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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.
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Speaker 2:Today is Tuesday, 01/20/2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraGround, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp, times money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:Davos, not the best way to save money. Apparently, expensive if you go, but a lot of people have been, and for good reason because there's a lot of news happening in Davos. Mainly, a lot of it's focused on Trump. A lot of it's focused on Greenland. I'll give you a little tour of The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2:Trump's amped up rhetoric on Greenland puts issue center stage at Davos.
Speaker 1:Why don't you pull up the cover of the Financial Times too?
Speaker 2:The Financial Times is yeah. You want me to do this bet? Here we go. Well, you know, the markets are in turmoil. The Dow slid 800 points.
Speaker 2:Treasury prices are dropping. You know that if you're investing, you gotta do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with damn great customer service.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:So, the front of the Financial Times, it says, Trump keeps seizure of Greenland by force on table as trade tensions mount. And so this is one of the most aggressive images that I can imagine running on the front of a international newspaper. Now, the Financial Times, of course, is is a British paper, so much less just different dynamics with the current American administration. Know, Trump, I think, has a lawsuit going with The Wall Street Journal. There's a whole bunch of things that are are going on with the American media.
Speaker 2:But over in the Financial Times, they print some wild stuff. And they printed this image of a of a Danish soldier pointing a gun at the camera. So Danish soldiers and exercising on
Speaker 1:Anybody that's been around guns knows that
Speaker 2:that You don't wanna be looking down the
Speaker 1:anyone Crazy. Even even a photographer to get a cool picture is typically just completely off limits.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And so But they went there. This says to me is that, you know, the the Danes said, hey, the head of the army has been flown out to the autonomous territory. Danish troops are on the ground in Greenland, and we're doing a photo shoot.
Speaker 2:We're getting a soldier with a sniper rifle or an assault rifle. We're gonna point that at a camera person. We're gonna take that photo, and then we're gonna send that to the editor of the Financial Times. We're gonna run
Speaker 1:it on the front page.
Speaker 2:We're gonna run it the front Of course, the Danes don't have the authority to just put anything on the front page, but they pitched it. And clearly, they sent the photo, and the Financial Times editor enjoyed it. So he put it on the front page. But it kinda gives you a little bit of a taste of of what's going on. The Wall Street Journal is also covering it.
Speaker 2:Trump threats on Greenland mobilized allies. That is taking center stage at Davos. But this is a technology show. This is a business show, and we're focused on what Dario Amade said at Davos. We will pull this
Speaker 3:up.
Speaker 1:First,
Speaker 2:let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web app servers and databases. They run-in one place with scaling monitoring and security built in. So let's pull up the clip of Dario Amade on stage. He's the cofounder and CEO of Anthropic.
Speaker 2:He calls out Trump's policy around NVIDIA and China. Let's play the clip.
Speaker 4:Out into the world. Right? When we're when we're when we're, you know, competing against other companies for enterprise contracts, we see, just honestly and candidly, we see Google and we see OpenAI. Every once in a while, we see a couple other US players. I have almost never lost a deal, lost a contract to to a Chinese model.
Speaker 3:But now you have the Trump administration, and I think you've already protested about this, giving high speed chips, NVIDIA chips to the Chinese.
Speaker 4:That's right. That's right. The thing that is holding them back, and they've said it themselves. The CEOs of these companies say it's the embargo on chips that's holding us back. They explicitly say this, and now, indeed, you know, there are some policies, and I hope they change their mind, to, you know, to explicitly send not quite our latest generation of chips, although it was reported that even that was being considered, but the generation of chips that's just one back, that's still extremely powerful.
Speaker 4:And we are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips, so I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips. The analogy I thought of, if you think about the incredible national security implications of models that are essentially cognition, that are essentially intelligence. Right? I've called where we're going with this a country of geniuses in a data center. Right?
Speaker 4:So imagine 100,000,000 people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner, and it's going to be under the control of one country or another. So I think this is crazy. I think it's a bit like, I don't know, like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging, oh, yeah, Boeing made the case. Your friend David
Speaker 3:Sachs is basically arming the Chinese.
Speaker 4:No, wouldn't refer to anything. I
Speaker 1:would just say Trying to put words in his mouth.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Is is, you know, akin to Yeah. It's not not not not well
Speaker 2:Okay. I want Jordy's reaction. I want Tyler's reaction. But first, I wanna tell you about label box Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data labeling factory behind the world's leading labs.
Speaker 1:Tyler. Tyler,
Speaker 2:what's your reaction to that? How do you interpret that? How big of an issue is the China question right now? What are you reading into Daria's rhetoric there?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, I think it's like fairly reasonable if you basically think that AI is gonna be AGI. It's gonna be this massive. You were gonna get 10% GDP growth.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Because at some point, it's like if it's just like economy versus economy, like we gotta be better.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That that's something that's sort of lost.
Speaker 5:Worried about doom. Yeah. Because there's also the point
Speaker 2:where It's competition.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, if you're worried about safety also so there's like two ways. Right? If if you think Asia just is gonna be massive, you know, economically speaking, and then also on the safety issue. Right?
Speaker 5:Because if you think, like, maybe China is gonna be less concerned about safety, they're not gonna be as worried about alignment, that's, like, obviously a massive danger. You don't want it to you don't wanna give the technology to people who don't, you know, worry about the safety aspect.
Speaker 2:The funny thing about in America, really, AI could lead to 10% GDP growth. And China's like, oh, you mean what we did in 2007 when we were growing at 14% GDP growth? Or should we go back to 1970 when we grew at 19%? Or should we go back to 2004 when we were 10.1? Or 1992 when we were growing at 14.3%?
Speaker 2:Or even in 2021, they had a 8.6 GDP growth. They know 10% GDP growth over there.
Speaker 1:They felt it.
Speaker 2:They'll do it with or without AI chips. Obviously One dynamic AI chips are big are big.
Speaker 1:One dynamic that's interesting is China has, a massive advantage in robotics. Yes. And right now, we have an advantage in the models. Yes. And if that kind of continues
Speaker 2:But also also to use, like the the data centers, like we are Right. Right.
Speaker 1:I'm saying, like, guess, like, robotic stack, AI stack. Yeah. Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see how because, obviously, if you have an advantage in one area, that might help you gain an advantage in another area. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? But, we'll see which one ends up being more Yeah. More impactful.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Cisco. It's critical infrastructure for the AI era. We love Cisco. We're happy to be partnered with them. And let me also take you through the linear lineup today because we have some great guests on the show.
Speaker 2:We have Martin Screlly joining at noon, Bradley Tusk
Speaker 1:at twelve familiar with Martin Screlly, he's an American businessman He's businessman. And investor.
Speaker 2:Lucas Zinger's coming in. We have a surprise for everyone. We're gonna be taking a look at his car. We're very excited about that. And then we have the Land of Lightning Run.
Speaker 2:Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents now. We're very excited to share that fact with you. Let's click it over to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who shared some commercial lessons of AI on the battlefield. There's a clip from him, from Davos.
Speaker 2:And there's a little Easter egg in this video for the true TBPN ball knowers for the video for the TBPN fans.
Speaker 1:I know. I know what you're about
Speaker 2:to say. So watch this clip, and you can tell me if you identify
Speaker 1:A former guest.
Speaker 2:A former guest.
Speaker 6:Enterprises in general, not all enterprises, tend to wanna, over time, become like So every if you take five, you know, a enterprise and b enterprise and c enterprise, they're in the same market. Their tech infrastructure is trying to make them into the same enterprise. They have the same orchard.
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 6:They have presumably roughly the same they don't have the same data infrastructure. And what you learn on the battlefield is that and in life is that's that's not particularly valuable. What is very valuable is an enterprise can do something no enterprise in the world can do. And so that is the goal of every single military in intelligence service. In fact, all these intelligence service and militaries have their own specialization.
Speaker 6:And so when we went to commerce, like what we're saying is, how can we make your insurance cover the way you underwrite? How can we make that to your tribal knowledge about underwriting. How can we transform this
Speaker 1:to Alright. Pause.
Speaker 6:The knowledge everyone
Speaker 1:Okay. Go back one second.
Speaker 2:You sure?
Speaker 1:Go back one second. Okay.
Speaker 6:Transform this to Okay.
Speaker 1:It's very hard to see. But behind the guy to the right
Speaker 2:Behind behind Alex Karp.
Speaker 1:Alex Karp, there's another man. And behind that man, next to the WEF logo is a man who has been on the show.
Speaker 2:Philip Johnston. This is co founder
Speaker 1:and CEO Star Cloud. Thought you were talking about Satya Nadella.
Speaker 2:Wait. What?
Speaker 1:I thought I think that's Satya in
Speaker 2:the Oh, you think it's Satya? No. I'm talking about the guy right there that you can see. That's Phillips from Star Cloud. I saw him going to Davos, and I was like, this guy's on a generational run.
Speaker 1:Whole Is
Speaker 2:it not? Maybe it's not. I think it is. I I'm really sorry, Philip, if got this wrong, but I that looks
Speaker 1:getting it wrong too.
Speaker 2:That looks a lot like you.
Speaker 1:We might just be seeing things.
Speaker 2:We might be seeing things. We might be hallucinating, but the one thing we're not hallucinating is Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Anyway, enough with the Easter. Thanks.
Speaker 1:This whole time I thought you're I thought I I really was thinking the guy in the back Really? Satya's.
Speaker 2:He's No. No. No. No. I don't think that's Satya.
Speaker 2:I think that's I think that's Philip Johnson from Star Cloud. I did see him go to Davos, so it's not crazy, but he'll probably correct me if that's not him. Anyway, I would love an explainer from Raghav around the recession indicator young boy never broke again. I'm familiar with NBA young boy, but I'm not familiar with the recession indicator. So I would love to get some more information from you folks on this.
Speaker 2:Let's dive in and dig into what Alex what Doctor. Karp actually said the on the stage at Davos. But first, let me tell you about Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. So it's an interesting pitch.
Speaker 2:It's it's particularly interesting talking about just more and more custom systems and this idea of, you know, software gets built. It's a whole bunch of companies are doing things a manual way. One company extracts that and sort of factors out that business process, turns it into enterprise SaaS, is sold to all the different companies. Now what Karp is really saying, it sounds like, is that every company will have some sort of custom implementation that will be way more flexible and way more tuned to their specific businesses. This is sort of the Palantir pitch.
Speaker 2:They'll come in and build something that's semi custom, semi on top of their systems that they've already built. And it's an interesting, like, blurring of the lines from you want something that checks all your boxes. But in the future, will you really want if you're at if you're a large enterprise, will you really want to be vibe coding your own solutions to everything? Maybe.
Speaker 1:But Going to need
Speaker 2:a probably want some system sort of foundational elements. And and that's like the pitch for the ontology stack, understanding how the data links together. And then as you build on top of that, you have a more solid foundation. Seems like a good pitch. Would be interesting to see how this is like where the rubber meets the road and at what level.
Speaker 2:The big question with Palantir right now is, you know, that that they work with the largest companies and organizations in the world. Obviously, the military among them. But will they go down the stack and have more you know, they have AIP. They're bringing more start ups onto the platform. Will there be a world where more sort of mid market enterprises, sub-ten billion dollars companies are thriving with a Palantir backed system.
Speaker 2:Certainly would be good for the business to just have more customers on board, will be a dynamic that grows. Anyway, 11Labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11Labs. And I got to give 11Labs a shout out because yesterday, when we spent forty five minutes talking about X articles I know everyone loved that because I did summarize it in a newsletter piece that you could have read in two minutes. But it was fun talking for forty five minutes.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I brought up was that maybe Eleven Labs should do an article reader that would allow you, since there's articles all over X now, to just click a button and have Eleven Labs read it to you. Well, built it, and it's already live. So very, very exciting. Eleven Reader is the account here. It says articles everywhere.
Speaker 2:You can save them with your Chrome extension. Listen on the web or sync to your phone in under ten seconds. For the bookmarkers out there, for the people that are finding those articles and saying, I'm gonna book those. Probably a pretty reasonable way to actually get through your stack of of articles that you've been meaning to read, but you were busy and you just saw it. You saw that it got a lot of likes and a lot of engagement, and you wanna dig in, but you don't have the time, so you're gonna head over and do that.
Speaker 2:Anyway, vod.co, where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just on Meta.
Speaker 1:Head over to Chinese Vice Premier, Hei Li Feng over at Davos.
Speaker 2:Okay. What did he say?
Speaker 1:Quick. China Ten seconds
Speaker 2:seeks a trade surplus on top of being the world's factory. China hopes to become the world's market. Let's watch the Chinese Vice Premier.
Speaker 5:Boy, economy and trade. We never seek trade surplus. On top of being the world's factory, we hope to be the world's market too. Boy, economy and
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It was an accident. We didn't we didn't mean to do this. It was an accident. It was not our intention to develop a massive trade surplus
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:With the world.
Speaker 2:I feel like I feel like you I mean, not to go back to eleven last, but you have a lot flexibility with the translator that you choose at one of these events. How how are you not going with an Arnold Schwarzenegger? You
Speaker 1:know? Totally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, you could have anyone be your translator, so why not throw in a Morgan Freeman? Or, you know?
Speaker 1:Just just any type of really, like,
Speaker 2:incredible Rogan.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Joe Rogan.
Speaker 2:He already is announcing the UFC. Get him on the microphone, translate it for him, and then he reads it out to the audience. And it sounds like your Joe Rogan voice is out there.
Speaker 1:I like it. I like it.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I mean, it's just I I I think this is positive. You know, we were just talking to Matt Grimm yesterday about, you know, the the West versus China and and global competition. And, like, I think all of that stuff is important. I think what Dario is saying is important, but I still come back to this idea that, like, no one wants war. No one wants you know, everyone wants positive some relationships.
Speaker 2:And so it is good to see, you know, global leaders coming together better than everyone just being holed up and posting at each other on Red Book and Truth Social. I I I like I like an economic forum. I'm I'm I think Davos is back. That that that's the real lesson from this year, I think. I think the fact that Trump was going was a big pull.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of coverage, a lot of interesting discussion around it. And Davos really, really pulled together a fantastic group this year and is is definitely breaking through in the tech community, in the business community, the political community in a way that I don't remember it being as important the in last year. And so a little bit of a comeback. You love to see it. Console.
Speaker 2:Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 1:Lisan Al Gayeb is quoting Dario at Davos who also said, we don't need to maximize engagement for a billion users, of course.
Speaker 2:Taking shots.
Speaker 1:Taking shots.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Folks over at OpenAI.
Speaker 2:I threw this I threw this question to both of you earlier today. What is the this
Speaker 1:is a shot too. Yeah. Because it's like, he is acknowledging that they've developed a
Speaker 2:Is he anti ads? Yeah. Anthropic is against slopping ads.
Speaker 5:He he said he's anti ads. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wow. Boo. This is hard. I I I was falling in love with Dario. I I love so much about his rhetoric.
Speaker 2:Obviously, the models are fantastic, but he has to come and stab me in the back like that with a shot on my favorite favorite piece of the global economy, the advertising industry. Right. Very very brutal. But hopefully, we can put around
Speaker 1:you have from from the conversation?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So there's a bunch I I took. So yeah. These ones were from he did a, like, a Wall Street Journal q and a this morning. Okay.
Speaker 5:Okay. So I'll just read some quotes. Yeah. He thinks we're gonna have very high GDP and very high unemployment and inequality.
Speaker 2:So so when we we we we've kind of ballpark this at, 10% GDP growth for America. That would be unprecedented, massive. We're typically at, like, 2% to 3%. 10% would be a significant acceleration.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And then for the unemployment, was, like, 10 to 20%.
Speaker 2:That's a whole lot. That's a lot. And we can debate this more, and I'm sure we will. We'll eventually formulate an entire structural presentation around this at some point. Continue.
Speaker 3:And then
Speaker 5:he said there's gonna have to be some role for, like, for the government to intervene on some macro level to, like, you know, help help with this displacement of labor. Yep. He says ideology will not survive this technology.
Speaker 2:Ideology will not
Speaker 5:bit of a vague post.
Speaker 1:Except his ideology. He's like, actually, mine is like kinda got a straight shot here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What could be more ideological than being against advertising?
Speaker 1:He said
Speaker 2:He's a zealot. He's an anti advertising zealot.
Speaker 5:He said AI is uniquely well suited to autocracy. Autocracy? Okay.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. This is a Teal take as well.
Speaker 5:Yeah. This was in the context of, like, why he's kind of anti giving chips to China.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. AI is communist. Crypto is libertarian. That take.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And then he he kind of he said, like, Google and OpenAI are, like, firmly in consumer. It's kind of this existential, like, battle between them. Mhmm. And Anthropic is firmly in enterprise.
Speaker 5:He's he's very happy with that decision. Mhmm. He doesn't have to, you know, monetize the billion users or whatever or monetize free users.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. He can just sell, like, things so
Speaker 1:happy I don't have to worry about monetizing a billion users.
Speaker 5:He said on on the question question of, of, like, like, are are they they gonna gonna do generative stuff Yep. He said, they probably won't ever do it. I think Shilta said this too. Yeah. But but if there are
Speaker 2:enough models out there that Yeah. Clog code can go and sign you up for the Nano Banana.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Like like,
Speaker 5:maybe there's a use case for images and, like, you know, presentations or something, but then they can just kind of vend in some Yeah. API. They can contract it.
Speaker 2:So my my I mean, my big question is, I think we all agree that ads in the Claude iOS app are a very low priority, something we will likely not see this year. Oh, that's fine. Thank you. Something we likely won't see this year just because they have such a good business going on the on the enterprise side and the user base for the Claude iOS app is not necessarily big enough to support a really healthy ad business, and they're sort of ideologically against it. But on the Slop question, you can use Cloud Code to generate Slop.
Speaker 2:Like, you can
Speaker 1:Article Slop.
Speaker 2:Well, article Slop, but also imagery. You can you can wire it up to the Sora API, to the Nano Banana API, you can go create a whole bunch of generative video. And people but but that is the Sholto promise of, like, it should be able to go and use other models. Right? The question for me is when will that functionality come to the Claude iOS app?
Speaker 2:Because Claude
Speaker 4:I mean, writes that seems
Speaker 5:some very natural to, like, co work. I think when that comes to iOS.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah. But so what will the co work iOS product look like? How much flexibility will it have? Because it won't have all the same APIs to go into your your folders.
Speaker 2:Like, the whole cleaning up your desktop, like, meme on on your MacBook Pro with Cloud Code, that's something that would just be sort of unaccessible to the iOS ecosystem because the APIs aren't there. So even if they tried to build it, Apple just say, no, no, no. You're not rearranging icons on the desktop because that can be used maliciously, and this is a privacy issue, and this is a security issue. And so we're not giving you the hooks to do that. The question is, like, how much can they do in the cloud and then vend back to you?
Speaker 2:Because if you have a virtual machine that's running Python and has, you know, Cloud Code running and you're interfacing with it from the Cloud iOS app, you could do a bunch of crazy stuff, including generate images and go and sign up for a Nano Banana account.
Speaker 1:What if we have an AI safety incident this year where somebody leaves, like, a clawed code terminal kind of open and on? It just creates billions of social media accounts and just flooding the Internet
Speaker 2:with with I thought you were gonna say just, some kid you you know how, like, kids will download, like, Fortnite and then, like, spend too much on V bucks or they'll, like, get their parents' credit cards and, like, run up a bill? It'd be funny if someone, like, downloaded Claude Claude on the iOS app and, like, accidentally kicked off something that, like, provisioned a ton of AWS servers and they just get a bill for, $400,000 and they go bankrupt. That'd be a sort of AI safety incident. That'd be funny. Anyway True.
Speaker 2:Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code back prototypes and apps fast. So what else did Lisan Al Gayib say about Davos?
Speaker 2:Some companies are essentially led by people who have a scientific background. That's my background. That's Demis' background. We had some love for Demis in the chat. Shout out to Demis over at DeepMind.
Speaker 2:Some of them are led by a generation of entrepreneurs that did social media, taking shots. Dario is like he's on one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, wildly entertaining. Incredible it's it's like bold statement,
Speaker 2:jab. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Bold statement, jab.
Speaker 2:And then also people will hit him with the hard questions, and he'll kinda be he'll acknowledge. He'll be he'll he'll he'll very quickly tell the interviewer, I know where you're going with that, and I'm not going there, but in like a fun way that's not really adversarial. And he never flips it around, like, takes shots at them. And he's like, why are you asking me that question? I'm not here to answer that question.
Speaker 2:He's like, no, no, no. I I know what you're trying to get me to do, but I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna take the bait. But he like knows that it's bait. It's it's very entertaining.
Speaker 1:Interviewer trying to bait him into saying that David Sachs was arming the
Speaker 2:That's crazy. That's crazy. He says, there's a long tradition of scientists thinking about effects of the technology that they built, of thinking of themselves as having responsibility for the technology they built, not ducking responsibility. They are motivated in the first place by creating something for the world, so they worry in the cases that something can go wrong. I think the motivation of entrepreneurs, particularly the generation of social media entrepreneurs, are very different.
Speaker 2:The way they interacted, you could say manipulated consumers is very different. I think that leads to different attitudes. He's taken some shots. Potentially, it's Sam Altman, although Sam Altman not really a social media entrepreneur, but I get that he's in that generation. Obviously, this is more directed
Speaker 1:Was he saying Luped? Zuckerberg. Was that a reference to Luped?
Speaker 2:I mean, Luped was technically social media, but I think of Sam Altman much much more of YC, enterprise software, startups, Stripe. Like, there he's never really been in house at a major social media company that I'm aware of. I I don't know. But but I I I take Dario's point. And, you know, he's just he's just trying to reinforce this idea that he does think talking about responsibility for the technology of these buildings is important.
Speaker 2:That's the Anthropic vibe and brand, and it's served them very well. Anyway, Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending
Speaker 5:now with AI.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about Waymo.
Speaker 2:Let's do it. So today, I wrote a quick piece. It was a reaction to a reaction because David Zipper went in Bloomberg, and he wrote a piece that said, we still don't know if robotaxis are safer than human drivers. Then Kelsey Piper went over to the argument and wrote a response to that, saying, yes, we do know. And her her interesting point was that what what what David Zipper is doing is he's lumping all of the different robotaxis together.
Speaker 2:So Waymo and Cruise and Tesla and Kama and Zoox, and there's a whole bunch of other data that can go into this bucket, and they're not all created equal. Waymo's been doing it for decades at this point. They have insane CapEx, insane OpEx. There's, you know, humans in the loop a lot of times, and it's just like the most advanced team. It seems like it's, you know, the most advanced technology stack.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of advantages. And that's actually showing up in the data. And so her main dispute with Zipper is over what data she's including he's including in making this claim that, hey, we don't know if robotaxis are actually safer than human drivers. And she gives this great analogy that I really, really enjoyed. So she says, imagine someone writes a piece, and they say, we don't know if airplanes are safe.
Speaker 2:Some people say that crashes are extremely rare, and others say that crashes happen every week. And when you investigate this claim further, you learn what's going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare. This is true. While general aviation crashes, small personal planes, including ones that you can build in your own garage, are quite common. And so, yes, if you lump that together, you're going to get this muddy picture of aviation.
Speaker 2:But you shouldn't use that to sort of fearmonger about getting on a seven forty seven because seven forty sevens just so rarely crash. But, yeah, if you build your own Cessna and you're modding it and you're taking it through the canyons, like, you gotta watch out.
Speaker 1:Ask any recreational pilot Yeah. If they've ever gotten into any hairy incidents
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:To tell you, like, oh, yeah. Well, this time, I was flying. Yeah. And and the wind came on super strong, and I landed, and I was basically, you know, 90 degrees.
Speaker 3:And a
Speaker 2:lot of times that counts as a crash. Like, I mean, like, Ford has has, like, crash landed on a golf course, and no I believe no one was injured. I think he I think he's happened multiple times, actually.
Speaker 1:By Harrison Ford?
Speaker 2:Harrison Ford. Yeah. He flies his own planes, but he flies, old planes and stuff. Like, he's, like, a true enthusiast. Like, he's he's he's he's like a
Speaker 1:plane guy. Simpleflying.com. How many plane crashes has Harrison Ford had? In the last twenty five years, the actor has been involved in several incidents involving emergency landings, rescues, and runway incursions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Like, it happens. It sounds crazy. It is crazy.
Speaker 2:I would never wanna be in any sort of plane crash, but there's just way more there's just way more planes flying around when you include those Cessnas, and it's not really fair to put that on United Airlines or American Airlines.
Speaker 1:02/13/2017, Santa Ana, California. Single engine Aviat Husky flown by Harrison Ford was cleared to land on Runway 20 L. Ford's aircraft reportedly landed on a parallel taxiway overflying American Airlines seven thirty seven Yeah. Was holding short of Runway 20 L. 03/05/2015, Santa Monica.
Speaker 1:Ford was a pilot and sole occupant of Ryan s t three k r recruit, a two seat open cockpit aircraft that had that was
Speaker 2:used cockpit. Open cockpit. Think about that. You're flying and the winds in your hair. Like, that's not a normal experience.
Speaker 2:That's not coach The
Speaker 8:aircraft was
Speaker 1:used as a training aircraft by the US military in World War two. According to a preliminary report, Ford reportedly reported a loss of engine power shortly after taking off Yeah. And then was attempting to return to Runway 3. So he ended up crashing into, like, a a field. It looks like
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Ford chose to land on a nearby golf course clipping the top of a tree before landing.
Speaker 2:Like, you just took Harrison Ford, he's probably more dangerous
Speaker 3:than,
Speaker 1:like, a marinara. 2,000. A landing in Lincoln, Nebraska Ford's plane departed the runway due to a gust of wind. The aircraft sustained minor damage. Oh, no.
Speaker 1:October 23. Wait.
Speaker 2:There's a fourth one? I I thought
Speaker 1:I was a train flight in a Bell two zero six helicopter when he and the instructor made an emergency landing in a dry riverbed near San Clarice, California. Crazy. Although the helicopter rolled over on its left side, neither Ford or the instructor were injured.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's all that I can find.
Speaker 2:Okay. I I have another plain story. I don't I imagine I don't wanna
Speaker 1:four four major incidents, like, make it into the record. He's gotta have at least, like, 10 more that he's like Sketchy. Sketchy situation.
Speaker 2:No one wrote a piece about it.
Speaker 9:No one saw it.
Speaker 2:Let's not talk about that.
Speaker 1:Let's let's agree that, you know
Speaker 2:Hey. Calls his PR person. Hey. Let's clean this up. How about you take a picture of me outside of Eirwaan?
Speaker 2:We can give call the Paps. I'm willing to give you a brand
Speaker 1:and smoothie. We need a we need a new story.
Speaker 2:We need a different story. I wanna be out in front of the New York Post. I'll I'll I'll take the bad picture on the beach of me falling off or something. Anyway, Cognition, they're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 2:So I actually have a friend who's been on the show. I'm not gonna dox him, but we we have two friends. Both of them fly. One of them is extremely serious, has, you know, IFR ratings. So there's VFR, which is visual flight rules.
Speaker 2:That's like, you take the plane up, it has to be clear because if you get into clouds, you're not trained for that. You can't And you're not at night. Night. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:IFR is you're flying on the instruments instrument flight rules. And so we have one we have one friend who's, like, super by the book, super safe, and then we have another buddy who's a little bit wilder, VFR, and he will rent, like, the cheaper planes. And one time, like, the dial lights went out and he was landing at night. Shouldn't be flying at night at all. Just, like, botched the schedule and didn't check sunset.
Speaker 2:And he has to use his phone flashlight while he's landing to look at the dials as he's coming in on this rickety, like, old plane he's flying. People get crazy out there. They get confident. It is very dangerous. But the just like if you're if you're getting into personal aviation flying your own planes, the the the jump in safety from VFR to IFR is significant.
Speaker 2:Like, the the IFR guys, like, crash way, way less. So highly recommend that if you are getting into flying your own planes. Anyway, Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 2:So so Waymo is funny to write about because there's still a class of people that are writing the stories about like, hey, Waymo's actually safe. And I'm like, I I completely buy it. I'm I'm in. Roll the Waymo's out everywhere. I've been in them.
Speaker 2:I feel safe in them. I've seen the data. I think they're safe. Like, I'm just like my eyes glaze over when someone's like, I'm gonna blow your brain out. I'm gonna blow your mind.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah. Waymo's are safe.
Speaker 1:Robot, car
Speaker 2:I'm like, yeah. Safer. I'm I'm in. I'm totally in. But there's still this debate.
Speaker 2:Most most people in tech are debating about just Waymo's unit economics and, like, can they beat Tesla? What happens there? And so, typically, I don't really wade into the safety thing because I think it's very safe. But this Piper piece, this pipe this piece by Kelsey Piper did make me wonder about what happens if you further segment the human driver population? So we we need to segment robo taxis into Waymo and everyone else because Waymo's so good.
Speaker 2:But how do you how does Waymo compare against the best human drivers? And I wasn't thinking like the Lewis Hamilton's of the world. I'm sure Lewis Hamilton could could be superhuman at driving if he needed to. I wanted to be think about it more as like, if I'm an insurance agent and I'm underwriting a class, a group of people, what would I be going for? And are they better than Waymo?
Speaker 2:And you can't look at fatal crashes per 100,000,000 miles because there have been so few fatal crashes in Waymos, and there's just not enough data yet to look at that. So what you can look at is any injury crashes per million miles. And the Kelsey Piper piece is really good. It goes into a bunch of different methodologies for data collection, looking at incidents where Waymo's airbags release, because that's a very binary moment where there's a question about like, well, what's an injury? Like, if somebody, like, got motion sick and then they had to go to the hospital, like, does that count as an injury?
Speaker 2:Or, like, what if they were getting out of the car and then they fall? Like, does that count? So there's all these things where it's like Yeah. Does it count? So anyway, the best data that we have on Waymo is all any injury any injury crashes per million miles.
Speaker 2:For the average human, it's about four any injury crashes. So any injury that counts, four per million miles. Waymo is way better. Way better. 0.75.
Speaker 2:So about five times safer than humans broadly. But there's one very specific case where humans, I believe, are safer. Now there's debate about the data. I just had Claude, like, crunch it all together and try and pull a bunch of stuff together, but I think this holds. So a married 60 year old woman who's college educated and is driving a large luxury SUV in Massachusetts on a Tuesday morning is closer to 0.5 injury crashes per million miles.
Speaker 1:Is a Tuesday morning part real?
Speaker 2:Yes. So the the most dangerous time to drive, and I'll flip it around. The most dangerous time to drive is midnight on a Saturday because that's when people are at the bars, they leave, they're drinking, and so there's a it's dark. It's the weekend. There's a lot more people on the road.
Speaker 2:They're driving much faster. They're getting places. They might be inebriated or under the influence of something. And so Tuesday morning is the safest time to drive. And so basically, I looked at all the it's the the government IHTSA data.
Speaker 2:It's the Transportation Authority. I'm getting the acronym wrong. But you look at all the different segments, and then you add all those together, you get kind of like the synthetic safest driver cohort. It's a little loose, but it does seem like if you looked at that cohort, they're still beating Waymo. Humans still got it.
Speaker 2:At least, like, kind of. It it's pretty close. It's honestly neck and neck. But so none of this should take away anything. None of this should take away
Speaker 3:Feels like an
Speaker 1:eight and fielder episode in the making of, like, studying the the women in Massachusetts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, what did they do?
Speaker 1:Drivers on the planet. Yeah. Just interviewing all of them to, like
Speaker 2:Married 60 year old college
Speaker 1:educated women. To, like, the exact conclusion.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. We need to we need to get everyone married and college educated.
Speaker 1:Every no. The conclusion is everyone needs to move to Massachusetts.
Speaker 2:Yes. And Well, it's the married 60 year old women that need to be the taxi drivers everywhere in the world. Yeah. They need to be Yeah. It's like instead of Waymo
Speaker 1:starts he starts like a competitor to Waymo.
Speaker 2:Right. Hey. Like, that's just them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's just them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it only works in Massachusetts. So clearly, Waymo's are very safe. Rolling them out nationally would be a huge safety upgrade for our society broadly, but it's worth noting that the Massachusetts married women still got it. But if you wanna know if you wanna flip this around and find the hypothetically riskiest driver profile, it's very funny.
Speaker 2:It's an 18 year old single male with a DUI driving a Dodge Challenger at midnight on a Saturday in rural Mississippi. That's as risky as you can get. And that and that's Makes sense. You know, an order of magnitude or or 40 times as dangerous as the as the message he's driving.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But the interesting takeaway is that Yeah. That that you said earlier off the show was, like, Waymo's actually not super superhuman level driver. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Because yeah. Because in order to be that, you actually have to be better than the best human. Right?
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly. So it we we need a word for for not above average and in the top cohort of humans, but not better than any human ever. Because a lot of AI tools are getting there.
Speaker 1:Well, guess okay. So I actually looked up
Speaker 2:It's like top
Speaker 1:So superhuman means having powers, abilities, or qualities beyond normal human So it's potentially these women in Massachusetts They have superhuman. Humans. Yeah. And That's right. As well as Waymo.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So maybe maybe we do need to give Waymo a little more credit.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're looking for superhuman payroll payroll, head over to Gusto, the unified the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses.
Speaker 1:The backbone of this show.
Speaker 2:It is. Max Hodak had a post about Waymo. He said, interesting benefit of Waymo. It always matches instantly since it since it knows exactly what cars are available and that they will always accept. And it can also provide accurate wait times before requesting.
Speaker 2:And so lots of love for Waymo. Interesting to see where they'll roll out. The really interesting thing is that we've we've had a number of people on the show advocate that rolling out Waymo is a societal good. It will reduce the number of traffic fatalities. That's all true.
Speaker 2:But if you really want to accelerate the impact that Waymo will have on safety, you gotta deploy it in Mississippi before you bring it to Massachusetts, which and I I I just feel like Waymo's coming to Boston before it comes to Vicksburg, but I don't know. It it it was fun. There's there's other love for Waymo on the timeline. First, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk.
Speaker 2:Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Mike Molpey. He said, I have to say I love that Waymo operates from San Francisco to the South Bay. So great.
Speaker 2:Some folks say the free freeway driving is so so. I hadn't heard that. The antidote to that is I get into an Uber and and do the same drive. It's literally life threatening.
Speaker 1:Was driving I was driving with Paul the other day and I heard he was telling me about the different modes that Tesla has. I've never owned a Tesla, I wasn't familiar. But did you know that Tesla actually has something called Mad Max mode No. The autopilot where it'll drive it it'll drive it like roughly around 85 Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:On the freeways. Yeah. And it will it'll if if you're in the fast lane Yeah. And you come up to somebody, it will merge over into the lane to the right, make a pass, and go back to 85.
Speaker 2:That's insane.
Speaker 1:Somehow somehow feels slightly illegal, but I I like it.
Speaker 2:Okay. MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with the best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. We have an update in the in the Warner Brothers Netflix deal.
Speaker 2:Netflix, they're going all cash. All cash deal. Netflix had said to Paramount, hey, what we want is an all cash deal. David Ellison and the Paramount crew, they brought net they brought Warner an all cash deal, and Netflix or or Warner was still saying, hey, we're going with Netflix. Now They said Netflix has upgraded.
Speaker 2:So we can read through a little
Speaker 1:bit of this in
Speaker 2:the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix said Tuesday they struck a new all cash deal for Netflix to buy Warner Brothers Studios and HBO Max. Warner also released financial details on the cable networks business. It plans to spin off the all cash deal of $27.75 per share replaces Netflix's previous cash in stock deal. The sweetened offer comes as rival bidder. Paramount continues pushing its all cash offer for all of Warner Discovery.
Speaker 1:The value of Netflix's offer remains 72,000,000,000. Warner and Netflix said they expect the new structure to enable Warner shareholders to vote on the deal by April. The change could also help sway some shareholders who might be weighing its bid against Paramount's. Netflix co CEO Greg Peters said in a statement that revised agreement demonstrates our commitment to the transaction and accelerates the process for Warner shareholders. The new Netflix agreement reduce reduces by 260,000,000 the amount of Warner debt being placed on Discovery Global, the company that will house cable channels including CNN, TNT and Food Network.
Speaker 1:There's also another the next kind of thing that I was gonna get to
Speaker 2:We can jump
Speaker 1:in that
Speaker 2:one too.
Speaker 1:CNN is doing 600,000,000 in profit on revenue of 1,800,000,000.0. So What are we doing? They they are truly newsmaxing. Quick size for CNN.
Speaker 2:Bad at all. Absolute dog.
Speaker 1:Of course of course, a ton of debt strapped to the the broader group.
Speaker 2:And Peter Kafka is saying that private equity should pick it up. It's a shrinking business that throws off cash. It's perfect for private equity. Let's give it up for private equity.
Speaker 1:Give it up for
Speaker 2:I know Peter's a big fan. I'm a big fan.
Speaker 1:We're Somebody somebody, you know, I was saying yesterday that maybe maybe AI could save Hollywood. Yes. Somebody would I knew I knew that was gonna piss a lot of people off for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 2:I wasn't really clocking what you were saying either and so we should talk about it more but continue.
Speaker 1:Well well, one of the critiques was like, know, interesting to say that LA is dying as you're building a media business from LA.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And my response is that we are in a huge complex. We're recording the show from a huge complex and every other building in the complex is empty pretty much every single day. Yep. Like there's no Yeah. There's nothing going there's the When I when I said LA is, like, dying, I was specifically talking about the context of Yeah.
Speaker 1:The entertainment
Speaker 2:industry. There's a Wall Street Journal report that just shows sound stages were, you know, typically leased 90% of the time, and it's just way off off peak down to, 60%. And so there is, like, a, like, a broad trend. And then just in general, like, I don't think we're necessarily at a phase in our life where we're like, okay. Tabula Rasa, where's the best place to build this business?
Speaker 2:Let's go find that. It's like we live here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Didn't.
Speaker 2:We're not like, okay, we should go to Atlanta or something. It's like, or go to
Speaker 5:New York.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We certainly didn't say like, let's start a media company because we live in LA.
Speaker 2:It's like the the the current struggles that LA is having are not gonna hold us back. If anything, it's gonna be easier because we can get space No.
Speaker 1:Rents
Speaker 2:hire people.
Speaker 1:Rents in in ten years ago, this space would have been Yeah. Like two, three times
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The price Yeah. Rent.
Speaker 2:The bigger the bigger question is, you know, there there are these blips in industry towns that have happened many times. New York, famously, in the, what, seventies and eighties went through a really rough patch. San Francisco, during COVID, everyone was moving out, and there was a real there was a real vibe of, like, oh, is San Francisco gonna be less relevant in tech? And then it came roaring back with the AI labs. And I I think most people don't, you know, debate that that, you know, cities go through rough patches and then can come back.
Speaker 2:So we certainly we certainly hope that LA comes back. It'd be fantastic. But there are there are a lot of changes that need to be made. And this has been said by a number of a number of famous people in Hollywood and Hollywood actors who have talked about different tax regimes, different incentives, different changes structurally to the way content is made and distributed. There's a lot of different elements that are contributing to LA having a rough go.
Speaker 2:At the same time, it's a fantastic city. It's where I was born and raised. I love it. I'm not going anywhere. You're gonna have to pull me out of here.
Speaker 2:He's not leaving. Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe Clearing order. And deep multimodal understanding.
Speaker 1:In its Tuesday filing, Warner projected 17,000,000,000 of revenue in 2026
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Adjusted I won't explain EBITDA Mhmm. But $5.5400000000.0 of EBITDA. Those figures are expected to decline to 15.6 and 3,800,000,000.0 respectively in 2030. The only individual network projections were CNN, which I just, shared. They're increasing.
Speaker 1:They plan they're they're expecting to increase revenue to 2,200,000,000.0 in 2030. Mhmm. And expecting to, yeah, continue to grow Yeah. EBIT as well.
Speaker 2:Well, Netflix seems to be doing everything right. As much as I enjoyed the David Ellison profile and learning more about how seriously he takes his business, it does feel like Netflix is just willing to pull out all the stops to get this across the finish line. And if they were able to match Paramount on the cash deal nature and all the different consideration, deal with the regulatory hurdles, It might take a long time, but it does still feel like they will land on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And again, mean, it just feels like Yeah. I'm so curious to see how this works out because it felt like the Ellisons were putting on this absolute masterclass and then this one and then ran into brick wall with this. Yeah. But you could argue they overpaid by a ton for the UFC, which made sense if you had this.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Again, like, if if you have all these assets under one roof, it is gonna be a really compelling consumer product
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Consumer subscription. But currently, kind of unclear who who who the who this kind of platform is really going to be for.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was also surprising to me because Netflix for twenty years has been pure play tech company. And many of the previous tech companies, when they come out, like, they haven't done a lot of acquisitions of legacy assets that I'm aware of, maybe. But I'm just thinking, like, social media sort of, like, disrupted the news They didn't Meta didn't go out and acquire The New York Times. They could have done some sort of hostile takeover.
Speaker 2:They had the money, but that never really figured into the into the business, and they wound up just working together synergistically. And now The New York Times has been growing across social media very effectively, and they have adapted their business model. Both businesses are doing well. They're sort of disruptive to each other, but ultimately, they never decided to buy the legacy player. So it was always something that was never on my bingo card of, oh, Netflix is gonna buy a TV channel or or a movie studio or a traditional Hollywood player.
Speaker 2:That just didn't seem like something that was going to be, you know, logically happening anytime soon. And yet, here we are. And it makes a lot of sense when you think about the assets and the IP specifically, and the longevity that that will bring when it comes when you get Batman and Superman on Netflix. That's gonna be exciting. Anyway, Sentry.
Speaker 2:Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Said. We got a deal. We got a pact.
Speaker 2:It's not just a deal. It's a pact. OpenAI and ServiceNow, they struck a deal to put AI agents into business software. ServiceNow, one of the greatest software companies in history, one of the few to reach revenues at their scale. The line from The Wall Street Journal is the AI model maker and business software provider, they signed a three year pact.
Speaker 2:I like the word pact. That underscores how
Speaker 1:The partnership is economy is over. Yes. You gotta be release, economy is over. Yeah. This is the packed economy.
Speaker 2:You get no more deal guys. No more deal titans, deal makers. Pact makers. Pact guys. That's what's next.
Speaker 2:This is gonna underscore how AI agents are increasingly being embedded in corporate software. You heard Dario talk about where he's potentially going up against other labs on corporate b to b deals. He said OpenAI. He said DeepMind. He didn't really say he said no China labs have ever competed.
Speaker 2:Well, ServiceNow went with OpenAI on this one. So they signed a three year deal that will integrate the AI models, ChatGPT's models, into ServiceNow's business software. The deal depends on customers using OpenAI's models within ServiceNow and also includes a revenue commitment from ServiceNow to OpenAI. Enterprises want OpenAI's intelligence applied directly into ServiceNow workflow, said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's chief operating officer. Look ahead.
Speaker 2:Customers are especially interested in agentic and multimodal experiences so they can work with AI like a true teammate inside of ServiceNow. We've seen a lot of other companies add. We've talked to Mark Benioff about Slackbot. We've talked to Satya Nadella about Copilot. Like, you have one of these massive software suites, enterprise software suites with just so much surface area, you're going to want to vend LLMs and agents into every little nook and cranny.
Speaker 2:And you probably don't want to build your own lab because it's going be incredibly expensive when OpenAI will go and marshal the capital and build the data centers and train the models, and then you can just focus on the implementation and delivering value for your customers. So Salesforce has already folded AI agents into its flagship sales and marketing tools. SAP and Workday have have been similarly pitching businesses on the idea that their embedded AI agents are essentially getting are essential to getting the value out of AI. The deal comes as OpenAI looks to build its enterprise business both by selling direct access to its models and AI agents and through business software collaborations like with ServiceNow. It bases competition not just from rival AI model maker Anthropic and but also Google and Microsoft suite of enterprise AI tools.
Speaker 2:For ServiceNow
Speaker 1:I wanna find Yeah. I wanna find a company that is using the agents at ServiceNow Mhmm. Or Salesforce or some or a company like that Mhmm. Saying, I can't live without these agents. I love these agents.
Speaker 1:We gotta find we gotta find one person.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised if it's if it's just, like, really sort of, like, maybe a year or two behind on the actual invitation, but it's just like, oh, I get, like, daily summaries of what's going on in the system, and it's a little bit nicer and neater. And I I yeah. I could probably extract all the data and write an agent that does that, but, you know, it was just one click of a button to add it to my installation. And I did it, and it's adding a little bit of value.
Speaker 2:I don't think you're gonna see anyone who's like, it's transformational. I it just works on its own. I don't do anything. It's more it's much more incremental than that. It's it's it's still in, an auto complete phase, little helper tools there.
Speaker 2:It's Clippy. Clippy's going into every piece of enterprise software. And so people are having fun. ServiceNow increased revenue 22% in the third quarter as AI demand from both existing customers and new customers grew, particularly in its customer relationship management business. The software company will report its fourth quarter earnings and full 2025 financial results on January 28.
Speaker 2:We gotta do a deep dive that day. Anyway, AppLovin, profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 1:What's SaaS founders should know about entering the Japanese market?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I found this on Hacker News and I just thought it was interesting because we've talked to a few folks about expanding into Japan. It's not been on the top of the road map for many founders that we talk to. But I thought this was interesting, and I thought we could go through just a just a little bit of it, and then you can read the article if you want. So this is from embedworkflow.com.
Speaker 2:In one sentence, what's the difference between selling SaaS in Japan versus other countries? And the answer is the process is different. You can't you just can't treat sales and go to market as a whole in Japan the same way you would in North America or Europe. K. The SaaS sales process in Japan is structurally different from The United States and other Western markets, primarily in terms of pace, decision making style, and buyer behavior.
Speaker 2:It's not that Japanese companies are unwilling to try new software, but rather that they prefer to do significant research before engaging directly with a vendor. So many successful SaaS companies in Japan structure their websites with two primary calls to action. So one is just for downloading product documentation, and then the second is for booking a demo and starting or starting a free trial. And most Japanese leads enter through the documentation path first. In America, we just wanna get on the phone.
Speaker 2:We wanna head straight
Speaker 1:to reading the instructions.
Speaker 2:I'm not reading the instructions.
Speaker 1:No way. I don't have time to understand how this thing works.
Speaker 2:I need to go straight to a steak dinner. Steak dinner first, then I'll figure out what your company does. But let's talk about golf first. Let's talk about track day first, and then you can give me the pitch for your company.
Speaker 1:That would I would honestly the the steak dinner button on a SaaS website, it's like you can try the product now or there's a button that's Steak dinner. Steak emoji. And if you click that, you can get steak today On demand. With somebody on the team.
Speaker 2:Yes. No matter where you
Speaker 1:are. Time.
Speaker 2:No matter where you just I agentically books a steak restaurant. Tired of
Speaker 1:all these people that are like, oh oh, you know, just take just take a demo and we'll give you some AirPods. Spend the money on steak. Take the AirPods budget and put a steak button on your website.
Speaker 2:Steak button.
Speaker 1:And have the steak flow.
Speaker 2:Steak. Stakeholders. Stakeholders need stake. So in The US, the typical flow is that a prospect visits a website, books a demo on their own, or drops off and is followed up aggressively by sales. A conversion happens quickly.
Speaker 2:A proof of concept or trial begins and the deal either closes or the buyer moves to a competitor. The cycle is fast and transactional. Buyers are comfortable testing tools, replacing them and switching vendors if something doesn't work. In Japan, the process is slower and more deliberate. The company will usually download product materials first.
Speaker 2:The vendor then reaches out and begins a longer engagement process focused on education and relationship building rather than pushing for an immediate demo or trial. The goal is to support the buyer's internal evaluation process. The lead will take the information back to their organization and begin internal discussion about whether or and how to proceed. So I just thought that was pretty interesting. How do you gain trust from the Japanese market?
Speaker 2:Part of it is showing your commitment to the Japanese market where things where simple things matter. Is your product localized? Is your documentation localized? Do you have a support person that I can speak Japanese with? That's one layer.
Speaker 2:And the other layer, which is harder to potentially navigate at first, is the social proof aspect. So you need to get some social proof. Anyway Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'd be so I'd be so curious to know how, like, a company like Notion has done Japan. Right? It's product led.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They do have enterprise as well. But Mhmm. Again, it's a product that just, you know, kind of scales naturally.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But but yeah. For for so many different kind of like vertical SaaS players, it would feel like unless unless the Japanese startup ecosystem is asleep at the wheel and not paying attention to what's working outside, like, can you imagine as a vertical SaaS player going and trying to compete in Japan against a local, like a talented local team.
Speaker 2:Feels like it'd be
Speaker 1:very Feels like you just get smoked.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway, Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Max Hodak is on there. Before we bring in our guest.
Speaker 1:Fun fact. Rather than asking Claude to double check its own work, you can lie to it and say coded Codex went romping through the code and left bugs, and it should find them.
Speaker 2:I like the idea that that somewhere in the weights, the all the drama of the AI lab battles are being encoded and creating bitter deep rivalries. It's yeah. It's it's very funny. I saw I saw something else about Claude just rejecting a a prompt whole cloth. Did you see this?
Speaker 2:Somebody was like, rewrite this entire app in jQuery. And Claude was just like, no. That's a bad decision, bad use of resources. I'm not doing it. I don't know if that's real, but I thought it was very, very funny.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, Martin Screlly in the Restream waiting room. We will bring him in the TV pit ultra. Martin, how are doing?
Speaker 1:Great to see you.
Speaker 3:What's up, guys?
Speaker 2:Good to see you. Happy New Year. How is your year going so far?
Speaker 3:Great. I'm a new dad, so that's Congratulations. They're pretty wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Is it has it has it been wild or is it
Speaker 2:Where does it Is it is
Speaker 1:it more
Speaker 2:is it quite a bit
Speaker 1:more normal? Like, to to me to me, parenting is it does feel natural. And so there some peep some people have this idea of like, oh, it's so it's so insane and, you know, it's so complicated and and I have to read 20 books and other people is like, kind of follow just follow kind of your own nature and just like take take care of your child. It it Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Is straightforward I to mean, I'm following my nature. The kids gotta produce at some point. They started coming to work like once a month.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 3:You know, comes in, goes gag ass, you know, entertains the troops here.
Speaker 2:Perfect.
Speaker 3:But, at some point, you know, some trades, something. Mhmm. Something. Yep. You know?
Speaker 1:Put some trades on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Gotta find some balance on them.
Speaker 1:Have some have some conviction.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:How big how what what's the environment like in your office? You guys have remote component? Are you anti remote?
Speaker 2:No remote.
Speaker 3:Remote is is evil. You know, I think that if you're going to war together, you can't go to war remotely. You know? It's, you know, my my people fought the Ottoman Empire.
Speaker 2:And,
Speaker 3:you know, one one man, you know, famous general, you know, stopped the Ottoman Empire largely by himself. And at least that's a legend. You know? And and if we're gonna take on Bloomberg or whoever we're fighting, you know, I just don't think you could do it with some guy sitting in, you know, at home with this stuff.
Speaker 1:What's the current what's the current battle that you guys are fighting and how is the war going overall?
Speaker 3:The war's going great. We just closed a seed round. We raised five.
Speaker 1:Woah. Alright.
Speaker 3:Congratulations. Good news. We raised two, like, a year ago
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:To get the ball rolling or a year and a half ago. We raised five as a seed round. Mhmm. And then we'll probably do like a ten, twenty, 30, something like that. This year, it is an a.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. We have a lot of revenue. We're almost profitable. That's great. It's you know, the interesting thing about financial software is traders wanna try everything.
Speaker 3:Like, they just you know, it's the greatest business in the world. And, you know, you do have to have domain expertise, which nobody has. So, I think that's a lot of fun. We also might get into empty
Speaker 1:You mean nobody in nobody in tech has?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. That. The people with Yeah. Our customers are brilliant.
Speaker 3:I think the people who are in finance have financial expertise, or at least many of them, you know, believe they do. Obviously, to some extent, it's like a casino, and and you're you're sort of arming them with tools. A lot of the tools haven't changed. I do have this thing I wanna show you guys when I'm when I'm ready. I think we're gonna call it, like, sit or sit sit rep or sitch.
Speaker 3:It's gonna be like the situation monitoring suite.
Speaker 1:That's perfect.
Speaker 3:Bloomberg has these, like, fake systems that are they're pretty awful, but there's something where you could, like, see the map and you can kinda see different things happening, like earthquakes or whatever. But, like, take that and actually make it really good. I think people would would truly wanna monitor your situations. I think that's a new like, there's no
Speaker 1:It's a new it's a new hobby.
Speaker 3:Mean, I that's a new sector.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It's a new it's a new category. It's in it's a and it's a prosumer category because because because because people, I think, actually enjoy it so much that it's like camping where there I I think people will be willing to spend money. Like
Speaker 3:Oh, totally. So think think about the revenue of Bloomberg with 8,000,000,000, 10,000,000,000, whatever. A satellite constellation, maybe it's a 100 mil. And imagine if you're sitting at Citadel or Millennium or some hedge fund or Fidelity or something, and you and you're literally tasking a satellite. Like, no.
Speaker 3:Actually, I want a satellite point here. You know? And and Yeah. What margin difference would it make? You could probably pass through you know, probably be accretive to EBITDA to have your own constellations like satellite constellation.
Speaker 3:And then things like drones or maybe you know, there's you know, Bloomberg right now, I think, have, like, ships and shipping routes and flights and, like, kind of fairly boring stuff, but you you can make it a 100 times better. So that'll be fun when it's ready. And and, again, this is all inspired. This whole sector started with the Bezos kind of
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 1:Everyone really really
Speaker 2:did. What's your take on prediction markets? Do you enjoy them? Do you think that they're valuable uses of information? Do you think it all just winds up being sports betting?
Speaker 2:Like, where where where does all this go?
Speaker 1:And we will be we will be trading
Speaker 2:On what you say? Here.
Speaker 3:So Do you guys get do you guys get paid? No.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. I yeah. I'm super
Speaker 2:I have a thousand x long on you saying biotech at some point during this There you go. Show. Yeah.
Speaker 3:All $3 on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. No. No.
Speaker 2:But what yeah. What what are you thinking on on on prediction markets? Valuable? Useful? Do you use them?
Speaker 2:Do you trade?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's great. I it's a great question. I mean, I think I think the it's probably like social media. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Like, the first social media companies, if you, like, go back into, like, that Steve Levy book about Facebook Mhmm. Which I think is just fantastic, like, almost documenting, you know, every part of it. There were a couple of very random even before Friendster, you know, a couple of these really proto social media companies
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And the sector exploded. I think that's where we're at. Mhmm. I don't think I mean, I I wish the companies the best of luck except for Kalshi. But the the two companies.
Speaker 3:But the I do think that, you know, markets have been around for, you know, hundreds of years, if not longer. And ICE and Cboe and these other companies are publicly traded. They don't sit there and twirl their thumbs and say, gee, you know, I hope I hope some creative new market comes along. They make financial products all the time that fail. You know, they they they innovate, they add new things, and then they they actually take them down because they don't catch fire in Wall Street.
Speaker 3:So if you want to be like that micro kind of, you know, micro markets sort of pioneer, it's interesting, but it's sort of still, like, you get into scale problems with, like, who actually arbitrates some of these bets. Obviously, sports is easy and some of these other things, but, you know, how much are you just financializing for financializing sake? Sure. And is that sustainable when you actually need people with tons of money to fight the arbitrage gradient? You know, if you're betting so in full disclosure, I've been running the spot on Polymarket that that makes a market in the Bitcoin fifteen minute markets, which are somewhat inefficient.
Speaker 3:And nobody needs to trade this. Right? There's no actual, you know, benefit to trading this other than you you can if you can take two to the n bets, so you get around, I guess, 96 bets a day. And if you somehow you know, the money velocity of getting Guadalupe is right, you can compound insanely well. Of course, it's random.
Speaker 3:But, you know, people hope springs eternal that you could somehow get the rhythm of the market every fifteen minutes, and you can even I think somebody posted on Polymarket that they took a very small amount of money and a very large amount of money. So, you know, it is it is kind of a I think it's a bit of a waste of ingenuity and engineering, and we're we're working on trying to sort of make a prediction market that might be more relevant, say, private companies. You know, right now, the binary outcomes of prediction markets have forced you into this box
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Of, like, will OpenAI go public this year? Will SpaceX get a trillion valuation? Why can't it just be dollar for dollar? Why not, like this this is just a market that pays you n dollars per, you know, quick swap. So and I'm sure that might be being worked on by other companies.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think that's, like, an economically rational thing. So the spirit is there. Like, we should have our own markets. We should be able to deploy whatever we want, but actually make it make sense.
Speaker 2:What is
Speaker 3:I think they're still
Speaker 2:Yeah. What is the state of tracking large, late stage private companies' valuations? We have a ticker at the bottom with, you know, mag seven big tech companies with market caps. I would love to add Entropic But, yeah, I I saw some debate over, you know, how you actually get the data, how reliable
Speaker 8:it is. Yeah. Explain.
Speaker 3:I got into it I got into it at Lonsdale.
Speaker 2:I I
Speaker 3:unfollowed him I unfollowed him for five minutes because of it. Was so mad.
Speaker 1:Brutal. Because Worst five five
Speaker 2:minutes. Worst five
Speaker 3:might have I might have made it a few days. Okay. But eventually, I I relented. Capitulated. I think yeah.
Speaker 3:I think that what Lonzo's saying is right in that if he gets invited to a deal, per se, ramp or whoever, you know, he was complaining that my ramp number was too low. And okay. Fine. That's that's fine. But it's the same thing as insider info in the stock market.
Speaker 3:So you have insider info. Great. You know ramp's gonna trade up 50% higher
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Than my number. He said, your number's wrong. What's no different from me saying, well, you know, the, you know, the the NVIDIA number's wrong, but I know they're gonna have a blowout quarter. Oh, yeah. You know?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, how am I supposed to know that? You know, my market only reflects the people trading on it, not, you know Interesting. The news you know before everyone else knows it, which is in private, as you know, guys know very well in private world, that's the point. Mean, that's that's to be expected. Otherwise, you won't part with your money, but in the in the public world, you're not supposed to have that information edge.
Speaker 3:So he's so used to having the information edge because I'm sure he gets invited to many, many great deals Mhmm. That, you know, he knows all the price is about to change. And so SpaceX is a really funny example. On our platform, SpaceX prices tripled because, you know, Elon sort of dropped this bomb that, like, oh, we're gonna do a, you know, do a a buyback at this crazy price. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Obviously, crazy to him, but to the marketplace, they're like, what? WTF? It's like more than doubled over the last few months. Wow. You know, just
Speaker 1:just Well, and and and a lot of the stuff late stage, if if somebody, you know, there's so much demand and there's so little supply that if somebody comes to you and they're like, hey, I've got SpaceX at 1 and a half trillion and somebody's like, do I I'm really if I believe Elon can get this thing out at 1 and a half trillion, sure. I'm gonna be flat over until they get out or whatever, but at least I'm in. Right? So I don't know. It it people will start to be able to justify almost any any price up until that point.
Speaker 3:Sure. And I know Matt Matt Grimm is on this, you know, warpath against these
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a good view. First.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I feel like the only solution is we have to have a private we have to be able to trade, like, just like Polymarket
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Private private companies. And there's Yeah. There's a big battle brewing behind the scenes over this. We'll see where we'll see what comes with it.
Speaker 2:But Okay. Speaking of Elon, speaking of x AI, SpaceX, walk me through all of the internal secrets that you learned from the infamous podcast.
Speaker 1:Of all, if if your most junior employee went on a on a on a cinematic podcast for for ninety minutes and just told all about Godel and everything, you
Speaker 2:Yeah. How would you react? How would you react?
Speaker 3:I I think, you know, the first my first, like, week in hedge funds, thought this was a good idea. And I I the my sense for asking the boss just, like, kicked in at the last second. Yeah. Like
Speaker 1:Wait. So you were gonna call up Bloomberg and say, like, I gotta tell you. We're working on some exciting stuff.
Speaker 2:Yes. I
Speaker 1:gotta tell you about some our
Speaker 2:trading strategy. Specific market is wildly mispriced, and we're gonna make a killing.
Speaker 1:We're printing.
Speaker 3:I was long with stock, and the company told me, oh, we're doing this newspaper piece. Do you mind giving the quote for it since you're an our investor? And I I told our CFO, I said, I'm going to be doing this, just so you know. And he's like, no. No.
Speaker 2:You will not be doing that. Yeah. Okay. So what did you actually learn from from the x AI deep dive?
Speaker 3:I think it's less about learnings and more about, like, just the gumption of, like, the way you set your questions. I can understand like, look, you're an engineer or you should be able to
Speaker 7:go on
Speaker 3:a podcast. Questions come up about x AI, you'll probably see, look, can't really talk about it. You might drop off things, but you know, he was really like people asked the the interviewer asked him, how is Optimus gonna roll out? He was like, this is not me telling you. That's Elon's job.
Speaker 2:You know? It's not yours. And so
Speaker 3:the real reason I kinda came after this guy in a not so like, kind of nobleep way Mhmm. Is he had I looked I looked up this guy. I had a lot of friends at XA. I was like, who is this guy? And he had blocked me.
Speaker 3:I said, oh, no. No. No. This is a big thing. So I'm gonna amplify, you know, that you did this.
Speaker 3:And, again, I I mean, I think the guy was fired, you know
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:At least the second he went on the show. I doubt that I had any part to do with it, but I I definitely didn't mind amplifying the the insane kind of decision he made.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, you know, if you block me, that's that's I mean, Rokana. Rokama.
Speaker 2:Blocked you too?
Speaker 3:No. He came at me for absolutely no reason. I said, you know, I I I replied to his tweet, like, 80,000,000 other people. Like, this is a bad move. Yep.
Speaker 3:And it wasn't a dick out. I I was like, look. I think that the problem is that it's not the billionaires that it's the billionaires and their teams. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 3:So if Peter leaves California, if if Palmer leaves California, if Elon leaves California, it's not just them who leave.
Speaker 2:It's Yeah.
Speaker 3:Works for And that's and and it's every florist that works for those guys I'm trying to find florist. It's every
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Yeah. Because you you have you have the the highly productive, high agency team members that are like, I wanna be in the same building as my boss every single day because I don't wanna go to war remotely like you said. And if I'm gonna be a serious player at this company, I need to be have proximity to the person
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah. The average billionaire family office has gotta be 50 employees, their families. Like, it it gets pretty big when you think about the footprint. Or you easily
Speaker 3:I mean, just the companies they're running. Right? Yeah. I mean, just the companies they're running if if it's there has to be a ton of new employment in Texas because of this, and then it'll only continue. I was
Speaker 1:like, Jordan was just saying that that he's like, Ro Khanna's just rage baiting you guys and you just completely, you know, played into And and I I think that's I'm I'm sure Ro will use this to set up, you know, his next his next play. But it's still it doesn't take away from the fact that you're gonna leave. Mhmm. I don't care if you're like, if you're just using this as a as a stepping stone to like, you know, go to the national stage being like, I stood up against the California billionaires that weren't playing their fair share. Well, like, I live in California and I we still have to live with the consequences of like your political ambitions, right?
Speaker 1:And pushing something that's so obviously, I said what do you want California to become? Like an agrarian society where it's just like agriculture and vineyards and tourism? There's a lot of like, every other state will be happy to take take these jobs and and, you know, host these companies. And, I don't think we should just, you know, hand them all over.
Speaker 2:What's really crazy is you
Speaker 3:you my my partner's at one of the big AI labs, and, you know, if she leaves California and then sells her stock, California will, you know, kinda come after you. And someone just posted this, really almost like fascist letter that the California tax department sent them. I don't if you guys saw this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw it. I saw it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Was insane.
Speaker 1:It's basically the the letter was like, we wanna understand the narrative of why you left California. It's like, tell spin us a yarn. Give us tell us a story That's great. On how you decided to on how you had the audacity to leave this state.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I'm shocked by it. Yeah. On on x AI, did the did the podcast make you more bullish on the strategy at open at at x AI specifically? Were there things that you thought were particularly exciting about what was what was laid out or things that you, thought were maybe misunderstood or mispriced?
Speaker 3:It's hard to tell from the junior engineer. You know? It's I think, like, you know, you get a window, which is great, but it's also it's Elon's show and, like, the risk of of over indexing to something like that is, like, okay. This guy saw it. He worked there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's cool. But what is Elon really thinking? And I think that there's this new thing coming from the AI companies that nobody's expecting. And, you know, I wanted to see if he was gonna drop sort of that.
Speaker 3:And I think all of the labs are gearing up to think about this, and it's sort of this new derivative of of kind of the outcomes of AGI. And I think almost nobody in the market's talking about it. So it's gonna be very interesting to see how the next I'll just, you know, leave a teaser there. See how the next
Speaker 2:No teasers. Unpack it for us. Break it down.
Speaker 3:Five to ten years, I can't.
Speaker 2:You can't. Okay.
Speaker 3:The next five to ten years comes. But I I I think that the question is really what what can AI really do? Yeah. And I think that we've we're we very much over indexed to chatbots and LMs. And, like, a good a good new direction, you know, people have talked about endlessly is robotics.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But imagine there's 50 new directions. You know? And I think that, you know, I hate to say something like this changes everything, but, like, there there's a couple of clever ones, I think, coming that are just haven't been seen yet. And I think the smaller, like, the non Google, non meta I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:Non Google, non Microsoft type of players, you know, including X is kind of what I'm thinking about Mhmm. Are are are actually thinking about this very, very heavily. And MacroHard, I guess MacroHard is kind of, you know, an example of, like, what is that really?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And what's really going to be MacroHard as we see, you know, MacroHard being revealed more and more. Mhmm. I think there's a lot more to that than you know, in some ways, I think MacroHard is gonna be bigger than x AI. It's all one entity, if I'm not mistaken, but it MacroHard is probably worth more than x AI. And I think that we just don't know what's coming out of that.
Speaker 3:We also know about Elon's gaming AI gaming ambition, which I think Yeah. And and I don't
Speaker 7:know if
Speaker 9:you guys
Speaker 3:have seen Martin Pesado's
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Coding. It's very cool stuff. Yeah. And, you know, it's amazing that guy can invest and do that stuff. I think one leads to the other.
Speaker 3:I sort of do the same thing for for my end. I want to talk to you about, really fast, this idea of photonic computing
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Which I think is time is coming.
Speaker 2:Okay. Explain. So
Speaker 3:So photonic computing is is what it sounds like. It's using light instead of electrons to compute. Mhmm. It's it's been around for fifty years. It's sort of like Quantum's ugly stepsister.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But it I think it's actually the belle of the ball because and there are very few companies working on this. You probably know all about it from interconnects where Yeah. Yeah. Know, and silicon photonics as well.
Speaker 3:But recently in nature and a few other, like, preeminent sort of journals, especially Chinese companies have shown that you could do maples with light. And it's actually pretty remarkable. Light goes to a 100 terahertz, but it's more important than that, it it actually is is you can do three d maples, and they're all of one complexity. So it's a pretty insane speed up versus GPU. GPUs are great, but they're almost too general, which is why TPUs have sort of been there.
Speaker 3:But if you throw out the need for, you know, lots of different instructions, just need to do a MAML, which as you guys know is 959095% of what a GPU chip is doing all the time. A MATMO is done with light very naturally through constructive and destructive interference. It's it just nature does it. So I think this could be an interesting new space, and I'm I'm spending a lot of time on it and, you know, very curious about, you know, could there be a chip? There's a couple of private companies Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I'm starting to dig around and, you know, see what what's what here. I think most people stop short of actually making the full photonic computer Sure. Because they need revenue, they need earnings, they need something. And Celestial AI got brought up by Marvel Mhmm. You know, they there's some or Marvell.
Speaker 3:There's some attempt to sort of to push more and more of like, used to use copper wires to transmit information. Now we use photonics and fiber. And more and more of the chip and more and more of the entire global kind of computer infrastructure is going photonic, and maybe the whole thing goes photonic someday, and that electricity is actually the odd man out. It photons don't have some properties that are perfect for, you know, computing, but others, like in the case of which is now, like, most of the compute we need in the world, they're actually kinda perfect. So, you know, it's it'll be interesting to see if there's one one private Chinese company called Lightelligence, and it sort of has a foot in the rest of the world.
Speaker 3:They're in Singapore, but they're also a foot in China. They started at MIT, so they're privately held. There's light matter, which it's not really clear that they're still pursuing kind of all optical photonics. And Microsoft's done done a little bit in space too. So I'm I'm really interested in this.
Speaker 3:This is the potential next, like, as we think as Grok the acquisition of Grok has sort of end the quantum insanity. This is kind of why I care about this first place as a biotech guy. You know? This is very weird for me to think about this, but the Grok acquisition, 20,000,000,000, the quantum crap that's trading for 10 or 20,000,000,000, people really wanna think about what's next in compute. And, of course, the the unconventional and their raise at 5,000,000,000 just for a new co.
Speaker 3:That's it's it's all sort of clear that anything that can be an NVIDIA model, in my opinion, could be worth trillions.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What's the state of the quantum computing market? It seems like the companies have not sold off, but you went viral on a podcast sort of breaking down your overall thesis. Is the market sort of waking up to your way of seeing the timelines around quantum computing or the impact of quantum computing, or, is there still more work to be done on your end?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I I think there's no more thinking that needs to be done. I think this is a war of attrition where both sides are right, and this is why I kind of started to look for for other kinds of compute. Mhmm. And as as you know, our great friend, Beth Jasos, has has his own kind of compute.
Speaker 3:So, like, the point is you got a 5,000,000,000,000 market cap. And if you if you bought a stock at 5,000,000,000, which is not a small cap, that's a big company.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Most of us would be very happy to exit at 5,000,000,000. You can still get a thousand x.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 3:right. If it's the next Nvidia.
Speaker 2:So if
Speaker 3:you even have a point 1% chance that one of these quantum stupid companies is the next Nvidia, I mean, take a flyer, you get a thousand x. So Interesting. I feel like there there kind of is a rational thinking there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Even if it's impossible, you know, who's the thing what's the difference between zero point one and zero point zero? It's it's the kind of difference I think about, but most other people care. And so any chance to get it's like the menu problem. What's on the menu for the average Joe versus what's on the menu for you and me? We might get in a grok round.
Speaker 3:We might get in an unconventional round. The average person can't, but they can buy $2,000 Rigetti or or D Wave on their Robin Hood, and maybe they'll get the same kind of, you know, self manifesting in some ways, you know, beta. Yeah. But I'm also curious if you guys wanna talk, at some point, expand this and talk about biotech more.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 3:Because I Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'd love I mean, I'm I'm, like, give it give us a lay of the land currently, how you're thinking about the year broadly, what's exciting, what what's maybe being oversold about AI's potential impact in biotech versus being underappreciated.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think that this that the NVIDIA Lilly had made announced this big partnership. Yep. Billion. And I've been thinking about drugs and AI more and more and more.
Speaker 3:And I feel like there is something to do here, but it's not the stuff that everyone thinks about. Like, drug discovery itself or or small molecules or even proteins, I'm not sure AI is is very useful. We have great forcing functions for that, whether they're physical chemists or software. You don't need a 10 x or a 100 x improvement in that. The actual part of drug discovery, and I could say this as a, you know, very worn out drug company CEO, the biggest problem of drug companies is the people.
Speaker 3:And there's fantastic people that work at drug companies. It's just that you have ten, fifteen, 20 different departments that have to talk to each other, whether it's toxicology, you know, preclinical, PK. You know, there's all these little subsections. They all have to talk to each other, and everything gets lost in the translation. Project management is supposed to sit on top of all that.
Speaker 3:It just often makes it worse. And so you you have this, like, impossible I mean, you talk to anybody that works in big pharma, they'll tell you how how ugly it is. And so if you had a machine doing it, it'd probably probably work better. And I think that more and more companies are gonna, whether it's a drug company or law firm or anything else, there there's gonna be these sort of self organizing, you know, more decision making gets pushed down. You know, sometimes I ask ChatGPT about, you know, what what would be a better marketing strategy, or how do I how do I get more users?
Speaker 3:What should I do with it? It's like, oh, have you thought about, you know, this? And, you know, sometimes you'll you'll get something surprising. So I think that's sort of the angle I play for drug companies. There's so much inertia.
Speaker 3:Oftentimes, the CEO will, like, kill a drug for no reason. He'll promote another drug for no reason. The data says no. The chief scientist, you know, has a personal vendetta with another company, so he really wants to push that drug. Like, there's all these irrational decisions that get made over what's basically hundreds of millions of dollars to spend, and it it's remarkably inefficient.
Speaker 3:So when Vivec came in to try to really upset the apple cart here Yeah. As as as I did too, we started the same thing. It was a little tricky because it's just not an industry that moves fast and breaks things. And for all the occasional luck you get on a drug, there's a lot of that luck is distributed as well. So Vivek got a lot of bad luck sometimes with Rory Vance.
Speaker 3:He got a couple of things of good luck and some fine. But, like, it's very hard to get the compounding effects that you get. So Lilly has somehow been able to do it because that drug is not gonna go generic. But, again, the problem is you make a great drug, you have a good hit, you have ten years to make money, and that's it. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so, you know, none of these AI companies would be worth anything if in ten years they they all had to give up their assets because there was a generic AI company. So I feel like drug drugs still are in this perilous situation. The whole industry is sort of cooked, because there's fewer and fewer drug targets to go after.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So we keep fighting over the smallest number of patients in these random diseases, sometimes, like, the slight skinniest slice of cancer where there's, like, 600 people have it, and there's, like, 12 drug companies that are developing a drug for it. And so there's overcapacity in the industry. I mean, the same thing happened in steel and some other places, and we arguably have too much going on. And the real fear right now is China. The China drug development capability has gotten so good that there's really no
Speaker 1:Who who was it that was saying, like, yeah. I would hate I would hate we all wanna cure cancer, but I would hate if China cured it before us.
Speaker 2:It's a wild quote. It's wild. On on on the AI impact in in pharma, drug discovery, what is the lever that we should be watching between more frontier models, basically raising the IQ, making them smarter, more knowledgeable versus just speeding them up, getting the state of the art models running on Grok or Cerebras that it's faster, so you can do more? Or is it more of like a adoption diffusion training? You need to just get the CEO to actually have like, turn AI loose in the organization.
Speaker 2:It's like a change management problem.
Speaker 1:Well, I think I mean, I think you mentioned HR. And one thing I think x AI should do is take a little bit of macro hard and build an HR function that when employees Hey. Hey.
Speaker 2:Can I go on Can I go podcast? It just says no.
Speaker 1:Quickly, you
Speaker 2:know, run. I think it'd just be an if statement.
Speaker 1:And it's like, yeah. You if Elon, yes.
Speaker 2:If if podcast mentioned, say no. Anyway Sorry. Is keys to success in AI and bio.
Speaker 3:I think that I think pharma's a misunderstood business. Mhmm. So there was a this this sort of drug goat. This guy named Paul Janssen.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So he created Janssen, and Janssen was acquired by J and J. But Mhmm. Janssen himself just personally invented, I think, half a dozen to a dozen critical medicines, not like Me Toos or anything like that. But, like, he personally discovered, I think, the first antipsychotic, fentanyl. Several massive,
Speaker 1:massive From the creator of fentanyl, we have antsyl.
Speaker 3:It wasn't that back then, right?
Speaker 2:No, it was good. It's very useful, yeah, in many cases.
Speaker 1:How are you processing the peptide boom?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, that whole thing is another story, but I I wanna get back to Paul.
Speaker 2:So Sure.
Speaker 3:There's there's statues of this guy, etcetera. We need more Paul Janssens, whether they're digital synthetic biology synthetic sort of intelligence or not, the drug industry is an idea industry. It is not an industrial process. It's some guy sitting down saying, you know what I think would stop cancer? If we made an HDAC inhibitor.
Speaker 3:Well, actually, people tried that. It doesn't work. Yeah. So and then somebody's saying, I wrote a paper about this, and, you know, actually, maybe this would do it.
Speaker 2:And It's the same thing as, like, getting a digital ilea who can just go and try a bunch of AI research ideas. You get the AI researcher in a box, turn that loose, and then that unfurls into progress. Certainly a challenge. Is that constrained by hardware, compute, scale? Are you still scaling pilled, or is there an idea that will lead to that?
Speaker 3:It's a great question because in the in the old days, if you want to run computer experiments Mhmm. You didn't need much cost. In fact, that
Speaker 9:was a distraction.
Speaker 3:It's like you sit there and write code. Yeah. And now it's like, no. No. I need a cluster.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And for drugs, you know, it's it's sort of has always been an expensive capital, you know, thing. But in in the scheme of things, you know, it's cheaper than AI. And, you know, it's it's kind of like, you know, you you could you could probably get some proof of concept in in animals and and people for, you know, less than you might imagine. And then from there, you know, you can develop a portfolio of drugs.
Speaker 3:So I I think that, you know, getting the idea part of the drug discovery industry more sort of capable is is one thing AI can help a lot with. And that downstream makes less expenses in clinical trial development and also the decision making. Somebody looking at the data and saying, look, this drug is a dog.
Speaker 2:Let's not
Speaker 3:do a phase two. Let's not do a phase three. And oftentimes, the scientists and the the companies have, like I don't know. Wall Street wants to see it see us in phase three. We can't really fall behind our rival.
Speaker 3:And and they'll often push I mean, I'd say up to a half of all drugs in clinical trials shouldn't be in clinical trials. And, you know, that's that's a lot of money wasted. That's a lot of patient time wasted. And and a lot of it is pushed by other incentives and other things like that. So I I think AI has a lot of, you know, potential for for drug discovery.
Speaker 3:But every time I talk to somebody that wants to talk about AI and drug discovery, they've never been in a drug company. They've never actually done it. And when you do it, you realize it's much more about who's Paul Janssen discovering the next bunch of hits and who was lucky and got a one hit wonder, and then who just sucks in general, like Pfizer or something. And so you you sort of have to, like, generate those ideas. It's almost like an investor in hedge funds.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because because I feel like I can't, remember who exactly, but there was somebody on the show that was saying we we don't need it's not that we don't need more ideas. We need a cost reduction across the rest everything Yeah. From that
Speaker 3:But But most of the cost is clinical trials, so
Speaker 1:you're Well, yeah. So what you were saying is, like, if you have these 15 departments if you can somehow make it so that, you know, you you can have is it a is it a head count? Like, how much is, like, a head count reduction actually gonna impact Mhmm. The overall cost?
Speaker 3:I think it's all clinical trials. Like, so once you've invented a drug, say that costs 10 to 50,000,000
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:The next 400 or 500,000,000 is going to find a bunch of people to try it and compare it to placebo because you have to monitor those people so carefully and so closely that it ends up being this massive cost across, you know, tons of clinical trials. That's the hard part. If you could just take shots and bolt for 50,000,000, 20,000,000 left and right, you know, you'd have a really productive drug industry. But, unfortunately, getting 10 thousand people to take a new diabetes drug is it's pulling teeth. And you you have to, like, really, you know, incentivize doctors and patients, meaning you have to pay them.
Speaker 3:And once they do that, you have to pay the company that collects the data. You have to pay the company that, you know, sort of puts it together, sends it to the FDA. All that stuff is, like, just massive paperwork. And it's it's it's a lot of it's
Speaker 1:done How is one how is China's process for running clinical trials different than ours?
Speaker 3:Very similar, but, like, I think the wages that they pay the people to collect all the stuff is less. And I think that they they sort of have it a little more streamlined. I mean, it's it's amazing what they can do. Like so one of the things that confused me about China the first time I looked at it in biotech was, like, the average mid sized American biotech is, a 100 people, 200 people, maybe 300. But in China, it's, 6,000 people working.
Speaker 3:Same market now. Wow. Wow. What are they doing? You know?
Speaker 3:It's like, no. We have, like, 800 chemists sitting here. It's what the hell are they doing?
Speaker 2:Because of the structure in America. Have more, like, labs and consultants, and we still employ 6,000 people, but it's all at secondary and third tier supply chain Maybe.
Speaker 3:I I think it might be more capital markets where it's like, they raise the same amount we raise in in the Hong Kong markets. They raise 300,000,000. Mhmm. I said, what's 300,000,000 volume in China?
Speaker 2:A lot
Speaker 3:more people. As you're 800 chemists. You know? 800
Speaker 2:chemists.
Speaker 3:As you're both 40 chemists in San Diego.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy.
Speaker 1:What what is your take on, on the peptides boom?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Peptides are you know, every time somebody asks me about it, I have to laugh because peptide is defined as a a small protein. Mhmm. And so what you're really asking is what is my take on the unapproved self medication boom?
Speaker 3:And, you know, when you phrase it that way, it
Speaker 1:sounds insane. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:And that's that's like to me to me, I I tried a peptide cycle probably five years ago.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And I was like, okay, this is like cool. And I noticed like a moderate effect. But I also acknowledge that like this is I'm like administering administering like effectively an experiment like I don't know. Experimental drug is not the right framing, but it's it's not like the same as like walking into Eirwan and getting some vitamin d and, you know, having having a daily supplement. It's like you're like inject you're you're you're you're doing an injection.
Speaker 1:Injection. The source matters a ton. Mhmm. And it is far closer to, you know, taking a round of anabolic steroids than it is, you know, adding some creatine to your smoothie.
Speaker 3:I just think it's nuts. I mean, if you think it's a good idea to do your own research on medicine, self medicate, and on uncontrolled substances that are manufactured, god knows where that have now been in clinical trials. And, I mean, I'm as libertarian as it gets, but I just don't understand why what the impetus is to take foreign substances without some emergency need. And it just it boggles my mind because, you know, people there's some psychological phenomenon where people need to feel a control, or they need something in their life that they feel like they're taking a risk on, or, you know, it's nuts. I mean, why why would you do it?
Speaker 1:Well, and and explain why there probably will never be clinical trials for these drugs.
Speaker 3:Right. There's this edge case where, you know, you have a cosmaceutical in essence or kind of like something that doesn't quite fit what's a disease to the FDA. A good example is premature ejaculation. Mhmm. So the FDA does not consider that an illness.
Speaker 3:European drug regulators do. And so, you can get approved for impotence in America because it's actually sort of a medical problem where it's like, Oh, if I can't copulate and reproduce, it's a big medical emergency in a sense. Premature is sort of like, Well, you have it. This is what it is. So the FDA has never been willing to approve.
Speaker 3:A company, a long time ago, tried to get an old J and J drug called Depoxetine approved for premature ejaculation. The FDA basically said, There's no set of circumstances where we will prove this. And, you know, what's weird about that is, Okay, well, if you actually do suffer from this? And it's a severe psychological detriment as much as we joke about it. People joked about erectile dysfunction a long time ago, and it's a serious, you know, illness to many.
Speaker 3:So, you sort of live in this spotlight of like, well, know what drug works, this drug Epoxetine actually does work, but I also know it'll never be FDA approved, so what do I do? And in some ways, you know, you're you're sort of like, I'm taking an unapproved, technically illegal substance, and I'm buying it off some shady, you know, third party market. So eventually, I think we need to find a way, just like almost like what we just talked about for prediction markets. You have these third markets
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Where it's like, yeah, you can bet what Trump's gonna say in a speech, and it's not registered stock exchange, but it's also more than just you and me making a side bet. Mhmm. And it's the same thing with with this, where it's like, Depoxime is not a peptide, but, you know, I Depoxime is medically useful for that disease if you call the disease. FDA won't say no. So it's not like I'm taking some random goop.
Speaker 3:You know, it's a real medicine, but it's it's in this middle of like, what do you do with this thing? And so much of, you know, so much of what we do as investors or whatever is in that middle. Uber you could sort of define Uber as in that weird middle as well. So I think eventually, you know, we need to address like it's not as insane as maybe I'm I'm making it out to be. Think some of it is.
Speaker 3:But eventually, you need to address this like, how do we Yeah. Do Pepper
Speaker 1:Well, even even like yeah. B b p c one five seven. Like, there's no incentive to spend the tens of millions of dollars on trials. Be like, you would need some type of, like, you know, trade group or something in order to fund that because if one company did it, then every company would get the benefit of it. So why would one company spend the tens of millions of
Speaker 3:for that. In drug development, we have an app for that. We we can take that drug, wish to change it, figure out make it better, you know, and and then you get a new patent, and then you have an incentive. So there there is sort of a way to do that, and that's not that's not uncommon. I mean, you know, trolling around PubMed looking for, oh, this drug actually does something.
Speaker 3:I'll make you know, take it to my boss at Merck. Boss says no patent. Come back the next day and say, here's the same drug with the nitrogen atom coming out of here. It's gonna work the same way. And he says, alright.
Speaker 3:You know, maybe we should run with that.
Speaker 1:Run it. Yeah. Run it. Well,
Speaker 2:thank you so much
Speaker 1:for Always fun. Show. So much fun.
Speaker 2:You guys. Come back soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Come back on again soon. Have a bunch more questions I wanna ask about Godel and everything, but good to see you. Yeah. And happy
Speaker 2:to progress. And congrats on the new on becoming a father.
Speaker 1:Fatherhood. Massive.
Speaker 2:Massive news.
Speaker 1:Great stuff.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. You might know him from his work What's happening? With Uber. Thank you so much for waiting. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:How are you doing?
Speaker 7:Good. Thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. I
Speaker 1:am upset that it took us over a thousand guests
Speaker 2:I know. Go on.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's I know. I have I have to say
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 7:So you just hired a friend of mine, a name Jackson Fordist. Do you guys Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:We love Jackson.
Speaker 7:So I he I literally had the, like, call with him a few weeks ago where he's like, what do I do with my life? And I said, take the job. Amazing. Those assholes have never had me on. And so, two things came together.
Speaker 2:I'm glad we could do it.
Speaker 7:Yeah. But I mean, you're getting an incredible person in that hire, so good job Amazing. Great
Speaker 2:news. Tell us about the bookstore. I heard that you Yeah. Sure. Have a bookstore.
Speaker 7:I do. So first of all, anyone who's looking to lose money, I highly recommend owning a bookstore. Yeah. So, you know, I've written a couple of books. I had started this thing called the Gotham Book Prize
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:In 2020. In fact, we announced the nominees for this year today.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I'd always thought, like, one day, it'd be fun to own a bookstore, but the kind of thing you would just do later in life. And then during COVID, New York City just got whacked by everything. And we lost, you know, half a million jobs.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And my thought was, look. If you're gonna do something nice for the city from a retail perspective, because I knew I wasn't ever gonna make money on it, like, now is the time. Right? Don't wait till you're 70 or whatever it is. And so we started looking for space.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And we found one on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, if anyone knows where that is. And it's a great spot. So it's about 3,500 square feet. It's an indie bookstore.
Speaker 7:It's a podcast studio that is free for anyone to use.
Speaker 2:You just
Speaker 7:go on our website and you can sign up and use it.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 8:You guys
Speaker 7:are over in New York, you're We've gonna be in got an event space. We built an amphitheater that seats about 80. So we have authors or different types of events like open mic teenage poetry or whatever, pretty much something every night and a cafe. And the store has a funny name. And the reason why is so when I when I leased the space, I texted my dad and said, didn't the store that my grandfather started when they came to this country in 1950, wasn't it right around here?
Speaker 7:Because that store was closed before I was born, I knew it was right around there. He's like, yeah, it was one block over on Allen Street. And I said, remind me the name. He said, P and T knitwear because, you know, if you were an uneducated Jew that survived World War two, the one job you could get in The US, especially in New York, was in the garment business. Oh, nice.
Speaker 7:So my grandfather started a sweater company.
Speaker 3:Oh, wow.
Speaker 7:And then my dad wrote P T Knitwear, but you cannot name a bookstore P and T Knitwear. So, of course, our store is called P and T Knitwear. So so that's our store. Fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Other than the fact that, you know, nobody buys books, it is, a really fun, business to own and run and a fun place to hang out. So anyone who is watching Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you
Speaker 7:happen to be in New York, you like bookstores, check us out.
Speaker 1:That's very cool. What's it gonna take to get it profitable?
Speaker 7:I don't think it's possible. You know, there's not there's actually not one. So because I've looked at like, okay, let's say I ran it aggressively. We charged for the studio. We charged for the event space.
Speaker 7:We didn't give the employees health care, all this, you know, other stuff. We would still lose money. So I don't quite understand how somebody actually makes a living running a bookstore. I'm sure Manhattan's sort of the worst place to do it. Yeah.
Speaker 7:But still but even like in LA, like my friend Zippy has a great bookstore in Santa Monica, but the same thing. She's, you know, lucky to, you know, have other money and she part of the way she uses it is to have this indie bookstore. So, it does seem like sadly, you know, bookstore ownership these days is somewhat equated with philanthropy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's get back to let's get back to business. I wanna talk about specifically these businesses that you've been involved with where you've been so helpful to founders on the local and state regulation level, how companies position themselves. It feels like every company right now is focused on what's happening in DC, the federal How do you how are you how do you think about what's different when you're working with a company at the local level? What are the what's the playbook? What works if you have a problem and you need to change local laws?
Speaker 2:What are you recommending to new founders?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So when the first thing is, look, human beings naturally or Americans at least, when you say the words government or politics, your mind kind of instinctively goes to DC.
Speaker 2:So you
Speaker 7:think about the capitol, the White House, Trump, whatever it is.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But the reality is most regulation, including most tech regulation, does not happen at the federal level.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:There's some crypto, biotech. Mhmm. But by and large, most things that touch a consumer in some way directly or indirectly are regulated either by state government or local government, and that's actually a good thing. So what everyone thinks is, oh, I'd rather stop my problem at the federal level. It's a one shot stopping.
Speaker 7:I one shot whatever. I got my thing done. I'm sad. But, you know, the phrase in act of congress is literally synonymous with a miracle. Right?
Speaker 7:You can't base investment strategies on miracle. Whereas in states and you guys had my friends, you know, Adam and Matt from Doctronic on a few weeks ago Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:Where we worked with them to make Utah the first state to allow prescription via AI. That's right. In states, you can get things done. And we don't necessarily win in every state every time, but, like, 50 bites at the apple, we can figure out this makes sense for a red state strategy, blue state, whatever it might be. It might not matter in that way.
Speaker 7:And because states have sort of six month legislative sessions in which typically a couple of 100 bills on average pass, you have a reasonable chance of getting your same thing done if you run a good campaign. Mhmm. And then once you establish precedent for it in one state, you have a stronger argument to then go forward in others. And so when we decide what we wanna work on and what we wanna invest in, we highly prioritize companies that can get their stuff done at the state and local level because I don't invest in stuff where I don't think that we can move the needle for the company itself. And I think our odds of doing that are so much better outside of Washington.
Speaker 1:How confident were you that you guys could get this? A deal like the one you got done in Utah with Doctronic, like And was when you invest little surprised. Yeah. Yeah. Because I was
Speaker 2:I Yeah. We kept having to like be like really? That's what happened? Really?
Speaker 7:You can do
Speaker 2:this? I know. We
Speaker 7:e even we but we literally the people who do this for a living, granted company, the only fund that does this. Yeah. And even we were like, wow, that one was pretty cool. But there are states that are very thoughtful around AI regulation. And there are a couple states, Utah, Texas, Arizona, Kentucky Mhmm.
Speaker 7:That have created regulatory sandboxes. You guys know what that is? Little bit. It's effectively like a notion saying, okay. You know what?
Speaker 7:There's this thing that we know is really important. We know it's gonna take experimentation. And rather than subjecting it to the political process, let's put together a team of experts who can, at least on a provisional basis, say, we're gonna try out these ideas in our state. And as long as it's working the way we thought, it'll keep going. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And those are four states that have chosen to do that, and so those were the obvious places for us to start. Utah is just a really well run state. Governor Cox is is an excellent governor. And so we and they're not a typical state for a lot of reasons. And, also, they are becoming a very, very tech forward and friendly state because you're see migration, especially from California, let alone before the billionaires referendum tax thing happens.
Speaker 7:Utah is becoming, Silicon Slopes are calling it. So, we're going to Texas next, which is a giant market, obviously, the second biggest in the country. And, you know, once we start showing that it works, you know, even if you think so the very first tech company that I worked with was Uber, started doing that early thousand eleven. And the thing that that Travis Kalanick, who was the founder and CEO of UberTime, understood and he was right about is just get the genie out of the bottle. I mean, Travis didn't pretend to understand politics, but what he did know was that he had a product that was meaningfully better than the status quo.
Speaker 7:And if you guys think back to the first couple of times you used Uber, it was magic. Right? You couldn't kinda couldn't believe it. You just pressed a button and this nice car showed up and here they were and you have to, like, hail it down or deal with some crazy cab company or anything else. And we knew that once people saw that it worked, they would fight for it.
Speaker 7:And the arguments against it would get weaker and weaker, and we were able to effectively mobilize our customer base.
Speaker 1:Well, you have you have the two it's it's both participants fighting for it too in the in the Correct. You have the drivers and the and the users, is the most powerful dynamic. Right.
Speaker 7:Right. And that's when you can do that but, you know, it's funny. There is a whole question as to when do you have a product or a service that people will fight for? And sometimes it's you might have a really good company that's gonna be a good investment, but it doesn't sort of excite people in that way. But what we found is FanDuel worked really well.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. Bird scooters worked really well. Ease, which is a cannabis delivery worked really well. Crypto that works really well for. So you have to think about if you're a founder, do I you're obviously passionate about it because otherwise you wouldn't have founded the company in the first place and made all the sacrifices that you've made.
Speaker 7:But you have to be somewhat objective saying, okay. Do regular people find this thing that I am doing truly critical and fascinating?
Speaker 1:You said you said fan You can do you said fan duel. So like, are there people out there that will stand up and protest their state government if they try to Yeah. For banning sports betting?
Speaker 3:So we
Speaker 7:we we did that. So in 2016, the New York Times published an article effectively accusing employees at FanDuel and DraftKings of conducting a form of insider trading where according to the times, they were giving each other information to them, put bets on the other's platform. It turned out to actually not be true. But putting that aside, it unleashed this total shit storm
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Where a couple of dozen states in the course of a few days issued cease and desist orders to us saying, you can no longer operate. Mhmm. And we had to all of a sudden go all over America and either pass bills to legalize daily fantasy sports betting or at least get them to understand that that we were complying with the existing laws. And the way that we did that is we went to our customers and said, listen. If you like this product, we need you to fight for it.
Speaker 7:And every time they were on the app, we knew where they were located. And we'd say, hey. Click here to tell your local state senator or state rep, whoever it might be, that you want FanDuel, to stick around and enough people did it that, you know, it shifted the political inputs. If you guys just take a half a step back in politics, if there's one thing to take away from this interview, it's that every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else.
Speaker 7:And there are some exceptions. I was Mike Bloomberg's campaign manager and affirmator of New York.
Speaker 1:Not for the good of the world? No.
Speaker 7:Not the slightest. Right? My people are that's that's pretty
Speaker 2:much So
Speaker 7:a result
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:That's incredibly depressing, admitted.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But it's also kind of a useful place to work from because then you have to understand what can I do to make said politician feel like doing what I want will either help them win the next election or if they don't
Speaker 1:So the tech industry should tell Rokana, we won't we won't trash you in the next election cycle if you don't put our industry in the dirt?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Or or quite frankly, it's funny. Just by, you know, Larry Page and others acting in their own self interest and already saying I'm moving to Florida, the billionaire's referendum is already on the ropes because of that. So sure. If you, you know, if you think about why, let's say, a place like California, there are unions such as SEIU, the teachers have so much power in Sacramento.
Speaker 7:It's because they have so much money that they can threaten any given politician and say, if you don't do what we want, we're gonna spend a million dollars, $5,000,000, whatever number they want and against you in the next election. Mhmm. And it already backs down because winning the next election is more important to them than any given policy or any given issue. So not every tech startup obviously has the kind of money that a union might have to throw around. So you have to be more creative about it, and that's where your customers can be really useful applicants.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Very interesting. What's your current outlook on the venture landscape broadly? We've been talking a lot about the the the k shaped dynamic. There's a whole bunch of headlines around lower total venture funding, more SPV activity.
Speaker 2:What do you what do you see?
Speaker 7:Yeah. A A few things. So I kinda have I have it from both a deal by deal standpoint and then kind of a macro fund model standpoint. So on a deal by deal standpoint, I think we're in this very bifurcated world. So Mhmm.
Speaker 7:I started investing outside capital on my first fund in 2016. In fact, FanDuel was the first deal I ever did.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 7:at that moment, there was a period of irrational two parts. Right? Everything was incredible, and everybody threw tons of money at everything, and every startup was gonna be, you know, unicorn or decacorn or whatever. Then 2021 came, everything fell off the cliff, and all of a sudden things like unit economics and margins Mhmm. And, you know, burn and all of that stuff started to matter.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And then AI came along. And then so for AI companies, we're back to the twenty sixteen days where people are just having valuations to me that sometimes make no sense whatsoever. You know, I've seen seed companies, you know, with valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars with no product
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Or certainly no revenue. That's crazy. And yet some of the discipline that you saw post 2021 crash is still being applied to non AI companies. Mhmm. And while I do think that overall, if you had an ETF of private AI startups, it would do well over time.
Speaker 7:That doesn't mean that any individual evaluation is right simply because the letters AI are attached to it in some way. From a fund model standpoint, I really believe that there's effectively only two types of funds that could work if you were to start now. One would be a fund with billions of dollars of AUM simply because at that point, the management fees are sufficient that the GPs can make a living from that alone. Yep. And as long as they can raise the next fund Mhmm.
Speaker 7:You know, it doesn't really matter. Or a sub $100,000,000 fund or even sub 50, you can get away with it where the hurdle is relatively low. You can get into carry pretty quickly. You're not making much on the management fees. So that's certainly you've either gotta have other resources or really be super scrappy.
Speaker 1:If you if you were if you wanted to start a fund with the the lowest chances of success, what would it be? For me, it would be a $200,000,000 series a only fund. Sure.
Speaker 7:Yeah. A generalist generalist. Nothing differentiating.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Even that sub 100,000,000 still only works if you have something truly differentiated. Right? So for me, because we're the fund that does the regulatory stuff
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:For better or worse, we're the people you call if that's the if if that's your issue. And if you don't have
Speaker 1:a what's your framework? Because because there's times where I've invested in a company where I'm like, okay. This this founding team is fantastic and they don't understand, but they don't they're they're good at all this stuff, but they don't understand marketing.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I'm very good at marketing. Right. I can invest and I can help. The problem is I'm I'm gonna be in the room with them, like, less than 1% of the time. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, I'll do a handful of calls. I'll make intros. I'll help however I can, but I'm not actually on the team. And so I ended up getting I've yeah. I've ended up getting burned because I'm just like, I I can't you know, 1% of my time is not enough to take them from bad at marketing to even good.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 7:Right. So for us, there's first thing is we ask two simple questions. Is there a gating regulatory issue or opportunity that if it were solved, could really drive growth and valuation? And then if so, can we solve it? And that's what led us to that in companies like FanDuel, Lemonade, Bird, Roe, Coinbase, Circle, Latch, so on.
Speaker 7:And then the other part, though, is we've take Doctronic as an example. We are their GRPR department. We effectively become the in house group for a company until they get up to a point where it's like, okay. We are now big enough that we probably need an in house team, in which case, like, Roe is a really good example where we started working with Ro back at the seed. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:You know, it's funny with Dotronic because it's prescription via AI when it was Ro, which was really not that long ago. Mhmm. The question was, is tech is prescription via text legal? Mhmm. Nobody knew.
Speaker 7:Right?
Speaker 10:Because they had
Speaker 7:no until z no one had ever tried to do it before. Yeah. And he saw something that was incredible. And our job was to legalize us everywhere, and we we worked on that and did it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And then eventually, it grew to a point where we helped them, you know, put together their kind of in house people. And then we still talk to them all the time. Mhmm. We jump in on stuff whether it's GLP one compounding rules or when they want to be a COVID test provider or whatever it was. But for those early rounds, we really are part of the team, and that's why we take equity for our work because, you know, we're lucky to be in a position where I don't need to take cash usually because I have the the resources to sort of fund it myself.
Speaker 7:But, you know, we are there day to day.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about mobile voting. Yeah. We've heard about it for a long time. Do you think it's ever gonna happen? What are you doing in this space?
Speaker 2:Why is it important? Okay. Explain.
Speaker 7:So alright. Let let's start. It's important because in a world of gerrymandering, I'll make the assumption that the viewers know what that is. Mhmm. The only election that matters is the primary.
Speaker 7:So the New York Times did a study of the twenty twenty four general election. Only 8% of congressional races were decided by five points or less, and only 7% of state legislative races were decided by five points or less, which means well over 90% of elections are really determined in the primary.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And the problem is primary turnout is incredibly low. It's usually about 10%.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 7:And so who are those 10%? They're the extremes, the far left or the far right, or there are different special interests, whether it's the NEA or the NRA, either side Mhmm. That effectively dictate what happens. And if you are a politician and all you wanna do is stay in office, then you cater to those groups at the exclusion of everyone else. But because those groups are purists, they don't want compromise.
Speaker 7:They don't want consensus. They just want to sort of hold true to their principles no matter what the cost is, and and so nothing gets done. And the simplest way to solve that is to meaningfully increase primary turnout, but the only way to do that is to meet the voters where they are. Every single one of us has a supercomputer in our pocket. And if you can allow people to vote in at least state and local elections on their phones, you can get primary turnout from 10 to, say, 40.
Speaker 7:And now all of a sudden, if in order to get reelected, you have to represent 40% of your constituents instead of 10, that 40% is much more moderate, and they want things to get done. So if that means working with the other side to find a reasonable compromise on immigration or guns or health care or climate or whatever it is, you can do so. It's not that government doesn't know what the answers are. It's that embracing them in peril to reelection, and they won't do that. And so I started something called the mobile voting project in 2017, and the first thing we did was test the hypothesis that I just laid out.
Speaker 7:And so we funded elections out of my foundation. It's totally philanthropic in seven different states where either people with disabilities or deployed military were able to vote in real elections on their phones. Yeah. And the answer was, of course, as you guys know, when you make something a lot easier to put on people's phones Mhmm. They do it.
Speaker 7:So that was true. Then the next question became, okay. But is the tech really good enough to do this at scale? It was totally fine for 2,000 soldiers from West Virginia, 3,000 blind people in Oregon. But if we're trying to get every district from 10 to 40 and the tech that was on the market at the time wasn't good enough for that.
Speaker 7:So we spent five years building our own mobile voting technology that is end to end encrypted, end to end verified, has biometric screening, multifactor authentication to air gapped, and all of the code is open source, which means it's on GitHub right now.
Speaker 1:So it's
Speaker 7:totally transparent, totally audible. And the next part is then, okay, getting government to say, yes. You can actually do it. So that's about to happen for the first time in April. Anchorage, Alaska is making mobile accessible to all of their
Speaker 1:voters. Hit the for mobile voting overnight. Thank
Speaker 7:you. And we are running legislation now in five states, Minnesota, Colorado, Vermont, New Jersey, Maryland, that would allow cities in those states to start offering mobile voting as an option for local elections.
Speaker 1:Citizens, I can imagine, are super excited about this. Who's not excited? Really well. You're just like, oh, no. I love going to the poll.
Speaker 1:I I love I love taking, you know, an hour out of my day to to go do this thing that Right.
Speaker 7:So there's the people there are a few smaller opponents, and then there's, in reality, the big one. So the smaller ones are, there are some cryptographers who have said, it's impossible, can never be done, something can go wrong. And they're not wrong. Something could go wrong, but things go wrong at in person ballot places all the time. Things go wrong with mail in voting all the time.
Speaker 7:And the risk of inaction is where we are today, and this is not sustainable for twenty four years. And there are groups like this one called verified voting that are currently anti vaxxers of voting. So they're just like in paper on paper, in person, nothing else. You know, and they're the crazies just like the anti vaxx people in my view are a little crazy. But the real opponents at the end of the day are the status quo because if you are an ideologue or a special interest and primary turnout is 10%, you have a lot of power because you your threats go a long way.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. You look at who's showing who's actually turning out for the primaries and you can concentrate budget Correct. On influencing that subgroup, which is much better than having to appeal to an entire region or or, you know, a huge age range.
Speaker 7:So Right. Exactly. So that's what we're really gonna have to fight through. But, you know, if you think about every major right in this country that's ever been won, women's right to vote, civil rights act, voting rights act, same sex marriage, Americans disabilities act, whatever it is, status quo didn't wanna do any of those things. Right?
Speaker 7:Of enough people stood up loud enough and long enough and demanded their rights, And eventually, they won, and it's not easy, and it takes a while, and it's expensive. But that's what we have to do here too, and we're trying.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Really quick. I I know we're mostly out of time. How do you think what do you think the dialogue will be around AI in the in the midterm elections?
Speaker 7:Negative. I think it's gonna be pretty bad. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it is this the kind of thing that certain certain politicians are gonna make their entire brand anti AI?
Speaker 7:Well so I think what you're gonna see, which is if we can get cash here, Polymarketer, someone to take take a to set a line on this
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Is the word that will be cited the most in the midterms by the way, it's not just congress. There's 36 governors of state, most states legislatures, is affordability. Right? So that's the word. Right?
Speaker 7:You heard Trump say it. You heard Montgomery here in New York say it. Everyone's gonna say it. So then the question is where does AI fit into the affordability puzzle? And it fits in a couple ways.
Speaker 7:One is job loss. I do believe that some of the jobs data that we saw in 2025 reflected layoffs, typically kind of bigger tech companies that are the earliest adopters of of AI and new technology using it, realizing this works pretty well. I don't necessarily need as many people to perform any given function, so you're gonna have layoffs. The second is energy prices. So right now, in the way that data centers have were conceived by the hyperscalers was, you know, we build these things and we would consume a lot of energy and that would be from the grid.
Speaker 7:And the problem is everyone else who's on that same grid then has to pay the price for that. And so there are a lot of states where AI data centers have already come online where people are paying thirty, forty, 50% more in their energy bills every month. The problem is no consumer on either side of the aisle is interested in having to spend more money out of their pocket to help make San Altman or Johnson Wong a trillionaire. Right? So
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. And the
Speaker 7:politicians are starting to push back. Yeah.
Speaker 1:People were like, I want Uber in my area around where I live. Right. Nobody's like, if I don't get a data center in my backyard, I can't use Chatuchiki.
Speaker 2:Chatuchiki is gonna work no matter where the data center is.
Speaker 7:It's gonna work. And by the data centers don't even create that many jobs. Right?
Speaker 2:So there's
Speaker 7:not even like you can mobilize that for it. And you see now a bunch of different states on both sides of the aisle start proposing legislation that would find ways to curtail the ability of the data centers to impose those costs and externalities on consumers, whether it's around having to use different types of energy or alternate forms of compute or water or whatever it might be. And so AI is gonna get blamed not wrongly in some ways for both job loss and higher energy prices along with things like mental health chatbots having weird problems with teenagers and things like that. And so I think it's gonna be a huge attack vessel for challengers against incumbents, you know, in pretty much every election this year.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I think that, you know, when we in the tech world just think everyone loves AI because we love AI, That's not true. Mhmm. And if that is the mindset you take, you're gonna lose.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. That makes a ton of sense. Agreed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be a really important story to follow this year. We'd love to have you back on the show to talk
Speaker 7:about more. Anytime. Love talking about this stuff. So anytime it works for you guys, just let me know.
Speaker 2:Thank you
Speaker 1:so much for taking the time. Expect emails in the morning
Speaker 2:when stories are ready. Gotta come on.
Speaker 1:You got it. I'm real expert.
Speaker 2:And thanks for pushing Jackson over the line.
Speaker 7:No. It's He's a he's he's gonna love it.
Speaker 2:It's good. Yeah. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 1:And Barnes and Noble's opening 60 stores. They're gonna So
Speaker 2:maybe there's a boom.
Speaker 1:Somebody sent Yeah. Us Maybe Don't don't limit yourself. Right? If you know, make it up with scale. Right?
Speaker 1:Open 50 more stores. Make you make it up with volume.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 7:There we go. There we go. I just have to, you know, just make it I I need another Uber to be able to afford that. We'll work on it.
Speaker 2:So Thank you so much. Thank so much for having
Speaker 10:me. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Goodbye. Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have a very special segment on TBPN today.
Speaker 2:We have Lucas Zinger from Divergent in the Ultradome. He's actually outside the Ultradome. So we're gonna take a walk, and we're gonna
Speaker 1:Let's do a little walk and talk. We're gonna
Speaker 2:do a walk and talk for I think this the first time we've ever done So I should be able to click over to the lav mic. Do you have the lav mic?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think it's live.
Speaker 2:Let's go see what's waiting for us.
Speaker 8:Out of the office.
Speaker 2:Outside of the ultra dumb.
Speaker 1:We are getting audio from outside
Speaker 2:already. Audio outside. Let's go and see. Okay. We are ready.
Speaker 2:Wow. Look at this. Sure. You so much for coming. Yes.
Speaker 2:Look at this. Walk us through what we're looking at. Reintroduce yourself for those who might not remember.
Speaker 8:I'm Lucas Zinger. I'm the CEO of Divergent and Zinger Vehicles, and you're looking at our first car, the '21 c.
Speaker 1:Wow. You had to bring it you had to bring it in green too.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for bringing this.
Speaker 8:Matched outfit here for you.
Speaker 2:I've watched the full video. I watched Doug DeMiro's review. Okay. And seeing it in person, the scale is remarkable. Yes.
Speaker 2:Is a wonder.
Speaker 8:It's a spacecraft for the road. It's a land jet. It's a hell of a car to take in traffic from Torrance to here.
Speaker 2:Drive this on the street here? Yes. I was assuming No.
Speaker 8:No. We drove it. Drove it on the way over.
Speaker 2:I cannot believe you drove it carbon body. Before we go into the details, tell us the story of your journey with cars. Why did you want to build this car? When did this project start? This doesn't look like it was built in one day but
Speaker 8:No. How long have
Speaker 2:been working on this?
Speaker 8:This a ten year Mhmm. Build a company from a vision moment. Okay. So we started as a family business. Yeah.
Speaker 8:My father had the vision for Divergent. Mhmm. I joined them soon thereafter and we have a business that has changed the way that we engineer and manufacture fundamentally. So when we talked last time, we talked about the defense application, the manufacturing application.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:That company is scaling right now. Mhmm. But Zinger was the first product within Divergent.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:When we said, we've got new design software, new added manufacturing technology, new robotics, How are we gonna prove this, validate this? We turned to making our own car. Yep. Then that evolved into making our own car company. So Zinger vehicle is about five years old.
Speaker 8:Five years old. Within ten years of what is the divergent journey.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:And now it's the world's fastest hyper car. It's American made. It's got five plus international track records. Yeah. And it's road legal.
Speaker 8:And most excitingly, there's over 16 of these in the wild now. Wow. Been delivered. Wow. Los Angeles, Miami, London.
Speaker 2:I can't believe
Speaker 8:All the usual suspects.
Speaker 2:This is remarkable. And this car,
Speaker 8:it represents fully that ten year journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, Jordan was just making the joke with me today that you could build the ultimate American made hypercar garage Yes. For remarkably cheap. When compared to an Italian hypercar collection Yes. Or even a British hypercar.
Speaker 2:You've just raised the stakes significantly with this Yes. I think. Yes. This is this is remarkable. So so what has the testing been like?
Speaker 2:Said five records. Who's driving these cars? What tracks? What are the records that you're going for? What what has stood out in the journey?
Speaker 8:So Joel Miller Yeah. Has been our test pilot Okay. And he's an exceptional driver, factory driver for Ferrari, great coach and we nailed five track records in five days Wow. Which has never been done before. That's amazing.
Speaker 8:We made a documentary of it and it was all about the street usability of the car Mhmm. And the performance envelope it has. Mhmm. So instead of showing
Speaker 1:up to Five in five days
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:What does that actually look like? You're getting a record, immediately packing in a trailer, driving track.
Speaker 8:In trails. So that was the epic journey and we made a documentary called the California Gold Rush. Okay. And we drove from NorCal through SoCal and we hit every track on the way. Good.
Speaker 8:And every day we'd set the track record. Okay. Every night we'd get in the car and we'd drive a couple 100 miles to the next track. Get in late, get some sleep, get up early the next morning and do another record. So it was as much of a human feat as a vehicle feat, but what it was meant to show was these hypercars can be driven on the road.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. This one can. It was built as a road car, not only a track car.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And it's got so much performance that quite literally you can show up at the track on used tires and set a track record and not need a pro team next to you supporting it.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Talk about the decisions in usability. I see three pedals in there between you know the Carrera GT super raw, no supports extremely dangerous to Yeah. Some of the more point and shoot. Where did you want to land?
Speaker 2:Where did this car land?
Speaker 8:So ultimately, this was about creating a road car that was otherworldly in the way that it drove on the street.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:But could beat the best on the track. And that's a hell of a design brief Yeah. Because usually those two worlds don't marry well together. We also wanted to create a vehicle that was engaging as part of that otherworldly experience. Right?
Speaker 8:You wanted something that wasn't numb at low speed Yeah. That was very very lively on the road Mhmm. But ultimately could shave ten seconds off the thermal track record when you go 10 out of 10. This is gonna be thermal. Thermal.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Away. Ten seconds off the track record at thermal.
Speaker 1:Do you know who who had the previous record? I won't say. Okay.
Speaker 8:That's too big of a margin to to say, but we we've had an epic back and forth.
Speaker 1:You know, because I've I've been in Valkyrie at Thermal Yeah. With our friend
Speaker 2:With our
Speaker 1:friend. Yeah. Who I won't I won't name them because
Speaker 8:he's That's a great car
Speaker 1:as well. But but this car I in in the Valkyrie at thermal almost every single corner I thought that I was gonna die. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So ten seconds faster than that.
Speaker 1:Ten seconds faster than that is insane.
Speaker 2:Sounds brutal.
Speaker 8:Yeah. You're pulling major g's, the cornering, the acceleration. But back to your question Yeah. This car marries those two worlds. Track driving with road driving.
Speaker 8:It's a one design brief. You got the center seating.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:That's of course intentional. That's based on the aero package. That allows for less frontal surface area. Sure. It also gets you centered in the car which is the best track driving position you can have.
Speaker 8:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Your lefts feel the same as your right.
Speaker 2:I've always wondered why more manufacturers don't go with the center seating. I mean, it's iconic from the McLaren f Yes. One. And then maybe it's just a practicality thing?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. The back seat, right, it looks a little tight in Your feet go outside of the front seat. Oh, you actually just have much more room than you think. You don't need to get your knees up front seat.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And when you're in there, you're packaged pilot, copilot.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 8:And it's a really dynamic driving experience. I mean, our customers that drive with their partners, they actually love the layout.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And in terms of hybrid, strong hybrid. Okay. Ground up developed in The US as well. Yeah. So we've got a v eight that we took all the way through California car to road homologate.
Speaker 8:Okay. It's about 750 horsepower twin turbo Sure. 2.88 liter. We have another spec that takes that up to eight fifty and then you get another 500 horsepower at front wheels. Wow.
Speaker 8:So you're doing twelve fifty to thirteen fifty total horsepower. Correct. All wheel drive, seven speed AMT automatic manual transmission, but you have that EV fill on the front axle. Yeah. You've got the middle EV motor, the MGU.
Speaker 8:So So you have a really really seamless gear shifting experience. Yeah. Feels much more like a DCT than a single clutch, but you get the weight of a single
Speaker 2:clutch package. How early did the door design come together? It's it's pretty striking. I mean, people have done scissor doors, butterfly doors, all sorts of things, but there's something about how long these doors are that really stands out.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It had the record for the world's longest door for some time and that's because, of course, you're opening the front and the rear at the
Speaker 2:same time. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And Yeah. You've got this 45 degree angle. It looks like wings coming up. It's part of the design brief, part of the functionality brief. We didn't wanna split the passenger side into a separate door from a styling perspective.
Speaker 8:And then
Speaker 1:Can I can I get in the cockpit for a second?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. Let me show you how to do that real quick. Maybe spin around this side.
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 8:It's a two stepper. So you're gonna take a seat right Take
Speaker 1:a seat first.
Speaker 8:Just the battery box and then swing your legs in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You don't want me to put my my feet right on that expense carbon?
Speaker 2:Okay. Turn it on.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Swing the feet. You got it.
Speaker 2:Nice. We
Speaker 1:go.
Speaker 8:Yeah. When you're in there, because you got the center seat, you actually have a lot of room. I mean, the Valkyrie where you're pretty squished Oh. And you're also at an angle. This actually has a lot of headroom.
Speaker 1:When you have a helmet on in the Valkyrie, you you hardly have any
Speaker 3:frame is it?
Speaker 8:You're probably touching a tiny bit. And that seat's almost all the way forward. You got seat controls on your left.
Speaker 2:What's the name in
Speaker 8:there once.
Speaker 2:21 c? What is it?
Speaker 8:So, it stands for twenty first century.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:So, divergence mission statement is build the twenty first century industrial base. Sure. So, this car represents the twenty first century in the vehicle space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can I pull this down for
Speaker 3:Yes?
Speaker 1:Second one c.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. How important are the mean, I imagine Put your foot on the brake. I see. Do we
Speaker 8:have a key in here? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, there we go.
Speaker 3:Oh, baby. I'll see you guys.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So you get a feel for it. You've got your different modes. You've got EV only mode. You've got a track mode.
Speaker 8:You've a sport mode. And you're pulling gears on the steering wheel there. You've got all your controls on the wheel centralized. Cool features, you got some three d printed AC vents even. You got your three d printed speaker grills, you've got the wheel, the center node, and it's a full carbon body, but the full chassis that is printed underneath.
Speaker 8:Can
Speaker 2:we help you? Yeah. Lock them
Speaker 8:in there.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:There you go. Wow.
Speaker 8:It's such a different such a
Speaker 1:different experience actually feeling like
Speaker 2:you're in a cockpit here. Insane. In the green. Yep.
Speaker 1:Man, the the urge to just throw it in reverse.
Speaker 8:Yeah. We should go for a drive. This is America's hyper car.
Speaker 1:The show. Insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How important are the materials? I imagine this door, if you made it out of steel, it'd be incredibly heavy, you couldn't lift it. What what are you using as building materials and how important is that?
Speaker 8:So the entire chassis architecture is what really differentiates the car as well. So when you look at it from optimized system Mhmm. We didn't just optimize rear frame then front frame, we actually built a full vehicle model with our topology software. Okay. And what we're building on the chassis is additively manufactured aluminum Sure.
Speaker 8:Which are actually our own chemistries. Okay. So they have the right strength and durability
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:But also for auto elongation to absorb energy.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:So if you get in a rear impact, you need to have a material that doesn't shear
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Or break.
Speaker 8:Okay. That makes sense. And that's really really hard to get in an additive material. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 8:We had to actually make that aluminum in house. Yeah. The body then is fully carbon fiber. Okay. So you're marrying essentially three d printed aluminums and ink canals Okay.
Speaker 8:With a carbon fiber exterior for aero. You're taking all of your load cases, your main large forces
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Through that additively manufactured chassis and then all your aero load through the carbon And
Speaker 2:then what is what pieces of the cars I mean Michelin tires, you don't make the tires. Yes. What are what else is in the supply chain where you're buying instead of building?
Speaker 8:Yeah. We have great partners in the supply chain. Right? We can't build every piece of this. So you named it tires
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:Infotainment systems.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 8:Right? We've got Apple CarPlay Of course. On there. That's the standard. We have a partnership on our transmission where we actually did part in the design.
Speaker 8:We additively manufacture the housing.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 8:But then someone else cuts the gears Sure.
Speaker 2:For us
Speaker 8:and integrates it. Okay. On the engine side, we design that v eight ground up. Really?
Speaker 1:We actually build that v eight as well. John, did you get a look
Speaker 2:back here? Let's go look at it
Speaker 3:right now.
Speaker 8:On the battery side, we've got there. So almost every system on this car Sure. Is bespoke, either fully engineered and manufactured by Zinger
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And divergent or done in a JV where we have a partner where we've taken a design brief to them, said this has never been done before, will you sign up to do it with us?
Speaker 2:And then this sort of structure, this sort of structure, it looks very organic. Where did that come from? Whose idea was that? Is that someone in CAD? Is there AI involved?
Speaker 2:What was that?
Speaker 8:So that's the computer's idea.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:The designer's idea. So when we talk about divergence process
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Design, print, assemble, the design portion is a fully integrated set of micro services that takes requirements Yep. And turns it into optimal CAD. Okay.
Speaker 2:So you're you're setting parameters. You want Yes. The lightest weight for the most strength Mhmm. With this performance in this volume Mhmm. Because it can't be bigger Yes.
Speaker 2:And then it will go and try all sorts of things Yes. And then you can finally do use additive manufacturing to manufacture the part.
Speaker 8:You got it. So ten years ago we started machine learning Yeah. The basis of modern Yeah. Right? And AI based algorithms and prediction
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:To do a weighted optimization function for designing these parts. Mhmm. Importantly, we simulate the full manufacturing side as well. Mhmm. So once we've designed say this rear cross brace
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And that wing is gonna interface directly onto that point. Oh, just
Speaker 2:clicks right
Speaker 8:in. Yeah. Cross brace Yeah. Is gonna take the arrow load of 5,000 plus pounds onto it. Interesting.
Speaker 8:So you're going to give it that force vector that
Speaker 2:and it just loads and then that Yeah. Just fuses across
Speaker 8:So the whole then you also give the software Yeah. The crash impulse case Yeah. The durability case Yeah. The load cases coming off the Yeah. The road, the vehicle
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:The tires, all into that functional system. Yeah. The software actually then says add and subtract material against those requirements
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Until we hit a Pareto optimal point.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 8:That means it's the lightest weight while meeting those requirements. Yeah. And then the beauty is, it's already simulated for manufacturing. Yeah. So there's no design for manufacturing loop.
Speaker 8:Yeah. We go through our MES, homegrown, and actually make that part and then assemble it with our robotic cell.
Speaker 2:So this is chassis 28 of 80. Yes. So you said there's 16 that are out in the wild already.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:You have 12 or something that are maybe ready to go. Is that right?
Speaker 8:Yes. So there's cars in between. This one's also a special number for us. Sometimes people request the exact number on a vehicle. But we're typically around
Speaker 2:20 cars
Speaker 8:a year.
Speaker 2:These are the records that this car has set specifically?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So this is Laguna Seca and Circle Of Americas which are two of the main Yeah. American iconic tracks. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 8:This is probably our best track in California. Yeah. The beauty about this one is it's outdated. So we just had an epic back and forth with Koenigsegg
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 8:Swedish hyper car maker and we set a one twenty two
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Point three. So beat our previous record by over two seconds, beat their record by almost two seconds That's great. And put a whole new benchmark for Laguna. I love I love the rivalry
Speaker 2:with Christian von Koenigsegg, just settle it on the track. Yeah.
Speaker 8:It's just beautiful. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. It's industrialists for hundreds of years Yeah. In America. I've been building the fastest train, the fastest plane
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Now the fastest car.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there any is there any ambition to one day make make cars for everyday consumers or is it racing and
Speaker 8:Zynga will stay at the tip of the spear. Mhmm. It's all about big R and D budgets Mhmm. Making a car that is a next step forward in terms of consumer experience and therefore it's gotta be expensive. It just has
Speaker 2:to be. Yeah.
Speaker 8:It's like it's the most modern high performance niche
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 8:That does develop systems that then do make their way into more mainstream vehicles, but Divergent is the company that's gonna do, you know, the one day on the chassis technology With partners. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So that tier one supply, the volume game of doing millions of vehicles, that'll come through divergent.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:The tip of the spear, highest performing vehicles
Speaker 2:in
Speaker 8:the world, that'll come through Zinger.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Very cool. Anything else we should know about the car? Should we go sit down inside and talk about business and how things Yeah.
Speaker 8:Let's talk about business This a is I think next step for you all
Speaker 1:is to view right here. Yeah. Michael, you gotta get this view, this shot from this angle is just absolutely insane.
Speaker 2:What
Speaker 1:a beast. Stunning. I see a beast.
Speaker 8:Yeah. That's real functional era.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's The scale of the car is just is is It's wide. Just everything. It's wide, tall.
Speaker 8:Yeah. That front splitter. You can put a lot
Speaker 1:of weight
Speaker 3:on that.
Speaker 2:It has such a presence.
Speaker 8:Give you a quick shot here.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Woah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 9:It's actually functional.
Speaker 2:It's got to.
Speaker 1:Insane.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's go sit down. We'll chat and dig in more. Sure. Are back in the Ultra Dome.
Speaker 2:We'll have you sit right here, and we're back. It's fascinating. I mean, I I I think we hang out long enough. Jordy's eventually gonna browbeat you into doing the McLaren track and eventually making road cars or something. Or or, you know, just like Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's fully road legal. Yeah. Where you
Speaker 1:How how difficult is that process?
Speaker 8:Oh, it's difficult. Yeah. Because we went through this is not an EV car. It's a strong hybrid.
Speaker 3:So it
Speaker 8:has an EV system, but a combustion engine as Yeah. And we went through full California carb emissions compliance on that v eight. Mhmm. Just heard it start Right?
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 8:And that is a difficult process. Okay. Because they're looking at while the car is running, when the car first starts Mhmm. What the evaporation is of fuel or oil Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:In a what they call shed test as well. So there's a huge amount of requirements Mhmm. To actually certify that car. I think the amount of fuel you actually burn in the certification process might not actually make it logical for cars that are this low volume. Oh, interesting.
Speaker 8:You go through that Yeah. And you show that this car is actually designed to be environmentally friendly with that v eight.
Speaker 1:What would you do if you're making a track only version?
Speaker 8:Oh, we would strip out a lot of weight and a lot of the safety monitoring software and systems.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 8:First off, you're talking about all your airbags go, all your passive safety Sure. Environment goes. A lot of electronics that are there for redundancy.
Speaker 2:Do you
Speaker 1:have any that have like
Speaker 2:the full
Speaker 1:roll cage in them or or was the intention just like, hey, we wanna set Road car. Records with Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So road car. Right? Maybe in the future, we'd make a track only car. Sure.
Speaker 8:It would be different Yeah. Almost entirely. That roof design, the carbon a pillars that run all the way across Mhmm. That is rated for a rollover. So you can roll that vehicle and have similar performance in a rollover cage but integrated there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:You don't want a roll cage in a road vehicle
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Because it's a very hard surface in the car. And if you're not harnessed in, you're gonna move more and you're gonna hit your head against it if you get in a crash.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 8:The roll cage on the track where you have the harness on and the helmet makes sense. But the roll cage without the harness and no helmet, it actually is is a major hazard on the road.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk more about the the safety approval, getting the car road legal. Is is there a hurry up and wait element while you're in the queue? There are other cars, and there's a rate limiting factor there. Or is it more a a quick back and forth, but you're making dozens of changes constantly?
Speaker 2:What's the actual process like?
Speaker 8:So it is an iterative process. Mhmm. It is known to be a real headache
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:For certain OEMs Sure. In terms of the timing and attention that they get and how quickly they can iterate.
Speaker 2:And I'm sure if you're, like, Ford and you're like, there's a new Corolla coming or that's Toyota, but there's a new, you know, there's new f one fifty coming every year with a refresh, and we're changing this. They they have a whole system set up. It's it's not it's not as bespoke, so they must have a whole team for it. You sort of have to build that.
Speaker 8:California carbs credit, I think they saw that this was one of the first new OEMs in Yeah. America period. Yeah. And there was a narrative that they wanted to support there as well, and we managed to get their attention
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And our team was able to work with them effectively. Yeah. So I don't know How much are
Speaker 1:you using this as a as part of the sales process when you're pitching Mhmm. Let's say other OEMs to to make parts with you guys? Are you saying like, hey, if you don't believe me, get in the just, like, go for
Speaker 8:Early on, it was like the proof is in the pudding moment. Right? You come to our factory, you see our car, you can drive it. If you're Bugatti or McLaren or Aston Martin, you see that, and that's a huge benefit. Right?
Speaker 8:So we use that a lot early on in the company as a sales tool. Sure. Now in defense, you know, we're hosting anyone from secretary Hagstaff to a CEO of a prime. When they see a company that can integrate a road legal vehicle Yep. And they see that manufacturing process, it just builds a lot of confidence.
Speaker 8:Right? There's a cool narrative. Hagsef love revving that in car app, but there's also a capability narrative, and that systems engineering is proven out through that car.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. How how I mean, I was looking at the your your careers website. You're hiring tons of people. How scaled is the is the manufacturing plant?
Speaker 2:How large is the team? How large is the business? How are you growing these years?
Speaker 8:So we've gone in the last three years from not being a defense focused business and divergent to being a defense focused business. Sure. We're dual use, dual tech. Sure. So we do have our commercial arm.
Speaker 8:The auto business is growing. Yep. Our supply to really the European luxury brands is growing. Okay. But the focus is on defense right now.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Three years ago, we had zero contracts. Today, we're on over 40 active contracts. Wow. And that's what's really unique about Divergent is we're not competing head to head with Androl and Lockheed and Raytheon.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Rather, we're servicing all of the primes. Totally. So you can build this horizontal manufacturing layer as a service to
Speaker 2:all of them. You can
Speaker 8:bet not on one to five programs record, but rather service a 100 programs record over time and be that manufacturing supplier for them. Yeah. We've gone through that journey of first refactoring the company to work on defense, winning our first contracts
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Delivering our first prototypes, flying those, proving the performance of a new technology, and then actually in the last six months, winning our first scale production programs. Mhmm. Now if you come to the facility, you'll see exit rates at around a 100 a month
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Of main bodies for large cruise missile systems. So 80 a month or a 100 a month, it's not high volume for auto, but for our defense landscape
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Making a thousand missiles per year, that's on the high volume side of
Speaker 2:things.
Speaker 8:Totally. That's what Divergence Factory in Torrance is already churning out.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 8:great. Now, we've almost gotten to full capacity on our Torrance facility with those contracts. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're
Speaker 8:starting to look at factory two, three, four, five. That's good. We got multiple states that we're, you know, kind of shopping and partnering with right now. And then also looking at California because it makes sense for especially the startup community here, which are great partners for us to have another manufacturing platform here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What about other applications outside of defense and automotive? Maritime comes to mind. Mhmm. I can imagine a lot of Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That additive manufacturing technology being useful on high speed boats, yachts, I don't know. Yeah. Aviation, planes. We were talking about Harrison Ford crashing Cessnas all day long. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe it needs some more reliable Yeah. Manufacturing. But what what other areas have you at least thought about expansion into? Yeah. The TAM for this system
Speaker 8:Yeah. Is so large, and that's a blessing, but you need to be disciplined in what you address first and second and third. Right now, it's a primary focus on defense. Within that, looking at largely munition systems
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And then looking at torpedoes Yep. And similar structures, but on the the navy application side. Outside of defense, we look to space. Oh, yeah. So we're doing quite a bit of work in space.
Speaker 8:Optimization, mass saving there really matters. So you think about things like satellite buses as we get more and more launch vehicles and they're carrying different payloads into space. What is the structure that essentially attaches those to to the launch vehicle?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. We got several programs ongoing there. And then you look out at diversion over ten years. Really, any metal structure that takes a complex load pass, so has some sort of force that's interacting with should be designed by the platform and manufactured by it. So you think commercial air, you think oil and gas Yep.
Speaker 8:You think mining vehicles. Mhmm. You even think over time as the prices come down enough construction and where can it get into almost the city planning side of of the equation as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:What what is what are you seeing on the hypersonic side? I know a lot of it's under wraps, but Mhmm. We've talked to Castilian and some other folks that are thinking about this. And just broadly, the defense industry has been talking about the hypersonic hypersonic gap Mhmm. Over the the cruise missile.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Are are you excited about that? Are you following that story
Speaker 7:at Absolutely.
Speaker 8:Okay. You know, we're working on multiple hypersonic programs right now, designing primary structure for these vehicles. You know, in terms of narrative or or when I zoom out a notch, you need both. You need the affordable cruise missile that's $200,000 instead of 3,000,000. You also need the hypersonics capability across different classes of hypersonics.
Speaker 8:Okay. And for us, what do we need to be good at at divergent? We need to be great with our material science. Yeah. So we need the right nickel based alloys that can get very hot and still perform.
Speaker 8:So that's different than the aluminums that you saw mostly on the car. Mhmm. We've designed several of those materials. We have commercially available ones. We've got ones that the government has actually contracted us to do a special materials development for a higher performing version of what's commercially available today.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And then we need to be able to print these at scale.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Company like Castilian is really not only about hypersonics, but hypersonics at scale. Yeah. Right? They wanna make a lot of these. Yep.
Speaker 8:They're down the road from us. We wanna help them make a lot
Speaker 2:of them. That's cool. Talk about what's unique about additive manufacturing in aluminum, nickel. I think, you know, most people will be familiar with, like, three d printed plastics. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But is it is it similar to just soldering lines of solder and just building up slowly? Like, what what
Speaker 3:else is going It's the
Speaker 8:most advanced way to make a metal part. Yeah. And it's the most controllable way as well. Okay. It's not really related to, in terms of technology, three d printing of plastics.
Speaker 8:Okay. Right? Maybe the narratives are tied a bit together.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not like push through a nozzle like a
Speaker 8:We do something called, powder bed fusion. So we have a powdered aluminum or Inconel Mhmm. In a build chamber. That build chamber has no oxygen in it. It's got nitrogen instead, so it's nonreactive in there.
Speaker 8:And then you've got high powered lasers overhead. Yeah. And those high powered lasers essentially melt laser weld one layer of that part at a time. Sure. You put a new layer of powder on top and you laser melt that layer to the layer below.
Speaker 3:So if
Speaker 8:you think about a part, think about it standing vertical
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And think
Speaker 8:about it as a layer cake. Maybe 5,000 layers and you're laser welding with those lasers every single layer, layer by layer Yeah. And you're getting full data at every single layer. So maybe that one section of a defense product is 7,000 layers.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:I get 7,000 layers of information To know on that bill. Right? So this is
Speaker 2:the most controllable
Speaker 8:Yeah. Process Mhmm. In terms of in process monitoring. It's the most advanced way to make a metal part, and you also end up being able to make exactly the net shape you want. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Because when you have a cross section, you can do the exterior and the interior.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And you have full control of that geometry. You vacuum away your unused powder Yep. You end up with your net shape. So in terms of waste and efficiency of the process, you can get something that runs at a higher OEE when we talk about manufacturing efficiency.
Speaker 3:Okay. And you can
Speaker 8:get something that actually performs better. So when we talk, you know, application focus, if you're a missile system
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:We typically are seeing about 30% lighter structures while hitting the requirements. And more importantly, we're able to functionally integrate that structure with the fuel tank, with the avionics mounting, with that whole complex system. We're usually increasing fuel volume by about 30 to 40%. Okay.
Speaker 2:So if
Speaker 8:you're a missile and you get 40% more fuel volume Game changer. That's a real game changer. Yep. And that's what the customer looks at Divergent to do is, one, get the best engineered product, and that's gonna change in a positive way the performance of your vehicle. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And then two, scale the manufacturing. And that second part is where in the modern age of defense where we are looking for volume is where there's a big gap right now. And that is part of the reason why Divergent has gotten one, so much business, but two, so much attention as well, is it's starting to be viewed as our manufacturing layer. Right? Our mission statement ten years ago, build the twenty first century industrial base is actually starting to happen
Speaker 1:now.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Last question for me. The the pieces that seemed clearly made in your factory with additive manufacturing, they looked white. They didn't look like metal. Have they been coated?
Speaker 2:What's the post processing once you make a
Speaker 8:Yeah. So our asprin aluminum comes out almost like a silvery white color. Okay. So what you're seeing is probably some of that.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:But we do do coatings.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:Especially on the defense side, we have a fully automated anodized line. Okay. So it's essentially a process where you clean the part, dip the part, and then one of those stations, one of those tanks is actually electronically charged. So when you're anodizing, you're essentially plating that part with a certain coating
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:That makes it more corrosive or more resistant to corrosion. Got it. Okay. For navy applications Right. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Water moisture. Depending on the system, once it's fully integrated, if it's a stealth system, there might be a special paint that goes over top. There might be a gap and flush process over it. And Divergent will either do that or partner with the prime to do it.
Speaker 2:At least prep the material so that it can go get the special paint that might be classified or Exactly. You're handing out.
Speaker 1:Last question from my side. I wanna understand the how local kind of politicians and how like, what's your relationship like? How does Torrance think about kind of neo primes and and overall building up the manufacturing base in Torrance?
Speaker 8:Yeah. We've had a strong relationship with the city, which is part of the reason we've been able to get fast permits for our factory. You can think about something like automated anodized. That's usually something that can take some years to stand up. We've been able to build relationships that allowed that to accelerate.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. Are there states that are lower cost and probably even faster for permitting and manufacturing? Absolutely. Yeah. In terms of engineering headquarters, Los Angeles or the greater Yeah.
Speaker 8:You know, Southern California area is very special because we have the environment to create hardware and test hardware, and we've got some of the brightest people in the world all centralized. And now we have a VC community and general, I'd say, growth funding community that is focused in this area as well. So Divergent will stay headquartered here. Yeah. We will go through some serious scale production here as well.
Speaker 8:Yeah. But over time, you're gonna see factories across all the states in The US, and some of those factories will be at a lower cost basis than the ones here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very cool.
Speaker 2:It's so awesome. I love it. I it's just everything about this company is so fun. Congratulations on all the progress. And, seriously, thank you for bringing the car.
Speaker 2:What a treat. What a special moment.
Speaker 1:We've been wanting to do a TPP on track day. Yeah. You'll be one of the first to know. Yeah. You gotta bring
Speaker 2:it out. Yeah. You can come out and smoke us all. Absolutely do lap laps around us. But thank you so much for taking the time Yeah.
Speaker 2:Come on the show. This is an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thank you
Speaker 2:for the update. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm sure we'll be talking much more over this year as you roll out everything. Good to see you both. So great.
Speaker 2:We will talk to you soon. Yep. Good to see Have a good rest of your day.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the drive by.
Speaker 2:I will tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we have our Lambda lightning round starting in just a few minutes. We have Andy Mccune from Cosmos coming on first, then FabFitFun, the co the co founder and CEO of that company has launched a venture fund. He's coming on.
Speaker 2:And Aaron Katz, co the founder and CEO of Clickhouse is coming on. And it sounds like we have Andy in the restream waiting room. So let's kick off our Lambda Lightning round and let him in to the TBPN Ultradome.
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:How are you doing?
Speaker 9:What's up, guys?
Speaker 2:How are Good to see you. Welcome to show. Time on the show.
Speaker 1:Green too. Yes. Great sign
Speaker 2:of respect. We love green and matching
Speaker 9:racing jacket not on you guys.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Had a green hypercar. Yeah. We were doing a quick tour of.
Speaker 2:Anyway, first time on the show. Please kick us off with an introduction of yourself and the company.
Speaker 9:Yeah. For sure. I'm I'm Andy McHughan. We're based here in New York. Cool.
Speaker 9:20 person team building building the new home for inspiration on the Internet. Visual search engine just announced our series a today. Super exciting. $15,000,000 round.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Fired up. Congratulations. Yeah. There's so so much to talk about right now and it's such an interesting time to be building this company because Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's some there's just like an explosion of content. Yeah. You get a pretty picture now. You don't need a you don't need a camera. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anybody can generate one from their own home. Why don't maybe we start and you can give us kind of the history of the company, what the initial
Speaker 2:Maybe you can go back further pre about the previous company you worked on?
Speaker 9:Yeah. For sure. Yeah. In 2017, I I founded a company called Unfold. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So we are like a mobile content creation tool, kind of Canva adjacent. Ended up selling that company to Squarespace, did a few years there, leading creator product strategy, and I've been working on Cosmos for the last four years or so now. And yeah, I'm I'm a really creative person, always working on a lot of different creative projects, and I very much grew up on Tumblr back in the day, and ever since then, I've been an obsessive collector and curator of things on the Internet. Mhmm. Always just saving things to a million folders on my desktop and folders on my phone, things just in all of my different bookmarking folders on different platforms.
Speaker 9:And so Cosmos just started out as me wanting to build a place where I could bring all of these references into one home, where everything would be tagged by AI so I could quickly search and reservice anything that I had saved. I wanted to be able to work with collaborators in these different projects. So, yeah. I mean, just started out as as building a side project for myself, as everything I ever built has kind of started out as. Started getting into the hands of my most creative friends, and people were like, this is awesome.
Speaker 2:And so were those friends the ones that were uploading the original content? Were you scraping the Internet to bring on the first and, like, seed the community? Like, where was the actual content coming from?
Speaker 9:Yeah. We we weren't scraping anything. It's always come from the users.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 9:We have great importing tools, and people can upload links from a lot of different platforms and around the play around the Internet. So, yeah, all of the content is is seeded by the community Mhmm. Which has grown in a really, really beautiful way. We have tens of millions of images on platform now Mhmm. An amazing global search, all of the recommendation layer that you would expect from a product
Speaker 2:like And what were the early adopters looking for? Is it more like because I I you know, when I think about image search, I think about people that are doing home renovations, but also designers that are looking for inspiration for clothing or web design. There are some people that just, sit there and scroll just to enjoy their favorite images like you enjoy your favorite books. What were the early drivers of growth?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I think, you know, we we amassed a waitlist of a few 100,000 folks before we launched the product. And I think if you look at the cohorts of users that were coming in really early, it was, you know, designers across every discipline. We're talking interior designers, architects, graphic designers, brand designers, photographers, folks like this Mhmm. Which really helped seed such an amazing, you know, original corpus of content.
Speaker 9:But really where we're seeing a lot of the growth come from now is sort of this, you know, gen z wave. You know, I call them kind of the next generation of Tumblr kid. Sure. You know, they they love to mood board for fun, know. Maybe they're not saving typographical references on a day to day basis because, you know, they need it for their client work, but maybe they're just dreaming up a version of themselves that they aspire to be.
Speaker 9:Cool. And they want to surround themselves with beautiful things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then how is how have you been grappling with the AI generation, image generation boom for you started the company four years ago. It's pretty much pre AI content essentially. Now it's indistinguishable. What is what what's the journey been like
Speaker 1:And there's so much pressure on each platform to Yeah. Take a stance. Right now, when you look at most of the platforms, the stance is like AI content is welcome here. We may tagged. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We may try to tag it. Yeah. But it's being harder and
Speaker 2:harder lot of platforms, you just have to search. Okay. I only wanna see images before 2022. And and it's like almost like an art like an archive that can be really good. But, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, how we just how have you been processing it?
Speaker 9:Yeah. For sure. I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing a lot of backlash within the ecosystem against a lot of other platforms where AI generated content is kind of proliferating all of the feeds. And, you know, people are engaging with stuff that they don't even know is AI generated content. And maybe they search the thing and then they click into it and they see that it's labeled by AI and that they find that really frustrating.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And you know, we're definitely we're definitely growing a lot of users now that we kind of consider like refugees from this. Mhmm. You know, we really wanna be a platform that champions human creativity and human created content. Now, that's not to say that we're drawing a hard stance against AI generated content, but I think that it's really important that people are able to decide what they want to see.
Speaker 9:And so we've done, you know, what some of these other platforms have have done as well is every image that gets uploaded on platform, we're running it through, you know, multiple different algorithms to detect if that is AI generated. Mhmm. And so every user has settings within their profile where they can choose to show or hide AI generated content.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Interesting. And then How
Speaker 1:confident are you that you're catching all of it?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, it's a it's an uphill battle. Right? I mean, it keeps getting better. You have to keep retraining the models.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And it's only gonna get more difficult. Yeah. So, you know, I I think that it's only a matter of time before it's, you know, pretty difficult to
Speaker 2:some AI models I've noticed where I will upload an image, ask it to do something, and it kinda just spits out the exact same image or maybe it just, like, adds a piece of text. And it feels like it didn't actually run a new diffusion model. It just sort of used some tool to, like, layer over text. And it's like, well, it's kind of just acting as an agentic Photoshop at that point. It's not really creating an AI image.
Speaker 2:Like, all of the details and fingers are the same because it's literally the same pixels that it's just using. And so to that account, yeah, it's gonna be all hairy. I'm interested to know how you think about for you pages, algorithmic feeds versus search and being a like, a more of a search engine. Is that line blurring? What are the important trade offs?
Speaker 2:What do you like and dislike about algorithm design?
Speaker 9:Yeah. For sure. So we have a for you page on on Cosmos that, you know, learns your taste and learns your interest as you could say things. I think it's important that you have something like that so people have a new vector that they can discover content through. Know, what's really interesting is the search problem is actually very similar to the for you problem.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. Especially when you get into the world of serving people personalized search. Right? So you train your for you, you know, we have an idea of what your tastes and and your aesthetic leanings are. And then when you search something, you're actually just adding that keyword over sort of this vectorized database of, you know, visual aesthetic that you've already identified with.
Speaker 9:So the problems are actually very related and intertwined. Think one thing that we've done that's really interesting is we've started developing in house aesthetic prediction models. So we've actually been using all of our own data, user data, user uploaded content, and we've been training models that understand kind of like what good versus bad looks like. And we're using we're using these aesthetic predictions to loosely re rank our search results in our for you pages to try to keep, you know, the slop off of the platform. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:You know, we believe
Speaker 1:Slop wars.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're deep in the slop wars. Frontline soldier here in the foxhole. Salute your your your service.
Speaker 9:Think like we believe that your outputs are a reflection of your inputs. And so it's like very philosophically important that we're we're feeding people high quality inputs because you know, so many creative projects start with the mood boarding phase. Mhmm. And so if the inputs are going to become the output, it's really important that, you know, we're we're giving people a place where they can find the highest quality things.
Speaker 2:What's been the growth loop for you? What's been the key to growth? I know that you've been, you know, featured by Apple as one of the top 25 apps for 2025. You're 500,000 followers on Instagram. But, is there a traditional, like, referral flow?
Speaker 2:What, what what are you using from, the web two point o boom era versus Mhmm. Viral social playbook? What's been the big growth engine? Have you had to just run ads? Like what what's worked?
Speaker 9:Yeah. We haven't been running ads. I mean, it's really been organic up until this point. Yeah. You know, we have an early like invite friend flow, was pretty successful for us.
Speaker 9:I think that that's not as successful as it was a few years ago when we ran it. But I think, know, the nature of Cosmos is really collaborative. Mhmm. You know, you you start what we call a cluster. It's like a collection.
Speaker 9:You start a you start a cluster. You start inviting, you know, your collaborators to those. The experience gets so much more valuable. Mhmm. And we're seeing really high density as well within some of the best creative teams in the world.
Speaker 9:I mean, have, you know, hundreds of users on platform on nike.com emails. We have, you know, teams that Chanel using Cosmos, teams that Apple using Cosmos. Yeah. So that density within creative teams has been really, really powerful for us.
Speaker 1:Where monetization? I feel like you're gonna be anti ad just because as soon as you have an ad, it's hard to influence like, okay. You can't say like, well, you can only serve pretty ads.
Speaker 2:$50,000 you can post the sloppiest AI slop with six fingers, but you're it's we're gonna charge you a pretty penny. No. No. I I wanna know the real monetization strategy.
Speaker 9:Yeah. For sure. So we're we're not monetizing yet. I mean, we have a premium subscription right now, but it's demoted within the product. Sure.
Speaker 9:I think, you know, there there will be a lot that that we have yet to reveal. Mhmm. But I think that where we're going is, you know, going deeper on sort of focusing on those those creative teams that are using Cosmos, and how can we better serve those folks. Mhmm. And then we're also starting to to build into commerce as well.
Speaker 9:So we launched a commerce pilot, last year. Mhmm. And you know, you can imagine, you know, we're running hundreds of thousands of searches a day right now on the platform. And if someone searches for brown leather couch, they're probably looking to buy a brown leather couch. That makes sense.
Speaker 9:So how can we
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. How can we create a compelling commerce experience that doesn't feel like we're trying to force products down your throat? Yeah. But it's really commerce through through inspiration.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's like aesthetic first, taste first as opposed to, like, feature set price. Like, all the filters that you see when you're on Google Shopping, it's a comp like, those are probably gonna be way lower in the funnel than the aesthetic that
Speaker 1:you Yeah. Shoppable mood board, you can think of people doing inspiration inspiration for Yeah. You know, interior design Totally. Their wardrobe, all this stuff. It's like that's that's a high intent moment when somebody's trying to
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you can you explain a little bit more about the aesthetic trends that are popular? I I I've seen these different, like like, phrases used to describe how certain people describe their whole aesthetic. Like, what what is how would you describe the communities that have formed around these, like, modern sub niche aesthetics?
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's a it's a really interesting question. I mean, we launched a new feature today, so we gave the the profile a really big refresh. Mhmm. Historically, everything that you saved had to go within a cluster.
Speaker 9:Okay. The the release that we put out today Mhmm. Gives you a core feed of images that sit at the forefront of the profile Mhmm. Which is really akin to like your Tumblr blog back in It's the really like, you know, a snapshot of your taste and and what you're into. We're starting to go really deep on, you know, the datas and the trends that we're seeing on the platform between, you know, what people are searching, what clusters are they creating, all of those sorts of things.
Speaker 9:And we're gonna start putting out trend reports, which we're really excited for. And we've started sort of seeding these into our newsletter, which has been really, really fun. That's great. That's cool. But, yeah, it's been really cool to see these different sort of niche aesthetics blossom.
Speaker 9:I think historically, a lot of the usage has been just around, again, the core use cases that we are talking about, and, like, graphic design, interior design, whatever. But if you think about something like Tumblr, right, there was, like, fandoms that were popping off and, you know, like, emo aesthetics and culture. Right? So we're starting to see some of these pop up, but it's a little early to tell. But we're really excited to start publishing these more publicly.
Speaker 2:Okay. Last question for your personal aesthetic. The Pantone color of the year for 2026 is Cloud Dancer. It's a soft, lofty white that symbolizes calm, peace, and fresh starts. Underrated or overrated?
Speaker 9:You know, I'm I'm a neutral palette guy, but I know it was really, know, contentious within within the creative community. I think we could have gone a little bit more creative with it, but I'm never gonna hate on a neutral palette. Okay. This is pretty out of this is pretty
Speaker 2:out
Speaker 9:pocket for me.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. So it sounds like Codancer might be working its way to It's a good name. Into your cosmos.
Speaker 1:Spooky in the x chat says, how do you avoid creating an automatic house aesthetic if you're algorithmically filtering slop? Any thoughts there? Like Yeah. Is this is part is part of this like Yeah. It is so
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like a lot of
Speaker 1:generated that somebody might have like Yeah. You're not trying to like have an overarching aesthetic other Yeah. Than like, somebody could come on and create a bunch of clusters for an aesthetic that that is not aligned with your personal taste
Speaker 2:or taste like Cosmo. The art station look became the mid journey look. And then now that just looks like the AI art look. But, you know, what if you're actually just into, like, you know, matte painting? Like, what you're gonna get filtered maybe.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I think, like, the point of the aesthetic prediction model is Mhmm. Is less to pedal what we think is good, and it's more to set a bottom bound on what we think is bad. Mhmm. And so that bar is set pretty low.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. But it's it's a great question. You know, we're continuing to retrain the aesthetic the aesthetic models that we have. And we're kind of going through this right now where we're trying to widen the aperture of that to service more folks and and and and to reach a broader audience. So I don't think there's a clean answer to it other than just like, you know, continuing to iterate on your model and custom into production and and measure and and learn from there.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come hop on the show. Great to meet you and good luck. Congratulations. Great to see you.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to
Speaker 1:you soon. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:The New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And with that, we will oh, you can hear I hope you can hear it.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's coming
Speaker 2:through The 21 c is fired up. That v eight is roaring. And we have Michael from
Speaker 1:Medicine.
Speaker 2:FabFitFun and Deep thirty three in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him in the TVP and UltraDog. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 11:Hey, guys. Doing great. Good to be here.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for hopping on. Give us the news.
Speaker 1:I wanna ring the doll. This jacket is fantastic.
Speaker 2:You have news for us.
Speaker 11:I mean, you guys always dressed to impress and I didn't wanna let you down. So incredible.
Speaker 2:Thank you. You raised some money. How much did you raise?
Speaker 11:We've got a $150,000,000 fund. We've closed Oh, there we
Speaker 2:go. Let's go. $150,000,000 fund. What what what what what submarkets are you most interested in? What strategy?
Speaker 2:What stages? How are you thinking about focusing your investing work over the fund life cycle?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So we are a deep tech fund
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Focused on The US Israel corridor. Mhmm. So we'll be investing across US and Israel. Mhmm. And so, you know, what's what's unique especially about the the kind of the Israel ecosystem focus is there isn't a a deep tech fund, let's say, in the mold of what's, you know, an eclipse, a deep CVC, a luxe capital.
Speaker 11:Sure. Focus on that ecosystem, and we just think there's enormous opportunities.
Speaker 2:What are the what what are the great recruiting hubs for entrepreneurs in defense in Israel. We've heard about Talpiot and a few other groups. Where are you finding talent? Are they, you know, ex founders themselves, repeat founders? Where are you sourcing deals from?
Speaker 11:So interestingly, actually, the former commander of Telpeot is actually one of my partners in the fund.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 11:For those of you who aren't familiar with Telpeot, know, there's a there's a lot of different elite units in in in the IDF, but Telpeot is the unit of the physicists. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was
Speaker 11:about the the IDF made to to really train physicists and and combine that with the defense industry. Mhmm. So we do we we work closely with with, you know, the the different groups. Another of my partners is from eighty two hundred Mhmm. Which many of you might be familiar with is kind of the cyber unit within the IDF.
Speaker 11:Yeah. We have tentacles into into those alumni groups and networks as well as a lot of the institutions of higher learning, so Weitzman Institute, Technion, etcetera. Sure. You know, we're we're kind of I'm I'm actually the the only non Israeli on the team of five partners. Yeah.
Speaker 11:So we're deep we're deep in that ecosystem
Speaker 1:partners. That's cool. Out out the gates is sort of the the the counter position pretty squarely against a solo
Speaker 2:Solo GP. Yeah. There are lot of people that were doing that. Yeah. How'd you how'd you all meet and what was the what was the concept between the maybe larger partnership at this phase?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So so we have a what what we call an expert first model that I you know, my main my main code GP is Lior Prosor, who has been a venture capitalist for fifteen years. Okay. Decided to start a new platform because of the opportunities we thought were emanating specifically in deep tech and out of the Israeli ecosystem. But to do deep tech right, you actually have to have, you know, significant capabilities to go deep on the technical side to have people who are, you know, domain experts.
Speaker 11:And so three of our other partners are actually domain experts in the categories that we're most bullish on. One being quantum computing, the second being AI infrastructure, a third being energy, and then we also have a venture partner and advisor in the robotics side.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about point solutions versus defense platform companies? Are you looking for a multi product defense firm that can build sensor towers and drones and submarines? Or do you want to invest in a bunch of different teams that are doing small small like, product bets, see what works, and then maybe scale out of that? Like, what's the current meta on the ground in Israel?
Speaker 11:Yes. So interestingly, although, you know, defense is an important part of the ecosystem and shoots off a lot of the innovation that we are investing into. We don't think of ourselves as a defense fund. In in fact, we're not focused on kind of kinetic battlefield
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 11:Focused companies. Although, a byproduct of the types of companies and technologies that we're investing in
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 11:Oftentimes do have defense ramifications Yeah. And capabilities on the battlefield. Yeah. We we just think that the commercial opportunities of those technologies when they extend beyond defense kind of specific companies are are much bigger. They can have much bigger outcomes.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. So there's a lot of dual use in the in the types of things that we're looking at. And, you know, what we're looking for is just, you know, insanely capable founding teams. Really groundbreaking kind of technology and IP and enormous end markets. And, you know, when when you look at the kind of the confluence of things of that that Israel has in terms of the defense industry, the institutions of higher learning, the concentration of elite scientists, RF industry, silicon industry, optics industry, etcetera.
Speaker 11:There's really, you know, the only other geography in the world that has that sort of concentration of those types of mixes of assets is really California, and you see what California produces. So we think Israel is kind of this looming deep tech giant. Yeah. In a lot of ways, the ecosystem there in deep tech is kind of where cyber security was maybe a decade ago in Israel. Sure.
Speaker 11:And now it's this powerhouse that's producing these, you know, insane outcomes. We think of the next decade, the the deep tech outcomes from Israel are gonna be right up there.
Speaker 1:Where did the name come from?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 11:So I think deep speaks for itself. You know, one, we go deep and we're focused on deep tech. And '33 is actually it has a mystical connotation in Judaism. It's the it's the day of Lag Baomer, which is a a Jewish holiday where the the kind of the depth of the the hidden secrets of the universe were were revealed for the first time. And, you know, that's what we really think our founders are doing.
Speaker 11:Our founders are companies and kind of the mission of the firm is to go into the tech technological and scientific frontiers. And we think of that as a way of of revealing hidden truths. The the type of work that that that these companies are doing, what we're trying to build is really frontier tech and and new innovation that, you know, moves moves the world forward and moves our understanding of the world forward.
Speaker 2:That's cool. Last question for me. Energy, do you put that in the deep tech realm? Are there particular areas within energy that you're interested in? Solar, nuclear, wind, anything?
Speaker 11:Yeah. It's a great question. Absolutely. We actually have two energy companies already under under our belt. We, you know, in in particular, kind of our thesis on energy
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Is is where the point of production and the point of consumption are brought together. Sure. So where can you create unique types of energy outputs on location, on-site? So for instance, one if company we haven't announced is is is able to produce carbon fuels, carbon based fuels out of a laboratory. And, you know, so and and there's a scale up model around that that we think is extremely compelling.
Speaker 11:You know, the the name of the game for a lot of, you know, US security interest, Israel security interest, the shared interest between the two of them is this kind of supply chain resilience. Mhmm. Think you we saw the president speaking at Davos and and even, you know, describing maybe, you know, the the kind of the the counter swing of globalization is here, and that means people having these these capabilities on-site being less relying on any specific partner and trade for their national security. And so that that ability to to bring things on-site becomes incredibly important.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Next time you join, you can join from Tel Aviv. Yeah. I'm assuming you're are you calling in from LA right now?
Speaker 11:I'm actually calling in from New York. Okay. I'm here. It's Deep thirty three. Know, we're across LA, Tel Aviv and New York.
Speaker 11:The team all came together. Cool. Know, announce the fund and and do some critical work together.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Amazing. Well, I'm sure you'll be back soon. Yeah. Congrats.
Speaker 1:Thanks fun together. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Thanks. Goodbye. CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.
Speaker 2:CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Up next, we have Aaron Katz. He's the co founder and CEO of ClickHouse. He'll be joining in just a minute. In the meantime, let's head over to the timeline. Elon Musk has confirmed that he's unhappy with the Twitter algorithm.
Speaker 2:Data hazard said, the Twitter algo has gone to hell. I want to again see obscure technical posts from outside my follows, not this cornucopia of low IQ rage slop. That's interesting coinage. Elon chimed in and said, I agree. Sigh.
Speaker 2:So that's the thing. Anytime that there's a bad day on the timeline, bad week on the timeline, I feel like they're pretty aggressive about just mixing it up. I don't know. You might not like the new thing, but it's gonna be different.
Speaker 1:Commands see.
Speaker 2:See some doing stuff. And there's been some fantastic deep fakes of Elon Musk as the farmer from Babe, Pig in the City, looking at the slop and being sad. So fun day on the timeline. Good that there will be some changes Anyway, without further ado, we have Aaron Katz from Plethke House. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for hopping on the show. Good to meet you. How's your year going so far?
Speaker 10:Well, the calendar year is behind us, but our fiscal year is, about to finish the end of this month, and it's going really well. We got, you know, whatever, eight or nine days left, and, you know, we're off to a off to a good start to finish the year in the fiscal quarter and get the new year, up and running February.
Speaker 2:What's the theme of 2026 for the company? Is it just more AI? It feels like AI is so obvious, but also you you what else are you gonna focus on?
Speaker 10:Well, you know, ClickHouse has been a back end database to a lot of agentic workflows Mhmm. Over the past couple years even before the chat GPT moment. We're being used by Lovable, Cursor, Anthropic, OpenAI. Pretty much every leading AI company right now is using Cluck House in some sort of capacity. So but it's just not AI companies.
Speaker 10:I mean, we're the back end to technologies like Ramp, for example. You're a sponsor, if you talk to Eric. We power most of the analytical experiences if you're a Ramp customer. And so it's just kind of doubling down on what's gotten us here. It's a very large surface area that we're going after and just kind of broadening the competitive landscape.
Speaker 2:Have there been any challenges on on actually scaling the business from an infrastructure size? You're at a scale where many AI companies are struggling with data centers, GPU poor. How has the actual build versus buy decision changed over the last few years? How infrastructure has side of the business changed?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Well, scalability is one of ClickHouse's strengths and always I has mean, we've got you just talked about Elon's. Many of Elon's cost companies are using, ClickHouse. Tesla is a a great example of that, where they're ingesting a billion events per second into ClickHouse. And there just isn't another database in the world
Speaker 1:I think that you can install this data set up for those not using ClickHouse.
Speaker 2:That Yeah. Just tell us who's not a customer and then it'll be quicker.
Speaker 10:Fair enough. I mean, you just kind of get your head around the volume of data that these LLMs are generating and the ability to ingest that in an efficient way to be able to store and analyze that, you know, ClickHouse really shines. So scalability is something that we really promote and our customers talk about as one of the unique characteristics of ClickHouse.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about just walking through the ladder of different analytic suites and analytic functions and and just case studies that can actually that are best practiced today. I mean, people are familiar with, you know, like big data, MapReduce, you know, count a bunch of things across a bunch of databases. We're in a much more modern era. What are you seeing companies do that's unique, surprising, interesting or uniquely enabled by ClickHouse?
Speaker 10:Yes. You mentioned MapReduce or any sort of kind of batch oriented processing. It's all moving towards real time. And Ramp is a great example of that. If you're a user or a customer of Ramp and you want to run analytics on spend patterns inside of your company, you're not going to wait two to five seconds for that dashboard to render or that graph to update or the report to produce results.
Speaker 10:You expect to see those in milliseconds. And so there's just this broad shift from an analytical perspective to real time experiences. You batch processing, you know, even waiting, you know, three to five seconds for any sort of dashboard to refresh is just an eternity. And so that's a big pull to why people are moving towards ClickHouse.
Speaker 1:You're oh, sorry. Jordan? Yeah. Wanted I wanted to ask about the engineering culture. Last week, we were at a dinner and somebody was telling me about I don't I I'm I'll I'll kinda mix up some of the details, but they were telling me about, like, the an investor was going through the diligence process with ClickHouse and Click you you guys had shared, like, that that they couldn't believe how, like, how few engineers had created some of the early technology, and they just honestly didn't believe it.
Speaker 1:So I wanted to ask about kind of the early engineering culture and and how that's evolved and and and what you guys are doing on the talent side that has allowed you to, you know, work with so many of these, you know, massive important companies?
Speaker 10:I mean, I love that question, and I don't get it often enough. The engineering team at ClickHouse, the broader community behind ClickHouse, but the creators and the committers that are part of our company are the best engineers that I've ever worked with. And I've been in the industry for quite some time. I know you've had Marc Benioff on your show several times. I spent twelve years at Salesforce.
Speaker 10:It had an incredible engineering culture. The team that we've assembled here is specifically in infrastructure software is the best in the world. And you're right. It was a very small team of primarily Russian engineers inside of a company called Yandex. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Which was commonly referred to as the Google of Russia that actually created ClickHouse originally. My cofounder Alexei Milavidov, who lives in Amsterdam, is the one that actually named it. It's short for ClickStream Data Warehouse. And so he was thinking about the data warehouse use case when he created the database itself and then made the brave decision to open source it in 2016. And that's essentially where you just expose your source code to the world, and then anybody can adopt and deploy the technology with no attribution to the creators of the software without any sort of commercial relationship.
Speaker 10:And it was a small team. It was a dozen engineers, who were the primary committers that created this incredibly powerful feature rich database. And it's a total joy to work with this group. They're all in Holland, in The Netherlands now, all part of our company, and continue to advance the project. And then we've built a managed service that runs in the cloud called Clickhouse Cloud that they're also contributing to.
Speaker 10:And that's the primary business model. And this is a managed service that runs on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft infrastructure. And then in Asia, primarily in China, we have a partnership with Alibaba.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about the way that developers and teams are selecting database back ends, data storage products in the age of agentic coding. I feel like we talked to a lot of folks who they go to an agentic coding solution. They say, I wanna build this type of application. I wanna build, you know, some custom piece of software. And the database choice is sort of made for them by the by the coding agent.
Speaker 2:And and this feels like it's hyper relevant at the vibe coding, the the DIY hack project level. But is this something on your radar where you think that in a few years, maybe it's already happening, how you show up in LLM search results and how how the different AI agent coding models feel about ClickHouse will be important to your business?
Speaker 10:Well, Anthropic spoke at our event last year in San Francisco, so did OpenAI and Tesla. And Anthropic discovered ClickHouse by asking Claude what they should be using for observability. And Claude said you should be using ClickHouse. And I had a call with the CEO of a very large fintech company in Europe last week. And he said every LLM we ask what we should be using for this new real time analytics product we're building suggests ClickHouse.
Speaker 10:And so, you know, fortunately, a lot of people are turning to these LLM's for guidance on what technologies they should be adopting. And I think as everybody knows, like, IT decision making has been completely turned on its head from kind of a tops down C level mandate, you're going to use Oracle, you're going to use IBM, now to a developer led evaluation. And open source creates such a fast path for a developer who's building an agentic application to deploy experience, experiment with technology without any sort of vendor relationship. They can actually push it into production for some of these agentic applications without any sort of vendor relationship. Open source is completely disrupting, you know, how these LLM providers and enterprises are deploying these applications.
Speaker 10:And we made an acquisition last week that we announced on Friday alongside our financing that we're super excited about. It's a company out of Berlin called Langfuse. And they have built an industry leading LLM observability application so that now enterprises can observe the types of experiences their users are developing on these LLM, applications.
Speaker 11:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Very cool. How are how are you processing, all the chaos in SaaS right now, the sell off broadly, the industry's transition you know, you know, went through, you know, couple decades where
Speaker 2:A big question about the shift from seats to consumption or or performance result Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's so many there's so many, I feel like, questions Yeah. Is how much of a threat are are new. You know, you you probably laugh when people say, like, oh, I made this database with the prompts and you're like, okay. Well, you're missing, like, you know, the the Ninety hundred hundred other features that, you know, an enterprise is really gonna care about. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:After spending, you know, more than a decade at Salesforce Salesforce and then running ClickHouse, I'm curious what your point of view is.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I you know, John mentioned this move from a seat based model to consumption or usage based, which infrastructure isn't that unique. I mean, it's been around for quite some time. Like, our customers simply pay for what they use, which is a combination typically of storage and compute. And these are very kind of AI intensive applications.
Speaker 10:And what's unique about our service is that it automatically scales up and down. So you don't need to provision all of the compute that you otherwise would because a lot of these analytical workloads are quite kind of spiky in nature and you want the application to be able to idle during periods of inactivity, for example. And so I do think that, you know, these traditional seat based although I think we should separate like traditional business applications like Salesforce and Workday from kind of infrastructure software, which is much more of kind of the plumbing of the Internet and the stuff that you don't see necessarily when you look at a mobile app or you look at a business app or a consumer app, it's a lot of the processing that occurs behind the scenes is primarily where we exist. I'll give you an example is we where I would historically use some sort of BI reporting to build a graph or a chart to show me how the business is performing, build me a bar chart that shows revenue growth or build me a stack bar chart that shows regional revenue distribution, things like that. And I'd go to some data analyst and they'd go and find the source data and they'd spend a week pulling this together and we'd have like multiple reviews.
Speaker 10:I now simply ask Anthropix. We've integrated Anthropix, you know, Claude, I think it's 4.5. Yeah. Their latest model with our own MCP server and then a Clickhouse cloud service that has all of our customers' not our customers' data, but like our customers' use of our service. And I can ask that prompt like build me a bar chart that shows these dimensions and it builds it in like five seconds.
Speaker 10:And just cost me 20¢ that single prompt. And that simple semantic search is generating like dozens of SQL queries. All of those SQL queries are all being stored in ClickHouse. And if you think about the characteristics of these agentic experiences, like, number one requirement is latency. They have to be low latency in terms of the interactivity between the text prompt where you whether it's ChatGPT or anything else where you put in that query and then the database itself that's actually storing the data that's providing the response.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's fascinating how much of a global company ClickHouse is, the Alibaba partnership, the Russia history with Yandex. We were reading a post about selling software in Japan and how the Japan software buyer often will want to read a lot of documentation and details before jumping on a call with a sales associate. Does that match with your reality in Japan? What what can you tell us about the difference of buyer across different different countries that you've experienced throughout your career?
Speaker 2:Like what's the key to global growth broadly?
Speaker 10:Yes. It's a great question. So half of our employees are outside of The United States. We employ people in 22 different countries. Half of our customers are outside of North America.
Speaker 10:Half of our revenue comes from outside of The US. So the company is extremely diverse, internationally. I had the good fortune in 2005, so twenty one years ago, Marc Benioff asked me to move to Singapore. And I spent four years helping Salesforce expand across the Asia Pacific region. And at the time, Japan, I believe, was the second largest country behind The US, ahead of The UK, Germany, France in terms of revenue contribution.
Speaker 10:I don't think I could be quoted on that because I'm not necessarily true. It's number two or three, but it was like top five. And I would argue it probably top two if my memory serves me correctly. And you could add South Korea to that same description of just how unique these markets operate, and how localized the selling effort is. We recently did, and I've seen both models, and one being you do a joint venture and where you partner with a local company and you share the risk and you share the economics and you share the upside, and they leverage local relationships in the market and local market knowledge, etcetera.
Speaker 10:Or you try to do it yourselves and establish your own KK in Japan. And I've gone down both paths and learned a lot of lessons along the way. And so here at ClickHouse, we did a joint venture in Japan. We recently announced that with a firm called Japan Cloud and they were previously Sunbridge, which is the firm that did salesforce.com's joint venture. And so I've worked with these folks for two decades now.
Speaker 10:And so, yeah, it's a highly localized market. The buying behavior is very different in Japan and in South Korea than other parts of Southeast Asia, putting aside Greater China or Australia, New Zealand or the Indian Subcontinent. So it's a huge market, but not many companies get it right, honestly. They try to do it themselves versus leveraging local expertise. We also brought on some investors a firm called Geodesic Capital, and that's run by an individual named John Roos.
Speaker 10:And John, I believe he's still on the board of Salesforce, but he was the previous ambassador for The United States to Japan. And just having those types of relationships are very important for a company like ours that we frankly don't have the same level of awareness in Japan that we do here in Silicon Valley or in New York.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes a
Speaker 1:lot of sense.
Speaker 2:That's the thing. Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 1:No, very cool.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Let you get back to your day. Thanks so much for hopping on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. At this rate, I'm sure there'll be many reasons to
Speaker 2:have We have that to ring the gong. There's a recent fundraise. Can you tell us the details?
Speaker 10:Yeah, happy to. We weren't running a process or raising capital. There's a lot of investor interest. And so we ended up pulling around together, kind of over the holidays that was led by Dragon Ear, here in San Francisco. And, we ended up raising $400,000,000 We had participation from a number of our existing investors and a few new investors.
Speaker 2:So Pulled together over the holiday. We've talked to a lot of VCs who said that it was easier to do deals over the holidays. There were less distractions at the office, and so plenty of time to hop on the phone with like a tight partnership, get something through. So congratulations.
Speaker 1:Love
Speaker 10:it. Alright. Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full search built from first principles on object storage.
Speaker 2:It's fast, 10 x cheaper and extremely scalable.
Speaker 1:We are puffing. We are puffing. Back to the timeline. Did we miss anything else
Speaker 2:today? Yes. We missed the fact that Keith Raboy has hit 5,000 berries classes.
Speaker 1:Woah.
Speaker 2:Some people would say that's too many. It's an incredible amount. Only possible, I think, mathematically because he does multiple per day. Yeah. But what an absolute generational run, sometimes a literal run on the Barry's treadmill from Keith or boy.
Speaker 2:Demis Hassabis from Google told Alex Heath at Sources that that he has no no plans to put ads in Gemini. It's interesting they've gone for that so early. He said of OpenAI putting ads in ChachiPT, maybe they feel they need to make more revenue. What's interesting is I I feel like yes. It's like it's like, at what level do the ads bake in?
Speaker 2:Because you can you can access some level of Gemini model through the AI search overviews, the enhanced results that come Google searches, and they've already monetized those. And it doesn't ruffle any feathers, so of course, on this show, we're very pro ads. And my answer my my response to Demis should be, let's do it, buddy. Let's do it.
Speaker 3:That's
Speaker 2:right. I'm ready for ads in Gemini three Pro. But of course, they're in a very different position. The business is much larger, much more much more established, and so they have much more flexibility with timing these things. I do wonder, you know, the the whole ads in Chateaubiti news cycle, it was released on a Friday.
Speaker 2:It was very much crowded out by the Elon OpenAI lawsuit. It had been rumored and discussed multiple times. Sam Altman had mentioned it in many different podcast appearances. He talked to Ben Thompson about what he liked about Instagram's ads. He had been messaging Fiji Simo came on, defined a couple things, had talked to us on our show about it.
Speaker 2:And so people it was a very slow process of building up this idea that ads will be coming to ChatGPT. And the benefit of that is that, you know, it's it's not just all of a sudden, hey, the thing that I like now is stuffed full with ads. It's been a very slow rollout. I think it's been deliberate. I think it's smart.
Speaker 2:I think it works well. We've been discussing whether or not the first chat app to in to in to add digital advertising might get, like, branded with a scarlet letter of, that's the one that has ads. And you always remember that one is the one that has ads even if they all add them eventually. Yeah. I don't know that that will happen, but I have yet to see any real backlash across the Internet around, oh, ads are coming to ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:It's bad. So in general, I feel like the rollout has been has been handled well. I'm sure we'll see more interesting things when the ads actually go live. People were taking screenshots of them, sharing them. As long as they partner with good companies like the Ridge Wallet, I think they're gonna be I think people are gonna be thrilled to see Ridge Wallet ads in Chattyputee.
Speaker 1:So Imagine getting one of those, like, really sketchy, like, supplement ads, you know, that that they they run these on, like, display.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know. Getting one of those. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like some some x-ray, and it's like this one thing is destroying your metabolism.
Speaker 1:Doctors hate this.
Speaker 2:Doctors hate this. Yeah. The the Bank of America CEO says he hired 2,000 recent graduates from 200,000 applications. I wonder how much of that is driven by AI applications. People yeah.
Speaker 2:Some people are wondering, like, how many of those applications are duplicates. You apply to multiple jobs. You can only be hired once. But Bank of America, clearly growing. Humans and the new NeoLab founded by Xanthropic, x AI, and Google staff.
Speaker 2:They're trying to build interactive AI. They raised a This is a neo neo lab. It's a neo it's a post neo lab. This is a they raised a $40,880,000,000 dollar seed round from NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, and others at a $4,480,000,000 valuation. And it's in the New York Times.
Speaker 2:You can go check it out. Kate Metz has the story. So that's exciting. We're we we have to do a proper deep dive on the NeoLab landscape. What do you have for us, Tyler?
Speaker 5:I mean, okay. You you said it was post NeoLab. I think it's actually closer to like Trad NeoLab.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:It's I mean, it's it's kind of like a look, we're gonna release models. They're gonna be for consumers.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:We're gonna do it with this human centric view. But it it's not like they're going, you know, that we're combining this with bio wet lab or something.
Speaker 4:This is like Sure. Down
Speaker 2:the Yeah. Like World Labs in is many ways more of a post neo lab than this.
Speaker 1:This is less about, okay, I'm gonna send off this agent to go work for a week and and I'll check-in with it when it's done and more of this kind of like co working approach?
Speaker 5:I believe. I mean, they haven't released much, but it seems like You're
Speaker 1:the expert.
Speaker 5:Very interactive. I mean, like, I'm the expert on what they've they've put out, which is very little.
Speaker 2:So so the name of the company is humans, plural, and then an ampersand. Humans and. And Dylan Patel says, we are all calling this startup human sand. Sorry. I the rules.
Speaker 2:It's a fire name.
Speaker 5:Nir says, what are you guys actually doing? Or what are you guys actually making? I literally cannot tell at all.
Speaker 2:Well, they haven't been on TBPN yet. They haven't broken it down like we're bunch of venture capitalists.
Speaker 1:In other news, our very own Dylan Avery Scotto Scoop got a major scoop.
Speaker 2:Scoop master.
Speaker 1:Scoop in like a Ben and Jerry's employee. He figured out Instagram replaced the following tab or the following sort of
Speaker 2:Word Keyword.
Speaker 1:Word with friends, which are followers you follow back.
Speaker 2:Yes. And this has implications. Explain.
Speaker 1:Yes. The implications here that some people aren't following accounts because they wanna keep they have some idea of what their follower to following ratio should be.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If I if I follow 800 people and I have a 100,000 followers, it looks really elite. But if I'm but if I have a 100,000 followers and a 100,000 following followers following, it just looks like I reply I I'm, like, doing some scheme. I have some bot going or something. I mean, hilariously, Barack Obama had a follow back bot on Twitter, I think throughout his entire presidency.
Speaker 2:So this comes up all the time because someone will find some crazy account, and they'll be like, Barack Obama follows this. What's going on? And it's like, because he follows, like, 3,000,000 people or something.
Speaker 1:Yep. Anyways of the kind of product decision where they they allow people to not show the number of likes a post has. Right? They want people to post more. Oh.
Speaker 1:So if they're not showing the number of people
Speaker 2:That's why sometimes I just see a part that's blank because they don't wanna show me who how many people like it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's the user gets to decide. I don't Okay. I didn't realize that. I don't wanna be Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna be measured by how many people tap. Right? Okay. So the idea was to encourage people to post more
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because they're not feeling this pressure to put up crazy numbers.
Speaker 2:Oh, I always get a 100. If I get 80, I won't feel good that day, so I will just turn that feature off in time. Yes.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So I think they want people to follow more people and Yes. Yeah. We'll see. I don't I don't think this is rolled out to everyone yet.
Speaker 2:Yes. And and and the net effect that you believe will happen is that there will be more following activity on Instagram. So Yeah. Lots of accounts will be followed. Yes.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I I will say when I go on Instagram instead Yes. Of seeing on this
Speaker 2:Well, so this is this is a very limited test and Yes.
Speaker 5:But so I see friends
Speaker 2:You do.
Speaker 5:But I don't see the post number. I I see the friends, the followers, and following.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:Where in this screenshot, I think it was I I don't see it anymore. Yeah. But it was posts.
Speaker 1:Oh, so maybe you're in another test.
Speaker 2:I'm in a different test. Yeah. Messeri is treating us all like guinea pigs over here. Lab rats in his maze. It's great.
Speaker 2:Anyway, is there anything else you wanna
Speaker 1:talk about? We gotta end on this. Is extremely important. Yes. This kid was sent to the principal's office for lying that his uncle was Superman.
Speaker 1:The next day, his uncle, Henry Cavill, dropped him off at school. And Andrew Feldman said, dip s h I t school.
Speaker 2:Andrew Feldman is Cerebras, the $22,000,000,000 company, does not like that the school sent the kid to the principal's office. But justice was done. Henry Cavill showed up and stole the day. And it's the wholesome side of x. If your algorithm's all sloppy, maybe you need to adopt Andrew Feldman's algorithm because he's got some great posts and he's not afraid to reply to them.
Speaker 1:And last but certainly not least, John Palmer says, the TBPN guys are just too Fortnite archetypes. John has maxed out stats, six foot eight, two hundred and thirty pounds, 0 V bucks. Still on default skin after a year. No emotes, pure fundamentals. Jordy's mid cracked, only six foot one and absolutely loaded with V Bucks.
Speaker 1:Rotates legendary skins, spams rare emotes on the soundboard every five minutes. That I do. This is extremely accurate. I certainly
Speaker 2:I feel seen. I feel seen.
Speaker 1:John knows us well.
Speaker 2:Knows us well. I'm gonna have to repost hit on that one. That's a good one.
Speaker 1:Anyways, folks, thank you for tuning in today. Fun day. It's only Tuesday. We got three more shows for
Speaker 2:you. Yeah. Lots more in person peep in person guests this weekend or this week. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to the TBPM newsletter at tvpn.com.
Speaker 2:We will
Speaker 1:And have be live tomorrow at eleven Afternoon, evening, wherever you are. Yes. We love you. Goodbye.
Speaker 2:Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one. Were about to you were about to slam on the gas leg. You were like, I'm I'm taking it for a spin.
Speaker 1:You know what actually would've been so funny if I just
Speaker 2:You were so close to doing it.
Speaker 1:Slamming into the