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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 TBPN. Today is Wednesday, 03/18/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money.
Speaker 1:Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Let's also pull up the linear lineup. Of course, it's the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspace on linear using agents.
Speaker 1:We have a great show lined up. We have Matt Wang from Paradigm joining at the end of the show. Cameron from Maximus is coming in person. We got Andy Fang from DoorDash.
Speaker 2:Matt New we acquisition.
Speaker 1:Got a got a great lightning round.
Speaker 2:Chris, we're we're adequate.
Speaker 1:Two Chrises. We're going back to back Chrises today. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for watching TBPN. As always, the big news of the day, more news out of NVIDIA GTC.
Speaker 1:Lots of NVIDIA announcements. The stock is up. It's a $4,440,000,000,000 company. Last time I checked, that is big. NVIDIA has been on absolute tear.
Speaker 1:And some really promising things with the Grok acquisition already or like pseudo acquisition, the deal, the Grok partnership. They're already starting to explain a little bit more about how those two technologies fit together. And there's a good there's some good coverage and trajectory about But the big news out of NVIDIA yesterday was that NVIDIA says it's restarting production of AI chips for sale in China specifically. So Jensen Huang says the company's supply chain is fired up after months of mixed signals from the Chinese market. We've been tracking this for a long time.
Speaker 1:Of course, chips were banned first from sale for sale to China in 2022 by Joe Biden under the CHIPS Act. That also unlocked billions of dollars in incentives for American chip manufacturing. We began following the Intel story. We began following the Huawei story. There were a number of different initiatives.
Speaker 1:And then the narrative flipped back and forth, back and forth on what are the risks and what are the costs and benefits of actually selling chips to China. Back in 2022, after the CHIPS Act, which you if you wanna read up more on it, we've interviewed Chris Miller, the author of Chip War. It's a great book. I highly recommend it.
Speaker 2:We should have him back on.
Speaker 1:That'd be amazing.
Speaker 2:About that time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Ben Thompson's also covered the story throughout. There's a whole bunch of good stuff in on chips in China. And the calculus has always been pretty clear, like, on the first pass, the first order effects. AI is an important technology.
Speaker 1:America wants an advantage in the AI race, the AI build out. So less chips for China means more chips for America, stronger economic engine.
Speaker 2:Massive chip shortage right now. Yeah. You see old chips being valued basically more than they were when they launched. Yeah. Which implies there's plenty of demand in America.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So you'd wanna keep those here.
Speaker 1:And But And plenty of demand at TSMC from American chip makers, specifically. Yeah. I mean, even Apple is sort of getting crowded down there on the two nanometer, which I think is better for phones than for GPUs, but they're, you know, they're they're grappling with what the compute boom, what the AI build out boom will be for their business. But the second order effects are what are more complicated. So in November 2022, I was writing about this and I said on a YouTube video, In the past, China's dependence on foreign technology companies has been seen as a key bargaining chip.
Speaker 1:Why would China invade Taiwan when they need to keep TSMC's manufacturing facilities online? Chip manufacturing is extremely precise. One of these factories isn't going to withstand a rocket hitting it. So if there is any sort of broad military action in Taiwan, TSMC probably gets a little bit damaged. I mean, even the tiniest earthquake
Speaker 2:Right. They they have to track the weather Yes. Outside of the facility. Exactly. If the weather outside of the facility
Speaker 1:is
Speaker 2:fluctuating
Speaker 1:at inside. Yeah. Earthquakes. Taiwan is famous or TSMC is famous where they don't even need, apparently, a, like, a like a detection system or a push notification to their employees if there's an earthquake. If the employees sense that there's an earthquake, they just get up and go to the factory and start working on things.
Speaker 1:They it's not like they need to, like, oh, we need to email all the employees. The employees just know because that's the level of sensitivity over the TSMC fab. So so if you wanna keep TSMC producing chips, you can't invade Taiwan. And so by banning the export of chips to China, the cost to China of a Taiwan invasion decreases. And so if China can't access TSMC chips anyway, it's a lot less risky to go to war.
Speaker 1:And that was always the risk with hardcore chip bans, that you'd create an increased risk of geopolitical conflict. And in 2022, the Russia Ukraine war was about six months old. Global conflicts have grown significantly since then. Obviously, we've been tracking the Iran war. And America's military is is potentially stretched thin, so the risks of a Taiwan conflict are higher than ever.
Speaker 1:And so you add to the fact that everyone agrees that we will be in chip constrained, the chip shortage through at least 2030. And the need to keep TSMC supplying chips to American companies is extremely important. It's always been difficult to parse the various arguments around selling chips to China because there's an insane amount of money at stake and many, many people whose basically, their full time job is advocate for a particular position. I was talking to a friend who who is interfaced with a lot of the different groups in in Washington. And there are, like, huge think tanks, huge lobbying organizations for on both sides because there's so many different interests going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not to mention how much of everyone's retirement accounts NVIDIA actually makes up.
Speaker 1:Holding up the world economy. Right? That's the meme. And that's certainly true. So there are good arguments on both sides.
Speaker 1:One that keeps getting trotted out is it's important to keep China dependent on the American AI stack, and it's reasonable. The better argument might just be dependent on a functional TSMC fab, but there is there are benefits to the CUDA ecosystem and to the idea that whatever models get built there will be applicable here, we'll be able to transfer those that research and development that happens over there very quickly. But the much more important thing is just that the more the economies are interlinked, the less likely there is a conflict. So all of this underscores the importance of TSMC Arizona, Samsung, Intel broadly, as well as startup fabs prod startup fab projects like the TerraFab. TerraFab.
Speaker 1:And there's a whole bunch of other companies that are doing that that are at least talking about tool making, talking about getting a fab up and running. Nothing that's really taken off. I mean, even Samsung is not fabbing any of the leading edge NVIDIA chips at this point. But, you know, there's incredible economic incentive and people have known that this is an important sort of cash cow business for a few years now at the very least. And so there's certainly been a lot of incentive to put put plans in motion that might play out before 2030 because there's such a shortage.
Speaker 1:And so in general, we're traveling this like long and narrow road, but I'm coming around to the idea that selling some chips to China is the best possible move at this particular moment in time. It was easy to stick with like the first order logic of just we want the chips because we can use them to power our economy, so we should have them. But going forward, it'll be really interesting to track how China's indigenous indigenization project of their domestic supply chain evolves. They, of course,
Speaker 2:have Yeah. My my take has always been that even if they are getting chips Yeah. It's not like the the party is gonna say, actually, the domestic our domestic supply chain is no longer important because we're getting a a drip of h two hundreds.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there's Keep
Speaker 2:the they're still gonna keep the momentum that they have. It just wouldn't be wouldn't be like them.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of debate over that because momentum comes from Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can take some of the wind out of the sails Yes. But they can just spend
Speaker 1:You can more slow the momentum potentially. That's the argument is that is that by limiting demand, you're like, there's a local local fab in China that just
Speaker 2:says A chipmaker.
Speaker 1:A chipmaker that that says, okay. Well, you know, our demand is half as much, so we're gonna so, like, we can't afford to scale. Sure. We have the money, but we don't really need to deliver this because there's no buyer, so you don't get the process level of, like, execution. You don't get the excellence that comes from actually needing to run the real business.
Speaker 1:It becomes more of, like, NASA than SpaceX. That that that's always the risk with like, you know, you're just throwing government money after it. Before we move back to The Wall Street Journal, let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma make, or Claude code, or Codex, or Sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas take shape and products ideas connect and products take shape, build in the right direction with Figma. And let me also tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.
Speaker 1:So, NVIDIA and the Trump administration have been involved in a complicated tango over the sales of its advanced artificial intelligence chips in China. Last April, the Commerce Department halted exports of the h 20 processor NVIDIA designed explicitly for the China market. That was the nerfed H200 that was not supposed to be able to train as advanced of models, but it was reported that the high flyer team behind DeepSeek sort of figured out how to use those chips effectively. So there was a debate over, is the H20 actually just as useful as the H200, or close to it, or closer? Well, it's sort of a moot question now, because H200 is coming to China, which is the more advanced version, the not nerfed version.
Speaker 1:So the company's fortunes turned again in December when The U. S. Said it would allow NVIDIA to sell its H200 processor, a chip that is a generation behind its most powerful series of GPUs. So this is not the b 200, not the Blackwell. This is the hopper, but it's still very advanced.
Speaker 1:In China, as long as the company shared 25% of its sales with the U. S. Government, so there's basically an export tariff. GPUs or graphics processing units are powerful chips used in AI training AI models. Think everyone knows this.
Speaker 1:In late January, after Huang visited China officials, signaled they would approve H200 sales as well. So there was a big debate over whether or not Beijing would block the imports of H200s in order to stimulate the indigenization of the domestic semiconductor supply chain. It seems like these will be going
Speaker 2:through It's and they will be inspire local industry to grind harder.
Speaker 1:Basically. But you have a whole bunch of AI labs that are not in the fab industry, that are not involved in the verticalization process, and they just wanna train great models because they have real businesses. Like, they're running Alibaba or Baidu or any number of companies, and ByteDance wants good AI and they want the best chips, they're not really interested in getting into supply chain at a deep level, at least in the short term. So but until Tuesday, the status of the B200 or the H200 in China was unclear. In NVIDIA's most recent earnings report, the company said that although it had received approval to ship small amounts of H200 products to China.
Speaker 1:To date, we have not generated any revenue from those sales. Speaking at the company's GTC event Tuesday, Huang said that in recent weeks, demand signals out of China have strengthened. We have been licensed for many customers in China. We have received purchase orders from many customers, and we're in the process of restarting our manufacturing. Our supply chain is getting fired up.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA didn't comment on how much it expected to earn from H200s sales in China. But in the past, the company has said that the Chinese market for its AI processors could be worth tens of billions of dollars a year. That makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:And Christina over at CNBC got the original scoop near the bathroom line at GTC Really? Huang happened to walk by security No way. And asked if he'd answered her earlier question. Wow. She said she had one more.
Speaker 2:He said you got China purchase orders. That means you got the green light from both sides? He said, yes.
Speaker 1:Wow. That is a that
Speaker 2:that is a scoop never know. As a scoop athlete, you never know where your next scoop is gonna come from. Seriously. You gotta be ready.
Speaker 1:The the the the sticking a microphone in someone's someone's face as they're walking by really does make sense.
Speaker 2:With the camera flashes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Jensen loves loves answering some questions on a on microphone line. Chinese authorities approve NVIDIA's H200 chip sales, source says, and TOR taxes says Xi Jinping has given up the situation with the H200 sale in China summarized. And it's everyone jumping off and Xi Jinping saying, stop.
Speaker 1:Domestic chips can work, maybe. And everyone at the lab saying, must get CUDA. Dude, NVIDIA is the future Falling
Speaker 2:into
Speaker 1:the 2 hundreds. And they're falling into the CUDA dependency mode. Will be interesting to see the evolution of the of the of the CUDA mote as as other chips come online. I mean, we've seen TPU become functional. So there there there are questions about the the CUDA mote long term, but it certainly seems like not a stop the stopper to demand right now as as labs place orders from from NVIDIA.
Speaker 2:In other news, JRR Tolkien used Gen Z brain rot slang over seventy years ago. That's how ahead
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:He was. And the quote maggots jeered that and cigars, you're cooked.
Speaker 1:You're cooked.
Speaker 2:White skins will catch you and eat you. They're coming.
Speaker 1:Oh, he's like using it literally. Like you that you will be They're cooked. By the some some, I don't know, villain, I suppose. A cry from the Grishnakh showed that this was not mere jest. Horsemen riding very slowly had in this is really hard to read with these hyphens had indeed been sighted, still far behind but gaining on the orcs.
Speaker 1:So the orcs will cook you if you if you fall behind, I suppose. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent with Okta.
Speaker 1:And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. NVIDIA's biggest GTC announcement was a $20,000,000,000 bet on the same problem that Cerebras solved six years ago, says Andrew Feldman, the CEO founder of Cerebras.
Speaker 2:Shots fired.
Speaker 1:Shots fired indeed. He says their next gen inference chip, not available yet, has a 140 times less memory and less memory bandwidth than Cerebras. To run a single 2,000,000,000,000 parameter model, you need 2,000 Grok chips. On Cerebras, that's just over 20 wafers. Even paired with GPUs, Grok's maxes out at a thousand tokens per second.
Speaker 1:We run at thousands of tokens per second today and every day in production now. Why? When you connect 2,000 chips together, every Internet connect has latency, every cable has overhead. It doesn't matter what your memory bandwidth is on paper if you're bottlenecked by the wiring between the thousands of tiny chips. We solved this with WaferScale, one integrated system, little interconnect tax.
Speaker 1:Jensen told the world that fast inference is where the value is. He's right. It's why the world's leading AI companies and hyperscalers are choosing Cerebrus. And so he puts up a little graphic of Cerebrus versus Rubin plus Grok together on one system, and he is touting 90 times the amount of memory, 90 times the number of chips needed to run a 2,000,000,000,000 parameter model. I don't know how relevant I don't know.
Speaker 1:Is there like, I wonder how this scales relative to well, what if you're not running a $2,000,000,000,000 a 2,000,000,000,000 parameter model? If your, you know, buybacks lower, does this number get much more manageable? It it it does feel like he you know, I mean, he's talking his book here. But I don't know. There are probably
Speaker 2:But it's a big book. Is a A lot to talk about. It's a big chip.
Speaker 1:I I don't know. I mean, have you Tyler, have you ever run into any Grok chips in the wild? I remember the original demo was inferencing Lama that was pretty fast, and everyone was like,
Speaker 3:that was amazing. I've hit the API a few times. Okay. Because yeah. You can, like there's just, consumer API where you can run, like, local smaller models.
Speaker 2:I had heard It's very fast.
Speaker 1:A lot of chips, but that's not on its face like a a huge a huge problem necessarily. But it did seem like they had made some some design decisions that maybe painted them into some particular corners, but those corners might be still economically advantageous in certain cases.
Speaker 3:But Yeah. I mean, it was definitely still slower than there was like the chat Jimmy thing. Right? Because because that's very much like it's literally the model
Speaker 2:No one can beat
Speaker 1:chat Jimmy. I mean, do we know that that's what happening with the chatjimmy.ai demo? Because, like, the Grok demo was very much like, we have a chip, here's a demo, and it was actually 2,000 chips behind the scene or or or a bunch of chips together behind the scene, behind the scenes. And so it's possible that the chatjimmy.ai is doing something similar where in order to speed things up
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's I asked chat Jimmy what's your favorite thing about Tyler Cosgrove from TBPN. Couldn't find any information about a person named Tyler, especially in the context of TBPN, which might refer to the Big Bang Theory, a popular TV show or maybe Big Bang Theory. The Bachelor Paradise. The A reality TV.
Speaker 1:TBP? TBP. The Bachelor Paradise Network. TBPN. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That works.
Speaker 2:It's it's fast, though.
Speaker 1:It's fast, but it doesn't I I I don't think chatchimney.ai has search. Yeah. Like, I I think it's
Speaker 2:all just That would that would slow. Slow things down.
Speaker 1:Let's let's play this video of I wanna play this video of Jensen back in September 2009. Bubble Boy is having some criticism of GTC because apparently people are getting up and asking questions that are intended to pump bags. He says, GTC has turned into a conference less about tech and innovation and more about pumping your bags by getting a Jensen sound bite on some niche supply chain player. And so someone someone stood up and asked, hey. Why'd you invest 4,000,000,000 in these companies?
Speaker 1:I mean, that's that's a reasonable
Speaker 2:Well, let's take a walk through history.
Speaker 1:I make content for Well, this
Speaker 5:is investors so they can have
Speaker 1:That's what it's the average American and people around the
Speaker 6:world That's cool.
Speaker 7:And have a
Speaker 1:Let's play this this Jensen clip from 2009, September 2009. Jensen walks onto a small stage at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. About 1,500
Speaker 8:people in in computer science. You know, if Dave Patterson and John Epstein, I know that Pat here and him sitting here watching me, you guys are gonna go nuts. If he
Speaker 1:put a mic in on him.
Speaker 8:This is not computer architect now. This is called CEO man. But it illustrates the point At stage. So
Speaker 1:much smaller.
Speaker 8:Why it makes a lot of sense? This is an illustration of coprocessing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Carlos says no jack.
Speaker 8:I realize there's a lot of words No jack? Looking pretty jack. Simple math here to do. There'll be a strong test at the end of this presentation. So this is a simple math.
Speaker 8:The first the first section on top is a an example of a program that is parallel intensive. And on the bottom is an example of a program.
Speaker 1:What does this mean? What's this doing? Sequencing camera.
Speaker 8:And the way that I simply made it is the serial the serial code part of the intense parallel intensive program just takes about one second to run. Whereas the parallel parallelizable part of the code takes a hundred and ninety nine seconds to run, which makes sense. It's an enormous amount
Speaker 6:of data.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA was a $7,000,000,000 company when this happened. Jensen kept saying the GPU wasn't just a gaming chip. It was a computing platform. Kept saying parallel processing would reshape every industry from medicine
Speaker 2:to finance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just put the video games in the bag, bro.
Speaker 1:Seriously. Yeah. This was yeah. Before training neural networks. Wow.
Speaker 1:Pretty pretty remarkable. 17,000 people are at GTC twenty twenty six now packing a hockey stadium watching the same guy explain what comes next. Very, very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market?
Speaker 1:Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Semi Analysis is over there slopping it up. They say LinkedIn is the only social platform where you can post a sloppy reaction poll and it will get tons of engagement.
Speaker 1:We need to do this.
Speaker 2:Wow. They're just really throwing shots. I I give LinkedIn a chance. On a long enough timeline, they will all come to x. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It might take thirty, forty years. But they'll make it over to the dive bar eventually. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 1:I I like that semi analysis leans into the particular, like, rough edges of every platform. Like, I follow them on Instagram, and they actually post just, hilarious vibe reels and brain rot.
Speaker 3:It's just like brain rot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But often, it's Completely not.
Speaker 3:I'm the only one that's liking them.
Speaker 5:I I comment on a lot
Speaker 7:of the videos.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I comment too. It's amazing. Like, they are not having broad success, but as far as, like, what Instagram
Speaker 3:Well, it's like, you know, the fine details of Yeah. You know, inference max or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then it's like Minecraft parkour over it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. I I I was in a few of them because they clipped our our interview with Dylan Patel from Cisco AI Summit and put some some videos on there. But there's a hilarious there's a hilarious one where it's like, it leads in with some some some text about, like like, you know, semi semiconductor analyst, like, explains, like, this thing, and then there's just no audio while he's explaining it.
Speaker 1:And then it just cuts to me, and I'm like and then it cuts back because we we we were editing the footage. And so I don't even know if it was like a mistake upload or it's like intentional, but it's all very very funny.
Speaker 2:Apple cracks down on vibe coding apps. It's over for you, Tyler. Apple's moves come as vibe coding apps help people create apps.
Speaker 1:Vibe coding apps, not vibe coded apps.
Speaker 2:I know. It's over for him times two.
Speaker 1:No. Because he doesn't he doesn't vibe code on a phone.
Speaker 2:I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Speaker 1:He doesn't vibe code on a phone. I'm kidding.
Speaker 2:But let let's Apple's move comes as vibe coding apps help people create apps for Apple devices as well as web apps that aren't listed in the App Store.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Let's get into Stephanie and Aaron's reporting from the information. Apple has quietly prevented AI vibe coding apps such as Replit and Vibe Code, which help people create games and other applications from releasing updates to their mobile apps on the App Store unless they make modifications.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The company confirmed it has told some app developers that the Vibe coding capabilities violate long standing app store rules that say an app can't run code that changes the way it or other apps function. Apple's crackdown is happening at a time when vibe coding apps are emerging as a potential threat to the company by helping developers create web apps that aren't listed on its App Store, a key source of revenue and profits for Apple. Some of these vibe coding apps also help developers create apps for Apple devices. The that ability has likely contributed to the explosion of new apps launching on the App Store in recent months leading to a slowdown in approval process in some cases, developers say. An Apple spokesperson said the policy isn't specific to vibe coding apps.
Speaker 2:Following the information's questions about the standoffs, two of the people with knowledge of the situation said they believed Apple was on the verge of approving updates to Replit and VibeCode. Mhmm. Those app makers had agreed to either tweaks tweak their apps the way their apps showed customer previews of VibeCoded apps or get rid of certain VibeCoding capabilities entirely like making apps for Apple devices. So it sounds like you're able to basically generate an app with Replit and then use a preview of it that maybe is functioning a little too much and effectively allowing Replit, the app, to do things that Apple didn't approve of.
Speaker 1:So, yeah. The the the app store Never heard of VibeCode. That's what I was looking at. The web the app store is always so fascinating. So if you search VibeCode, you get an ad for Replit as the first response.
Speaker 1:Replit is number three in DevTools, has 14,005 star reviews or or reviews. Then VibeCode is listed as VibeCode website builder, has 3.3 k. Pretty solid. It's it doesn't look like it's charting, but it says learn how to vibe code. No experience needed.
Speaker 1:Build websites with professional designs. Much more focused, I think, on static content. But there's been a number of these, like, website builders in the App Store for a very long time. Then Replit ranks number two when you search for VibeCode because it says Replit, VibeCode apps. Then you get Sticky, an AI game maker, VibeCoder, AI app creator, anything, the AI app builder, vibe code, Claude, and Codex AI with 21 stars.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of people that are like Yeah. Just just jumping in. There's one that's
Speaker 2:gone Replitz argument is that they're helping the user generate an app that's just opening it up in a web view. So effectively a a just a mobile an app built for mobile web. Yeah. And Apple's arguing that, no, that's effectively in in the Replit app.
Speaker 1:Would you download this app, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I don't know. It's insane.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you can see. It's
Speaker 2:Definitely vibe coded the app store preview.
Speaker 1:It's like a graphic, like an AI image of the of the Gigachad using the computer. It's very funny. But, man, there is so much IP infringement. Love a code. Not from Lovable.
Speaker 2:Love a code.
Speaker 1:Build with vibe code. They're like, I wonder who they're trying to SEO against. Clearly, there's a whole
Speaker 2:Who doesn't love the code?
Speaker 1:That are just trying to steal market share from from incumbents that have name recognition. We do you remember that company that was doing vibe coding on the on the iPhone and they would tap your phone and basically airdrop you the app. We we we talked to them at YC demo day last year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and there's a number of these companies that are, you know, trying to be like the the AI game store, sort of like the the meta simulator, like build a simulator and and create a harness that's really good at vibe coding a game. It feels like a really valuable category if you can crack it, but you are gonna be bumping up against the App Store
Speaker 2:all have to compete with Sam Altman. Yeah. Dario Amade. Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 2:I'm Jad.
Speaker 1:I do I do wonder if there will be some sort of or or I mean, Roblox would be like the bigger one. Maybe? Or does it come out of Codex and Cloud Code instead? Like, how do you I wonder I wonder what the barrier and how how much distribution matters there for that for that audience of people that wanna like vibe code a game.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For gaming, I just think Roblox is just gonna continue to be like Roblox is the Roblox of vibe coding.
Speaker 1:And yet, we did not build our simulators in Roblox.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But they're not like massive multiplayer games.
Speaker 1:And we want people to be able to click a link and and use it on their phone immediately.
Speaker 2:We actually We have a new simulator coming by the way. We have a We're addicted to sim simulation.
Speaker 1:We do love simulators.
Speaker 2:This one, we're we're putting a little bit more effort into, and John's already addicted.
Speaker 1:I would say this one is, like, just actually fun. Jeremy Gaffan simulator was more just, like, a different way to experience podcast. It was educational.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Was for people that didn't just But listen to his episode on Investec.
Speaker 1:They sat They studied. Simulated it. Yeah. But the the actual interaction pattern of, like, guessing and whatnot, like, it it it was like, oh, this is novel. And then it was like, Okay, this is a chore.
Speaker 1:And then it was like, Okay, how many questions are there? 200. There were, what, like 60 questions or 40? 48. That's a lot
Speaker 2:of questions. This new simulation, you're not going to be able to put it down. You're not going be able to put it down. And it can effectively solve some industry wide issues
Speaker 7:Yes.
Speaker 2:That are happening right now.
Speaker 1:Potentially. So
Speaker 2:But We're going for impact. Yeah. We're going for fun.
Speaker 1:But, you know, Apple's had this long standing policy around do not do not like like they want to review the software. And so you can't create an app that rewrites its software. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wonder if Apple can do anything to create more like a peer like a mini sort of peer to peer experience. Because I remember I made I I was, like, learning how to to build iOS apps when I was, like, a early teenager. And I was so frustrated that I had built Pong Mhmm. But I couldn't just, like, share it with my dad and say, hey, you can play this.
Speaker 2:Like, it just wasn't it it was We can do TestFlight. Right? Yeah. TestFlight. But but TestFlight is still, like, it's certainly not designed for
Speaker 1:It's not like airdrop messed peer to
Speaker 2:peer experience.
Speaker 1:Like, you you still have to opt in to the TestFlight network or do all these do all these jumps. Like, it would be and it for some reason, it is weird that it kicks me out of the Apple ecosystem when I get a text a test flight
Speaker 2:says, high key Tyler could make better Siri and Replit with a thousand dollar budget.
Speaker 1:And Replit? Two massive things.
Speaker 2:No. Better Siri in Replit.
Speaker 1:Oh, better oh, okay. Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:For for his last thousand dollars.
Speaker 1:He's down
Speaker 2:to his last he's down to his last thousand bucks.
Speaker 1:That's a good challenge. Yeah. Maybe that should be the new constraint on on, like like, hackathons instead of it it's being like two days. It's like $20 is the max budget. And you and what can you do with that budget for the token allocation?
Speaker 1:Big budget for hackathon. Yeah. I mean I mean, maybe the $200 plan or something, like exhaust that you can't use multiple or something like that.
Speaker 2:The question is how much is Apple itself vibe coding? Because the software quality in the apps that I use
Speaker 1:Mark Gurman said they're using they're using Clot all the time. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:So But but but to me, I'm saying, so far, my experience recently
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I've had I've had an issue with the most important application on my phone Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is weren't complaining about the photos app.
Speaker 2:The the That was just poor design.
Speaker 1:The phone app has gotten a
Speaker 7:lot Yeah.
Speaker 2:John finally came around because the phone app is like
Speaker 1:Phone app.
Speaker 2:You're like, okay. I'm gonna hit this button. Yeah. I might be calling this person Yep. Out of the blue Yep.
Speaker 2:Even though I just wanna
Speaker 1:And I'm not sure what phone line I'm calling them on. I I guess they're designing for a world where people only have one phone number, but I still have a lot of people this is blowing your mind, Tyler. But back in the day Something like a home phone? Back in the day, people used to have multiple phone lines, multiple phone numbers. That's true.
Speaker 1:I'm so
Speaker 3:but yes. Like a work phone.
Speaker 1:Like a like yeah. Like a work phone. I mean, I when I was at FF, I had two phones. But Two phones? Two phones.
Speaker 1:That's right. But but a lot of people will have a a home phone and a mobile phone. And so that was the thing that you saved in your contact book a lot a long time. And the problem with the new the new iOS phone app is that I've been calling randomly people on their home phone if I have it saved. So I need to maybe go delete those numbers or, like, put them in, a comment field so that it always calls their iPhone.
Speaker 1:Because I have moved to just calling people on their mobile phones. But anyway
Speaker 2:Well, the good news, we have our first ever Apple employee coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Really? Oh, yes. April. Do. I'm very excited First about
Speaker 2:ever
Speaker 1:That's gonna be exciting.
Speaker 2:Apple employee Yes. On the technology business programming network.
Speaker 1:That's not, I mean, current Apple employee. We've had ex Apple employees Yeah. Of course. Live players.
Speaker 7:I move on,
Speaker 1:let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And let me also tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password reset. So, Martin Screlly.
Speaker 2:We gotta go over to SF with Martin Scrawley.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wait. Oh, okay. This is part two. We're just jumping straight into the
Speaker 2:straight into part two.
Speaker 1:Okay. We're going straight into part two. Take it for
Speaker 2:He says, have you ever had the thing that you know a lot about become the current thing? That's happening now with peptides. Holy s h I t. I don't know where to start.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Pharma basics. Most people obsessed with peptides don't know a few things. Peptides as pharmaceuticals have been around since the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1:Overnight success.
Speaker 2:Peptide is just a small protein. Peptides have extremely 19 short half 50, What's that?
Speaker 1:Nineteen fifty, that's 10 that's minutes minutes before eight p. M. Yesterday.
Speaker 2:Yes, correct. Peptides have extremely short half lives often on the order of seconds or minutes. If you're saying you're interested in peptides, you're saying, I'm interested in biopharmaceuticals, but only drugs with very weak pharma Pharmacokinetics. Cocokinetics. Pharmacokinetics.
Speaker 2:That's a new word for me. Drugs of which peptides are a subgroup usually have a specified target. This is an electrostatic interaction, usually hydrogen bonding between the atoms of the drug and the atoms of the target typically but far from always the receptor. If you can't tell me what the target is and how the drug is binding to it, you do not have a drug. You have delusion.
Speaker 2:Next, drugs are rigorously tested rigorously not only for safety reasons, just identifying the pharmacokinetics of a substance, how it travels in the body. Pharmacokinetics. Pharmacokinetics.
Speaker 1:It's a collab. Between pharma
Speaker 2:and They're linking and buildings. Exactly. Is arguably the most important starting point for any medicine. How is it metabolized? What is its half life?
Speaker 2:Without this basic information, you can't even begin to have a medicine. You can start pharmacokinetics in animals and scale to humans but you also need a therapeutic hypothesis. Yes. This is a thoroughly vetted biological idea considered a priority as to why this medicine just might work. You very rarely discover these after the fact.
Speaker 2:Determining target engagement requires assays. Assays. Assays. This is gonna be a rough one.
Speaker 5:This is a
Speaker 2:rough one. Also, guess I didn't a priory.
Speaker 1:Not a priori. Brutal. A priori assumptions.
Speaker 2:Brutal. Exposed. What assay was your drug tested in? What did it show? Direct target engagement is very important to falsify your biological hypothesis.
Speaker 2:And you can continue, John.
Speaker 1:Preclinical studies are so manufactured and fraudulent in today's day that I wouldn't rely on them for biological hypotheses unless they are from an incredible lab, were done a priori, etcetera.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Clinical reality is far harsher. Without a double blind placebo controlled study, there is often nothing to talk about. If I hear, but I know dozens of people one more time, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point, screw the FDA and pharma. Really? Really?
Speaker 1:Coming from Martin Screlly, he is saying maybe don't screw the FDA and pharma. When most of the SF and elsewhere crowd talks about peptides, they're not thinking, and this is going be a hard one for me, octreotide. They're thinking some random stuff has been thrown in animal models and is not FDA approved. Look, I'm not a softy. If there was a drug that could help me or my family, I'd find a way to get it.
Speaker 1:But I'm also not stupid and spent twenty years looking at pharmaceuticals. Drug companies like to make money. Drug companies love looking at random molecules and putting them in clinical trials. There are thousands of biopharmaceutical companies that are publicly traded. It is not hard to do a trial a clinical trial from a university.
Speaker 1:If your drug has never been tested, there is a reason. The reason is not that you are a biopharmaceutical genius who has found something cool that everyone else missed. The FDA plays an important role. They make sure that whatever is on the label is actually in the drug. That's why prescriptions are important.
Speaker 1:If I operated one of these research chemical shops, wildly illegal, I might add, I would just ship people alanine or something. No one would have any idea that it was b p that it wasn't BPC BS or whatever is popular right now. The other side of the argument. But Martin, there has to be some unapproved drug out there that's useful to take. Yes.
Speaker 1:There are plenty. That is how I made a living, says Martin Scrawley. But it is not for you, world traveler, to think about this. The things you know do not apply to pharmaceuticals. You it's not that you're not smart.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you're smarter than I. It just takes practice and time to understand medicine. I believe some places will even require you to go to school before you can decide who takes what drug. Just ask your doctor for medical advice. There's a reason you don't do surgery on yourself, fly a plane by yourself, etcetera.
Speaker 1:But Martin, I wanna optimize my health.
Speaker 2:You could fly a seven forty seven then.
Speaker 1:I could. I that that that I that is
Speaker 2:That's take. I agree. Don't need we don't need studies.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 2:need You could land the
Speaker 1:seven If 40 if if I needed to.
Speaker 2:If you if if it was asked of you.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Oh, 100%.
Speaker 1:But Martin, I want to optimize my health. No. Stop it. You're not sick. It's all nonsense.
Speaker 1:Leave medicine to physicians. You do not know what you are doing. Become a physician if you are that interested or spend a lot of time and money on biopharma. I have zero doubt you'll change your mind. There are no health care professionals that I know of who give an SHIT about these unapproved research chemicals.
Speaker 1:But wow, there are actual people there are actual dying people in the world. Duquesne muscular dystrophy, pecan, Lafora. Go fix those diseases. You'll make someone in their family a lot happier than LARPing that you know about medicine. This has to end.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Lots of debate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So We we are going to We have debate. Max Marchioni Okay. From Superpower will be coming on Monday Mhmm. At twelve to debate Martin Shkreli, the professor himself.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So we're gonna have a little debate. Superpower, I believe, sells Mhmm. These small proteins. Yeah. And so it'll be an interesting conversation.
Speaker 2:So Monday at twelve Pacific, we can look forward to the great debate.
Speaker 1:So there's some conversation in the comments here. Michael Drugan says, When people talk about peptides, they mostly mean things like retrutide, which is in stage three clinical trials and looking extremely good, or BPC-one 157, which tons of clinical and anecdotal evidence. Your critique is just self aggrandizing fluff that falls apart when you apply it to the actual examples most people are using. So he's he's saying, look, most people aren't using this stuff that's like crazy far out there. They're just pulling forward things that are actively being worked on by the
Speaker 2:pharmacy. Just another pod guy says, great post. Would be even better if you were in a flow state with a low dose of Retta.
Speaker 1:Martin does not think he doesn't like BPC one hundred fifty seven. He says BPC one hundred fifty seven has no evidence LMAO. Retrutide is literally a biopharmaceutical from Eli Lilly, pyridine.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, the concern with BPC one hundred fifty seven has always been that it could accelerate cancer growth. Yes. It stimulates growth. Yes.
Speaker 2:And so because it hasn't been studied Yes. Well enough in humans, that is a risk that people, I think
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Should be aware of.
Speaker 1:How much of this is actually because of people's AGI timelines? Like, is there a real overlap in San Francisco between, like, yes, it might give me cancer in twenty years, but I think we will cure cancer in ten. So if it makes me look good in the next five
Speaker 2:But I think it's all about people just want some type of edge. Yeah. They wanna alter their states. Yep. It's somewhat basically human nature.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's You can make the same argument for for why you should wait though because then in ten years
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:AGI will create like a super drug that will just instantly make me jacked. Oh. Right? Okay. It's like you can do it
Speaker 1:either But
Speaker 2:No one has a decade to wait to be Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You wanna be jacked now. Because the because all things equal, if the cancer risk of both scenarios is zero, you'd rather be jacked for forty five years as opposed to forty
Speaker 2:How much how much would we have to pay you a day to not lift anything heavier than a single piece of paper? There's no amount of money. There's amount of That's right.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:You can't wait ten years.
Speaker 1:Ridiculous. Let me tell you about Terrible Puffer. Serverless vector and full tech search. Built from first principles in object storage. Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 1:And let me also tell you about Cisco. Unlock critical infrastructure for the AI era. Seamless real time experiences. New value are unlocked every day with Cisco. Pretty iconic.
Speaker 1:Someone hire this kid, Robin Smith, is sharing a poster. Warning. Warning.
Speaker 2:This man has been known to increase shareholder value with a QR code out to his LinkedIn. I love this. And his name is Lachlan Von Eggman. That's a great name.
Speaker 1:And he's looking for a job as a summer twenty twenty six electrical engineering intern, and I cannot recommend this gentleman enough. He has the the correct mindset to go into a summer internship optimizing
Speaker 2:Lachlan Von Eggman, you should get a job as an electrical engineering intern. But if you don't, hit us up.
Speaker 1:Yes. This is good marketing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can Maybe we could hire Ben. Maybe we could hire this guy to work on our little electrical engineering problem. We got a lot of cords.
Speaker 1:He's just doing cable management. I think he has bigger bigger fish. That's crazy.
Speaker 2:But But
Speaker 1:whatever increases shareholder
Speaker 2:value of the homes,
Speaker 1:he might go for it.
Speaker 2:If you can handle cable management in the Ultradome Yeah. You can you can go far.
Speaker 1:Dependable thermonuclear work ethic. That's a good phrase. Thermonuclear work ethic. He says he's smart, with a capital s, and he shares his email. So if you're looking for an electrical electrical engineering intern this summer, give give Lachlan a call or shoot him a call.
Speaker 2:Let's head over to Eric Soufford. Okay. That mobile dev memo. He writes, private credit and the AI value reallocation. Starts with a quote, the essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous.
Speaker 2:Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, I e of truth. Martin
Speaker 1:Heidegger. I like it.
Speaker 2:Says, a familiar intuition about the emergence of any new technological paradigm is that new methods of engaging with the world create uncertainty which is most easily interpreted through the lens of perceived negative outcomes. As private credit markets deteriorate, it's tempting to not only to blame AI for that decline, but also to extrapolate any dislocation to its logical extreme. That is where rising default expectations among software companies are increasingly framed as early signs of a global systemic crisis. The most convenient analogy is the GS.
Speaker 1:And yesterday, carried no interest was giving a little bit of a doomer take around some of these software private equity deals, but he was not ringing alarm bells to the tune of the global financial crisis. Correct? Was just saying that some of these deals are underwater, some of these investment professionals might be needing to join different firms to find different opportunities, sort of the bull case for special situations. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Leaving the firm would be like, no, I didn't really work on it. I I was an investor, but I didn't do much investing during 2018 to 2022. I was I was mostly just sitting there saying, guys, like, don't know if we should do this deal.
Speaker 2:The the I guess, the the beauty of private credit is that you have all these different funds Mhmm. That are being deployed Mhmm. That have been deployed on different time horizons that have longer time time horizons in general. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so you can have basically like a rolling collapse versus like a like versus versus like an like a run on the bank Yeah. Where you have like one day Yeah. Where everyone realizes A
Speaker 5:rolling collapse.
Speaker 2:It's kinda like the worm. Like, you were doing the worm yesterday. Yeah. It's kinda like a that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That does not seem great. It's like a weight. Like when you when you tiny weight. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You start It's the like and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. No. So you're Yeah. You're six eights.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're starting the worm. Okay. And you're really tall and you're kind of coming back Falling
Speaker 1:a tree.
Speaker 2:Falling, but then you bounce back up like this. Okay. And you're steadily kind of like losing.
Speaker 1:I I hope that's not where this goes. Let's continue. This framing is incomplete, says Eric Zufer in Mobile Dev Memo. Says it isolates the destructive effects of AI while ignoring the mechanisms through which those effects propagate and where value ultimately accrues. In this piece, he makes the case that contemporary economic conditions bear no resemblance to those leading up to the global financial crisis of two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1:I also argue, he says, that any weakening in various categories of the software landscape as a result of AI will not only mostly remain contained there but will likely lead to economically expansionary productivity gains and efficiencies that offset potentially disproportionately losses in private credit. That's very exciting. The private credit market, he gives a little history on the private credit market. The private credit market has grown precipitously since the twenty twenty era COVID pandemic. In a note from the Federal Reserve, you're just like, there will be a rolling collapse.
Speaker 1:But also, I'm excited to grow. Like
Speaker 2:You gotta hit the air horn for growth.
Speaker 1:The authors in a note from the Federal Reserve, the authors remark that private It credit
Speaker 2:is funny that if you go back to the to our early bits
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:We were joking about praying for bubbles
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Encouraging leverage. People were listening. I'm not encouraging ads.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of things came true.
Speaker 2:Obviously, were joking. They were bits. I guess some people may have taken it a little too seriously.
Speaker 1:Isn't there isn't there some humor in every joke? Isn't that the point of humor?
Speaker 2:You mean some truth. Some truth. Some truth
Speaker 1:in every what did I say?
Speaker 2:Some joke. There is some humor in every joke.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Some some truth in
Speaker 2:every As John Coogan once
Speaker 1:said Wow.
Speaker 2:There's humor in every joke.
Speaker 1:I'm only on my second Diet Coke. Okay? Don't talk to me. Don't talk to me until I've had my tenth energy drink. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Anyway, this is what the Fed had to say. Private credit has emerged as one of the fastest growing segments of nonbank financial intermediaries, NBFIs, over the past fifteen years or so, reaching a total asset class size of 1,340,000,000,000.00 in The US alone by the 2024. A report from Morgan Stanley published in October 2025 estimated the size of the private credit market at the start of 2025 at 3,000,000,000,000. A report from Vanguard said it was 1.8. So people are sort of all over the place.
Speaker 1:Private credit is an asset class that functions as a parallel banking system. Don't call it a shadow banking system. It's just merely parallel in darkness. Look.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna be I'm gonna be concerned. Here's what I'm gonna be concerned. And you have leaders at at these private credit firms that say, you know, look, private credit's amazing.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. It's it's unfair Yeah. That we're keeping Yeah. All of these gains private and we need to make them public.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, some type of like Yeah. Federal Yeah. Kind of involvement Yeah. The private Yeah.
Speaker 2:Credit sector could make sense.
Speaker 1:It would also be really, really bad if, like, one of the most respected leaders of one of the biggest banks in the world was to compare the industry to, like Cockroach. Yeah. So, like, some really, like, you know, some bug. That would be Yeah. That would be a
Speaker 2:You don't wanna be compared to to a scottolling No.
Speaker 1:No. No. Maybe a soaring eagle instead. There are some soaring eagles in this in this in this portfolio of private credit assets. So while it predates the global financial crisis of two thousand and eight, the scale of assets under management for private credit began growing precipitously following the global financial crisis to fill a funding gap.
Speaker 1:As the regulatory standards for lending and capital requirements applied to banks such as those introduced by Basel III intensified in the wake of the GFC, nonbanks such as private credit lenders became a key source of funding for companies, especially those operating unprofitable as many software companies might be earlier in their life cycles. Chernenko specifically attributes an increase in nonbank lending to regulatory rigor. So the banks become more regulated after the financial crisis, and so nonbank lending that is not subject to the same regulations increases. Many, many such cases. Another note from the Federal Reserve identifies private credit as a significant vehicle through which private credit is deployed because private equity acquisitions are often funded with debt through leveraged buyouts.
Speaker 1:They used to go to banks for that for those lines of debt. Now, they're going to private credit firms.
Speaker 2:Okay. And I think we should fast forward to down further private credit in the AI bull case because this article is very long and you should go subscribe to Mobile Dev Memo and read it entirely. But let's skip to the AI bull case.
Speaker 1:Okay. So last month, Blue Owl sold $1,400,000,000 in private loans across three of its funds and announced that it would end regular quarterly liquid liquidity payments in one of its funds, OBDC two, opting instead for payouts tied to asset sales and other liquidity events. This month, Blackstone experienced a record number of redemption requests.
Speaker 2:And this is Blackstone. They wanted to inspire their LPs to grind harder.
Speaker 1:Yes. The company it would honor all requests.
Speaker 2:If we give you too much mailbox money.
Speaker 1:Mailbox money?
Speaker 2:I've never heard that term. Mailbox money? No. What's money that? That, know, like It shows up?
Speaker 2:You have some apartment somewhere and they just send you the check.
Speaker 1:Okay. No. I've never heard that before. Do you wait. Do you know that, Tyler?
Speaker 1:Mailbox money? No. Okay.
Speaker 2:Am I crazy?
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 2:know. Mailbox money refers to passive income drives regularly with minimum active effort Okay. Commonly in the form of real estate income
Speaker 1:Learn something new.
Speaker 2:Oil and gas royalties or That's why
Speaker 1:you listen to TBPN.
Speaker 2:It also is a mix tape by Nipsey Hussle.
Speaker 1:Nice. That's why you know it. Also this month, JPMorgan marked down the value of loans the bank holds as collateral from private credit funds related to software businesses, reducing those funds' ability to borrow. Some of this negative sentiment is attributed to recent bankruptcies from firms to which private credit facilities were exposed. First Brands and Tricolor are among the headline cases.
Speaker 1:But the substance of the current negative outlook might be traced to fears that AI will render the vertical SaaS products into which PE funds invested in the twenty twenty to twenty twenty two vintage irrelevant. So this is the SaaSpocalypse narrative, but playing out in the private markets. In a recent note, JPMorgan states, private credit has 21% exposure to software driven by the attractiveness of SaaS recurring revenue models and the fact that 96% of software companies are privately held. Exposure rises to 40% when including broader tech and business services, the highest among extended credit markets. We see software volatility as a sector led reset rather than a start of a macro default cycle.
Speaker 1:Similarly, last week, in an analyst memo, UBS proposed that investors increasingly wanna talk about AI disruption and our tail risk scenario, a rapid, severe AI disruption. This is not our
Speaker 2:This 20 this 21% exposure thing Yeah. Is important because when John Zito was talking to the journal or he thought he was talking off the record and being a little candid. He was saying, you know, you you I would expect, you know, some of these loans to record only recover 30 to 40% Sure. Of of the overall loan value. And that just says to me, like, okay, if you have 21% exposure, but you can
Speaker 1:Get 30 on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Still recover.
Speaker 1:You're down 15% overall.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not it's not
Speaker 1:But the goal is not to be down at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But you're also getting your your, you know, a lot of these Yeah. Companies have been getting interest. You know, you've been getting some amount of interest back Sure. On the loans.
Speaker 2:Yep. So but it but again, it it doesn't feel like like you're getting anything close to a GFC style Yeah. Systemic risk yet, especially when you account for the fund kind of time horizons and the fact they can just say, sorry, you can't get any money out right now.
Speaker 1:So here's what the Swiss bankers over at UBS had to say. They said, what is new is a clearer catalyst, rapid, severe AI disruption. Assuming contagion impacts not modeled in our earlier note, we anticipate U. S. HYLL and PC high yield leverage loan and private credit defaults could rise to 3% to 6%, 8% to 1014% to 15% for private credit, respectively.
Speaker 1:Blue Owl's updated redemption policy has been compared to BNP Paribas suspension of redemptions for three funds exposed to U. S. Subprime MBS in August 2007, roughly one year before Lehman Brothers failed. Reasons I've stated above, I think that comparison is flawed. The GFC was a systemic crisis driven by leverage, opacity and reliance on short term funding.
Speaker 1:Mortgage credit risk was embedded throughout the financial system and amplified by opaque securitized products like CDOs, CDO2 and CDO3 securities, which established tight interdependencies between institutions. Furthermore, the deep interconnectedness of The U. S. Financial system rendered the GFC inherently systemic. Home prices were tethered to a mortgage derivatives market that was amplified in value by complex instruments that couldn't easily be valued or understood.
Speaker 1:The same isn't true of the private credit market, writes Eric Souffert, which comprises relatively straightforward bilateral loans and is largely concentrated within private equity backed companies and dedicated credit funds. While pockets of stress have emerged, the system is less dependent on short term funding and less tightly interconnected with core financial infrastructure. While the total value of the private credit market is vastly larger than the high yield energy debt market of the twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen period, my belief is that distress will remain similarly localized and not spillover into the broader economy since there are limited direct risk conduits into the core banking system or short term funding markets. So further, valuation multiples for PE backed software companies and especially vertical SaaS companies are compressing for two reasons. One, rising interest rates have increased their debt burden as a result of their floating rate loans.
Speaker 1:So a lot of these companies were sitting at, you know, with with Fed funds rate of 3%. Now it's at 6% or I don't know what the Fed funds rate is, but interest rates have basically doubled since the ZERP era. And so their debt burden has also increased. And then two, AI enabled coding tools, more specifically, jeopardize the defensibility of their business. So viewing the composite impact of these two effects as a potential threat to the broader economy ignores the productivity gains posed by AI that imperil vertical SaaS software solutions in the first place.
Speaker 1:If a company can replace a SaaS vendor with a homemade solution because new AI enabled engineering tools reduce the time to deployment of a narrow task specific piece of software to days from months or even years, that's exactly what we've done here. We have a number of point solutions that didn't really exist before, but previously, we might have gone to some sort of some sort of software company and said, oh, well, can you do a special version for us? Or can you change
Speaker 2:Changes the economics.
Speaker 1:Changes the economics.
Speaker 2:Reduces basically like modes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that that same company is not only saving money by no longer paying for that specific point solution, but they are also likely accomplishing more across a number of other software development related vectors like clipping in our example. What might be critical here is the hurdle rate in terms of labor to accomplish any task. If one person can build software now with assistance from AI enabled development tools that previously would have required a team, then building software becomes more accessible generally throughout the economy. For small companies, there is no build versus buy tension.
Speaker 1:The base cost of SaaS solutions may have simply priced them out of the market completely since hiring a software development team is likewise unattainable. With AI enabled tools, the cost of building a point solution is reduced dramatically. Certain companies may now benefit from those solutions where, before, the economics were prohibitive across either building or buying. As Sibyl Security notes, in a rebuttal it published to a recent macro short thesis that was something big is happening or no, that was the Strini prediction. Job postings for software developer roles have increased with the availability of AI enabled development tools.
Speaker 1:Critically, AI reduces not just the cost of building software but the cost of attempting it, expanding the set of economically viable solutions across the long tail of firms. Not just more software but more bespoke solutions to commercial problems that should result theoretically in better firm level outcomes that aggregate to greater levels of economic productivity.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for better firm level.
Speaker 1:Atholif Aguion, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics last year, speaks to the expansionary effects of technology in his book, The Power of Creative Disruption, coauthored with two other authors. Automation is thus not in and itself an enemy of employment. Automation is not an enemy of employment. By modernizing the production process, automation makes firms more competitive, which enables them to win new markets and therefore to hire more employees. This is what we call a productivity effect.
Speaker 1:This same productivity effect was at work in prior industrial revolutions, those induced by the steam engine and then by electricity, and explains why neither of these revolutions produced the mass unemployment that some had predicted. How can we reconcile this optimistic conclusion with the more pessimistic finding mentioned earlier that automation has a negative effect on employment at the level of commuting zones? One response is to invoke the difficulty of measuring automation and robotization at the commuting zone level, as we discussed earlier. A second possible explanation is that firms do not automate sufficiently that do not automate sufficiently end up downsizing their employment, outsourcing their production, or simply going under. This would reflect an eviction mind's an eviction effect of automation on employment.
Speaker 1:Firms that invest significantly in new industrial equipment substantially lower their likelihood of going out of business over the following ten years compared to firms that do not make such It is thus not automation or manufacturing processes that causes firms to eliminate jobs, but rather missing the critical juncture of automation and consequently finding themselves forced to reduce the scope of their activities or even exit the market. In other words, it is through the process of creative disruption that automation can lead to job losses. In that sense, the vertical SaaS companies acquired by PE firms under low interest rate conditions face headwinds not just from rising rates but also because it's simply more costly as a result of institutional momentum for them to rebuild their workflows and internal development processes around AI than it is for a company to establish those workflows and development processes in the first place. In other words, established companies face higher costs in adapting to the AI era than do new entrants or companies that are internalizing these tools de novo. And PE backed firms are fundamentally averse to cost increases.
Speaker 2:All right. Go subscribe to Mobile Dev Memo. And before we get to our first guest of the show, we gotta check-in with Jeans, the restaurant in New York.
Speaker 7:They are
Speaker 2:weighing in
Speaker 1:They're weighing in.
Speaker 2:Private credit. They say, if you think private credit is a problem, wait until you find out about the annuity businesses they all bought.
Speaker 1:I love that that this story has gone so broad that it is now being posted to the Instagram stories of New York restaurants, but that's where we are in this cycle. Anyway, let's move on to Andy Fang, the cofounder of DoorDash, who is waiting for us and who is joining us. Andy, how are you doing?
Speaker 5:Hey. What's up, guys?
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 1:Good to see you again. Welcome back to the show. Wait. Actually, we did not have you on
Speaker 5:your show.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry. My first time.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Stanley and Tony were both on
Speaker 1:the show. That's right.
Speaker 2:That's That's right. Just right. Three it's just the three of you guys. Right? Or is there a force?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's the three Musketeers.
Speaker 1:The three Musketeers.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:How's life these days? How's 2026 going?
Speaker 5:2026 is good. I mean, lots going on. I mean, I guess, you know, for us, I think AI is like a big focus of mine personally company. So, yeah. I mean, recently, we just announced Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe start with some background on your role, how it's changed over the the the period of building DoorDash and growing the company. I'm sure it's been a wild ride, but I'd love to hear it from your perspective, and then we can go into the acquisition.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Totally. I mean, let's see. Thirteen years in the making, I guess. I mean, so I've been always involved on the tech side.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So really focused on product and technology at DoorDash. You know, I I helped scaled up our, like, product engineering teams for, I don't know, like, eight, nine years. First eight, nine years of the company. More after that, we brought on, you know, more senior leadership to kind of manage the the growing organization, and I've been more focused on how do we help DoorDash find the next big bets to help us keep growing.
Speaker 5:You know, I think whether it's our international businesses, our DashPass subscription program, more recently with the AI stuff. And so I think really just like sinking my teeth at the various technology and business problems and figuring out how we can, like, kinda continue to grow the business and find those next seats.
Speaker 2:Well, So talk about so talk about how the how the the news today ties into your focus.
Speaker 5:Absolutely. So, yeah, I was just briefly mentioning. So AI is, like, something that we're really trying to figure out at DoorDash, how we can incorporate it into our business. And so earlier today, we just announced that we acquired a company called Metis. They're an applied AI research lab.
Speaker 5:They went through YC and like we met with them, I want to say like six or seven months ago. And I think we were thinking about how to
Speaker 2:Was that intentional? Honest. 06/07?
Speaker 1:June a viral
Speaker 2:me. '7?
Speaker 5:I don't know. I was like, September just
Speaker 1:pops into your brain. It Every time. Such a weird
Speaker 5:I just feel a Oh my gosh. I'm such an old head.
Speaker 1:No. I do too. I I was I was reading through some Wall Street Journal article, and I was I kept saying the the the two numbers that shall not be named together. And Jordy was like, are you doing this intentionally?
Speaker 2:September. September. September.
Speaker 7:Meet
Speaker 1:September. You meet him.
Speaker 5:Absolutely. So yeah. So then September is when we first started talking to him. And we were trying to figure out how to productionize AI use cases at DoorDash. And so, really, I mean, we kinda spread in terms of talking to a bunch of different startups.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:There's a lot of startups, like, trying to figure out how to deploy AI for, like, the enterprise use case. And we just, like, decided to be really open minded about it and partner with a bunch of them. But Metis really stuck out to us. I mean, we were working with them since September. There are some really cool use cases around agentic commerce and physical intelligence that I can talk about a bit that we're working with them on that we're super excited to accelerate with them joining the company.
Speaker 5:So, yeah, I mean, they're, like, a bunch of cracked 22 year old, like, AI pill people, and they're, like, super, high hustle, very knowledgeable about what's going on in the space. And, you know, we just wanna inject a lot of the energy into how we're trying to innovate here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. May maybe may maybe take you through some of the the the history of AI at DoorDash because I imagine you were doing recommendation systems very early.
Speaker 2:Matching.
Speaker 1:Yeah. All all sorts of stuff. And then when the LLM revolution happens, like, the obvious, like, bolt on, like, chat box went into a lot of apps. Like, did that happen? And then, and then everyone starts using coding agents and IDEs.
Speaker 1:And so, like, what what have been the key turning points just internally at DoorDash and AI adoption?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean so I think to your point, I think there's two themes in terms of how we're trying to think about it. I think one is, like, employee enablement or, like, productivity. Mhmm. I think, obviously, you guys are very well aware of, like, since November, basically.
Speaker 5:I think there's been an explosion, especially in the the the coding side in terms of people being much more productive. Mhmm. I'd say, I think at DoorDash, our evolution in terms of AI on, like, the product facing side
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Has been a longer journey in the sense that I think we've been trying to figure out how this all fits into our marketplace and how this would benefit our customers. Like, to your point, I think a lot of people, ourselves included, we're just trying to bolt on some sort of chat box just to see how it would play in. And I think, one, when we did that a couple of years ago, the LLMs were not nearly as smart. But two, I think we just need to be more thoughtful. Like, how do we integrate this into the experience?
Speaker 5:And I think agentic commerce is something that a lot of people have been talking about and trying to figure out. And for us, I would say, like, agentic commerce is basically figuring out how we can leverage this technology to make it actually easier for restaurants to run their business and for customers to, like, find what they want on DoorDash. You know, I think one of the big problems that we've had on DoorDash is and what people tell me all the time when I talk to them is like, look, Andy, like, you guys got a ton of selection. I have no idea what to order. You know, it's like there's so much, you know, so many different restaurants and all these different cuisines.
Speaker 5:Like, I'm having, like, decision paralysis right now. And so I think, like, that's a very interesting problem where we feel like AI can be beneficial in helping you, like, find what you want and give you confidence in that as a customer. So
Speaker 2:I can't One of the Sorry. The the greatest luxuries or first world problems in life is is decision paralysis on what to eat. It comes comes for everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have have you been seeing folks like vibe code sort of like plug ins or add ons or features that then you can potentially use to adopt or roll into the actual road map. I swear I saw someone post something about this where they vibe coded basically a Chrome plug in that would filter DoorDash for vegetarian options. And it was, like, a pretty mature functionality, and they just went through, like, a series of prompts and got to, like, something that they were very satisfied with. But that feels like they're sort of doing the r and d on their end.
Speaker 1:And then once it's working, they you you can actually bring that back. I'm wondering about this, like, primordial explosion of of, you know, people building custom software and then the pipeline to actually bring that into the business as new features.
Speaker 5:That's interesting because I think there's some I haven't heard of that one specifically, to be honest. But I think there has been a lot of interest as like, hey. Like, can you figure out a way to, like, enable whatever my agent or, like, whatever software I'm building to integrate into the DoorDash ecosystem? Like, I've got some pings from founders be like, yo, when's the DoorDash CLI coming out? And I'm like, hold on.
Speaker 5:Like, we'll we'll need to figure out what what that means. And I think I would say, you know, and we also did something with OpenAI in terms of, like, being an early partner with their ecosystem and stuff. So we're trying to figure out how we wanna play in this space, to be honest.
Speaker 8:And if
Speaker 1:we think So so so just walk me actually through that OpenAI partnership because, like, wouldn't that be the CLI? Like, if I have Codex, that's a CLI. And then if you have a partnership with OpenAI, can't Codex CLI talk to DoorDash then, or is there some break in the chain that needs to be resolved?
Speaker 5:I think it's more like in ChatGPT.
Speaker 7:It's like
Speaker 5:not it's not really accessible through Codex, I don't think.
Speaker 1:So I to tell Codex to go use ChatGPT. Open a web browser, click on the ChatGPT box. It is weird, like, these un hobblings are so, like, intuitive, and then you realize that, okay, there's actually some sort of business reason or whatnot. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people are just trying to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Yeah. So I think one thing that we've been finding really, like, getting a lot of traction, especially with, like, what we're working with Metas on is, like, I think there's some actual agentic Yeah. Workflows, like, customer facing workflows that we're working on that.
Speaker 5:Like, just like us playing around with it the past couple of weeks, like, we legitimately think this is gonna be something that's gonna be beneficial to customers and Yeah. Help you find what you want and help you order, like
Speaker 1:Okay. So we How you think about
Speaker 2:how do you think about even positioning these products? It's like Mhmm. Obviously, like broad public opinion on AI is not great. Is this the kind of thing I I'm assuming you're just like trying to deliver a great experience and not, you know, slap Mhmm. Like DoorDash AI, the thing you've been waiting for.
Speaker 5:Exactly. I think we wanna introduce it in a way that's actually, like, beneficial to Yeah. Like, conversion or, like, you finding what you want and being satisfied with it. And so that's why we've taken our time in some ways in terms of, like, rolling something out that we wanna launch more broadly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But I think some of the challenges we've had historically is, like, these agents are not very smart at, like, finding you what you want. This was, like, a while ago. Right? Obviously, things have gone a lot smarter. The question is, how do we get leverage the intelligence that, you know, a lot of, like, harness building, context engineering type stuff.
Speaker 5:But it's also, like, how do you build a great experience around it? Like, you know, there's, like, obviously, LMs. They're super smart. Sometimes they, like, are slower with their reasoning, but we're just trying to find that balance. And, like, I think to your point, it's like, how do we create a interesting experience that doesn't just feel like we're slapping something AI on?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are you gonna do anything with with voice at all? Like, I can imagine imagine somebody in the DoorDash app saying like, hey, I want Chinese food. I wanna avoid
Speaker 1:tells you that they integrated with a decade ago.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Some voice modality stuff. Sure. I think I would say that's a little bit more like just a modality in terms of how you Sure.
Speaker 5:Place your order and like I guess if it's more natural language with Yeah. The AI technology like that's a
Speaker 2:natural Yeah. I'm saying like, yeah, it's natural language. You're kind of searching over all the offerings in your area and and then it's like potentially putting together like a cart for you Yeah. That you or in order you can check it out. Couple couple more things.
Speaker 2:How how does Metis tie into the physical AI autonomy? You mentioned about that earlier.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So, I mean, I think DoorDash wants to play the frontier of physical intelligence. I think that's something we talked about for a while. Obviously, our You guys little robots. Exactly.
Speaker 5:The dot delivery robots. So my cofounder Stanley, who's been working on that full time, like, we're super excited to deploy those more broadly. But, you know, we have, you know, a large courier network. We have a large support network where we're collecting billions of data points in the physical world every day. And it's like, how can we leverage that to actually push forward what's possible with robotics and physical intelligence?
Speaker 5:I think, you know, there's some interesting conversations we've had with various startups and labs on how we collaborate to push forward the frontier together. And I think Metis has some great experience doing that type of stuff in the expert data space. I mean, you know, Ari and the CEO is, like, a former Mercor. So I think there's some really interesting stuff there that we're interested to explore and, yeah, we're excited to accelerate some of that together with them.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Matt from Tempo is coming on later today. Tempo is launching today. I know you guys were an early design partner. Yes.
Speaker 2:Talk about kind of that decision to get
Speaker 4:It's funny you bring that
Speaker 5:up because Matt literally texted me before. He's like, hey, we're gonna be on the show together. Was like, six. So, yeah. We're excited.
Speaker 5:I mean, I'll let Matt talk more about that. But I think some of actually what Matt's working on is gonna be synergistic with the Age of Commerce stuff we're working on potentially. But, essentially, like, we are very excited to just partner with companies like Tempo to see how stablecoins can be disruptive and innovative in our space. You know, more to come in terms of what exactly our pilot use case is gonna be. But, yeah, we've really enjoyed working with them, and, you know, Matt's been great.
Speaker 5:We've known Matt for a while. So
Speaker 2:Awesome. I wanna ask one
Speaker 1:more about AgenTek Commerce. I I'm I'm trying to think about, like, the product that I might actually want. I I understand, like, when most people say Agenda Commerce, it's like, open up ChatGPT and fire off a query, say order me a burrito, and it goes through DoorDash and you handle the rails. But I'm thinking more about, like, the the the the next version of that. And maybe it's something like, okay.
Speaker 1:I have I want lunch every day, but I need you to check my calendar because the show ends sometimes at two, sometimes at 02:30. That information's on my calendar. But also sometimes I'm leaving to go to the airport and I'm flying, so I'm not available. And I could potentially, like, encode all these preferences. I have favorite things at different restaurants.
Speaker 1:I'd like some variety, but some consistency. Maybe you should fire off a text message to me and and let me know that I can opt out of today's, you know, order. And I and I I feel like that's, the system that someone would vibe code if you gave them the CLI, but that should probably just live within DoorDash. So how do you think about that sort of that sort of, like, at a higher level, like encoding all of your preferences and then putting your DoorDash experience, like, basically on autopilot?
Speaker 5:Totally. I mean, I think one thing we say to ourselves is, like, if someone's building DoorDash today, it would not look like DoorDash. Mhmm. You know? Like, it would be I think and when we think about agents versus, like, just like outlines, like, agents in an ideal world, they're not just telling you stuff.
Speaker 5:They're actually doing stuff for you. And I think I would say from a consumer facing use case perspective, in my opinion, I think besides the chatbots, I think OpenClaw is, like, kind of the closest thing we've seen to something that is, like, where agent to commerce is heading towards. And so we're very inspired by that type of I don't know if use case is the right word, but that model and that paradigm of, like, agents doing stuff on behalf of you. And I think your example, like, kinda hit it on the head. It's, like, I don't wanna just, like, you tell me stuff.
Speaker 5:Like, do stuff for me. And I think we have a ton of information on your preferences. Have ton of information, real time information on what's going on logistics wise in your neighborhood and your city. Like, real time inventory information in restaurants and retailers. And so, like, we can create some magical experiences there.
Speaker 5:And again, for us, it's not just about slapping this technology on just for the sake of it, but it's like actually stuff that's like restaurants would really appreciate because we can help them run their business better. Like a concrete example on the restaurant side, just and I'll get back to the your use case in a second. But on the restaurant side, it's like, I don't know how to price my pad Thai in my neighborhood, you know? Like or like what deals or promotions should I be running right now? You know?
Speaker 5:It's because like, I just want to figure out to grow my sales or like help me figure out how to, you know, the lulls between lunch and dinner. Help me figure out how like, you know, get more demand there. And then on the customer side, I think to your example, it's like, you know, like, I don't wanna think about, like, ordering my lunch to the office every day or, like, my weekly groceries. The the grocery is
Speaker 1:basically Which is a crazy thing to say because, like, you basically invented the I'm hungry button on your phone, and it's literally, two clicks for me when I use We we still I'm I'm in the past. I don't want my horse anymore. Give me
Speaker 5:the card. Yesterday.
Speaker 1:I didn't have lunch yesterday. We actually messed up somehow.
Speaker 2:We at the office forgot to order.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We forgot to order, actually. No. I did have a salad, but it was like hours later when I figured it out.
Speaker 2:How how rare how rare is it to be thirteen years into a business that has been as successful as DoorDash to still have three founders in the business? Yeah. Like, it feels
Speaker 1:like That's crazy.
Speaker 2:I was trying to come up with an example
Speaker 1:Narrative violation here.
Speaker 2:Of a business at this Yeah. At this scale.
Speaker 5:Interesting. I did not expect that, but, I I don't take that for granted at all. Mean, in fact,
Speaker 1:Tony and hate Zach each other. Right? But there's like some weird contract. There's some weird contract where if any of you leave, the whole company shuts down, so you're locked to each other handcuffed on the Titanic together. No.
Speaker 1:I'm messing.
Speaker 5:I I I I think we're, like I I'm very grateful for the dynamic and the relationship we have.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 5:I think Wow. Tony is, like, you know, one of one CEO, and I think, like, we have a really good dynamic together, and, we put a lot of trust in each other to, like, just do the right thing.
Speaker 1:We always had the same the same roles, basically, and sort of known, okay. I'm not gonna step on this person's toes in this particular region because then there's mutual trust as opposed to, like, a lot of founding teams, they get in trouble when it's, there's three people that wanna be CEO, and they're, like, fighting over a cost. I mean, that's usually what happens.
Speaker 5:No. It's true. I mean, I would say we delineated our responsibilities pretty early on. Mhmm. And I think Tony's role has stayed consistent.
Speaker 5:I mean, CEO is CEO. But I think Stanley and I, our roles have evolved around both how to stay on the forefront of innovation, but also just making sure, like, we're thinking about, like, what are the most important problems to solve. But no, I think we have a really good relationship. I think it's high trust. We I mean, we're getting dinner tonight.
Speaker 5:We we try to catch up every so often. But yeah,
Speaker 1:I mean Do doordashing dinner tonight?
Speaker 5:No. We're gonna go out. I don't know where we're going out. Well, we'll pick a spot. But Fun.
Speaker 2:No. Boys.
Speaker 5:It's a Yeah. It's a it's a special relationship. I I did not expect that but yeah. It's right.
Speaker 2:No. It's cool. Last last question. After the the very silly Suttrini piece, did you guys Oh. Have you thought about doing a hackathon and getting your best engineers to be like, hey, just vibe code DoorDash.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Make the agent native DoorDash. Because I think it would actually be really interesting to just actually try to do it and see
Speaker 5:You know, it's you bring that up because there's that's the training report like blew up out of nowhere. Yeah. And I don't know. I mean, honestly, we didn't react too much to it. I mean, I tweeted something in response to it just in terms of my own thoughts there.
Speaker 5:But I would say, like, in general, like
Speaker 2:Two words. Network effects. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean, I would say in general, like, we just try to focus on growing our business and Yeah. Focus on customers. But I don't know. Like, we try to get people to vibe code a bunch of different use cases, but not try to vibe code DoorDash. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's more to it. More to it. A Bits and Adam's company.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Great. Great to great to meet you, Andy. Next time, bring bring all three.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'd love
Speaker 2:to have you.
Speaker 5:We'll do all
Speaker 1:We'll do a round table. We got chairs and mics. We'll we'll do the whole history. Awesome. Well, yeah.
Speaker 1:Congrats.
Speaker 2:Give our best to the Metis team. Yeah. Congrats on on on partnering up straight. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Yeah. Speaking of agented commerce, let me tell you about Shopify.
Speaker 1:Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And let me also tell you about voice mode. You want voice mode? Why not sign up for Eleven Labs? Build intelligent real time conversational agents.
Speaker 1:Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. And without further ado, we will bring in Matt Jayson from Multiply. How are doing, Matt?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 9:Hey, guys. Nice to see you.
Speaker 1:We're talking about my favorite topic. What are we talking about? Introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 9:Right on. So my name is Matt Jayson. I am the founder and CEO of Multiply.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And we are the first ever hybrid AI media agency for a media company.
Speaker 1:We're making ads.
Speaker 2:You're speaking my language.
Speaker 9:We run some ads. Okay. Do you guys like ads?
Speaker 1:We love ads.
Speaker 9:The ads make you guys some money?
Speaker 1:Yes. Well, the entire business is ads, and we
Speaker 2:We refuse to have any revenue that isn't ad.
Speaker 1:And and just to be clear, we would run ads even if we weren't being paid and we have run ads that we didn't get paid for because we love of the game.
Speaker 2:Early on, we had this bit where where we would just be talking and then we'd be changing the subject and John would go, before we talk about x y z, I need to tell you about Gulfstream.
Speaker 1:But it would sound like
Speaker 2:podcast ad, but
Speaker 1:I But didn't say that we were sponsored by them. I just said, I gotta tell you about this company because it's really cool and I gotta run it out.
Speaker 2:And we would put in in in the description, like, this show wouldn't be possible without. And then just a
Speaker 1:number And we weren't being paid. It's just like they like, it wouldn't be possible without them because they're awesome.
Speaker 6:I like it.
Speaker 1:This company. Anyway, break it down a little bit lower. Who are your customers? How are they actually using multiply? What what pieces of funnel are you touching in the b to b advertising space?
Speaker 9:Definitely. Alright. So first, just the big news of today is we've raised we kinda we came out of stealth today. We raised nine and a half million dollars for a week. Oh, yes.
Speaker 9:Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 9:Sourcing capital, Instacart cofounder Max Mullen, and Josh Woodward, leads Gemini at Google Yeah. And lots lots more great people. And the reason we're all huddled in this advertising space, this is an old world in advertising. Google has built massive business. LinkedIn and Twitter have built massive advertising businesses.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. But ads feel the same way they did five, ten, fifteen years ago despite the crazy rise in AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And we work for b to b companies. We work for so I came from Brex before this. We work for high growth b to b companies
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Who have these crazy goals in their head. They have to go five x their sales pipeline.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 9:And that's a lot of, honestly, your sponsors Yep. Here here too. And it's pretty impossible of a task today. You've gotta go figure out across all your channels how can you go grow faster, and advertising is just stuck in the old world. Yeah.
Speaker 9:So what what we found a way to do is say, hey. The big problem in advertising is stuff goes stale right away.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:You launch a new ad, your audience is tuned out in two, three days a week tops
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:And your message is stale. So what we've done, we've said, great. Let's go combine AI agents with the best humans in the world at Mediavine. Mhmm. And we built this combination AI plus human media agency.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And what we do together is we build self learning apps. So really what that means is you put out initial campaigns. We're we're connected into your sales call recordings, so we see why your customers actually say to your sales team.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:Hey. We love what you do. Here's why we wanna buy from you versus competitor.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:We read your your customer emails. We get the same thing. Yep. Every time there's a new quote or pain point, we ingest this, and we can actually go create tens or hundreds of new ads dynamically learning based upon why people love just what you do.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So that's our world. We're already partnering with companies like Vanta, like Listen Labs, Superhuman, PowerMode. You. Thank you. And the growth is insane.
Speaker 9:And for a lot of these companies, they're hitting 300 to 500% or more growth on these ad channels just from changing from static old world ads
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:To new world self
Speaker 2:learning ads. Basically, there's all this all this, like, knowledge that has been trapped in sales, and you're basically just, like, bringing it over and helping.
Speaker 1:And it's different from just going to an off the shelf LLM provider and saying, like, come up with some taglines for my business because you're ingesting proprietary data that happened on a phone call between the top salesperson and an interesting client that surface something interesting, and then you can actually pipeline that through to the creative. That makes sense?
Speaker 9:That's it. That's it. Spot on. It's grabbing this proprietary data for your business.
Speaker 1:Yep. Like Yeah.
Speaker 9:We see why we love, like, what you do, not like some generic company might like
Speaker 1:it. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Like, specific your product
Speaker 2:or
Speaker 10:what you have.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:And then we help you grow based on it, which we love. Like, renovation companies like Discover.
Speaker 1:And and and a lot of that stuff isn't it's just not available on the open web. Like, that's may probably true for consumer. People do post about their their their clothes that they purchase and the food that they eat, but a lot of people aren't actually sharing how a particular piece of b to b software is making their business more efficient just organically. So even if you
Speaker 2:have historic right now.
Speaker 1:Even if you have an LLM that can scrape the web and is very good at searching, it's not gonna have access to that data.
Speaker 2:So that's important. With the kind of thesis I've had for a while now, which is historically ads had very like limited targeting. You'd be, you know, let's say running like a TV ad on a specific channel Mhmm. Like very limited targeting. You're creating creative that's gonna be seen by tons and tons of people and you can't really control who those people are.
Speaker 2:It's just like the most general ad. But then and then with social, you could create an ad that was like effectively for, you know, a 100,000 people and you run it and it gets stale quickly and you have to create more creative. And it feels like we're on a trajectory towards at some point and people that hate commerce and ads and the economic engine of the Internet won't like this. But it feels like we'll get to a point where like every ad is basically created in real time for a specific individual. Do you do you do you see that?
Speaker 2:Do you see us kind of headed in that in that direction? And and part of that is just like the right message at the right time for the right like one specific person and there's obviously kind of like layers to that stack. Maybe you need to multiply that's also working with like a, you know, a meta platforms, etcetera. But headed towards like targeting that's so extreme, it's like, one ad for one
Speaker 1:We're potentially a vibe.co where do you see brands, b b startups, AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. You could deploy for your customers. You could potentially be a big partner to vibe.co, our partner.
Speaker 9:So I look. I love I love that vision. We're seeing companies are demanding the same thing. We're running these personalized ads where we see, hey. A similar set of customers decided to buy food for this reason.
Speaker 9:Hey. Actually, let let me step back. When when we're seeing financial services companies
Speaker 10:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:With a certain sector buy from a certain reason, we're already running different ads to them than manufacturing customers Mhmm. With certain revenue. So it's already we're actually ingesting CRM data where we can do a version of what you're talking about and saying, hey. Don't advertise to these folks. And for these folks, give them this specific messaging based on why they buy
Speaker 6:from you.
Speaker 9:So we're going there. We're having companies ask us all the time from our personalized. So we're building more for one to one as well. I think the the question and the thing that I think is so interesting about the space, even if you can go do one to one advertising for everyone,
Speaker 4:How do you know
Speaker 9:it's the right message when it's predictive? And really, one of the things that we focus on is not saying that we know the right answer. A lot of traditional media agencies have like a playbook. They'll say, hey. We know the best way to break through, and we fundamentally disagree with that.
Speaker 9:We think the best approach is always on obsessive testing. So when we talk to growth marketers, like the way we frame a lot of our AI, we we frame it as we built the world's most insatiable AI agents. And just like a good growth marketer, there's no such thing as enough pipeline. And the reason I say that here is we're running hundreds of experiments every week for a lot of companies. It's thousands over time.
Speaker 9:And when you see all of that, you're actually learning by doing. You can't just say one to one, here's the right message. It might be one to one. Let's try ten, twenty, 30 things until we crack. This is what really isn't speaking the language of that person or that customer that that speaks to them.
Speaker 9:And you wanna speak their language even though it's your value, your break you're
Speaker 5:bringing life.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Alright. Here's a challenge. Sell me a pen in the next twenty four hours.
Speaker 1:Sell me actually, sell me a a it would be the b to b equivalent. Like, I want an ad for a co packer that can make me custom pens by the billions if I want them. Yeah. TBPN branded pens. This could be our next merch drop.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Great to meet you, Matt.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on the on the Riz. Very exciting company. We'll talk to you soon, Matt. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken.
Speaker 1:It helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And let me also tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of dev and the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 1:And we have Cameron here in the studio. Are you a doctor? Should I be calling you doctor?
Speaker 7:You don't need to call me doctor, but I am a licensed clinical psychologist.
Speaker 1:Wow. Congratulations. Give a little bit of your background. Explain the company, and then obviously, I wanna dive into the current thing, is the peptide debate.
Speaker 7:Of course. Yeah. So I'm doctor Cameron Sepah. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. I served as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCSF School of Medicine for over a decade.
Speaker 1:That's a good school, right?
Speaker 7:It's the number three
Speaker 6:medical school in the And
Speaker 7:since 2012, I've become a serial health care entrepreneur. Okay. So I was on the founding team of Amada Health Okay.
Speaker 11:Which is
Speaker 7:a unicorn that went public last year that creates online Yeah. Weight loss programs. It's helped a million people lose 10,000,000 and cut their risk of diabetes and heart disease in half. That's a great KPI. Yeah.
Speaker 7:The thing I'm much more proud of than the financial outcome. Yeah. Spent a year at Trinity Ventures on the VC side of the business and now I'm currently the founder and CEO of Maximus
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:Where we are pioneering performance medicine.
Speaker 1:And what's the core focus of Maximus? Obviously, we're going to talk about peptides, but you've been in the business since before the peptide boom, correct?
Speaker 7:For sure. Okay. And peptides is really almost like a meaningless term. It just really means like drugs. It's a particular chain of amino acids that are getting hyped right now.
Speaker 7:But performance medicine spans hormones, peptides and other small molecules.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does
Speaker 2:feel You'll appreciate. So we we we were at a conference in 2024 and it was like we had we had just started doing the show And we were asked to give a talk kind of last seconds. We were like, oh, what should we talk about? Mhmm. Was And was meant to be like somewhat of a provocative subject and we were making the case that basically founders should be on, like, a performance drug stack.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yep. And that venture capital firm
Speaker 2:platform teams platform teams should be,
Speaker 1:like, helping them optimize. Team. They have their brand team.
Speaker 2:They have
Speaker 1:their recruiting team. They'll help you optimize your performance tech. But how important is performance these days outside of, you know, bodybuilding competitions?
Speaker 7:Yeah. You know, I I think a lot of in fact, the trend that we're seeing, this huge consumer wave, whether in peptides or sort of performance enhancement, really trickles down from professional athletes and bodybuilders. Yeah. You know, one kind of hack I I describe is you can look at the WATA List, the World Anti Doping Association, and that gives you a pretty good indication.
Speaker 2:That was our point. It's like Yeah. There's no there's no banned substances. I mean, are actual legal
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Drugs, but there's not like there's no governing body in business that says, you cannot take these because they actually they work too well.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Exactly. Right. And I have a private practice on the side. I work with the top Silicon Valley CEOs and VCs. And I can tell you, without naming names, a lot of the folks that you interview are
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Taking essentially doctor prescribed but performance enhancing substances in order to be more effective at their jobs with Okay. Less stress.
Speaker 1:And what does that mean effective? Because, like, you just being in shape and, you know, being able to walk around and not be too tired during the day, that's valuable. But then there's also focus if you're working on a spreadsheet or programming. Like, there's so many different, like, levers to pull on performance broadly. How do you narrow it down?
Speaker 1:Is it case by case?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So the way I describe it, I think there's sort of five foundational health behaviors. So diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, and intimacy are the five things that are critical for health And and let me make a little bit of an analogy that I think really captures the field of performance medicine. So Steve Jobs used to love to tell a story about how there's an article in Scientific American that would track how effective various animals of the world are at locomotion. So who can travel a kilometer with the least amount of calories?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Right? Now the condor, a bird, was the most efficient animal and human beings Yeah. Exactly. Human beings, despite being, you know, the crown of crown jewel of creation, were like a third of the way down the list.
Speaker 1:So it
Speaker 7:was pretty pretty unimpressive showing. Yeah. But someone had the bright idea and they said, if you give a human being a bicycle, they skyrocket to the top of the And so Steve would make that analogy that the personal computer is the bicycle for the mind. Right? And really revolutionized the world with that idea.
Speaker 7:I'd argue now we're seeing the precipice of two new revolutions in that AI is the motorcycle for the mind. It's not only as smart as a PhD, but it has all of the PhDs and can work 20 fourseven. Yep. And similarly, we're seeing a revolution in biology and this shift towards performance medicine. Yep.
Speaker 7:So if you take the five foundational health behaviors that I described and you want to enhance your ability to do these things because they're critical to your health, you probably have a supplement stack, like you're saying. Right? So let's just walk down those five things. So if you're trying to enhance your exercise, and the main goal of exercise is to build muscle mass, you're probably going to take the most studied ergogenic supplement, which is creatine.
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 7:Right? Now, creatine, if you just sit on your couch all day, is not going to do much for you except make you bloated. But if you combine it with strength training, it will increase slightly the amount of your lean mass. Now, what happens if you introduce testosterone? Now, testosterone, there's a great study that was done.
Speaker 2:Don't get John started.
Speaker 10:Don't attempt to.
Speaker 7:There was a great study that was done that gave guys testosterone and told them not to exercise. They gave another group, they told them to exercise without testosterone, and then obviously the combination. Now the combination obviously grew the most amount of muscle Mhmm. And that testosterone and strength training are obviously synergistic. But the fascinating thing is the guys who took testosterone and sat on their butt all day grew far more muscles than the guys who were lifting weight five days week without testosterone.
Speaker 7:Right? It is literally a cheat code. And so it literally mogs creatine, if you will, in that it is far more performance enhancing, which is why it's banned by a That's ridiculous. And so really, if you want to, you know, grow muscle
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:In the most efficient way possible, testosterone is is clearly the best way of doing it. Yeah. Now, what about diet?
Speaker 1:Wait. Quick quickly on creatine. Have a question. So I heard a theory that creatine has benefits outside of muscle building, and the basic effect was that it helps with hydration. It's good to be hydrated.
Speaker 1:It's helping your cells retain water, which is why some people complain about creatine. Oh, it's just water weight, but water in your muscles makes your muscles look bigger, so people are happy with that. But creatine could potentially be beneficial outside of a bodybuilding context.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So there's some recent studies that show that it can help with sleep deprivation.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. So there's
Speaker 7:some brain absorption effects. Don't you
Speaker 1:have to take a ton of it for that though?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think it's a
Speaker 2:little overhyped I tried doing that on some I don't know, boss. If I could have another
Speaker 1:I don't know
Speaker 2:if I could have the fiftieth gummy today Well, to
Speaker 7:that's the irony, right? People are mega dosing creatine in order to eke out some very slight performance enhancing benefits when they could be taking testosterone and having very clear performance enhancing benefits.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So the other health behavior, diet, obviously critical for minimizing body fat. So the most common supplement that you can take to try to regulate your appetite is fiber. Right? Almost everyone takes fiber in some form or another, whether through whole foods or a supplement. You might lose one, maybe 2% of your body fat if you're consuming a fiber supplement.
Speaker 7:Now, with these prescription GLP-1s, semaglutide, tirzepatide, clinical studies are showing 14.7% weight loss, 22% weight loss. So it absolutely trumps anything that you can take terms of a supplement, and it's obviously literally bending the obesity curve in America.
Speaker 1:If
Speaker 7:you look at sleep, the most common over the counter supplement for sleep is melatonin. Right? Melatonin mildly works. It can particularly help if you have jet lag. But what if you take a growth hormone peptide?
Speaker 6:When you
Speaker 7:Sounds really impressive. It is. But think about this. Your growth hormone peaks at puberty and it actually declines throughout your lifespan. And so
Speaker 1:What if you stub your toe? Have you considered Trend?
Speaker 7:Well, Trend is an anabolic steroid that I would not recommend for most people. Or a stubbed toe. There's a lot of anti
Speaker 2:You're aging like, alright, you force I'll Yeah, take
Speaker 7:for sure. But the fascinating thing is because growth hormone declines across the lifespan, you can take your growth hormone peptide Yes. And just restore yourself back to And youthful
Speaker 1:and that's what a lot of the scientific consensus is about. Not the super physiological levels, not getting your testosterone 10,000 times bigger than what it would be naturally, but if you are truly at a deficit, bringing you back in line, that's that's sort of the medical consensus. Correct?
Speaker 7:Exactly. Okay. So there are growth hormone peptides now, sermorelin and tesamorelin Okay. That enhance sleep, they enhance recovery, allow people to sleep back towards that seven to eight to nine hours of sleep that's critical for physiological restoration.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:If you think about stress management, the other kind of fourth health behavior, the most common supplement that people take is magnesium. It helps you kind of be calm and kind of not be too stressed. It works mildly as well. But now, you can take oxytocin. So oxytocin, you probably know, is sort of the love Right?
Speaker 7:We've connection actually developed a topical formulation of it. So you can actually apply it. I'll show you what it looks like. This is a little container. You can apply it intranasally or on thin skin Oh, such as the scrotum or the perineum.
Speaker 7:It absorbs and it reduces cortisol, the stress hormone, and it helps people feel more connected far more than, you a magnesium This
Speaker 2:is what the kick streamers need if they get frame mugs.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's true. Cortisol spikes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And EpiPen EpiPen.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It will prevent actually a cortisol spike.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. If you're going frame mugs.
Speaker 7:Yes. There you go. Yeah. You don't just stab people. Reply it, I would say.
Speaker 7:And then finally, intimacy, I think, the most underrated health behavior. Zinc is the most common supplement that people take in terms of enhancing sort of sexual function. Sure. But the ED drugs, Tadalafil, Viagra, Vardenafil.
Speaker 1:There's been a big boom with Hims and Hers and Roman Exactly. Companies.
Speaker 7:People are taking that because it not only enhances sexual function in terms of erectile strength, ability to last longer, enhancing the enjoyment of sex, But it actually increases blood flow to all of your body and into your muscles, to your brain. People take it as a pre workout. There's interesting associational research showing that it reduces the incidence of Alzheimer's and dementia. There needs to be further studies that needs to be done to substantiate that. But that's the future that I see, is that almost everyone right now has sort of that supplement stack.
Speaker 7:But I predict, this is my kind of bold prediction, is that the top founders and VCs in the next five years will be taking at least three of those five things that I mentioned. So testosterone to build muscle, tirzepatide to drop fat, testamorelin to increase growth hormone and recovery, tadalafil to increase intimacy and blood flow, and oxytocin to reduce their stress.
Speaker 1:Okay. So those five so you have the five supplements and then the five drugs that need prescriptions, Right. Is your prediction that the FDA will approve non prescription versions of those exact chemicals or that everyone will sort of elevate to working with a doctor that can actually write prescriptions?
Speaker 7:Yeah, it's a great question. All of these prescription drugs that I mentioned are already FDA approved. Yes. But a physician has the right to prescribe any of these off label, right? So Tadalafil is a great example.
Speaker 7:It's FDA approved for erectile dysfunction. But we actually prescribe it as a blood flow enhancer. So some people literally take it as a prescription pre workout for non sexual reasons or they are taking it as an anti aging sort of drug because that's sort of the vision of performance medicine is it's not just treating a deficit or a medical problem, but it's enhancing your health, your aesthetics, or your Sure. And
Speaker 1:so, like, between those two, you would expect, like, many more doctors' visits, many more consultations with medical professionals to get access to that tier of prescription only medicines.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Well, I feel like that fits
Speaker 2:into this, you know, put differently
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're positioning this as like much more proactive approach Yeah. In medicine, not just trying to survive when something bad happens or you're experiencing some sort of disease but like proactively trying to take yourself from the baseline to the best you
Speaker 7:can Yeah, possibly you absolutely nailed it. The problem is right now in America, we don't have a health care system. We have a sick care system. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 7:It's run by an oligopoly of insurance companies that are not in the business of providing health care. They're in the business of denying health care. Very sadly and tragically when the UHG There's CEO
Speaker 2:some where like Mhmm. Various health tech companies will, you know, be talking to VCs and they'll say like, oh, like we're gonna be able to get access to insurance dollars Right. Or and the issue with that is that insurance companies don't care if something will make you healthy
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:In ten years Mhmm. Because you're most likely gonna be on a new insurance plan. Absolutely. They're just wasting money. Right?
Speaker 2:They expect you the average American stays at their job like, you know, low single digit years Yep. I think. And so that just means like, they're like, that's great. You're gonna be healthier later, but but I'm not gonna pay for the benefit of some other insurance carrier.
Speaker 7:Yeah. That was what we learned at Omada because we sold through employers that if the employer didn't retain their employees for more than three years, there's no point of selling into it because they're like, it's not my problem. Someone else is gonna have to pay for it. So really, the anecdote to that is performance medicine in that it bypasses the insurance system altogether. And within basically, we're a cash pay private practice that operates in all 50 states.
Speaker 7:And our belief is that the only person that should be making a decision is you and your doctor, and that every drug, of course, has risks, but it's up to you and your doctor to decide whether the cost benefit is worth it for you in making that decision, not the insurance companies who are really in the business of minimizing the amount of care. I'll give you a really great example of this. If anyone measures their testosterone levels
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Unless you're below the second and a half percentile, the insurance company will deem you're not sick enough, essentially, to be warranted to be
Speaker 2:in the bottom two and
Speaker 7:a percentile. So the question is naturally, what happens to the other ninety seven and a half percent of Americans? Yeah. Obviously, the lower half of that would probably feel better in terms of their energy, their motivation, their drive, their sexual function, their ability to build muscle mass. But even folks who are, let's say, low normal would probably benefit from a higher level of testosterone in terms of the performance enhancement that we're talking about.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Right? Insurance will never pay for that. And so there's been a proliferation of the rise of sort of private practices like Maximus order to really meet the needs because I think there's this huge consumer trend which includes peptides and hormones Yeah. Of people who want to enhance their health, enhance their performance and enhance the quality of their life.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What are you how are you advising clients and just people broadly around the risks associated with peptides? There's debate raging right now around Is BP like efficacy but also the potential risk because we don't necessarily have for some of them, we have plenty of data even if we don't have full on studies. But how are you kind of guiding people?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Really, the question is which peptides and which drugs? Sure. Because we can't sort of
Speaker 1:because some are fully approved.
Speaker 7:Yeah, exactly. So the GLPs are really these are peptides as well. Oxytocin that I mentioned, those are also peptides that have literally been FDA approved, some of them for decades.
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 7:yeah. Have a very substantial body of literature on them. And so, you know, comparing that to, let's say, a BPC, which is not FDA approved
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:Is a very different ballgame. Totally. So responsible clinics, I would say, like ours, are only prescribing FDA approved drugs
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 7:That have a very substantial body of human literature Mhmm. In addition to a lot of clinical experience, right? Yeah. So some of the, like, we're actually the largest prescriber, for instance, in clomiphene in The United States. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:We publish studies with ends in the thousands on the safety and efficacy of these things. And so, with the body of literature, then I think you can evaluate each drug on their own merits and decide, okay, is this something that's worth prescribing as a clinic? Yeah. And then, obviously, each person between them and their doctor make a decision of whether that cost benefit is worth it for them. Now, think, you know, individuals can always make a choice in taking something that's a little bit more experimental.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. That's up to them. Mhmm. But really, I really recommend that people are getting it through a doctor, and it's fulfilled by an FDA inspected compounding pharmacy what
Speaker 2:kind of have you heard any horror stories around these kind of like offshore compounders? Just people getting Well,
Speaker 7:those aren't compounders. Those are just Yeah. There's a lot of people who are just literally buying black market illegal drugs Yeah. Directly from manufacturers or from resellers in The United States. And, yeah.
Speaker 7:I mean, you know, there's literally labs that are the problem is you can't ensure what you're getting is pure. Yeah. It's even the compound. Like Peptide Sciences, which just shut down, was, you know, people were testing it. They're buying a non FDA approved GLP that's soon to be on the market.
Speaker 7:And literally, it didn't Retta? Yeah. It didn't contain any of Retta in the vial. Or what's a common thing is they it might contain it, but the dose might be off by 50%. And so what you're seeing is people having side effects, because Retta is a glucagon agonist.
Speaker 7:It has effects on the heart. It increases heart rate reduces heart rate variability. If you're not able to dose it probably proper properly, you're more likely to have side effects as a result. Yeah. So, it's a wild west.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Any responsible clinician would say, don't buy things on the black market. Now, obviously, individuals can make their own libertarian choices about what they do. But the difference is that there are good alternatives on the market. For instance, tirzepatide is generally efficacious for weight loss.
Speaker 7:There's no reason for most people to taking Retta and also to be dealing
Speaker 1:with We have the that's FDA approved.
Speaker 7:That's FDA approved.
Speaker 1:We have two, actually.
Speaker 7:You know that it's pure. Yeah. You know that it's Sure. Relatively safe because there's a wide body of literature and it doesn't have the cardiac effects.
Speaker 2:So Do think Hollywood is gonna be somewhat of a model for Silicon Valley in the sense of like actors are have historically been like, how did this actor have this insane transformation? Chicken broccoli. Chicken broccoli and a lot of water. And it's like, I don't know about that. But but basically, it's like bodybuilders lead the charge.
Speaker 2:Hollywood kind of picks up on that. Mhmm. And then and then but but is Hollywood kind of the somewhat of of the model?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Think so. And I think increasingly Silicon Valley investors Surely. And founders are gonna increasingly become the model. The problem with Hollywood is until maybe recently, a lot of people literally had to lie and say they weren't on TRT despite the fact I have friends who are personal trainers to these guys who prep them for the movies.
Speaker 7:They're clearly on performance enhancing drugs. Nobody nobody bills like Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it is it is irresponsible for like, you know, Zac Efron to be like, yeah, I'm on TRT because a bunch of young people are Totally. See that. I want to look like that.
Speaker 7:But this is a really great point that you mentioned about sort of young people and TRT, and this is actually one of the whole founding genesis of Maximus, right? So testosterone is a really interesting compound. The gold standard is injectable testosterone. So if you inject exogenous testosterone from outside of your body, your body realizes it's getting enough, and so your testicles will shut down, shrink, and you become infertile. So nobody under the age of 50 or nobody who wants to still have children should really be injecting testosterone.
Speaker 7:Sure. Now you can take something called HCG, which is a replacement for LH, and it can help you get off of it and restore your fertility. But it's not perfect, and there's some risks involved.
Speaker 2:However,
Speaker 7:there are alternatives nowadays. So we actually prescribe oral and topical testosterone, so you don't need to inject it. And it's native testosterone. It's the same testosterone that your body makes. The problem with injectable testosterone is we made sort of an interesting devil's bargain, is we took testosterone and we added a molecule to it called an ester.
Speaker 7:You probably have heard of testosterone siponate. The benefit of the ester is that because it's annoying to inject every single day, you only need to inject it once a week, so it becomes more convenient. The downside is it redlines your testosterone for 20 fourseven for a whole week, and so it shuts down and suppresses your endogenous production. So, you basically become dependent on it, and if you come off of it, you're going go through withdrawal symptoms. The benefit of oral testosterone is that it peaks within two to four hours, lasts about six to eight, and topical testosterone peaks at about two and a half hours, lasts about 12 to six.
Speaker 7:And so they're shorter half life, shorter duration, and they're less suppressive. The interesting thing that we found in our research is that if you take oral testosterone, it's actually not very suppressive for most people. And if you combine it with Enclomiphene, which is a selective estrogen receptor modulator, it basically blocks estrogen in a particular part of the brain, the hypothalamus and the pituitary. It prevents that suppression from happening. And so you can kind of have your cake and eat it too for the first time, in that
Speaker 2:I want it like a free lunch.
Speaker 5:A little. There's no such thing
Speaker 7:as it's completely a biological free lunch, but you can maintain your natural testosterone production and then supplement it with oral testosterone and Enclomiphene. And then the really revolutionary thing that we found is topical testosterone, which has been used for over half a century. You apply it to your scrotum, it can increase your testosterone by several fold. It's normally suppressive, but when you add Enclomiphene to it, you can maintain your natural testosterone production and enhance it to high normal levels. In fact, we have two patents on the combination of oral and topical testosterone, plus and clomiphene.
Speaker 7:And so actually men as young as 18 can take these without suppressing their fertility markers. So it's really a revolution, and it allows us to really fulfill the vision of performance medicine, because there are safer alternatives. The injectable testosterone is still great for the guys who are 50 and they don't mind being on it for the rest of their lives. But they're now essentially safer alternatives for younger guys or guys who want to maintain their fertility. And we're actively doing this research, publishing it, patenting these protocols, and disseminating them so we can democratize performance medicine.
Speaker 1:Do you think about the personalization of medicine? We talked to Paul Coiningham on Monday. He was the fellow who used AI to process some DNA data around his dog who was suffering from cancer
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And was able to work with a lab to synthesize a custom mRNA vaccine that was targeting the specific cancer that his dog had, looking at the delta between the healthy dog's DNA and the cancerous DNA in the same animal, and then was able to create a one of one medicine for that dog. I could imagine that coming to, well, there's these peptides.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:They work broadly on populations, but in the future, is there a world where you're getting a tirzepatide that's designed specifically for you? And would there actually be a benefit of that, or is that where we're going?
Speaker 7:Absolutely. It's already here. In fact, with tirzepatide Yeah. We have micro doses. Okay.
Speaker 7:So this is like
Speaker 1:So that's modulating the the amount of Correct. Of product, but not the actual molecular construction at all?
Speaker 7:In that in this particular case, it's not. Okay. But the the the benefit of doing a microdose, for instance, it's for people who are not overweight.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 7:Right? BMI under twenty five.
Speaker 1:Why would you
Speaker 7:They may not even wanna lose weight, but they might wanna take it to reduce their inflamaging is sort of the term that's that's used. Okay. It reduces, you know, impulsivity.
Speaker 1:It
Speaker 7:can just help reduce some of the food noise. And maybe there's some folks who are not necessarily overweight, they want to maintain a six pack without having to constantly fight this willpower battle for the rest That's of their obviously a little bit more aesthetic than performance enhancing. But that custom dose, people can kind of find the right dose that fits for them. So, yes, there's going be both personalized medicines in terms of the type of medicine, but also I think the dosing is really critical because it allows flexibility. So, Enclomiphene is a really good example.
Speaker 7:Yeah. When Enclomiphene first was introduced to the market, literally the only dosage that was available Twenty five milligrams. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like HIMSS.
Speaker 1:That's what they studied.
Speaker 7:You get twenty five milligrams of Viagra no matter Right? Who you We offer eight different dosages, all the way from three point one two five milligrams to twenty five milligrams.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:And the way we we titrate it is actually through lab testing. Okay. So we have an at home blood test.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You don't have to go to a Quest. You can just stick it on your shoulder. Sure. You press a button and you can take out about half a pinky full of blood.
Speaker 7:And we can not measure a 100 markers like at Quest, but we can measure about a dozen of them including you
Speaker 1:take it to a lab that
Speaker 7:Exactly. Males next day air to a lab. So you can take your baseline levels, you know where you stand.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:And then we can put you on, let's say, topical testosterone plus and clomiphene. You'll probably notice your total testosterone goes over a thousand, your free testosterone goes over 200. And then we can titrate you to the just the right amount by retesting you after thirty days. Yeah. And usually after one or two iterations, we can get you to make sure that your lab numbers are ideal, but also that you're feeling and functioning your best.
Speaker 7:So, this is really the promise of personalized medicine that you're talking about that will be personalized to every single person.
Speaker 2:How much do you care about wearable data when working with clients?
Speaker 7:I would say in my private practice, I look a little bit more at that. At Maximus, I honestly think most wearables are a little bit overhyped.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I noticed I don't think you're wearing one.
Speaker 7:I'm You
Speaker 2:have a nice watch.
Speaker 7:Thank you. And it has no battery or technology. My anti tech watch. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Interesting thing as a psychologist, think it actually causes anxiety in a lot of people. Right? A lot of these sleep wearables, you know, because they look at it and you're like, oh, my my whoop score is not a 100 now. I'm gonna be sleep deprived
Speaker 1:I have say Trem.
Speaker 2:Great. John so John, his entire life is just signaling like Yeah. Fake Trem.
Speaker 1:I I got a I got a I got a 98 on Eight Sleep and I immediately Googled like D ball plus Canivar plus Trem plus massive needle this big. There you go. That's what I want.
Speaker 7:Your your sleep score is gonna go to about 20.
Speaker 1:I know. Right? No. Do not do any of
Speaker 2:this.
Speaker 7:But, yeah. I mean, look, can be helpful. We use tracking really when we want to see if an intervention is making a difference.
Speaker 2:So Mhmm.
Speaker 7:A lot of our clients actually, when they're using oxytocin, because we've published a study showing that it enhances sleep quality Mhmm. Extends sleep by about twenty five minutes sleep duration on average, they'll look at their aura or their WHOOP scores, and then they'll notice an improvement in let's say REM or deep sleep. And this is kind of, I think, you know, beyond sort of randomized controlled trials, the top of the evidence based hierarchy is running really a randomized controlled trial of one. And so you can look at your own data, and then if you see, you know, if you do sort of an ABA test where you don't do the intervention, you add oxytocin, and then you come off of it. And during that period of time, that B portion when you were taking the intervention, you're clearly sleeping better, your sleep duration's better, your deep sleep at REM are better.
Speaker 7:It gives you a pretty positive personal indication that this treatment is working for you.
Speaker 1:You didn't mention across any of those five categories, like the ADHD meds that they feel like have been popular in Silicon Valley
Speaker 4:for across
Speaker 1:Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse, and Modafinil. Right. And there's a few others that people take occasionally. Some of them are prescribed. What is your overall thesis on that?
Speaker 1:That one feels it's always felt like a Faustian bargain, but
Speaker 7:it's your take. Exactly. And I think it is. And I'm especially as a former psychiatry professor Yeah. I'm incredibly conservative about things that are psychoactive and specifically work on the neurotransmitters.
Speaker 1:Sure. It doesn't come from a biomarker. It's not like I get a blood test and says, oh, yeah. You're low in No. There's no there's no yeah.
Speaker 7:There's there's no great blood marker for dopamine, for instance.
Speaker 1:Sure. Okay.
Speaker 7:And the the diagnosis of ADHD is is problematic. Most people aren't doing a full neuropsychological examination to get a true diagnosis. Yeah. A It's little over diagnosed these days.
Speaker 1:One of the questions in the survey was like, did you lose things as a kid? And I was like, who has never lost anything as a child? Like Right. Everyone loses their sweatshirt when they go to school in the morning and then it gets hot, you take the sweatshirt off, you lose it. Like this is not like
Speaker 2:I never did. You never did? Well then Fair enough. Felt different.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And there's a lot of folks who may have there's kind of a notion that people outgrow ADHD in adulthood. Really what
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 7:What may be happening is they're learning to behaviorally compensate Sure. Routines and patterns. But anyway, obviously if you have true clinically diagnosed, properly diagnosed ADHD, prescription stimulants can be like Ritalin, Adderall, the various amphetamines can be life changing in that despite their despite the risks and trade offs, obviously, if it lets you function and keep a job Mhmm. That cost benefit, it's gonna be beneficial. Yeah.
Speaker 7:From a performance enhancement perspective, I've been very public in companies like Cerebral. We're doing the wrong thing by shelling Adderall on TikTok. Yeah. We won't prescribe it because it's addictive. Yep.
Speaker 7:And we don't prescribe things that are addictive because I think to your point, it is a Faustian bargain and there's significant trade offs in doing so.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:So I I didn't mention focus as part of those five. Yeah. I do think there are things.
Speaker 1:Well, it feels like your your your philosophy is that focus comes from the other the other areas. Yeah. If you're balanced everywhere else.
Speaker 7:Well, in 2019, I popularized dopamine fasting as a behavioral way Mhmm. Of improving focus. The main thing that's actually messing with people's focus for the majority of people is not ADHD but digital distraction.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? So everyone's distracted by social media, gaming, gambling, shopping.
Speaker 1:I I I do Adobe Evening Fast every single day, like eight at least six hours.
Speaker 7:Yeah. That's that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:From like 11PM to 5AM.
Speaker 7:So, yeah. I mean, know you know in China actually, literally from 11PM I think to like
Speaker 1:access it. Right?
Speaker 7:You cannot computer game manufacturers are legally required.
Speaker 1:To take take the servers off.
Speaker 7:To do it. And so there's there's something there. Right? That's like institutionalized dopamine fasting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:How often do you do full blood panels and and Oh, yeah. By 2035, how how often do you think the average kind of American will be doing a blood panel? Yeah. I mean, assuming right now the average person does it if they're sick and they are having an issue, that's starting to change. But what's your protocol now?
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's a great question. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't even have a primary care physician.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:I mean, I think the standard recommendation and one that I will continue to espouse, is everyone should get an annual physical every year and have a relationship with a doctor, ideally, you know, a good primary care physician. Unfortunately, because of the health insurance situation that we have that's tied to employers, a lot of people are freelancers, They don't have health insurance, or if they do, it's like a minimal amount through the open market. They don't have that. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is the blood test that you get through your primary care is very sparse.
Speaker 7:So I'll tell you a funny story. So, you know, being at Omada and literally being in the diabetes industry, I never had my blood sugar level checked. And when I brought it up with my doctor, like, you're young and healthy, you don't need to check your blood sugar. And I was like, my dad has type two diabetes, I want to check, you know, and just make sure I don't develop it. But that's the mentality.
Speaker 7:Similarly, it's not routine to measure your testosterone levels or get a hormone panel unless you are like incredibly low energy and symptomatic, and your doctor would be concerned. They don't think it's sort of necessary. And so, the unfortunate thing is going through the traditional healthcare system, because they really want to minimize the cost associated with the panel, you're not going to get a good comprehensive blood test done. Right? So, through Maximus, we have a comprehensive test.
Speaker 7:It costs $199.99 You can get 110 biomarkers measured. True unique biomarkers, there's a couple of companies out there that repeat tests every six months and they're not unique biomarkers. So that will give you an assessment of, you know, standard CBC, CMP, your lipids, your hormones, your thyroid, all the things that you need to know. And obviously now with AI, you can, you know, throw that into an AI and identify areas that are problematic. And obviously, if you have a clinic or a good PCP that can work with you, it can help optimize it.
Speaker 7:Like a good example of this is almost everyone is vitamin d deficient cause we just don't get enough sunlight. It's the easiest thing to fix. You can take a multivitamin like the building blocks that we produce and we do before and after lab testing so that after a couple months you can get into an optimal range and it's gonna enhance your mood, your sleep, a 100 different biological functions.
Speaker 1:We gotta pop the top on this ultra down. Let the sun in. Get the vitamin d
Speaker 2:We actually we actually we actually wanna eventually
Speaker 1:Get to natural light. It would be so good. We gotta make it happen.
Speaker 5:Pleasure.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Have a great rest of your day, and we will talk to you soon. And I will tell everyone about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And I will tell you also about Graphite, code review for the age of AI.
Speaker 1:Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, we will kick off our lightning round, the Lambda lightning round. We will go to the cloud. Hopefully, we'll see. The Lambda lightning round begins now with Chris from Adquick, one of our favorite Oh, TBPN royalty as the chat likes to say.
Speaker 1:Let's bring Chris in to the TBPN Herald. Chris, how are you doing? Great to see you.
Speaker 2:There he is. Is a TBPN
Speaker 4:green suit?
Speaker 1:Beautiful jacket. That is a fantastic jacket. I like the liner too. Anyway Yeah.
Speaker 4:I picked it up
Speaker 11:in London at Charles Stewart.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Very
Speaker 11:cool. Couldn't miss out on the opportunity to get dripped out with my fellow technology brothers.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. Re reintroduce the company and sort of explain the shape of the business these days and then take us into the news.
Speaker 2:For anyone that hasn't heard
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 2:1,000 TadQuick
Speaker 1:I think it's 250 last year or something like that. Probably more. Yeah.
Speaker 11:So Adquix building the infrastructure for real world advertising, so out of home. So when you think about it over the last thirty years, every dollar of every ad spend has gone to doing one thing, reaching human beings with a message. And that's primarily been done through digital channels, cookies, pixels, real time bidding, programmatic. It's all digital. But what they did forget is that people are outside.
Speaker 11:People are constantly getting exposed to an advertising medium, and this one hasn't been optimized. It hasn't been architected with technology. And so, you know, the big players like Google, Amazon, The Trade Desk, none of them have cracked the nut that is out of home advertising. And, you know, we're we're building the pipes and the plumbing for Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of interaction with the physical world. At a certain point, someone has to physically print the billboard, put it up, like, tape it down, tie it down, do whatever, and you are able to abstract that and then serve a company with a thing that looks like a, you know, more traditional digital, platform. Right?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Absolutely. And most importantly is, proving that the medium works. So we now live in an age where, you know, you don't get investment in advertising unless you could prove that it works. And so we pioneered the measurement and the analytics.
Speaker 11:So if you get exposed to an out of home ad and then to subsequently do something online in an app, go into a store, we can attribute that to the exposure and then model it out with all the rest of your channels.
Speaker 1:So it's out of home advertising made easy and measurable. That's what I'm getting from this. That's right. But take us through the more recent news. What's going on with the business?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So there's three big players in the space in in The United States. It's a $10,000,000,000 market. 2,000,000,000 roughly is is sold by Outfront Media.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And you'll see their billboards and their transit in New York, Los Angeles, and all the major metros in
Speaker 1:The United They own the physical real estate. They own the physical, like, the the structure that the billboard goes on? That's part of their business?
Speaker 2:Or just the the rights? Or the rights To
Speaker 7:the rights. How does The rights
Speaker 11:and the structures.
Speaker 1:Got it. Okay. Got the rights
Speaker 10:and stuff.
Speaker 11:And so this is this is an organization that's like two two thousand employees, a thousand sellers, all regionally distributed. Yeah. And they've been selling this medium very much like, you know, real estate agents have prior to, like, your your Opendoor
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Your Zillow, so on and so forth. And for the first time ever, they're gonna have world class technology to support their sales efforts across these thousand sellers. And then they'll be also using our audiences to find the best fit for their inventory against an audience Mhmm. And then also measure the success for their clients. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Yeah. Walk me through the the the the measurement problem because on my drive to work every day, I drive through Hollywood, I see so many billboard ads for movies. And whenever I buy tickets, I wind up going on Fandango, and there's a huge disconnect there. I don't know that I've gotten a survey, but with the right data, you could probably see that I was in this area or I purchased something on a credit card panel in this area, and I might have been exposed to that billboard.
Speaker 1:Like, I could imagine how you could piece that together that I went to this particular movie because I saw this billboard. I've been seeing billboards for the project Hail Mary, and we are actually going. And the billboards should get some of that attribution. But other than hearing me say it right now, I don't know how you would puzzle that together. So what is the process these days?
Speaker 11:Sure. So your weather app doesn't make money by telling you it's gonna rain.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 11:We buy up all the highest quality mobile traffic data.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 11:We pipe 7,000,000,000 pings into our platform every single day
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:So we know where you are Yeah. What time you're at, what direction you're heading at, what speed you're heading at, and all these things.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 11:And then we use that to basically identify when the mobile device is inside of a geofence that we have geofenced all of the inventory in the platform. Got it. And then we count that as an exposure. Sure. We then map the exposure to a pixel on the website and an SDK and an app.
Speaker 11:Sure. Or we also, in the case of brick and mortar, will actually geofence the store location. Yeah. And so we can kinda connect the dots that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:Breakdown kind of trends in the SF out of home market. Like, how it how is kind of all the the AI funding boom? Yeah. Does a billboard Assuming.
Speaker 1:Up in SF cost, like, 10 times as much as anywhere else? Like, what's the ratio, at least?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I mean, it's after the you know, we had that 2023, we had the software recession. 2024
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:We started to see things come pick back up. And in the last twelve months, it's gone gangbusters for for the AI companies. To answer your question, yeah, the the prices are some of the most expensive in the market. And but, you know, you know, some of our customers are some of the leading AI companies, Finn being one of them. Yeah.
Speaker 11:Eleven Labs, we've we've done campaigns for. And so, yeah, you're starting to see AI companies use this channel to, you know, kinda break through the clutter of of digital.
Speaker 2:What's the most underrated out of home form factor in your view?
Speaker 11:If you're b to b, I really like account based marketing or account based. So basically, you take all of your h q's for your target accounts, you put them in the map, and then you buy up all the inventory surround
Speaker 2:bus stops, you know, basically, like, just flood the zone in a in a, like, two block radius kind of thing.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Exactly. And I don't know if you recall, but say, like, maybe, like, five or six years ago, the founders of Brex took over all of San Francisco, most of San Francisco being their target market. And I think they spent, like, half $1,000,000 and, you know, customer acquisition.
Speaker 2:I think I think people haven't fully processed that, like, there seems to be, like, increasing, like, returns as you spend more on out of home Mhmm. Which is that, like, you know, if you spend $50 on a campaign somewhere around LA, you're gonna have, you know, some effects. But if you if you spend spend, you know, dramatically more than that, like in order of magnitude, it seems like you really like break through in a different way. It's funny. Sam Sam Blonde who who did that original campaign, he's back with his new a new company and taking the same approach, you know, heavy heavy heavy out of home spend.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Some some of our teammates in San Francisco were saying that Monaco's up and down the one zero one. Yeah. I think they bought, like, sixty sixty or 70 billboards, so they're making their presence felt.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He told me about that before we had him on the show, and I was like, that is such a bold way to to introduce your company. But it it it really does break through. I've seen photos of it, and if you're there, you'll you'll you'll see
Speaker 2:What about on the on the supply side? How how heavy are the restrictions on bringing on new out of home supply? Is I'm assuming, obviously, it's
Speaker 1:You're thinking for your house?
Speaker 2:City by city. Yeah. Mean, I'd love to put like, you know, a massive billboard on my on my house. But no, I just think in in in general
Speaker 1:Hey, honey. I sold the front yard.
Speaker 2:The roof.
Speaker 1:Hey. Our mortgage is gonna be half the price now. That's amazing. I'd Yeah.
Speaker 11:So in terms of limitations, in 1965, the Highway Beautification Act was passed. Mhmm. So that kind of restricts That
Speaker 2:required every highway to have beautiful Okay.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So so basically, there's only a a certain subset that you can put near highways, but you're starting to see all all these other formats kinda come about. Sure. You know, there's folks putting ads on trucks. Yeah.
Speaker 11:There's folks wrapping Ubers. They're putting ads inside of Ubers. They're putting pulling planes in the sky, which is kind of old old school. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:Skywriting.
Speaker 11:And then drone shows are are the the new big thing and expect to see a lot more of those in the future.
Speaker 2:I know. I'm surprised it hasn't been hasn't been utilized. The the only other thing is can you can you put a blimp on AdQuick? Like, I'm so I've I've I've given I've given this advice to Yeah. Enough companies now and they haven't done it.
Speaker 1:I feel like
Speaker 2:But just like flying a blimp like a Goodyear blimp over SF for
Speaker 1:Goodyear's just cornered the market. I think that they wouldn't I don't think Goodyear would sell their blimp for billion dollars. I think there's just their greatest capital asset they have because you could monetize that thing so well flying around San Francisco.
Speaker 11:You know, we do have 2,000 media owners on the platform and Okay. I'm pretty sure that might fit the bill.
Speaker 1:That'd be amazing. Love it. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations on on the on the partnership. Yeah. And thank you again
Speaker 1:Makes so much sense.
Speaker 2:You have been the second
Speaker 1:Day one.
Speaker 2:The second advertiser right after ramp
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:To back us Yeah. And will never forget
Speaker 1:Yeah. Your support. We appreciate you, Chris.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much. Whole team.
Speaker 1:Alright. We'll talk
Speaker 8:to guys.
Speaker 1:Great to see you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 1:And let me also tell you about Labelbox, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.
Speaker 2:Expecting our next guest to be duct taped to his chair.
Speaker 1:Oh oh, is he? Is he? He was duct taped. Oh, he's free. He got free.
Speaker 10:I'm alive.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Introduce yourself. Introduce the company, and then explain the duct tape stunt.
Speaker 10:I love it. Co founder and CEO of Hanover Park. Think about us as financial infrastructure. Empower investment firms, private equity, venture funds. The most unsexy industry in the planet.
Speaker 10:We're now making sexy.
Speaker 1:And thank you for your
Speaker 10:yeah. So I was duct taped to a chair and I announced a blooper that I tagged Jordan and you guys, and I was like, okay. How can we make the most boring industry in the world sexy? And that was obviously replacing human duct tape. And so, yeah, pumped to do it.
Speaker 10:We launched our analysis Okay. Here
Speaker 1:So the metaphor is there's a lot of human duct tape inside these funds, piecing different puzzle pieces together to manage the financial assets and LP relationships, and you make all of that go away. Correct?
Speaker 10:A 100 per and also, like, I don't know. I've been saying this for two years, like b to b SaaS is dead. We wanna sell outcomes, not tools.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And so tools are things that are a bunch of duct tape around with humans and software, and we're like, we're gonna replace the human heavy services business out there too.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:What is the what is the key moment for an allocator using the platform that that really Clicks. Wows them or clicks?
Speaker 10:When you wanna make a $100,000,000 follow on decision and you have to ping your CFO and say, hey, can you pull together the data that we haven't had in real time for the past two months? Can you figure this out?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 10:AI agents solve the problem by getting you real time data and then help you make those decisions. And so we're pulling in data from granola notes. We're pulling in data from emails and board decks. We're pulling in data from all the boring accounting data on those positions. And so people are like, oh my god.
Speaker 10:I can finally make a decision in real time without waiting a bunch of days.
Speaker 1:Okay. So there might be a whole bunch of decks from all the different investments and all the different companies that have various ARR figures and growth rates, but they're sort of buried. Hanover can go in there, get that data, put it in some sort of centralized database and then visualize that or maybe even help with marks. Is that something you do? Or is there still a human in the loop for that?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Even more importantly, we think there's a world where you don't even need to log in to Hanover Park. We're going to expose all the data via MCP server. And so we launched that where people are accessing it via Claude, Cowork, and via GPT, etcetera. Sure.
Speaker 10:And so that's been a key piece, I would say, for like GPs, whereas like CFOs are gonna use us for things like capital calls, distributions, financial reporting to LPs, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Got it. Got it. What what so interesting. So if somebody's on, like, the, like, enterprise OpenAI plan or something, they they they do they have to integrate this themselves, or is that just like a off the shelf plug in? And then and then, if they want to actually get this into, a deck, what's the current stack to get that information?
Speaker 1:They would be exporting it, like, transforming it over in their LLM tool of choice and then taking it to the LPs?
Speaker 10:It's actually even worse. You would have to email some human called your fund admin and say, hey. Can you pull that data that's locked in some random tool you don't give me access to? Yeah. You then get a spreadsheet, you then put that into another tool, you then put that into Claude or GPT, etcetera.
Speaker 10:And so, a lot of the value prop here is you're gonna pay a fund admin anyway to do this boring financial reporting. LPs demand this from a third party. Mhmm. And so instead of having that data locked away, we can at least give you access to it and then you can put it into Claude and other things.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:How big is the market? I this is a market that like, you know, compared to like SMB
Speaker 1:There will never be too much venture capital, George.
Speaker 2:I know. I know. Know. And we're trying to
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're
Speaker 2:trying to to to get more people to
Speaker 1:be There's a $110,000,000,000 raised this month. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. But but yeah. So so I'm I'm assuming with with, you know, venture funds, private equity, all this stuff, you know, you you have to kind of ignore, like, individual SPVs and entities. But but I'm assuming you can kind of clock pretty precisely like what the how big the market is and then you gotta go and try to get as much of it as you can.
Speaker 10:Yes. So there's a 100,000,000,000,000 of global assets and there's a $20,000,000,000 public
Speaker 2:like somewhat of You're gonna get PIMCO
Speaker 1:at some point. Right? Like, they
Speaker 10:It's yeah. It's like hedge funds. Okay. Right? You have like private equity funds, real estate private equity venture, etcetera.
Speaker 10:Like, SS and C is a public company today. They have like 5,000,000,000 of revenue. Sick Co has 5,000,000,000 of revenue. Right? So there's a bunch of like these massive dinosaur companies that exist, it's really like venture and private equity is just the start.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. And and so within I mean, venture also scales from $15,000,000 fund to $15,000,000,000 fund. Like, I imagine that there's some trade offs where the bigger you go, the bigger the dollars, but also the bigger integration, the more requests versus somebody who's just starting a, you know, a new fund. They don't have any software, so it's super easy to get off the ground.
Speaker 1:Where have you been picking one or the other as like a beachhead market? Or have you just been doing like whoever you know?
Speaker 10:Yeah. You'd be surprised. The bigger it is, the the easier it is to differentiate actually. Okay. And so a lot of these bigger funds
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:They've been like running around with players like SS and C, which I call, like, the evil empire, which is basically, like, you're using them and all of your data is kinda trapped. Whereas, like, an early stage venture fund that's just getting off the ground, things are pretty clean and pretty easy. And so we've actually focused on, like, mid market enterprise, so think, like, 250,000,000 plus Sure. In assets Yeah. Venture and private equity to start at least.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. You do any work on the on is it all equity, or are you starting to do stuff in private credit or private or like public debt or any of the other asset classes? Or are you just purely in alternatives?
Speaker 10:Purely in alternatives today. I would say like six to twelve months from now, obviously, focused on expanding into things like private credit. Yeah. Obviously, big opportunity being here in New York. I've I've been saying this for a long time.
Speaker 10:Favorite sponsor ramp. It's like Stripe for payments, ramp for expenses, Hanover Park for investments.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 10:And so that's kind of the the Have
Speaker 2:you had any customers just ask you to just handle just all the investment decision making? They're like, I'll just put money in a box and then you you deploy it. Let me know how it goes. Talk to my LPs too. Don't wanna talk to them anymore.
Speaker 1:I don't talk to founders or LPs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Not yet.
Speaker 1:Not yet.
Speaker 10:I I think it's been funny. It's like a lot of LPs that we talk to are like, I keep you know, my venture funds are investing in AI, but they're back in middle offices run by the anti AI. And so this idea of like we're investing in it, we might as well move to it as well has been pretty exciting for people. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 10:But I think long term, it's like unlocking alpha for the investment firm based on all the unsexy financial data that we have could be interesting. Yeah. But we got a lot of work to do to get there.
Speaker 1:Is unpack a little bit of more of, the dream unsexy proprietary dataset. Does that look like PitchBook or Crunchbase data? There's a lot of different data sources that venture capitalists go to throughout diligence. Is do you wanna be a conduit to those sources, or do you imagine that the LLM tools that venture capitalists are using will interface with those separately and just do the joins in the whatever work session is happening?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's actually not really Crunchbase PitchBook. It's really like the unsexy financial cash flow data. So, like, give me the cash flows from every LP through history and how that flows into our next cap call or our next distribution or our next, you know, financial statement. So it's actually that data, which is the data that's mostly trapped in these fund admins.
Speaker 10:I think Crunchbase and PitchBook access will get commoditized. Those will go into the the underlying models, and I don't think we wanna play that game.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about the overall health of the venture capital market. I feel like you're in a unique position. There's been these, like, sort of warring narratives we joked earlier, like a 110,000,000,000 raised, but that was OpenAI. There's a lot of there's, like, sort of a crunch in, k shaped recovery maybe in venture capital.
Speaker 1:There's a variety of mega funds that are scaling up. Like, what are you seeing when someone just asks you from the outside, maybe they're, you know, a public markets investor, and they say, like, how is how is how is venture capital doing these days?
Speaker 10:We're actually seeing a lot of haves and have nots. It's a very stark bifurcation because when you start a fund, you basically sign a lawyer and a fund admin, and so we see from inception of how your raise is going. And so literally it's there's people that are raising in three, six, nine, ten weeks for a first fund, is crazy fast versus six to twelve months. And then there are people who are never raising.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:And so I think it's the people that are spinning out of a lot of the major funds that are targeting, call it, a 100 to $200,000,000 fund ones Yep. Are having an actually an easier time from some of the emerging managers that are focused on, like, $25,000,000 fund ones. And so it's a pretty big bifurcation there.
Speaker 1:How are you processing this new holding company roll up firm? It looks like a private equity firm, but it also sort of looks like a start up. We've had a couple of these founders on where Yeah. Those probably
Speaker 2:aren't clients because they just get a bunch of money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Would they be or could they be in the future? How do you think about that?
Speaker 10:It's actually funny. We've had a lot of these folks reach out because fund admin and, like, accounting services more broadly, right, think about us as a subset of that because we're doing financial accounting reporting for investment firms. Yeah. That is a ripe industry for roll up, and so people have been like, oh my god, should this be a fund admin roll up as an idea in terms of vertical bio? What we've realized is, if you just toss agents, the the word agents on top of any accounting data, it doesn't really do anything.
Speaker 10:Really? Having, the core ERP for the fund and the system of record that we had to build from day zero is actually, like, way more important than just saying, like, AI solves all our problems, which I don't think does quite yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you had to do any, like, fine tuning on your own data or your system, or are the agents sort of able to, you know, find their way around your system pretty quickly? Like, did you need to build your own MCB servers or your own CLIs for these things? We were just talking about this with DoorDash. There's, like, demand for a DoorDash CLI now.
Speaker 1:And it's funny, but it makes a lot of sense in the context of agentic engineering.
Speaker 10:Yeah. We've actually to build our own little AI fund accountant, I call it, which is doing simple things like Yeah. AI cash reconciliation. When you get an email from someone to make a decision Mhmm. How does a human do that?
Speaker 10:It's actually client specific, different clients have different preferences, and so almost how do you build that like AF and accountant.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 10:We're using a bunch of the models off the shelf Sure. To do that as well, and then we're doing some fine tuning on top.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Does does that look like a like a like a m like a dot m d file, like a skill, Or is this more of like a full harness that's actually, you know, like a whole bunch of code that you've written? Like, how do you see that system growing as you develop more core capabilities?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I I think one so there's a bunch of different ways that we sliced it. But like for something like migration, which is how do I get the most complex financial data in the entire world from one system to another, that's a lot about building harnesses and building skills in and around the core underlying model providers to say, this is the weird messy financial data from pick your massive investment firm. Yeah. Here's how we need to think about this.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And then for things like doc processing a little bit differently. So depends on depends on the workflow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the progress of the company, like where are you based? How big is the firm? How are you growing? Where do you see this going over the next couple of years?
Speaker 10:Yep. So two years old, raised 31,000,000. Obviously, we're today, we're announcing a $27,000,000 series a led by merchants. We went we go. We did it.
Speaker 10:Just getting started though.
Speaker 8:We're just
Speaker 1:getting started. Oh, there we go.
Speaker 10:We're we're just getting started. What are you talking about?
Speaker 1:I love it. I love
Speaker 10:it. We went 1 to 15,000,000,000 in assets in the past twelve months. We We've had a lot of excitement from folks. I actually I was joking with the team. I said, guys, this is a top point one percent problem.
Speaker 10:Having unlimited demand and people excited, now let's go make them raving fans, which is our goal for '26. And so not cursor, but we're focused on, you know, keeping our heads down and and executing.
Speaker 1:That's great. That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 2:I love it, dude. It's awesome. It's awesome to see your your progress.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I remember mean years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just the absolute thread grinder from the 2021 Yeah. Era. Just ran it up. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're just And
Speaker 1:so I'm sure you angel invested. Right?
Speaker 2:I did I did miss
Speaker 5:this one.
Speaker 10:Happened, guys? Saw him one got in. You didn't get
Speaker 1:in. This is this is the nature of the show. This is why we're podcasting because, we we we we we see people like you all the time and we just miss everything. So back to the show. I know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jordy makes a lot of good investments. I I just don't I just don't do it. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come great
Speaker 4:to see
Speaker 2:you, Chris.
Speaker 8:We'll talk
Speaker 1:to you soon. Congrats. Let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 1:And let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without middle without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And our next guest is in the restroom waiting room. Georgios. What's going on?
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Good afternoon. Thank you for afternoon.
Speaker 1:Good to see you.
Speaker 2:Great to
Speaker 1:see you. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.
Speaker 6:I'm Georgios. I drive the engineering team at the Temple project. Yeah. Temple is a payments first blockchain that we started developing in August. Today, we just launched the Temple Mainnet live in production.
Speaker 6:Alongside it, we also launched the machine payments protocol, which is our answer to how agents should pay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you think
Speaker 6:about it, agents are great at searching the web. We use agents all the time in our development process Mhmm. By AMP, Cloud Code, Codex, whatever it is we're developing, but we find it very hard to make them pay. So we developed the solution for it, and I'm excited to talk about both.
Speaker 1:So you have MCP. A lot of people were saying, like, why doesn't MCP have payment a payment spec already baked into it? There's this whole debate about HTTP maybe having a payment spec in it that maybe about twenty years ago or something. MPP solves that. But is MPP, like, a subset or a superset of MCP, or is it a completely different spec?
Speaker 1:Is there any relationship between the two technologies?
Speaker 6:They're complementary. You should think of MCP as a way to talk to an API Yep. That has been designed to be baked into the agent harnesses. Mhmm. And MPP is a way that you can payment gate an MCP.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. So imagine that you have your service, you have written an MCP for it, but you actually want to make that a paid service. Maybe, for example, on TBPN, you guys do great prep for all of the people that you work with. Hey. Well, what if you just
Speaker 2:Sometimes.
Speaker 6:Added a paid API to that? Sometimes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Awesome. So so yeah. I think anybody that that hasn't been living under a data center has heard of the potential for agents to to use stable coins and and blockchain technology generally for various services. You guys are working with a bunch of really cool companies.
Speaker 2:Like, what kind of use cases are you trying to guide your design partners towards enabling?
Speaker 6:I think the most exciting use case that they have to do around commerce Mhmm. Basically, there's a lot of, like, very interesting work around, hey. I'm on ChatGPT. My ChatGPT is browsing around, but, hey. It wants to buy things for me.
Speaker 6:I think that's one of the things that is I'm unlocking. The other thing to think about is that your Charge GBP is, again, browsing the web, but it hits a paywall. You want it to be able to instead of saying, hey. I can access this information, you wanted to instead be able to say, actually, pay 30¢, and you can actually access this wonderful article that would have been paywalled, which might improve your research queries by, say, 30% or something. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So we
Speaker 2:learned that So in that that case, you'd be going to like, so is there a plan to go to publishers, people that do have paywalled content and try to get them to enable MPP? Is that is that the idea?
Speaker 6:Totally. I think that would be awesome. And the other thing that I think is just happening already is that, again, envision that that people these days don't have an attention span, and people these days also don't wanna click buttons around. They just wanna tell their, again, their AI app to do things for them. I think what we've been seeing ourselves as developers is instead of me going to, say, Cloudflare, Vercel, and saying, hey.
Speaker 6:Log in. Add billing information. Get API key. Pull it back to my terminal or go to Eleven Labs and say, hey. Do me this text to speech thing or any kind of, like, API gated service that exists today.
Speaker 6:Instead, I can just say, hey, agent. Here's $5. Go and figure it out for me. And, actually, he doesn't just do it in one service. It does it on many services.
Speaker 6:Can imagine a waterfall of queries. You can tell it, hey. Go search the web, pull all this data, translate it with this API, then voice to speech it, text to speech it with some other API, and then upload it onto a website and email me that link of the website, all one shot.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah. I was gonna ask more on the on the technical side. There's been a lot of protocols created blockchains over the last, you know, decade. You've seen pretty much all of them.
Speaker 2:I'm assuming this is your Mona Lisa, you know, taking all the different learnings from the different blockchains and trying to build, the the perfect perfect, product experience this time around. What kind of, like, technical decisions did did you and the team make, for this kind of use case?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So the Tempo blockchain is itself optimized for payments, which means that it's really fast. Mhmm. It has very high throughput and very low latency. Our block times are less than a second, which means that you hit.
Speaker 6:And before the spinner even finishes spinning, you have a confirmation back, which is what any normal person would expect from a payments experience. But in addition to these, the innovation that we've done on the MPP side is a feature called sessions where normally you would need to let's say you're talking to I don't Let's say, again, the OpenAI API. And if you were to do payments, if you were to pay for every query that you're doing, you will need to wait for the blockchain to, like, confirm your transaction. You will need to pay a fee anytime you do your transaction. And that these days, maybe you can do 10,000 transactions per second or something.
Speaker 6:But really for the agentic web, and it does seem that everyone will be making a lot more API calls than they were doing before, We need to scale up to hundreds of thousands, millions, if not, you know, billions of payments per second. Just to put it the analogy would be that instead of thinking of, like, financial transactions, we should be thinking about API calls Mhmm. Per second. So we developed this feature called sessions, which let you really go with API scale by bypassing the blockchain and thinking about it like going to a opening a tab where you say, hey. I'm opening my tab.
Speaker 6:And then every time on your notebook on the side, you write what are the updates. And then only at the end when you wanna settle do you pay, which amortizes the cost of a very expensive otherwise operation. If you wanna do, you know, a thousand or a million API requests, just two. The opening and the closing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes sense. Do how how are you dealing with the just general perception that there's always a risk that AIs hallucinate. And so maybe, you know, you don't wanna have an you don't wanna give an agent the ability to go spend an unlimited amount of money. Maybe you want a transaction to be reversible.
Speaker 1:There's this joke about, like, giving OpenClaw your, your credit card that seems irresponsible. But in some ways, I would maybe rather give a credit card to an agent than, you know, a a crypto wallet that if it sends to the wrong address, it's gone forever. It's not really reversible. How are you thinking about handling those, like, long tail errors that are that can be catastrophic?
Speaker 6:That that's an awesome question because I absolutely have, in the past, lost money using systems that, you know, others had built where where you just give your agent money, and then the agent goes and spends it without realizing how much access it has. Yeah. We developed a feature called access keys Mhmm. Which basically is your standard card permissions. It's a bit more programmable, but you should think of it as limits, spend limits Sure.
Speaker 6:And you can program that. So whenever you open a a tempo session, you can just authorize the agent and say, you can only spend up to $10. Mhmm. Or you can tell it, hey. You can only spend up to $10 an hour or $1 a second.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. So it lets you have any kind of granularity on the assets that you're accessing, the the functions that you can call or the API calls you can make, and also on the frequency that these budgets can be applied.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about getting the long tail of publishers onto some sort of agentic payment rail? Because
Speaker 2:Hopefully, they're already on Stripe. Otherwise, they've been living under a data center.
Speaker 1:Yes. I'm just thinking about like the actual that's like that's
Speaker 2:to me that's like why when I saw the launch and heard about the product the the project previously I was okay, Stripe already has a long tail of merchants. If they can easily enable MPP, then you're kind of able to kind of bootstrap a network.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I'm just thinking, like, if you have a blog and you put AdWords on it, you got a stream of payments from Google. Whenever you would show a page, they'd show an ad. They'd auction that ad. They would send you maybe 50% of what they made on that ad, and that would be paid monthly.
Speaker 1:And they were able to onboard sort of the long tail. If you it feels like the the opportunity here is like this many to many relationship, I'm but wondering about, like, is that onboarding going to happen on Tempo directly? Is is that going to be decentralized? Or would we expect the big labs like OpenAI and Thropic to say, okay. Now we have opt in for anyone who wants to get paid when one of our LLMs, one of our agents hits your website, and we will use Tempo as the payment rail.
Speaker 6:So there's a few questions here. So I think what you just said is true and will happen. It's already happening. Right? So Anthropic or OpenAI or both already have a service where you plug in only the OpenAI, and then you can just have a billing relationship with all of the integrated partners that they have.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:So that that will happen for sure. On the tempo side, the machine payments protocol Mhmm. MPP, which is what we launched this morning, it is co built with Stripe. We co authored it, and it's payments method agnostic. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So every merchant that is on Stripe and if you go to the Stripe docs, MPP is already there, and it's already an option you can enable. Every merchant could turn that on, and their API and their website could become MPP enabled, which would cover a part of that tail, if not, you know, that part that you just said.
Speaker 1:Sure. So is this a bet on model commoditization and local compute? Because if there's consolidation and the vast majority of LLM traffic is coming from, like, a single lab or two labs or three labs Yeah.
Speaker 2:When are take most?
Speaker 1:The Wall Street Journal does get scraped by OpenAI, but they have a deal between OpenAI, the corporation, and News Corp, the corporation. And they sat down in a boardroom, and they said, hey. This is the value. Like, send me the check and pay, you know, via invoice. And it's a very different relationship.
Speaker 1:But for these long tail, if the the long tail with Google can pay a ton of small bloggers who set up their own websites on whatever. They can code, you know, their own their own blog. But is this is this maybe a solution to, like, if models commoditize and you're seeing LM traffic come come from all different sources, then you need your agent to go and make the payment?
Speaker 6:I think for the publisher use case, I think that totally could be the case.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:The thing that we're the most excited about is the machine machine payments world and developers. Right now, every there's just a a tailwind right now where with AI, more and more people are building things. Yep. Everybody wants to make paid APIs or everybody wants to monetize their knowledge base, their API. And these are just not things that it just means that the tail is just going to be so long Yeah.
Speaker 6:That it's not something that I expect will be realistically captured by the labs in that way. Just because any random dev can spin up an API that could be very, very, very valuable. And I think that the lowest friction way to access and monetize that API will be via MPP on Tempo.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think that makes a ton of sense. I I've I've run into this issue where I've gone to, a particular LLM and said, I want you to, take this video, convert it to an MP three, then transcribe it, then, you know, transform that. And it can do and it's like, oh, I need a tool for that. Like, why don't you download the file and
Speaker 2:You're like, no.
Speaker 7:You're
Speaker 1:They literally told me, like, open up QuickTime and turn it into an m three. I was like, no. No. No. I want you to do that.
Speaker 1:And if you Google it, like, you know, m p four or or m four a two transcript, like, there's a tool out there that does it. It's I don't know if it has an API. It probably should. There probably is an API out there for a lot of these
Speaker 6:It might have malware in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of them are like websites that have a million ads and stuff. It's way better.
Speaker 1:I I if it just came back to me and be and was like, hey. That's gonna be 15¢, and I've already approved that. Or, hey. It's gonna be $50 to do what you want because you asked me to go generate a whole bunch of AI video and crazy stuff, and, you know, that was a big request. Is this in budget?
Speaker 1:And I can be like, yeah.
Speaker 6:Absolutely. And this is right now supported. There's the MPP services registry where you literally go tell your agent, hey. Build me an image, convert this to whatever you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:There are APIs already integrated, which let you do all of these things without ever leaving your agent, without getting every base, like, a p you know, install your own API tool.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Explain if I'm a developer and I'm using something like Codex and I want to, like, effectively enable the agent to buy different services with MPP, what is the process for what is, like, the recommended process for, like, actually giving it funds, everything on that side?
Speaker 6:So this is the use case that we've been optimizing for. It is the exact use case because we're developers, and we actually dog with this experience every day. Yeah. The process is extremely simple. You tell it, install the Tempo skill.
Speaker 6:The Tempo skill is available on Tempo website. You just paste the link in your agent. And then once you tell it to install the Tempo skill, the Tempo skill bootstraps the whole process and says, install the Tempo command line interface from your codex and then onboard the user. The user's browser opens, the user face IDs, and then or touch IDs if you're on your MacBook. And then the user just gets onboarded via Apple Pay if they have Apple Pay if they have an Apple card or via another crypto if they have stable coins or we right now, we provide some referral codes to make onboarding easier for people.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 6:And then you're in. Then you're logged in and you can go crazy.
Speaker 2:And then you could ask the agent, like, add more fun you know, I need to add more funds.
Speaker 7:Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And so if you hit if you hit some type of Paywalled experience or Paywalled API, it'll just tell you, I need access to more funds. And then Absolutely. Can just enable it. That's very Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very, very
Speaker 1:launch. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 6:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Great to meet you. Have a good day.
Speaker 6:A good day.
Speaker 1:Me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me also tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado,
Speaker 2:we have Matt Long from
Speaker 1:Here he Paradigm in TBPN Herald.
Speaker 2:How are you doing, Matt? What's going on?
Speaker 8:What's up, guys?
Speaker 4:How's it going?
Speaker 2:Great to finally have you on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Fantastic.
Speaker 4:Long time listener. Big fan.
Speaker 1:Appreciate that. Where should we start, Jordy? Should can we should do a little biograph biographical stuff? Can we go back in time a little Get to how we
Speaker 2:got here? Touch on Tempo
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Since we've been talking about Tempo. And then there's a bunch of other stuff we can talk about. But glad to see you're drinking a diet a virtual diet coke with with John.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 2:I guess my question for
Speaker 1:you on on Tempo is it it it feels like a big project. It feels like it launched very fast. Is this faster than expected? Like, what were the keys to actually getting to this point as quickly as you did?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think it's perhaps one of the fastest, you know, project start to mainnet launch. Yeah. In crypto. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it certainly was top of mind for us to move really fast.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 4:the genesis of the project was around noticing the problems that existing infrastructure had surfing all these stablecoin use cases. Mhmm. And we didn't wanna wait around for many years.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But certainly, you would have seen the opportunity before August. Right? Like, it's not like you weren't thinking about AI or stablecoins or anything. So so was that, like, somewhat of an intentional strategy of, like, hey, we need to build a really strong thesis of of how this market is gonna evolve and we shouldn't just like rush in, launch something and then go through kind of wandering in the wilderness to then get to the point where you could launch something to main net.
Speaker 4:You know, you're ascribing a lot of foresight. Candidly I mean, obviously, we've been paying attention and investing and building in the crypto space for a long time. Candidly, it was kind of two sides coming together. On the Paradigm side, we were noticing the slowness of existing infrastructure. And then on the Stripe side, they've been doing a bunch of great work in Stablecoin and were themselves experiencing a lot of the infrastructure challenges that existing chains had.
Speaker 4:So we had a conversation in April about maybe we should actually get together to build something. And then a week later, the entity was formed.
Speaker 1:Are there any other big, like, distribution nodes that need to fall into place besides having the network up and running and then the partnership with Stripe? Because it feels like that solves everything, but I'm I'm curious to know, like, what are the other next steps in the rollout broadly?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think there's probably two layers to think about. Right? There's tempo of the chain Mhmm. Which all the crypto infrastructure and exchange infrastructure needs to support, and we have a bunch of great infrastructure partners there.
Speaker 4:Then I think there's just the broader trend of stablecoins. Mhmm. Like, if you think about payments, I like to think about it as, like, a thousand or 10,000 different markets. It's not a single market. You know, there's what country does it originate from, where does it go, the size of payment, whether it's a business, consumer, etcetera.
Speaker 4:And so some of those are much better served by existing infrastructure, and some of it's much worse served. And so stablecoins are actually particularly good at certain segments of that kind of big matrix, and that's where it's being adopted first, you know, cross border, remittances, payouts. And so part of the goal around tempo is to kind of promote stablecoins more broadly, not just offer another chain.
Speaker 2:How how predictable has stablecoin adoption been to date? Like, if you go back five years ago, were you pretty confident that you'd see it more in emerging markets, and then and then it would go, you know, eventually to to business use cases for, you know, businesses that were operate are operating internationally, like, and then obviously trading use case which has been, you know, dominant since the beginning.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Stablecoins have been around for ten years, mostly dominated by trading. And I think the emerging market use case is definitely expected. I mean, the monetary rails and monetary units are much worse there. I will say we were probably surprised in the last eighteen months by how much it's taken off.
Speaker 4:I think even the most bullish people inside of crypto, maybe some predicted it, but all of us have been surprised by how much stablecoins are being used outside of crypto. And that's really the bullishness that drove us to get excited about launching something like TEMPO.
Speaker 1:And is the big is the big driver I mean, I've heard about the, like, Scale AI use case. I think SpaceX has mentioned a use case for stablecoins. There's a lot of, like, cross border deals.
Speaker 2:Deals. Deals. Yeah. One.
Speaker 1:Invested heavily. Is that the current narrative, or are there other little offshoots popping up around adoption?
Speaker 4:There are probably three big buckets. The first is the cross border.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:And so that's where you have deal which Yeah. Serve so many different countries, and Shopify is thinking about similar things. Yeah. And then you have the instant nature of stablecoins. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So, I mean, when you think about it, it's kind of crazy that the financial system shuts off during nights and weekends. Like, the Internet is on 20. The financial system is off more than it's on. Yeah. And so I think stablecoin potential is just to bring that into the twenty first century where it's on all the time.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah. And the US dollar has insane network effects, obvious product market fit, and then you're taking a product that works that Mhmm. That's pretty great and then, you know, it has has some of its issues. But and then you just like wrap it in something that, you know, unlocks Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You know, all this additional That's right. Know, airtime.
Speaker 4:And you know, there is a trend in the seventies and eighties called Eurodollars, which is sort of the the offline trad fi equivalent of this, of dollar deposits outside The US. And that also started kind of illegal and frowned upon pretty small and has now grown to, you know, north of 10,000,000,000,000 in offshore deposits and fully legitimized by The US system. And I think stablecoins are probably on that track as well. But back to your question, like, the instant payouts, instant payments, think is underrated too. It's so it's not a cost advantage.
Speaker 4:It's more getting the money immediately and being able to spend it immediately. And if you think about a lot of these labor marketplaces, that's something that the supply side of those labor marketplaces really value.
Speaker 2:How what how do you think the shape of the kind of issuer market evolves? Do think it's you know, right now, it seems to be like a winner winner take most market. But it's certainly a number of companies are kind of promoting this idea of like, there should be millions of different stablecoins. What's your what's your view?
Speaker 4:So I think I think there's probably there's the how many stablecoins will there be that are generally have some usage? And, like, what will the distribution of volume and deposits look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think the distribution is gonna be very top heavy just because network effects around a single unit of account and how liquidity works in DeFi and exchanges. On the other hand, I think a lot of enterprises that we're talking to own the interface that people are gonna be using these stablecoins through. And you can think of them in that context, maybe a little more like stored balances or gift cards, where, like, Starbucks has a massive gift card program. And it's essentially bank like, if you think about it in some ways. And so I think a lot of those types of financial services that are kind of hiding inside these consumer businesses will end up considering launching their own stable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:How are you feeling about the regulatory environment? It felt like 2025 was a great year for just getting clarity around where crypto was going from a regulatory perspective. Has that trend continued in your mind? Are you happy with where things are? Are you optimistic for new regulation or less regulation or any changes?
Speaker 1:Just what's your read on the regulatory environment right now?
Speaker 4:I'd say we're in the top 1% of universes that we could have hoped for. So things are going well.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 4:Like, the Genius Act passed Yeah. That's been huge for stablecoin adoption. Mhmm. Obviously, stablecoins were growing even before that, but a lot of the enterprises we talked to, they weren't really comfortable participating in stablecoins until the regulatory clarity. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:The next stage, hopefully, we get market structure, the clarity bill passed as well. There's some kind of last details to work through between the banking industry and crypto, but I'm feeling optimistic that we can hopefully sort through that.
Speaker 1:Are you a believer in stablecoins to the degree that you'd put your own fund capital in stablecoins?
Speaker 4:Well, yeah. Well, stablecoins, I think, will be like, as a a cash instrument, I think, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Then you don't have to I mean, you can do instant capital calls when you sign the term sheet at 9PM at night.
Speaker 4:You don't have to wait till the next day.
Speaker 1:That's actually pretty bullish. Take us back through some of the previous investment experience you've had. There there was someone in the chat asking about your early fund one investments, very heavy on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Can you tell that story of what that was like from a risk perspective? What actually played out there?
Speaker 4:Yeah. When we launched Paradigm in 2018, I mean, a lot of our thesis was we knew that crypto would expand massively. Mhmm. And then there was this open question, should you invest in the core protocols like Bitcoin, Ethereum, or invest in startups. And obviously, in hindsight, the answer was both.
Speaker 4:Like, you could own Coinbase and Bitcoin. Mhmm. But I think it's a lot like the AI landscape now, this question of, do you own the model companies or do you own Yeah. Oh, that's like, station layer on top? Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so, in 2018, like, Bitcoin and Ethereum were, like, OpenAI and Anthropic, and those are the things to own. And we were sort of we're thinking much more bottoms up about what we wanted to own for five to ten years, rather than, like, is this too much in one investment or it happens to be a publicly traded thing. Yeah. Those are all details.
Speaker 2:That's such an interesting comp because I feel like you can almost think of, like, l l twos
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, and and comp those to like cheaper, smaller open source models today where like l l twos have been, you know, great in in some ways, but also kind of threaten the the the revenue stream or the underlying protocols points.
Speaker 1:Take me back to the ByteDance investment. Was there a similar thesis around should you own ByteDance or Facebook or something? And in reality, the bet was to own both. What went into your initial investment? Take me through the thought process for that one.
Speaker 4:You know, I wish I was that thoughtful back then and could claim some some kind of genius. Yeah. But I was just very lucky to meet the entrepreneur on a trip. And, you know, he's just one of those people you meet that jumps off the page. And I'm sure you guys have had this experience.
Speaker 4:And I was gonna give him money even if he was building a hotdog stand.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. What was it that stuck out? It's just the conversation, the level of detail, the technical side, the EQ Yeah. IQ.
Speaker 1:Like, how were you evaluating him at that time?
Speaker 4:Well, it was a weird conversation because he was I don't really speak good Chinese. I can kind of stumble through ordering dim sum.
Speaker 1:I I don't speak good Chinese either.
Speaker 4:And and he didn't really speak good English, so
Speaker 1:was Yeah. Through a
Speaker 4:But, you know, he's one of those entrepreneurs that, like, seems very thoughtful, academic, highly technical, but then in the revealed nature of his actions, is just, like, extremely hyper aggressive. And I think a lot of Yeah. Some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs look like that too in a great way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. I I I'm thinking of a number of of CEOs who've talked to founders of talk. Patrick at Stripe, I think.
Speaker 1:I was I was gonna say. Yeah. Exactly. Where where they have one demeanor, one level of they can communicate about the technical side of the business very thoughtfully. High EQ, but the level of ambition is just unlimited.
Speaker 1:And that's it just seems like such a rare combination. But when you find it, you gotta go all in.
Speaker 2:How should people think about Paradigm today?
Speaker 1:That's a good question.
Speaker 4:So, you know, we've spent a lot of time, in the crypto space. And increasingly, as crypto goes mainstream
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:We're finding that distinction to be a little less, meaningful. And there's a lot of interesting things happening in the world. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, it was it was it was entirely right to be entirely focused on crypto in 2018.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then as the technology diffuses, you realize like, hey, there's a lot of other businesses. And then you also have to follow your own personal interests. And I and I feel like if you're if you're, you know, logging off and then thinking about, you know, biotech or or AI at a certain point, like, think the best investors, like, follow their obsession. So
Speaker 4:Yeah. And don't get me wrong. I think crypto is still one of the most interesting frontiers. It's finally winning. It's getting mainstream.
Speaker 4:It's getting integrated everywhere. But AI and many other areas are also super interesting. And I think of Paradigm today is a lot of the team we've assembled, I mean, just spoke to the our CTO. Yeah. And, you know, he found out, like, what a balance sheet was somewhat recently.
Speaker 4:And, like, is not a typical GP or investor at a fund, but everyone at the fund knows how to code and is in kind of some kind of CLI tool all day. And the team really embodies this hacker ethos that lives at the frontier, And we want to be spending time anywhere that is interesting at the frontier.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Is this the best time in history to be that hacker archetype?
Speaker 4:I think so. It's like the joke that there's a billion dollars stuck in your laptop. You just need to press the right keys to extract it out. And I think that's never been more true with the leverage of intelligence kind of on tap.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I completely agree. What a time to be alive. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to Have finally have you
Speaker 1:a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Excited to Okay. Watch the rollout.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We'll talk soon.
Speaker 1:To you soon. Goodbye. Cheers.
Speaker 4:See you guys.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.
Speaker 1:CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Jordy, what else is in the timeline? Trevor Milton is out raising money for a new company. Trevor Milton, of course, was, convicted and then pardoned for defrauding investors in his truck company, Nikola. Now he's raising funds for a new jet that he claims will transform flying.
Speaker 5:The
Speaker 2:There's quote a quote in the journal. Here that we can pull out. He says, from the journal, now Milton has joined an exclusive group of post pardon business people seemingly anointed by Trump's favor. I hope they've got a group chat for the post pardon mafia. I walk into Trevor says, I walk into meetings now and I'll get high fives from the most wealthy people in the world.
Speaker 2:He said, they're like, welcome to the club. You can withstand the fire. We can trust you now.
Speaker 1:Wow. That is a wild quote. Film has wasted little time embarking on a second act. He's now CEO of CyberJet.
Speaker 2:And With an s. He's unveiling plans for a new small jet that he says will have the highest speed and range and largest lavatory in the light jet category.
Speaker 1:Lavatory. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's important. It's important.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess we wanna be able to take a full shower.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Documents reviewed by the journal said the goal is for the plane to be the first light jet to focus on AI flight to market. CyberJet plans to create entirely new avionic system, likening the effort to Tesla's approach designing its infotainment and vehicle control system. The company also needs to secure more funding and suppliers and overcome regulatory hurdles. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's interesting. I mean, the the the concept of the jet is cool. This was an existing business that he acquired with an investor group
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then they're raising, you know, more money Yeah. After that. The the the the kind of interesting thing in is I feel like Trevor made a name for himself Mhmm. For being a great showman, but not exactly, you know, the most competent and, you know, sort of like engineering led Mhmm. CEO.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Right? Like everyone stuck in their mind. You have the video of like
Speaker 1:Truck rolling
Speaker 2:down the hill. Yeah. And I don't wanna buy a jet Mhmm. From that kind of archetype of CEO.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Right? You kinda wanna buy a jet from
Speaker 1:Like a hacker. Like a hackathon guy who just like whips it up.
Speaker 2:A vibe coater.
Speaker 1:A vibe coater.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. You know, the the the you you wanna buy a jet from Someone with
Speaker 1:decades of experience, ideally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A company with ideally with with decades and decades of experience Yep. You know, millions of flight hours because reliability is more important than anything when you're, you know, thousands Yeah. In the air.
Speaker 1:So We'll we'll we'll make Tyler demo it first.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I think
Speaker 1:Step aboard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then and then and then the the the AI AI component is interesting. I mean, I think there's a number of, there's a number of light, jets and Yeah. Even I think the Pilatus PC 12. I I think the PC 12 has like an a lot of the planes have the auto land functionality.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They still require pilots. Yeah. I'm sure big pilot will figure out a way to make sure that, like, legally
Speaker 1:Well, you'd get a normal a normal jet with no autopilot, then you put a Tesla Optimus in the front seat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We got a pilot. Drives the plane. Gronk, take the wheel.
Speaker 1:Take the wheel. Kalshi has a market here. Tesla Optimus released this year, 25.2% chance right now. Obviously, it's declining a little bit as the year goes on because every day that it's not released, there's a lower chance. It was up at where was it?
Speaker 1:It was up at, like, 50 above 50% last April, but it's since declined. And the market resolves to, if Tesla Optimus or another humanoid robot is on sale to the general public before December 31, that feels tough because I have to imagine that what yeah. What is on sale to the general public? Like, this the demand's gonna be so high, would think that you would go with with business consumers or someone that's at least, hey. Why don't you come in and let's talk about your use case, and let's see how we'll be how we'll be pricing this, like, because it's more
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the security use case.
Speaker 1:Quick. Oh, yeah. Wait. Go for it. Oh, I was just gonna tell everyone about Restream.
Speaker 1:One livestream, If 30 plus you wanna multistream, go to restream.com. Sorry.
Speaker 2:We gotta talk about the security use case. Tech companies are now using robot dogs costing up to 300,000 apiece to guard AI data centers. Remember I was saying Mhmm. I just wanna put a humanoid in my backyard, let them patrol around. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I think it'll be a good deterrent. It's working for dogs. Let's pull up this video. Yeah. Alright.
Speaker 2:That's that's freaky.
Speaker 1:It it can open door.
Speaker 2:This is the last thing you wanna see when you're
Speaker 1:mixing footage here. Right? Because you wouldn't have a robot dog walking on two feet in a Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's that's his that's his attack mode.
Speaker 6:Like
Speaker 1:Yeah. It seems like it. Yeah. I guess that's just the news that, the robot dogs are being deployed. Guarding some of the data centers?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Seems seems relevant.
Speaker 2:You're not impressed because you think you could take it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 2:You kind of know you can take it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Drop kick that thing. No problem. I still got it.
Speaker 2:Taylor Lorenz highlighting from this Vanity Fair profile which we'll get into tomorrow. But in the profile, Dario Amadek never actually gave me an interview, stiffing me after months of planning. So I created a version of Dario Amadek using his own machine. I've met Claude several published interviews, including everything Amadek said at Davos plus the contents of his two books of essays and told which I'm sure Claude already has access to. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He told Claude to simulate the interview using variations on real quotes and to make it like a scene from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. It took Claude less than three minutes. You probably couldn't tell the difference and maybe there isn't one.
Speaker 1:Okay. There was there was like some hot mic moment. Is that real? I I everything's if everything's still have to
Speaker 7:read through
Speaker 1:it. Yeah. We yeah. We gotta properly read through this. I'm sure there's I'm sure there's some interesting stuff.
Speaker 1:It does seem like there's a few interviews. I saw some I saw some quotes about like trends saying that he doesn't wear sunscreen anymore, which I've been advocating for, you know, getting on the trend and deball and a VAR because AI will cure all the downsides, potentially. It's sort of a sort of twist on that. But, at this point, now that I've seen the screenshot, I'm kind of wondering, okay, like what in here is real? Is it all gonna be revealed at the end?
Speaker 1:It's a very long piece. But we'll we'll give it a
Speaker 2:read and see what's going there. We can briefly cover introspection gate. Yeah. Yeah. Mark Andreessen shared, something from Marcus Aurelius Meditations.
Speaker 2:Stop talking about what the good man is like and just be one. And Rune says an entire book where the guy is introspecting.
Speaker 1:I think that's the joke. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is is yeah. Mark Andreessen's like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think I I I you know, seeing through
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think we saw we we we got what Mark was Yeah. Was saying even though a lot of people have he's, you know, leaned into the chaos and and seems to just be having a good time.
Speaker 1:Eight sixteen z's
Speaker 2:He was basically saying just Joking stop about it. Ruminating.
Speaker 1:Stop ruminating. Just I mean, it's a transposition of the you can just do things idea. It's like actually go and do the thing, you know. Jeremy Gaffan has another post about this. It's like people are like rehearsing for the fight that never comes.
Speaker 1:And and that is like a different form formulation of like the don't it's like don't don't don't spend your entire life just thinking about what you're meant to do with your life. Like, go do something. Get some real experiences. There's probably room for introspection, and then go back and forth and watch the game tape, monitor your a your KPIs, but also just think about what brings you joy and what you can do in the world that's that's beneficial. What's your icky guy?
Speaker 1:What's what are you good at? What does the market want from you? What can you make money doing? That type of stuff. Like, these are reasonable, but should that be 99% of your of of of the your time spent?
Speaker 1:Probably not. You know?
Speaker 2:Never ruminate. Never ruminate. Always specked. Never ruminate. Always specked.
Speaker 2:Okay. Specked, Max.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, say, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 2:Bill Gurley says, I fear that AI has decimated the traditional email inbox as we know it. Too many personalized sloppy mails slip through the spam filter. Hope someone builds a better mouse trap. This one is cooked in its current form. Great use of the word cooked.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Nikita was saying February 11 prediction in less than ninety days. All channels that we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense, iMessage, phone calls, Gmail. Email inbox certainly feels that way. Nikita says spam laws will need to be rewritten soon. Machines should be prohibited from communicating with humans unprompted.
Speaker 2:But this will actually make your job just actually just hitting like the button because like, no, a machine didn't send that. A human did. The human hit the button and you're gonna have to press a button like, you know, 10,000 times a day if you're BDR sending sales emails. So anyways, it has been an honor to do the show.
Speaker 1:We have one last Today. Kendra Barnett was just served her first OpenAI ad impression. It's amazing news.
Speaker 2:For The Wall Street Journal, the benchmark in business coverage since 1889.
Speaker 1:I can't imagine a better ad to get served. We love The Wall Street Journal here, and we love ads. So congratulations to Kendra for being served that first OpenAI ad impression.
Speaker 2:We hope you all have the best afternoon Yeah. Evening of your entire life. And we look forward to being back with you
Speaker 1:tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Flashback.