love to know more about the nature of the exclusivity of the partnership, how that all takes shape, and anything else you can tell us about it.
Speaker 6:Sure. So we've been working with with companies that are in their portfolio for years without actually engaging at the you know, with H16Z So with Alan and Databricks, for example, have done a number of things together in the Department of Defense. Mhmm. We we do things with Andoril. We, you know, we we have a Yep.
Speaker 6:Partnership with Shield AI
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:That makes a ton of sense because we're building our tech and our cybersecurity tech on top of Hivemind Mhmm. Which is their core autonomy product. And then we about a year plus ago Mhmm. I started talking to to Ben and to Mark. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And we started shaping this idea that there's more we could do Mhmm. Together at their level that that, you know, we could begin to think about not just the companies that are obviously playing in this market, but the the broader Mhmm. Ecosystem and thinking about, okay, how we create a way to even do that? What's that discovery process look like? How do we create opportunities?
Speaker 6:How do we vet them? How do we manage our techs so that, you know and and that's been the the over the course of the last year, we've done a bunch of stuff that has gotten us all super excited leading up to this announcement on Monday.
Speaker 2:What are some of the earliest stage companies that would qualify for this program? Are you working with Series A stage?
Speaker 1:They accelerator. So they have these companies that come in with just one or two cofounders and they get a $100,000 check. And then you have a Databricks, which is a $100,000,000,000 business. How do you size the partnerships?
Speaker 6:So so we're working you know, we're we're almost working problem back. So what is the problem we're trying to solve and who has a piece of this puzzle? So Sure. We even have our own little corporate VC
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:Fund and there's companies in there. Seek is a great quantum company. Albedo is is doing very low Earth orbit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love Albedo.
Speaker 6:Satellites. Let's see. Scout AI Sure. Is doing autonomy on the ground. Sure.
Speaker 6:Firestorm is doing, essentially three d printed drones. Oh. And and we think about, okay. So what's what is Firestone doing? What's Shield doing?
Speaker 6:What are we doing? If we bring all of this together, can we solve a unique problem that that we know exists that doesn't have a solution today? Mhmm. So so, you know, we're we're not so interested in the size of the company so much as we're interested in problem back, what can we solve and how do we scale it. So we're working with Mistral, for example Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Which is in their portfolio on on NATO type problems and and European ally problems. As you know, Europe is is beginning to spend their fair share on on the defend on their defense budgets. Well, they got a series of issues that we can tackle together that weren't on anybody's radar screen. So so that's the kind of stuff that frankly super excites me. And I think this is where there's a ton of energy and and and some really cool stuff coming along.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 2:No. Very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Come talk with us. Congratulations on the partnership, and we're excited to to hear more. I'm sure a bunch of portfolio founders will be on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Join us again as you guys have more announcements.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'd love to
Speaker 6:keep Absolutely. Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of
Speaker 2:your day.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom card. Parker Conrad, the founder and CEO of Rippling chimed in on the one time California billionaire tax.
Speaker 1:He says leave before the series b. I don't think of Parker as outspoken against the the the California Democrats very often, but he's quoting Jason Lemkin here who has more context
Speaker 7:Yes.
Speaker 2:I can read through this. So Jason says, my take on California's one time billionaire tax, it's much worse than it looks. Will it pass? Yes. Likely.
Speaker 2:It only needs 50% plus one voter approval. CEI, you, and CTA have done this before. Prop 55 won 63% in 2016. Will it get tied up in litigation? Almost certainly retroactive wealth tax on a tax type California has never had equals due process challenges.
Speaker 2:Billionaires have the legal budgets for years of fights. But it's clearly only the start that the goal is an annual tax, not one time. And the target is 25 to $50,000,000 net worth. Folks, including illiquid holdings Yeah. I e early stage founders raising a series b.
Speaker 2:And the one time framing is strategic. Same coalition is already has a b two five nine written an annual 1% wealth tax at a 50 mill at a greater than $50,000,000 threshold with plans to go to 25,000,000. It's been introduced three years running. The one time tax removes the constitutional barrier. Once that's gone, the annual version becomes a much easier ballot measure.
Speaker 2:California Policy Center said if SEIU hopes to keep Medi Cal spending growing, it may need to place repeated wealth taxes on the ballot, potentially lowering threshold as billionaires flee. The risk for founders at 1,000,000,000, you're taxing 200 people at 50,000,000, you're taxing 23,000 households, including the most successful founders on paper before any liquidity event. So imagine you raise a series b, suddenly you have $50,000,000 of paper gains. And suddenly, the government's coming over and saying, yeah, we need you to come up with a piece of that or get on a payment plan. And so then you're effectively just building up a debt to the California government that, as of right now, seems like it just doesn't go away.
Speaker 2:Even if your company fails, it's like you owe that to the state. So what'll happen here is people might if this goes through as is, people will start companies like Parker's saying, they'll start the company and maybe they raise like a pre seed round, seed round, something like that, and then they'll be like, Okay, literally have to move the company. Or maybe they won't even start it in California in the first place. And Newsom has come out in the last twenty four hours and is against the tax.
Speaker 4:Against the tax.
Speaker 2:So he is on siding with the tech billionaires.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. But when I see names like Parker Conrad, Vinod Khosla, like, don't think of these as like the tech right. I just think of these as like tech people. And so to see them pushing back against this is it's less of a political issue and more and more more of a practical issue about where companies will be led from.
Speaker 1:I saw a different angle that potentially the supervoting, like control could be used to determine how much you have to pay. And so you can have a founder who has super voting shares. They have 90% of the voting shares, but Yes. They take on
Speaker 2:a 100 lot of million dollar company. Yeah. The bill as the the the way it's written today, they'd be taxed as if they have a $90,000,000 position in the company
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 2:Which is just insane. They might have a by that point, they might have a 25%. Exactly. They might have less depending if
Speaker 1:they're Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, multiple founders. So Pirate Wires has a great piece on this. Encourage everybody to read it. California's tech industry kill switch from Mike Solana.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He says it's not a tax on wealth. The union's ballot prop is designed to target the very concept of founder controlled companies. Yeah. And it will force the technology industry out of the state.
Speaker 1:It'd be very, very weird to see a situation where a company gets started. They still go to San Francisco because that's a fun place to be. That's an exciting place to be. But then slowly, the executive ranks are just relocating to Incline Village or Las Vegas or Texas. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which
Speaker 2:Jensen Jensen was like, yeah. Don't I don't It's mind like, were you just trying to earn points, right, with the with the general population? Like at what point like so many of his employees would be subject to this? Right?
Speaker 1:At a certain point, yes. And I don't know. It could be very complicated. It certainly seems like a like a very yeah. It's just very, very complicated position.
Speaker 1:Austin Allroad says, I wonder how many founders in California know that if you are making 250 k a year and move to Texas or Florida, you pay $2,500 a month less in taxes. Switching state of residence will save enough to cover rent. And, of course, Austin, I believe he doesn't he believe doesn't he live in Utah? I I don't think he lives in California, although he is part of the Silicon Valley community. And Newsome did chime in.
Speaker 1:He vows to stop the tax. Where are the prediction markets on the tax? Will this happen? While we look that up, let's pull up Gary Tan. He says it's time for Silicon Valley to actually get involved and organize in California when financially tough times are ahead for California.
Speaker 1:California's government will almost certainly try to loot Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley will flee. Four, this will create a severe loss for the Bay Area in California and for The United States. Five, the only way out is for successful technologists to run and win for office at every level in the '2 2026 midterm elections, especially for governor. So
Speaker 2:Quotes from Newsom. Newsom says, this will be defeated. There's no question in my mind. I'll do what I have to do to protect the state.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Well The governor has long opposed the wealth tax because of concerns it would
Speaker 1:All of that is very, very complicated, but there's really good news because now you can book a hotel on the moon. A new startup backed by NVIDIA NY Combinator is planning to develop the first hotel on the moon by 2032. I'm going. I'm going. It's starting at $416,000 per night.
Speaker 1:We'll see where that actually lands. You can book on their website. But we have the perfect guest discuss because we have Glenn Fogel, the president and CEO of booking.com. Hopefully, we'll be able to book a hotel on the moon. We can ask him about it.
Speaker 1:He's in the restroom waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVPN UltraDome. Glenn, how are you doing? What's happening?
Speaker 4:I'm doing well and that's so exciting to hear. Road Tails on the Moon.
Speaker 2:I know. I love it. The TAM expander. You guys were looking for more for more assets to bring on the platform. Why not go interplanetary?
Speaker 2:This thing is quite a lot of renders. So, you know, fingers crossed they can turn it into reality.
Speaker 4:But it's But but but here's the thing. Do you remember the TV series? Oh, it was like think it was oh god. Was it AMC? It was Mad Men?
Speaker 4:Do you remember that?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Mad Men. Alright. There was an episode where the person who was supposed to be the head of Hilton, Conrad Hilton. Yeah. And he'd hired he'd hired the guy and he wanted to have the ad be about putting a hotel on the moon.
Speaker 2:Ahead of ahead of their time.
Speaker 4:Ahead
Speaker 1:of They their
Speaker 2:this company should should go back and reference it. I've I'm sure there's I'm sure there's some great copy buried in there. But fantastic to have you on the show. Would love would love just an introduction on yourself and the journey on on how you got
Speaker 4:Well, I'm the CEO of Booking Holdings and booking.com, which is the largest subsidiary of Booking Holdings. We have a number of different companies that I think many of your, well, watchers would know. Things like not just booking.com, but OpenTable, for example
Speaker 7:Yep.
Speaker 4:Or Kayak, or Priceline. And people who are out in Asia certainly have heard of Agoda and a number of other, companies as well. And we do travel. OpenTable, of course, doing restaurant reservations, but we've been around for a long time. Priceline.com was the first one in in The States, and that went public in 1999.
Speaker 4:And I've been at the company since almost the start. I joined in 2000, so been around for a while.
Speaker 2:Where did where were you before before you joined?
Speaker 4:Before I joined in 2000, I was a I was a head trader for a guy named Barton Biggs, who was kind of a legend on Wall Street and Morgan Stanley Asset Management. And, I left to join Priceline during that first Internet boom period, and I joined a week before the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000, thereby proving a couple things. One, I absolutely should have left my job as trader because I just would done what's known as top ticking a trade.
Speaker 2:An amazing amazing time to leave, but then you're sitting there being like, is am I gonna am I gonna have a job? Totally. Well, what yeah. What matters is you you you saw it through. Did you ever was there any there ever a point that you or or any of your peers were like, okay.
Speaker 2:Maybe the Internet is just over or was it like, hey. We just we really we it's just like we needed to just really hunker down and we got ahead of our skis and, this is all inevitable, but, it's just not, you know, like most things, it's not always up into the right, forever.
Speaker 4:Well, yeah. And a couple of things. First of all, certainly, our stock went down. I'm gonna do the reverse split number because it went it went to a under a dollar, but stay listed. We haven't actually do reverse split.
Speaker 4:So so we'll call it what? At that time, as you
Speaker 1:can see on the
Speaker 4:chart, it's $6 because we get it back up. So even my mother at the time thought, like, gee, are are do you still have a job? Is the company got bankrupt yet or not? Mhmm. And I'd left a pretty good job to do this.
Speaker 4:But here's the thing. A long time ago, my career, I started out when I came out of college, and this is in the eighties. My first job is I was an IT guy, again, at Morgan Stanley, different time period. I was in their back office doing coding for doing a whole bunch of real exciting things. One of the exciting things was things that we're doing in terms of algorithmic trading.
Speaker 4:Now that was back in the day. We weren't calling it AI. Know that's exactly what it was. You know, go from the mid eighties to joining in 2000. I really believed in the future of using technology to make life so much better in so many different ways.
Speaker 4:Priceline at the time was using technology to make it cheaper and easier to travel. So I I never doubted the concept that technology is the it's always been the future. I mean, go back couple hundred years, go back to the industrial revolution. Technology is a wonderful thing for improving the human condition. So I would do not doubt that.
Speaker 4:I I was a little concerned about our cash position. Everybody should always speak. But since I was there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Nevertheless, fate. How have you
Speaker 1:been processing all of the agentic commerce news? We had Harley from Shopify in the store talk on the show yesterday talking about what Google's doing. Obviously, ChatGPT is interested in agentic commerce being able to, you know, complete transactions in the LLMs, in the chatbots, in the apps. How are you thinking about your strategy in a world where people want to purchase things through text and chat?
Speaker 4:Well, look. People always want things to be easier. And agentic commerce as a concept is fantastic, and we are doing a lot of work with all the frontier players absolutely to be very hand in glove working together to come up with solutions using agentic ways so people can do things easier, faster, better, etcetera, etcetera. That being said, it's gonna take some time for things that are very complex like a lot of travel. Now I'm not doubting that.
Speaker 4:We're gonna be doing a lot of agentic travel transactions. Absolutely. It's just not gonna be tomorrow. I'm really glad with some of the deals we've already done with all the players. There's not a single one that we haven't either set a deal with done a deal with, working with, making progress with, etcetera.
Speaker 4:But even more so is what we're gonna do internally, what we're building ourselves. We have thousand engineers. You know, one thing I don't know if you're watchers or if you watch your show, really understand the size of our company. You know, we're a 100 and approximately a 170, 175,000,000,000 market cap company.
Speaker 2:Hit the gong, John. We got a gong here. We'd love to we'd love to hit it on your behalf.
Speaker 4:But but what's even better is that, you know, that's twice as big as the next biggest player in travel. I'm not talking, you know, distribution of travel. I'm talking all travel. Like, number two would maybe it's Marriott today.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 4:Maybe I and then after that, it falls off pretty darn the biggest airline in the world is about a third of our market cap.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 4:I mean, Expedia's a fifth. Yeah. I mean, so we have the size. We've got the scale to do the work to come up with these wonderful things that are gonna be coming down the pike.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yep. So, obviously, it feels like it's advantageous to have as much experience as you have at the company for another tech transition. How are you thinking? We were talking to Harley about this.
Speaker 1:Like, is this the is this similar to the mobile moment or social moment? Obviously, with Shopify, they think a lot about brands, which were very much transformed by influencers showing off some leggings or some product that you wanna buy, and so you go right there. And there was a debate. Will it would that transaction happen on Instagram or on Facebook? It ultimately wound up happening on Shopify, but the ads platform was very valuable, and there was integration there.
Speaker 1:How are you tracking previous lessons from previous technology shifts in purchasing behavior to kind of prepare for the the agentic transition if it happens this year or next year or whenever it happens?
Speaker 4:Yeah. And and because it's so hard to predict the future as we all know is making sure you're covering all the options, trying to balance the amount of resources you're putting in, the things that you're building now versus making sure you continue to improve what you currently have going on that's producing the cash. I mean, that's the thing is that it's always difficult when you have an ongoing entity like ours that's doing very well and our investors like seeing the cash flow that we produce. They like the growth that we're showing right now. And they are always cautious as investors should be is where are you putting that, you know, cash that you're producing?
Speaker 4:Is it gonna be put into things that are not gonna produce future increased cash? Is it going to be wasted or not? And I believe we got the right balance set up. We've got the right people. I but in terms of people wanna know, I I'm asked this all the time.
Speaker 4:It's two questions. So it'd be, are you gonna be disintermediated by something new, something different? And b, are you growing fast enough right now to prevent that? So I think we have it going well right now. I like the progress that we're making.
Speaker 4:I like the numbers we're showing off, and I like the new products we have coming out. So we'll see. But I look. Nobody nobody has a guarantee. You have to every single day be working incredibly hard to keep up because the competition is very, very stiff.
Speaker 1:How difficult is it to for an AI to act as a travel agent?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's what I was gonna ask.
Speaker 1:We we we we've had this question where the AI model seems so powerful. They can build whole websites. They can write more complex code than I could write in a month. They can do it in just an hour. And yet, I actually can't just say, hey, I need to get to New York.
Speaker 1:Book me a flight. Because I wind up having all these weird preferences. I don't wanna lay over. I'm okay flying early, but I don't really wanna fly late.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When people talk, every every lab wants to build the best, you know, super assistant. And when I think about the moments where, like, a real EA in my life has delivered the most value, it's when I'm like, okay, this meeting's running late. I'm gonna miss my flight. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I need a rear, you know, and I'm just firing off a text being like, you know, I need to switch the car to pick me up like in an extra hour miss my flight. Find me the best flight. I don't wanna lay over. Like, I wanna lay flat. Like, all all these details that today that still takes, you know, that still takes real time.
Speaker 2:And so I'm curious for you, where do these experience Where do you see these experiences actually sitting? Is it is it in, you know, ChatGPT or Gemini or it's it's gonna be sitting in Siri? Yep. Or will it be sitting on booking.com and you guys wanna own that experience or both?
Speaker 4:Right. Or will it be in many of the places you just mentioned? Because for example, right now, let's let's look at what we have right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:We have some
Speaker 4:we have 60 approximately 65% of the people who come to our site to buy something or do something or to actually do that. They are coming to us direct. Now I'm doing that number. I'm not including our b to b business on the side there. But 65% of the people are coming in directly to our site.
Speaker 4:There's a loyalty thing. Why? Now why? Because it's easier. Because we know who they are.
Speaker 4:We already have established certain things that they like and are able to provide them with that. That's great. The thing in the future though, with the ability of memory of LLMs to remember what your preferences are over time, that is obviously a powerful thing. Now we are doing that within ourselves, creating our own ability to make sure. Your example, I want a flatbed.
Speaker 4:I only like to take the flight at night. All sorts of those things. Those are the things that we are putting in because what we really want is using technology to replace what you just said, that executive assistant who knows everything about you, who loves to make sure they do exactly what you want, and you don't have to ask him or her how to do They know how to do it. That's what we are building, which even more so. Because your EA should know, but may not know, for example, that, oh, I forgot I gotta stop by and buy a present because I'm going to visit my, you know, friend in France.
Speaker 4:May not know that, but we wanna have it so much so that we know so much about you. We know that. And not only we know that, we know it's gonna take a ten minute delay and, oops, you may not make that flight because of the delay on the highway. So we're gonna switch all this stuff around for you, suggest should we do this because it looks like you're not gonna make it. So then you can get on a flight.
Speaker 4:You don't miss the flight. And then because it's a new flight, we automatically are changing the car pickup that you have. And we're changing because now your dinner reservation is gonna be later. We're changing that too. And if there is no availability at that restaurant because we have open table, we're looking for a restaurant that's very similar to it right near it, and we're gonna put a new reservation for you and your friend there.
Speaker 4:And in addition, because we know you're gonna be incredibly tired, and you're gonna be all upset, what we're gonna do is get you a special favor from the hotel. So when you show up at the hotel, you got your favorite, bottle of wine. And all these things can be done. The technology is there. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:We just have to stitch it together. That's the hard part.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:How are you how are you processing the rise of voice agents? I get really excited about, you know, there's so many moments still even with the Internet where you if you're traveling, you end up having to like Call. Call a hotel or talk to somebody in person. Never really wanna do that. Right?
Speaker 2:It's just like give me the information, etcetera. Mhmm. But it feels like we're moving to a world where eventually it could just be agent to agent directly, no voice. But feels like we're gonna there's some middle ground where you have agent to human or voice agent to voice agent, and they're just having a conversation.
Speaker 1:But voice agent to, like, legacy phone tree, which is all recordings, but it's
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:System. And just having an agent be able to run through that speeds things up.
Speaker 4:Well, one of the wonderful things about right now that's already we're already doing, and other people are doing it too, is using GenAI to really speed up and make that customer service issue go away. Mhmm. So that's something that's really powerful, and it is the idea that you don't wanna spend time talking to somebody. You certainly don't wanna be put on hold. You just wanna solve the problem.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And what what we've been able to do with some of our vendors, some the things we do internally is create a much better thing. When you need customer service, you can solve it instantly almost. That's great creates a greater loyalty because I like using booking.com because I don't have to wait. It fixes it right away.
Speaker 4:That is a really powerful thing. But I agree with you. Going down it's gonna be a commodity. Everybody's gonna be doing that. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What's the key to a great celebrity partnership? Hiring spokesman.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The great thing is that it ends up with more business than what you paid them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There we go.
Speaker 1:What are the keys to success? What would you recommend? We've been we noticed we were watching the Xbox launch at CES, and Bill Gates is standing on stage, and he's next to Dwayne The Rock Johnson. He refers to him just as Rock. It's very funny.
Speaker 1:It's awkward in funny ways, but it's cool. It's interesting. Obviously, everyone knows the price line negotiator. But what's the key to success? What would you recommend?
Speaker 1:When is the right time to bring in a celebrity? Like, do you have a mental model for this, or have you just delegated it to someone else on your team? Like, how do you
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. Yeah. That that's one of the important things is knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know and making sure that the person you're spending a lot of money be the chief marketing officer that that person knows. Yeah. If they don't, you have to get a different one.
Speaker 4:And that's why you're paying the money to make businesses. But here's the truth is, this is an old saying. It's uncertain who really said it first. That half of your brand marketing is wasted. You just don't know which half.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's the problem. And that's the thing. And and by the way, I love I love it when you hit it and it goes out of the park, goes viral like you just mentioned. I know you you mentioned that one before about Bill and The Rock. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But here's the thing is, you you can't predict those things. Sometimes you just hit that lightning in a bottle. A lot of the time, it's just wasted money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What's your workout routine? You're looking absolutely jacked, I gotta ask.
Speaker 4:Well, I'll be perfectly honest with you. I do work out every day. If I'm I'm home and I travel, half the time, I'm away from my home. And, you know, there are a lot of gyms in Europe that don't have a lot of hotels that don't have gyms.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So you're doing it in the hotel room, you know, small hotel room and stuff. I always bring some bands so I can get something done.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 7:There you But
Speaker 4:I tell you, it's so important because, one of the things when you're you're doing all these every single person right now in the tech world, we're all working incredibly hard. Mhmm. And to stay healthy, it's really important to work out.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What do you have you ever we we've joked on the show before. We we get frustrated frustrated at at gyms gyms having having a a a dumbbell weight limit.
Speaker 1:It's We think it's because of the insurance, but most gyms, the the weights, the dumbbells start up stop at 40 pounds, 50 pounds. They don't want
Speaker 2:think that could be a bookingbooking.com feature is like I want hotels.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So first of all, you guys are big guys. Okay? Yeah. Well, yeah.
Speaker 4:Let's face it. You know, six eight and six one. I mean, you're tall people. You're big people. Okay?
Speaker 4:Normal sized people don't worry about this quite as much. Okay? I know.
Speaker 1:But you
Speaker 2:have a small but but, you know, very passionate
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Audience.
Speaker 4:You I you know the answer to this, by the way. It's not the amount of weight. You can do more reps. You get the same impact.
Speaker 2:Just There
Speaker 4:you go. Less weight, more more reps should be fine.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you just wanna stack a couple 40 fives on the bar and move a big number.
Speaker 2:How are
Speaker 4:you I
Speaker 1:can help.
Speaker 4:No. No. Wait. Wait. This is important, guys.
Speaker 4:You guys are young guys. You know, young thirties, late twenties. You can do that stuff. I'm 63 years old.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 4:Well, if you so
Speaker 2:that's why that's why I asked.
Speaker 1:That's why I asked. What recommendations? What's on the shelf behind you? What would you give to somebody, the next generation? What do you think is worth reading?
Speaker 4:Oh, god. There's so many things. There's not enough time to read everything. I'm giving some instead of reading it. Here's here's a piece of advice I give all the time.
Speaker 4:And I I was I was I was actually in a classroom situation yesterday, guest guest lecturing something. And what I really like to get across is the idea of prioritization and self discipline. Mhmm. You know, there's a book out. You don't have to read it.
Speaker 4:It's four thousand it's called four thousand weeks. That's kinda like the average time you have a lifetime.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 4:Okay? You get the choice how you wanna spend it, a lot of that. Make sure it's on the things that matter and things that are important to you. And I see too many people wasting their time. I mean, I don't wanna I don't wanna denigrate social media or any any of my partners or anything.
Speaker 4:But I'll tell you, a of people are wasting a lot of their time doing stuff that it has no impact in their life. And later on, they may regret not having used that time more efficiently and more effectively.
Speaker 1:That's possible. That's one outcome. But it is also possible that I'm on my deathbed being like, wish I watched a few more I Instagram wish I scrolled TikTok just for a couple more minutes.
Speaker 2:No. Think I think I I think that the the what what you're saying, there's a very real scenario in the future where people, you know, are are towards the end of their life and they're just looking at their lifetime screen time on their iPhone just saying like, don't do this. Yeah. Don't do this. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I have one more one more more serious question. How are you guys thinking about the live events category broadly? There's a lot of people talking about excited about live events specifically because they feel
Speaker 1:Because of that time. Like,
Speaker 2:the from AI. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. Look. Obviously, there's a lot of truth to that. The people really are really enjoying those live event things.
Speaker 4:Now for us in the travel business, there was a lot of talk when you have the Taylor Swift effect it was called. Where she'd be going doing a concert, and there would be an increase in travel to that location, and then all the local economy would build up a little bit on that. But for us that are because we're so global, and we are so all that's doing is transferring what would be the normal amount of travel to that location. For us, we're indifferent. So for example, you know, we have this whole thing about World Cup and, you know, it's a partnership between The US and Canada and Mexico and so and a lot of people are really hoping it's gonna build some of the people coming to The US for travel, and how much is that gonna help our business.
Speaker 4:And to be perfectly honest with you, I don't think it's gonna make that much of a difference because all it means that the people who do choose to come to watch World Cup in the state come to The States for that, that's a trip they were gonna take anyway. They haven't come to The States. We would've gotten that business anyway. Now it's good for the cities that have the actual games.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:They'll get the benefit. But us as a company, I don't think this made a huge difference.
Speaker 2:One of the challenges of scale. You're like, we are the market. We're just shifting pieces around.
Speaker 1:I have one last question.
Speaker 4:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll let you go. You travel a lot. You run a travel company. What's the secret to avoiding jet lag?
Speaker 4:Just keep doing it. And then you'll never you'll be in normal state all the time. You're going to
Speaker 6:sleep me
Speaker 2:off stop moving.
Speaker 1:This is good.
Speaker 4:I like that. Just don't just don't stop.
Speaker 1:That's essentially just man up. Just suck it up and just disregard it. Just ignore it. I love that. That's the best advice I've heard.
Speaker 1:People will tell you all sorts of take your shoes off, do this, do that. I like that one. That's great.
Speaker 4:No. No. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Okay?
Speaker 4:And I've never felt jet lagged per se. Mean,
Speaker 1:it's This like breaking. We need to put this on a headline. Breaking.
Speaker 4:It doesn't exist. It's just a figment
Speaker 2:of your figment of your imagination. Yeah.
Speaker 4:No. It's not the imagination. It's you're going from JFK to Amsterdam. Okay? It's six and a half hour flight.
Speaker 4:You're gonna best because you gotta wait to take all the and then they wake you up when you're landing. Yeah. Maybe you'll get four hours good. Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You're gonna be tired. It's not jet lag. You got four hours sleep. That's why you're tired.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Yeah. Yep. There we go. Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Well, I hope hopefully, the rockets can get fast enough that, when we're booking Yeah. We're booking a hotel on the moon on booking.com. Yeah. We it'll just be you'll see like we just, teleported.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you
Speaker 2:so much. Again soon. Really enjoyed it. Time.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Bye bye. Do you wanna change the world? Go to the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:And raise capital.
Speaker 1:Raise capital at the New
Speaker 2:York Stock Exchange. Just do it. No more excuses.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's our number one piece of advice this year to to anyone who asked. What what advice would you
Speaker 4:give me?
Speaker 2:That's gonna be our advice for our
Speaker 1:next Just raise money up
Speaker 2:a guest. Hey. Next round, JD. Do a New York Stock Exchange. Just just raise capital.
Speaker 2:Do a little road show.
Speaker 1:Just just do it. Stop making excuses. Yep. Really stop making excuses.
Speaker 2:JD Ross. JD here
Speaker 1:with coverage. An absolute dog. An absolute dog. And we got some breaking news from him. JD, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:Good to
Speaker 4:see you.
Speaker 2:He's back.
Speaker 7:Good to see you guys.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 7:Has energy for 60 whatever.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. That's why I was like, need to know this guy's workout routine. Everything. He's like, jet lag doesn't exist.
Speaker 7:He doesn't work out right working out.
Speaker 1:There's a couple of these corporate athletes. Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take Two, maker of GTA, is, absolutely diced. He's in his sixties. He's on the cover of men's fitness every once in a while. There's a couple people that figure out how to just keep that motor going.
Speaker 1:I'm a big believer in the sixty five to ninety five era of a business person's career. Warren Buffett testosterone.
Speaker 2:Had a Everything everything before that was a warm up.
Speaker 1:Everything else is a warm up. 65 is where the real game starts. The real compounding begins. But you're much younger than 65, but you have some breaking news for us. Give it to us.
Speaker 7:I just It's all peptides.
Speaker 4:You wouldn't know.
Speaker 1:Okay. I guess that's the news. But, no, tell us about the business. Tell us what's going on in your world.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So we are arguably in the most boring of the enterprise businesses you could possibly be in.
Speaker 5:I think That's not boring
Speaker 2:to us.
Speaker 4:It's not boring to
Speaker 1:us. That's why we're here every day. That's why we have a gong, and I know we're gonna ring it.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So we run insure we're we're modernizing insurance brokerage. So, basically, we replace the traditional insurance broker Yeah. With a ramp for risk management. Sure.
Speaker 7:Side.
Speaker 2:Ramp there go.
Speaker 7:And we just raised $42,000,000 series b from
Speaker 4:Founder, Moe.
Speaker 2:Great stuff. Can't even get a word in. We're just having too much fun.
Speaker 4:Hit him with the flashback, Jordy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's
Speaker 4:American Eagle
Speaker 1:about that? Out. Watch out, JD. Watch out. Out.
Speaker 1:Anyways,
Speaker 2:once you
Speaker 1:The bank account once you get your
Speaker 2:bearings, you can continue.
Speaker 1:Who did the deal?
Speaker 7:It's been awesome. I'm queuing back up with Keith Throbois, who is my co founder of Opendoor, and we brought on Sequoia as a new investor. Yeah. Amazing.
Speaker 1:The PayPal mafia coming together. You're a made man.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You know, it's I think it's the first time Keith and Ruloff have co led a deal together. It's the first time they co led something since since PayPal. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're you're a wise guy
Speaker 2:bringing getting the band getting the band back together.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Yeah. Well, walk me through $42,000,000 series b. What does that actually mean? Because insurance, like, at some point, you have to have reserves.
Speaker 1:There's is there like, are are you acting as an intermediary and there's a different financial institution that's dealing with the actual the capital that goes towards that? Is this capital going towards the operations, the hiring, building of the product, or is it actually, like, if there's a insurance claim, you're paying it out of this $42,000,000? How how does that all
Speaker 7:So what's cool about our business is everyone else in the industry gets paid more
Speaker 1:Yeah. The
Speaker 7:more money that you spend on insurance. Right? They're they're brokers. We don't bear risk. We're just helping you be placed with the right insurance carriers.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And so what we've done, which is actually, like, shockingly innovative and say, hey. Instead of charging you based on how much you spend, we're gonna charge you based on how complex you are and how much, you know, servicing you need
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:And how much, you know, product you need. And so we replace it with a flat fee. Mhmm. And then say, hey. We're we're gonna net out all the commissions from your from your policies.
Speaker 7:You're not gonna pay commission as much as legally possible. Mhmm. And it's just one fee for us for service. And what that does is it aligns incentives.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And as a result, you know, over 700 companies now have moved over from, you know, GoPuff and Eight Sleep to, you know, Chomps, Bombas, tons of these incredible businesses.
Speaker 2:I thought you were saying when you first said that, was like, wait. GoPuff had a had a had a enterprise insurance product. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:So No.
Speaker 7:So we so we don't do the insurance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so almost like asset light. I don't know exactly the term, but more of a Analogy. Meteor platform technology company. But, at the same time, I feel like I've heard so many amazing stories about it's really hard, but once you get the insurance business actually up and running, you wind up with Berkshire Hathaway or what's happening with Apollo.
Speaker 1:Like, you just have this this float and this cash machine that can go towards other things. Is that enticing to you even if it's gonna happen when you're on when you're in your 65 to 95 year old run? Is that something that might happen decades from now? Or is that just, like, never in the picture because it's fundamentally incompatible with what you're doing?
Speaker 7:I I think you have to start with your customer. Right? Like, when you go from, like, the, like, oh, wow. That's really enticing. You start, like, twisting upside down to find a way to make a bad business, like, decision.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:And this is kind of what I think some of our earlier competitors did in the last round of InsurTech is they said, well, let's that looks really nice. Let's go after that. Mhmm. And they were fundamentally misaligned with their customers. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Our job is never to our job is to get you the cheapest insurance possible for the best coverage. Right? As soon as you start selling our own book, there's no way for us to be able to do that job. Mhmm. And so we don't do reserves.
Speaker 7:The 42,000,000 we've raised is for product development and sales and growth. Yep. Unfortunately, we haven't found a way to spend money yet as a company. We we even touched a penny of our series a when we raised this. It was kind of more to say Fantastic.
Speaker 7:We were profitable last year, which is crazy.
Speaker 11:That's good.
Speaker 6:Wow.
Speaker 7:But I'm confident we will solve that problem this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How how does the how does this actual sales cycle, work? People are, you know, signing up, with you know, for a specific insurance plan, and then there's, like, you know, it's cyclical. Like, how how does that motion working for you guys?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So usually, it starts with an introduction or, you know, someone saying, hey. You gotta talk to these guys. They're awesome. And our first conversation is they're already onboard on the product.
Speaker 7:It's get them on. We'll show them exactly how it works. Mhmm. Instead of, like, going through PDFs and everything else, you see everything in one place. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And we're gonna do this very strong, like, in detail risk analysis saying, top to bottom, here's your company. Here's, like, the opportunity for someone to get hurt and slipping and falling in your restaurant. Here's what happens when someone in your manufacturing facility, you know, might get injured or if a product injures a customer, all the different cases. You might need a product recall.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And running through those scenarios and saying this isn't as where you are currently covered and not covered and how we can fix it. And, also, here's how you benchmark against everyone else just like you. So instead of working with that sort of generalist insurance broker, we bring on this specialized team, almost like the Navy SEALs of, you know, product recall and say, here's exactly what you need to do to deal with this when it happens. And for us, risk management doesn't end with insurance products. It goes through, like, what do you actually do when that happens?
Speaker 7:What's your playbook for dealing with a product recall? Who what lawyers do you need to talk to? How do you actually, like, file this with, you know, the relevant regulatory bodies? There's a whole bunch of stuff, and we do this for customers in kinda every single industry that we work with from, you know, aerospace and defense to health care to construction to consumer brands.
Speaker 1:How do you think, is insurance, playing a factor in, like, these legal cases with the big AI labs I saw? Anthropic paid, like, a billion dollar fine for scraping some books. And it's just something that if I'm underwriting Anthropic at seed, it's like, how am I gonna predict that they're gonna scrape books that they shouldn't and this lawsuit's gonna happen? It's gonna this huge settlement, and that feels like something that would be way out of coverage. But are people even thinking about insuring for these, like, entirely new dynamics that can happen only in the AI age?
Speaker 7:Absolutely. And there's really cool new carriers who are kind stepping in. And we've seen remember there's a new innovation in kind of business. Some new insurance company that becomes a giant leader is the first one to come in and step in and say, hey. I'm willing to take a understand like, really understand this and take a bet.
Speaker 7:Interesting. And so coalition did this with cyber insurance. It's now a 5 plus billion dollar company
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 7:Where no one else really understood what cyber insurance meant.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:They came and did that. Now they're doing, you know, really well across TNO and number of other spaces. Interesting. Same thing with crypto that's been more kind of broadly adopted, but, you know, insurers like Realm have done amazing there.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. And in that in walk me through the that that cyber insurance example. Like, do they have to raise money? Are they raising debt? Like, how do you if you weren't doing what you're doing and you were just building a pool of capital to ensure companies directly, what does the what does the build out of a company like that actually look like?
Speaker 1:I've never really
Speaker 7:thought You you literally need to raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of equity. Wow. And then yeah. It's like To collateralize the issue and then partner with you see, you start by partnering with existing insurance companies if you can. Yeah.
Speaker 7:But if they don't understand it and are unwilling to underwrite it, you have to just raise huge pools of capital.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Wow.
Speaker 7:I mean, this is the oldest business of all time. It's it's basically Lloyd's of London is a syndicate of people who were just pooling capital for these literally pooling capital for risk for ships.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Traces all the way back to the dawn adventure, the whaling, and whatnot. Fascinating. Fascinating.
Speaker 7:Well, congratulations. Crazy things in insurance too where, like, the words that are used don't make any sense. You're like, why would trucking be called marine?
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 7:Well, it's because it's you're shipping you're literally shipping things, you know, on ships over water, and
Speaker 4:they just
Speaker 7:adapted it.
Speaker 1:Wait. So marine insurance refers to trucking? Like, physical Yeah.
Speaker 7:Like, it's called inland inland marine. Inland marine. Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Wow. Wow. What an awesome industry. Well, congratulations on all the progress.
Speaker 2:Where where are you guys, where are you guys seeing the benefits from AI in the business Sure. Not on the product side, outside coding?
Speaker 7:I think what's really cool is, like, we we we we can measure this stuff. Right? And, like, I think last year, I would have said, oh, we get rid of data entry. We get rid of whatever. Now I can say, each person in our team is writing three times as many emails today as they were six months ago.
Speaker 7:Woah. Like, we've scaled the business. We're breaking the scaling laws of financial services through AI. We're we're pulling in all the context, and it's becoming much less human reliant on Yeah. The day to day operation of the business.
Speaker 7:So the people are actually just focusing on, like, high end problem solving Mhmm. Strategy, the things that, you know, people are good at. But I have no idea how sort of the, you know, entry level kind of paper pushing jobs are gonna keep doing this because we just don't need them.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Where are you building the business?
Speaker 7:The company is based in New York. I'm the odd man out in Austin. Okay. And I think in San Francisco, if you're building a, like, model company
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:You gotta be an SSF. Yep. If you're building applied AI Mhmm. In financial services, it's just much easier to do that in New York. Like, the people actually understand what that means.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so for us, we're we don't sell software. Right? Like, we're building a competitor to locked in these kind of 50 to $100,000,000,000 brokers. Mhmm. And we're coming in and saying, look.
Speaker 7:Like, can't sell software to you. You can't buy software. You have no idea how to even deploy this. You have, like, 10 different factions in your order to do this. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:If we were to do that, we would do that maybe in San Francisco. Mhmm. In New York, you get to go head to head and say, look. I'm just gonna go after your clients, and we're just gonna do your job better.
Speaker 2:We're gonna
Speaker 4:spend your lunch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, probably deserve like a bite.
Speaker 7:Your lunch is four more meetings.
Speaker 1:Yes. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by and giving us
Speaker 2:the news. Always fun get job. Makes so much sense going in and, you know, talking with coverage and having them not just be incentivized for you to spend the most amount of money, but for to get the best plan and actually get the most out of it. It's just I love I love the alignment. It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:I'm waiting
Speaker 7:for you guys to do your first, like, event so I can show you. You know? We'll cover all your, like, awesome giant conferences with the fireworks and stuff you're inevitably gonna want
Speaker 1:in there. Yes. Like, catch on fire. What we need we're trying to get a intern catches on fire.
Speaker 2:We wanna get a fog machine. Too many fuck. We want, like, a c o two cannons in here.
Speaker 1:That could be very risky.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 1:Suck all the air
Speaker 2:out of here. Insured.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're not doing that yet. Don't have good insurance.
Speaker 2:We've got So we'll talk.
Speaker 7:I actually own two industrial snow machines. So if you ever need to rent one, just give me
Speaker 12:a shout.
Speaker 1:Woah. We needed that during Christmas. Where were you when we were dressed up in Santa Claus? We needed we we had the fake snow going over the show. But next year, real snow for sure.
Speaker 7:Real snow. I'm shipping it out.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Thank you, buddy.
Speaker 2:Great to see you, JD. Talk soon. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Let's kick it over to this video by Storm Crew on YouTube. The boss asked me to take on 10 robots by myself. An individual has assembled a set of 10 unitary or humanoid robots, got in the boxing ring, and fought them. And the results are very, very interesting. We'll have to sort of click through a little bit of this But he fights incremental amounts of
Speaker 2:somebody to do this forever.
Speaker 1:I've wanted to do this personally. I wanna fight the humanoids. Look at this. So it's one on one and it's not too bad. He can just hold it off.
Speaker 1:He's just he's just holding it. Can't do anything. Now keep in mind, this is the unit tree. I believe it's the g one, the the cheaper, smaller version. Now he's one on three.
Speaker 1:Let's see what happens. He's kick they're kicking. Oh, he does the ball rush. That's a I had not thought of that strategy. Oh.
Speaker 1:Oh. He's pushing them over. And with these small you get them down, they can get up but they're pretty easy to pin. He starts he starts fighting five. This is one on five now.
Speaker 2:He needs a flashback.
Speaker 1:And he said they are hitting him. They are hitting him. He's taking some blows. Oh, he knocks one down. That's a good hit.
Speaker 2:Their movement looks surprising.
Speaker 4:Oh, he picks it up.
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh, we're going WWE
Speaker 4:mode. Okay.
Speaker 1:He picks it up and slams it down. Oh, he gets back up. He's gotta throw it down.
Speaker 2:They really they need bigger robots because it looks like he's just bullying
Speaker 1:When they when they pop up, that is that is a scary animation.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Picking it up and throwing it out of the ring. Oh my god. Slammed onto the ground. Yeah. Slammed onto the ground.
Speaker 1:Well, he finally
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:He he's fighting, like, six or seven here. They're really closing in at this point. This this is where it starts to get intimidating.
Speaker 2:Gets a little hairy.
Speaker 1:I feel like seven, you know, you can't keep your eyes on all of them Falling over each other. But if you use them against each other yeah. Creating the pile. The pile method, that's what you wanna go for. You wanna create a heap
Speaker 2:of of robots? Benchmark. The Terminator benchmark.
Speaker 1:Terminator bench.
Speaker 2:This is the only benchmark I really care about.
Speaker 1:Who wins? AI or humans? But then he adds the g two, which is the newer unitary robot. And this one is a little bit more athletic, and things start to get a little bit riskier.
Speaker 2:Do we think they're teleoperated?
Speaker 1:I imagine all of this is teleoperated. I this seems like some sort of ad integration or some AI. We're ad appreciator. I don't know what's going on. Let's skip to the final bit.
Speaker 1:I think we can skip ahead. I think it starts at two zero eight, maybe. We can see. Robot 10 x.
Speaker 2:That was a clean Yeah.
Speaker 1:So he's boxing the big guy, and he hits. Yeah. It's it's pretty He gets knocked on the ground. It's not looking good for humanity. Very, very rough.
Speaker 1:If we skip to
Speaker 2:I think he's getting a
Speaker 1:little Oh, yeah. He is.
Speaker 2:He's running out of gas.
Speaker 1:It's tiring. I think
Speaker 4:he I think he I think the conclusion
Speaker 2:of this Did you see the Yeah. Headbutt from
Speaker 4:I think position.
Speaker 1:Looks very dangerous. I think the conclusion of this video is that he loses. Know? Who knows how scripted this is? It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Lot of cuts.
Speaker 1:A You of know? It's mostly entertainment, but it's good entertainment. Challenge yourself to fight robots with difficulty levels ranging from one to 10 robots. See how many you can ultimate KO. That could be a good that could be a good sort of you know, those VR centers where you go and do VR in person?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You could go and do this in your local put that next to your Cross Fit gym. Anyway Like it. Next, we
Speaker 2:have our Lambda lightning round.
Speaker 8:Yes. Lambda lightning round. Nick from
Speaker 1:Sandstone is the cofounder and CEO. He's in the restroom waiting room.
Speaker 2:Get that gong ready.
Speaker 1:And now he's in the TVP And Ultradome. Nick, how are
Speaker 2:you doing? What's happening?
Speaker 5:Let's get the gong going. Going.
Speaker 1:How much did you raise? What's going on?
Speaker 9:We're announcing our $10,000,000 seed round recipe. Yeah. There you go.
Speaker 2:A humble 10 a humble
Speaker 1:I like
Speaker 2:cum Humble mango seed. We love to see it.
Speaker 1:Real question. 10, you versus 10 humanoid robots. Do you think you could beat them up?
Speaker 9:I I don't think so. Okay. But
Speaker 1:You're the same We all
Speaker 5:we we all need those robots.
Speaker 1:We do.
Speaker 9:In our in our life. We're we're we're gonna get them in the office as soon as we can, and I think that's your first round to to come work at Sandstone is you actually have to fight off the robots to get into the office.
Speaker 2:There you go. That's good qualifier.
Speaker 1:You're you're you're building AI for in house legal teams. I imagine if the humanoid robots get deployed and they start harassing people, the in house legal teams will be
Speaker 9:It's it's a net deposit of our market.
Speaker 4:It's huge for our market. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But this is something we've actually been excited about. We've been we've been wondering where legal AI will land. There's obviously companies that are selling to large firms. You can do some stuff in the apps by yourself, but that feels a little bit risky. Sometimes the the the chat apps will push back on you.
Speaker 1:Hey. I'm not a lawyer. I don't wanna give you this type of advice. And maybe you don't wanna upload your employment agreement to an app that will ultimately train on it and maybe leak your information at some point. So how are you thinking about building the product, the go to market, the the the value prop in a world where the other platforms exist and there are some DIY options?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Mean, the first of all, thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 9:It's great to
Speaker 4:be here.
Speaker 9:Actually, the the the way that we've thought about approaching the in house market is really from sort of two pain points that we saw, and I I saw this when I was serving legal teams at McKinsey and as an engineer. In house teams have a ton of requests that come in from the business, from external users. They're basically getting bombarded with emails and Slacks and Teams messages. Right? And they don't have a single platform in the same way that, you know, we have Linear or Jira, if you were an engineer ten years ago, to manage your work and who's doing what.
Speaker 9:And so that's not even yet an AI problem, but rather a data problem. And so that was the first thing that we wanted to solve, which was, can we sit across all these systems that lawyers have to deal with and pull in all the requests into one place so that when the AI, you know, goes to redline the agreement or answer the question or draft the contract, it already has context on, you know, the entire thread that you're working on as well as all your other business systems. So one of the issues with whether it's Claude or ChatGBT or even some of the legal solutions out there is, I open a contract and I ask for it to be reviewed. But if it's a sales agreement, I need to know, like, have we worked with this company before?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:Is it high ACV? How does it compare to our other deals in Salesforce? Does the seller have a good relationship? Right? These kinds of things are like what the lawyer actually goes and, like, they spend admin time doing to go gather that information.
Speaker 9:We wanna be the context layer that pulls that all in. So when you go open that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Ticket in your system in Sandstone, which has the sales agreement, all that context is there and ready for you.
Speaker 1:So how do you pull in all that data? Are you a big, like, Zapier customer and you're integrating with everything on day one? Are you writing MCP integrations, API integrations? Is it client by client and it's more high touch because you're going with really big companies as starting customers, and you go to their in house legal team. And if they're using some custom CRM, you'll build a custom CRM integration because it's important to them.
Speaker 1:How do you go down the stack of integrations to get that full context?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So mostly API integrations. I think there's some MCP that that we're working with. Mhmm. The the way that we think about it is being pretty opinionated about what data from your CRM or your ERP is important for legal workflows.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And so we're able to, you know, on day one, have the team come in, set up an integration, and then essentially tell us what are the you know, according to these critical fields that we need, where can we find them in your system? Right? Salesforce systems are very complex. And so we ask them, hey, Here's, you know, the 10 things that we're gonna need.
Speaker 9:Where do these live within your Salesforce so that we can much more easily query that going forward? Mhmm. This has allowed us to, you know even for some, you know, five to 10 person legal teams, we can onboard them within a week with multiple integrations. And I think one of the things that's important is, like, this isn't gonna be an overnight problem. Right?
Speaker 9:No legal team's gonna solve their data issue in in one night. But if you can integrate even Google Drive and maybe your contract management tool and Slack, and that's 50% to 60% of your data, that's going to change your ability to answer questions and get legal work done by several fold. And then we can continue to integrate over time.
Speaker 2:What's the mindset of your buyers? I think if you're Harvey or one of these other legal AI players and you're selling into a law firm, they're doing this dance right now where they're like, we're going to make you way more efficient, but there's this kind of the elephant in the room is like, Okay, is this going to impact billables? But if I'm an in house legal team, that's not really on my mind. I just want to deliver great work and protect the company and keep the company compliant across a bunch of different dimensions. I imagine there could be like more pull, more excitement, more kind of urgency to adopt than maybe some big law firm that's like, hey, we've done it this way for a long time and our business is doing great right now.
Speaker 2:We don't need too much AI.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Before I started Sandstone, most of my work was at McKinsey helping big law firms think about AI and tech strategy, and we would actually go out and deploy AI solutions for some of these big firms. And I think the hardest thing was you have to go every partner in every practice area as if it's its own business and kind of sell, you know, a one off solution to them and get them on board with the fact that, hey, this might have some implications on your billable hour model going forward. With in house, it's completely different, right? When they see AI solutions that can take a lot of the admin work off their plate, generally, GC thinks, hey, now my team can go focus on being in more of the business strategy conversations and become more, you know, proactive around potential risks and issues with our company rather than, you know, reactive and trying to play catch up on all the requests that we have coming in.
Speaker 9:I think this is like one of the bigger paradoxes within legal and within AI more broadly is like, as legal teams get more efficient on the admin side and collecting the context, which we're working on, they're gonna be able to be in more business discussions, protect the company from more risk, but also have more work ultimately. And so, you know, a lot of our legal teams, I anticipate they'll continue to grow as they adopt more AI, but they'll just do it in a more effective way for the business. And we'll see a world where, like, you know, the top law firms in the future need to be AI native and AI enabled, but I think the top legal teams in the future and even the top companies will have to have, like, these AI native legal teams. Similar to how, you know, Ramp I think if you're using Ramp as a smaller company and your finance team is using it, you're probably spending a little bit less on, you know, services that you typically might have on the the financial and accounting side, and it's also helping your business move faster. I think historically, we didn't see that in finance.
Speaker 9:You see the same in HR with Workday, and so I think legal will will get there over time.
Speaker 2:How's growth been?
Speaker 9:Growth has been has been great. So we started working on this, you know, five months ago. We've got, you know, dozens of companies using it today. We got we got dozens of companies using it today, you know, a mix of earlier, smaller in house teams all the way up to Fortune 500s. Team Let's is go.
Speaker 6:Let's give it
Speaker 3:up for the
Speaker 2:for the Fortune 500.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 9:Our team is, you know, a team of 15 engineers and lawyers in in New York and Brooklyn. One of our mantras is that everyone ships. So we have four lawyers on our team. Every single one of them codes. Wow.
Speaker 9:Three of them are actual full time engineers. My my cofounder was a lawyer. He became an engineer.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 9:We have a general counsel who became a software engineer for five years, and, you know, they're shipping every day. And so that's sort of how we wanna build this. We wanna build this like a tech company would build today, and everyone has some sort of a legal background or engineering background. And, yeah, whether you you have that from your experience or it's it's something that you've learned by by being at Sandstone.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress.
Speaker 2:Just make so much
Speaker 1:a short amount of time. Congratulations. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very, very cool. I'm sure I'm sure you'll be back on Where
Speaker 11:are you
Speaker 2:staying quarter. That's my that's my bet. That's my bet. So great great to meet you. And Thanks, guys.
Speaker 2:Good luck out there. We'll talk soon.
Speaker 1:To you soon. Thanks. Rest of your day. Goodbye. Up next, we have Rob Slaughter of Defense Unicorns.
Speaker 1:You gotta check his website out. It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Name, very cute, for himself. Very cute name for his business.
Speaker 1:And then intense business because he's, getting software to war fighters. He's in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVPN Ultra Dome.
Speaker 4:How are you doing, Rob?
Speaker 1:Look at the show.
Speaker 2:Look at that.
Speaker 3:Look at that. Look
Speaker 11:at that.
Speaker 2:Friendly unicorn.
Speaker 1:Friendly unicorn. Please introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Tell us what you're building and how it's going.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Rob Slaughter, you know, spent my career in the military. I spent about thirteen years active duty. Wow. Got out with some cofounders about five years ago.
Speaker 8:I like to joke around that I spent first half of my career struggling with with software, the back half of my career trying to solve the software delivery challenges. Mhmm. I started this company because, you know, we saw a real huge problem. Mhmm. You know, it's hard to tell because the the most most of the ecosystem, most of the industry, especially on the defense or especially on the tech side Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Doesn't have a ton of exposure to defense. Mhmm. You obviously read the big headlines, so you get the the the big news. Everybody understands we have the best military in the world. You know, the recent operation in South America obviously highlights this stuff.
Speaker 8:But there's real significant tech challenges that, you know, as a company, we we really strive to solve. So we're super excited to to talk about the series b and, you know, announce a lot of the good stuff that we're doing.
Speaker 1:How much did you raise?
Speaker 2:How much?
Speaker 8:We have officially raised a 136,000,000
Speaker 9:for our employees today.
Speaker 11:So it's quite, you
Speaker 8:know, it's You know, we're we're obviously excited to get back to building. Obviously, love what we do.
Speaker 1:And you're a unicorn now, which
Speaker 2:is amazing because a capital allocator acknowledgment. Bain Capital
Speaker 1:Bain Capital
Speaker 2:is the leading the round.
Speaker 1:It feels like if you put unicorn in the name of your startup, you're really asking for you're like, you're you're calling your shots so aggressively that everyone's gonna be like, oh, they they'll never do it, and you did it. So congratulations.
Speaker 2:I do do wonder if there was ever, you know, during the the the deal process, they were like, oh, we wanna do nine yeah. How about $9.90? Like, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I can't possibly. It will destroy the brand. Where where does the name come from?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So a couple things. First and more first and foremost Yeah. We hire unicorns.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh.
Speaker 8:And so it's hard to find those people Mhmm. That are mission focused
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:That, you know, typically have clearances. Yeah. They typically have, like, clearances. They're they're based in The US. Sure.
Speaker 8:That's the
Speaker 1:other thing.
Speaker 8:So one of the big things is that we hire defense unicorns. The other thing is if we're successful as a company Yeah. One of the biggest things we'd like to see in the ecosystem is, like, it's not gonna be just, you know, one, ten, 20 defense unicorns in the ecosystem. There's actually gonna be hundreds or thousands. Yeah.
Speaker 8:So just like, you know, quick back of the envelope numbers, you know, for folks. You know, you look at somebody like NVIDIA Mhmm. And they do, you know, 200,000,000,000 ish a year revenue. You you know, you have a Department of War that spends 1,000,000,000,000 a year.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:That's five five x that. And, you know, as you guys mentioned earlier on the show, you know, Trump's talking about increasing that to to 1,500,000,000,000.0.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And so when you think about this from, like, a market opportunity perspective, what you actually find out is that there's most most likely probably several, you know, multi trillion dollar companies. And then when you cascade that down, what you're actually gonna find is that there's not just dozens, but hundreds of defense unicorns
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:That should be entering the ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Okay. Very cool. And and, I agree. I think I think it'd be positive for the ecosystem. What, how, like, how do you how do you guys work with other software companies?
Speaker 2:Like, what like, break down the platform for us and and how the how everything actually works.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So first, talk about the the problem. Mhmm. One of the biggest issues is is a combination of three things. One, these are mostly air gap systems.
Speaker 8:And to define air gap, air gap is either fully disconnected, semi disconnected, or extremely high firewall. So think about, like, security police policy settings to where things like GitHub are inaccessible. Sure. The next issue is, like, the super high cybersecurity standards and a lot of this accreditation standards that the government expects. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And then the third thing is that there's actually a huge skill gap delta between what you see on industry expectations and what you typically see in, like, military spaces. Not just the defense industrial base, but but a lot of times the people who are actually operating these systems are actually active duty airmen, soldiers, sailors, and marines. Mhmm. And so a lot of the technologies that we work with are Kubernetes based. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And and so to just say it, you know, you know, how this is really operating is you have people generally wearing a uniform that has to actually operate things that's incredibly complex. Mhmm. Their core day job is is firing missiles and and and and, you know, guns on target. Their primary day job is not IT operations. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And so what we do as a company is we have an open source baseline called UDS that allows people to integrate in an open source fashion. We have the ability to take those applications and, you know, unclassified environments, classified environments. And, really, our bread and butter is extending those to actual web edge weapon systems. So things, you know, f sixteens, f 20 twos, our largest customer is department of navy, specifically the submarine community. And so, you know, really for us, it's about how do we have, like, a whole of nation approach.
Speaker 8:You know, if we're going to enter a near peer adversary type of engagement, how do we actually, you know, have the ability to inject latest and greatest technology from anywhere around the country to some of these, you know, new weapon systems.
Speaker 1:Last question for me. I remember talking to Shyam Sankar at Palantir, and he told this amazing anecdote about the early days of Palantir. They built a piece of software, put a bunch of dots on a map. Right? He goes to deliver it, and the machine that they tried to install it on had, like, you know, one megabyte of RAM or something.
Speaker 1:And so it just couldn't run the software. And I'm wondering, you you have this Panasonic Toughbook on your website. How do you think or how do you work or do you work with your customers to understand where products can be actually deployed? Because once you're beyond the air gap, you're probably doing more things on device on at the edge. What what what are the hardware constraints?
Speaker 1:I imagine that there's a ton in the age of AI. You can't just run Lama locally on some ten year old tough book. How are you working with clients on understanding hardware and how it will enable their software to be delivered?
Speaker 8:Yeah. You nailed the problem, which is, in in these military systems, if you wanna do a software update Mhmm. You effectively have to update the hardware. Oh, yeah. And that's why the hardware is so out of date.
Speaker 8:It's because for the new iterations of systems, they've struggled to integrate it. It hasn't worked successfully. So that latest and greatest program that was supposed to deliver didn't deliver. Mhmm. So you're stuck with the legacy system.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. Now that happens two or three times. And before you know it, people are still stuck on, you know, wins Windows 95. Mhmm. You know, to take your, you know, true story.
Speaker 8:Yeah. You know, those types of things are are super common. So so how do we actually, you know, find success? How do we actually enable the Warfighter? Well, if you actually make it easy enough to deliver, in many cases, you don't have to update the hardware.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. In in your example, certainly you do. It's already gone too too far. But a lot of cases, what we're doing is we're finding, you know, a certain weapon systems. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:You know, they've had a hardware, you know, refresh, if you will, say, a year or two, you know, ago. It's not the latest and greatest, but it can actually run way more software than what was available two years ago. Mhmm. Can you actually do a software update on that slightly older hardware to make it mission effective? And then you also nailed, you know, key fund fundamental point, which is, you know, these things you know, modern AI is a it's a it's a memory hog.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And if you're going
Speaker 8:to war with outdated hardware, which is the reality Mhmm. And you're trying to get the latest and greatest AI, you actually have to have the ability to update the software on demand. Mhmm. So you might be flying a mission and saying, hey. I need this specialized, you know, local AI model.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. And then the next day, you're running a new mission, and you might might actually need a different AI model. Mhmm. The way war is conducted today, that would actually be a full reset. That'd be a whole new maintenance period.
Speaker 8:The jets or the the navy ship would actually go down. You know, it's not really viable. With defense unicorns, you actually have that capability.
Speaker 1:That is good to hear. Well, congrats on all the progress. Thanks so much for coming on the show to break it down for us.
Speaker 2:I love a business where it's so clear that you had to experience the problem as a team for a decade and makes so much sense to just, you know, keep hiring veterans that have experienced the the the real pain, not just heard about it on a on a podcast or something like that. So super, super exciting, and and really congratulations on all the progress.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Have a good rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Up next, we have the cofounder and CEO of Benchling calling in from the JPMorgan Health care conference. We are very excited to welcome Saji to the show. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 12:I'm doing well. Thanks for having me guys.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hopping on the show. First, I mean, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and Ben Schling. I think most people are familiar, but we'd love to get an update on the shape of the business today. And then I want to go into the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference as well.
Speaker 12:Sounds sounds great. Yeah. I I'm the cofounder and the CEO of of Benchling. We make software that helps scientists discover and develop new medicines. We spent about ten years helping bring science to the cloud.
Speaker 12:It was pretty much trapped on premise and in spreadsheets before And then today we're very focused on bringing AI to scientists everywhere by putting models and simulation directly in the workflow of scientists and building agents that automate all the toil and drudgery that drug discovery is filled with.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Someone was pitching me cursor for bio, and I said that can't happen because there's no Versus code for bio. And you said, love open source or hate it? Like, it's just it seems like it's just a fact that if you do can't fork something quickly, how are you going to spin up and grow as quickly as Cursor has grown? Has that proven true?
Speaker 1:Do you feel like you're the Cursor for bio and that, you're set up the structural
Speaker 2:They're the bench link for bench link.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Really? I mean, I shouldn't even try. But walk me through that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But walk me through what you're actually building.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I I think AI in bio is kind of like it's kind of like GPT without the chat. So GPT came out and it didn't explode until someone put the right interface on it. That's how I feel a lot of AI in bio, where you have these amazing new models and capabilities for doing different tasks. But making it medicine is so hard and complex that putting it all together in the right interface and making it super easy for the scientists in the labs to actually use is a really difficult problem, and that's what we're focused on at Benchling.
Speaker 1:And what's the we've seen in coding, which I think people are most familiar with, you know, autocomplete gets better and better, then you get sort of the back and forth, the copy paste from the LLMs, then you get the fully agentic prompt systems called code. And is there something similar happening where there's an auto complete for bio before there's an agent for bio? Like, how what is the shape of the interaction that the scientist is having with the various ways you can interact with AI models?
Speaker 12:I think there's even lower hanging fruit than that. We have customers where they're using our AI agents to ingest all this data that's trapped in spreadsheets and PDFs and SharePoints that's been, it's six, ten, fifteen years old. The people who made the data have long moved on, and they're able to understand what's been done before and sometimes not even rerun experience. We had a customer who brought 10,000 different experiments into benchling that previously hadn't been touched, and a scientist was about to run some studies that would have taken about eight months, and they realized that someone else had already done the work many years ago, and they were able to cut a bunch of them out. And life science is just full of examples like that that 's gonna help compress the time it takes to make drugs and get them to market.
Speaker 12:Do you think cursor yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Where do you where do you think AI is overhyped in life sciences, and where do you think it's underhyped?
Speaker 12:Oh, man. I think there's a lot of excitement, I don't want to say overhyped, there's a lot of excitement about these models that help you create a new hypothesis. And that's really important, but drug discovery is 9,999 steps after that, many of which are incredibly hard and full of toil. And there's a lot of opportunity, especially when you get to things that are regulated, or in animals, or closer to manufacturing, to make huge differences in the lives of scientists ever to get medicines to patients faster.
Speaker 1:How do you think about speed of token generation? We were talking to the CEO of Cerebras, and he was very optimistic about applied AI speeding up in bio specifically because more and more of the questions that scientists are asking look like deep research reports, whereas consumers might just ask, oh, you know, what's the capital of, I don't know, Illinois? And it's a quick, you know, LLM. It just fills the next word in. It takes one token.
Speaker 1:But a lot of scientists might say, for every question that I'm asking throughout the day, every fifteen minutes, I'm effectively firing off a deep research report that might take half an hour, and so speeding that up makes sense. How are you feeling about the different options on the silicon side? What partnerships have you done? How are you thinking about accelerating the actual workflows?
Speaker 12:Yeah. We've got partnerships with both NVIDIA and Anthropic, which I can talk about in just a second. But I think life science is actually not even at the point where token speed is the rate limiter. Obviously, in San Francisco, AI is everywhere, billboards are selling you GPUs and whatever. But if you go to Boston, another life science hub, or I spent time in Europe in the last couple months, I was just in Asia in December visiting biotech and pharma companies, AI adoption is not going to just happen spontaneously in all these organizations.
Speaker 12:Most of these scientific organizations actually are just getting co pilots and whatnot turned on. There's a lot of legal, safety, regulatory, security concerns that they have. And scientists' workflows are so, so complicated, they're already jumping between a bunch of different tools with really complex data that AI is not necessarily purpose built for. And so there's a lot of, like, last mile work to do before token speed even becomes a problem, and that's that's what we've been trying to focus on at Benchling.
Speaker 1:Is the decline of Boston as a biotech hub overstated? We read a piece by Will Menaitus declaring Boston dead almost. He was very dramatic about it. How are things going in Boston? Is it still a competitive place?
Speaker 1:There's been a number of different reports around hiring, maybe weakening and softening. But what are you seeing in Boston?
Speaker 12:I think there's still a lot of really good scientific talent in Boston, and they can come out to San Francisco to raise money if they need. They're just a plane flight away. I think maybe zooming out, what you're probably hearing is like biotech went through a like it's it's a pretty good vibe right now at JPM, but biotech went through a really tough couple years. Like, they the biopharma industry went through like the .com bust equivalent for a few years, you know.
Speaker 1:What was the driver of that? Because it feels like during COVID, there was a lot of biotech energy, and then through the GLP one boom, we're seeing more. But is this CRISPR overhang? Like, what what what is the is the foundational technology of the .com, if the internet was the thing that ultimately caused the bubble of
Speaker 5:.com?
Speaker 12:There were a lot of great new scientific technologies, but it takes a lot of time to make a drug. It takes seven, ten years. The industry how many how many drugs do you do you guys think get approved a year? Can you guess?
Speaker 1:Don't know. Hundreds? I don't know. Under 20? What is it?
Speaker 12:For the last ten years, we've gotten about 50 new medicines approved per year.
Speaker 5:Wow. Just
Speaker 12:50. And how much do think the industry spends on r and d?
Speaker 1:Is it like $10,000,000,000 a The
Speaker 12:industry spends almost $200,000,000,000 a year on R
Speaker 2:and D. That's $100,000,000,000 off on board.
Speaker 12:And you get 50 new drugs a year, and it takes ten years to figure out if you're right. And by the way though, drugs are amazing. We want more drugs. Drugs get cheaper over time, they become generic. Hundreds of millions of people take statins and all kinds of other drugs that they don't even think about how cheap they are and how impactful they are.
Speaker 12:So we get to add 50 to our stock stockpile every single year of new life changing medicines. We should want more of them, we should want them faster, we want them to be better. And I think because it takes so long though, and it's such a difficult artisanal process, like, I think everyone got excited with mRNA and COVID, and I think a lot of money went in and I think science takes time to become durable and turn into businesses and have medicines get commercialized. And I think some people, a couple of years after COVID, also got impatient and there's other things to invest in. And so the money kinda went back out.
Speaker 12:And so it was a really difficult couple years for the the industry and, you know, interest rates, geopolitical things. If there's any industry that doesn't like uncertainty, it's biotech. You know? You're you're underwriting something that's gonna take ten years to see the results of.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How should people think about JPMorgan Healthcare, like the conference? Is it is it an opportunity to raise money? Is it an opportunity for companies that are thinking about going public? I know the the financial profile of a lot of drug companies is very different than start ups at the at same the time.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of companies that are now taking a more traditional Silicon Valley path in growing their business and raising money. What's the purpose? Why do people go to JPMorgan Healthcare? Are they out of it?
Speaker 12:It's actually really funny. A lot of people are here for JPM, but they don't actually go to JPM. It's like every conference kind of has their ratio of at the conference versus ecosystem around it. JPM might be the most lopsided, where 90% of people here are not going to the conference. It is a banker conference for CEOs and CFOs to raise money, but it's like this barometer for the industry.
Speaker 12:And most people are actually here for all of the ecosystem around it, all the events. We're having an event at our HQ tonight that's like an AI and bio panel with Eli Lilly and Isomorphic Labs and ProFluent and Anthropic. But people are here to get customers, to fundraise, to see their friends, and to there are pharma companies that have alumni reunion parties here. And so it's just the gathering to kick the year off. The mood is good, the way.
Speaker 12:Like the XBI has been trading well. There's been a bunch of M and A in biotech, which has sent a bunch of money back to investors. I think some of the tariff and MFN stuff has settled a little bit for now. Eli Lilly, as you said, becoming the first trillion dollar pharma company. I think that's raised everyone's ambitions a bunch and then, you know Yeah.
Speaker 12:There's there's
Speaker 2:options for to Benchling next.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Benchling next. It's easier now since, you know, it's always been the fast fall work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:So Exactly.
Speaker 1:Have you back on Exactly. When when you hit the one t. But I'm so glad to hear things are going well. Thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to meet you. On the show. We've been wanting to make this happen for a long time.
Speaker 1:This is great.
Speaker 12:Thanks. Thanks for having me. Guys need more biotech on the show.
Speaker 2:We do. Please. TPP and for biotech. You're new you're a new correspondent. You'll be our You'll So tell us the the companies that we should have on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'd love that.
Speaker 2:And some recommendations. Enjoy this.
Speaker 12:Alright. I'm here for a vibe check anytime you need it. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Well, we have a very special guest in the TV panel for the film live in person. We have Scott Nolan from General Matter. Welcome.
Speaker 2:How
Speaker 1:have you been? How was the holiday party? How was your New Year's? Is 2026 off to a good start?
Speaker 11:It's been great. Yeah. Thank you guys for having me on. Of course.
Speaker 2:Of course. Look at the headlines, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's I'm so glad we get to catch up. Take us back. We we we've we've talked many times, but take us back to the process of of finding this category, finding this opportunity. I think most people will know that you're at Founders Fund in as in an investing role for over a decade, I believe.
Speaker 1:Yep. But talk to me about the process Overnight success. Deciding to. You didn't hear it, but he just played the overnight success. Sound sound cute.
Speaker 1:But talk to me about the process of actually finding an opportunity, picking this one, and then making the move.
Speaker 11:Yeah. And for people who aren't familiar with the general matter,
Speaker 1:we're the
Speaker 11:American nuclear fuel company Yeah. Enriching fuel here in The US Mhmm. Using US tech.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:So the whole background was, you know, finding it overnight took about a decade. Yeah. And there was certainly no intention of starting anything. Really, this was in response to a huge market need. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:So, like you said, you know, I'd found our son for a decade meeting a wide range of advanced reactor companies.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 11:All of them had the same message, which was we have no we have no fuel. We have no source of HALO.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 11:And we've got to depend on Russia and China for that for that fuel that we need. Yeah. And so I said, why don't The US fuel companies make that fuel? They said, there aren't really any.
Speaker 1:Oh, you say, depending depending on Russia and China, is it true that the HALEU, the the nuclear fuel that comes from Russia is they actually take it out of a missile that's nuclear? Does that happen? Or they take it out of submarine? Where are they getting it in Russia? Why do they have it and why don't we why don't we?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Not not a wives' tale, but Okay. You know, have their own enrichment capability in Russia. They do. They do.
Speaker 11:Yep. They're actually the world leader in enrichment. More than half of world market, you know, capacity is in Russia. Yeah. You've got Europe number two and China quickly growing as number three.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. US used to be number one back in the eighties. We're about 85% of global enrichment.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Today, less than point 1%. Mhmm. So we went from first place to basically last place.
Speaker 2:And what what were the catalyst for that?
Speaker 11:It was exactly what you're saying of the down blending. Mhmm. Back from pre Cold War, obviously, was, you know, post the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was mutual disarmament goals
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And there was trade. And so it was called the the Megatons to Megawatts Program Mhmm. Where The US worked with Russia to down blend weapons into fuel that could be run-in reactors. Got it. That was the start of it.
Speaker 11:And then, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think The US basically said, hey, free trade. Mhmm. Let's go get our fuel from other countries who do this very affordably and consistently. And maybe we don't need to have this outdated capability of gaseous diffusion, which was running at a few sites in The US. So over time, we basically outsourced it.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Other countries were better than us at it and we allowed that skill to atrophy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you look at the s curve of nuclear power growth, we went through this exponential period, and then it basically flatlined for, I don't know, forty, fifty years. How much of that is due to 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, like fear mongering? How much of it is due to just the oil and gas companies being elite and just compounding and compounding, and they're just so big that they can hire all the best talent, do all the best lobbying. What are the different factors that go into the plateau that we've seen in nuclear power generation?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Unlimiting nuclear power, I think everyone lists those things. People will also mention the regulator.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 11:I think it's none of those things.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So if you actually look at the data, nuclear has been the safest, cleanest form of baseload power
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:But it hasn't been the cheapest. And so, you know, that S curve followed a period and maxing out the S curve really was at a time where costs were just rising dramatically
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:On nuclear builds. Yeah. They were run like huge construction projects. Yeah. So most of nuclear all the way through the nineties was classic light water reactors.
Speaker 11:Yeah. You know, billion, $10,000,000,000 projects, over schedule, run just like highway projects, like other things that just were not done efficiently. The move you now see towards advanced reactors is all about changing that.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:So all the advanced reactors basically have two goals. One is often increased safety, the other is decreased cost.
Speaker 2:Glad they care about safety.
Speaker 11:Often passive safety, so not relying on active measures.
Speaker 5:Essentially But And the
Speaker 2:and the goal the goal here is, like, you have a private company Mhmm. Who has somebody they have, you know, potential customers that will pay for power or even help them fund the CapEx, and they're heavily incentivized to stay on schedule and deliver it at a cost or deliver effectively the system at a cost that whereas, like, a government, you know, funded project has maybe less of an incentive to actually hit cost, you know, stay within budget.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think the key dimension is that they wanna be factory built. And so if you're factory built, okay, we can get these coming off an assembly line. Mhmm. We'd have the parts made with extreme, you know, consistency and bring cost in over time.
Speaker 11:And then those pieces can be deployed out to a site and installed and and turned online. Yeah. And that's what the, you know, the acronym SMR is Small Modular Reactor
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 11:Where the small part is small enough to be built in a factory. So that's the whole point. Now, if you go that small
Speaker 2:And how how is that is that plane size at the at the
Speaker 11:Think of, like, extremely wide load size. So highway transportable. So dumping
Speaker 2:a bus size is
Speaker 1:shipping container sized one megawatt. So replacement for a diesel generator usually.
Speaker 11:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And now people are talking about, well, what if we get a thousand of those together, we get a gigawatt, maybe we can power an AI data center. Is the AI boom and the AI narrative changing anything for you? Is there more maybe about your business, but also just about regulatory openness, excitement about the category, just getting real about a transition to a different fuel source?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think you've seen a few tailwinds. Yeah. In the nuclear space, AI has certainly been a huge tailwind. Yeah.
Speaker 11:And the hyperscalers have always wanted baseload power Yeah. And they want it to be clean.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 11:That really points you towards nuclear
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Where the missing piece has been cost. And so they're turning towards SMRs as a way of reducing the cost. Sure. Whether it's one megawatt, a thousand of them together to make a gigawatt
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 11:Or maybe it's 20 megawatts, people are coming up with different formats
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:To solve the need in AI.
Speaker 1:And there's even companies that are bringing old nuclear facilities back online, just building, okay, I'm gonna go get a Westing But Mhmm. That was not an option a while ago. And so, I mean, just this week, didn't met a partner with Oklo to bring some nuclear power online. The timelines are depressing in AI world. Think about AGI next year, and then you see that they are doing a deal that won't come online until 2032.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But at the same time, than than never. Right. How are you thinking about timelines? I imagine that since this is a big step moving into this role, you're thinking in decades or longer.
Speaker 1:How do you think about, like, when to hit certain milestones, how to grow the business, what you can do in a twelve to eighteen month cycle?
Speaker 11:Right. So for us, we're online by end of decade. That is our goal. That's our line in the sand. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Late late last year in August, we announced a lease with the DOE in Kentucky Mhmm. To re industrialize a site that used to host enrichment in Paducah Paducah, Kentucky. That's right. That's right. So we are now breaking ground and and preparing that site to build on.
Speaker 11:Yeah. That will be online by end of decades. That's roughly our timeline. Okay. That timeline is dictated by construction and by licensing.
Speaker 11:Okay. Basically, those two things. Yeah. The scale of construction and the scale of actually bringing online on day one will be increased through this award that we received last So that's that's the main way it impacts us is it actually brings commercial scale, domestic scale, satisfying all US needs forward a few years earlier.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are you are you a are you a dependency or or going are you going to be a dependency for some of these other projects that are saying, like, okay, we're gonna build all of this infrastructure, but ultimately, we're gonna need fuel. Otherwise, the whole thing doesn't actually matter.
Speaker 11:That's right. Yeah. So after the decade of meeting different reactor companies, I realized none of them had a good source of fuel. Mhmm. And if you take a step back, fuel is upstream of everything.
Speaker 11:So if energy is upstream of all economic activity Yeah. Fuel is upstream of Energy. Energy. Yep. And if you can't make your own fuel, you can't do all the other things that you want to do.
Speaker 11:So within nuclear, there's this missing step of enrichment in The US. Yeah. And so to answer your question, yes, we think that enrichment is the key bottleneck for nuclear energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How on earth have you approached hiring? Like, who's the oldest person on your team?
Speaker 11:Oldest let's see. Oldest person, I'm not sure. I mean, north of 50.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. I was maybe there's some 90 year old who's like, I
Speaker 1:still I was at Chernobyl. Well,
Speaker 11:in in the industry, you will see this what's effectively a bathtub curve, which is a lot of young people that are very
Speaker 2:Getting started.
Speaker 11:Nuclear. Sure. And a lot of people that were in it at the very beginning when it was exciting and new and growing very rapidly. Yeah. And in the middle, you have enthusiasts, people who really believed in it even when no one else did.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. But the number of people seems to follow that curve. Yeah. And so we've had consultants on our team who are in their eighties.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I figured. Right?
Speaker 2:Which is like, they're maybe not like, sign me up for a new w two, but I'll be around the table and and help you guys think through That's right. How to actually do this.
Speaker 1:On the young side, how where are you hiring from and how much retraining can you do? Can you take a great engineer and bring them up to speed on all of the particulars of nuclear? Or do you want to go with someone who knows more about nuclear broadly and teach them something specific about refinement? How do you think about training and and building, like, the next generation up?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So one one misconception of team composition is probably that it's all nuclear engineers. Mhmm. The reality of an enrichment facility or a refining operation is that there's actually no nuclear reactions.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 11:So there's actually no chemical reactions. Interesting. All there is is taking a material Yeah. And separating it. Yeah.
Speaker 11:Yeah. And so it's a sorting operation, it's a refinement operation. Interesting. So you do need some nuclear engineers, but it's not the bulk of the team. Okay.
Speaker 11:What we really need is, you know, the team today is comprised of aerospace engineers, like Yeah. Applied physics, electrical, software, chemical engineers, mechanical, all these classic engineering disciplines and then a few nuclear engineers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:So we're really just looking for for the best from every every discipline. Discipline.
Speaker 1:And then the facility in Paducah, can you give me a idea of what scale we're talking about? We've seen Crusoe building these Gigawatt campuses. They're massive. Are we at that scale or are we smaller? Like, is this a mega project?
Speaker 1:Are there, you know, can one can you hop in a golf cart and drive around? Or can you hop on the the bulldozer and push the dirt around?
Speaker 11:Or is
Speaker 1:it like, you know, those huge those huge, you know, dump trucks that you see going into mines?
Speaker 11:Not that. Okay. Not that. So all above ground. Okay.
Speaker 11:So to set the stage, Paducah, Kentucky Yeah. Over 3,000 acres used to host enrichment, the number one enrichment site in The US. Mhmm. It's what made The US the world leader in enrichment back in the eighties and nineties. That site was a DOE site that was then fully shut down in 2013.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. So the town still remembers when there was enrichment there. They're very supportive of it. The reason we picked Paducah was actually the local community being extremely supportive of of enrichment and nuclear operations there. Through conversations with the DOE, we found a 100 acres at the south end of the site.
Speaker 11:So to answer your size question, it's really 100 acres inside the DOE fence Mhmm. Where they are currently taking down the old gaseous diffusion plant and planning to re industrialize that. So our partnership with DOE was around re industrializing that and potentially using some of the depleted uranium that's already there
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 11:To help produce new fuel. Okay. So we're talking, you know, ballpark a million square feet of building
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 11:On a 100 acres.
Speaker 1:Got it. You you you talk a big game about being upstream of the nuclear energy generation, but what's upstream of you? Does America have uranium in the ground? Do we have deposits? Do we need to mine this?
Speaker 1:Are we mining it?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I heard you guys have a whiteboard somewhere.
Speaker 1:We do. Please. Let's get the whiteboard out. I would love to We didn't wipe this out for you. Whiteboard out for us.
Speaker 1:This is a live demo, which is always risky, but, you are an expert in this.
Speaker 11:Let's let's see. This goes.
Speaker 1:We have them on the light on the lights. Locks on. So explain to us what what is this? The nuclear fuel reaction process or refinement process?
Speaker 11:This is yeah. This is just the five steps to make nuclear fuel.
Speaker 1:Okay. Great.
Speaker 11:So it's pretty simple. Step one is milling and mining. Mhmm. You get it out the ground. That's u three zero eight, often called yellow cake.
Speaker 11:Okay. You then convert it into a gas. Mhmm. Once it's converted into a gas, you can enrich. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Once it's enriched And
Speaker 1:is that a centrifuge process, basically?
Speaker 11:There's a there's a bunch of processes. We are not yet sharing our process. Okay. Maybe I'll come on later this year and and share that one. But there are a few different processes.
Speaker 11:Everything from Got it. Centrifuge, gaseous diffusion, laser, aerodynamic, you know, aqueous. Interesting. Once you enrich, you then can deconvert back into a solid. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And once you have a solid, you make fuel pellets. That's fuel fabrication. Yes. So in The US today, we already have US mining We do. In a few different states.
Speaker 1:And do we have the deposits here too? Is America rich in this natural resource?
Speaker 11:Yeah. We have plenty of uranium That's great. In The US. Our deposits are not as rich as some other countries, but they're still economical
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:To mine. Okay. And so you see new new mines coming online in Texas, in Wyoming.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But if someone throws at you, do we have enough fuel to power, you know, 10 gigawatts of nuclear power during the next wave of the AI boom, you're not blinking at that.
Speaker 11:This is not the issue. So plenty of US mines. Great. US conversion
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Is actually right across the river from our site in Kentucky. Mhmm. So there is a US conversion facility run by Honeywell.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. And that's and that's going well as well. That that's working.
Speaker 11:That was mothballed last decade
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 11:Bringing it back online now. Okay. So that production's coming back. Yeah. Enrichment is the one step where there's no capacity.
Speaker 11:Okay. Less than point 1% of capacity.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 11:So effectively out of the game here, there is, you know, r and d scale in different locations, but nothing that's commercially relevant for either our existing reactors in the grid or the advanced reactors coming soon.
Speaker 2:Is that the hardest step in the process?
Speaker 11:I think it's the step with the most technology leverage.
Speaker 12:Yeah.
Speaker 11:That's part of the reason we thought we can make a big difference here.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yes. You said you're not sharing your process there. I I can think of a lot of reasons for that. Is Jordy, quickly grab the mic. Is is there any risk with this business of like like fast follow risk?
Speaker 2:People see, you know, the business has traction
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, it seems so easy. I imagine like every YC founder will just be, I'm doing that.
Speaker 5:No. I I I think
Speaker 2:that to me, looks like the business with the least fast fall of risk because you have to be insane to Yeah. To go after this opportunity especially because like it feels like pretty quickly you'll have a talent vortex a lot of the people that are the enthusiasts, people on that that sort of bathtub curve bathtub curve. You talked about why would you wanna work at the the sort of, you know, second or third, you know, horse in in the race. Mhmm. Or how do you think about that?
Speaker 2:I mean, as a as a former FF guy, imagine, like, you want the you you want to build a with the lowest possible fast fall risk.
Speaker 11:Yeah. The main the main goal here is just bring this capability back. Mhmm. Your intuition's right though. It's it's not an easy thing to start.
Speaker 11:So to build a facility like this is over a billion dollars. Wow. Multiple billions at full scale. Mhmm. You know, obviously, it's a sense of technology.
Speaker 11:So a lot of the people on the team, almost all of them have to have security clearance who are working on tech. And so, yeah, there's there's a lot of different hurdles to get started. But, you know, I think at the end of the day, we want there to be multiple US players in the space. Mhmm. We think this is a lot like you know, there's so many parallels to space launch where I started my career at SpaceX.
Speaker 11:Yeah. SpaceX did become the place that a lot of aerospace engineers wanted to work. They moved fast. They did innovative things. They were making a real difference in the industry.
Speaker 11:But ultimately, even SpaceX wanted there to be many players because the ultimate goal wasn't to build a business. The ultimate goal was to make human spaceflight happen. Yeah. And for us, it's really about making nuclear energy not just not just the safest, not just the cleanest, but the cheapest form of baseload.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the SpaceX thing is so interesting because, you know, obviously, the Blue Origin teams worked very hard, but you have to wonder, would Blue Origin be as dominant as is without SpaceX? Probably, there's like some knock on or competitive effect just like, oh, if he's going, I gotta go. And now America has the two best spatial companies. It seems like Yeah.
Speaker 1:It seems like China's
Speaker 2:Somebody to to build a a viable competitor, you might need to spend a decade Yeah. At at the company Yeah. And actually Indeed. Learn learn the And
Speaker 11:and with Blue Origin, people forget Blue Origin started before SpaceX.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's right.
Speaker 11:So I think the big difference was that Blue Origin had someone that everyone on the team knew would just fund it continuously until it succeeded. SpaceX was do or die, basically. Yeah. And so their whole mindset was always we're bringing the cost down. Yeah.
Speaker 11:We're commercial.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have
Speaker 11:to stand on our own two feet.
Speaker 12:That's our
Speaker 11:mindset as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Every penny matters. Interesting. Talk to me about the fuel. You said fuel pellets.
Speaker 1:We've had Doug from Radiant on the show before he talks about Triso fuel. What is Triso fuel? Are you able to make it? Are you solving his problem? Or are you just one piece of the puzzle for him when he needs fuel?
Speaker 11:We are this middle step of enrichment. So Yes. Downstream of us, people take take the gas that's converted one step ahead of us Mhmm. Turn it back into a solid, and then turn it into fuel pellets. Triso is one type of fuel pellet.
Speaker 11:Okay. So Triso is typically used for HALEU, the more enriched fuel. Mhmm. And the basic idea is that it's additional containment for the fuel. Okay.
Speaker 11:So not only is it containment, but it also has a negative reaction coefficient with temperature. So as things get hotter, it slows down the reactions and interesting. Basically self regulates. Got it. And so a lot of people like Triso.
Speaker 11:Safer. Safer, adds a little bit of cost.
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 11:Reduces packing density inside the core. Yeah. So there's some drawbacks, but overall net positive.
Speaker 1:But if Triso becomes a massive industry, you'll be part of the supply chain.
Speaker 11:That's right.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Yep. Okay. Got it.
Speaker 11:There's really two form factors people are thinking about a lot. One is HALEU inside of triso pellets. Okay. Second is traditional LEU Mhmm. Cylinders ingots.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. What are you seeing in terms of timelines to bring new reactors online? Obviously, we talked to Doug about going to the dome and testing a new reactor design.
Speaker 1:There's a constant line I hear repeated about the regulators haven't approved new designs. It feels like there's lot of energy to change that. When do you expect sort of a a blip in the graph, an uptick in the growth of nuclear power generation in America? Yeah.
Speaker 11:We we really expect to see that growth curve really getting steep at the end of the decade. End of So you've probably talked to a few reactor companies Yeah. Beyond DOUG. A lot of people are aiming for this year for first Tests. First criticality, first You then would go through a licensing process that now under NRC
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 11:Executive orders is meant to only take eighteen months. And so, you know, that puts you at, let's say, 2028 for really having the ability to go build and deploy a lot of reactors. I think we then see that really curve up early 2030s. Got it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I and I imagine that even if you get a a Radiant or any of these other companies to produce a few units, it takes a while until it actually puts a dent in the curve. Right?
Speaker 11:That's right.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about the relationship with the White House. I love seeing you in the Oval Office. It's amazing. It's such a such a tangible example of the work that you're doing. Are but but how do the other energy players think about nuclear today?
Speaker 1:You could imagine a world where big oil is saying, yeah. It sounds good, but let's just not do that. Let's keep doing what we're doing because it's our core business. Or we could see what we're doing in AI where Google jumped in on the AI boom immediately. And so do you think the oil and gas companies will become
Speaker 2:They created it.
Speaker 1:The creative areas. Maybe it's bad analogy. But but you get what I'm saying. Like, you could see a world where oil and gas companies become very synergistic. They're partnering with you.
Speaker 1:They are excited about the new technology. Or maybe it's more just competitive till the end. How do you see that playing out?
Speaker 11:I don't worry about the competition piece. Really? I think yeah. I think one one microcosm of this is really looking at the Department of Energy, and it's, you know, Secretary Wright Yep. Comes from the oil and gas industry Okay.
Speaker 11:Yet he's been one of the biggest advocates for nuclear energy. Interesting. And so a lot of people will will ask the same question around, is the oil and gas industry an enemy of nuclear? Has it been an issue for nuclear? Mhmm.
Speaker 11:I'd say not at all. The oil and gas industry has been trying to increase US energy production by whatever means are available. Yep. And that's that's the lever that they have. The nuclear industry has not done the same thing for, I think, a variety of reasons.
Speaker 11:But people blame outside parties. I think, you know, in the principle of just taking ownership for things, think it's the the industry needs to take ownership for why it has not grown. And I think Yeah. The advanced reactor vendors are trying to solve that by bringing down the cost while increasing safety and increasing deployability.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Jordy?
Speaker 2:Where how how are you setting up the the company geographically? I'm assuming you're spending a good amount of time in Kentucky, but, know, where where is the team mostly been?
Speaker 1:Part of San Francisco.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. Right downtown. No. Kentucky is where we're really growing the team aggressively, but engineering is also in LA.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 11:So two pieces, engineering headquarters, G and A, really primarily California. And then the facility itself, construction production
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Primarily Kentucky. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about solar. You worked at SpaceX. Elon's a bit of a solar maxi, at least it seems like he's a solar maxi. It's always hard to read the tea leaves from his post, but solar seems like a similar opportunity. It's a big scale.
Speaker 1:It's unlimited. It's the fusion reactor in the sky with unlimited energy. And a lot of folks have painted sci fi solar punk futures. You obviously looked at those companies too. How do the two technologies play together?
Speaker 1:Why did you think nuclear was the real bottleneck? What are the benefits of nuclear relative to solar? When do you pick one over the other? What does the blend look like over the next couple decades?
Speaker 11:Yep. Yeah. So the solar AI data center in orbit concept is a new thing. Mhmm. You know, it's probably the last few weeks that's really become something people are talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:If we rewind a couple years ago and we're talking, okay, data centers on earth Yeah. And do you want to do solar or do you want to do nuclear? Sure. Solar obviously takes a lot more area on the ground, but there's there is plenty of area Sure. For that in general.
Speaker 11:The missing piece was really storage. Yeah. So solar is inherently cyclical. Yep. You need to smooth it out.
Speaker 11:Yep. To smooth it out, you need very cheap grid scale or at least gigawatt scale storage. Batteries. Batteries or other forms. We haven't had that yet Yeah.
Speaker 11:At a cost point that I think can compete with nuclear.
Speaker 6:Sure.
Speaker 11:That could change. Yeah. And that would be great. But for now and the foreseeable future on Earth, it's nuclear.
Speaker 1:And that's what you mean by base load. Nuclear power plant, once you fire it up, you're getting whatever it says. If it says one megawatt, you get one megawatt twenty four hours a day. It doesn't matter if it's sunshine, rain, snow.
Speaker 11:That's right. Versus turning off at nighttime and having to go off the batteries that were charged up during the day. Yeah. And now when we talk about in orbit Mhmm. It's a whole different ballgame.
Speaker 1:Because you can be in sun synchronous orbit, you get sunlight like 99% of the time. Correct? That's right.
Speaker 11:Got So if you have very cheap launch capacity Yeah. If your GPUs don't weigh very much Yeah. Which they don't and they're high value Yeah. You could potentially put all of that in orbit Yeah. Have your solar panel completely in sun sync
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 11:Solve the battery issue. The one remaining piece is you've got a lot of incident solar energy. You're gonna run those GPUs. How do you cool them? And I think that's that's the piece that people are gonna be working on for the next few years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's the material science question. So you're saying put the solar panels in orbit. Keep them off the Earth. Earth is your domain.
Speaker 1:We're gonna do nuclear down here. That works? Of course, we'll do both.
Speaker 2:Until until, of course, you know, the 2040 pitch for general matter, we're putting a putting a reactor on the moon.
Speaker 3:On the moon.
Speaker 2:Reactors.
Speaker 1:There there nuclear does have applications in space though. Right? Didn't the what was it? The Mars lander, the Mars helicopter that we put out there had some sort of nuclear fuel in it? How does how do you get energy without putting a full nuclear reactor there?
Speaker 1:Do you understand how it works?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Typically, you'll have a fuel source
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:That has a shorter half life Okay. And can emit a lot of energy more
Speaker 1:quickly. Okay.
Speaker 11:Uranium has a very, very long half life. Okay. Some of these other ones have much shorter. So you can harness heat off of that and charge batteries continuously.
Speaker 1:So it's basically just a hot rock?
Speaker 11:That's
Speaker 1:right. It's not actually a full reactor with rods going in and out. It's not Chernobyl or anything like It's just a hot rock.
Speaker 11:That is yeah. That's right. If you're talking about lunar reactors, that would be a different story. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 11:If you're talking about, you know, interstellar things from science fiction Sure. More like a reactor
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Is what everyone's always talked about. But the things that have been deployed Yeah. So far are usually radioisotopes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. What are the biggest bottlenecks leading into the end of the decade? 2030. That seems like an important moment for the company.
Speaker 1:Obviously, the job's not finished then, but talent, money, approvals, regulatory, enter anything else? What what else is going on?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Our the way we think about it is is the primary bottleneck to get online by end of decade Mhmm. And to be at huge scale with the world's lowest cost of enrichment is all about the team. Yeah. So it's all about recruiting.
Speaker 11:It's all about engineering.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:It's not just engineering of what goes into the building. It's the construction of the building. So out in Kentucky, we're building our own EPC and general contractor in house to run that just like was done at Tesla Gigafactories. Yeah. In LA, we're doing the engineering on all the components that go inside to to cost and scale optimize those.
Speaker 11:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How do you balance the desire to run quickly with not swinging at every pitch when you get a new applicant? It feels like it feels like hiring is maybe similar to investing. You don't wanna just say, oh, I have to make it one investment every quarter because my fund is x size. You also might not wanna say, need to hire one engineer every month. Right.
Speaker 1:How do you how do you stay sane in an environment where you have to hire people?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's lumpy. Yeah.
Speaker 11:You know what your open roles are. You know what you want to have on the team. Yeah. If we look at that, we're hiring over a 100 people this year at 12 sites.
Speaker 1:Oh. We gotta hit the gulf for that. Boom. I get excited.
Speaker 2:How does it feel in person? It's like you can feel it really feel
Speaker 4:it in
Speaker 1:your bones. It's louder in person. I can feel it. Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 11:But like you said Yeah. You have to you know, the key thing for scaling a company is Yeah. Keeping the bar high. Yeah. I think Naval has said this a bunch of times.
Speaker 11:Yeah. The team you build is the company you build. Yeah. And so we're trying to find people that are just extremely passionate, great engineers, great operators who are aligned and just wanna work on this problem and solve it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the biggest lesson from working with Peter on the board, on the team, like with, you know, your career that you're taking through this business?
Speaker 11:I think for this business, it was it was really the lesson of, you know, a lot of people wanna go after a trillion dollar market and own a tiny percent of it. Sure. We're trying to solve first the halo shortage in The US that's gonna prevent all reactors from coming online if they can't have the fuel that they need. Yeah. That's arguably a small market today.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. But you wanna start it's okay to start in a small market and then grow into a bigger one.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And so our markets are really HALEU Yeah. Which you could say is maybe a $100,000,000 market today. Something like that. Yeah. And then LEU in Richmond, which in The US alone is a couple billion dollar market.
Speaker 11:Yeah. And then you go from there. So I think probably the best lesson is the zero to one lesson of start small, solve a real problem for some known customer and go
Speaker 2:from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great. That's great. Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Thank you so Appreciate
Speaker 2:the full breakdown.
Speaker 1:For coming on the show.
Speaker 2:The whiteboard moment. We appreciate a whiteboard moment.
Speaker 11:We love
Speaker 1:a whiteboard moment. Well, we will leave you there. Thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow at Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple podcast and Spotify and sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com.
Speaker 1:See you tomorrow. Goodbye.