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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.
Speaker 2:Today is Thursday, 04/02/2026. We are Three live
Speaker 1:hundred and sixty four days until April fools.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's right. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have some huge news. This is from the OpenAI blog.
Speaker 2:OpenAI Acquires TBPN, Accelerating the Global Conversation About AI. This is not an April Fools joke. April Fools was yesterday. We didn't do anything for April Fools' Day. This is real.
Speaker 2:This is a very interesting deal. I think a lot of people will be interested in this. We're very excited about this. We have a bunch of context and information to share about how this changes things, what changes, what doesn't. I'm sure there's a million questions.
Speaker 2:We're trying we're gonna try and get to them all. But then we also have a huge normal show because
Speaker 1:Normal show. We got Mark Lohr.
Speaker 2:That's the first Coming on. Not changing. TBPN's not going away. We're gonna be live every day, three hours, as long as we want. We have a lot of flexibility.
Speaker 2:We're gonna do a lot of interesting things. Got Mark Lohr, the LeBron James of e commerce. This is from his Wikipedia page. That's We can pull up the if you are calling me right now, I can't pick up because I'm live. And I think Yeah.
Speaker 1:Might be time to turn off the phones.
Speaker 2:I think Yes. It might be time to turn off the phones.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very, very strange. I think this is maybe the first time in history there's been a deal like this. And then two people that are a part of it have to go and talk for Yes. Three hours straight.
Speaker 1:But it's technology business as usual over here. Yes. But we have a fun show for you today. We'll get into the news in a second. But we have Adam Meyers coming on from CrowdStrike Yes.
Speaker 1:To talk about all the recent
Speaker 2:The Axiom attack
Speaker 1:and More. We have Jeremy from Circle coming on. In person. In person, which is exciting to talk about stables. Stablecoins.
Speaker 1:Justin from Shepard, Garav from Mirage, and then Philip
Speaker 2:from Star Cloud.
Speaker 1:Star Cloud. Of space a week.
Speaker 2:We're very excited about the Artemis two mission going successfully. Hopefully, you all watched it. It was a lot of fun. We were watching it here on the the screen and we were gripped as the rocket took off because Yeah. We were we
Speaker 1:were so locked in. We were we were joking around that it shoulda it felt like it shoulda been a pay per view. Yeah. Like, could we turn space into a profit center for the government?
Speaker 2:Somebody was saying that it was not entertaining. I was extremely entertained. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe they maybe they could do more, but
Speaker 1:has a decent e commerce business too. We were watching. They were selling like 10,000 patches a minute or something like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think we were we were doing the back of the envelope just from the main call to action at the bottom of the YouTube stream. They were selling a patch for, I don't know, tens of dollars and they'd sold like hundreds of thousands of them. So as we were watching, were selling like something like $10,000,000 worth of merch. So maybe go get some for yourself. Anyway, let's go over to Pheji Simo's post on the OpenAI blog.
Speaker 2:She shared this message with the company earlier today. She says, I'm excited to share that we've acquired TBPN. This acquisition brings a team with strong editorial instincts, deep audience understanding and proven ability to convene influential voices across tech, business and culture.
Speaker 3:That's
Speaker 1:I'm still going to be hitting the soundboard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, you are. TBPN has built something pretty special. It's one of the places where the conversations about AI and builders is actually happening day to day. A lot of you already watch it and rely on it to stay close to what's going on.
Speaker 2:As I've been thinking about the future of how we communicate in OpenAI, one thing that's become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn't apply to us. We're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift and the mission of bringing and with the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes a responsibility to help create a space for real constructive conversation about the changes AI creates with builders and people using the technology at the center. And that's exactly what TBPN has built, which is what I was going say is the next line. That is a huge part of the show is making sense of what's going on, how these tools are actually being used, all of the implications.
Speaker 2:We've gone all over the place and we will continue to go all over the place
Speaker 1:over year, the like, you know, multiple years, there's just been so there's so much uncertainty about AI. Yeah. I don't think we can change that. Yeah. But there's also a lot of fear Yeah.
Speaker 1:And just talking through it with the people that are actually helping diffuse AI through the economy across every single industry is something that we've enjoyed a tremendous amount and is exactly what we're gonna continue to do. Yeah. If you wanna continue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So she says, so rather than trying to recreate that ourselves, it made a lot of sense just to bring them in, support what they're doing, and help them scale while keeping what makes them special. A core part of this is editorial independence. We can say whatever we want because we're live and we don't need to run anything through anyone. It's not possible.
Speaker 2:It is. It would be very difficult to have somebody here. Can we say this? I'm about to say a sentence. TBPN will continue to run their programming, choose their own guests and make their own editorial decisions.
Speaker 2:That's foundational to their credibility, and it's something we're explicitly protecting as part of this agreement. And also, we were never in the scoop industry. People were kind of asking, like, is this journalism? Is it commentary? I think we've always been like, hey, we like to talk to a lot of people, have a conversation, bring in
Speaker 1:people And over the
Speaker 2:that's
Speaker 1:companies have approached us and said, we'll give you the exclusive. We don't Yeah.
Speaker 2:We'll say, give it to somebody else.
Speaker 1:It's like, hey, you can come on the We actually want you to go talk to the Journal Yeah. Or the Times Bloomberg. Wherever Bloomberg, etcetera.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Wherever you want to go. And then
Speaker 2:come and contextualize it with us and and let us dig in and understand more about the strategy. And so TBPN will continue running their programming, choose their guests and make their own editorial decisions. That's foundational to their credibility and something we're explicitly protecting as part of this agreement. I'm also excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team. We got lots of ideas and we're very excited for this.
Speaker 2:They've helped many brands market online and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going, their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed. Did you see about me? I can't wait to leverage their talent outside of the show to innovate on how we bring AI to the world in a way that helps people understand the full impact of this technology on their daily lives. TBPN will sit within our strategy organization reporting to Chris Lahain. Really excited to welcome Jordi, John, Dylan and the broader team.
Speaker 2:And here's a statement from you. Do you want to read this? What did you say?
Speaker 1:Over the past year, we've had a front row seat not just to OpenAI but to the entire ecosystem covering the daily news announcements and launches in real time. While we've been critical of the industry at times after getting to know Sam, Fiji, and the OpenAI team, what stood out the most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right. Moving from commentary to real impact and how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us.
Speaker 2:I contextualize it a little bit more shared. You know, a lot of people are like, is this an April Fool's joke? I've been saying, expect the unexpected. This is a plot twist. I'll give you that.
Speaker 2:It was unexpected. Was unexpected to me, But I'm really happy about it. And when I reflect on my career, it's I think it makes a lot of sense and I can walk you through some of my career and my experience with OpenAI and with Sam Altman. I've known Sam for maybe thirteen years. He invested in my first company in 2013 and then we got in a really serious logjam during a financing and I wrote him an email.
Speaker 2:I told this story in Bloomberg a couple years ago. I wrote him an email and said like, hey, like this is getting really rough. I'm a first time founder. I don't know if we're gonna be able to get this done. And he called
Speaker 3:me and we hopped on the
Speaker 2:phone for like five minutes and he was able to completely resolve everything and everyone walked out of the deal feeling pretty good. And so that always left this impression on me that like he was founder friendly. Obviously, he didn't in in this particular case, it was to my benefit, not particularly to his benefit, the way the deals the way the deal like wound out. And and he was just a great add a great addition to the to the negotiation and really
Speaker 1:And you were very young at the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You were
Speaker 1:just a wee lad. I was. You were about 23, 24 or something in Yeah. That
Speaker 2:And then when I took my second company through YC, he was president at the time. And then when I joined Founders Fund, the very first deal that I saw in motion at Founders Fund was the post ChatGPT round in OpenAI in late twenty twenty two, early twenty twenty three. And so I sort of had this, like, front row seat to all of this. And then once we actually started growing TBPN, he was one of the first people that I texted to, you know, say, hey, do you want come on the show? And he was the first lab lead to come on the show and we're excited to continue having him on the show, hopefully have other lab leads on the show, have other people from all over the industry.
Speaker 2:And just generally, I think that when I was at Founders Fund, I was not particularly in the weeds of intra venture capital fights. I was much more interested in the conversation around technological stagnation, not funding companies, not making great companies happen. I never was in a situation where I was like, oh, like if a different VC firm backs a great company, that's bad. You know? And I think that's the same philosophy that I have always taken forward and will continue to believe in, which is that, like, the American AI industry is the most important thing and that will continue to be the case.
Speaker 2:And I'm excited for all the different competition and everything that's happening in industry to to continue and, yeah, push further. Jordy, did you have anything else to say? You said
Speaker 1:I just wanted to say Yeah. Some thank yous because a lot of people have been a part of this journey to It's been I think, something like let me do the math here. Four hundred and ninety six days, roughly sixteen months since we put out the first episode. Yeah. It was just the two of us and Ben sitting in a room, couple cameras
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Couple microphones. And I will just say I didn't know this special of a business relationship was possible Yeah. Between you and me. Yeah. Like I think like if you look back on that almost five hundred days, we've had disagreements around strategy or approaches or things like that.
Speaker 1:But we have like almost universally stayed perfectly aligned on everything that matters every single day Yeah. Every step of the way. Yeah. And I think that's somewhat of a miracle given that we went into this not really knowing what it would become and Yeah.
Speaker 2:We've done like one side project together and it took like eight months and it was like not it was like successful but it was not like, oh yeah, like okay. We were we were working together daily for months, you know?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was a lot of just just jumping and leap of faith. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think we've got this question so many times like do you guys get sick of each other? You know, you just have to talk to each other for three hours a day? And like I've said this before, I'll say it again, and it is actually hilarious. The second that we leave the office, we both get in the car, we call each other, we end up talking for like another hour on the way home.
Speaker 1:And so it's just been it's been the privilege of a lifetime to just build this business with you and the whole team. The team has been absolutely incredible. You guys are all truly amazing. And this very much a team sport. Business is a team sport, but this is like a live team sport.
Speaker 1:We come in here every single day. And the show doesn't happen if we don't all come in and make it happen. And so the consistency of the team has been just incredible. And watching everyone's individual talents just flourish has been incredible. A lot of people came into this, you know, having done a thing or two in the past, but learning new things.
Speaker 1:Brandon has been absolutely incredible. Just an absolute rock in the organization. Brandon, if you're not familiar, writes our newsletter every day and is just remarkably consistent and has helped us shape our editorial approach. And it's been incredible. Dylan, who joined us, I guess, technically Q4 of last year, I'd worked with him at my last company, but is truly truly one of a kind, remarkable.
Speaker 1:I never want to I never want to do business without him. Yeah. And he has just done such an exceptional job working off air. It's like, you know, challenging when you're building a company and you're also having to put on a live performance Yeah. For three hours every day.
Speaker 2:And he wrote the newsletter yesterday. That's true. The op ed. He wrote the op ed.
Speaker 1:Ben Ben, who's been here
Speaker 2:since
Speaker 1:since
Speaker 2:Before TBPN, he was working with me on my YouTube channel. When did we start working together?
Speaker 1:I was here before Geordie.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe like mid twenty twenty four maybe, something like that.
Speaker 1:Sounds right. Videos.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We traveled a lot. A lot of Peloton cases.
Speaker 1:No, but it's been absolutely incredible to watch you grow from an extremely talented individual into a very capable and talented manager, and building out a team of people that are so hardworking and wonderful, and Michael, Scott, Jackson, you guys you know, are so you know, such a joy to to work with even though what we do is is not easy and it's changing
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You know, day to day. Yeah. To all the guests, seriously, it's been it's been so much fun. Like, if you went back and rewound to the beginning of of the show to to we we started with no guests. We did something like 50 episodes Yeah.
Speaker 1:Without any guests. We thought that there was a time that we thought we would just do that forever Yeah. Because that was the only thing that was, you know, really unique about the show.
Speaker 2:Like, that's the reason I started creating content in 2020. Because it was during COVID, there were no events, there were no places to meet other founders, meet other business people. I wasn't thinking of it as like a media business. I was thinking of it as like a way to just have conversations and meet other people who are building companies. We get to do that all day long, which is just a dream come true.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so many so many guests have turned into to dear friends. Yeah. You know, the the Joe Weisenthals, the the Dylan Patel's. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's there's really too many to list, but we will have you all back on the show. So I can't wait. To everybody that's tuned in, whether you've watched, you know, the RSS feed Yeah. Single the live show, the clips, the newsletter,
Speaker 2:anything. Laughing hard.
Speaker 1:You know, we've strived to to create the right product regardless of how much time you have. If you have two minutes a day to read the newsletter, great. If you've got five minutes to watch some clips, if you wanna watch the entire podcast, if you wanna watch Diet TBPN, The Daily Cut Down, thank you. Thank you for tuning in. And fortunately, pretty much everything is going to stay exactly the same.
Speaker 1:Tyler, Tyler, you are truly truly incredible. One of the brightest young people I've ever worked with. And you have such a bright future. We we always always knew that I I've felt from the very beginning that you would go on to start your own company and we cherish every single minute that we have with you. And we're gonna do our very best to retain you for for decades, but thank you for everything you've brought to the show, everything you've built.
Speaker 1:Tyler, if if you're just tuning in now has built all of the internal software that we we use to run the show.
Speaker 4:It's insane stuff.
Speaker 1:It is a, you know, fully custom, you know, content management system Yeah. CRM. It helps us edit all of our videos. Yep. It is the backbone of the show.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a tool that the entire team uses on a daily basis and truly the show would not be possible without it. Yep. And yeah, your your contribution's on air as well. It's It's amazing. It's so much fun to be able to cut cut over to you.
Speaker 1:And so it is with great honor that I give you this soundboard. Good job. And our sponsors.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We can start with with the Ramp team, Eric Eric, Kareem, and the whole the whole team over there has just been incredible. They allowed us, you know, at the at the beginning, sorry, the 2024 when we had started doing the show, we really loved it. Mhmm. They were they committed to sponsoring the show for a year and that allowed us to do to do so much in terms of investing in all in all the equipment that we use, hiring people. They they made it possible and have been truly truly exceptional partners.
Speaker 1:And and, you know, watching Ramps growth over the last
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Over the last couple years has just been phenomenal and they deserve all the all the success. And every other sponsor that has that has been a part of this.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Truly. Shout out Nick as well.
Speaker 2:Oh, did he not get one?
Speaker 1:We gotta get a direct shout
Speaker 2:out for Nick. We gotta get a direct shout out for Nick.
Speaker 1:We don't know we don't know what to call Nick. He's a
Speaker 2:We can't give his name on air because he'll get 10 times more emails. He he the lineup every day is is crafted by Nick. He is our liaison to 99% of the guests that come on the show. Sometimes it starts with an interaction over x or a text message or there's other intermediaries involved. There's a lot that goes into actually getting someone into the waiting room, into the show, making sure that they understand how the show will work.
Speaker 2:It's sort of like, you know, you're hot dropping into this live show. That's new for a lot of people. And Nick does a great job communicating and and parsing all the noise to understand what the best news of the day is, how we can contextualize it best with the optimal guess. And he's done a fantastic job and we'll continue.
Speaker 1:It's an honor.
Speaker 2:It's an honor.
Speaker 1:David Senra. Yeah. One of a kind. Literally inspired us to try harder. Yeah.
Speaker 1:David was our very first listener that I'm aware of. Yeah. He gets sent a lot of
Speaker 2:You send him a link in a Google Drive.
Speaker 1:And he listened and from that first episode, even though it was very scrappy, he said, take this take this, you know, a 100 times more seriously
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Than than you than you are right now. And we did and it's it's the best advice that I've ever gotten and he has been
Speaker 2:And we have a picture of him.
Speaker 1:We have a picture of him here.
Speaker 2:We couldn't print it full size. And it appears that it was printed on a black and white photo printer. But it's a black and white photo and he's a black and white brand. So thank you to David Senora who's been the podcast godfather, truly. And the gong.
Speaker 2:The gong. The chat is asking us to hit the gong. We have to we have to revlodge. The gong will remain. The gong will remain.
Speaker 2:Will Menidas has already chimed in with his take. He says many guy many people are saying wherein the deal guy Yuga many are saying. And it means a lot that Will Menidas the only he is the only guest who has co hosted a full show from start to finish with us. And if you want to go back in the archives, you can can watch that episode. It's a wild one.
Speaker 2:It was in a hotel room. We had yet to figure out the remote shows fully. The team worked really hard to make that one happen and Very chaotic. It's a good time. Very chaotic.
Speaker 2:And yeah. Where else should we go? Should we go to is there anything else to say about OpenAI? I mean, of course, we'll be in conversation with you forever, you know. Anytime on the show, you're welcome to leave a comment or chat in the chat is asking, where is Will Minitis right now?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Probably sailing a boat. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. New York. And, yeah, it's an honor
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To partner with OpenAI and every single person on the team that we've had the pleasure of meeting, we've been impressed by. They are ridiculously talented and Yeah. Every single person is committed to getting getting this AI thing right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're very
Speaker 1:excited. We're incredibly excited.
Speaker 2:Great. Well, let's move on to the Artemis two pictures and images and news. Very, very exciting. It made the front of The Wall Street Journal. NASA aims to orbit moon for first for first time since '72 to boldly go the crew of NASA.
Speaker 1:Chad is asking is that three Diet Cokes? Yes. I got four. You got to thank Diet Coke.
Speaker 2:Thank you to the Coca Cola Corporation for making this possible.
Speaker 1:Thank you to the Hewman team
Speaker 2:The Matayana.
Speaker 1:The Matayana, Yerba Mattes, the podcast in a can. Yes. Wouldn't be possible without you guys.
Speaker 2:And thank you to tailors and suit makers. There's a lot of people that make this possible. The horse, the prop department, there's a million things here. It's been a it's been a great time. So the crew of NASA Artemis two head to Cape Canaveral Launch Launch Pad Wednesday for the first human space flight to the moon in half a century.
Speaker 2:John Krauss posted a incredible photo. Is he is he someone who actually yeah. He he he Special comms assistant. Special comms assistant. He actually goes to the launches and brings special photography gear to get the best possible photos.
Speaker 2:And man, did he deliver with this one. What an incredible moment. We talked about it a little bit. There's an article on the watches Oh god. NASA Artemis two.
Speaker 1:John, we have to thank our lovely wives.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:How could we not?
Speaker 2:Our families. Did you get a text?
Speaker 1:Maybe. We we we don't talk about them a lot on the show. Yes. This is a show about technology and business. But they have been they are the back they're the truly the back bones of the show and have put up with
Speaker 3:A lot of
Speaker 1:travel. Nights, lot of phone calls. Mornings. Yeah. A lot of early mornings.
Speaker 1:I think out of the last out of every single day that we've done the show, I haven't I've I've left the house past 6AM, maybe twice. Right? It's been it's been a long it's been a long road and and the good news, ladies, is it's nothing's gonna change. No. Thank you to both of you for supporting us and allowing us to to do what we do.
Speaker 2:Can we pull up this picture, Ben, of the in the production chat of the first episode that we recorded in the Jonathan Club in downtown showing a
Speaker 1:little Yeah. I put it up earlier.
Speaker 2:Oh, did? Yeah. Behind the This is yeah. Such a such a wild time.
Speaker 5:Remember that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Remember that, Jordy? Suitless. Suitless. We had the flag.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But no suits.
Speaker 2:It looked it looked it looked pretty good on camera. I was I was happy with the way it came out. But
Speaker 1:can cook. Well,
Speaker 2:where should we go next? Artemis two?
Speaker 1:Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Yesterday, the long awaited Artemis two mission took to the stars en route to the moon for the first such manned mission since 1972. Boeing flashback. The
Speaker 1:chat asked for a flashbang. Flash
Speaker 2:out. Okay. That's good. Yes. The flashbang has been a highlight for sure.
Speaker 2:Both literally Yes.
Speaker 1:The soundboard. It's truly And a character on the
Speaker 2:I have some too now. Its members all had Omega Speedmaster x 33 models strapped to their flight suits. Danny Milton just wrote a full article on the site now detailing the watches worn on the wrists of the four astronauts throughout their time as part of this mission. Watches have a long standing history with spaceflight, most notably through the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch, but there are countless others that have cemented their place in the cosmos. Head to the site to learn more about the watches of Artemis two from the Speedmaster x 33 to a surprising Breitling.
Speaker 2:You won't want to miss it. And this is from Teddy Baldesar, who's a great watch creator.
Speaker 1:So we can pull up this video now of the astronauts working on it on what looks like some type of tablet. This was
Speaker 2:Do you think this is an iPad? I don't think so, right? Don't think it's an iPad.
Speaker 1:Looks like it's running some Windows. They seem very committed to Oh the
Speaker 2:yeah. Are they running Outlook or something? Yeah. So here he is typing in Most secure password known to man. What is that?
Speaker 2:9393 or something? 3939.
Speaker 5:3939.
Speaker 2:9393.
Speaker 1:Powerful. Powerful.
Speaker 2:We're going back to the moon. Apparently that video we played yesterday was a little bit of fake news. The the the young man, the adolescent who swears and says, we're going to the effing mood. He was he the the real line I believe in the community note is that he says we're going to the frickin' Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And and it had
Speaker 2:been to add the actual f word. But the sentiment is still the same. Yeah. It's very exciting, very inspirational. Jared
Speaker 1:Isaacman on launch day says, oh, this kid is definitely getting a bag of NASA gear.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:There is some there are some wrinkles with the launch. Right? Fortunately, nothing like disastrous or catastrophic But or the good news is that we're on our way back to the moon. The bad news is that the toilet's broken apparently. And I believe this is from the live blog from the New York Times.
Speaker 2:The NASA associate minister said there is a controller issue with a toilet on the Orion capsule and it would take a few hours to troubleshoot. We're just getting started, he said, when addressing that some that and some other glitches with the space spacecraft, the spirit of Apollo 10 lives on. They said one thirty five. They told us that here's another it seems like this is not the first time that this has happened, but we're hoping for the best here.
Speaker 1:Sounds like there were some other issues with Outlook as well. Mhmm. We can pull up this video from Tom Warren.
Speaker 2:Yes. Oh, so there's audio with this too? We
Speaker 6:can remote in and take a look directly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Go for it. And then I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working. If you wanna remote in and check Two. Why do you have two?
Speaker 2:Like, and desktop? Or you think it's, like, two separate desktop installations?
Speaker 6:Join in on your PCB and we'll let you know when we're done.
Speaker 1:Honestly, this is the best possible failure scenario is Outlook and not the rocket itself.
Speaker 2:Can they
Speaker 1:I think it's a good outcome. There were so many amazing images coming out yesterday.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Peyton Alexander says, this is the real reward for Artemis. This is who we are actually doing this for. They will grow up knowing they can one day work in their country's bases on the moon and Mars. We are not just abstractly hoping for a better world for them. We are going there.
Speaker 1:And two kids here watching the launch from Orlando. Just beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. My five year old said it was boring, which is not what you wanna hear, but we'll have to give some more context to him about how big of a deal it is. He was like, yeah. I don't know. Maybe maybe maybe he wants more more flashing lights on the screen.
Speaker 1:We were we were we were driving
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For the actual launch Yeah. And it was so funny listening to the audio feed and sitting in traffic and just looking out at everyone. Yeah. And and realizing that it felt like the majority of the world still wasn't paying attention or or or didn't care.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, like rockets do launch like every day now.
Speaker 1:I know. SpaceX has normalized it to such a degree.
Speaker 2:Isn't there isn't there some sort of subplot on the Apollo missions that by the by the third or fourth Apollo mission, there was no like the actual viewership had dropped off and like the American population had gotten to
Speaker 1:3.6 has put subway surfers on it. Yeah. On the NASA feed.
Speaker 2:Crazy that you actually need to maybe need to do this. Ed Ludlow was at the launch, but he
Speaker 1:Yes he was. Let's pull up this this video of of legendary tech anchor
Speaker 2:I mean it's Ed Ludlow. It's an emotional moment so I guess it makes sense to capture his result but everyone's saying you should turn around and actually watch it. But it's very funny to do the selfie video. I mean, contextualizes the moment perfectly, but it is oh, he was live on the air. He he was alive on the air.
Speaker 2:Okay. So yeah. I mean, if you're live like you you you don't wanna necessarily turn around, guess. I don't know. There's that famous clip of what?
Speaker 2:It's a it's a wild video. There's that amazing clip of from that documentary where the the host is giving this monologue and then the monologue ends right as the launch happens. Like he timed it up perfectly and it's very cinematic anyway. I don't know. Delian shared the coolest orbital animation he's seen of Artemis two.
Speaker 2:It looks a lot less fishy when you see it this way. It's fascinating how close they have to be that's
Speaker 1:And by point fishy, John, means one of the The other wish actually was shaped like a
Speaker 2:a fish. But this one is a little bit more of a straight shot. But it really emphasizes how short that window is where you're actually next to the moon. It really Delian says, it really just really shows you how far away they're flying today and how precise they need to be to go to the moon. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Remarkable. I'm very excited to to keep following this.
Speaker 1:New York Times article, How AI helped one man and His Brother Build a 1,800,000,000.0 Dollar Company Yeah. Who Needs More Than Two Employees When AI Can Do So Many Corporate Tasks. It's Super Efficient and A Little Bit Lonely. Aaron Griffith has this story. People are calling this the
Speaker 2:The prophecy.
Speaker 1:The prophecy. The one man, $1,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you're in tech and you're in the business of making predictions, no one wants predictions. We want prophecies. Prophecies. You need you need to be prophesizing for sure.
Speaker 2:So the article, How AI Helped One Man and His Brother Build a 1,800,000,000.0 Dollar Company. Who needs more than two employees that when artificial intelligence can do so many corporate tasks, it's super efficient and a little bit lonely. So Aaron Griffith tells the story of Matthew Gallagher who took just two months, $20,000, and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his startup off the ground. From his house in Los Angeles, mister Gallagher, 41, used AI to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created AI systems to analyze his business's performance and he outsourced the other stuff he couldn't do himself.
Speaker 2:His startup MedVee, a telehealth provider of GLP one weight loss drugs got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, he gained more than 1,000 more. In 2025, MedVee's first year in business, the company generated Full year. Four or the first full year in business. The company generated $401,000,000 in sales.
Speaker 2:Mister Gallagher then hired
Speaker 1:This is absolutely insane because I as GLP ones were starting to take off, I had I I remember distinctly talking with somebody that was like, I wanna start a telehealth company for GLP ones. Yep. And at that time, I was like, okay, there's a lot of telehealth companies that are at scale. Yep. They're all gonna be very quick.
Speaker 1:Well aware of this. Yeah. They will immediately introduce this product and other, you know, similar products to their customer base and it's gonna be incredibly difficult to be Yeah. To be competitive. And it turns out there's just such overwhelming demand for these products
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That you could come in as a new company and scale, you know. I'm I'm sure this guy, mister Gallagher, is incredibly talented. But the market overall is just growing so quickly that it didn't matter that every other telehealth company was also getting into the game. There was just such an incredible, you know, volume Yeah. Of sales coming in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So, like, one year in maybe, he hires his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they're on track to do $1,800,000,000 in sales. A $1,800,000,000 company with just two employees in the age of AI.
Speaker 2:It's increasingly possible, says Aaron Griffith in The New York Times. Sam Allman, the chief executive of OpenAI, predicted the rise of a new breed of super efficient company in 2024. A one person business worth $1,000,000,000 would have been unimaginable without AI, he said on a podcast, and now it will happen. Now as AI tools spread, entrepreneurs are harnessing the technology to expand their startups to an enormous scale at breathtaking speed with very few humans. Big companies, especially in tech, are getting in on the disruption too.
Speaker 2:Pinterest, Block, and others have cut thousands of workers in recent months, citing efficiencies enabled by AI. Mister Gallagher, who formerly formerly ran a startup that sold wristwatches Mhmm. Said he thought mister Altman's prophecy of a 1,000,000,000 one person, 1,000,000,000 would be a firm that built AI. He was excited when he realized he may have done it taking the old taking an old idea, being a middleman for weight loss drugs, and using AI to turbocharge it. I am interested to know, and we're gonna try and get him on the show, the like, what the margins are on this.
Speaker 2:I imagine that the revenue is, you know, like a lot of this needs to accrue a lot of the value needs to accrue to the the the companies that actually designed
Speaker 1:and Yeah. And the one person, $1,000,000,000 company is at a billion dollar valuation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. At the same
Speaker 1:time a billion dollar run rate.
Speaker 2:I would imagine even even a reseller would trade around like one x revenue maybe. Yeah. I I have no idea. Maybe way more.
Speaker 1:I Yeah. Imagine Does this count? Does this count yet though? Like I feel like to be the one person, $1,000,000,000 company, you gotta be able to log in to your payroll tool Mhmm. And you're the only person there.
Speaker 2:Oh, so
Speaker 1:And he's got his brother
Speaker 2:in there. Sorry, bro. Take a walk. He's got he's gotta let his brother let his brother go.
Speaker 1:In an email, mister Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech CEO friends over when such a company would appear and said that he would like to meet the guy who had done it. Yeah. MedVee is technically not a one person $1,000,000,000 company Yeah. Since he hired his brother and some contractors. The startup which has not raised outside funding also has no official valuation, but many highly valued tech companies can only dream of hitting 1,000,000,000 in revenue with so few workers.
Speaker 1:Medvia is also profitable. That is great and important if you're bootstrapped.
Speaker 2:Can't Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can't can't
Speaker 2:wrapper company? It's it's like a GLP one wrapper. Is but it's AI enabled, it's not wrapping the AI foundation model. It's like using the tool to wrap another industry and just create the efficiency between the manufacturer and actual distribution. It's it it really is remarkable that they were able to hoover up so much revenue in such a competitive space because you Yeah.
Speaker 2:You would assume that that the other telehealth providers would have significant ad operations and that the margins on customer acquisition would be very, very tricky to crack. But he must have found some unique insight into how to distribute the product, get actual people to the website because the AI certainly can build the website and write the copy, but it can't necessarily get people to show up and actually put down their hard earned cash for the product. Yeah. And just to put
Speaker 1:it into context, HIMSS did 2,300,000,000.0 in in full year 2025 revenue Wow. For 2025.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:This guy started in 2024 and got to 401,000,000 in sales.
Speaker 2:I wanna know more about, yeah, the strategy here, how this how this built up so quickly. As a teenager, mister mister Gallagher began building websites for local businesses. He always had a hustle including selling candles and samurai swords on eBay. This is the classic founder journey, selling something on eBay. The blade.
Speaker 2:That's how I I I was selling DJ equipment on eBay back when I was a teenager. At 18, after building a web hosting business, he sold that business for $6,000. He briefly attended the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University, did not graduate. In 2010, he moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. He eventually returned to coding, bouncing between tech jobs.
Speaker 2:In 2016, he built Watch Gang, a startup that sold Ritz watches via subscription. Interesting. Is that is that like a buy now pay later for watches?
Speaker 1:Or I would get a lot of Are you renting them? You're like, you got another watch? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh. Oh. I'm You're just subscribed to like new didn't
Speaker 1:realize I was getting subscription.
Speaker 2:Oops. It came in the mail It had fans but never turned a profit, Watch Gang, even as Mr. Gallagher chased revenue growth and hired 60 people. So wildly different business outcome here. Wow.
Speaker 1:He's like, I'm not doing that again.
Speaker 2:OpenAI's release of ChatGPT 2022 inspired Mr. Gallagher to start tinkering with AI. Two years later, he met Jittan Chabra, a cofounder of CareValidate, a medical startup in Atlanta. CareValidate offers what is essentially telehealth in a box kits. Companies, employers and retailers who that want to sell customers prescription drugs can use CareValidate's technology and network of online doctors to set up a business.
Speaker 2:The company's software connects patients with doctors and pharmacies which write, fulfill and ship the prescriptions. Charges fees for its software. So you have to imagine that there's like a fairly decent cost structure here, but it's that's not to diminish it. It's an incredible amount of Like you look at the comps and you're blown away. But yes, it's just interesting to understand the Yeah.
Speaker 1:Other the other big the other big question here is like how much are you spending on ads? Yeah. Like, it's very possible that, you know, the company is profitable. Yeah. But if you're spending 60% of every dollar you bring in on paid acquisition plus COGS.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then any other expenses that actually go into fulfilling Can you imagine getting prescriptions out.
Speaker 2:Public by himself. He's like, I don't need an investment bank. I'm just gonna like vibe code the the the the road show and 100% retail allocation. I don't know. I mean, I I I think I think like taking a company public is just technically a bunch of SEC filings and if the investors sign up and the emails are sent and everyone agrees that it can happen.
Speaker 2:So knows? Maybe he takes his company public with with two people. That would be a like it's just the the New York Stock Exchange bell ringing and normally it's like 20 people and it's like only the executive team and bankers and all the employees are you know outside or on the trading floor. And he's just standing there being like, oh yeah, I did it like by myself. Wild.
Speaker 2:Gallagher saw an opportunity for his own telehealth business. He could use AI to do the branding and marketing and let CareValidate and a similar platform OpenLoop Health, which is another interesting company. And someone was posting about handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance. He planned to start with GLP-1s. He was entering an established market for nearly a decade.
Speaker 2:Hims and Hers Health, Roe and other companies have sold drugs for erectile dysfunction and hair loss online using an online network of doctors to write prescriptions. HIMSS, which went public in 2021, has 2,442 employees and generated 2,400,000,000 in revenue
Speaker 1:by Yeah. Is what I this was what I was explaining to my friend who wanted to do something in this space. Yeah. Like, hey, you're gonna be going up against a company that has billions of revenue already. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thousands of employees. Yeah. That already has all the infrastructure to prescribe these drugs. Yeah. But again, the market is just growing so quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He really used everything. Chad GPT, Claude, Grok, eleven Labs, Mid Journey, Runway to create media assets for his website and ads. Spent $20,000
Speaker 1:definitely on a notable something quite notable out of any any time we're seeing these stories where, you know, the guy who is making a cancer drug for his dog. Yeah. A lot of people are picking if if you can think of LLMs as like digital digital guys or girls. Like people are working with multiple digital guys Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. To do to like complete these projects. Yeah. And so
Speaker 2:One model's better at writing, one model's better at coding, one model's better at marketing or strategy or anything else. Interesting. He said from the beginning growth was insane. He became he quickly became one of CareValidate's and OpenLoop's top clients. Companies were blown away by startup speed and scale.
Speaker 2:You're like, do you have an army of people behind you somewhere? And he's like, nope. Wow. Well, you can go read the full full article on The New York Times at newyorktimes.com. It's Aaron Griffith's latest piece.
Speaker 2:You can also listen to it. There's an audio version. There is some commentary on this. Just a lot of people having fun with it. Clayton Petty says, who has two thumbs and wants to know what the ad spend is?
Speaker 2:This guy. Yeah. I'm I'm very interested to know. I mean, I I I would still be shocked if this is not a fantastic business. Yeah.
Speaker 1:At that at that scale, you can have truly terrible EBITDA margins and still be printing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and it's like even if even if like it's impossible that it's negative margin because he hasn't raised money. And so like where would the losses come from? So you can't be losing money. And if you're
Speaker 1:Gonna lever it up.
Speaker 2:Maybe. I don't think so, though. I think everyone's gonna be shocked by how much, cash flow this business is producing. But it is, it is a very exciting exciting moment and story. Let's go over to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.
Speaker 2:The yeah. Yeah. He just shares this. Sam said one person running a billion dollar company. But if two are closely genetically related, Tyler Cowen's still counting this as a correct prediction and some people in the comments.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Huge opportunities for other siblings to fulfill the prophecy
Speaker 2:Yeah. As So people are moving the goalposts already because technically he had agencies that had humans that worked there. And if he works with a marketing agency and then there's a bunch of people there, it's more just like the disaggregation of the of the different institutions and the different organizations. What
Speaker 5:do Yeah. I think the the real goalpost we got to move is just you can't talk to anyone the entire time you're
Speaker 2:You can't talk to a human at all? Yeah.
Speaker 5:Can't say
Speaker 2:You can only be on the command line basically in the prompt box. Yeah. But you can tell the agent or the LLM to go and and and call someone?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I do that? That's fine. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 5:And you're not interfacing with someone. Right?
Speaker 2:Do you have to be truly a shut in? That that's the prediction now. Absolutely ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Chat is asking for John. John Yes. Yes. Getting the Ultradome.
Speaker 2:Get back here. We did not unplug Exley. Got get him back in.
Speaker 1:He's somewhere.
Speaker 2:We'll find We'll get him back in. Jonathan Ross is talking about the petrodollar. There was a story about how there has been an interesting flight to the dollar. The dollar is very strong even amid all of the geopolitical uncertainty. Jonathan Ross, the founder of Grok, now the Chief Software Architect at NVIDIA, said, The petrodollar defined the last fifty years of American economic dominance.
Speaker 2:The token dollar, the currency AI compute is bought in and sold in will define the next fifty. Oil is priced in the in U. S. Dollars. That means every country on Earth needs dollars to fuel their economy.
Speaker 2:That single fact has been the foundation of American financial power since the 1970s. Now consider AI. Training runs cost tens of billions. Inference is scaling to hundreds of billions. The companies sell that are selling compute are American.
Speaker 2:The currency it's priced in is dollars. The petro dollar the petro dollar had oil. The token dollar has compute same structure, same leverage, new resource. Countries aren't just competing over AI talent and chips, they're competing over whether AI remains a dollar denominated economy. That's the game nobody's naming yet.
Speaker 2:And so he is coining it. He says the token dollar is the is the concept.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a it's a it's a cool position.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean, it'll be interesting to talk about Circle with Jeremy about how stablecoins fit into all of this. Also yesterday talking to Corweave about compute backed credit lines and all the different financial products that are popping up related to debt issued against GPUs that have essentially a flow of business that will be expected to come in against them. Very interesting watching the larger AI economy, you know, mature. Brexin says compute backed credit lines are the next frontier for fixed income and will quickly turn into one of the largest asset classes on the planet.
Speaker 2:People are going back and forth. No shade. Trying to learn isn't compute as an asset depreciating quickly due to innovation scale economies, hence bad collateral. Brex Brexin says no shade taken. You're right, but it's still a couple notes.
Speaker 2:Supply constraints on chips right now makes older chips still valuable in secondary markets because of the above capital markets care more about revenue produced from chips rather than resale value and chips are only a subset of the total cost of compute, heterogeneous builds, the rack, powered shell, interconnect, cooling. It was interesting when we were talking with Corweave about the the I was I was really expecting the answer to be chip constraints and he was saying powered shells, powered shells, which is what we've heard from Satya Nadella and Yeah.
Speaker 1:I and I and I think it makes sense given their business. It's like it's it's it's hard to get chips but think about all of the logistical complexity to actually get the location, the energy, the shell, everything built Yep. Together. And navigating all those regulations, it's just like one of the it's an incredibly complex infrastructure project Yep. That you're trying to compress onto timelines
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That America has generally not done infrastructure projects at in a long long time.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so this was this was always some of the, you know, one of the exciting things about the data center build out among among the fear has been that a mere like a bunch of people are learning how to build complex things fast. Mhmm. Right? Mhmm. So
Speaker 2:Well, the year is off to the strongest start for big deals ever. Corporate mega deals flourish despite turmoil. This is in the Wall Street Journal. Large corporate deals had their best quarterly showing ever as companies forged ahead with tie ups and investments despite the Iran war rattling markets. So far in 2026, 22 transactions valued at 10,000,000,000 or more have been announced globally, a record quarterly number according to LSEG data.
Speaker 2:The next closest quarter was the 2015 when 21 such deals were announced in that year. This week alone, Unilever unveiled a more than $65,000,000,000 deal including debt to combined its food business with spice maker McCormick. And Cisco, which we talked about a few days ago, agreed to buy Jetro Jetro Restaurant Depot for over $29,000,000,000 including debt. Uncertainty due to oil growth rate growth and rates isn't going away but major deals are still getting done, said Ben Goodchild, a partner in the M and A group at law firm Paul Weiss. The M and A market is focused on the long term fundamentals, right deal, right price and right strategic rationale.
Speaker 1:There's more The total value of all deals announced globally jumped roughly 29% in the first quarter from a year ago, but the number of deals is down more than 17% as smaller deal activity slowed. The mega deal tally includes a handful of big equity investments in AI companies such as Amazon's $50,000,000,000 investment in OpenAI announced in February. A number of other big transactions are in the works. Estee Lauder has been in discussions to acquire Spanish beauty group, Pied Pied Pied Brands, a deal that would combine two of the world's biggest beauty companies. And there is a number of others.
Speaker 2:Absolute is buying Jack Daniels. Tilman Ferretta is buying the Caesars Entertainment. There's another heist on the Caesars Casino referencing Apollo. Many companies see a moment to pounce on bigger deals that would normally face prolonged antitrust scrutiny. The Justice Department's top antitrust official departed in February after clashing with Trump allies who at times favored more lenient oversight of big deals.
Speaker 2:All this all comes as US stocks delivered their worst quarter in nearly four years led by a 7% drop in the tech heavy Nasdaq Composite Index. That makes it harder for buyers and sellers to agree on price to agree on prices. The Iran war has sent crude prices above a $100 a barrel, which could keep interest rates higher for longer to combat rising prices and make funding deals more expensive. There's a very interesting chart. I don't know if we can pull it up in the journal.
Speaker 2:Big deals have big first quarter number of global deals valued at 10,000,000,000 or more. There we go. And it's just Look
Speaker 1:at twenty twenty twenty twenty one if you
Speaker 2:2021? What was going on?
Speaker 1:Oh, this is another chart.
Speaker 2:This is nine. Oh, if you want to scroll down, you can look at the smaller deals. These are deals valued between 1,000,000,000 and 5,000,000,000, and 2021 was huge. What was going on then? It was ZERP era.
Speaker 2:Right? Post COVID, lots of lots
Speaker 1:of investment. And when interest rates are near zero, you may as well lever up.
Speaker 2:I guess that's yeah. Guess that's Buy some assets. Bankers and lawyers say smaller deals are less of a must have. Buyers are more willing to put them on hold, but the big deals, they have to have happen regardless of what's going on in the economy. Also private equity firms are sitting on a record number of portfolio companies they need to eventually sell or pay take public including many software firms threatened by the rise of AI.
Speaker 2:But many are hesitant to strike deals at today's depressed prices. While deal making activity in the software industry has stalled, there has been plenty in other sectors, including financial services and health care. Eli Lilly struck a deal for Contessa, and Biogen bought Appellis. Dealmakers have high hopes going into twenty twenty couple
Speaker 1:small. Couple questions in the chat and a special arrival. Jon Exley has entered the chat.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Welcome. The original
Speaker 1:chat room general. Yes. Hit the gong for actually.
Speaker 2:Let's take like Jon. Jon actually.
Speaker 1:I don't know that John has missed an episode, and it's an honor to podcast with you, John. Thank you so much. Another question. Who is blacklisted from TBPN now? No one.
Speaker 1:No one. We've never There's never been any anyone blacklisted from the show. In fact, the evidence of this is every single one of our sponsors ever. We've had
Speaker 2:The competitors.
Speaker 1:The competitors on the show and all of that will continue. We want this to be a place where
Speaker 2:Conversations can happen about anything.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So And there's also just a broader trend of this. I don't know if you if you watch like the broader podcast landscape, people from like, you know, quote unquote, like rival firms or different firms go on each other's shows all the time. Not not uncommon these days for crossover content to happen all over the place.
Speaker 1:Jim Kramer says if private credit is so horrendous, how has KKR oversubscribed so easily on its $20,000,000,000 fund? Raised 23,000,000,000. Some kind of disconnect here. Boys boy, are these firms ill advised in how to tell their story.
Speaker 2:This was the this was the early confusion about private credit. People were seeing a whole bunch of private credit deals during the AI boom. And and then when the when the the nervousness matured, it was much more when we talked to carry no interest, for example, the worry was much more around software companies, not hard assets. It was not, oh, in this private credit fund, there's a data center that Meta is going to pay their bill on. It's some other company that maybe is not going to have as high of dollar retention going forward.
Speaker 2:And so I think that the different private credit firms have a messaging problem of like what is in the fund because it can be a lot of different stuff. And KKR clearly did a great job explaining why their particular strategy will endure for the long haul. There's other news about
Speaker 1:Let's pull up let's pull up this video quickly of Kramer talking about our friends at Semi Analysis. Is There
Speaker 6:there is a company that I regard. It's the it's the absolute it's the gospel, Semi Analysis. And I've got this guy, Dylan Patel, and I realized that semi analysis is the arbiter.
Speaker 1:They're like What
Speaker 6:has semis. Done.
Speaker 2:And when
Speaker 6:they do when they bless something, it means that it's the they benchmark it the best. They are the most honest guys I've come across. And I I I've always been reading them, but Jensen plays really praised the GTC. Yeah. So I reached out to this guy whom I regard as is genius.
Speaker 6:He's genius.
Speaker 2:That's I can't wait to talk to him. That that's that's that's a promo. Yeah. We'll see
Speaker 7:you tonight. That was. Good promo. Add money, 6PM. Down
Speaker 2:It's awesome.
Speaker 1:Dylan says, can I short myself? And some people some people were saying like, yeah, come on dude. Like he's complimenting you and Dylan and This is
Speaker 2:fun. And Kramer. This is the meme. Everyone
Speaker 1:knows And the I've always said that Yeah. That Kramer having this saying where no matter what he says, people say like
Speaker 2:Be inverse.
Speaker 1:They'll take the verse or whatever. Is the best engagement hack ever Yeah. For a content creator personality because it just means anything you say, you get Coaching. A million impressions from people saying the opposite. Yep.
Speaker 1:And the fact is, like, Jim Kramer is he's an entertainer. He is incredibly you know, fun to listen to and we'll be we'll be having another conversation with him in the next in the next month or so which I'm excited about.
Speaker 2:Let's head over to Cliff Water and Stephen Nesbitt. He brought private credit to the masses. Now the masses are fleeing. This is more context around the private credit story. Cliffwater is racing to calm investors after steep withdrawals.
Speaker 2:So Stephen Nesbitt is Private Credit's chief evangelist. His investors and industry are having a crisis of faith.
Speaker 1:Nick says hope this still means my invite is open.
Speaker 2:We'd love to have
Speaker 3:you Nick.
Speaker 1:Of course Nick. You're family.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're always positive. As long as as long as we're we keep it positive, can say it's and and we keep the camera roll smiling and we and we maintain that occasionally we are back. It's not always over.
Speaker 1:Very frequently we're back.
Speaker 2:Very frequently.
Speaker 1:Nick Nick will admit that.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:No, we had a great conversation with him when he came on. For more than a decade, the 72 year old championed the hottest asset class on Wall Street. His firm, Cliff Water, went from managing no money to nearly 50,000,000,000 on the back of impressive fundraising and big gains turning Nesbit into a billionaire. Now many of the wealthy individuals who powered Cliff Water's rise are itching to leave as investors rethink their views on private credit. After a handful of high profile defaults, investors are pulling so much money out of industry funds that managers are restricting withdrawals.
Speaker 2:We've talked about this many times on the show. Shares of big firms are dropping. Few are like Cliffwater, until recently was an investor darling but now finds itself in the hot seat. Its top executives aren't lending specialists themselves. Instead, the firm invested alongside and sometimes in other funds.
Speaker 2:So it's a fund to fund strategy, a feature that is now being treated as a vulnerability. Investors asked to pull the equivalent of 14% of its biggest fund in the first quarter. Wall Street skeptics who long questioned Cliff Water's growth are now calling it a canary in the coal mine and a turducken of problems. Turducken of problems. That is such a weird phrase.
Speaker 2:Nesmitt's ability to call the qualifiers will be a test of his funds and the industry's future Are they calling
Speaker 1:it a blue owl in the coal mine?
Speaker 2:Something like that.
Speaker 1:No. No. I'm just joking. Of course, blue owl capped private credit fund redemptions
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:At at 5% after steep request levels. This was the other news Oh, okay. From this morning. I think they got something like 21% redemption request outstanding during the first quarter, so they had to cap it at 5%.
Speaker 2:Well, you know what this guy did before he started a, what, $50,000,000,000 private credit fund? He was a gravedigger. I'm not Really? Yeah. He grew up near Rochester, New York.
Speaker 2:He worked as a gravedigger in high school. He spent a quarter century at Wilshire Associates consulting for pension funds on private equity and hedge funds. Nesbitt was a soft spoken presence in a big in a business of outside outsized egos says Greg William son, a long time pension fund executive. He didn't preach like others, Williamson said. He spoke about his clients' needs.
Speaker 2:In 2004, Nesbit started Cliff Water. After the two thousand eight, two thousand nine financial crisis, he began recommending private credit just as banks were pulling back from lending to riskier companies, giving Blackstone, Ares, and others the opportunity to make high interest rate loans. Nesbit became a private credit advocate. Cliffwater launched an index tracking performance. The firm shared research, and Nesbit wrote two books on the topic.
Speaker 2:In 2019, he shifted to managing money, launching Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund or CCLFX with Blake and Phil Hasbrooke, a then 30 year old executive. They they marketed to wealthy individuals through independent financial advisers, the kind of clients Hasbrooke worked with. It was built as an interval fund offering to buy back 5% of its assets each quarter from investors and provide daily updates on its value. It charged lower fees than some rivals and allowed clients to avoid the messy tax filing requirements of traditional private funds. By February, the net assets totaled about 33,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Cliffwater made 375,000,000 in fees from the fund in the first seventeen in the first eighteen months that ended in September. A 54 person crew researched and managed the portfolio of 4,100 or so underlying loans. Along the way, Cliffwater wrangled with rivals when an executive bond powerhouse PIMCO when an executive at bond powerhouse PIMCO said the returns of private debt didn't compensate investors for its growing dangers. Nesbit sent investors a letter saying PIMCO had had a failed track record of predicting market changes. After J.
Speaker 2:B. Diamond used a cockroach analogy to warn about looming defaults, Nesbit's declared there were no cockroaches in private debt. Others criticized Cliff Water's marketing especially when it boasted of hedge fund like returns with minimal risk setting industry metrics like sharp ratios and standard deviation. Critics said private loans rarely change hands so they lack the volatility that funds face. Anyway, it goes into the true docking problem.
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of Jamie Diamond, the Acquires show. Jamie Diamond eyes post JP Morgan media venture.
Speaker 2:He's potentially launching a podcast? Is that what this is?
Speaker 1:Matthew Zeitland, friend of the show, former guest says, The desire to post is the only force in the universe that holds a candle to compound interest.
Speaker 2:It's actually true. Everyone needs a pod. People have been talking about him running for president. A lot of presidents and media people have podcasts. Not very
Speaker 1:presidential. Well
Speaker 2:there there isn't all that much news here. But Diamond said that if he were to start a media venture, it would be something different about policy. He said, I think media is critical. Media teaches everybody. Media is the great influencer.
Speaker 2:A lot of bad policy he believes stems from people in the media doing a bad job of explaining issues. And so we talked about this yesterday or the day before in The Wall Street Journal. He has the the the new plan, the diamond plan for the the American dream, wanting to lend to more small businesses. That seems more important than ever in the world where you have a one person, $1,000,000,000 business. More people should have shots on goal.
Speaker 2:And if you if you think about the the $20,000 that that gentleman was able to marshal to get the business off the ground, if you have more people that have the opportunity, that's probably a good thing. But we'll be tuning in when Jamie Dimon launches his show. Should we go over to Apple?
Speaker 1:Should we? I think it's time.
Speaker 2:They really dominated this entire week. I mean, it's spring break, is perfect timing. This must happen.
Speaker 1:I think they probably planned
Speaker 2:They planned this.
Speaker 1:Years ago. They knew the fiftieth would be during spring break in 2026. Yeah. And so it would be a good time to, you know, really celebrate the anniversary.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We had a great, great conversation with Eddie Q yesterday. You can go listen to it on Apple Podcasts, which he created. And but there's more reflections and and and stories about Apple from all over the place. Ben Thompson wrote a great retrospective.
Speaker 2:The Wall Street Journal got access to rare Apple archives that even Tim Cook hadn't seen before. It's very cool and because you think about it, it's like that's crazy. He's the CEO, should know all the archives. But then you think about like how busy his day is and he probably doesn't have that much time to just like go reminisce
Speaker 1:Obsess over every small decision or prototype
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like that. There's like so much work to be done. He doesn't have that much time to go look at like the original patent for the Apple II or or whatever he, know, is in that archive. So the Wall Street Journal took the took the viewers through that in a video.
Speaker 2:We have a big read from the Financial Times here that's very interesting talking about the roots of a tech revolution. So Winston Churchill called it, quote, the most daring and courageous act of the entire war. On 08/30/1945, General Douglas MacArthur landed in Atsugi Southwest of Tokyo. He wore aviator sunglasses, a corncob pipe dangled from his lips, and he was unarmed. A man of war was arriving to make peace.
Speaker 2:Over the next six years of allied occupation, MacArthur would demilitarize Japan and franchise women
Speaker 1:And by the you know you guys know AGI will be very close when Tyler is smoking a corncob pipe Yes. Himself because AGI of course should be able to one shot, you know, any sort of lung issues that might come from
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Using a corncob pipe.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So In my
Speaker 1:Some people skip sunscreen. Other people, you know, indulge.
Speaker 2:In 2012, I lived in a hacker house in Sunnyvale and the best engineer, I still one of the best engineers I've met in my entire life. The best engineer in the house was completely straight edge, would not drink or use caffeine or anything, but he would smoke a literal pipe. It was a very odd thing. And he just
Speaker 7:It's a Lindy.
Speaker 2:It's Lindy. Yeah. I don't know. He was like, yeah, I just enjoy this.
Speaker 1:I would actually expect it to make a comeback, right? Are, you know, a little nostalgic. It's clear that vapes are maybe not something that people should be using. But the corncob pipe
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 2:There's a chance. Tyler, what do you think about corncob pipes?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I'm super Lindy. Think I'm
Speaker 2:You're in?
Speaker 3:I think we're
Speaker 5:probably like one one or two models away and then Yeah.
Speaker 1:Start ripping pipe pipe.
Speaker 2:I'm into it. I'm into it. So over the next six years he enfranchised women, oversaw the writing of a new constitution and a decree of democracy. But first he faced a more prosaic problem. Japan's communication industry was in such shambles that he could barely issue commands.
Speaker 2:This is MacArthur. Solving this challenge turned out to have enormous consequences. Not only reshaping Japan in the nineteen forties but upending global manufacturing in the nineteen eighties and by the February revolutionizing
Speaker 1:the Gandalf Max.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Revolutionize the way products would be built at Apple, a company that did not exist at the time. So Apple, which turns 50 years old on Wednesday, is arguably the world's most iconic company. It is also notoriously opaque and secretive in virtually all accounts of how Steve Jobs transformed Apple from near bankruptcy in 1997 which we talked about yesterday, thank you, to the world's most valuable company by his death in 2011 product vision and design all get the credit. But what actually makes a $1,200 iPhone possible at global scale with vanishingly few defects is a manufacturing philosophy that traces back not to Silicon Valley or Southern China, but to war devastated Japan.
Speaker 1:And it took all my energy yesterday to not use the twenty minutes we had with Eddie Q for for kind of like a tech support session. Yeah. I'm having this issue where
Speaker 2:You seem to be having like particularly
Speaker 1:weird actually think I need to like return the iPhone.
Speaker 2:I think you are having some weird issue because there are weird UX UI issues that you can learn and adapt and change it. I would say that they are skill issues. Like if you can't use the the camera roll effectively by now, you are needing to like You're lost. Yeah. You should just throw off some
Speaker 1:My issue, I don't know if any anyone in the chat has experienced this, but when I open the messages app or the phone app Mhmm. I just get a blank white screen and then the app crashes
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like a bunch of times.
Speaker 2:You have something weird.
Speaker 1:And then I just doesn't matter what I do, can do a hard reset Yeah. Or anything like that.
Speaker 2:I wonder if we were pushing it to the limit too hard yesterday because we were on a FaceTime call together and then also watching the Artemis two launch on YouTube. And then I was I was watching it on my phone and I was streaming Geordie my screen via SharePlay and I think that might have the phone was really hot. I can tell you that much. I don't know. Anyway, by and large, the products are flawless and I have enjoyed my Apple journey the whole way.
Speaker 2:So in the decades after the Second World War, Japan's economy grew rapidly. This is a story of how ideas travel across oceans and factory floors and sometimes through a single person changing jobs. It is a story about how America invented a manufacturing philosophy, exported it to Japan, forgot it, relearned fragments of it through a handful of companies and then re exported the whole synthesis to Asia. The story leads us to the present moment with The U. S.
Speaker 2:Spending vast sums to bring it all back, Southern India investing to be the next global tech hub, and China fighting to hold on to its manufacturing dominance. It is above all a story underscoring that what Apple started to build in Shenzhen, China, a quarter century ago is not merely an assembly line. It is the endpoint of a multi decade chain of civilizational knowledge transfer, a feat of enormous complexity that cannot be replicated with tax breaks in carnage or ribbon cutting in Texas. Tax breaks aren't going to be enough. You need civilizational knowledge transfer.
Speaker 2:The whole chain begins with a question. In occupied Tokyo, a 33 year old engineer named Homer Sarason stood before a group of Japanese executives asked, why does any company exist? Powerful. When the telegram arrived from General MacArthur, Sarasota initially thought it was a prank. A physicist by training, the paratrooper turned radar engineer was working on a transcontinental microwave relay system.
Speaker 2:Tyler. Physicist by training. The
Speaker 1:podcaster slash vibe coder.
Speaker 2:That's true. He he dismissed it only realizing his air when an when an indignant colonel called him back a few weeks later. Then he was dutifully off to Tokyo for what was supposed to be a nine month stint. Saracion's mission was to reestablish and rehabilitate the communications industry but he found there was nobody to work with. American bombers had devastated industry and MacArthur had abolished the Zaibatsu, the powerful prewar corporate cartels.
Speaker 2:We had to start from scratch, he recounted in 1988. When we looked around not only did we see no facilities but we could find no managers. We had no we had to find lower level people, second level managers. And I said, as of today, you're going to start up this new company and you're going to run it. The quality of manufacturing in Japan was shoddy even before the war.
Speaker 2:But as Sarason began learning the language and immersing himself in Japanese culture, he realized the root of the problem was not technical, it was managerial. When he asked a group of employees how they might improve quality, they murmured among themselves about what an answer would please him rather than answering directly, sort of the opposite of like the Elon walking the floor and like I'd want to get to first principles. They're literally like, what do you think he wants to hear? Like, when will this plant be online? And they're like, think he's expecting it in in June.
Speaker 2:Tell him. See June. Yeah. This is not not good. Everyone understands this now but that was not the case in in Japan in the forties and fifties I suppose.
Speaker 2:They had been taught to be deferential, he concluded, to not not to question authority. So Saracen set out to teach them a philosophy of management. Despite initial opposition from MacArthur, the need for economic stabilization meant that Saracao got his wish. He and another engineer, Charles Prutzman, went off to an Osaka hotel for a month to write a textbook on industrial management. They designed a rigorous eight week course and made it compulsory for top managers.
Speaker 2:The seminar began on the importance of quality as a guiding state of mind, a devotion and dedication. After asking why does any company exist, Saracion encouraged his disciples to draft a mission statement by invoking a motto from a shipyard in Newport Rhode Island. We shall build good ships here at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships. It's a good line.
Speaker 1:That's good line.
Speaker 2:It's good line. Manufacturing, he taught, had to be considered a total system. Its disparate parts orchestrated with such repetitive precision that defects could approach zero. He inculcated his students in his students a sense that quality was foundational to the whole enterprise, empowering workers close to production and telling managers they needed to understand the details. Quality control is not a band aid, Saracone later recounted.
Speaker 2:To be effective as a control, the total process to which it is applied must be well designed to begin with. So when Saracone left Japan in 1950, he recommended his successor be the academic W. Edwards Deming, an advocate of statistical process controls.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for statistical friends.
Speaker 2:Let's also give it up for using the first initial of your first name and then your middle name. That's an under we've that's sort of a lost art. You don't meet a lot of people that yourselves that way, but J Alexander Coogan, I think that sounds pretty cool. Maybe I'll rip that at some point.
Speaker 1:That sounds very regal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It sounds good. Well, what would you be to That'd
Speaker 5:be j j Tyler Cosgrove.
Speaker 2:That's good. Yeah. Because Tyler's the middle name. So j Tyler. That's good.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, j w Edwards Deming would prove so influential that the union of Japanese scientists and engineers
Speaker 1:Randall says sometimes I get emotional about manufacturing. That's true.
Speaker 2:That is
Speaker 1:That says they're good ship.
Speaker 2:That quote The ship's quote is so is so good. I'm sure it's already been printed and hung on many of the, you know, new defense tech and American manufacturing companies. But it is a good reminder to always build what is of high quality and aim for profit.
Speaker 1:Justin says chat is on fire today, of course. It's great. It's great to see all of you here. Someone asked how are we gonna celebrate. I think we're gonna have lunch with the team later.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Excited about that.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're excited for that.
Speaker 1:But I but I think funny thing is just really our lives aren't aren't changing. Yeah. It's business as usual.
Speaker 2:Chop wood.
Speaker 1:We're gonna go hang out with our families and I'm I'm already excited for next week.
Speaker 2:We we we do have a holiday tomorrow. The it's it's Good Friday, so the New York Stock Exchange is closed, the market is closed and so we will not be streaming tomorrow. But we will be back on Monday. But just so you're aware, don't be shocked, oh, like this OpenAI deal happened and then they stopped streaming. That's not what's going on.
Speaker 2:This has been on the calendar for a long time. We haven't been booking guests for months because we know that this is a holiday coming up, which we are very excited about. And everyone will be enjoying the long weekend. So Saracao recommended the work to of Joseph Geron, a consultant who during the war had managed a program shipping war materials to allied nations. Geron's work in Japan would go on to earn him the highest honor from emperor emperor hero Hirohito.
Speaker 2:We don't have a ton of time. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You want to tie this into Apple? Yeah. Let's let's go I Just go on this insane tangent.
Speaker 2:We used to do crazy long reads we'd spend like two hours on one New Yorker article. And then of course the show got much more complex. We talk about a lot more topics. But I like going through a long read. Of course, you can pick this up in the Financial Times, which you should go and subscribe to.
Speaker 1:Alex asked, how long did the acquisition take from start to finish? I I don't remember I have the exact number of days, but it was incredibly It was incredibly quick. Incredibly quick. Yeah. Part of what enabled that was we had been having people from OpenAI on the show, having interactions with them.
Speaker 1:We had spent a hundred hours talking about OpenAI. I didn't written proposal. Have We didn't have a lot
Speaker 2:of questions.
Speaker 1:And, you know, just just given how much time we've spent. Yeah. And so that that enabled a quick process. All also, you know, your your long history with Sam.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just like you meet your acquirer, like, years before
Speaker 1:anything Yeah. This case, thirteen years before.
Speaker 2:It's crazy. Okay. Where where where do we go to close this out? It was the early nineteen nineties. We're flashing forward.
Speaker 2:And Jobs was a half a decade into leading Next, the startup that he had founded after being ousted from Apple. Next first product, a cube state workstation from costing $6,500 had already been a much hyped flop. The team's goal
Speaker 1:Such a good had
Speaker 2:been to make a computer their friends could afford. By the time it shipped, the joke goes, the only friends that could afford to buy it were Steve's. Japanese quality ideas had been all the rage for a decade. The superiority of Japanese production had become a clear had become clear in March 1980 when Richard W Anderson, a Hewlett Packard executive famously discovered that the best Japanese memory chips performed 1000% better than their American equivalents at initial inspection and 50% better over time. The so called Anderson bombshell made HP start to obsess over quality.
Speaker 2:Its Japanese joint venture Hewlett Packard, Yokogawa won the Deming Prize in 1982 and became the foundation for rigorous standards applied across the whole company. HP aspired to improve quality tenfold within a decade. And when that looked to be failing, it adopted a Japanese step by step approach to quality known as plan do check act. Let's see where else.
Speaker 1:Jobs was clearly taken by the ideas of qualities of quality Silicon Valley was beginning to import from Japan. Having set out to build a computer company that would create better products, he commissioned an automated factory in Fremont inspired by the plants of Japanese electronics manufacturer Alps Electric.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Anyways, we can we can continue, but but
Speaker 2:We have our next we have our next guest, Mark Lohr, joining in just a few minutes. Let's run through some of the timeline posts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was cool. Taylor Taylor Johnson said nothing gets me hyped like a reaccelerating top line
Speaker 2:This is the definition of AI company, right?
Speaker 1:Sharing sharing or or just a founder mode company. Yeah. But but really both you can see. This is data from Sakura.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sakura shared.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So funny people calling me right now.
Speaker 2:I know. I know. If you have called me, if you have sent me We a text message
Speaker 1:are live.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. I will get back to you Yeah. After the show.
Speaker 1:Feeling feeling the love. But anyways, incredible chart here. You can see Plaid had ended. They in 2023, they went from 308 to 390,000,000 Mhmm. Of ARR and then jumped up to over half 1,000,000,000 in 2025.
Speaker 1:So Zach and the team are on an absolute tear.
Speaker 2:You know who's also on an absolute tear? Taylor Lorenz. Apparently, spends seventeen hours a day in screen time. I guess that means phone, but maybe phone and computer.
Speaker 1:She has to spend a lot of time because she's defending big technology.
Speaker 2:Yes. Exactly. There's
Speaker 1:some incredible quotes in this story. Think she said if she could put the screen in her brain, she would.
Speaker 2:That's wild. That's very unexpected.
Speaker 1:Mean, she's gotta get gotta get set up with the Neuralink team.
Speaker 7:But
Speaker 2:Get me
Speaker 5:A true timeline merchant.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. It's yeah. Well, yeah. Extremely online is her is the name of her book.
Speaker 2:And she certainly lives lives her brand. Elijah Udkowski had an interesting post here. He said, today I learned that Gemini Claude and Chatty PT, but not Grok, are told that today, he was referring to March 1, April Fools Day yesterday, is March because if you tell LLMs it's April 1, the conditional text predictions downstream become less less reliable for obvious training dataset reasoning.
Speaker 1:The model's like, understanding April 1. Yeah. It's How do I understand
Speaker 2:It would be very, very confusing. I mean, were confused all yesterday because you see so many news announcements go out and you're like, is this a joke? There is news
Speaker 5:Yeah. But if you're told it's April or or March
Speaker 2:should be more confused. You're gonna
Speaker 5:be like, that's clearly wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder how real this Yeah.
Speaker 5:You would think they would just keep it March 30 or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. We'll see. We'll have to ask some people. Rune says the AI doc reminded me mostly of Kony 2012 documentary Slacktivism selling the feeling of we need to do something as a product oddly centering the filmmaker.
Speaker 2:When is the embargo lifting for the AI doc? Because I did see it with Tyler and a bunch of other folks from the team and enjoyed it but I would love to talk about it. I believe we're gonna the
Speaker 5:I think it already came out.
Speaker 2:It came out?
Speaker 5:Yeah. March 27?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. It was the the the biggest gap between the the AI doc and his his, like, you know, the press tour that the creator is on now is that he seems like he doesn't believe AI is is real at all, I guess. He he he was very worried about Doom in the in the movie, comes away sort of like, oh, there's an optimistic scenario here.
Speaker 2:It's a very nice ending. But then he came away being like, stuff is not real, which is a very funny like conclusion. Because he's not really asking about any of the financials or economics or business applications. Like, he's having a much more philosophical debate and then came away with like a financial conclusion. I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. Yeah. What's this?
Speaker 1:Google has released Gemma four Gemma the best ever models in the world for their respective sizes. Demos says excited to launch Gemma four. Available in four sizes that can be fine tuned for your specific tasks. 31,000,000,000 dense for great raw performance, 26 b MOE for low latency, and effective two b and four b for edge device use. Happy building.
Speaker 1:Excited to see what people do with it. They're available now under the Apache license in Google AI Studio or on Hugging Face and some other platforms. So massive launch.
Speaker 2:Very exciting.
Speaker 1:What else do we got? There's more on the MerCore leak. Very unfortunate. Gary Hand says incredible amount of state of the art training data is now just available to China thanks to the MerCore leak. Every major lab, billions and billions of value in a major national security issue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm just feeling I'm I'm feeling, you know, that the national security issue is one thing. I'm feeling really concerned for individuals that not only gave PII Mhmm. As part of onboarding, but maybe now there's like live video of them tied to that Mhmm. PII.
Speaker 1:So it feels like there's some real deep I'm fake
Speaker 2:very glad that we have Adam Myers from CrowdStrike coming on today to explain the surface area, what the trends are in cybersecurity because things do feel like they are ramping up significantly. Very also just very odd that there's there's now a leak of of data that could be used to RL models. There's new open source models. There's also the the leak of the of the cloud code harness. And so you if you piece all these together, you get pretty close to the frontier.
Speaker 2:And that's something that we're certainly gonna have to like contend with the fact that there's that every time that there's a leak
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You probably shrink the gap between the frontier and the open source community a few by maybe a few months or something as they catch up even if they're doing it like sort of above board. Anyway, Lewis Lewis. Says
Speaker 1:He found a public company with 99% of revenue coming from one customer.
Speaker 2:You've heard of the one employee, $1,000,000,000 company. Now we found the one customer, billion dollar company. I actually don't know how big this company is. But we need to figure out what company this is.
Speaker 1:Is TSS Inc.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Ticker is TSSI.
Speaker 2:And they said, we derive a substantial majority of our revenues from a single OEM customer. Revenues from this customer comprised approximately 99, 90 nine, and 96% of our total revenues for the year ending December 2024, and 2023. So they actually had more revenue diversity in 2023, and then the revenue concentration increased over the last two years. Although we provide services across multiple business units and divisions of this OEM and have entered into a long term AI rack integration agreement that includes minimum monthly payments, our overall financial performance remains highly dependent on the continuation and scope of this relationship. Well, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah. And they're they're trading very reasonably. They're at something like a $240,000,000 run rate as of q four. Okay. Market cap of like 366,000,000.
Speaker 2:Okay. So yeah. It's priced
Speaker 1:seems seems to be priced in.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Buko says imagine being a software company with like 250,000 customers, 1,000,000,000 of revenue growing 20% and the market says you're worth 3,500,000,000.0. And then Rigatoni Computing has generously five customers and basically no revenue is worth 4 and a half billion. It's a cold world.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Yeah. I mean, this is the this is the reality of like working on a on a sci fi technology is that if it works, the value is really really big. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Essentially. Prepared remarks says, but those five customers might go to six, so you have to get in before that.
Speaker 2:What is what what's going on with Scott Wiener's BASED Act? Did you see this? Probably the most radical bill ever to degrade tech products. It it bans Amazon Prime, stops iPhones from having FaceTime, strips travel, shopping local, and AI results out of Google search results. This feels like a stunt almost.
Speaker 2:I I don't know. It must be a
Speaker 1:commentary This on some
Speaker 2:feels like something that's like sort of being misinterpreted almost. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Adam We've had Adam an update to the chamber Okay. Progresses group. He said the BASE Act is likely the most radical proposal to regulate and direct technology product design ever advanced in California. Legislature, the bill dictates how core products must function from search results to app stores
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:To e commerce marketplaces.
Speaker 2:Well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Mark Lohr from Wonder. How are you doing, Mark? Good to meet you.
Speaker 7:Hey. How you doing, guys?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Great to be here.
Speaker 1:Sorry we couldn't give you much warning around our news. It's kind of a wild wild day over here.
Speaker 7:I just saw it. Congratulations. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you. I'm sure I'm sure we can get into M and A war stories and whatnot, whatever you want to talk about. But why don't you, since it's the first time on the show, sort of take us back in history and give us a little little background on yourself for for the viewers.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Started my career in in investment banking. And then in the late nineties, did a first startup, sold it to Topps, the baseball card company.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 7:Then started dieherch.com.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:And then sold that to Amazon in 2011. Yeah. For 550,000,000. And then worked inside Amazon for a couple of years. Started jet.com, which is another e commerce site.
Speaker 6:Jet.
Speaker 7:And two years later sold that to to Walmart for 3,000,000,000 and then became the CEO.
Speaker 2:That's why they call him the LeBron James of e commerce. It's on the Wiki.
Speaker 7:Became the CEO of Walmart's e commerce business and did that for about four and a half years.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And now I'm the founder and CEO of Wonder. Yeah. A food tech startup.
Speaker 2:Maybe take us back to diapers.com. I'd love to know like how you were thinking about that business when you started it. Was there a thesis that sort of vertical focused e commerce was going to be a trend? What was the ecosystem like? What was the competitive landscape?
Speaker 2:Were VCs saying like
Speaker 1:Or did you just snap up a great domain and think I got to make some money with
Speaker 2:this Yeah. Yeah. How much of it was just organic versus
Speaker 7:The way it started Yeah. I was just searching on Google what search terms people were searching for a lot and doing it at night, searching, searching, searching. It would tell you how many times it was searched and I saw
Speaker 1:Oh, so they didn't even have so did they even have like Google Trends at that point or you just had to search and they they would show you?
Speaker 7:It was Alexa. I think it was called Alexa maybe or something. Can Oh, type in a search term and it would tell you how many times it was searched on Google. Yeah. Diapers, I remember, was 200,000 times a month.
Speaker 7:So, I went online and I saw the price of diapers was like $10 more expensive. I had a baby at the time. It was a pain to go get diapers. Why aren't diapers delivered like everything else? Like books and all this other stuff.
Speaker 7:And I thought, yeah, diapers.com, you know? And that was actually, one-eight 100 diapers started because I the couldn't diapers.com domain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wait. So, the one-eight 100 there must have been a moment where like the $1,800 was like more expensive than the.com though and then did it flip at some point?
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah. Was very like, when I was there, was very cheap. It was like, you know, I don't know, just tens of thousands whereas the diapers.com was like a half 1,000,000 or something. So
Speaker 2:was it like building an e commerce website back then? Like, I mean, we just we just read a story about a one person or I guess two people company, two person company that's at a billion dollars in revenue. And that feels unthinkable, but like what was the team like? Were you racking servers? Did was there a cloud?
Speaker 2:We were racking servers. Okay. We were
Speaker 7:racking servers. Yeah. It wasn't nothing was in the cloud. It was just, know, eventually transitioned to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But, yeah. No. It was servers in the server closet and
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 7:Yeah. We had, you know, designers, you know, designing the website and building it out and like it was, yeah, old school.
Speaker 2:And then, I mean, how how were you thinking about fulfillment, vertical integration, what you want to do, what you don't want to do early on with that journey?
Speaker 7:I mean, the the we had very little capital, so everything was, you know, hand to mouth. It was we would sell a diaper online, a box of diapers online for let's say $40 Mhmm. And then we'd go to the wholesale club and buy it for 42 and ship it to the customer.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 7:So it's like that kind of thing. So we're actually losing money on every box we sold.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then and then what what was the the integration with Amazon like at the time? Where was Amazon as a business? Where was the vision? What was the what was the thesis and like the what you saw was was going on at Amazon?
Speaker 2:Like, why was it an exciting opportunity?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I mean, was still early days. Amazon was actually crushing it in 2005 when we started divers.com, but they were mass. They weren't focused. Any one category wasn't a great experience.
Speaker 7:Like, if you're like me, a new parent going on to Amazon and wanting to buy, like, your stuff for your baby, you're, like, all over the place. It wasn't a great experience. The diapers were actually more expensive on Amazon than in the store, so they just weren't getting the whole thing and saw an angle to create a specialty site that focused just on that vertical, everything the parents want, everything they need all in one spot, and it was really working, you know. We also were able to ship the diapers and all this stuff out of the same fulfillment center with two day delivery, which wasn't being done on Amazon at the time in that category.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is more important in that particular category because parents need diapers for their kids? It's a more urgent like it's a like where you might wait for a book or you might wait for a TV or something.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. You realize I'm running out of diapers.
Speaker 2:I need them tomorrow.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 7:That sort of thing. So definitely. I also think there's a lot of you're buying like a lot of different things and it's expensive to ship them from multiple warehouses, so wanting to get them all in the same box. Yeah. Like getting the wipes, the diapers, the baby formula, bottles and things, like everything in the same box because they're low margin.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And so it's too expensive to ship them separately. But we were also the first ones to bring in Kiva Robotics into the warehouse.
Speaker 2:Oh, no way.
Speaker 7:Amazon ultimately bought Kiva Robotics. Yeah. We were the first ones to use robotics in the warehouse. And again, all in the name of the margins are low. Have to have to figure out how to automate.
Speaker 7:We create this software that told the people in the warehouse exactly how to put everything in the box so we can get all the things in the smallest box possible.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:Because FedEx a lot of times would charge you for the box size. Yeah. And so we tried to like we had 23 different box sizes. Sure. So like we were very advanced when it came to the logistics and trying to pull costs out of the system.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:What what elements of the Internet boom like, what are the ways in which the Internet boom feels similar to the AI boom and and and how does it feel different?
Speaker 7:I think it feels very I think it feels very similar. I mean, you know, there's people on both sides of the fence. This is good. This is bad. What's this going to do?
Speaker 7:Like, lot of uncertainty. Yeah. We were we
Speaker 1:were looking back on on how people all the fears people that had about the Internet are almost mirrored one to one with AI. Like, every single one kind of matches up. You know, the job displacement Y two fears, y two you know, y two k, things like that. It's pretty remarkable how how humans feared the internet in the exact same way as
Speaker 7:humans fear everything. You go back to when they trains, okay? Yeah. I don't know if you guys know I wasn't alive. Trains were a thing, they strongly advised people not to go on trains because at that speed, they don't know the long term effects it'll have on your brain.
Speaker 7:Woah. And they told pregnant women, do not go on a train if you're pregnant.
Speaker 2:Woah.
Speaker 7:Because for the same reason. Like any industrial Yeah. Advancement that's ever taken place in history, there's always an incredible amount of fear.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fascinating. Can you tell me about the process of the idea for jet.com? It it it when I remember that process happening and it felt like, okay, at this point with diapers.com, like there's a niche, there's a landing zone, like it makes so much sense, it's complementary to Amazon. Jet.com felt much more like, okay, this is like a direct competitor.
Speaker 2:Was that the correct framing? Were you thinking about that? Were you just thinking there needed to be options in the market that you could differentiate? What was your thought process going into launching jet.com?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think there's just a massive market and there was no number two to Amazon and we had an angle. You know, Amazon at the time was, you know, shipping stuff from multiple warehouses. It was very inefficient Mhmm. From a logistics standpoint.
Speaker 7:They were burning a lot of money, but they had no competition, so they could do it. And the idea was very simple. Let's empower people and teach them how to shop smarter so that they can save money. Mhmm. And so we built this smart cart technology where, you know, when you started adding items into your basket, it would reduce the prices of the items that could be fulfilled from the same warehouse in the same box
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:As an incentive to get people to save money because if you shipped an item from two different warehouses, you had to pay, you know, at least $5 per shipment.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And if you shipped it in the from the same warehouse, the marginal cost to ship might be 15¢. And so that was the idea of teaching people how to shop smarter to save money. And Yeah.
Speaker 2:Was the fundraising environment like throughout that that journey?
Speaker 7:Well, it's funny.
Speaker 1:I doubt you've had a hard fundraise.
Speaker 2:At the same time, it's like, you know, you're going up against Amazon during this time.
Speaker 7:I mean, I tried to raise money in 2001 Yeah. 2008, '15, some really tough years. I've been through it all. I've been raising money. Now for thirty years, I've done probably as many venture capital Yeah.
Speaker 7:Pitches as You know? Probably over over a thousand pitches easily now over over the career. But the fundraising has changed. In the early days of debris.com, if you were to raise a $100,000,000, that was like a huge deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And and then today, you know Yeah. It's crazy. It's raising billions, tens of billions, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Very different environment today. But back then, it was it much harder to get private capital.
Speaker 1:What drew you to food? We had we had Travis Kalanick on few a weeks ago and and we were sort of joking around. It's like you do if if you've done food feels like the hardest possible, you know, massive opportunity, but it's like probably the hardest food tech, probably one of the hardest categories. And so if you've mastered, you know, at scale logistics and these incredibly capital intensive things like e commerce or ride share. It feels like the final frontier, an incredible challenge.
Speaker 1:But what brought you what drew you into it?
Speaker 7:Mean, first of all, I I think the margins in food are just so much better than e commerce.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 7:that's And I felt like, you know, there's a restaurant sector that's ripe for technological disruption. Yeah. And restaurants haven't changed fundamentally in a hundred years. They're still capital intensive, labor heavy, difficult to scale, and they're they're places. And we wanted to challenge that and ask the question, what if restaurants were in place?
Speaker 7:What if restaurants were just ideas? What if you can build a restaurant and scale it across a network like software without any incremental capital or incremental labor with robotics in the back end?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And if we're able to do that, then we're able to bring, you know, make great food more accessible. We can bring restaurants to places that currently don't have access, at times of the day that don't have access, and at price points that are really unfathomable today. That was really sort of the thinking there. And, you know, we managed to, today, in 2,500 square feet, have 25 unique restaurants across 20 different types of cuisines. Everything from a high end Bobbie Flay steak to Jose Andreas to barbecue, burgers, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Middle Eastern fried chicken pizza, all in one two thousand five hundred square foot kitchen with no gas, all electric, no open flames, with very lightly trained labor.
Speaker 7:So it's very systematized.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And we see a future where we'll have a thousand or more unique restaurants operating out of the same 2,500 square foot kitchen. Yeah. And so
Speaker 2:Wild. Have you read any of those like old stories about the automats in nineteen fifties? Have you heard of this? It's like this No. It's like this restaurant, I think it was in New York and basically there was like a wall of cubbies where the food would be prepared in the back and then you would just sort of open the cubby and take your food and there was no interaction and they were like they were herald as like the future in sci fi but they never really took off in like the fifties I guess.
Speaker 2:I've always wondered about like how important is the online interaction like the delivery point because there's been a number of attempts to make like robotic restaurants work but it feels like if people are going to a restaurant they want a particular experience But if they're ordering food online, they want they're okay with a different experience. And I'm wondering how separate those are even though we think of them as like it's the same name. It's this pizza place in person or this pizza place in on delivery, they're actually maybe much more different experiences and like and like experiences delivery, like what the value prop is.
Speaker 7:Yeah. We're I mean, we're focused it's primarily delivery first, so 70% of revenue is delivery. Mhmm. About 25% is pickup.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:And then less than 5% is sit down. So we have 10 to 20 seats
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:In the front. So it's like a it looks like a high end fast casual in the front, but it's a pretty small front of house.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But being vertically integrated, so we bought Grubhub, so we own the delivery.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:We own We and we also own all the restaurants.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we
Speaker 7:own all the restaurants. We do the cooking. We built all the technology. And so the vertical integration combined with a very tight delivery radius
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Allows us to offer an incredible experience, like faster, more on time, hotter food, great quality, and of course, everyone in the family can order from a different restaurant and it all gets cooked and delivered at the same time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And
Speaker 7:we can do that in ex urban and even rural areas where restaurants can't typically go, and that's one of the advantages of the model. And then recently, we just added drone delivery in New Jersey and that'll be a big part of the next year's Is
Speaker 2:it flying or road going with wheels?
Speaker 7:Sorry. Flying.
Speaker 2:Flying
Speaker 1:drones. And who did you guys partner? Did you fully verticalize?
Speaker 7:Yes. No. No. We were partnered with a couple different
Speaker 3:Sure. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Speaker 7:Cool. We're online. You can order from Drone in New Jersey in this one location and Texas
Speaker 1:What is going to next are the challenges with doing prepared food delivery via drone? Like, I've seen some of these videos where a package will fall, you know, 10 feet out of the sky and and obviously that's not going to work if you're ordering ordering a nice meal. No. It certainly does.
Speaker 7:Comes with a tether. Yeah. It comes down with a tether and very gently puts it on the ground, but the advantage is no tips. It's more on time. You can service a bigger area, and then you could also deliver to if you're on a boat, on a lake, on a beach, a field, you could be camping.
Speaker 7:So the idea of being able to deliver it to the point as opposed to somebody's residence is really cool. That's cool. And it's really at an inflection point now. I know we've been talking drones for ten years, but when we go to Texas next year, we fully expect half of our deliveries to be done via drone.
Speaker 6:Wow. So this to kind
Speaker 1:of Yeah. Prevent We've had Keller from Zipline on a number of times and it it you we've been feeling the acceleration with every every Yeah. Interview we have. How do you Yeah. One of the things that Go for it.
Speaker 2:Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
Speaker 1:How have you approached everything on the supply chain side? Because I imagine some of that is out of your control but that, you know, you need you're you're heavily reliant on those inputs no matter how good your whole technology stack and process is. The food's got to arrive at each of these kitchens.
Speaker 2:What
Speaker 7:is That is absolute most important. I'm glad you called that out. We have, you know, 40 culinary engineers on staff. We just hired Victoria who's the head of global supply chain at Sysco Foods. So we have a 700 ingredient library.
Speaker 7:We source everything from a number of different purveyors. It brings it to our distribution center, then and from a distribution center every day, we replenish every location. Today, we have a 100 and I think 18 locations open. Next year, we'll have 400. Growing growing very fast.
Speaker 7:Wow. But the food quality is
Speaker 1:I'm assuming it would never have worked to work with third party like food distributors like you need to control it. Can have them come into the central hub but you need to actually
Speaker 2:what want to
Speaker 7:have you're specialists. If you have everything from pizza dough to barbecue to sous vide steaks to vet, like everything comes from a different supplier. In some cases, it comes from But, yeah, the food quality is most important. The 700 ingredient library is fixed. All the equipment is fixed.
Speaker 7:Think of that as like a data center. Once you have the the data center and piping in the ground, anybody can create a restaurant using the platform and launch it across instantaneously across all locations. So at the end of this year, we're launching Wonder Create, where anybody in the world with just an AI prompt can create their own restaurant and launch it across all Wonder locations for $10 a month.
Speaker 2:So we think it's
Speaker 7:going to fundamentally change how people think about restaurant creation.
Speaker 1:So, yeah. Walk me through this. I come in. I want a prompt. I I start prompting or or even just typing out what I wanna make.
Speaker 1:And then your guys is are based using robotics, are you you can just make it on the fly, like what is the lead time?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So this is Can you
Speaker 1:actually like open up the floodgates here? Like, how how limited In will
Speaker 7:December, yeah, in December, you'll be able to go to Wonder Create homepage and say, create me a fast casual Mexican concept for Gen Z, and that's it. Hit create. Then AI will brand your restaurant, name it, give you a couple options, do all the images, do all the recipes, write the descriptions, price everything, do all the health information, create your entire restaurant in under a minute. You can decide to publish it in all Wonder locations for $10 a month instantaneously, and now you're live to potentially 20,000,000 people next year. You can push it on DoorDash, Uber, and Grubhub if you want as well.
Speaker 7:And you own the restaurant. You price it. You own it. It's live. And if you're an influencer, So you have
Speaker 1:are you doing a rev share back with the creator or how does how does that work?
Speaker 7:Yeah. You just basically the creator would pay us for food and pay us for robotic time. So it would plug in let's say you created a fast casual Mexican concept, it would plug into our Infinite Bowl machine that we acquired from Sweetgreen. The Infinite Bowl machine would make your bowl according to your recipe. And then we would actually print your packaging on demand to match your logo.
Speaker 7:You're fully in business. You don't need to do anything. You can be live in a matter of minutes with your new restaurant. And then we're next year launching an automated sauce machine, the Infinite Sauce Machine, which has 130 raw ingredients and can make 80% of all sauce recipes on the internet on demand, 500 sauces an hour. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So you can also create your own sauce recipe, your own dressing, your own whatever sauce you want on these on these bowls that are made from the Infinite Bowl machine. So that's that's sort of all it's
Speaker 2:all going to lie to
Speaker 9:you the end of this year.
Speaker 1:I am.
Speaker 2:So I mean like you're describing a very a very broad vision for the type of food that can be delivered and made. Walk me through the like the level of robotic automation because you walk into a place that toasts bagels and they have a machine, it's sort of robotic that will like move the bagels down and toast it or the pizza goes through the oven. And then you and then we see pitches all the time from humanoid robotics companies where it's operating a toaster that's not automated at all but the robot is moving and it's fully humanoid. What is actually useful? Where are we in the deployment of this?
Speaker 2:What robotic form factors are actually moving the needle and driving value?
Speaker 7:No. So, okay. So where we are today Yeah. We have conveyors in every location. Okay.
Speaker 7:We have, again, no open flames, all electric cooking platform. Sure. When the item gets onto the conveyor, it goes down to the expo area. It gets auto scanned, no human, robotic arm picks it off and puts it into the right bagging lane. So like that is the extent of the robotics today.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But the robotic machine, the infinite bowl machine we bought from Sweetgreen is Live in 32 Sweetgreens. It makes all the salads and all the bowls without any human intervention. The only thing you have to do is put the ingredients in the machine, but the bowl is beautifully made. It turns the bowl, neatly puts the ingredients in the bowl, and there's no human labor. You're pulling out 25 points of labor on on making those bowls, and the and the bowl machine can do 500 bowls an hour.
Speaker 7:It can do 13,000,000 in revenue in 300 square feet. Wow. Incredible piece of machinery. Yeah. This great team from Spice Robotics, they have 34 MIT engineers up in Boston
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Are now working for us and they're building the sauce machine. The sauce machine will go live early next year. Yeah. And we're working on an infinite beverage machine that could make basically any drink, in a coffee shop or a cold brew concept, all the foaming, layering, blending. That machine will also go live next year, so we're layering on the automation.
Speaker 7:And then in the middle of next year, we're launching an automatic retrieval system where all it has a cold storage, a frozen and ambient and everything's stored in there. So if you order wings, it'll robotically pick the wings and send them to the fryer and then the person just puts them in the fryer. In the future, the frying will be automated, but that's kind of like where we are today and where we're going next year.
Speaker 1:Wow. We envision Yeah. For it.
Speaker 7:But we envision in the not too distant future being able to generate 20,000,000 of revenue at a 2,500 square feet with with only 15 people operating that 20,000,000 in revenue. So That's crazy. Your labor cost is a small percentage. Yeah. Your your your rent is a tiny percentage, and we're able to make a fifty percent four wall margin, which we're going to take that extra margin and put a lot of it back into price.
Speaker 7:So we'd expect prices to come down and be deflationary over time, and it's consistent with our mission of just making great food more accessible.
Speaker 1:Price point Yeah. Food food ever been deflationary? It just feels like it all forever, it just goes up and up and up. I wanted to get your thoughts on humanoid robotics, specifically in a restaurant context. I'm guessing I already know what you think, but what's your take?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So we don't use any humanoid robots, so I think I know.
Speaker 1:I understand now. I mean more like diffusion. You think a do humanoid form factor will ever be productive in a commercial kitchen? Or are these kind of like bespoke systems like you've created going to dominate?
Speaker 7:I mean, I think definitely short term what we're doing is is sort of like first principle thinking on this stuff. Like, the humanoid robots going into a kitchen that exists says, oh, there's the fryer. This is what you do. You put the fries in the basket, the basket down, the basket up, the basket over. We like to rethink and think, why do you need to do that that way?
Speaker 7:Why can't you just create a fryer that has a conveyor and the conveyor goes through the fryer and fries it along the way so you don't need to put anything in a basket and take it out of a basket? Like, that sort of thinking. I do think there's some things that can't be automated and would be a long time before we could ever automate it like assembling a burger or rolling a burrito. If a humanoid is able to roll a burrito or assemble a burger, we'd be very interested that and we would look at it. It doesn't seem like anything that's going to happen in the very short term, but I'm always open to know that anything you think is not possible today, you know, could be possible.
Speaker 1:Were asking a humanoid founder about what we're calling Diet Coke bench. How effectively effectively can a humanoid open open a Diet Coke if it's simple but probably not too not too easy.
Speaker 7:Yeah. We really would like to just Sorry. Okay. Good.
Speaker 2:Just my last question is I'm wondering about your vision for the future of like restaurant brands generally because if like will we get to a point where I can go and prompt or design a specific meal and if I want buffalo wings put on pizza and fold it into a calzone deep fry like all as long as I'm using the tools that are within one facility will I be able to just create something that's essentially a one of one meal that is to my exact specifications and actually be direct to consumer?
Speaker 7:Yes. You'll be able to create your own restaurant Wow. Your own recipes
Speaker 2:I guess you can
Speaker 7:the way you want Yeah. And go direct to consumer. So we envision a future where there are not only influencers creating restaurants, but every college student can have their own cold brew concept. A high school student can have their own, you know, salad or Mexican concept. We envision in the not too distant future, there are tens of thousands of salad concepts in The US, tens of thousands of fast casual, and the market will be very long tailed, very fragmented.
Speaker 7:Won't be consolidated the way it is today.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating. I mean, you're basically taking franchising and bringing it online, and franchising in a way has been so successful because you're giving people a system and a But proven in this case, you're not asking for them to take on hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of debt to set up these
Speaker 7:$10 a month. That's all it is.
Speaker 2:It's $10 a month. Well, thank you.
Speaker 1:Incredible. You're person. Suspect. Are you guys what are you hiring for right now?
Speaker 7:Mean, across the board. We're we're kind of, you know, big open a lot of open positions in robotics. Yeah. In engineering. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So, you know, we've got over a thousand engineers on staff, but we can't seem to to get enough. So
Speaker 4:It's amazing.
Speaker 7:Yeah. If you're listening, reach out.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, thanks so So great to meet you, Mark.
Speaker 2:For taking the time to come talk
Speaker 7:to us. Nice meeting you guys too.
Speaker 1:I've been a follow-up followed your career. Yeah. Same here.
Speaker 2:I was building an e commerce company in 2012 and I was like, yeah, this guy is the Lebron James. So thank you for everything you've done for
Speaker 1:the Yeah.
Speaker 7:Great to see you guys.
Speaker 1:Great to
Speaker 2:get up.
Speaker 1:We'll have to create a TBPN. Thank you.
Speaker 7:I love it.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. There was something that you wanted to pull up, Jordy. What should we pull up?
Speaker 1:Was here from Rat King, our friend over New York Times. Yes. Tech reporter.
Speaker 2:What did he say?
Speaker 1:He wrote he wrote a profile on Yes. He was able to get screenshot actually from our contract
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:With OpenAI. And he says, interesting. As part of negotiation with OpenAI, TBPN has a commitment to editorial independence written into the contract, which states the following. TBPN retains full control over its daily programming, editorial decisions, guest selection, and production schedule. TBPN will continue to host a broad range of voices and perspectives, which we shared earlier.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. Open open stage to talk about whatever whatever you're building Mhmm. In technology and AI. TBPN independently determines its external appearances and commentary.
Speaker 1:OpenAI will not control TBPN's planning materials or working documents. OpenAI will not provide direction on TBPN's editorial calendar. OpenAI will not influence who TBPN books or what topics it covers. Again, we just talk about so many things. Oftentimes we're talking about topics like on the fly, there's breaking news.
Speaker 1:This was incredibly important.
Speaker 2:Tell us it's more fun to have the directors be the hosts as well. Yeah. So that we're not talking heads. Just Yeah.
Speaker 1:Say whatever we want. Yeah. People have always asked us how do you guys decide who comes on the show or decide what to talk about and Whatever arrangement. The honest truth is we, you know, it's whatever we're interested in. It's always been that way.
Speaker 1:It's super important. It's always been important because we have to sit here and talk for three hours every day.
Speaker 2:It's got to be interesting to us. It's got
Speaker 1:to interesting to Or
Speaker 2:else it's brutal.
Speaker 1:And yeah, OpenAI will not materially alter, discontinue, or rebrand TBPN. OpenAI does not have rights to TBPN host likeness. Yeah. We specifically have it set up where they can't even train models on TBPN. Can't train it on the chat.
Speaker 1:They can't train on anything TBPN related. I'm sure other companies train on TBPN Yeah. Already in one way or another. But but, yeah, this was incredibly important to both teams and I think we got it to a really good place.
Speaker 2:And thanks to Mike Isaac for covering it. Will, let's bring in our next guest, Adam Myers from CrowdStrike. He is the head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike and the host of the Adversary Universe podcast. Adam, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Adversary's worst nightmare.
Speaker 2:The adversary's worst nightmare.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Thanks for having me. Congrats on the acquisition too. I was reading about that earlier.
Speaker 2:Amazing. It's awesome. Yeah. And thanks for hopping on. A crazy week.
Speaker 2:I imagine it's an extremely crazy week for you. Can you sort of level set for us, is this a really, really weird week generally?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting because when we had last time we had George on or Yeah. Or maybe the time before I was talking, it's like we haven't had big AI related security breaches to date and not everything that's happened this week has Yeah. Been, you know, directly tied to AI, but it feels like everything is heating up.
Speaker 10:We're seeing more of it. There's been a couple in the last two weeks of these supply chain attacks.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And, you know, I think what's clear is that especially with the use of of Cloud Code and some of the different agentic solutions that are out there Mhmm. People don't know necessarily what these things are downloading, what they're loading on their systems. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:I know you guys have talked
Speaker 10:about like OpenCloud before and things like that, and it's just, you know, the supply chain for software has been an issue for a while.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And it I think it's just escalating. Right? We've seen so many of these over the last week. We've seen team t c team PCP k. Doing a few of these, and then this most recent one, which was a big one tied back to North Korea.
Speaker 1:North Korea. Yeah. It's it's two things are happening. People aren't reading code. They don't understand the ways in which they're they're actually building products.
Speaker 1:And then there's also like, you know, it feels like a 100 or a thousand times more software just being created too. Yeah. And the combination of those things is what's what's driving this. Maybe
Speaker 10:I've been doing a a plan with it a lot and it's you know, you can't even see it as it's running and and it's just pulling down NPM libraries and God knows what else from PIPE and stuff like that. So it's just, you know, who knows what's out there. And and the other thing is you install these libraries one day and then they become evil overnight. Okay. You know, you have to go back and review everything that you're using.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you give us a supply chain attack one zero one? Some people might be familiar with SolarWinds. That was the last one that really broke through to the mainstream. But just how does this work?
Speaker 2:What's the anatomy of a supply chain attack? And then we'll go into how to fight it and how why they're on the rise in particular.
Speaker 10:Sure. Yeah. So generally, supply chain attacks, you know, are going to impact the software supply chain. Mhmm. And so in SolarWinds, I actually worked that one.
Speaker 10:Wow. So I I can I can tell you that one was was pretty special because they got into the CICD environment and were able to actually affect the building of the software so that it was done in a way that nobody really could tell that that had happened? What we're seeing in these new supply chain attacks is that they're targeting the developers themselves, many of whom probably listen to the show, and so it's important to pay attention. That they could you know, they go after your credentials, they phish you, they get access to your logins to things like NPM and and Pypeep, and then abuse that. And and there's a a number of ways they can do this with Git tags where they can actually, you know, hide the code and then redirect Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Git to a Git tag. But effectively what happens, you know, for the layman is that you have software that is depended on by enterprise applications, by open source stacks, and their, you know, Acquires was downloaded something like a 100,000 times per week. Right? So that that gives you a sense that these things are being used extremely frequently, and you know, people don't look at them. They don't they don't analyze that code.
Speaker 10:They don't analyze that library. They trust it came from MPM. It must be good. The communities looked at it, But those things can be updated at a moment's notice and and you don't you don't know what that latest update is unless you review the code yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. So on on reviewing the code yourself, we were debating this. The two sides that we were kicking around was maybe the reaction to this is that, sure we're not going to write as much code going forward. We know that the models are good at writing code but there will be a lot more code reading that goes on and people will just demand that if you're hired as a software engineer that you read every line, you work through the dependencies, you are in charge of the code that you ship regardless of whether or not it was generated by an LLM or not.
Speaker 2:The other side of it was sort of like maybe the answer to, you know, code bad AI code is more good AI code and that we will be doing more AI code reviews and that we can actually throw more AI at this problem. I imagine the solution somewhere in the middle but how how are you wrestling with those two paths forward?
Speaker 10:Well I think what we're looking at is how do we secure it absent of is somebody reviewing the code or not. Right? And so there's things that you can look for at the endpoint at the security fabric. Right? We we kind of see ourselves as the operating system of security at CrowdStrike.
Speaker 10:So being able to see that, you know, the AI agent is writing code and it loads a library and inside that library, you know, use this Axios example, there's a chunk of it that's base 64 encoded Yeah. And it's being, you know, decoded and instantiated. That's suspicious behavior, right? Just if I say that out loud, I'm like, hey, you guys are going to pull down a bunch of base 64 code and then decode it and run it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 10:You'd be like, no, we're not. So, you know, I think that those things that we could see at the endpoint at the build time, we can actually look for that and say, this is suspicious behavior. Let's flag this
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And pay attention to what's happening with this particular thing because, you know, to your point, you could demand everybody read all the AI slop that they're generating, but the reality is that even if they do that, they're not looking at all the libraries that they're using. Right? How many libraries does a standard build have? Right? I mean, I've I've been vibe coding for a while and you know, who knows what libraries you know, you run it and that's the beauty of it.
Speaker 10:Right? You run it, it spits out a bunch of stuff and then it works. Yeah. The reality is nobody's looking at those code bases until something like this happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what does the what does the future of security products, CrowdStrike? I I I can just imagine a world where more people need security products for open source projects, for their personal projects, for their personal life. Like if you have someone whose day job is important but then they're vibe coding their, you know, their their family calendar at home but all of a sudden that creates a vulnerability where you can get their, you know, phone number and then, know, sim swap or something like there's just
Speaker 1:so many different thing is like really soft people have had like relatively high trust with software for the last Right? It's like, oh, it's a Google login and Yeah. And only only this year have I started to be like really question Yeah. Different apps and things like that that people are making because there's a tendency if you're working in tech to like wanna try the new thing. Totally.
Speaker 1:Right? And now when something pops up, it's actually kind of a headwind Yeah. For startups because I think we're probably headed into a lower trust era.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think that's part of it. I I also would point to the people that are building these libraries, right? They need and we've seen this with Chrome plugins too and and and browser plugins. You need to have MFA, you know, multi factor authentication on all of your authentication for pushing code out to these library bases because somebody comes along, fishes the developer
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Convinces them to enter password for drive or some sort of cloud storage or something like that. They take those credentials and then they use that to log in and change the code base. So the developers really need to be focused on securing their own accounts and identity. Yeah. And we've seen you know, we released this global threat report a few weeks ago.
Speaker 10:Identity, you know, for a long time, Endpoint. And when CrowdStrike I've been with CrowdStrike since we started back in 2011. Endpoint was kind of where It really
Speaker 2:is. What a good run.
Speaker 1:What what advice are you giving to developers today that are, you know, I think everyone that my advice would not be freak out and, you know, slam your computer into the table.
Speaker 2:We're going back to pen and paper.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pen and paper but like what what are the, you know, two two factors, an obvious one, any any other like advice that somebody should basically implement immediately?
Speaker 10:It would give everybody secured their identities, my job would be a lot easier. Right? Like the number one thing thing that we've seen is identity attacks. Mean Sure. Two years ago, we we saw that voice based phishing.
Speaker 10:So threat actors calling up the help desk and being like, hey, this is Jordy and I can't log into my account. Yeah. Right? And sorry Jordy, I'm just picking on you there. But you know, but hey, it's you know, I can't log into my account.
Speaker 10:And they're like, alright, well, know, who's your supervisor? What's your work location? You answer those two questions and they reset the cred for you.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And that that happens to the point or hundreds of percentages of increase that we've seen that occurring
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 10:From threat actors. So, know, one of the ways to get around that from a defense perspective, multi factor authentication. Don't use SMS by the way for multi factor authentication because that's a whole other thing because I can sim swap you or I can you know, and and you know, if you have a backup for your multi factor authentication as your Gmail, I'll target your Gmail. Mhmm. And then I'll I'll intercept that key.
Speaker 10:So having smart secondary factors and using pass key and things like that really important. Mhmm. And then using different, you know, I I tell this to everybody and you know, even if I'm talking to a bunch of school kids, like hey, use different passwords for everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And I love nothing more than going into a room with people. I'm like, alright, raise your hand if you don't use the same password for every account. And they all raise their hands and I'm like, look around. If your hand is is up, you're a liar. Because everybody does password reuse.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course. Give us the pitch for the podcast. Give us a summary. Tell people where to find it.
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's Adversary Universe podcast. It's myself and Christian Rodriguez who's our field CTO of The Americas. And just like you guys, we like to have a good time just kind of back and forth banter, bringing guests occasionally. Yeah.
Speaker 10:But we really deep dive into the adversaries. So in this case, with the the Axios incident, we're attributing that to Stardust Cholima, is a North Korean group.
Speaker 3:We've been
Speaker 10:tracking them since 2015 and Wait.
Speaker 1:So and then lap lapses, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly was connected to the light LLM attack, but that do I have that correct? That was a different group.
Speaker 10:Well, yeah. That's that's kind of team PCP I think claimed claimed credit for that. But you know, there's they're they're actually fighting. You can watch this in some of their channels. The two groups are kind of you know, talking They're
Speaker 1:like, I did it. No, I did it. They're Well,
Speaker 10:I think the lapses guys are like, or shiny hunters was like, this is why we hack them. Right? So, know, they hacked team PCP. So there's a lot of back and forth there. But, you know, this one was North Korea who has been doing, you know, they stole last year $1,460,000,000 in just one attack against a cryptocurrency company.
Speaker 10:So they've been stealing cryptocurrency since 2016 at, you know, billions of dollars is kind of the the current total. And when they do a supply chain attack like this, they want to go after developers who are doing blockchain and and kind of DAOs and stuff like that because they know that if they can get into there, then they can they can actually steal cryptocurrency and use that to buy things for their weapons program.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah. A lot more straightforward than than acquiring data and then trying to auction it off Yeah. If you're seeing with the Or the red incident.
Speaker 2:If you get the coins.
Speaker 10:Well, yeah. Some of some of those are interesting because they actually they were deploying stealers, right, to steal credentials to then go after other targets. And Mhmm. There's a whole ecosystem on the underground where you know, you could go in, you could buy creds to an organization. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And if you have creds to an organization and you log in, you can go straight into their single sign on, you can get into you know, Microsoft SharePoint or any of their data stores, and you're off and running and there's really very little that organizations can do to prevent that, know. It's a legitimate user logging in with a legitimate credentials so it becomes very difficult for them.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come break it down for us. Have a great weekend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This was insightful. Talk to soon. More Come often.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This would be great.
Speaker 10:Anytime guys. My pleasure. Have a
Speaker 2:good to one. Have you. Goodbye. Bye. Our next guest is Jeremy O'Leary from Circle.
Speaker 2:He's live in person in the TBPN UltraDome with us. We're very excited to talk to him. Jeremy, good to see you. Good to see you. How are you doing?
Speaker 9:I'm good.
Speaker 2:Take us through the the announcement. We were covering it over the past few days around maybe maybe reset on where the business is today and then we'll go into the Quantum story.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, look, obviously we went public last year. Yeah. And you know, as we went public and talked, Thank you.
Speaker 2:There's a soundboard in person, too. Can Don't
Speaker 9:I hit that? No. And and, you know, at that time, like Yeah.
Speaker 10:We we were talking
Speaker 9:a lot about, like, our stablecoin network Yeah. Which is, like, rooted in USDC. Mhmm. And but really, you know, over the last year, we've really widened out. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so we we are a broader platform company now, and we have an operating system that we've been building called Arc Mhmm. And that's getting ready to, you know, go main net, as we say. And and then we've been kind of building out abstractions around kind of payments and sort of making payments more simple and mainstream, and then just building a lot of infrastructure and tools for developers and stuff. So Sure. Platform platform has really broadened, but I mean, you look at, you know, where where we are now, like USDC has become the most widely transacted digital currency in the world Yeah.
Speaker 9:Bigger than anything else, basically, and and has overpassed overtaken Tether in terms of transaction volume. Interesting. And, you know, we're seeing new uptake. We're seeing new uptake from, you know, major companies now, you know, whether it's like a a fintech like ramp that just launched, like, whole treasury management with it, or it's, you know, a global bank like JPMorgan that's now has used it to, like, sell digital bonds, and Wow. So it's it's all over the place, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 9:And then, you know, one of the things that we saw really start to pick up and we'll talk about I think hopefully today too is and is is effectively like this explosion in people building agents. Yeah. And agents consuming services and needing ways to kind of pay for all of that, and the technology and standards to kind of do agent to agent economic transactions, financial transactions, and USDC has played a big role in that, and that's emerging, and to me is like one of the most interesting things happening in the agentic economy. And yeah, yeah, USDC and our stablecoin network is like 99 of the transactions happening now at that layer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So how how are you tracking adoption? What kinds of use cases are you expecting to be the first to to really kind of go more mainstream? This is something that people have been talking about for years now and as agents have become massively more popular, it feels like now could really be the moment. But like what are you tracking most closely?
Speaker 9:Yes. I mean, look, there are a bunch of things. I think, you know, if you think about like the agent stack as it's emerging, right, you're clearly seeing a lot of companies that have services, have software, have other things. And they're basically like, okay, I need to kind of convert what I do into an agent consumable system. So I want to have an m p m c p server.
Speaker 9:I want to have, you know, a CLI interface. Right? You're all all these kinds of things and this sort of discoverability. Mhmm. And then you need ways to basically enable agents to like onboard and transact really, really quickly and not go through the kind of onboarding that you you would typically deal with.
Speaker 9:And so that's where we see this first wave is basically agents consuming services that are now kind of agent ready and have been kind of structured that way. And so there's like a registry of now, you know, thousands of services that are basically becoming what's called x four zero two enabled, which is a key standard we're involved with.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 9:There's a big announcement actually today about that. And so that's like the first, it's sort of like getting that connected. But to me, the really interesting and more explosive kind of growth potential is really, you know, agents that are providing services to other agents themselves. And so, if you think about like I'm building an agent that's extremely good at a particular form of, let's say, medical analysis, or I'm building an agent that's extremely good at reviewing resumes, or whatever that is, this sort of agent as a service is, again, way that people are talking about this is, like, in those models, you're basically paying for, you know, intelligence. Intelligence is going to be priced in dollars, but also as consumable tokens.
Speaker 9:And you need, at that point, like, if you look at, like, what's the cost for cost of intelligence for x number of tokens Yeah. With a given model, it could be 5¢, it could be a dollar, it could be 35¢, it could be it could be more, it could be something long running, could you know, a $100 or whatever. And so once you start having agents contracting with each other and needing that medium of exchange to settle that, that's where I see this as explosive. Yeah. Because you get this compounding effect of agents.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were talking earlier, there's guy in the New York Times today that built, you know, 1,800,000,000.0
Speaker 9:I've been reading
Speaker 8:about it. I've watched your show before
Speaker 1:I came in here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and and what's notable is like he's using a bunch of different intelligence providers.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you're just hopping between different LLMs all the time, it's not great. You're like and pasting and it's not like unified and so you would imagine that over time you get to actual aggregators Yeah. And you're like, hey, we need to tap into a different model for Yeah.
Speaker 9:And you know, like an agent an agent marketplace and these registries of agents and this and and obviously, it's like because it's all machine to machine, like, it's super discoverable. Yep. And what's behind any given agent, is just kind of consumed through, you know, some kind of underlying CLI or whatever API. Right? Like, it doesn't matter what the underlying model is behind it.
Speaker 9:It's just like I there's a there's a function I need, and it's here. And so, yeah, I I think it's also, you know, the the the kind of, you know, compensation, fees, transactions around agent to agent stuff is obviously has that, like, huge exponential potential. I think what gets more interesting is when you really start to think about structured economic relationships, like like most economic relationships are not just like, you have a thing, I'm paying you for the thing. Right? It's like a labor contract might there might be a lot involved in it, or a service contract.
Speaker 9:There may be many, many stipulations that are part of it. And like a trade agreement between two companies, there's like all kinds of stuff. And so you can imagine like more elaborate forms of contracts, Mhmm. And those need to be machine written contracts, machine enforced contracts, and machine validated and audited, and and and kind of have dispute resolution against all of those. And, like, economic operating systems that are built on blockchain tech stacks are like the way that will happen.
Speaker 9:And that's more of a view of like what is the agentic economy? What is the economic system? And actually these these these new companies that are the one person billion dollar startups, etcetera, like all of that phenomenon, in some ways, these are emergent corporate forms, right, that are using a lot of AI labor. But over time, like, think even the nature of corporate forms will change, and we'll have more digitally native corporate forms that most of the substance is actually just software execution. And, like, there's humans involved and maybe the legal system will always require there's a person that's there.
Speaker 9:But I think we're face going a lot of very hard legal questions around sort of entity substance, like what is the substance of the entity? What is the entity? And but I think a lot of this there's a lot of material here that we have to work with to ultimately create these sort of fully digitally native forms that are composing and interacting with contracts and economic systems.
Speaker 1:How are how are you guys working with companies today? The beauty of USCC is anybody can kind of get the power of it by just Tap in. Permissionless. Yeah. Just tap in.
Speaker 1:But I know you guys have invested in in companies in the past, partner with a ton of them directly. Like, how are people? I'm sure you're getting an insane amount of real pitches and then also people pitching you with OpenAI and things like that. Oh, God. Yeah.
Speaker 9:I mean, look, I think like So a couple of things. I think within this AI space, right, we're yeah, we're making investments, like venture investments in different types of startups that are doing interesting things. We have builder programs, so we have with funding and stuff like that, so we have builder programs in this space. But a lot of what we're doing is just basically like making sure everything that we have, like all of the infrastructure for wallets, infrastructure for money, the infrastructure for creating smart contracts, like all the stuff that goes into this, that all of that is just consumable and discoverable by either AI development tools or by AI agents themselves and then letting things happen. But like stepping back a little bit away from the AI specific side of it, yeah, I mean, the range of companies now getting involved and plugging into this is really broad.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And that's exciting. You know, this is definitely kind of going into a mainstream phase.
Speaker 2:I imagine AI companies are ahead of the curve there in terms of adoption and turning on agentic payments because
Speaker 3:you go to
Speaker 2:an agent and it needs to use some resource. That's the logical the logical pattern versus
Speaker 1:a post, I forget who who put it out earlier this week, something to the effect of people AI people are more excited about crypto right now than crypto Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I've I've always thought of these as as sort of highly complementary. And and even going back thirteen years when we were kind of starting Circle
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:The thing the thing that got me really excited was this idea of programmable money
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:That we were gonna have, like, self running software machines that would intermediate economic stuff on the Internet. Like And that was the promise of the tech thirteen years ago. You couldn't do it. It wasn't possible. It didn't exist.
Speaker 9:Yeah. But it was like, as an Internet technologist, that was really exciting to me. I'm like, wow. Like, if you can actually have, you know, these sort of self running software machines that are auditable and can and run Now, I didn't have a concept of generative AI Yeah. But definitely was like, okay, programmable money Mhmm.
Speaker 9:That is going to be like a completely new form of utility for money that's never existed.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so that was very exciting. And so I think in many ways, like, you know, a crypto infrastructure, crypto as a tech stack Yeah. Is very, very purpose built for the the the agentic world. Like, they really are hand in glove, and and will work very, very closely together. And so, you know, trustless intermediation is like what what what happens in AI.
Speaker 9:Right? Yeah. You know, whether it's of data or of of Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's interesting to think about how many business transactions, like, if there's a contract, they're so trust dependent. Yes. And and stables can can play a role in helping that evolve because you can say Yeah. You know, basically if, you know, you can you can escrow funds. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can make Yeah.
Speaker 9:And and these can be very very loud.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's always been the thing. Will people like people like to buy from people, but part of that is because you wanna know, okay, who's my counterparty? Yeah. Do they have a good reputation?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do I trust that even if we have a contract, they'll they'll follow it and I don't have to get into some, you know, legal Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I remember the pitch for machine to machine payments. Yes. Yeah. I think it was around like Ethereum, maybe $20.15.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. So this was like an early thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it sort of made sense Yeah. It was very hard to imagine writing all the code to do all that now. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Makes a ton of sense. I'm wondering what you think holds about the the current economic philosophies or the economic rules of the road just in business and what might be different as we move towards a world of decentralized agentic payments? Like, I imagine network effects still hold. I imagine that if you create value, you create the network, you can capture value through some transaction percentage and everyone will be happy in the ecosystem. How do you think about the economics?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, look, I think I think there there there are a bunch of different pieces here, So so Circle is a is a money issuer. Like, we issue digital dollars. Yeah. We issue digital euros.
Speaker 9:EURC is the largest digital euro stablecoin. We issue digital treasury
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Products. We have the largest tokenized money market, basically. So we're a money issuer, and so if we can build networks Mhmm. That have wide utility and protocols for that those those monies that we issue that are super super widely used and provide a great, you know, utility. You can permissionlessly plug in, etcetera, and and we can grow that.
Speaker 9:The monetary base alone Mhmm. Can be massive. Right? So we can we can we can we can imagine that, you know, these these kinds of digital dollars running on these networks, there'll be trillions of dollars of these Mhmm. As opposed to hundreds of billions of them now.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And so that itself is is significant and, you know, the economics are are very significant from that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But I think, you know, ultimately, I think, you know, as as the infrastructure becomes kind of more widely utilized for real world transactions, I mean, whatever that means, right? Yeah. We absolutely have an opportunity to participate in the velocity of those transactions and the economics around that. But, you know, we had this philosophy when we started Circle that, you know, over the long run that the marginal cost of storing and moving value would go to zero and that the business model of charging fees for payments would collapse. Interesting.
Speaker 9:And and, you know, I think over the long run that is still going to be true.
Speaker 2:Actually zero or like 0.0001%?
Speaker 7:So Which is so big.
Speaker 2:It's so good.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Mean, almost all yeah. I mean, actually zero to most of the consumers of it Yeah. Because the costs underneath it are going be so low. It's like like, you know, don't get charged for your WhatsApp audio call.
Speaker 9:Yep. Right? They're like, you know, we're going to we're going
Speaker 1:deal with the make it up the other way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's too cheap to me.
Speaker 9:But like, we've we we just announced something called Circle Nano Payments.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:It's a it's a module for agents Mhmm. To basically be able to, like, have a stored balance of of digital dollars, of of tokenized dollars, and be able to transact them to like different wallets on different blockchains. And and we've gotten it to the point where we can actually have transactions priced at $1.01 millionth of a penny Mhmm. Per transaction. And you know, you're like, well, who would ever need that?
Speaker 9:Well, if there's like
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, here's here's an example. So yesterday we had Eddie Q on from Apple and he was talking about the early days of the App Store and how when you when you bought a song, they would effectively kind of open a cart and they would hope that you would buy multiple songs Yeah. Songs. In a twenty four hour period before they actually like process the payment because otherwise they're giving you quarter
Speaker 9:of Yeah. Of a transaction.
Speaker 1:And so like that right there is insane like the fact that Apple, one of the biggest consumer tech companies the world had to use this kind of weird workaround Totally. Just to not give 25% of every transaction Yeah. Taking money away from, of course, like the creators and the record labels
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And Apple, just like pure kind of rent extraction.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's like pay payment systems, like, were never designed were not designed for a machine and an AI economy. They weren't. And we we even see this now where because the cost to transact USDC on has has gone to, you know, sort of fractions of a cent Mhmm. In in in general, you can do that.
Speaker 9:Like the velocity of transactions has exploded Mhmm. And you see that in the growth in the year over year growth. It's like tens of trillions of dollars of transactions on a monetary base of around, you know We have trillions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Congrats on saying the biggest number. On scale, what are you tracking right now to understand where we are in the adoption Yeah. Of agentic payments? Because I imagine like it is happening.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's small. It is. Is it are you doing like a percentage of GDP thing? No.
Speaker 2:Percentage of your transaction base? Like just growth month over month? Like what's the what's the correct internal So
Speaker 9:there's there's there's a couple ways to look at it. Okay. Right now. Yeah. So so one is like there are specifically standards for AgenTic payments.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 9:And so we are a co developer of the x four zero two standard. Actually, x four zero two foundation just got merged into the Linux foundation. Yeah. A lot of great companies, Stripe, Coinbase, who is a pioneer in this circle.
Speaker 2:This has been a proposal in HTTP for like twenty five years.
Speaker 9:It's this old thing.
Speaker 2:It's a money It's crazy.
Speaker 9:Like payment request model. And so but now if you look at like x four zero two version two Yeah. It's like building out into a a pretty rich vernacular Sure. That's needed for the the the needs of agentic payment. So Mhmm.
Speaker 9:One way to look at it is like what's x four zero two traffic and like you can can look at x four zero two traffic, you can track it,
Speaker 7:you
Speaker 9:can look at the payloads, you can see what the transactions are. And that's in the like it's been growing. It's in the hundreds of millions.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 9:Okay? So quite small from a from a starting base. But I think the if you look at a leading indicator, which is the number of of these, like, agents or services or endpoints that are x four zero two enabled has been growing very rapidly. Yeah. And and we, as as well as, like, companies like Stripe and Coinbase and others are we're basically like shipping stuff so that it's like super butt simple to like Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Have x four zero two in front of whatever it is you're doing Mhmm. Or or you in front and behind. So you could be a consumer and a service provider.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And so I think that, like 2026, we're going to see this huge growth in that and then the consumption models. The leaked Anthropic code actually had all of these references to X4 two So, in you know, it's clearly like even in foundation models becoming something that they're going like, hey, this is gonna be like a common pattern. Yeah. But, you know, so that's that's one way to look. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then the other is like, it's hard to measure which is like people are using AI to create bots, like these Polymarket trading bots Yeah. Or these hyper liquid trading bots or like all kinds of stuff. And those aren't using x four zero two, and so that's like other traffic, but it's AI driven transaction Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 9:And so it's hard to measure.
Speaker 2:We got
Speaker 1:to talk quantum. Quantum. Yeah. Quantum. When I mean, I'm assuming you were aware of the risk of Quantum to We did it hit flash.
Speaker 9:No. Didn't mean, so very aware.
Speaker 1:And I'm saying like aware predating starting circle. Right? Like, because this is just risk for
Speaker 9:Of course. Overall This has been, you know, crypto is cryptography, which is math all this is about who can compute these keys and ciphers and all that stuff.
Speaker 5:So of
Speaker 9:course, it's always been a background debate, always been a theoretical background debate. As we've been building up our own operating system, our own crypto based operating system, Arc, we have been saying, Okay, we're doing this kind of clean room from the start. It's a new infrastructure. We have a chance to do post quantum readiness from the start. Whereas existing networks, and there's this Google paper and all that jazz and so on, there's a migration and there's risk and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 9:And so we basically
Speaker 1:said Yes, this massive coordination problem.
Speaker 9:Huge coordination problem. So we basically said, Look, we have phenomenal PhD crypto people in the company. And so we made this a priority. And so we actually just announced today our whole post quantum roadmap. And one of the most powerful things is that when ARK goes mainnet in the not too distant future, right, it will have post quantum signatures there from the start.
Speaker 9:So if you're issuing assets and you're doing transactions, you can actually use post quantum methods from the start. I think we'll be the very first blockchain network in the world to have that there, which is key. Now there's like multiple layers to this, and so the road map also details like, okay, how do the validators on the network get themselves to be quantum resilient and resistant and
Speaker 2:so on.
Speaker 9:So there's multiple layers that have to happen over time. But the base layer, which is the most important, which is the fundamental mechanism for how you sign transactions, how transactions are published to the network and how assets get defined, like that's post quantum. There's a lot of detail we put it out in our documentation today. But we've been thinking about it a long time and it's sort of interesting because we were gearing up to launch this and then this Google DeepMind where it was like came out and we're like, okay, well, time to launch.
Speaker 1:Well, it's an interesting challenge for the industry because everyone needs to get their house in order and like create a plan. But then it's also like the entire industry to rally because even if you guys have your
Speaker 9:Oh, yeah. No. It cascades across all these ecosystems and like USDC runs on 32 blockchain networks. Right? And and so like, you know, we we are part of the whole ecosystem, obviously.
Speaker 9:And then, of course, if from a de novo perspective, people are building new stuff. Mean, one thing to remember is, like, basically, like, crypto infrastructure blockchains had been an early adopter phenomenon until very, very recently. And, like, the actual usage at a global scale in the real economy, like, you know, 98% of that's still ahead of us. So we're still very early in all this.
Speaker 1:Last question for me. How did you process the twenty twenty eight intelligence crisis, that that paper Oh, yeah. To Trini because some some of it was Yeah. You know, spec basically making the argument there's a lot of kind of rent seeking in the economy Yes. And AI can potentially make a lot of transactions a lot more efficient.
Speaker 1:That's kind of what you're betting the
Speaker 9:company But they had specific bunch of specific stuff about stablecoins and USDC and, like, you know, all that. I mean, look, we are so I I I read that, and there's a lot of really interesting things in there, and and and broadly, like, you know, even Circle itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The interesting criticism too is like the criticism was like, okay, this is like sci fi. Yeah. But when you look back at sci fi throughout history Yeah. It's like There's a lot of sci fi that that that is like, you know, kind of come come to Yeah.
Speaker 9:Mean, look, mean, fundamentals of of like of like like completely restructuring, like what what transaction costs are and and and basically models where, you know, much of the work that's conducted in the real economy is work conducted by AI or by intelligences Mhmm. And that that that work is economically gonna be measured out and and metered out and executed using these new digital currency forms. Like, I believe that very, very deeply. Mhmm. And I don't think anyone knows how big that will be, but it it's certainly, you know, again, like, total processed volume, which is like this number that, like, the card networks and others use, like, these numbers are gonna be look so small in comparison.
Speaker 9:Sure. The unit economics are going to be very, very different.
Speaker 2:I So I'm
Speaker 9:agree with, you know, a number of those conclusions. Not a hedge fund.
Speaker 2:Don't have
Speaker 9:any positions in any
Speaker 2:of these
Speaker 9:companies and all that. Like, I think it's it's it's real and it's happening and yeah, we're we're we're trying to build for that future.
Speaker 2:Amazing. I'm glad we have you working on it. Thank you so much
Speaker 9:for taking the time Thank you, guys.
Speaker 2:To come on down to the TBPN OpenAI. Thanks. I really appreciate you. Our next guest is in the waiting room and we will bring in Justin Levine from Shepherd into the TBPN UltraDome. Kicks off our lightning round.
Speaker 2:Jeremy, how are doing? Oh, sorry. What's going on? Justin.
Speaker 1:I'm Still updating Cairo.
Speaker 4:Time. Congrats. Big day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Big day. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Honor honored to have you here Honor
Speaker 2:to you
Speaker 1:on this day. Sorry we couldn't give you a heads up, but
Speaker 2:been the strongest things. All good. We are not here to talk about us. We're here to talk about you. Please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Justin Levine, co founder and CEO of Shepard. We're a AI native insurance business. We focus on large scale industries like construction and and renewable energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about the growth of the construction data center industry broadly? Like what's the headline number that you're quoting? Because I imagine you have a TAM and it's growing, but how do you actually sense make about the what to expect over the next couple of years as you build the business?
Speaker 4:I mean, we're in we're in a massive construction super cycle specific to the AI infrastructure layer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think this year alone, there's something like $400,000,000,000 of infrastructure spend just related to either data center assets or the energy assets that need to support those data centers. There's not enough energy on the grid, we now have to build the energy assets next to the data centers in order to make it all operational. So, you know, from a TAM perspective, we are we're seeing a massive inflection in in terms of construction. This year alone, $80,000,000,000 of data centers were started. So $80,000,000,000 of new data center starts just happened in in in the last twelve months.
Speaker 4:So we're just seeing a massive wave, and it's kind of ironic for us. We we built Shepard on this thesis that AI was really right to productize this service of underwriting and doing underwriting differently. And then ironically, a lot of these AI companies became our customers because this industry is is is really, you know, the the driving force of construction right now.
Speaker 1:Okay. So who are all the different parties that you guys are helping insure? It's it's AI companies EOLabs. EOLabs. Like, actuals.
Speaker 2:Who trucks firm. Who who who calls you?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's it's a mix of of all the above. So everything from hyperscalers to the labs companies to, you know, contractors that are building, obviously, these these assets. Our portfolio is actually more diverse than just AI specific companies. But so, you know, our typical business is a large scale developer of assets that are either energy assets or healthcare assets, hospitals, things of, you know, all sorts of different, I'd say, large commercial physical assets.
Speaker 4:And then we insure the contractors as well. So a big portion of what we do is identifying the best contractors who are using the best technologies out in the field and then rewarding them with innovative pricing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what what what are what are they insuring? Right? Is it is it
Speaker 2:Weather, inclement weather, fire damage
Speaker 1:Labor cost, like
Speaker 2:There's so many different Yeah.
Speaker 1:What is this factor? Can you insure versus like what is just too what what could you insure but it's just too hard to price? You have to go too, you know, too high to make it, you know, feasible?
Speaker 4:There's there's a lot of different hazards obviously like related to the construction cycle. So there's obviously like the the just the the the cost of the building during the the construction phase. So the property risk that is associated with, you know, again, a large data center campus might be $20,000,000,000 of both construction material as though as well as equipment that's being installed. There's an enormous property component and just ensuring the actual property during the construction phase is a huge strain on the insurance ecosystem. Then there's a liability perspective.
Speaker 4:Builders that creating these assets, they are on the hook for mistakes, for defects, for potential, you know, injuries to people or buildings and other assets that are around these job sites. So depending on sort of like the product offering, you're obviously focused on a specific hazard. We really focus on like the driving hazard. So casualty is our key product offering. Again, that's going to be like property damage or bodily injury to people in and around the building of these large scale assets.
Speaker 4:But then we also do property. So we also do the the the materials, and the cost of construction while it's being built.
Speaker 1:What what are your relationships like on the actual insurance side? Who who are you who are you actually who's who's putting up all of the capital and taking on the risk?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we we partner with large scale insurance balance sheets, almost similar to, like, a neobank that's gonna have, you know, sort of a traditional bank behind it, you know, providing all the financial stability and and and rating and and the necessary requirements to fulfill whatever the the contractual risk that is is there between a lender and a and a and a builder. So we kind of we stand up under what's called an MGA model, which is that Shepard really owns all of the upfront marketing, sales, underwriting, policy servicing, everything from a submission coming in the door, the underwriting that happens, the making the decision making around what risks we wanna we wanna ensure, and then ultimately servicing those accounts once they become policyholders underneath our brand.
Speaker 2:Take us through the raise.
Speaker 1:We got it going.
Speaker 4:$42,000,000 rounds. Oh.
Speaker 2:Amazing gold. Love it. And and yeah. What what what is special about this like the actual investors on this round?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so this is our series b. It was led by one of the largest insurance companies in the world. So Intact Private Capital led led the round. That's the venture arm of Intact Insurance.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Intact's a $30,000,000,000 global insurer. I I I would say what's special about it is the signal. You know, I think a lot of the things that we're trying to do differently specific to the automation of underwriting, making underwriting significantly faster and more efficient. A large insurer, a large commercial insurer like Intact pairing with us and partnering on this, I think signals that they see that the world of underwriting is is is about to change dramatically just like other large industries, whether it's legal or accounting or all these other areas where we've seen a huge impact from AI.
Speaker 4:Brokerage and underwriting are kind of right in that wheelhouse of where services businesses can change dramatically. Intact So had partnered with us at the a. They were a capacity provider for us, so they are one of those balance sheets that that sits behind us. They've seen what we've been doing. They see the innovation that we're bringing to the industry, and so they they actually preempted the round and and and doubled down into the into the b.
Speaker 2:Last question for me. How how human is the process of underwriting? Because I feel like you could probably build a model, square footage, what are the assets, where is it? You know, you probably have underwriting models, but there's probably still like, who are you hiring? How do how would how do how will the will the human capital side of the business scale?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Totally. So I I you know, commercial insurance, you know, differently from personal lines is is definitely more complex. It's more more data heavy, more intensive, and there's a lot more sort of decision nuance and decision making that happens at the underwriter level. So we actually we equate what we're doing on the underwriting side to a little bit of of a similar view of the self driving kind of autonomous vehicles type of road map.
Speaker 4:So we've mapped our own level one through level five. And the idea is, today, most commercial insurance companies have underwriters with two hands on the wheel Yeah. And they're, you know, literally doing every single thing. What we're trying to do is get to a place where the underwriter at Shepard is much more of an orchestrator. They are managing a portfolio of 200 accounts rather than just 20 or 15 on a monthly basis.
Speaker 4:And so underwriters do play a significant role. We hire underwriters who think of themselves as as entrepreneurs who wanna build a portfolio. They wanna orchestrate and manage that portfolio. What they don't wanna do is data entry and and and some of the, I'd say, like, process heavy and and high friction elements of traditional insurance underwriting today.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 1:and break it
Speaker 2:down for us. Congratulations on the round, and good luck out We'll talk to soon. Ripping.
Speaker 3:Have a
Speaker 2:great one.
Speaker 4:Congrats. Congrats.
Speaker 1:See you guys. Talk soon.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is Gaurav Misra from Mirage, formerly Captions app. I found out about the company through Rev Randall. Previous round, bringing Gaurav to the TBPN UltraDome. Gaurav, how are
Speaker 1:doing? What's happening?
Speaker 8:Good. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. And Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Thank you. Yeah. It's been almost a year.
Speaker 7:Crazy that you Yeah. Both
Speaker 2:You were
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very how you must have been in the first how many guests?
Speaker 2:I'm I'm a huge user of this app. I love this app. I've I've used it for every name that I send you. Every time there's a video with captions over it, I'm I'm always downloading on my phone, screen recording, putting it in captions, and then I'll even use it to transcribe videos.
Speaker 1:John John is a magician. Like, can make he can make basically feature length memes. Yeah. That that usually just get sent to to the team chat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, yeah. For for those who don't know, the the the apps, but also just where the business is broadly and where you're expanding to, sort of give us the lay of the land.
Speaker 8:Yeah. As you mentioned, we transitioned our names, we kind of went from captions to mirage. But, you know, the app still remains to be captions, the company that we renamed, basically. Part of that is like we're building out a product suite, so it makes sense to sort of have a different company name for that. Now we obviously, we raised about $75,000,000 recently.
Speaker 8:We announced that, which is exciting. Here we go.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. Thank you. I love it.
Speaker 8:Love that. And so so, you know, Yeah. With that funding a lot of what we're gonna do is expansion, you know, market expansion. So, you know, we are very excited about the magic moment the product already has. I know you talked about it a little bit.
Speaker 8:Right? And when we can bring
Speaker 1:the product in front of a
Speaker 8:new customer, they're very likely to convert, very likely to pay, and very likely to retain. Right. And that's kind of what our investors saw. Mhmm. That's kind of why this new investment came in.
Speaker 8:Now, we want to bring this to as many people as possible around the world as quickly as possible. You know, historically, we've been sort of marketing in, five to seven countries. That's kind of where we've been, US centric, like, a little bit in Europe and stuff. But now we want to go really broad, you know, especially Asia is a big focus region. So that's kind of the plan of where we're going.
Speaker 2:How do you think about just feature requests and all like the the the scope of what you can do with video plus AI, I don't want to narrow you down to mobile, but I think, like, I think you've executed very well on mobile. But there's so many different features, and a lot of them get broken up into different models, different APIs. I feel like there's so much opportunity to bring all that together. At the same time, you're going up against meta and edits and CapCut and DivideDance. Like there are some big players, but there's also a lot of opportunity.
Speaker 2:So how do you see the landscape of things that you can do? I'll scroll reels all the time and see some crazy edit and be like, oh, I know that they jumped to Blender for that or they used a particular AI model for that or they're in After Effects for that. And I want to recreate it but I don't want to necessarily sit down for five hours and remember how to use Blender.
Speaker 8:I mean, you actually hit the nail on the head because this is exactly kind of what we're the way we're thinking about how our proper roadmap goes. Right? Yeah. I think if you look at the AI video space, there's tons of companies. There's a lot of activity happening right now.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Right? But our approach is a bit different than everybody else. Like, we're not only about generating video. Even though that's a big component of what we do, right, we use all kinds of models out there.
Speaker 8:We have our own models as well, right, for audio and video generation. But it's really about the assembly of the video into something that actually makes sense, right? Something that a narrative that ultimately can work for you whether you're a small business, you're selling something, whatever is. You can tell your story, sell your product, market yourself or your business using our product because we can assemble the right video for Yeah. Now, here's the interesting part.
Speaker 8:What we've noticed is that a lot of our customers, especially the ones that are retaining for long periods of time, it's not just about fully generated video. Like, that's like it's a thing. If you're making Super Bowl commercial short, like, go and generate the entire thing like it's going to look awesome. Right? But there's actually a much, much larger market for, a mix of content.
Speaker 8:Like, think about, like, our average customer, they're like a plumber, right, or maybe electrician or like a nail salon. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:They want to actually show, like, their actual nail salon. Right? What does it actually look like as opposed to a generated nail salon of
Speaker 1:some sort.
Speaker 8:Right? And want to merge that with some generated footage, some cool shots, like maybe, you know, a founder video like talking, you know, perfectly about whatever whatever they want to do and put it all together into something that they can give to customers, market on the in their website, wherever they're putting it out there, social media. Right? So it's really about the connection of generated and non generated together and putting the narrative together. That's the intelligence there.
Speaker 8:Right? So, like, that's really our focus.
Speaker 2:How do you think about entry points into video creativity? There's something that can be sort of intimidating about an empty text box. At the same time, it is like the universal interface. It's the most broad possible UI. When do you want a user to start with an existing video or an image versus start with a blank text box?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So I actually so even today, over 50% of our users start with some sort of media. An image, a video, you know, a set of images, a set of videos, audio, music, all kinds of things. Right? So over 50% of people start with media, which actually is like very different than most other like, a lot of like pure video generators, people start with text.
Speaker 8:They start with a prompt. And ours is flipped. It's like media first, prompt is attached to it. Right? Yep.
Speaker 8:Now, I think the way we think that's going to evolve for us is that, you know, it's going to go more and more media first. That's that's the crazy part. Right? Like, I think people expect it to go more prompt first, but I think our angle is a little bit more media first using real footage. You know, I actually think that, you know, there's another extreme here.
Speaker 8:Think about like, let's say you want to make a documentary. Right? Yeah. You probably want like zero generated footage in a documentary. Right?
Speaker 8:Like, it's like all documented reality. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've seeing that. I've been lately, like, I'll I'll try to pull up a video on YouTube with with with my son of like a cheetah. But I have to find videos that are older than like four years because I don't want a bunch of AI cheetahs. I want the real thing.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to see like documentary footage. So you gotta find like the vintage National Geographic stuff.
Speaker 8:Wow. Yeah. Soon that's going be lost. We may never find it again.
Speaker 1:No. We will always have the archives. We'll be going deep into the vintage.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's real. What do you what are the plans to scale the business over the next year or two with the new fundraising?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, so a lot of it is gonna be market expansion. Right? We talked about that. I think secondarily, it's use case expansion.
Speaker 8:Right? So, like, you talked about, like, we started off with something really simple, adding captions to your videos. Like, we that was the first thing we ever did. Right? Straightforward, but quite useful.
Speaker 8:Right? And then from there, you realize it's it about it's really about, like, automatically editing your video. Right? Like, automatically adding edits, automatically doing stuff that people do manually normally. Right?
Speaker 8:And that's kind of how we built our roadmap. Right? So, the future for us is expanding use cases on what can we automatically edit. Right? Today, it might be, okay, it's talking head videos.
Speaker 8:It's real estate videos. Things like that. Right? Tomorrow, it could be product launch videos. Right?
Speaker 8:Tomorrow, it could be, like, all kinds of other things that we don't do today maybe perfectly. Right? Yeah. So that's kind of where things are going. And with that comes, like, new sets of users, you know, expanded use cases.
Speaker 8:Obviously, it's like expanding the channel for product. Right? So that's kind of where we're going both on, you know, product expansion, geo expansion. You know? That's really the focus.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Congratulations, and we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Great to have you back on. Let's not let it be a year.
Speaker 2:Always a great time.
Speaker 8:Yes. And by the way, congrats to you guys.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Have a great weekend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to
Speaker 2:Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Alright. And without further ado, we have our last guest at the show, Philip from Star Cloud, putting more and more data centers in space. We're very excited to talk to Philip.
Speaker 2:He is, I believe, in the waiting room. We'll bring him in to TBPN UltraDome when he's ready.
Speaker 1:Google released a feature called inbox zero. They say inbox zero is a thing of the past, introducing AI inbox cut through your email clutter with smart prioritization and daily personalized briefings. Isaac says, brands sending five emails a day to drive higher and higher ROI won't work anymore. RIP email. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It'll be interesting to see how this channel that
Speaker 2:sent us a bunch of, a bunch of emails that he's been getting. And they look like spam recruiter emails, but they all come from newly set up Gmail accounts and they're not quite human sounding so we can clock them. But basically, he's getting like an an ever increasing amount of poaching emails. And you know, the the usually like you'll need another filter on the other side.
Speaker 1:Going standing outside offices and just waiting for people to leave.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have I believe we have Philip from Star Cloud in the waiting room. We got some vertical video. We'll make it work.
Speaker 2:We are gonna have a quick chat. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Well, it's going.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? Hey, guys. Apologies for the for everybody here. We're all good. It's great.
Speaker 2:We got back to back sounds. Okay. So I can't
Speaker 1:turn this off.
Speaker 2:Second time on the show. Kick us off with the fundraising. Tell us what happened.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we just raised a $170,000,000 at a $1,100,000,000 valuation. Congratulations.
Speaker 7:That is
Speaker 3:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:A massive round. So
Speaker 1:The video is vertical because the valuation
Speaker 2:is It's going vertical. Yes. Never. Too. But yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Under this
Speaker 2:course. This this works great. So yeah. Talk to us about what you'll be building with that new round. Is this hiring?
Speaker 2:Are you gonna be in the r and d phase? Do you have manufacturing partners lined up? Are you gonna be buying heavy equipment to make stuff? What does the next couple years look like for you?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we're building the third satellite that's very similar to it's gonna fit on the Starship Pes dispenser form factor. Okay. So it's this constellation we've just filed with the FCC for 88,000 satellites. Cool.
Speaker 3:And so what this allows us to do is build a manufacturing line for that. 88,000 satellites, by the way, would allow us to deploy about 20 gigawatts of compute capacity, which is That's lot. On the
Speaker 2:order of
Speaker 3:a $100,000,000,000 worth of CapEx spend. Yeah. So, yeah, we're ramping up.
Speaker 2:Low. Too low. That was I know we've been swinging at this. The height.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolutely. While who like, what what kind of partners are are you are you working with? I can imagine basically every every chip company Yeah. Wants to have some exposure to what is an emerge you know, will be an emerging category.
Speaker 1:How are you approaching that side?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. A 100%. So we're working with NVIDIA on we just announced and at GTC Jensen announced it, this space Rubin chip.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So it's like a slightly mass optimized, slightly radiation tolerant, and then slightly thermally optimized chip, which can be used for space inference.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And we've been working with them on that for a while because we've got an enormous amount of data now from the Star Cloud one satellite, which has the first NVIDIA h 100 onboard. And so we're using all of that telemetry to inform the design choices both on the Rubin ship and also on our second and third satellite.
Speaker 2:How is And
Speaker 1:are you running workloads, like mini workloads on the on the first satellite? How what does testing look Yeah.
Speaker 3:Exactly. So we ran we trained a model. So we trained Andre Carpenter with his Nano GPT on there.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:We did the first type out inference. So we're we're running a version of Gemini called Gemma on the on the spacecraft. And then we're now also doing some more like military kind of useful workloads, which is running inference on SAR data, so synthetic aperture radar, which are basically where companies or where satellites collect a three d image of the world underneath them, and then they can use that to detect things like a vessel entering, you know, entering a territory or or other things.
Speaker 2:How is it? How is the discussion going? How is the research and development going around heat dissipation? That that that felt like the key will it work? What are the economics?
Speaker 2:Are we are we expecting to be, like, on track for some solution? Do you feel like the solution's in sight on some curve or may maybe even already here? How is that going?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, this is where I wanna give you guys credit for shifting the average window on this because I think you guys are the first to do a segment where you were like, do you remember the bit where you were like, imagine before they had cameras on spacecraft and people would be like, wow, that's so crazy. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:From then from then on,
Speaker 3:people were like, okay, maybe, yeah, this probably actually is good.
Speaker 2:That should be,
Speaker 3:I think. Yeah. But but, yeah. So so we've been we've been working on this radio for radio radiator for two years now. Okay.
Speaker 3:It's know, it's a solved problem in the sense of the physics of it.
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 3:What's what remains to be done is the manufacturing challenge. So making this thing cheap and light.
Speaker 2:And also small enough to to fit into that what do you call it? Like the Pez dispenser?
Speaker 3:Exactly. The Pez dispenser form factor.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:We're we're we're we've got that we've got a design with that we've mocked up, so we fabricated it, and it's going through thermal and vacuum testing now. It's about a 100 times less cost per watt of dissipation than the International Space Station radiator Okay. And about 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator. Yeah. And the main reason is we're not doing three d like additive manufacturing.
Speaker 3:We have a a much simpler manufacturing technique. Mhmm. Which, yeah, that's our kind of our core IP.
Speaker 2:Sure. And then I just I mean, can you give me like a a mental picture of what I'm visualizing? Because I feel like Yeah. It can't just be a sail that just like the there's no wind, so the wind doesn't expand the sail. Am I thinking about, like, and little tiny motors to sort of, like, expand and and unfurl?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. So the deployment mechanism is what is what's called a pantograph. So it's it's like this scissor mechanism that if you've ever seen, like, when you when you walk past the building site, sometimes see those, like, platforms that will raise up and down. Yeah.
Speaker 3:They're they're lifted by this pantograph scissor mechanism that goes like this. Mhmm. It's exactly the same deployment mechanism, which, by the way, all Starlink solar is deployed using a pantograph. So what we've done is we've just added you might have, say, 20 segment 20 sections of solar panel that unfold in the z fold, and then we've just added five segments of radiator at the beginning, which also unfold in the z fold, and then they're connected with tubing. And then we're pumping coolant past the chips directly and then out to this z fold five segment radiator.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting. You're at one GPU in space. You filed for Five GPUs. Oh, you're at five. Okay.
Speaker 2:I saw I had you short. So you have five, but you're you're going to 88,000 or something like that. What will the curve look like? Are you trying to do 50 and then 500 and then 5,000 and then 50,000? Are we going by orders of magnitude?
Speaker 2:Or is it like Yeah. Lot of work and then they all start flying up really fast?
Speaker 3:So we are very heavily dependent on Starship before we will be flying frequently. So we're we're expecting Starship to deploy the first Starlink v three payloads either end of this year or early next year. And then from there, we're expecting eighteen to twenty four months before the first commercial payloads, so customers like us flying. So we're looking 2028 before we're launching on Starship. But our own deployment schedule is later this year, we'll be launching StarCart two, and that will be a 10 kilowatt spacecraft, about a 100 times the power generation of the first one we flew.
Speaker 3:And that has this this the first one to have this deployable radiator. It will be by far the largest commercial radiator in space. And then next year, we launch a very similar version of that. And then we launch on Starship, this PEZ dispenser. And, actually, we may even launch it on Falcon nine, the first one, to test it
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Which will be about 200 kilowatts. So 20 times, again, the Star Cloud two. And then we can launch 50 of those per Starship. So then you're talking about 10 megawatts of compute per Starship launch. And, you know, once once Starship is flying frequently, we're expecting to be launching hundreds of times per month.
Speaker 3:So that's a 100 Starship launches about a gigawatt of new capacity. So we're we're talking on the order of tens of gigawatts of new capacity per year being deployed at that point.
Speaker 2:Do do you have any insight into how, like, space compute might in the short term be better for a particular AI workload? Like, it's gonna be better at diffusion or worse at diffusion or better you know, we've seen some bifurcation just in the data center around ASICs, Croc chips, Cerebras, etcetera. Is there a world where we're like, oh, there's this one small use case that's going to really, really work well? And then maybe over time, it'll do everything. But in the short term, we're confident about this.
Speaker 3:So at a high level, it's not gonna be any training workload.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And at a low level, it won't be anything that requires sub fifty millisecond latency. So there'll be a sweet spot in the middle, which in my mind is basically all back office business processing tasks and all cogeneration tasks. You know, you could even do voice agents for customer service or, yeah, anything like that, video generation as well. Yeah. But it won't be things that require extremely low latency or things that require very highly internally networked cluster, like like a training workload you could not do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much. Congratulations on the round. I'm very excited.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Massive. Yeah. And you you you seem like you've you've even evolved yourself since the last time you're on the show. I'm sure I'm sure you've just you and the whole team have been pushing it to the absolute limit.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's it's fantastic to see someone, like, call their shot and then it becomes just one domino falls after another and then it's being mentioned at GTC and Elon's talking about it and it becomes, you know, much more like science fiction fully moves towards like science fact, which is very exciting. So thank you.
Speaker 3:I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon. Hopefully
Speaker 3:Congrats on OpenAI. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Have a good one. Goodbye. Jordy, what else texted my dad the He says, congratulations. That's so exciting.
Speaker 1:Thanks for letting me know. Talk to you soon. Have a great day. So thank you. Thank you, dad.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:it's amazing. Well, if you've texted me or you've called me in the last three hours, there's a good chance that I might respond to you in the next couple hours because we are winding down the show. Please leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter, tbpn.com. Everything is the same.
Speaker 2:We will see you on Monday.
Speaker 1:Eleven AMPs. Week, five shows, fifteen hours. Let's be honest. It'll probably be more like seventeen or eighteen or nineteen. We'll see.
Speaker 2:Who knows? The world is our And thank you for being with us along the journey. We appreciate
Speaker 1:one more gong hit, John.
Speaker 2:One more gong hit. And we will say It's
Speaker 1:been an honor.
Speaker 2:A gong hit. Goodbye, everyone. See you soon. We'll see you tomorrow.