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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, 10/29/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome.
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance.
Speaker 1:The temple of technology.
Speaker 2:The capital of capital.
Speaker 1:One x
Speaker 2:Look what I got here.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. What do you have?
Speaker 2:Look what I got here. Our dear friend, Sikhi Chen, friend of the show, made a hot sauce for his company, Runway, and he sent it to us. Runway is has so much cash on their balance sheet that they made a hot sauce called burn rate. Okay. And it has a real $100 bill as part of the, packaging.
Speaker 2:So thank you to Siki.
Speaker 1:This is incredible
Speaker 2:because And the execution here is great. I mean, look at look at this box. I don't think we've ever seen
Speaker 1:So he really he really gave us a $100 here. This is remarkable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Except, of course
Speaker 1:Is it is
Speaker 2:it can never spend it.
Speaker 1:It is wait. Why not?
Speaker 2:I mean, you technically could. You could technically Because I
Speaker 1:owe I owe someone a $100 or I'm I'm going to owe someone a $100
Speaker 2:by the end the week. Oh, yeah. Because I made
Speaker 1:a side bet on whether you
Speaker 2:I was making a bet on something and then John made a a derivative bet Exactly.
Speaker 1:On whether or not Jordy would win his bet.
Speaker 2:And I'm I'm not
Speaker 1:performer. It's not looking good. And so
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, you might need to send
Speaker 1:this over to to Dylan and Briscata who I probably owe a $100 by the end of
Speaker 2:the week. But but very very cool activation from Sikhi and the runway team. And thank thank you for sharing. I won't spend it. We'll keep it here on the desk.
Speaker 2:I will be giving John will be John will be putting it to
Speaker 1:pay off my gambling debts.
Speaker 2:But anyways, it's good to be back. We missed missed everyone in the chat yesterday when we're on the road. It's always brutal. Don't have a visual of the chat.
Speaker 1:We'll figure
Speaker 2:it out. We are very very happy to be back. The Fed two minutes ago came out and announced What's going that, the Fed cut borrowing costs by a quarter of a percentage point for the second Tyler Hoots. The the studio
Speaker 1:goes crazy. The studio goes crazy. Let's ring the golf.
Speaker 2:Nothing like cutting into froth. Yeah. Warm it up a little bit, John. Okay. You kinda went to the top side there.
Speaker 2:I'm worried because That that wasn't You
Speaker 1:have this gong issue where if I hit it right in the center
Speaker 2:Yeah. Rings for a really long time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think if I if I hit it here, it doesn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Alright. Well, kind of an ominous hit, I will say. It wasn't it wasn't it wasn't that pure. But Oh.
Speaker 2:But anyways, this is what what Polymarket had, going into this. They they had it at a 99%, chance, a 25, basis point, cut, and, they were correct.
Speaker 3:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:So if you had if you had a $100,000 riding on that 99% bet, would have made roughly $1,000?
Speaker 2:Something like that.
Speaker 1:That could be a really good strategy if you're down a thousand bucks. If you win it all back.
Speaker 2:Like me. Like me right now. Yeah. Anyways.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved. Both easy to use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. The one x robot launched, and it's burning up the timeline. People love it.
Speaker 1:People hate it. People have breaking news. It's teleoperated, folks. It's teleoperated. It's not an end to end AI machine learning model, and people
Speaker 2:are not.
Speaker 1:People are people are saying that like it's breaking news, but
Speaker 2:They're saying that the demos that have been given so far teleoperated. Yeah. But I don't
Speaker 1:think that's a I don't think that's a scoop. Wait. No. I I think they're gonna ship a teleoperated robot. I think that's the point.
Speaker 2:It's entirely teleoperated?
Speaker 1:I think the pitch yeah. Tyler, you break it down.
Speaker 4:Okay. So so in the video, it seems like there's a lot of tasks that it can do, like, fully autonomously. Sure. And then there's some tasks which are a little bit more complex that you can use expert mode
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Which is when someone will basically be, like, observing the robot as it's doing the thing, and then it can I assume that they can, like, interfere?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It seems like it seems like you can pay a human to be in VR and operate your robot for you to do things that it can't just do automatically. And I I don't know. The the, like, the the the back and forth here. So Jo Joanna Stern at the wall in the at the Wall Street Journal got a whole demo of it.
Speaker 1:Said, I tried the robot that's coming to live with you. It's still part human. First, it needs to be controlled by a human in your home. Is that cool with you? Obviously, there's privacy discussions here.
Speaker 1:The big, like, bombshell post right now is from MKBHD who got 12,000 likes on a post saying, so to be clear, this is a preorder for a humanoid home robot that will cost $20,000 or $500 per month when it maybe ships next year, and it's currently not finished. Joanna Stern got to do a demo, and in its current state, 100% of its actions are teleoperated. So of the tests that she did
Speaker 2:That's, yeah.
Speaker 1:They were tele all the impressive stuff
Speaker 2:was teleoperated. But I think anybody that's buying the robot today or preordering it assumes that there will be some tasks that it can do that's non teleoperated.
Speaker 1:Sure. I don't really know. I I don't think people will be buying it because of that. I think people buy it and say, yeah. I'm I'm paying 20 k, and then I'm also paying $2 an hour for someone to teleoperate this thing and actually do the dishes effectively and sit there until the dishes are done as opposed to, yeah, it has some, like, basic stuff I can chat with it.
Speaker 1:I don't think people will will will be driven by that. And, also, I just don't think that the whole I it's basically being framed as this, like, big reveal. Like, oh, it's actually teleoperated when I think that it's just that's not that much of
Speaker 2:a No. I'm I'm a huge teleoperation bowl. Yeah. I think that it's even even if you're just thinking about a use case for somebody who's like, yeah, every once in a while I come home late and I wanna put food in my dog's bowl and I can just teleoperate my robot and go
Speaker 1:Oh, teleoperate your own robot.
Speaker 2:Haven't thought about your own robot. I'm like, oh, I'm coming home in a little bit. Wanna like open the window. I wanna open like the Yeah. The a door to bring in some air or something like that.
Speaker 2:So, I do think it's I do think it's Look.
Speaker 1:You can teleoperate a Porsche. You put the robot in the Porsche, then you are driving the car
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Remotely. I'm sure there won't be any problem operating operating the three pedals
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:at 75 miles
Speaker 2:an hour. If somebody maybe had a few too many drinks
Speaker 1:You could put this
Speaker 2:And so they legally couldn't operate a vehicle.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Could they tele operate on their phone a robot that was driving the vehicle?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. They're sitting in the passenger seat. Teleoperator.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 1:I was tele operating.
Speaker 2:I've just been sitting here on my phone. I don't know. You gotta take this up with him.
Speaker 1:I love the idea of
Speaker 2:So here's the thing. Here's the thing. Let's play out a scenario. So so one, I I I think I love that this robot looks unique. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I think they have like a I I love the color choices that they've used. It's very kind of like skims adjacent almost. Like, they've created a whole kind of cool brand world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It definitely feels like more this a new
Speaker 2:take on a robot. And and and they're going for cute. But if this thing is being teleoperated in your kitchen, let's say it's loading like, dirty dishes
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. From your sink Yeah. Into the or from your table into your dishwasher Mhmm. And then it picks up a big knife
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And it just starts moving over and then it just pauses there. Mhmm. If you look over at your robot and it's just sitting there looking at you like this with a knife with a knife in its hand, are you not gonna get all freaked out? This this thing this thing looks cute, but the second it's got, like, a kitchen knife in its hand and it's looking at you, does it really look that cute?
Speaker 1:Is it cute? I think it's the cutest robot, the cutest humanoid robot I've seen demoed. The question is, like, yeah, there's, like, this uncanny valley of, like, actually going cute because, like, I don't I don't have a problem with just a like, I I I think if you went to the Optimus team and you went to and you went to Elon and you said, like, hey. What's your goal for the design of Optimus? I don't know that Elon would say, it's my goal to make it cute.
Speaker 1:He might be like, no. It's like, the Cybertruck is not designed to be a cute little Volkswagen beetle. Like, it's meant to look cool and badass and, like, and awesome. Right? It's meant to look sick.
Speaker 1:And I and I think that there are different there are different, like, optimization vectors to actually go down. Yeah. The one x team is clearly going down the cute route, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's, like, actual solution to what will get adoption. So I don't know. I think that the I would give this like an eight out of 10 on the cute scale.
Speaker 2:I'm giving it an eight out of 10 too until it picks up the kitchen knife.
Speaker 1:And then it goes down?
Speaker 2:I'm just saying I'm saying in certain context, it's gonna look really scary.
Speaker 1:But is there
Speaker 2:Like all humans.
Speaker 1:So so so but yeah. But but but like, walk through that. Like, what
Speaker 2:Something about something about an eyes eye without a mouth
Speaker 1:Eye without a mouth is is maybe an odd choice. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it it just looks it looks fundamentally a little bit demonic not having any other
Speaker 1:But if add the mouth, then you get more uncanny valley. Right? Isn't that the risk that
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:As you
Speaker 2:one thing I don't understand is the pricing strategy. So Yeah. $499 a month Yep. Or $20.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Who pays the $20 when you could get do you think this thing will be the best robot you could possibly have for forty months straight when there's a bunch of companies coming online with robots? Like, wouldn't the default be, like, okay, humanoids are gonna progress rapidly. I'd rather, like, effectively lease one and know that in forty months, I could get one that's gonna be, like, significantly better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I would definitely be a lease, sir. I'd be happy to be a lease, sir.
Speaker 2:Just like Satya.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let me tell you how Restream one livestream 30 plus destinations, multistream reach your audience wherever they are. Tyler, what what you're not afraid of this thing?
Speaker 4:It's sick. Well, no. Okay. So a couple reasons I'm not afraid of it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:One, it's pretty small. Right?
Speaker 2:It's only five six pounds.
Speaker 4:Right? Yeah. Sixty pound it's sixty six pounds.
Speaker 1:Oh, true. You could totally, like, roundhouse kick this thing out the window.
Speaker 4:Yeah. He's a tiny little, you know, guy. You can just push him over.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:Also, it seemed I mean, nothing I haven't seen any videos of it, like, really moving quickly at all.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:So I I'm not afraid that it's gonna, like, get the jump on me
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:If it has the knife. I I think I can run faster than it. Yep. And yeah. I'm I guess I I would be a little bit scared if it's being teleoperated.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But I don't know who's who's teleoperated.
Speaker 2:What about in your sleep? Lock the door.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You could just lock this thing in, in in like a closet, you know, at night or something. Can't really get out.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's gonna be a whole new world when people are like, you know, I'm going to sleep. I'm paying expert mode to have my, you know, somebody in my house at the humanoid.
Speaker 1:Mean, I I I'm just not that worried about it because like, it has been possible to, like the the like, there was some movie about this where, like, the AI oh, it's Fast and Furious. In Fast and Furious, like, doesn't isn't there an AI that takes no. You won't know. But, I I think that there's an AI that takes over the cars and, like, drives the cars fast and, like, crashes the cars. There's been other movies where, like, the Teslas have been teleoperated to crash into each other.
Speaker 1:There was that movie about the about, like, the doomsday where they all go in the bunker. I forget what movie this is, but there's some what movie is that? I think Obama produced it. I'm not kidding about that. The Is it don't look up?
Speaker 1:It's not don't look up. It was, like, from the same era. What was it? Is that it? No.
Speaker 1:It's not leave the world behind. Oh, yeah. It is. It's leave the world behind. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's that scene where all the Teslas are are coming and they're all crashing into each other. Like, that's been possible for a while, but the economic incentives are just such that, like, no one's actually been able to just, like like, there there's no one out there that's just like, oh, I just wanna, like, kill someone randomly, and I'm gonna hack all of Tesla's system to, like, take over your car. It just it it feels like something that's, like, definitely possible, but it would require, like, billions of dollars to actually take over. And at the end of the day, a lot of people just wanna make money. And so they're like, if I have the ability to go and and hack into Tesla's network and steal the cars, it's like, I can probably just build a car company or something.
Speaker 2:So some more, Yeah. We're we're not, you know, neo factual media here. Yeah. Yeah. But, I do have some facts here from their FAQ.
Speaker 2:Will my Neo be fully autonomous? Neo works autonomously by default. For any chore request it doesn't know, you can schedule a one X expert to guide it, helping Neo learn while getting the job done. Who are the one X experts? One x employees physically present in The USA.
Speaker 2:Okay. So that's interesting. And then they're also manufacturing Neo in California, which is significant. So my sense is that, the unit economics on these are gonna be like really, really, really rough initially. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because these, you know, one x experts in The USA are by default gonna be making a lot more than, like, $2 an hour.
Speaker 1:Minimum wage.
Speaker 2:But I guess it it, you know, it it it's gonna allow Neo to just get better at a variety of tasks. And so they would be training people to teleoperate or they'd be paying people to teleoperate them anyways.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And at least they can recoup, a little bit of the cost.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be really expensive. This was like the end of my take was like the the magic here is, like, it's half actually figure out the technology and half, like, financial engineering. Because you have to do this extremely delicate dance where you keep the capital coming in and burn and burn and burn, and you're probably burning more every year for a really long time. And then at the end, you get the incredible reward, but you have to burn for so long. Ready to do capital.
Speaker 1:Get and and we saw this with we saw this with Waymo. Waymo was founded in 2009. It's been sixteen years. And, like, there's been some report that, like And people are still saying, like,
Speaker 2:oh, they're never gonna get the cars cheap enough.
Speaker 1:Exactly. In San Francisco, I think they do have positive unit economics in this, like, very one in this narrow area. But it's not like a cash cow yet. It's not Google search. Right?
Speaker 1:Which which took, like, two years before it was throwing off cash, basically. Not really, but, but certainly not sixteen years to scale that business. And then, you look at VR. How much money has Mark Zuckerberg invested in the metaverse? How much has how much money has Reality Labs burned without gen without it turning into a cash cow.
Speaker 1:Like, they're not they're still not making money off of Reality Labs. And it was the same thing with AI. Like, you look at the Satya Nadella deal, like the $1,000,000,000 in 2019. Like, that business was not making money, and it had been around for five years already. The company was founded in, what, 2015, I think Yeah.
Speaker 1:OpenAI. And so or the nonprofit was. And so you have you have these when you're going after these, like, frontier technologies, these really broad moonshots, you just wind up burning money for a decade potentially. And can you stay in the game as a venture backed company? It's really, really hard.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, these types of moonshots are exactly what venture capitalists should be going after. Like, this is the goal of venture capital. Yep. Quickly, let me tell you about Privy. Wallet infrastructure for every bank.
Speaker 1:Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple
Speaker 2:It's interesting that Figure AI, Figure Robotics has has pivoted their marketing, external marketing at least to being entirely focused on home help. Yes. So the homepage now, it says the future of home help is here. Figure three is a general purpose humanoid robot for every day.
Speaker 1:Yes. So Wildly different than Boston Dynamics. So if you look at Boston Dynamics websites, they're saying, we are trusted as one of the top robotics companies by DHL, BP, National Grid, Woodside Energy, Maersk. Like, they went industrial level. They went enterprise, and, and they even have some that are, like, three axis robotic arms.
Speaker 1:And then they do have the robot dog, and they say, yeah. Let let the dog walk around and pick up trash or or or or check-in on, you know, the the quality of your of your, you know, oil and gas infrastructure or your mine.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:You know, walk around and and and assess and do surveys. And
Speaker 2:Constant Dynamics is apparently 80% owned by Hyundai. Yeah. And SoftBank owns the other 20%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's such a remarkable, company because Google owned it at one point, I believe. And it's changed hands a few times, but never really found, like, a flywheel to take off. But they've definitely, like, manufactured, like, real robots. It's more just about how they found the actual flywheel for will people are they solving a problem that's really widespread, and can they sell the robot and then funnel the money back into selling more of the robots and and get something really what really, really broadly deployed?
Speaker 1:It hasn't really happened yet. Yeah. But, I mean, they should be in a good position to to do it. The the the sort of like black belt, I suppose, is that Boston Dynamics was never really set up as this, like, okay. We're gonna do the the big transformer model, the end to end machine learning model.
Speaker 1:We're gonna let, you know, scale. We're gonna be aligned with with the scale of the training run, very much more so on the actual, like, let's design the algorithms and and choreograph the movements more than let, lean into, like, the bitter lesson. Like, it it the Boston Dynamics feels like a pre bitter lesson pilling company or something like that. But, I mean, Figure AI claims to have done end to end machine learning, no teleoperation for household tasks. Like, that is the core claim of Figure.
Speaker 1:And but I think what's different is that they're not letting I don't think that Figures let The Wall Street Journal take it for a spin, and I also don't think that they've actually put up a website where you can just, buy one or at least, put down a reservation. So this does feel like one x is moving more aggressively than Figure towards actually delivering something.
Speaker 2:Shipping.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Towards shipping. Exactly. The other the other interesting thing about this this story
Speaker 2:You know, I'm I'm expecting we'll see more fundraising, news out of one x.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's rumor that the pressure Gonna raise a 10,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:The pressure from the pressure on Figure to perform who's already marked, valued by by their latest investors at close to 40,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:40,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:That's right. You know, they they don't have, they gotta really come I mean, figure three, whatever robot they ship is going to, be heavily reviewed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is it is odd setting the expectations that, like, we're already on the third iteration. But I guess I guess they have said that they've shipped because they've shipped to that BMW plant, and they've done some different tests here and there.
Speaker 2:Which, the journal had coverage this year earlier
Speaker 1:on what
Speaker 2:was actually happening at the BMW plant.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That said it was like mostly teleoperated, sort of like narrow. It was not like, oh, yeah. BMWs are now And
Speaker 2:figure likes did they sue the Fortune? They they sued Fortune. Fortune?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is that it? Yeah.
Speaker 2:They had to defend they had to defend their business practices.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, the the the vibes at one x are great. I think people are enjoying it. And it seems like they've been I don't know. They've they've just been upfront about the way that they're building the company, what they're doing.
Speaker 1:They haven't been it it feels like they have they've one x has never been over their skis in terms of promises, which is why I think my reaction to the MKBHD post was
Speaker 2:And they were always focused negative. Were always on the on the phone. Or sorry. Sorry. Focus on the home.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Focus on the home. But, yeah, I mean, I I think I think MKBHD is is correct in his assessment that, like, it is risky to go put down $20,000 for a product that hasn't shipped and and isn't really live and, like, there's a lot of promises around. This happens all the time.
Speaker 1:And from MKBHD's perspective, he's looking at his his audience of, consumer electronics buyers and saying, well, my audience got burned by the Rabbit r one. They got burned by the the humane AI pin. They got burned by Friend where there were a number of, like, AI hardware companies that made really broad
Speaker 2:like couple $100.
Speaker 1:Exactly. But even then from the MKBHD perspective, the the claims the marketing claims when the product was announced did not match what MKBHD reviewed when he got the product. And it this happened a few times. I'm not sure about the exact companies, but this happened a few times where where someone stood on stage and said, this thing is gonna be amazing at doing x, y, and z. MKVHD reviews it, and he's like, it barely does that.
Speaker 1:And so I understand where he's coming from saying, like, hey. This is a preorder. It's a lot of money. It's the product's not done, and it's currently teleoperated. Like, don't go into this thinking that you're getting Wally, this or, like, some super AGI robot.
Speaker 1:Like, you gotta be careful, and you gotta know that this is, like, maybe dev kit level
Speaker 2:Yeah. Results. I I I just think I think this is this done a good job. It will be a polished enough product for hardcore enthusiasts and kind of packers. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that that is probably the right go to market here. People that are understand, hey, this thing is not gonna do everything out of the box immediately. I'm gonna have to work on making it better Yeah. Training it. But if it can get if it can reliably, like, clean up after dinner Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or put away the kids' toys, you know, think I every every parent deals with this like, you know, if my kids are are in the house for more than twenty minutes, they're just like toys everywhere.
Speaker 1:We have to put this guy in the seat of a nine eleven.
Speaker 2:We'll do it. We should we'll be the first You have to do it. One x team, we volunteer to be the first people to track a neo. I love this post from Matt Slotnick who's been on a tear. He he quoted the announcement and said, can't wait to hook this bad boy up to a reasoning model in 11 labs and send it door to door selling knives.
Speaker 1:The funny thing is like, it is it already is kind of hooked up to a reasoning model. And I believe it speaks and whatnot. It definitely has the ability to to you get you get most of the AI assistant, the current state of the art AI assistant stuff out of the box, which could actually be beneficial in the same way that, you know, you have an Amazon Echo or Apple's new tabletop robot. Having just having an an always on LLM around is a benefit to some people, even if it's just walking around just kinda looking cute.
Speaker 2:My my so so something I my my expectation here, and I don't say this to be negative Mhmm. Every you know, all these products have to search somewhere. Just have to get in the home, start doing work, start getting that feedback, start getting more more training data. But I my my concern is that having a humanoid in the first at least few years will be like having a four year old helping you. Where like a four year old can like pick up stuff from a four year old can do a lot of things, but they're not necessarily, like, super efficient.
Speaker 2:Right? They could be slow. They can be distracted. They can just stop.
Speaker 1:I'm just imagining being like, oh, yeah. Wow. I just had, like, a fantastic dinner. 20 of my closest friends came over. We had a dozen bottles of wine.
Speaker 1:It was great. Hey, Neo. Can you clean those 25 wine glasses up? And it's like, no problem, boss. Smash, smash, smash.
Speaker 1:Just shattering everything. It's just like slipping on the glass and like falling down smashing more boxes. And one of the
Speaker 2:marketing videos, they have the Neo like carrying boxes around the house like after the the owner. Yeah. And you can just imagine like if you're trying if you're if you ask like a four year old. Yeah. Just pick up that those three boxes and carry them upstairs with me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's like they're dropping them all over the place, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I mean, I I I think that, like, it's definitely you you you you're you're you use the phrase, like, you're training this thing. And I think, like, you are this feels like almost like the Oculus DK two, the dev developer kit two. It's like, if you do this, if you sign up for this, you should see it as you're helping pull forward the future.
Speaker 1:You're basically giving them training data. You gotta be ready for the rough edges. You gotta go into this knowing that you're the you're the early adopter, but you're supporting something that's really, really cool.
Speaker 2:You're a part of creating Yeah. The future.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. And so there's a lot that's, that that's really cool to like.
Speaker 2:Box in the chat. They should sell this to elder care centers and max out the Medicare reimbursement box. Not even joking. I could see that. Hopefully hopefully doing that, within within the guidelines.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, if you want a humanoid robot for software engineering, head over to Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. It's a whole team.
Speaker 1:What else?
Speaker 2:Buy the robot. Buy the robot. Get hired as a remote robot operator, become your own robot, get paid to do chores and chill
Speaker 1:in your own house. What?
Speaker 2:Health insurance.
Speaker 1:That's actually hilarious. Buy the robot.
Speaker 2:This is the job of the future, folks.
Speaker 1:We we yes. You go to work. No. That that just depends on what their economics are. Because if they have negative unit economics Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can go work at YX.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's a good way to get health insurance.
Speaker 1:It is it is fascinating that they're that they're hiring, the remote tel operators in The United States. Obviously, the like, over time, you would imagine that even if it's not one x, someone will be doing remotel operation across border, and that looks like the, you know, deindustrialization story all over again. I would imagine that it becomes a political issue. At the same time, it's not gonna become a political issue until there's, like, hundreds of thousands of these in the streets.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I I I still think that even a competent humanoid that can be teleoperated by itself can be can be a total game changer. Yeah. Because what if you want to be able to let's say somebody needs to like look after a parent. Right?
Speaker 2:You can if you can buy them, like, you know, a robot, put it in their home, and if you they need help with something, can just
Speaker 3:And if you
Speaker 2:teleport there.
Speaker 1:If your parent wants to go for a canyon run
Speaker 2:You can
Speaker 1:take him out
Speaker 5:for
Speaker 1:a Sunday Yeah. You can have the robot drive the 99992
Speaker 2:Dude, GT3RS.
Speaker 1:GT3RS through the canyons.
Speaker 2:Dot 2.
Speaker 1:Dot 2. Dot two. Sorry, Tyler.
Speaker 2:What did say? But but also but also more more seriously, it's like if you if you could hire in LA Yeah. Like, house cleaners today get paid a much probably higher rate than some random place elsewhere in America. Sure. Right?
Speaker 2:And so somebody could live elsewhere Yeah. But like be a house cleaner in LA.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's the same. It's the remote it's the remote work story. It becomes a global labor pool. It's a huge supply shock, so prices go down.
Speaker 1:None of this happens overnight, but eventually, it will become a hot button issue. Tyler, what are thinking?
Speaker 4:I would like to see them go the Uber route. Right? You you saw those tasks that Yes. Drivers can do in between rides. Yes.
Speaker 4:So then they can just put on the VR headset if if they don't have a ride currently, then they just teleoperate for a little bit. And then, you know, maybe they're they're only halfway through their task when the when the next drive comes in. So then someone else just
Speaker 1:comes Just drop the wine glass.
Speaker 4:Behind the robot. So it could be multiple people.
Speaker 1:It's true. Yeah. I don't know. It's gonna be interesting.
Speaker 2:Abdul says Zuckerberg's clanker watching yours and your wife's clanker in 2035.
Speaker 1:Oh, there's a clanker outside the outside the window. Yes. Clankers are gonna be the the clanker slurs are gonna be through the roof over the next few years. All the experts are at the one x offices. Very smart move by them.
Speaker 1:I feel like this is this is this is a very, very, like, like, shrewd move because, like, if if they were saying even no matter where they pick, if it wasn't America, it
Speaker 2:would
Speaker 1:just be a political football immediately. I mean, we saw did you see Bernie Sanders talking about friend.com? Yeah. You saw this? That was crazy.
Speaker 1:It's like like, Avi has not even broken through meaningfully, and yet politicians recognize that robots are coming. And even if Avi isn't the one who has it completely dialed, like, the idea of talking to an AI is already a political issue, which is just remarkable. That's why you should stick to Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together.
Speaker 1:You can get started for free.
Speaker 2:Dalton Caldwell hit the timeline to share that whatnot from YC winter twenty twenty is now a decacorn. Congratulations. Whatnot has raised 225,000,000 at an 11 and a half billion dollar valuation the company plans to announce on Tuesday
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Which they announced yesterday. The round comes less than a year after the e commerce platform raised 265,000,000 at half that valuation and puts its total fundraising at about 968,000,000. So, again, this LA based company
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 2:I believe. Awesome.
Speaker 1:We've heard about the online shopping stuff.
Speaker 2:It seems like live shopping might finally be working.
Speaker 1:In America. We've heard about it in China. Oh, it's so massive in China. We were wondering when it would come to America. It feels like it must have came
Speaker 2:to It's interesting that it seems like it's working in it's not working in as broad as broad of a set of categories as in China. Like in China, people will just straight up buy like vegetables. Yeah. They'll be like selling people will be selling coconuts streaming. Here, it's like trading cards, sports cards Oh.
Speaker 2:Various collectible toys, thrift type stuff, coins.
Speaker 1:We've never used whatnot. And I don't know many people that have but they must have found some powerful niche because 10 billion's no joke. I wonder where it lands. I wonder if this is like a Snapchat sized business or if this can really grow into something that's Amazon, Walmart style, like massive massive massive. I I mean, clearly, like, they've done a lot of things right.
Speaker 1:But, you know, interesting to see, like like, what is the American, what is the American, you know, appetite for this product specifically? Let's
Speaker 2:Take it over to
Speaker 1:Our first guest.
Speaker 2:Yes. Do
Speaker 1:it. Welcome to the stream. How do I pronounce your name?
Speaker 5:Martin. Hi.
Speaker 1:Martin.
Speaker 5:Martin. I know it's difficult, but Martin goes a long way. Thanks.
Speaker 1:You so much for joining. To meet you. Thanks. Thank you for staying up late. We know that you are over in Europe.
Speaker 1:If you could please give us an introduction on yourself and some of the research that you've done, we'd love to kind of explore some of the ideas that you've been writing about.
Speaker 5:Sure. Sure. Thank you for having me. Of course. So I'm I'm professor of economics at Kurzmysk University in Warsaw, is the highest ranked business school in Central Europe.
Speaker 5:It is sort of the Stanford of Central Europe, if you will. I also wrote a book that claimed the Polish economic miracle Yes. The the fact that Poland has been the fastest growing economy in Europe and worldwide, except for China, over the last thirty five years. Wow. And I've also worked and advised, over the past twenty years, almost 20 governments around the world, including most recently India and China.
Speaker 5:So that also brings a bit of a a global perspective to what has been happening in Poland, in The US, and around the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what are the key ingredients to to Poland's economic success broadly if you were to kind of rank the the few key choices that were made or investments.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Every it it feels like at least once a month, a chart pops up of of Poland's, like, GDP growth relative to a bunch of other countries, it's just absolutely remarkable. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So it's in a remarkable sort of Hollywood Netflix like story, or you can call it a California like unicorn because it is an economy that was bankrupt, backward, and broken in 1899 at the at the end of communism and and and was poorer than Jamaica, Suriname, Gabon, and a couple of other countries. And thirty five years later, it is now richer than Japan, and it will be richer than Spain and Israel next year, which is a remarkable story
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 5:Of sort of unicorn and phoenix like growth. And I think there were a number of ingredients, but one is definitely the the grind, the work habits. Even now, thirty five years into this economic miracle, Poles are the hardest working people among all the rich countries. An average poll poll puts in seven hundred more hours of work per year than an average German. There's, like, twelve hours per week.
Speaker 2:That's incredible. You're speaking our language. That's amazing. Our language.
Speaker 1:Is there wait. Wait. Take me one click upstream from that. Like, I can imagine a a population is more hardworking if you ban things that make it hard to, you know, do leisure. So I I I I are there anything is are there any pieces of the of the the what the government has done to make hard work more easier to pick or or more likely for the population to lean towards?
Speaker 1:I'm thinking of, like, Singapore has banned a ton of, like, drug use, for example. And so I would imagine that Singaporeans work harder because the alternative of going in, you know, to a rock concert or to, like, the equivalent of Burning Man isn't on the table. Is there anything like that that's actually been like like, cognizant the government said, we want our folks to work harder, and then it happened, or is it just, like, chance luck of the the Polish people?
Speaker 5:No. It's it's not Singapore. It's a democracy with, would you believe, 20 different governments over the past thirty five years from left wing Democrats to right wing Republicans, from Bernie Sanders to Ron Paul. And all and all of them, I think they represented a society that is just hungry for success and a society that just wants to be richer or at least as rich and then richer than the than the fat cats in Western Europe.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And that's exactly what's been happening. There's been a choice of Poles who have moved from one third of German income thirty five years ago to 75, 80% of German level of income now, and they wanna get to one hundred and one hundred twenty. And one way of doing it is obviously working hard. So an average Pole per week works twelve hours more per week than an average German and even six hours more
Speaker 2:And what's the what's the exact the exact number? Is it is it fifty hours a week? I don't know how how much time Germans spend working.
Speaker 5:It's I don't know. I don't wanna pick on Germans. Yeah. I say hi to all my German friends. But, you know, Poland continues to believe that that working hard, and and there's a lot of opportunities.
Speaker 5:You know, Poland is part of an open global economy, part of the West, part of the European Union where we have 415,000,000 consumers with no borders, no tariffs, no nothing. Mhmm. If you have a good idea, you can win and conquer these markets, particularly from the incumbents, Western European players who very often just lost the hunger for success.
Speaker 1:What's the lesson from the rollout of the Internet? I've heard, a lot of countries sort of were able to pull forward economic growth by leaning in on high speed Internet, making it more accessible, extra infrastructure investments. How much does the rise and rollout of the Internet and, like, getting that right play into the Polish growth story over the last Oh, big part. Part.
Speaker 5:And then so Poland is a latecomer and also a beneficiary of being backward. You know, when I came to The US for the first time in 1997, I did not know where Czechs were. I I just never never knew they existed. Mhmm. So Poland moved from a backward communist country straight into swiping credit cards and and sort of WeChat like payment systems, which we have right now.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. So and also brand new five g and and fiber optics. So I think this is the what they call, a rent of backwardness, which is what exactly Poland has leveraged. It has not had any sunk cost in the old infrastructure, which, again, has happened in in Western Europe. For instance, in Germany, one of the reasons they seem to be losing the the battle to be competitive in in electric vehicles is that all the BMWs and Mercedes, they did not want to cannibalize the good business.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And so they were late to compete with the Chinese. Poland never had this sunk cost, and it went straight into the into technology, technological frontier.
Speaker 1:How do you how are how are you counseling or thinking about sovereign AI? I feel like, giving every country if you want your country to succeed in the in the two thousands and the 20 tens, you definitely want every citizen to have access to Google or every access or to Google Search to, you know, cloud documents, the cloud broadly. But you don't need necessarily a data center in your country to access Google or to search the web or have access to the Internet. It wasn't it wasn't that critical to have the actual infrastructure in your borders. Now it feels like there's a whole new discussion around you need sovereign AI.
Speaker 1:You need to be doing the inference within your borders for some reason. And I just I'm I don't know that I fully believe that. I feel like you you want your citizens to use AI, but, whether they use it, whether they, you know, jump through a fiber optic cable across the border and access it somewhere else, That doesn't seem
Speaker 2:like I think the push for the push for sovereign AI Sure. Is partly out of a fear of this sort of fast takeoff scenario. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, yeah, I I I'm I'm I've never bought that. But
Speaker 5:Yeah. But in in it does not need to be mutually exclusive. So in Poland, actually, every single player is players in the market. Yeah. You know, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, these guys have the largest data centers Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And they're ready to provide AI services to whoever is in whoever is interested. But at the same time, the the government is also building redundancy. It's it's building additional infrastructure, including to host apps that do not even exist in The US. Like, for instance, I don't have to have any plastics on me, any ID when I drive, for instance. It's all on my phone.
Speaker 5:There's a Polish app called, you know, Citizen where you virtually have most of the things you have needed. It's all on your phone. So it's it's, again, it's an example of how some countries have just moved on, and increasingly, a lot of public services will be done from the phone. It also helps that there's a lot of Polish talent that has actually helped create AI in the first place. I mean, a Polish guy is a chief scientist at OpenAI.
Speaker 5:Yeah. One third of the founding engineers of OpenAI were Polish. So, you know, these guys called their moms and called them Amazing. Ex girlfriends and tell them, look. You really wanna look at chat GBT and what we're doing because that's the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How how is is Poland's university system helping to accelerate, you know, all these different priorities? It feels like The US is at a unique moment where we've had a very robust, you know, academic system, but currently, our our there's somewhat of a well, not even somewhat. Certainly, a kind of a conflict between the the government and our university system, but then also like a a broad sort of distrust of of a lot of our institutions.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That that is true. And, you know, for all people, most people around the world, including myself, a lot of I got my, know, PhD in Poland. I became a professor in Poland, but I did my pre dog and post dog at Harvard. And I know The US well, and it's obviously still the best place to get the top quality education.
Speaker 5:Most Nobel Prize winner winners come from The US. But but some other countries sort of hustle. So Poland has not only outworked its competitors, it has also out educated its competitors. So for instance, half of young Poles aged 25 to 34 have university education. In Germany, it's only one third.
Speaker 5:So that gives you an idea. They they do not do not only work hard. They're actually pretty well educated. It might not be Stanford and Harvard all the time, but this is solid education as reflected is it in these OpenAI guys. And finally, Poland also outcompetes because you you get this talent for half price for what you would pay for it in Germany.
Speaker 5:You know, a top notch computer scientist in Poland whom you can put at Silicon Valley any day will cost you $75. I guess back where you're sitting, it would be 200 plus. So it's it's really this combination of human capital and and low labor cost and being located in in the heart of Europe and getting increasingly increasing interest from global global investors who who look at 11 labs, and I saw just a guy who who was there just before me. I think he had a hat.
Speaker 2:That's right. Tyler's rocking the hat. Right? What about what about on the on the regulation front? What what are the ways that Poland has you know, what break down Poland's decision making around regulation versus, know, maybe other members of of the EU?
Speaker 5:So in the EU, you cannot really have much of your own voice on digital matters. So it's actually all been consolidated in Brussels, and the European Commission puts up ideas on behalf of everyone else. That's the same for trade. So for instance, when the European Union cut a deal with Trump, it was the EU that was negotiating on behalf of everyone, not Poland, Germany, Spain. On digital, it's pretty much the same, and there's ongoing debate whether Europe is just overregulating, and I including AI.
Speaker 5:And I agree. We are overregulating or at least there's a perception that Europe is overregulating, which is killing AI. Mhmm. So I'm I'm hoping that the the perception will change. And, again, newcomers, new guys on the block like Poland Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Now the twentieth largest economy in the world, you know, richer richer than than Japan with more than $1,000,000,000,000 of GDP. Poland will be one of the countries that will be pushing for deregulating for opening up because it's exactly what has worked well for this country.
Speaker 2:Did you have to ask Brussels if you could come on our podcast?
Speaker 5:No. I'm here in the pandemic. Also wrote this book if anyone is interested. No.
Speaker 1:But no.
Speaker 2:Okay. Good. Okay. Good. You're like, I had to apply.
Speaker 2:I it was a, you know, ten hour application to go on the on the podcast. No. It's not quite
Speaker 5:not quite that extreme. The advantage of the EU is that, for instance, there's now this debate about creating a new regulatory system where you could set up a company which could immediately work all across Europe under the EU laws. So I think they called it sort of the 28 regime. You you could sell your products and services everywhere in the EU without worrying about local regulations. And I think this is the way to go, and I think Poland and our region, all countries in the region will be pushing for these kind of solutions.
Speaker 5:We don't want Europe to be sclerotic. We want Europe to be successful. And Poles, are the most pro American society in Europe and probably also in the world, will be one of the big supporters of these changes.
Speaker 1:Awesome. What's the mood in Poland around energy? Or or what's the what is is there any place where Poland differs from Europe like, other European countries broadly in terms of energy strategy or where energy is going. When I when I think about the sovereign AI thing, a lot of countries, it just if you have cheap energy, you should set up an AI factory even Right. No matter where you're wind wind up selling the tokens.
Speaker 1:That's just a great use of energy these days. But how is Poland thinking about the current energy mix and where that's going and various incentives and trade offs that might differ from other countries?
Speaker 5:So so Poland has originally and traditionally been a coal based country. Mhmm. But it's really moved quickly. Now about only half of the all energy use comes from coal. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And Poland has decided to go all in on on nuclear Yeah. And on renewables. Mhmm. So the plan is to pretty much minimize or even eliminate the use of coal within the next decade plus. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And then and Poland has already decided to build one nuclear plant and and actually with Westinghouse, American technology. But renewables is is the is the other part of the answer. So there's probably not enough of a surplus now to make Poland into a data center hub, but it's pretty much but it's pretty much coming. In other ways, Poland is a hub. Like, a lot of Belarusians, Ukrainian, Czechs, Slovaks, virtually the whole region is increasingly moving into Warsaw and Poland because this is where things happen.
Speaker 5:If you wanna scale up, if you wanna internationalize, if you wanna find capital that's not Vilnius, that's not means for sure, you really wanna come into Warsaw because that's where all the interest is and that's where the action is.
Speaker 2:Cool. Very, very cool. Well, I cannot wait to at some point, I'm sure we will do this show from Warsaw. Love to. And that will be a fun moment.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for joining Breaking It Down. Anytime anytime Poland is in the news, feel free to jump back on the show. It'd be great to to talk through it.
Speaker 1:Thank you
Speaker 2:so much.
Speaker 5:Great. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Let me tell you about vanta.com. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously.
Speaker 1:Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.
Speaker 2:Back on the timeline, Cyan Bannister over at Long Journey has gotten a tattoo of the logo of their newest, portfolio company, Substrate. We have the founder of Substrate, James Proud, coming on the show in just a little bit. I'm excited for that. And I never knew that my friend Chris Ovitz, also here in LA, was the one who introduced James, I guess, a long journey, they were, sounds like, the first check. I don't I don't know that for a fact, but, at least very, very early.
Speaker 2:So good good to see, and I'm excited to meet James.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a post here from semi analysis. Classic an all time classic. We have been in serious problem. Saying this is ASML talking about substrates approach and their new lithography system, so we can get more info from, James in a little bit. But this company was announced yesterday Yeah.
Speaker 2:And announced, about a was it a 100 on a billion straight out the gates?
Speaker 1:100 on a billion. Straight
Speaker 2:out of the gate. Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. Logan Paul was, a series a investor and whatnot.
Speaker 2:So he's going from a 90,000,000 to an 11 and a half billion dollar valuation. Not too shabby at all. I know, another friend of mine, Ann Skates, was I believe also, one of the, a part of leading that Yeah. Series a if I remember just not too long ago at all.
Speaker 1:It's it makes so much sense that Logan Paul would have invested in this company.
Speaker 2:He's just, like, super into collectibles and
Speaker 1:Oh, collectibles, but also just social media. He's actually sold a ton of products on social media on he's done all sorts of different YouTube videos, the Vine era. Like, he's seen firsthand every single iteration and turn of what's happening on social media, on content, on on commerce. And so, it makes a bunch of sense that he would be, like, fine tuned to understand the opportunity here. Although, there were a bunch of companies that were going after this.
Speaker 1:Very tricky to pick the
Speaker 2:right Popshop.
Speaker 1:Popshop, are they still around? Did they do okay?
Speaker 2:I don't I don't think so. I think they well, they still have a website.
Speaker 1:I know I know a few other companies were trying to come after this exact idea, this live shopping.
Speaker 2:I mean, even in these live shops I guess is is around.
Speaker 1:Popshop's around still. Okay.
Speaker 2:There's somebody live right now selling blind boxes.
Speaker 1:There you go. Hopefully, they're selling SaaS. Hopefully, they're selling graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. This is
Speaker 2:Sam Altman said yesterday an IPO is now the most likely path forward for OpenAI given the scale of capital the company will need going forward. No surprises. No surprises there.
Speaker 1:Yes. It'll be very interesting to hear more comments from Sam Altman and Satya Nadella on what happens over the medium to long term. I'm fascinated by the idea of if if Microsoft winds up with, like, a $150,000,000,000 position, maybe that goes up in the public markets. You could be looking at, like, a $200,000,000,000 position. Like, what is the treasury strategy?
Speaker 2:Market sells as soon as the lockup ends.
Speaker 1:It just fails immediately. Immediately. Yeah. No. No.
Speaker 1:I mean, Microsoft is Thanks for the I
Speaker 2:thanks for the I p buddy.
Speaker 1:Microsoft is an open AI treasury.
Speaker 4:I'm gonna be trading just based off Rune Tweets alone.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna be trading Microsoft for now. You can do that today because I own That's true.
Speaker 1:They have a 135,000,000,000 This is position. Yeah. So it's always an option. But, yes, what will what will Microsoft do, over the medium term, once the company gets I would imagine that they don't just hit slam the sell button on day one. I imagine that they they they, you know, let that evolve over a long period of time and and probably, don't crash the stock because that just seems not particularly advantageous as, you know, silly as it would be.
Speaker 2:More important news. Yes. There's an abandoned McDonald's that NASA turned into a moon probe picture recovery lab. What?
Speaker 1:What is a moon probe picture recovery lab? Was this is this from years ago?
Speaker 2:Like Yeah. I I don't know if it's still operational.
Speaker 1:People are saying
Speaker 2:.com.
Speaker 1:Nick Moon.
Speaker 2:The official website of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. And it does indeed look to be in they're calling it McMoons.
Speaker 1:Is it is it AI? No?
Speaker 2:No. It's not AI. This is a real
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. Wait. This is this is right by, Google. This is this this building is right, next to where Sergey Brin's blimp is built, which we saw yesterday.
Speaker 2:Absolutely stunning blimp. I'm so happy. I love seeing blimps. I love airships.
Speaker 1:We I wanna know more. I know Ashley Vance did a whole video interviewing the founder of that company that Sergei partnered with, like the CEO that came in and has actually run the company. And I don't wanna sound too rude, but what is the goal of the company? Because blimps have been invented. So it's like, are we
Speaker 2:just We're bringing them back.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I love it. I want it to be brought back, I guess, but it's like it's a thing that exists already.
Speaker 2:Well, there was another there's another company. There's a new blimp company called Airship. Yeah. That's an a SpaceX team.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Ex SpaceX
Speaker 1:team
Speaker 2:that is trying to leverage Airship's blimps for global freight.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And the idea is that like Yeah. A lot of exciting things happen when you're not trying to work within waterways Yep. Ports and you can just transport goods, you know, directly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I've seen
Speaker 2:from China. Yeah. Fly over.
Speaker 1:I saw someone who is, like, a a venture capitalist, I believe, like, lay out the whole, like, blimp, bowl thesis, very eloquently and, and and run a bunch of numbers. Seemed pretty interesting. But it is funny that, like, your moonshot is a thing that, like, like, we've done it. It's I guess it's just like
Speaker 2:Your blimp shot?
Speaker 1:Your blimp shot. It well, it's really just, like, okay. We like like, I guess there is a challenge. The challenge is, like, make blimps work in the way that trains work or in the ways that contain Commercial. Work.
Speaker 1:Commercially. Like, actually scale
Speaker 2:Not just as a
Speaker 1:never really yeah.
Speaker 2:Because a Goodyear blimp still flies around LA sometimes.
Speaker 1:But there are, like available. Truly, like, six blimps in the entire world or something like that. And so the total market cap of the blimp economy is just nothing. Like, it's just a disaster. And so that's the real challenge.
Speaker 1:I guess the challenge is not is not make another blimp because we know we can make blimps. The question is, like, can we find something more valuable to do with them such that it scales as a mode of transport? Are you your are your anti hot air balloon, are you anti blimp? Would you go on a blimp ride?
Speaker 2:I would inspect it first.
Speaker 1:You would you would inspect it. Oh, you feel equipped?
Speaker 2:I would use Kick the tires on I would use large language models. Yes. And I would say, how much gram?
Speaker 1:And then and then you would know, okay, this is a good blimp.
Speaker 2:This looks like a rock. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think, I I I would love to I I I would go to blimp
Speaker 6:I think
Speaker 2:without checking in. I think, Blimps. Blimps, especially with, you know, being you know, potentially having, like a parachute on your back, you know, as
Speaker 1:parachute guys? You're like, I I need a parachute with me. So I'm gonna go up high. Might fall.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Planes have life jackets in them.
Speaker 1:Those are those are parachutes.
Speaker 2:I know. But you it's not the worst idea to have have a backup plan.
Speaker 1:It is funny, like What
Speaker 2:are the odds when you take off on a plane that you're gonna crash into the ocean and need a life jacket?
Speaker 1:Pretty rare.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What are the odds that you're gonna need a parachute on a blimp?
Speaker 1:Probably
Speaker 2:Rare, but not non zero.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That is true. It is funny how, there aren't any plain like, imagine if United was just like
Speaker 2:Zack is coming in with the the important take here which is data centers tied to balloons.
Speaker 1:Steampunk data center? So let's go.
Speaker 2:Blimp data center.
Speaker 1:That that might work.
Speaker 2:Elon apparently said on the on recently that he's thinking of what he wants Tesla's to be like distributed cloud, basically, so that when it Yeah. Was just parked
Speaker 1:That was a crazy post.
Speaker 2:Providing
Speaker 1:Well, you know who should run a blimp ad? Julius dot AI. The AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data. Ask questions in plain English.
Speaker 1:Chat with your data. Get expert level insights in seconds. Uh-huh. So I I believe Google had a data center on a container ship that they put out, in the bay for a while ago. So this has happened.
Speaker 1:It is interesting that there's no there's no airplane service that is like, we we actually have parachutes on board. Like, what would that do to the airline economy if United one day was just like, yeah. We're putting we're putting parachutes on all the United planes. Like, they don't do that on JetBlue. They don't do that on American.
Speaker 1:They don't do that on Delta. Does Delta give you a parachute? No. United gives you a parachute.
Speaker 2:I mean, a good upsell Would that for Sky
Speaker 1:to more would that make you more more likely to fly United or less likely?
Speaker 2:Be honest. Why are you guys adding parachute?
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's begging a lot of questions.
Speaker 2:I I look at it more as a potential upsell. Yeah. It's like instead of having to fly into JFK You
Speaker 1:think it should be something I have to pay for?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like extra thousand dollars
Speaker 1:dollars and I get a
Speaker 2:parachute out anywhere over the Oh,
Speaker 1:you owe let's say area. Lets you go. Yeah. I I was just thinking like like, you know, for for the price of the ticket, for $200, get the life jacket. But for $300, you get upgrade to the parachute.
Speaker 1:I think that might be a way to to just squeeze a couple extra I dollar
Speaker 2:want the I want the economy premium. I wanna yeah. Yeah. I I want an option for executives that don't have time to go through the airport Airport be able to drop into Yeah. Their
Speaker 1:I like that. If United came out and said, we now have parachutes on board, and you have a choice. You're flying to New York from LA and you have a choice between Delta, which does not have parachutes, and United that does have parachutes. Tyler, which one are you picking?
Speaker 4:I don't think I want my airline to have parachutes.
Speaker 1:Why? That makes me way more scared. Why? It's a pure upgrade in safety. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's literally like anything I
Speaker 2:don't want. My car to have seat belts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, you put seat belts in there. You're expecting the car to crash. No.
Speaker 1:It's just if it happens, we have the seat belt here. If if the plane dissolves in the air, you have a parachute. On this airline
Speaker 4:It dissolves?
Speaker 1:Yeah. If the plane rips open like in Fight Club, which you haven't seen.
Speaker 2:If there's a bunch of if there's a bunch of snakes on the plane and the the Yeah. The I think
Speaker 4:it makes more sense on a blimp because we've seen blimps just blow up in the sky.
Speaker 1:Yeah. True. Planes don't really do that. False flag. Planes are pretty safe.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I hope no one in the chat is watching on a plane because that would always be be rough.
Speaker 2:Caleb Watney over at IFP says, hard to understate what a blow this would be for American leadership and AI if this happens. He's talking about how Trump has suggested he was open to providing China with access to NVIDIA's Blackwell, chips as part of a trade deal, which would represent a major concession and rile up national security hawks in Washington. We'll be speaking about black wells, Trump said, touting the chips as super duper and years ahead of what was currently available from other countries. He said NVIDIA CEO Jensen had recently brought a version of the chip to the Oval Office for him to see Mhmm. AI Bellwether NVIDIA shares extended gains to eight and a half percent in Asian trading on the alternative platform.
Speaker 2:Blue Ocean signaling potential further gains when US markets open. They are seemingly in route to a $5,000,000,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 1:I think they hit it. Didn't they? We gotta pull that up on public.com investing for those to take it seriously. They got multi asset investing.
Speaker 2:They did. Did. Hit that. $5,020,000,000,000. Okay.
Speaker 2:That was a better hit. That was a better hit.
Speaker 1:It's better hit, but it's gonna do the weird ring thing, I think. Yeah. See? It's gonna keep ringing. Because apparently, we broke our gong, and this is what happens when you break the gong is that it just keeps ringing.
Speaker 1:But that's actually kind of a feature in my mind. I don't know. Feature. What do you think?
Speaker 2:The question here is maybe Trump is doing a little five d chess and he 60 chess actually. Could be six, could be seven, could be five.
Speaker 1:It's a little simplistic to me.
Speaker 2:You know, it's it's really hard to say Yeah. At this stage. But it's possible that he realizes that AI is about infinite slot machines.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And he realizes adult content. It's actually in America's interest to get as many black wells Yep. To China as possible.
Speaker 1:So that they all get one shotted.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is the modern information war. This is the cybernetic future war that's happening between America and China. It went from AI is a good thing,
Speaker 2:so we need to keep
Speaker 1:the chips in America. We can't let them have them today.
Speaker 2:The AI is saying you can only have
Speaker 1:the black chips out of America.
Speaker 2:You can only have the black wells if you let every give a free plan of GPT four o Yes. To every citizen.
Speaker 1:Xi Jinping's just, you're absolutely right. Would love to give every every citizen, Ani, with with sexy mode. No. I don't I don't know. I my my my take on this has always been, like, we we do we actually have Slack capacity for chips?
Speaker 1:Because we've been having the GPU poor debate for a while. Everyone said that that, you know, oh, we can't make enough chips. We can't build enough data centers. But, like, it it is it's a lot easier to advocate for, hey. Don't sell to China if there truly is unlimited demand in America.
Speaker 1:It's a completely different conversation if it's like, well, yeah, actually, like like AWS and Google and, OpenAI, like, they're actually good on NVIDIA chips. They don't wanna buy anymore. And NVIDIA is like, wait, but we've made so many of these. We wanna sell them. Like, can we sell them to China?
Speaker 1:You'd be like, well, yeah. Because, like, that's gonna hurt your business a ton if you have to write those down because you made them versus it's just a choice of who you're selling to and it's zero sum.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, Jensen does not wanna lose the Chinese market. He's been very clear about how frustrated he is about the the whole situation. But he's been playing nice. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. The the NVIDIA just just, you know, continuing to ramp up despite, everyone waking up to the to how big of a of a threat, you know, TPUs are to NVIDIA. It is interesting timing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There there there were some more news about TPUs. I think the demand for TPU is, like, through the roof. The the they saw some post about that.
Speaker 1:In other news, Oliver Cameron, friend of the show, introduced Odyssey two instant interactive AI video. This is general purpose model that instantly imagines 20 FPS video you can interact with in open minded ways. It feels like true sci fi. Type a few words and AI instantly imagines a video that feels alive. So the the the the browser war is in full swing.
Speaker 1:Now the the real time video generation wars are in full swing. You got World Labs. You got Odyssey. You got Genie three, I believe, from Google. There are a few companies working on this.
Speaker 1:I'm personally excited for, you know, where this goes once you get some extra harnessing in there, some extra mechanics. I don't know if this is I I we need to have Oliver back on the show and talk to him about, is he thinking about going more API driven, or does he wanna kind of own more of I mean, yeah. Like, how much of it needs to be the foundation model company versus the application layer? How much does he need to Does does he wanna own, like, the end result or whatever people do with the product? There's a there's a pretty wide swath of opportunity once you have a model that works in a particular way.
Speaker 1:You can go set up a short form video app if you want and try and win and build a new social network. But it's all, there's a whole bunch of trade offs there and a whole bunch of challenges. So, clearly, a, you know, a next next step in advancing the model, but a lot of questions about how do you actually monetize this. Is it a prosumer tool? Will people be using this just as better video generation because it's faster turnaround so you can iterate more quickly?
Speaker 1:There's a whole bunch of benefits there. All the demos here are vertical, interestingly, but the launch video is horizontal. What does that mean? Dig into that. If you wanna generate some video, head over to fall, generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image video and audio models all in one place, developing fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.
Speaker 1:Toby Lutke was taking shots at AI notetakers. He hit the timeline and said having some AI follow you into your Zoom meetings or Google Meet for taking notes is the digital equivalent of showing up to a meeting with your fly down. What do you think? You're you're you're anti AI. You're anti clanker in the group chat.
Speaker 2:I never let I've never let him in.
Speaker 1:You never let him in? You never let him in the
Speaker 2:Zoom room? The clanker the clanker is in the waiting room.
Speaker 1:Oh. It's ready
Speaker 2:to be let in. I forgot. Sorry.
Speaker 1:This, this this reply post is, Firefly is waiting in the lobby, and that's where Firefly will stay.
Speaker 2:Toby's on fire. He said Firefly better fly right into the in the Fire. E o d d a m n fire.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, I don't know. He was he didn't he didn't elaborate on why he doesn't like this. Friend of the show, TJ Parker, said, maybe it has something to do with the fact that if you're recording every meeting, every meeting is now discoverable. And so if you have some random lawsuit, all of a sudden you know, there's, like, leaked tech emails?
Speaker 1:Imagine that. But for everything you do at work all the time forever, That's what having an AI notetaker is in No.
Speaker 2:Says, that's why I just wear my friend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, truly, it is it is fascinating that, like, people that that we actually got to the outcome where Firefly identifies itself and says, like, hey. I'm an AI notetaker. I'm here, and I'm gonna join.
Speaker 1:As opposed to the alternative, which was just, like, run clearly on your computer and no one knows.
Speaker 2:Gold Rock says that using transcription clankers are a no go. Oftentimes, they're used without all parties consent. That's another one. It's like if somebody wants to come in to the call and say, hey, for the next ten minutes, do you mind if I record this Mhmm. So that I don't have to take notes myself?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I'm open to, like, opting in. But just like the default record every single call, like, there's no
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's no there's it it just not, not something I'm interested in doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Obviously, depends a lot on the use case. You know, are you synthesizing takeaways? Is this actually useful? It's probably not a replacement for not actually paying attention during the call.
Speaker 1:Like, you're not just gonna zone out for an hour and then review some meeting notes and be like, oh, I I that was now a productive meeting. Like,
Speaker 2:no. I would love to know what percentage of transcripts, like, ever get Yeah. Like the notes. Yeah. Is it like, I I would expect it to be a very small percentage that actually get read.
Speaker 2:So it's like one of those things people are like, kind of peace of mind.
Speaker 1:I mean, I did I did have one interaction with a group of friends who had a Zoom call to talk about they're they're all, like, everyone's, like, a content creator, and so they'd have these calls. I couldn't make one. Normally, everyone hops on the phone on the calls, talks about trends, strategies, whatever there's do whatever they're doing. I couldn't make one of those calls. And so they did have one of the transcripts happen, and I was able to read through that.
Speaker 1:And that was fun because, like, I like these friends. And so I was kind of able to, you know, not fully listen to the full call, but get some of the topics like, oh, what's top of mind for my friends? That was kinda cool. But that was definitely something like it was a meeting that I was looking forward to. So I was happy to to, you know, enjoy it as a as a transcript as well because I would enjoy the meeting if I had actually attended.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But regardless, if you're transcribing a bunch of stuff, if you have a bunch of text, you need to search every byte. You need to use Turbo Puffer, serverless vector, and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Puffin. We puffin.
Speaker 2:We puffin.
Speaker 1:The golden age of private credit is over. Private credit winter is coming, says high yield Harry. Lenders are quietly rewriting their collateral rules, which suggests a crisis waiting to happen. People have been nervous about private credit booming. Ares has minted seven new billionaires, something like that.
Speaker 1:There's been a ton of boom in private credit, ton of boom in in in debt. Debt is coming. The question is, when will there be a pullback? How much more room does it have to run?
Speaker 2:There's a reply here from a guy named, Jason who says, that's nice, but I prefer not to lose any money, so please make sure the government is prepared to cover all potential losses. If not for everyone, then for me and my cohort specifically. Warm regards.
Speaker 1:Me and my cohort? What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Oh, me and Everybody's got a cohort.
Speaker 1:What cohort do you identify with? That's hilarious.
Speaker 2:Oh, this this post from Italian.
Speaker 1:What did he say?
Speaker 2:Hilarious. I don't even know what he was replying
Speaker 1:to. I don't know what he was replying to because it's
Speaker 2:deleted. Spaceman live on TBPN. His eyes rolling back in his head.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That was a very weird screen grab. I don't know how this screen grab happened, but it was absolutely wild. What did what did Boz say? So Boz posted a blog post about you are how you act.
Speaker 1:He says the modern American self is best defined by two enlightenment thinkers who never met but have been arguing in our heads ever since. Jean Jacques Rousseau believed in the primacy of the inner self, a core of goodness constantly betrayed by circumstance. In his view, the world corrupts us. We begin pure and only fail because society obligation or expectation pulls us away from who we truly are. Benjamin Franklin saw it differently.
Speaker 1:For him, there was no such thing as a good person or a bad person, Only people who do good things and people who do bad things. Virtue was a habit, not an essence. Modern America carries both of these ideas, switching between them whenever convenient. We invoke Rousseau when we need forgiveness. I meant well.
Speaker 1:We invoke Franklin when we need accountability. Show me what you've done. It's almost entirely it's it's an almost entirely incompatible pair of philosophies that coexist perfectly in practice because they're both so flattering. One to our intentions, the other to our ambition. But only one of them scales.
Speaker 1:Faking till you make it is often dismissed as shallow, but it's closer to Franklin's truth. Faking it law is faking it long enough is making it. The repetition of behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is what shapes character. You become the kind of person who does the things you repeatedly do. I agree with that.
Speaker 1:Rousseau invites endless introspection. Franklin invites progress. The first is how you feel is about how you feel. The second is about what you build. I find the Franklin model far more useful, not because it's truer in some cosmic sense, but because it gives you agency.
Speaker 1:You can't always change how you feel, but you can always decide what to do next. It doesn't take great men to do things, but it is doing things that make men great. Arnold Glasgow. And, you know, some people had some some jokes. They're poking fun at Boz saying tech bros are re deriving Sartre from first principles.
Speaker 1:I haven't read Sartre, so I don't know.
Speaker 2:But like I
Speaker 1:like reflective posts like that. I think that's a good post. Think that's I think that's an interesting little like tour of a couple philosophers you might have heard of, but kinda distilling and then recontextualizing these two these two thinkers. This is a this is a sweet spot. I've been enjoying writing these, like, 500 word essays.
Speaker 1:Just kind of like one little thought packaged up in a couple paragraphs. I'm glad Boss is doing it too.
Speaker 2:Cheers. In other news, Bending Spoons Yes. European software conglomerate has acquired America Online, AOL, and raised 2,800,000,000.0 of debt to get it done. They say, big news. We're acquiring AOL, the iconic web portal and email provider from Yahoo, subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals.
Speaker 2:Is this call worthy? I would it's it's painful that that America online will be owned by a European software conglomerate. But let's hit the gong for raising 2,800,000,000.0 in debt to buy legacy digital asset. I'm so we gotta have somebody on from Bending Spoons because I I don't I don't feel like I have a good understanding of this company at all. They acquired Evernote.
Speaker 2:They acquired WeTransfer. It's such a funny name company. They acquired Vimeo. So they, are kinda all over the place. But
Speaker 1:In Matrix inspired? In the Matrix probably?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Interestingly enough, they, I wonder I wonder what just like AOL's email business is worth. Like, do people do people pay for like, pay for that at all, or is it entire is the entire business ad space?
Speaker 1:AOL? I think there's still people paying. I wouldn't be surprised if there's still people cracking open a CD and being like, gotta get my Internet this month. Do you do either of you remember what I'm talking about? Are you familiar with this?
Speaker 4:No.
Speaker 1:No. There there was a time when you got the Internet from a physical desk, basically, which just sounds ridiculous. But, basically, it was like
Speaker 2:How does that What are you talking about?
Speaker 4:It's the whole Internet is on.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:So basically, I I I think the way it works is, basically, you'd open up a magazine and there would be a CD and it would be like AOL. And and the disc would would would claim some sort of like number of minutes. Ben, do you remember this? No? No one remembers this?
Speaker 1:I'm so old. And it would be like seven thousand minutes of Internet access. And, basically, what you do is you would put the is you put the disk in, and then you would pull and then you would install a piece of software that would allow you to access the Internet. Just the the the crazy emoji guy. No.
Speaker 1:And and then so on the disc was the software that would that would, like, give you a web browser, basically. Because how do you get a web browser if you don't have the Internet? You need to install that first. So you would install the AOL But did you buy software package
Speaker 4:disk every month?
Speaker 1:No. No. So they would give out free trials, basically, and then you would be able to connect to the Internet, and and you would be limited based on the number of minutes that you spent online. Each CD would give you a couple thousand minutes for free, something along those lines. Anyone, anyway, we have our first in person guest of the show.
Speaker 1:We have Brian Johnson. Welcome to the stream. Go over there. While he hops on, let me tell you about AI Google Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. Chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Gemini. Classic LA story.
Speaker 1:Good to see you again.
Speaker 2:People in LA arrive on time fifteen minutes after you normally arrive. Oh, yeah? At least I do normally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's the nature.
Speaker 2:Hopefully you didn't have too much traffic. It's great to have you here. Big week for you.
Speaker 6:It's been a great week for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Congratulations. 60,000,000, but break down exactly what happened. What what was the impetus for the deal? Take us through the recent history of Blueprint.
Speaker 6:I mean, I started this. This is the idea that we are the first generation who won't die. Mhmm. It's kind of a crazy idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:We started this a couple years ago, I think a lot of people thought this was kind of an insane thought process. Yeah. So we've been hammered away, and I think it's gone from weird to interesting to yesterday was kind of like now it's accepted and maybe even cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yep. And so I think we've it's a it's a thing now. It's a part of the zeitgeist, and I think it formalizes that we're really gonna take a a shot at this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, I mean, there's, the philosophical underpinning where you're I imagine, you know, in in the vein of Kurzweil, like, looking at long term trends, artificial intelligence, compounding just the value of compounding little gains all over the the health system potentially could, at least in your belief, get us to infinite life and not die. Don't die. So you get to that. But then you, you know, at some point, do instantiate that in a company, in a business, in a suite of products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so that's what Blueprint is today. Is that the idea of of the the fundraise? Is that what people are investing in?
Speaker 6:Yeah. The idea is, when somebody says, yes, I want to be healthy, it's pretty hard. You have to go out and you have to navigate a thousand things. Yeah. You know, like, is this good for me or is it bad for me?
Speaker 6:You have people who have conflicting opinions. Yeah. And so our target customer is somebody who says, I want to be healthy. Mhmm. And we just say, we've got you.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We will give you, like, the protein amounts. We'll give you tested and certified foods. We'll give you the exact dose. We'll help you with your prescriptions.
Speaker 6:Yep. We'll give you protocols. Like Yep. Your autonomous self, like, it's not go navigate the world by yourself. It's we've got you.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And we'll do an evidence based biomarker approach.
Speaker 2:One of the, I feel like anybody that really gets into health goes through a period where they realize I I at least, at one point, I was, like, 19 at the time, realized that it felt like I was spending, like, 50% of all my cognitive power on just, like, trying to be as healthy as possible. Yeah. And at a certain point, realized like this is such an inefficient use of time. Fortunately, you build up some habits and kind of like understanding of what's good and what's bad and what you wanna leverage more and and kind of avoid and all that stuff. But I think, like, make you know, removing that step from the process of being able to just kind of, like, default into a system.
Speaker 2:Walk, can you can you get into a little bit more of, like I I I remember reading a post at this point from you, maybe it was like a couple months ago, kind of like talking through the decision making around, you know, where you wanted to take Blueprint Mhmm. Why kind of raise capital, all that kind of thing.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Mean, it was this I mean, I guess I my sole objective is try to be sober in this moment, and I really enjoyed the perspective of thinking a few hundred years into the future. You look back at this moment, and we are giving birth to some kind of superintelligence. We don't know what it is. We don't know what kind of scale, but it's big.
Speaker 6:It's important. I have neither an opinion that it's positive or negative. It's just significant. Mhmm. And I was really trying to think through, does it even matter if I build anything in the world right now, or should I work on building the philosophy and the moral framework on, like, what does it mean to be intelligent on planet Earth in this part of the galaxy?
Speaker 6:And I was kind of in the middle of, like, as an entrepreneur, do you build or, like, which way do you build? And so I was just reflecting that, am I misallocating my time? And I thought, you know, really, blueprint is the practical implementation of this philosophy. Like, when you say yes to don't die, you're saying, like, I value existence. I respect existence.
Speaker 6:And so it's it's less about living forever. It's more about a philosophy of, yes, this moment is big. And so what a lot of people don't realize is this endeavor is entirely about AI alignment. Yeah. I mean, that's the sole thing happening on planet right now.
Speaker 6:And so when you take care of yourself, you take care of your body. When you take care the body, you take care of intelligence. Like, it's this it's this holistic system of we acknowledge existence. So that was it. It was like I was trying to figure out as a human, what do I do on planet Earth right now, and how do I spend my time?
Speaker 6:I'm an entrepreneur. My intuitions are to become an entrepreneur, but I wondered, is that really the the right way to do it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What is what does Blueprint look like in a decade? It feels like you're it's it's such a unique consumer packaged goods business because you can't even call it that. It's like I I understand that there's, the philosophy, and I I love that as the brand.
Speaker 1:But even just in terms of, like, the business of, like, what people pay for, there's a lot. Yeah. And that's just that's just such a contrarian approach to this this category because so many people are like, I have an idea. I'm gonna make coffee better.
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna make a greens powder better, or I have an opinion about the the burger or the meat or the food or the one particular thing. And then they grow and grow and grow, and then five years in, they're like, let's do a line extension. Let's do
Speaker 2:Yeah. The CPG trend of the last ten years was go walk into the gas station, find a product that's popular, and make a a version of it that's, like, 50% healthier, and then you probably have, like, a 9 figure revenue business.
Speaker 1:Or make nothing, like Thrive Market, Erowan. There's a bunch of companies that have been, like, we'll just be the the seller of everything. How did you land on, like, I want to kind of make everything that feels like an immense challenge? Yeah. I wanna walk through all that.
Speaker 6:I mean, that's what, you know, Kaparthi was talking about the autonomous systems with DoorDash. Yeah. Like, that then and he and I think very similar in this way is that if you model out what AI systems will do, they'll probably take on more autonomous responsibility in our lives. Mhmm. We see beginnings where you plug an address into a card, and it helps you navigate to the place you don't think about it much.
Speaker 6:Yep. We're gonna build our autonomous self. Our health will be run on our behalf. So right now, we have to chase down all our food. Have to chase down protocols.
Speaker 6:We have to chase down evidence, but it's not gonna be that in the future. It will be that it will just be run for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And as we get measurement, it's more high fidelity. So blueprint is basically we're saying, we are going to build your autonomous system of health, and we're gonna ride the breakthroughs of science so that as we make better progress in lowering the speed of aging and reversing aging damage, you could just say, I'm in, and I'm gonna ride with you. And so we're gonna try to be on the very, very forefront to help people have, you know, the best possible health. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So we're just building out autonomous health systems.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That feels like super valuable just from the consumer experience of, like, I you I'm I'm delegating all of that hassle. I even know, basically, if I buy one from one brand, it it's all aligned with one philosophy, which is great. What does that mean on the logistics side? What does that mean on the CapEx side?
Speaker 1:What does that mean on the operational cost side? Do you have, like, 25 different product managers for each niche? Like, what's the shape of the company? This feels like a big challenge.
Speaker 6:A very big challenge. We're standing up, like, 10 different businesses at the same time.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. Like, there's plenty of people that could have done what you did and where they, like, become famous, so they become content creators in one way or another. And then they're like, now I have one product. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you're like, now I have how many products do you actually have? 50 or
Speaker 6:Over 20.
Speaker 1:Over 20? Yeah. Yeah. And it's clear that, like, you probably a lot of that comes from the fact that you've been a successful entrepreneur before. You're like, yeah.
Speaker 1:I can probably do more than just one. But, but what what what actually does the what does the does the business look like? Does the system look like? Are there cross selling benefits in retail on day one, or or is this just an ecommerce play on day one? Like, how do you think about the the cost and benefits of going multiproduct so soon?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, the the thing is that when people want to be healthy, you can't just address one thing. Yeah. They're still left with 99 things to deal with.
Speaker 1:I totally get the consumer value. Yeah. Makes ton of
Speaker 6:sense. So internally, we're basically building out the infrastructure Yep. To deliver every single channel. So digital, food, prescriptions, testing. Yep.
Speaker 6:So we could say like
Speaker 1:So much stuff.
Speaker 6:You know, this is what I've done this myself
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 6:You know, like five years. Yeah. We've mastered the system for me. Yeah. And, you know, I've been fighting to achieve the best biomarkers in the world.
Speaker 6:I kind of, in some sense a like a ridiculous idea Yeah. But also like it's a new sport. Like Yeah. You can imagine it becoming a thing. So, yeah.
Speaker 6:I mean, basically, we've mastered it. We've built it. Now we're just productizing it. People do it.
Speaker 1:So where where are the images of the
Speaker 2:What what is how do you think about so so every every consumer out there has, probably at some point or another gone through the frustration of of finding a product they love and then watching the company behind it or sometimes an acquirer just like steadily just like try to maintain or increase their margins to the point where it's no longer that it might have a similar looking packaging, but it's no longer the same product. Like, like, I imagine, like, you want Blueprint to be the thing that you are reliant on for the majority of your calories, the majority of the supplements you take, the majority of the drugs that you are going to, leverage. And so, I can imagine, like, you know, holding the company to that standard so that you're not having to go anywhere else or realize, like, oh, this product would actually be better for me. But, like, do you have any kind of, like, ethos around that? Because that just feels like every you know, I try to be cognizant of, like, when a company goes from founder led to they've exited and Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The new acquire is just gonna say like, hey, you know, we could actually source this salt from over here Mhmm. And we're gonna save like 80% Yeah. And nobody's really gonna notice because it's gonna taste similar. But then the test starts showing up and it's actually like got lead in it now or whatever.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Exactly right. I mean, I'm Blueprint's number one customer.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:I appreciate it so much, you know, because like we when we first started doing this project, I was testing everything I put into my body.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Air, water, food, like everything. And I learned, first of all, food is guilty until proven innocent. Yeah. It is so toxic. It's Yep.
Speaker 6:No matter where you get it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People were freaking out last week when there was that, protein powder report came out that a bunch of them had lead in it, and I was like, I my immediate reaction was like, obviously, lot of this stuff has lead in it. It's mean, like, look at the average chocolate bar has like a ton of lead in it.
Speaker 6:And that's like it's not even so you can isolate that one toxin, but there's so many other toxins.
Speaker 3:Totally.
Speaker 6:So people, they they grab onto one concept that they understand. It's like, oh, that's bad. There's trace levels of heavy metals in all of our foods. Yeah. So like the fact that it's there is not an alarming.
Speaker 6:It's just it's out of context, but it's at a level people understand. But, you know, like the the goal is I'm going to Blueprint is my way to try to achieve, you know, this don't die, and so people will be just riding along. We build on population level data, so this is not about Brian Johnson's body. This is about Sure. Everybody's body.
Speaker 6:So all ages, both genders. Yeah. But, no, I think we're we're being meticulous about what we do, And so it will be the quality will be the best in the world. And so I care about it. I'm consuming all about myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what, what's the plans on the kind of telemedicine front for, for kind of interventions or therapies that require doctors kind of involvement? Is there anything on that front?
Speaker 6:We will build an infrastructure to basically when you want a prescription, if you wanna go on a GLP one Mhmm. We can help you get started whether you want a large dose or a microdose. This is just funny.
Speaker 1:You're you're just like, yeah. And also I'll do the lab testing and also, like, build the, you know, the I'll I'll I'll I'll be mining the metal that gets turned into the needle that injects you
Speaker 6:with the. That's like,
Speaker 1:you want to hold up the entire global economy. I love it. It's good ambition. I I I I strongly support this. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I I was interested in, like, like, where are the edges of, like, what you really Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I'm not gonna go into that market, but it feels like you'll just continue to work on it until you get to some status where you're like, yeah, actually,
Speaker 2:it's It'd full circle. You would you go into hospitality? Would you create like physical kind of
Speaker 1:That's what was say. Yeah. So If you want if you wanna get a 100% of these calories
Speaker 2:European these European kind of, health retreats that are very like evidence driven. Yeah. Testing focus. I could imagine a blueprint retreat center that that people can visit once a year to Yeah.
Speaker 6:We have about a dozen groups around the world that wanna stand this up, and some of the biggest hotel chains around the world. They because the thing is they just want credibility. They wanna say, like, come here. We have this thing structured. When I meet with some of the most powerful people in the world, they're just as clueless as everyone else.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. It is not a like, people imagine reaching powerful people just have it solved. Yeah. That is not the case.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 6:Yep. And so, yeah, we are gonna stand this up. We probably will not do physical clinics. It's just too much on the real estate. And so we'll probably license it out.
Speaker 6:Sure. We'll probably do the digital model. We have IP
Speaker 1:model almost?
Speaker 6:We have trust. Yeah. Like, we wanna have like, we could do a model across food and clinics Yep. Where we have this evidence based approach. So, yeah, I mean, we're we're kind of in it to just Yeah.
Speaker 6:Blanket the entire industry
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:With a framework on how to do things in a credible way that's biomarker led
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Evidence based.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was the thesis behind the round? $60,000,000, tons of faces, not the traditional CPG, VCs, private equity folks. Like, what was the thesis?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, so I I've been funding the company myself up up until this point. Yeah. And, you know, I guess I just wanted my friends to come along with me. Sure.
Speaker 6:So these are people I talk to in private. Yep. They enjoy it. They're into it. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I think a lot of people, they have not known how to think about me. Like, am I legit? Am I not? Is this a thing? Is this weird?
Speaker 6:And then they see that list of investors are like, oh, shit.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And so, like, yesterday, I think it was the first day it was like, oh, it's safe to say this is cool. Let's see. People have like that.
Speaker 1:Flipped like a long time ago. Really? Yeah. I I I feel like the I feel like the the first, like, biz I I what was the first piece that you did that was, like, I spent $2,000,000 on my health and that went super viral?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Two or three
Speaker 1:years ago. That was, two or three years ago. Yeah. I feel like that was the moment where people
Speaker 2:were really kind of confused. But pretty
Speaker 1:quickly, people dug into your backstory and were like, You sold them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. My my personal view is is America has has, over the last few years, had so little trust in health institutions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like if you just went and followed the American Heart Association's guidance Yeah. I'd probably die at
Speaker 1:like 60.
Speaker 6:Right? Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:And so so to me, I was always like, you know, knowing how much I I You can read about health and you can listen to podcasts and you can listen to what some influencer said in a short form video. But to deeply understand your health, you have to do self experimentation Yes. Because everybody is different. And so I always looked at it, you know, you you always tried to be controversial enough to like generate attention, attract some people that were gonna become super fans Mhmm. And lose some people and you were kind of okay with that.
Speaker 2:But my my sense was always like, thank you that somebody is gonna invest more money than basically anyone else Yeah. And just self experimentation and then open source all of that. And now people can buy your olive oil if they want or they can decide, no, I'm actually gonna go on my own journey and try to find some Yeah. Some product that can fit this requirement. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it felt like such a public benefit that I always wish there was like a thousand Brian Johnsons that were just all running the same experimentation open sourcing process versus the biggest thing we we talked about this the other day is health influencers quickly get into put themselves in a niche and they're like, I'm the I'm the the fasting guy. I'm the HRV guy. And then every single thing becomes about that. Yeah. And it's cool because you can like tap into a world and like kind of accelerate and understand a lot about a category.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But then in reality, it's not like fasting is the only thing that matters. It's just like one tool. So
Speaker 1:I have another take on on that that maybe I'd like your reaction to. There's also this this trend in health influence where if I wanna blow everyone's brain, I'm gonna come in and, blow everyone's mind. I'll be like, guess what? I boil it all down. It's a sleep, diet, and exercise.
Speaker 1:That's like 99% of what you need to do. Yeah. Everyone's like, man, this John guy, he's not talking about the crazy supplements. He's just telling it like it is. Sleep, diet, exercise.
Speaker 1:I did it. I feel great. This is amazing. And then after I've made, you know, one hour of content every week for five years on sleep, diet, and exercise, I'm like, you know what? Let's actually talk about, like, the seventeenth piece of magnesium you should take or, like, the the thing that's yeah.
Speaker 1:It is beneficial, but it's point o o 1%.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and it's still interesting, but it's not gonna have the power law effect of, like, actually start working out or, like, actually get sleep. And so do you wrestle with that? Do you feel like you have to go back to the basics sometimes, or or do you think that there's there's actually maybe that's not even that's not even a reasonable critique?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think that the the thing that most people struggle with is doing things they don't want to do. Mhmm. Like, they don't wanna overeat. Yeah.
Speaker 6:They don't wanna eat a pint of ice cream.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, they don't want to drink, you know, you know, so
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Those things are really the highest leverage interventions. It's Yeah. It's it's behavioral. Yeah. And so, yes, you can say sleep that exercise, but you get deep, and you then uncover that American like, our American society Yeah.
Speaker 6:Is one of addiction. Sure. Like, the American powers of capitalism have appointed at getting people to be addicted Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Food.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right? Sugar, nicotine, porn, junk, like, all
Speaker 2:of it.
Speaker 6:And so this is if you look at yourself, like, just from a broad perspective, you begin on Western thought with plural Aristotle, Christianity
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:Middle Eagle times, Renaissance, enlightenment, and modern modern scientific era.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, you look at these big frames, we're due for a major shift. And right now, we're at the tail end. This is like kind of a Dalio kind of thought process of, like, these big macro trends.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:We're at the end, and right now, you know, capitalism was for solving scarcity. We're now compulsive. Right? We're now compulsive. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And the idea was democracy was freedom of choice. We now have no longer choice because we're addicted.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:So we're really playing on this very big macro frame of we're at different times of species. And so, yes, with that exercise, but in this larger frame
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's about what does it mean to actually be intelligent, make decisions, and Mhmm. You can't when you're addicted to everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what do you think about some of the longer tail interventions, like the the the, like, the third peptide that's not approved yet, but people are already taking it here? It feels like is this sort of, like, un pseudo regulated, unregulated biohacking becoming more prevalent? Is that the correct world in a world where the FDA is broken, or does the FDA need to change? Or how how do how should we, like, map the, you know, accelerating advances in science with maybe stagnation in regulatory?
Speaker 1:What's your framework for that?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, peptides are very powerful. They're basically drugs. Okay. Right?
Speaker 6:So you get access to drug like effect sizes. Sure. The problem is peptides are oftentimes not manufactured to spec,
Speaker 1:and so
Speaker 6:you have risks Sure. Like putting stuff in your body that you shouldn't be putting in your body.
Speaker 1:Then also Like, they could have lead in them just like your chocolate bar and a bunch
Speaker 6:of other stuff. Same with stem cells. So, like, there's a there's a real quality problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. The other problem is peptides.
Speaker 3:A lot
Speaker 6:of peptides are not fully well characterized. So typically drugs, you say, like, you can do this thing, but also here's the long list of side effects. Yeah. And that's nice because like, okay, at least I know what the trade off space is. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. With these peptides, you don't have the characterization. Okay. And so it's a bigger risk that people experiment. You see a lot of this in bodybuilding.
Speaker 6:Now you have biomarker biohackers doing it. Sure. So it's fine. It's just you have to understand it's the wild wild west. Sure.
Speaker 6:That may be your game. It may not, but, like, definitely you wanna be cautious.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:It's not gonna the safe path, but then there's other things like you start with the highest level of evidence. You know, sauna is great. Yeah. But, you know, like if you I've talked about this a lot. If you don't ice the boys in the sauna Sure.
Speaker 6:You crush it.
Speaker 2:Can you make a ice pack?
Speaker 6:So right.
Speaker 2:I to I used to think we maybe talked about this last time. I used there used to be this ice pack on Amazon that was for this use case.
Speaker 1:Wait. And it's gone?
Speaker 2:And they stopped selling it. And I don't I I liked it. I lost I lost my
Speaker 6:So we should They don't want
Speaker 2:you icing your voice
Speaker 1:out there. They want that.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And then a lot of men will say, like, I'm not trying to have, you know, babies. Okay. So it doesn't matter, but it has negative feedback. Hormone.
Speaker 6:Hormone health. Exactly. Interesting. So yeah. There's so yes.
Speaker 6:Sleep diet exercise is great, but then you dive into the details. This is what I'm saying, like, you you start down this path and you inevitably will spend 50% of your time chasing down
Speaker 1:everything. Some sort of weird root cause whatever
Speaker 6:it is. It's never easy. Yeah. So you have infinite chase.
Speaker 2:And that's
Speaker 6:what I'm saying is that's the problem I'm trying to solve is nobody has 50% of their time to do this.
Speaker 2:We How, how are how are you thinking about wearables? Because there's a world in the future where you have a camera that's effectively a sensor that's able to experience life in your in your view. And that as like a health copilot would be pretty wild because it would be like, hey. Hey. You you've already eaten like, you know, well beyond you assume that like cameras get better at, like, calorie tracking.
Speaker 2:It's like, hey. You're well over, like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your daily caloric needs.
Speaker 2:Like, you're now going into a surplus. Maybe ease off, and maybe that's enough.
Speaker 1:The Meta Ray Ban displays, like, need a killer app. That sounds like something you should build. What what do you think?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, the if you think about it, GLP ones are kind of that. I mean, a little bit. Right? It's like it's like modulating your hunger Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Your satiety, and it's like so
Speaker 2:How do you how do you think, we'll view GLP ones and the the explosion of their use in fifty years?
Speaker 6:It's probably the most successful antiaging drug ever built.
Speaker 1:It's incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 6:It it's like, you the benefits keep on accumulating. Yes. There's They're getting better all the time, but it's Do
Speaker 1:you feel the same way about statins?
Speaker 6:Those are they're complicated. I mean, statins do have benefits, but they're complicated.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like there's any value to reading into the, the the conspiracy, like, weird vibes around the fact that, like, Ozempic came from a demon, like this Gila monster? Is it the Is it the Gila Gila monster? Monster? Or Komodo dragon venom or something like that? Like, it just feels like wrong.
Speaker 1:Right? If you're just like, you know, just humanity one zero one, you'd be like, yeah. Don't drink
Speaker 2:Don't become the reptile.
Speaker 1:Don't drink the reptile venom.
Speaker 6:I mean
Speaker 2:You're you're he Brian, we've been trying to become the reptile
Speaker 1:I mean, a you into it?
Speaker 6:The Sonorian toad gave us five MEO DMT.
Speaker 1:And I would say that that's bad too. I I I that that throwing off all sorts of red flags for
Speaker 6:me. It just got FDA approval.
Speaker 1:It
Speaker 6:did. It did.
Speaker 1:For what?
Speaker 6:Break the test for treat depression treat resistant depression.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Treatment resistant
Speaker 6:depression. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Got it. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I guess if you're sad, you need the you need the toad
Speaker 6:to cheer
Speaker 1:you up, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. Thank you, Ricardo.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm I'm happy if it's helping people. I'm happy. It is it is just funny when we were we we we we were looking at the story of Ozempic like a year ago.
Speaker 2:What's your what's your view on I think everybody's hoping maybe maybe GLP ones are this and and people haven't sort of fully realized it yet. But everybody is kind of, I feel like for a while, hoping that like, oh, by the time that I'm I'm a I'm really aging, like I'm really feeling it, there will just be a pill that I can take and, you know, I'll just be able to halt or maybe even reverse. Are like, you how open to to you how open are you to the idea that, like, there could be something that is, an order of magnitude more effective than GLP ones in terms of antiaging? Like, are you you know, where where do you put the probability there?
Speaker 6:I mean, study that came out from China in June, they showed that they took this form of a FOXO three protein. They use CRISPR. They put it in a mesenchymal stem cell and delivered it via intravenous treatment. It had a, biological equivalent for human anti so this was in monkeys. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:It had a three to five year, age reversal in over 50% of the tissues, which is unseen. Mhmm. And then for human equivalent, that'd be, like, nine to fifteen years roughly. So these demonstrations are being done. I think we'll probably I was gonna actually figure this out.
Speaker 6:You know, the the hype cycle where you you
Speaker 1:Yeah. Gartner hype cycle.
Speaker 6:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Trough of disillusionment, of projects.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 6:gonna model this out this week. Yes. Trying to figure out, like because I think we're probably gonna hit peak in something like
Speaker 1:GLP ones or something?
Speaker 6:2032, you're like ish. Like Okay.
Speaker 2:Like Okay. We got some time.
Speaker 1:We're still going on.
Speaker 6:Few things that hit people will be like,
Speaker 1:it's here. And then Oh, oh, and people will think that they're gonna live forever.
Speaker 6:And then And then
Speaker 1:there will be a crash and be like, oh, actually, there's still more problems to solve.
Speaker 6:Exactly. Then 2035, 2037, people were like, oh, man. Like, it's not solving this or that, or we have these complications. Then, like, maybe early twenty forties, people were like, actually
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:We got this. Like, something like that.
Speaker 1:I saw some
Speaker 2:post You get you get crazy inbound from from mad scientists all over
Speaker 1:the world. They're like, hey,
Speaker 2:I made this thing. I was talking with Chad GPT for fifty hours over the last week, and I figured out, like, let me let me come inject you. When I
Speaker 6:was when I was building Kernel for this brain interface Yeah. I would get all these emails that people are like, I've been implanted by the government. Oh, wow. That would come in. But now, yes, like I do.
Speaker 6:I get,
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 6:know, would be like seven to 10 a day.
Speaker 1:Woah. You're like,
Speaker 2:People offering you experimental.
Speaker 6:You're like, I've I've discovered the quantum realm and how the how Sick. Yes. I mean, it's it's wild. People are excited about this topic.
Speaker 1:Maybe some toads involved in that one. That's funny. Yeah. I remember seeing this post a while back. I I don't know if you remember it better than I do, but it was basically looking at, like, the the distribution of lifespans is not there's not just a single power law where everyone falls off at, like, 90.
Speaker 1:Like, you would expect if it was just a normal power law that we would get a couple 150 and, like, one 200 year old person. But in fact, there are, like, the this double exponential effect. Yeah. And so maybe that's kind of what happens where you maybe we solve one of them, but then we still are at this, like, you know, exponential fall off in in longevity. But even unlocking, like, one person at 200 would be amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. There was this interesting paper that came out of Levin.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:So he said, his theory after running this model Mhmm. Was that basically after we reproduce
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Our cells lose purpose.
Speaker 1:Like, we
Speaker 6:our cells don't have a unifying objective. Yeah. So they just like aging is just like, we just don't know what to do. Interesting. And so if his model is correct, like biology needs don't die.
Speaker 6:Like, they actually need an objective at a macro scale, like at our level of cognition, but also at a cellular level. But I think, like, these are the kinds of experiments people are being are doing of, like, what what is the underlying incentive structure of biology? Why do we age? Why do we not age in certain parts of our life? Yeah.
Speaker 6:Why do we have protective mechanisms? You know, why do some species regenerate? So I think it's this really exciting frontier where our ideas now of aging Yeah. Are beginning to crack open a little bit and expanding our horizons. Like, how do we think about time?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, we talked about this last time you were on about Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, not particularly famous for their biohacking, but incredibly resilient, well like, life well lived. So many stories about them, like, you know, staying up drinking Coca Cola and wine long into the night. And I I wanna believe that there's some level of just if you have a purpose, if you have drive, your body just pulls it together a little bit more.
Speaker 6:I I know people want this to be, like, the answer. Yes.
Speaker 1:You know? But you're saying,
Speaker 6:like just luck. I think it's such
Speaker 1:a I know.
Speaker 6:I know. Think it's really such a bad idea because people in their mind, they make that shortcut, they're like, you know what? I've got got to work harder.
Speaker 2:I've to work harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did we did we cure, balding? There was that study it was Oh, last week.
Speaker 6:They're all such they're weak effects.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So, like, you we really have not made
Speaker 2:I guess it's So long turkey.
Speaker 6:It's a little bit embarrassing as a human race that we haven't been able to make really good strides on hair loss.
Speaker 1:That one seems very simple.
Speaker 6:It's like I I don't know.
Speaker 1:It just seems, like, very mechanical. You know? It it doesn't seem as complicated as, like, you know, your brain degenerating. We don't even know how the brain works. It's like, it's hair.
Speaker 1:It just grows. Like, it should be easy.
Speaker 6:We're working on it. We just put out our best, attempt, and we're gonna see if it works. Like Okay. We're gonna try to beat every everything that's out there on market.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We'll
Speaker 1:see. How important is, these, like, cosmetic intervention to the blueprint plan?
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, because you could imagine a world where people will say, yeah. Make me live forever, but I don't care about wrinkles and hair because unless it's gonna help me actually live longer
Speaker 6:Yeah. Why bother? I mean, thing is, don't die is really be hot. Like, what? Like, what?
Speaker 2:Every every every every supplement company, every every company in health, you're ultimately selling at the end of
Speaker 1:the day. And I I think this is brilliant from a business perspective. Yeah. But does it make sense in terms of the science? Like, does it take something out
Speaker 2:of Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, being hot is good science. You know? Like, if you look youthful and vibrant, your skin is nice and, like, you you have a lot of energy. So I think be hot is legit. Okay.
Speaker 6:The path for this. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hot. Don't die. Have
Speaker 6:a
Speaker 2:safe How do you think about longevity in the business? You know, if you look at the D to C bubble, there was a lot of companies that raised similar amount of money and and, you know, are are no longer with us. I imagine you care about a lot about just making sure that don't die and Blueprint survive decades. And I'm sure that's informing the way you're building
Speaker 6:I mean, this is like you you know, the Internet comes about Google sets up shop Yeah. And rides that tailwind. Amazon sets up shop on on commerce. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Basically, somebody's gonna set up shop in longevity Mhmm. And ride a multi trillion dollar ride.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:So that's what we're trying to
Speaker 1:do Yeah.
Speaker 6:Is we're trying to just be home base, win the early innings of longevity Mhmm. And then ride for the multi trillion dollar market.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you think there's a lot of like, I imagine m and a will be pretty important to your strategy Really? For a lot of companies. I mean, I just Yeah. View there's lot of companies that are important that are like single product or Yes.
Speaker 2:For specific use cases that don't really necessarily need or shouldn't be. Mhmm. Because like if you're a Blueprint customer, maybe you need it once every three years. Mhmm. But that means it could be harder to actually build a business around, but it would slot in.
Speaker 6:You nailed it. So basically, if you look at the landscape in health right now, nothing is proprietary. You basically you got wearables from all these different providers. You have food from providers. You have biomarkers.
Speaker 6:Like, nothing's proprietary. Yeah. And so the winner's gonna have to outcompete everybody and bringing a an experience to the customer that is sensible and practical and make you know? So I think that's that's where the competition's gonna be because this is like the days when I was building a Braintree Venmo is it was commoditized. Like, you're all on the Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, Stack, and you have to build something unique, then, Braintree and Stripe just collapse the market.
Speaker 1:Yep. How do you think about wait. I now I wanna hear the story of, of the Venmo acquisition. How did that happen?
Speaker 6:They so they built up a vent. So people in payments, it was very clear PayPal was the only company making money Okay. Because they had both sides of the market. Sure. They got lucky because they got into eBay.
Speaker 6:Yeah. They built the consumer side, but then they had the merchant side too. Because otherwise, if you just offer it to merchants
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Your margins are pretty low. Sure. Right? You're making, whatever, twenty, fifty basis points like And so everybody was going after PayPal trying to build a two sided marketplace, and that took a lot of capital. It's very hard to build
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:From scratch. And so I said, okay. I'm gonna build, the merchant side of the business, first, and then we're going to acquire the consumer side. Mhmm. I said this when I started the company.
Speaker 6:So we got customers like Airbnb, Uber, GitHub. We got all the Gen Z people, and then Venmo had done a fantastic job building out consumer side. And then we could then marry those two demographics, it was just like, perfect. And so yeah. So they had built a great business, but they hadn't solved making money.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:When they plugged into our world, we bought them for 26,200,000.0.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. How much of that was, like, not making money because of fraud? I hear that, like, a lot of fintech companies, like, they actually have something where the unit economics should work, but it's always crazy in the early days. So you hear the story about PayPal where
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:PayPal was losing tons of money, but it was only because of fraud. The actual business, when it wasn't fraudulent, made sense. But then once you get to scale, you can do the antifraud properly. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Was that something that you were problem, problem solving around?
Speaker 6:It's very hard,
Speaker 1:I guess.
Speaker 6:Because you're doing peer to peer,
Speaker 2:and, of
Speaker 6:course, you have, like, you know, like, illicit purposes
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 6:Primarily as your driver.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so it's a very hard problem. So as a standalone, it's hard for them to make sense because you if you have if you stack on a fee when you're paying your buddy, it's hard. There's friction in the adoption. Yep. So you have to kinda speed run adoption and then make money later.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:But there was no good make money later problem.
Speaker 1:It becomes a
Speaker 2:big cash sink. Do you I I was running, I think it was a shower thought. I was like, okay. There's so much cap capital sloshing around the private markets. It's been interesting that we haven't seen more people, like, try to take on Stripe.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it's I don't know. I I be curious, from your point of view. At at what point will people even try to climb that mountain?
Speaker 6:It's very unlikely. They've done such a great job executing. I I sold, Braintree in 2013.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So they've been building twelve years since. They've done such a good job making that airtight.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:They're just great. Yeah. That's like this is the thing is like
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can't come in and make it 10 x better product.
Speaker 6:Amazon locked commerce. So you, of course, can build your e commerce business on Shopify, but at a scale, I mean, Amazon has just kinda owned that entire thing. It's very hard to replicate that. Yeah. So that's that's our goal too is we're basically trying to do that for longevity is once you collapse the entire space, it just it's very hard to get in.
Speaker 1:Okay. We got a lightning round. Favorite book? Or just a book recommendation, something you read recently that you like?
Speaker 6:I just finished, the history of the western mind going through all of western thought.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool. Favorite music. What's in your
Speaker 6:You know, I have such a soft spot for Eminem. When I was Eminem. When I was depressed he was the only artist that I could feel.
Speaker 1:Okay. Love it. Wow. When will humanity develop AGI?
Speaker 2:Asked you to That's your heart. You don't wanna sound like a diesel. You don't wanna be
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Just call it right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well well, I wanna be able to clip this the day
Speaker 6:out and be like Exactly. Brian.
Speaker 1:I wanna say I wanna say that Hold it to the I wanna say that we'll be nice to you and we won't clip this, but I know our clipping infrastructure, and we absolutely will clip this.
Speaker 6:It's such a sucker question, man. It's like
Speaker 1:Well well, maybe let's flip it around. OpenAI and Microsoft where did this where the the the the definition of AGI will be convened What by a group of is your definition of AGI?
Speaker 6:I I approach this question as a more through psychology Mhmm. Of when will humans Mhmm. Feel useless?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Feel useless.
Speaker 6:Yes. Like, our entire identity is based upon, like, we do things, we contribute Yes. Build.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:And now AI is a tool. Like, we feel more productive with it.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:At what point will it do everything so well Yes. You feel this deep hole in your stomach of like, what do I do?
Speaker 1:So what if yeah. The weird thing is, like, computers are incredible at chess, yet people play chess for fun and at the professional level because humans, I guess, they're anti clanker, and they like watching humans play chess. And if we can solve that for everyone so that everyone has some sort of like, in this AGI world where there's no more real jobs, there's no more actual okay. You need to produce something for food or, you know, livability. Everything is just for fun or for games Yeah.
Speaker 1:And for status. And it's all about, I wasn't under chiropractor saying you go to the gym and you'll learn in the future? Yeah. And it's and I wonder, like, if your definition is once that breaks down, that is feels really fun.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:But I I like that. I like that.
Speaker 6:Like, people afford to retire. Like, retirement is a goal. It's an ideal. It's like, we're gonna get an RV. Gonna cruise the country.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Then they retire. They're like, this sucks. Like, there's there's not the tension.
Speaker 2:Never retire.
Speaker 6:So if we imagine, we're gonna, like, learn and we're gonna, do yoga all day and paint and Mhmm. But, like, if there's not the tension of the stress and the of real life, like, do we really wanna be on vacation all the time?
Speaker 1:Do
Speaker 6:we wanna be at leisure? Like so that's my like, what I think about is when that happens, that's a pretty unnerving situation Yeah. Because humans don't do well without uncertainty. Yeah. And then our systems have to respond.
Speaker 6:So like, that's what I really think about all day
Speaker 1:of day.
Speaker 2:Everyone in the end is just gonna be competing on biomarkers. It's gonna be the final it's gonna be the final
Speaker 6:It's gonna be final
Speaker 2:the final.
Speaker 1:That aligns with parapathy's take. Last lightning round question and then I want you to ring the gong. Favorite vacation spot. Where would you go?
Speaker 6:Redwood Forest. Redwood Forest. I love Redwood.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Staying in California?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I would love I love Redwoods.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 6:Like, they're
Speaker 2:This is John. This
Speaker 1:is John. Like, California.
Speaker 2:You don't need to go to Europe.
Speaker 1:I love America. I don't You
Speaker 2:don't need to get all the radiation on the plane. Yeah. Just stay here.
Speaker 6:They're, like, such beautiful Yeah. Majestic creatures. And they live a long time. They live a long time.
Speaker 1:It's a very on brand for you. I love it. Congratulations on the round. $60,000,000. Fantastic progress.
Speaker 1:I'd love for you to ring that gong, and I'd love for you to ring it at a at a decibel level that you feel is appropriate for, hearing don't wanna do
Speaker 6:Do you what? Actually, me pull Let me pull up
Speaker 1:teach us?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Let me pull up my decibel meter. Do we have my phone? Let's make sure we get this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's bring over
Speaker 2:If
Speaker 6:we don't want to be Okay. Over 80 decibels
Speaker 1:Yes. Because we, we do have IEM, so it is a little bit of hearing protection, but I would love to know. You can you feel free to take as many swings you as you need.
Speaker 2:Because But I'd
Speaker 1:love to know Yeah. What what an 80 decibel
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Ring sounds like.
Speaker 6:So, yeah, I recently yeah. I measured my ears. My left ear is sixty four.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So I have moderate mild to moderate hearing loss Oh, really? Which substantially increases your risk of dementia.
Speaker 2:Oh, woah.
Speaker 6:So yeah. So
Speaker 1:Because you're going crazy because you don't you don't perceive reality properly.
Speaker 6:Your brain's missing all these things. Wow.
Speaker 1:So That's crazy. These studies Makes so much sense.
Speaker 6:Built for for hearing loss, like concerts
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Social gatherings, restaurants. So, yeah. I would suggest everyone get a hearing test. Yeah. I just get hearing aids.
Speaker 6:Okay. So alright.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Cool.
Speaker 6:Here we go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Hit hit that gong at at a at a at a longevity approved level. Let's hear
Speaker 6:it. Alright.
Speaker 1:Okay. What are we at? How are doing? 90. 90.
Speaker 1:Okay. So about that level, if we go any higher, we're gonna need Just
Speaker 6:a just a tad.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Just a tad.
Speaker 2:There we go. That is the bright spot. Improved approved. Gong hit.
Speaker 1:You heard it here. I got I got everyone in the chat is like, oh, finally.
Speaker 6:That's that's my shot.
Speaker 1:We we smacked that thing so loud. Fortunately, you know, we Dude,
Speaker 2:do you have tinnitus?
Speaker 6:No. I don't.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:Fortunately. But I I do. Oh, you do?
Speaker 2:You do? I've had it since I was my my Coachella era.
Speaker 6:This is the thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Wow. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now I I don't I don't go to concerts at all. I don't pay to stand in crowds and lines. But but I do I I I specifically recall, or I believe I know the exact weekend that that that that Yeah. It started.
Speaker 6:Man, is it a pretty significant thing in your life?
Speaker 2:No. I I zone it out. But but if I take a if I I like, I've adapted to not hearing it. Yeah. But if I every probably few times a week, I'll I'll be in a really quiet space and realize that I have constant ringing.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Have you looked into hearing aids?
Speaker 2:No. Yeah. Maybe I should.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So I just got the Oticon Intense. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. And that that that increases your not wearing them right now.
Speaker 6:Not right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But you've you've been testing them out?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Exactly. I actually I I'm so sad. I I was running out the door and I forgot them. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Because I just finished my morning routine, so I'm so sad. But But they actually they've I've only had them for a week. They have substantially improved my life.
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah. Wow. Cool.
Speaker 1:Well, this conversation has substantially improved
Speaker 6:my life.
Speaker 2:Guys. Thank you so
Speaker 1:It was great. Yeah. You're on the show. This is fantastic. Nice to see you.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 6:Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And we will talk to again soon. Soon, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. But first, let me tell you about ProFound.
Speaker 1:Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And we have Nathan Mintz from CX two in the TBP and Ultradome. Nathan, how are you
Speaker 2:doing? Boom.
Speaker 8:Wonderful. Wonderful. It's, sunny and about 75 degrees outside here in East El Segundo.
Speaker 2:I love it. Great.
Speaker 1:Haven't, yeah. It's been too long since we caught nothing up.
Speaker 2:There's nothing like pulling open the weather app in California, and it's just ten days straight of sunny and 75, and we're lucky to have that pretty much year round.
Speaker 8:I like all makes the taxes tolerable.
Speaker 1:I like all the all the traditional press pronounced behind you. We need to send you some physical memorabilia
Speaker 2:Screenshots from your
Speaker 1:your TVN appearances since this is your second one. But give us the give us the update. What what's new in your world?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So, you know, CX two, we've been turning and burning. Yeah. We pretty much have been racking up the frequent flyer miles going to multiple exercises this year. Think we're about to go to number eight next week.
Speaker 1:Wow. Wow.
Speaker 8:And one of the things we realized as we go around and we talk to leaders and we talk to the war fighters and stuff is that there's kind of a nebulous understanding of the nature of the problem that we're facing. So we decided to get together with, some of those knowledgeable warfighters we know, along with our experts here and, you know, really write it down in in booklet form as the spectrum imperative.
Speaker 2:And,
Speaker 8:if you go to our website, cx2.com, there's a big banner where you can try and type in spectrumimperative.com. I'm not the best speller, so I would just go to the our website and then go from there. But really what we're trying to do is come up with what is the core thesis
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Of electromagnetic warfare in the twenty first century. Because the the electromagnetic spectrum is this cross domain across the entire, all the other domains of warfare, land, sea, space, air, and and cyber that connects all of them. And particularly as everything moves to more autonomous systems, we are seeing more increasing reliance upon the spectrum
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:And it becomes a more contested domain of warfare, which because we had the luxury of working for twenty years during the, you know, global war on terror, Iraq, etcetera, where we had permissive access to this spectrum and air superiority
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:We never had to worry about it before.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And now it's something that as we're seeing every day in Ukraine, when it's heavily contested, our ability to have air superiority, air dominance
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:Or really to maneuver on other, in other domains is severely impeded by it. Can you
Speaker 1:help me can you help me synthesize, Palmer Lucky's latest sound bite around, America as the world's arms dealer as opposed to the America, the world police? This idea that, American defense technology companies will be building products that America basically sells or deploys to other countries. Like, what does that look like in Ukraine for you, in Taiwan, in The Middle East? How is that different than, America, the world police where you're designing a system that's ultimately used by American boots on the ground?
Speaker 8:So, in traditional defense, I spent fourteen years in traditional defense. Yeah. I think I pulled my passport out of my drawer three times and once of them was for one time was for my honeymoon. Right? Versus in the last five years that I've been involved with new defense, I think I've been abroad six or seven times.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 8:So that kinda gives you an idea. Actually, the last year, I think I've been abroad four or five times of where we're going. You know, now it's much more common for us to go visit the warfighter up in the battlefield and understand their situation and try and figure out how we can adapt what we're building to go along with them. And think that's what Porter what Palmer's referring to is how do we, you know, works alongside our allies. This is actually one of our, one of our talking points within the within the spectrum imperative is that we need to be more integrated with our allies from a spectrum standpoint.
Speaker 8:We have to be compatible with their radio systems, compatible with their sensor systems, compatible with their command and control systems, and that's a huge part of the spectrum imperative. So I think I think that's what Palmer is really referring to is how do we get them Yeah. To to work with us to buy what the gaps in their capabilities are, build them indigenously. You know, there's a lot of talk about factories at the edge or, you know, forward leaning supply chains to deal with contested logistics.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:That's kind of the, I think, the direction where Palmer's going.
Speaker 1:I I what is the latest update on what's going on in Ukraine? It feels like it's fast becoming a forever war, unfortunately. At the same time, I've been hearing, new updates on drones with fiber optic cables to avoid, you know, the the problems of, electronic, and magnetic warfare. Right? Like, what's what like, what's the state of the the the conflict, and then, what's actually on the cutting edge of what the various militaries are using?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So Ukraine, what's basically happened is the front lines have been relatively frozen.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And it's because if you think about it, you you need to have, you know, uncontested data link, you know, data links at the spectrum layer, you need uncontested navigation, etcetera, or else you're kinda swimming upstream. So effectively, they've created this, you know, no man's land of electronic concertina wire and minefields that really impedes any forward motion. Interesting. And 98% of the action is occurring with autonomous systems, whether that's drones or unmanned ground vehicles or unmanned surface vessels. Yeah.
Speaker 8:The Ukrainians have actually been probably the most successful with the USVs in the Black Sea. They've pretty much pushed the Russians completely out of Sevastopol.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Completely out of Crimea. And now they have to go all the way to their ports on the eastern, side of the, the the Black Sea to actually, like, you know, keep their ships safe. Right? So that's a case study where autonomous systems are actually automated systems in this case because it's still human driven
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:Have been able to really make a difference in that conflict. Meanwhile, the whole concept of a forward line of advance or, forward edge of the battle area is now completely obsolete in the sense that you can have drones pop up from many kilometers behind the lines Mhmm. And hit strategic targets, which is specifically what we saw with Operation Spiderweb. Yeah. Now you mentioned tethered drones.
Speaker 8:Those were very popular in the Kursk offensive. Actually, the Russians were the first to introduce them. Oh. And the Ukrainians then followed suit. And the whole idea was that, well, if there's nothing to jam, then you can fight through all the jamming.
Speaker 8:The trouble is is that the tethered drones in some cases within the Kerst offensive actually turned into about 30% of the drones being used at any given time at its peak. But it has it's a brittle solution. If you go around a tree, you can snag it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:If, you know, the lines can be cut quite easily. You know, there's all sorts of limitations and then not not to mention over water, it's like running a fishing line. If it touches the water at all, it's gonna weigh down the drone and take it down with it. So I
Speaker 1:hadn't thought about that.
Speaker 8:Tethered Yeah. So tethered drones, like, have their time and place. It's a little unclear how, applicable they will be in, in in, like, The Pacific, for example. But, you know, for things like persistent surveillance where you're putting a drone up in the air, and, you know, you can actually run power up to it for surveillance, it it may make a lot of sense. Right?
Speaker 1:I hadn't even thought about that. That's super interesting.
Speaker 8:Yeah. But but Maslow's hammer like Yeah. Yeah. There there is no silver bullet. There is
Speaker 1:What still was the phrase you used? You said Maslow's hammer?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Maslow's hammer that if I have a a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 8:And so that's what tends to happen with any sort of new countermeasures. It's first involved, and then the enemy saturates and counters it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:In fact, probably the biggest paradigm shift we've seen in the Ukraine war that will be very applicable in The Pacific is this idea that all of our systems are highly adaptable. Mhmm. That both us and the enemy are operating on a much faster, fly, fix, fly loop and countermeasure loops than what we're used to seeing. We're used to seeing years for new systems to be introduced. We'll be looking at more like weeks or possibly even days in some
Speaker 1:cases Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And augmented by commercial software practices like CICD and other things.
Speaker 1:Well
Speaker 3:with your update.
Speaker 1:Sorry. We have to move on so quickly, but thank you for the update, and, congratulations on the on all the progress. Definitely encourage everyone to go check out the Spectrum Imperative campaign from c x two, and we will talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to
Speaker 4:catch up, Nathan.
Speaker 2:So much.
Speaker 1:Cheers. You soon. Bye. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products.
Speaker 1:Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. Our next guest is James Proud from Substrate. Welcome to the show. James, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Suited up. Love it.
Speaker 7:Thank you for having me, guys. It's a it's an honor.
Speaker 1:You look fantastic. Please introduce yourself. Give us a little bit of the backstory, and then tell us the general overview of the company, what you're building, and where it's positioned in the in the supply chain of the semiconductor industry.
Speaker 7:Sure. I I I think quite simply what we're what we're doing is a bet that America can do hard things again. Yeah. And that if it's important enough, then we can go and do it. Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's not a question of whether we can or not. And I think when it comes to advanced chips, I think we all know and we all believe this is certainly important enough. And so our bet is that The United States invented this technology. We can invent the next generation again. And and starting with the core process of lithography is how you can actually go and make a what we think a next generation foundry.
Speaker 1:Yep. Okay. So I I think many viewers will be familiar with the general semiconductor stack. You have the design shops like NVIDIA. You have your TSMC, the fab.
Speaker 1:You have ASML, the the lithography machinery maker. You might have Trump or, Zeiss or some other supplier deeper in the chain. How do you see yourself fitting in? Are you vertically integrated? Do you wanna come in and at the ASML level, at the TSMC level?
Speaker 1:We've talked to other TL fellows like the folks at Etched where they're not setting up a fab, but they are designing a new chip, and they're gonna work with at TSMC to run that process. How do you see yourself fitting into the stack?
Speaker 7:Yeah. We're we're we're we're slightly insane, and we think that The United States can build and sustain a new pure play foundry business. Okay. And to do that, we need to be a little bit more vertically integrated than usual. Usually, you have the tooling makers, you have the fabs that buy the tools.
Speaker 7:Yep. We see ours is more a sort of return to the beginning of the industry where everyone sort of did a little bit of everything. Yeah. And so for us, we're we're gonna start making our own tools specifically around the lithography piece.
Speaker 1:Yep. That makes a ton
Speaker 2:of sense. You've been on a on a press blitz this week, all all over the map. What was what was the last year like leading up until this point? What have you been focused on? Then, what does the next year look like specifically in terms of making progress against all these goals?
Speaker 7:Honestly, incredibly, incredibly hard. There's a video that I'm sure you guys have seen of when Elon was being interviewed about the Model three ramp and he sort of looks the floor and talks about how his head and heart physically hurt from how hard he had to work. And I know exactly what that feels like and I'm sure a lot of our team do as well, but as I said, it goes back to, like, is this important enough to actually make happen? And and and we believe that that this certainly is and we're very proud of the results that we have and and wanted to show the world and sort of tell people what we believe and and what we're doing.
Speaker 2:And then what what is, you know, more tactically like what are you know, this is the kind of company that that it's the true potential will only be able to achieve achieved across decades. Right? This is not the kind of company you start and expect to, you know, it's it's it's a massive journey, but like how do you break it up with the team? Like what what are you looking to accomplish more specifically in the next like one to two years?
Speaker 7:Well, moving quickly I think is sort of one of the key important parts of this. I think that this ten years from now is far less important for The United States two, three, four from now. So our goal is in 2028 to actually have a facility constructed and be running wafers. And so one of the reasons why we're coming out publicly is it's going to be very hard to start building big particle accelerators, big clean rooms in in secret. And so the the the goal is we we start doing that very quickly and sprint to '28.
Speaker 1:Walk through some of the milestones to date. Do you have to come up with new ways to etch chips essentially because of IP? And you or do you need to do a bunch of licensing deals? Is it is a big piece of the equation for the last year been marshaling capital and then placing orders to buy equipment and build up a facility. There's so many different ways that the business could take shape if the general goal is, like, let's build a fab in America.
Speaker 1:I can imagine a bunch of different ways to solve that, but how did you go about solving it?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So so up to now, the company is is really three years old. Mhmm. And and the the big thrust so far has been building lithography tools Mhmm. Demonstrating that they work, printing the the smallest things that that human humans are able to go and print.
Speaker 7:Yep. And that's been the focus really up to now. And in terms of like what kind of tool, the IP and the like, our focus has been how do you reduce cost and complexity. And so all of the design choices we've made have been driven by that.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And and really, like, EUV and and the tools that that exist today, these are modern miracles.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:These things are incredible. The engineering, incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But but but the choices were made in the in the really the nineties and and took a while to scale up.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 7:Our approach has been on the lithography side, if you were building a next generation lithography tool today Yeah. Would you make the same technical choices? We've believed no and and the answer is no.
Speaker 2:What's it been like on the recruiting side? Have you been visiting The Netherlands, visiting Taiwan? How are you thinking about building building the the team going forward?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. As I sort of said at the start, like this has been primarily, it sounds very simplistic, but a bet on The United States. A bet that we still have the best engineers, the best scientists, the best national labs. Like if you look at the history of semiconductors, this was all invented by The United States.
Speaker 7:Transistors, CMOS, FinFET, EUV, like American companies usually maybe it's basically been IBM and Intel that invented all of that stuff. And so, like, the the bet is that we have the people, we have the talent. It's just can we actually have a new direction? And and so that's been the the the work that we've done. And so predominantly, we've been recruiting from American companies, US National Labs, so all here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's why America can do things like the CHIPS Act and can restrict the way ASML equipment moves to China because America, because these the IP was developed here in America. So even if it's changed hands, we still have, some leverage. Fascinating. Take us through the fundraise.
Speaker 1:How did it come together? Who's involved? What's the story with the latest fundraise? It feels like a big ambitious project that needs some very ambitious capital, but, what happened?
Speaker 7:So so I wanna actually quickly go back to your your previous point about export restrictions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I A big belief that we've had is that we shouldn't bet that China won't do this. Totally. And a big part of what we're doing is that, like, there's The United States and China, and those are really the two countries that can actually attempt something like this. And because of export restrictions, we know they're trying. And our belief is that if we're not trying to build what a next generation foundry looks like today, we might wind up five, ten years down the line in a really difficult place.
Speaker 7:So that's been a big sort of motivation because of the timelines. These things take a while to play out. On the funding, I know there's a 100 plus number that's more actually historical, but clearly we're not going to build a fab with that amount of money. The key thing though is that unlike I think sort of traditional semiconductor fabs, because we focused on vertically integrating tools, we can reduce that cost and complexity so you don't need to spend 10 plus billion dollars to even get something up and running. We think we can actually get that done for for a much, much lower cost.
Speaker 7:And then on on on the the the the previous money that was announced, I think a huge shout out needs to go to our investors because because really, when when I started this company, I said there's a 1% chance of success, and they still invested. And so for the for the Founders Fund, the General Catalysts of the world, and and all of the others, these guys deserve a huge amount of credit. Like, that's true venture capital, and we think, hopefully, with these results, we're showing that, yeah, these these crazy bets can work.
Speaker 1:Is there any world where you partner with, strategic investors or someone else in the stack? Is there a is there a natural bedfellow in the ecosystem that doesn't feel that, like, feels like there might be some synergy here long term?
Speaker 7:I mean, 100%. Like, for for the entire American economy, it's now basically built on top of AI, which is built on top of advanced semiconductors. Sure. And so there's like, we see this as a sort of a a whole of nation effort. And so the the more people we can partner with, we're we're very open to that.
Speaker 1:Very exciting. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Congratulations Congratulations. Coming out of Stealth. Massive weekend. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:And thank you. The production team thanks you for potentially the most, perfect, Zoom in the week. So shout out to Great. Shout out to your team.
Speaker 1:I like the IEMs as well. That that's a nice touch. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Great stuff. We'll talk
Speaker 3:you guys. Bye.
Speaker 7:See
Speaker 1:you. Up next, we got Sean McGuire from Sequoia Capital coming. Oh, what's he wearing? What's he wearing on the hat?
Speaker 2:There he is.
Speaker 1:I got so excited about the hat. I forgot to do the ad read. The numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax and bike. Okay. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Now now we got Sean. Sorry. Sorry. I I saw you on the preview screen with the hat. I got excited.
Speaker 1:I brought you in prematurely before I could do the ad read. Anyway, how are you?
Speaker 2:Good to see you. Big week in Big week. Sequoia Capital.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, explain what happened. Some new funds, raised, but how do you frame all of the the actual progress and the actual announcement?
Speaker 1:Like, what happened?
Speaker 9:What is up, boys? You guys have become celebrities since last time I was here. You got Satya Nadella. You got all these legends and then jokers like me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, you kicked it off. You kicked it off.
Speaker 9:Anyway, it's been amazing to watch. And, yeah, I got the hat. I'm repping for you.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 9:And I gotta say, this last guy had the best Zoom and audio setup ever and, you know, again, I'm just online.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, no. This is
Speaker 2:your zone. This is your zone when you when, you know, anytime there's controversy on the timeline, you just flip open the laptop Hit record. Hit record. It's thirty minute video.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Single take
Speaker 2:with one tap.
Speaker 1:And this is this is what people want. They want something that just feels like, okay. I'm actually talking to the person in their office. I get the texture of what their life is actually like. I'm sure this is what tons of founders see when they pitch you.
Speaker 1:They they open up, and this is who's on the other end of the line. Right?
Speaker 9:Some something like that. It work it you know, it works to be somewhat relatable. Yeah. That's great. Yeah.
Speaker 9:So look. We're dropping new funds. We are very lucky. Square's been in business for over fifty years. You know, this is the next vintage of our
Speaker 1:Overnight success. Overnight success.
Speaker 9:You know, Sequoia's backed a couple small companies in the past, first investor in NVIDIA
Speaker 1:Yeah. NVIDIA.
Speaker 9:Series a of Apple, series a of Google
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 9:On and on and on. Next venture fund vintage dropping, venture fund '19.
Speaker 1:'19.
Speaker 9:Also seed fund six.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 9:Seed is, you know, something that we used to combine inside our venture funds Yeah. But wanted to place a major emphasis on it really to show the distinction. And I would say so anyways, fund size, 750,000,000 and Yeah. You know, 200,000,000 for seed. Something that I think is
Speaker 1:And is there is there a growth fund as part of this? Is that a separate thing? Is that off cycle right now?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So the growth fund is different cycle. Different cycle. Okay. Announced their funds recently.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 9:Something that I'm honestly very proud of, I joined Sequoia six years ago. Mhmm. And I feel like this is the first fun cycle where we really have, like, a new team, a cracked generation of young people, and that have been now been working together for five plus years.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And so just it really feels like we're firing all cylinders. We got Stephanie with
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:You know, skilled on stage with Jensen yesterday
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 9:And, you know, Reflection. We got Constantine hitting his stride with
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:Expo and a bunch of other companies. You know, we got everyone on the team has some amazing portfolio companies. Yeah. You know? And then the growth team, we have so many great people, Pat, Andrew, you know
Speaker 1:Andrew taking companies public every day now.
Speaker 3:Happy. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Etcetera. And a whole new generation there too.
Speaker 2:Any any, any specific kind of, like, decision making or insight around, like, how you guys decided kind of the fund sizes specifically? Was that, I'm I'm sure, you know, based on a lot of learnings over the last few years and and seems like a commitment to, like, driving, driving, like, real venture returns and and staying committed to that. But what what more can you say there?
Speaker 9:Yeah. No. You nailed it. Something I think people kinda misunderstand about Sequoia and I look. I gotta drop the flex, but, you know, Sequoia has this outsized history in terms of the scale of companies we've backed.
Speaker 9:Like, if you look at the Nasdaq, about 30% of the Nasdaq by market cap were early Sequoia, you know, companies. Pretty wild.
Speaker 6:Crazy.
Speaker 9:But but we actually don't invest in that many companies per year. Like, we really try to keep it pretty focused and targeted where we can be active company builders. And there was a pressure the last few years, and and I would say, like, we were we got caught up a little during the COVID era as everyone did, and our pace increased. But we've just gone back to basics, and we're really just focused on ultra high quality, like, finding just true outlier founders that have really big vision and and kind of rolling up our sleeves to help them build these companies. And it's just we're trying we're trying to not get too caught up in any of the trends.
Speaker 9:We're we're trying to be, like, ahead of trends and, you know, keep the fund size just where we can actually have we we strive for minimum 10 x net returns. Like, that is that is our goal for every fund, and
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:That's where we wanna be.
Speaker 1:What about actual team structure, team size? Is has there been any evolution in the thought process around how large the partnership is, how large the support structure is, the the the back office, the you know? Yeah. How all of that fits together? Is there anything that's structurally changing, or do you see it as, like, kind of just a a slight evolution of the of the conti of the same plan?
Speaker 9:Great question. So we're I you know, we we have to be paranoid at Sequoia. Like, that's our our secret is being ultra paranoid and just trying to outwork everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Didn't a Sequoia founder say that?
Speaker 9:Something I hope so.
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 9:But we went through a pretty hardcore generational transition, you know, five, six years ago. Yeah. Most of the team was not here eight years ago. You have people like Rulof and Alfred that have been here for a long time on the early team and and kind of have helped and Doug, he was active, helping to kind of bridge the generational divide. But I would say where we've innovated is kind of a new team, and then otherwise, really trying to to stay true to the roots of Sequoia, active company building, you know, focus on both like, really trying to understand market structures and find outlier founders.
Speaker 9:I think that's that's something that's different about Sequoia is it's we're not we're not like a an or. It's not founder or market. We're it's an and. Like, we want founder and market. In terms of everything else, I would actually say we've almost gone back to basics a little bit more.
Speaker 9:Like, you know, we have we have a wonderful operating team, and that's something that, you know, we've built up over the last five or six years, but we've basically kept it pretty steady in terms of size. Like, we we feel good about where everything is, and now we just need to execute.
Speaker 1:Okay. Defend the venture capitalist because I'm gonna make the argument that the the that the venture capitalist, not Sequoia in particular, but venture capitalist's entire category is cooked, chopped, destroyed. It's over. The game's over. Agree.
Speaker 1:And here's my thesis.
Speaker 2:What was Roloff's quote the other day? It's
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:It's it's not an asset class. He said venture capital is not an asset class,
Speaker 1:which I
Speaker 9:a 100% agree with. It was a great quote.
Speaker 2:He said it's a reward free risk.
Speaker 1:It's a reward free risk. That's a great quote. But, but, specifically, I want you to address this kind of maybe it's a headwind. Maybe it's not. You tell me.
Speaker 1:There's this idea that you are a venture capitalist. You can see the future. You know that self driving cars or company are coming, and your options are Waymo and Tesla. Like, you can't get venture exposure to that necessarily. You're excited about humanoid robotics.
Speaker 1:Oh, well, Tesla's in in that. You're excited about AI. Well, like, if you wanted to play, like, OpenAI took a billion dollars from from Microsoft and all the VCs were getting in in small slices, no one was able to build a 30% position in that company like they would have done in the previous era with a Facebook or with a Google.
Speaker 2:Yeah. John John was texting me last night joking. He's like, it's absolutely criminal that Satya didn't get carry on on the on the OpenAI investment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and, I mean, I I don't know your thesis on quantum computing. It it feels very early.
Speaker 9:I love the series a and iONQ, which is a public quantum computing company.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 9:Okay. Okay. So it's in the quantum information
Speaker 1:So maybe that so maybe that works. Yeah. Maybe we need to go there, but it feels like there's also competition from big hyperscalers in that market.
Speaker 2:We need the Martin Screlly, Sean Maguire debate on Quantum.
Speaker 9:Oh, yeah. So we definitely I'm actually closer to Martin in a lot of lot of views. Yeah. So
Speaker 2:Maybe it would be in agreement.
Speaker 9:Martin, Sean conversation rather than
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, yeah, let's let's let's table Quantum particular in in particular, and let's instead say, how does venture capital play in a world where frontier technologies take $10,000,000,000 and twenty years to mature? Self driving cars, AI, etcetera.
Speaker 9:Look. I think Rilav nailed it when he said that venture capital is not an asset class. Yeah. Like but we don't do it the way other people do. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:You know? And and granted there's a couple funds I respect unbelievably deeply Sure. That have a lot in common with us.
Speaker 2:A couple?
Speaker 6:But look,
Speaker 1:we I knew it. There are only A two couple people I respect. There are two people I respect.
Speaker 9:There's there's a couple funds. But but, look, we're we're really deeply involved oftentimes in, like, the formation of companies. I think in the last year, there's been at least five or six companies where we signed term sheets bef or sorry, where we were involved in the putting together of companies. Like, before before they were even incorporated, you know, we were, kind of structuring the companies, bringing the founders together. My partner David Khan played a big role in bringing Kela together, for example.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Which is an Israeli defense tech company Yeah. Where, you know, there was a very talented founder that a bunch of us knew Alone Drawer who had a general idea, but he didn't have the right team for it. And I would say his initial idea was wrong, and we helped him with the idea. And then David brought in had a vision to bring this woman, Homotom Meridor. And that combination is magic.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And I I really it's hard to explain how frequently we do that. And so it's like, if you're a passive investor at the late stage, there's no alpha today in VC or very little, but that's just not the game we play. We're extremely active. I mean, my partner Jim gets incubated Palo Alto Networks.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know, Ruta Rulof both invested in YouTube with three people, and they worked in the Sequoia office in the beginning. And, I mean, I can give you so many examples Mhmm. Like this. And so I just we don't think of ourselves as as just, like, an index on the basket. We're trying to, like, bend the arc on the asset class.
Speaker 9:And, look, I'm gonna give a shout out to Founders Fund. Like, they do this incredibly well. They've been incubating companies. They bring a founder mentality. Yep.
Speaker 9:They're, you know, more passive
Speaker 1:My yeah. My later stage. I mean, yeah. Obviously, like, Sequoia and Founders Fund, incredible returns. Like, the model's clearly working.
Speaker 1:I guess maybe it doesn't matter that Sequoia and Founders Fund, like I don't know. All all the funds, it just feels like there's a world where, self driving happens or some other big, huge humanoid robots. It happens, but it happens in a way that the value isn't captured by venture capitalists. And that's what I'm wondering
Speaker 9:I'm not worried I'm not worried about it.
Speaker 1:You're not worried about that. Okay.
Speaker 9:I'm not worried about it. I think there will be a lot of value captured in the public markets. You know? Like, one of the best one of the best Yeah. You know, trades you can make in AI.
Speaker 9:The last five years is obviously buying NVIDIA.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA. Yep.
Speaker 9:The same issue with crypto, though.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:You could
Speaker 9:just buy Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:You know? Yeah.
Speaker 9:Buying Bitcoin outperformed basically every crypto investment. Yeah. But Coinbase was still an amazing investment. I think Bitcoin, like, at almost every point in time, outperformed Yeah. Coinbase.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Maybe not
Speaker 1:I've heard from investors that that's why they passed on Coinbase because they were like, I'll just buy Bitcoin.
Speaker 9:And It's actually a big part of why Sequoia passed on Coinbase
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:In the time. Yeah. So look, like, I think we've seen this play out many times before, but I'll give you a counterpoint.
Speaker 1:Thing in there is that the reason why Bitcoin has done so well is probably because there were VCs that were like, yeah. I'll pay for the r and d at Coinbase to make it accessible, and then the prices went up. And then so everyone else is you you you and f f were free riding, maybe.
Speaker 9:Yeah. We we we were. There's always been this dynamic, though, you know, like the famous telco build out in the late nineties where Global Crossing and all the you know, there were 17 fiber companies that went public and were very highly valued, and then investors lost all their money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But that fiber build out laid the pathway for, you know, SaaS and consumer Internet companies in the early two thousands. Like, this dynamic is always happening, and I I think as investors, we just have to try to stay countercyclical, to stay ahead of the bubbles, try to figure out what second order effects of the bubbles. Like, whenever you concentrate huge amounts of capital, there will be all this new infrastructure that you can take advantage of. And and so we're just you know, like, defense tech is an area where we were not very active in before the war in Ukraine, And tragically, that war was a catalyst. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And you have to identify, like, even though you have a catalyst, there's probably only a six to twelve month window Mhmm. Where Defense Tech is non obvious. And it's like, we made three or four, I think, really good investments in that period, you know, like Niros, like Stark, like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know, Keller a little after that. And you just have to be ahead of the curve because, like, now I think defense tech is becoming Consensus. It's too obvious. And so it's like, valuations are incredibly high. Yep.
Speaker 9:But it's just like, that's our job at Sequoia is to be ahead of the curve on these things. And and there's just always gonna be opportunities to make money if you're proactive.
Speaker 2:Venture capitalists, buy minority positions in companies, and you can be on the board and you can be adding value and helpful. But there's this after you kind of deploy into a company, there can be, kind of this grass is always greener thing where it's like you can meet, like, another five companies the next day and there's always like this this influx of opportunity. You've been at Sequoia now for years and you have an opportunity to meet new companies every day or or, you know, get on the phone with existing portfolio companies, some of which are maybe doing really well, some of which are maybe not. Like, I I was curious if Sequoia, like, has any lessons throughout history of of companies that, like, that you guys draw on, of companies that kind of, like, hit rough patches and people were maybe less excited about, but, like, found a way to have you know, get to another kind of inflection point. Because I feel like you have fifty years of history, A lot of being a great firm is just remembering what made you great and having these sort of, like, lessons that are, like, IP effectively.
Speaker 9:Oh, man. This is such an astute point. And and look, I think this is one of the superpower I'd say it sequels a lot of superpowers. You know, one is we just have this network. A lot of the foundry back were employees at, you know, prior Sequoia portfolio companies.
Speaker 9:So there's that flywheel. There's, like, the institutional knowledge, you know, moats. There's just, like, the there's a customer moat where we have there's so many companies that, you know, they've someone that bought Wizz early and it it made them look really good as a CISO or CIO, like, they're more likely to buy, like, the neck like, EON, the next infrastructure company. So there's all the there's all these moats, but, or advantages. But on this one, incredibly astute point.
Speaker 9:Alfred Lin tells a story of how DoorDash really struggled to raise, like, at least one or two rounds of funding. You know? I'm sure you remember, like, Uber was the hottest company in the world for a long time, and DoorDash was DoorDash was, like, number three or so in the space. It was really hard for them to raise. I think it was a series c.
Speaker 9:I may be off by, like, maybe a series b or d, but I think it series c. He tells the story all time
Speaker 1:that pretty hot as well. Then Postmates was hot. There were bunch of legacy platforms like Grubhub and and companies that had been around before too.
Speaker 2:So it
Speaker 9:was a bloodbath. It was ultra competitive.
Speaker 1:It's the car that was
Speaker 9:hadn't yet become positive. Yeah. They really struggled to raise around. You know, Airbnb, obvious like, Sequoia was the first investor
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Or or led the C drum. Sorry. Not first investor. They did YC, but, you know, we invested
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 9:$600,000, like, a $3,000,000 valuation, and they went through some incredibly hard times. Even even, like, during COVID, I mean, for them, I remember Alfred's updates. It was just unbelievably brutal period. It was, like, easy to give up on them. And that may sound crazy given the scale they're at today, but, you know, also with Elon.
Speaker 9:Like, SpaceX and Tesla were on the verge of death, at multiple points. And when you have these when you have these experiences, like, it it really is an institutional knowledge, like, you know, weapon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because it's just not it's it's way less it's way less fun to jump on the phone with a port co that's, like, totally struggling. And they're gonna say, like, hey. We need a bridge, or can you introduce me to some some more investors? And it's like, well, it's not fun to introduce a company that's struggling to other investors because they're it's it's way more fun to introduce a company that's ripping because you're, like, you know, throwing a bone to them.
Speaker 2:I was curious to get a sense of, like, your activity in in h one of this year versus now. Have you picked up the pace? Have you slowed down at all? What's been, what's it been looking like?
Speaker 9:I'm embarrassed. I saw the data recently, like, a few weeks ago, but I have so much going on, including a lot of, you know, Twitter drama as you guys see, and I some somehow, I don't remember the exact pacing date, and so I don't wanna be wrong. We're a registered investment adviser now, so these things are
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 9:Like, we get
Speaker 1:This is, like, definitely hard to we're wrong. Every time you come on, I wanna ask you about stuff that you can't talk about because of RIA.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I don't care about whatever you're going viral for on Twitter. Can you talk about data centers in space? You're a Caltech PhD. Do you understand it? Does it make sense to me?
Speaker 9:Team Delian, or am I, team
Speaker 1:I wasn't gonna make I wasn't gonna make it about that. You could be you could you could comment on it at a more abstract layer Yeah. Level. But, but, you know, you're obviously No.
Speaker 9:This is something I thought a lot about. I mean, like, for fifteen years, I started a a failed space launch company in 2007. So, you know Wow. And this is this is an idea we actually thought a lot about. Look.
Speaker 9:I think I think the reality is no one really knows. Yeah. And, actually, something I told Delian with Varda, like, you know, I passed on Varda in the early days, which I should have made the investment. And the way I describe it to Delian now is I think he had the right macro idea and the wrong micro idea. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And to unpack that, like, the micro idea is they wanted to make ZBLAN. This, like, ultra pure, you know, fiber optic cables is like, dude, we don't need ZBLAN in a world with Starlink. Like, ZBLAN is good for long distance data movement. We're gonna do it all with star the long distance data movement's gonna happen in space with Starlink. And, but the I think the macro idea of just building space infrastructure, building an incredible team, you know, building like, learning how to build satellites.
Speaker 9:I think that their timing couldn't be better just in terms of what's gonna happen to the space economy over the next ten years on the back of SpaceX and Starship.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:And I think their ability to just concentrate talent and be in position to pounce when the opportunities come up is something that should not be underestimated. And so some with these data center companies in space, there are two very real serious unknowns. One is, like, just the thermal properties. Dissipating heat in space is insanely hard, and anyone that says they figured it out right now, like, they have not figured it out. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:They may figure it out in this in the
Speaker 2:just by doing need a lot of surface area.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Is that is that Yeah.
Speaker 9:There there's basically there's, like, no thermal connectivity or very little of space as a medium. And so heat that leaves any unit area or whatever in space, it just it stays close to the satellite in space. And so you need you can move things around inside the satellite, but once heat leaves the satellite, it'll just heat up a little local pocket of space around you and takes a very long time to dissipate away from the satellite. And so, like, this is something no one really understands how it works. The second is you have to deal with high energy particles that are going through your electronics.
Speaker 9:You don't have the, you know, Earth's magnetic field shielding your electronics, and there's you can have, you know, metal shielding and and things like this, but Mhmm. No one really understands how this is gonna work and how it will affect all the circuits and electronics. So these two things are hard. There's also, like, a big just time question around exactly when Starship will fly, like, cost will be passed to the, you know, launch companies. So I think some of these companies may be too early.
Speaker 9:And, look, I actually think I I'm more team dealing on the micro. Like, I think he has the right points that there's a lot of things that are unsolved right now on the micro side of data centers and space. But I just I'm such a macro bull on space over the next ten, fifteen years it's hard for me to bet against any team that is just building that, like No. Concentrate talent, building the expertise, because I just think it's gonna be such a exponential rising tide at some point in the next, like, ten years. I can't tell you when that will start, but it'll be big.
Speaker 2:On the on the SpaceX front, how, there's been a lot of news over the last few weeks around, direct to sell, partnerships between, like, SpaceX and and other, you know, you know, device manufacturers, etcetera. How screwed do you think, a lot of the big telecom companies are over the next ten years?
Speaker 9:Look. I I don't think they're screwed. I think that when you I think that I think look. Think SpaceX can do unbelievably well, unbelievably well, and I'm maximum bull on direct to sell for SpaceX. But I think what happens like, in the kinda most wild success scenario for SpaceX, SpaceX is providing, like, 30% of the world's mobile data in a decade or so.
Speaker 9:Yeah. But I think that the total mobile data consumption will be, like, double at that So it's still, a 70% net increase for all the existing telcos. Because there's something this is just a, like, a fact of history. When a product gets better, people use it more. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And, you know, like, when you have the ability when you don't have dead zones in cell service, when you have five g everywhere, you know, like, Optimus is gonna come online, you know, Tesla cars are gonna come online, people are gonna be when you can when you have really good mobile connectivity from the car, you're gonna be streaming instead of instead of, like, 10:28 p, you're gonna be streaming eight k content from your car while it's driving you. And so I just I think it's gonna be one of these things where rising tides lift all boats, but I would not underestimate how big of a deal it's gonna be for SpaceX.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like It's already an oligopoly, but there are multiple $100,000,000,000 companies in the category. And so if it just becomes even if it even if the market structure doesn't change and there's just a new player in the oligopoly, that looks very, very good. We've asked a lot of people in the age of AI, should you learn to code? That's a less interesting question to me these days.
Speaker 1:I wanna know, should you learn to deal? Should you learn the art of the deal? Because art basically, is is the art of the deal becoming a more important tool in the founder's tool chest?
Speaker 2:Because Not the book specific.
Speaker 1:So many so many no. I I we it really feels like there are founders out there who Yeah. Can just work magic and marshal capital and buyers and customers and the government and the government from a different country, and they get 17 people to say, yes. This has to happen. And then all of a sudden, it happens, and we get the thing.
Speaker 1:And it feels like it could be the beginning of of a new archetype, a new founder archetype, or maybe it's an old archetype. But what do you think about learning to deal?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Look, I mean, first on the learning to code, I personally think that coding is gonna be like doing arithmetic a long time ago. Mhmm. And it's just like it won't be as interesting or valuable. Humans won't be doing that much of it.
Speaker 9:But I think it's very valuable to train your mind how to think. And so a lot of like, learning to code
Speaker 2:Like, thinking is that kind of like thinking mode?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Think sure.
Speaker 9:Thinking mode. Thinking mode, deal mode. Yeah. But, look, I think I think, like, even more extreme than an even more extreme way to train your mind to think is is doing pure mathematics. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And so, like, if a kid's asking what to major in today, I mean, my answer would be, like, do pure math or physics Physics. Which are the maximum ways to train your mind to think, you know, or learn huge social skills, like just don't even go to college. You know, if you do be frat president and
Speaker 1:and like over here. Our our intern in at TVVN is on a gap semester studying physics and is now hanging out here. And he's just, like, nodding, just being like, I'm patting myself in the back, Sean Reyes, as I did everything right.
Speaker 2:Curious kinda last question. I wish we could hang out longer, but, we're back to back. How are I'm gonna come
Speaker 9:to your Thunderdome soon. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Please. Next one should be in person.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm in
Speaker 1:Thunderdome now.
Speaker 2:What are you seeing how is the government shutdown affecting, defense tech companies that that you're seeing or or talking to?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's a good question.
Speaker 9:I'm gonna give the brutal brutally honest version, which is what I try to always do, at least my own opinion. It's a tale of haves and have nots. Mhmm. So I work with a few companies that are, you know, getting absolutely reamed by it. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:But I also work with a couple companies where it hasn't really affected them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And basically, like, if you have something that the government absolutely needs, like, maybe they can't send you the money right now, but they're still giving you the phone call and telling you know, and, like, you know, telling you that
Speaker 2:Giving you the signal.
Speaker 9:Should expect after, you know, after the shutdown ends. And, you know, we can still give you the award. We just can't, you know, tell you the exact dollar amount because we need congressional approval on the exact dollar amount. And it's it's a tale of haves and have nots.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a really good signal, to be honest, at least as an investor, be like, is what I'm investing in a nice to have or a need to have?
Speaker 9:For sure. It's very clarifying.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very good. Cool. Great to catch up.
Speaker 1:Always fun. Congrats on the new, we need to ring the gong for Sequoia. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They don't I forgot this would happen. Gong hits. Two gong hits for the two new funds. Still got it.
Speaker 2:There we go. Thank
Speaker 9:you, boys.
Speaker 2:Great job.
Speaker 9:Legends. Keep crushing. Bye.
Speaker 2:See you soon. Thanks for coming on. Bye.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on g two. You can go to fin.ai to get started. And we have Aneel Chakravarthy from Adobe in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultradome.
Speaker 1:Aneel, great to
Speaker 2:meet you. What a Thank you so much for setting up. It's almost like you guys are in the creative industry.
Speaker 3:Yes. Yeah. Likewise. Great to meet you, and thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hopping on. I assume you're at Max. Take us through the big headline news. What's the what what what are the most exciting things happening in the Adobe ecosystem these days?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm coming here live from Max. In LA, we have over 10,000 people, everybody from individual creators Yeah. To people in Hollywood who work with creative, in the creative industry, enterprise customers, all kinds of people. It's been really exciting.
Speaker 3:Obviously, it's all about how we're bringing AI in the creative tools that everybody loves and knows so well. And we're really talking about how to make responsible use of AI. Right? You know? We have our own models with Firefly, and we had added ton of innovations around Firefly, which is, you know, designed to be commercially safe.
Speaker 3:But we announced a big partnership with Google around Vio and Imagen, and there were all kinds of other third party models that are now integrated into our tools, Runway and Luma and many, many others. Then we also announced how we can help customers with their own custom models. So we call it Firefly models, partner models, your models. And, you know, if you are Disney or Home Depot or Newell brands, how do you have an AI model that really protects your IP and becomes your brand brain? So that's really what so what's really what's been exciting.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about the the creative journey of the customer? I feel like, there's probably people in the audience who might have, became an Adobe customer by pirating a version of Photoshop in 1998, and now they pay for cloud, every month. But, you know, now there's even more varieties of, like, niche use cases where a consumer can use a point solution, and then they grow and grow and grow into the ecosystem. Is it more important than ever that you set up teams to capture those long tail interactions, just a face swap over here or just a background remover over here and then funnel everyone into the ecosystem? Or do you wanna focus on just capturing people once they're ready to to go into the enterprise workflows?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, exactly. As you mentioned, we have such a a wide variety here of people who had their journey with Adobe. We had a a Brandon Baum on stage who was exactly like what you said. Yeah.
Speaker 3:He said he was 11 years old when he started using a a cracked copy.
Speaker 1:This is the thing. Yeah. No longer
Speaker 3:Exactly. After Effects, and he said he's a paying subscriber now.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 3:Of Of course. Then, you know, what he said was, you know, he said he started playing with it when he was a kid. He got hooked on it. Yeah. And he showed how you could do it with Firefly.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 3:he posted something yesterday, and, you know, he that a video that he created with Firefly. And then, you know, he got some comments and said somebody said, hey. Looks like this is gonna be a plot twist here. And so he did the plot twist on stage today. He used Firefly and all the tools to just take the next episode in that story.
Speaker 3:So we've got all types. You you got enterprise customers who are like, hey, we would love to use all these new GenAI tools. It's got to get through our systems, our regulation, our compliance. Adobe people trust Adobe. So if you can make it available, it becomes so much easier to use all of this innovation.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then we have a lot of people, like you said, who have their favorite tools and they wanna see all this AI in their favorite tools. And then there are many many others, you know. We think maybe more than half the people at Macs are attending for the first time.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:So they just want everything on a mobile app. Yep. They they don't have the, you know, desktop machine with Photoshop on it. They they know every layer and all of that. So they just want it on their on on their their mobile app.
Speaker 3:And so we got all types. So the creative journey, ideas can strike you anywhere, and we wanted to help you turn that into creativity.
Speaker 2:What's your what's your read on how Hollywood's been navigating Gen AI? We're here in LA ourselves, and when I when we talk to people in the industry on or off air, it seems like everyone is trying to be get ahead and be and and leverage the tools to the best of their ability, but there's this pressure to not piss off the broader industry of people that that make it possible. But, what's been the read from from people that are talking at the event? Because there's a little bit of, if you're too much at the bleeding edge and too loud, you know, you might get people people might come after you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. They're threading the needle. Exactly. They are excited about the potential.
Speaker 3:They see what AI can potentially do in terms of everything from ideation, from helping create create and make those make the movies and other content for TV. And then also then getting the audience to participate. You know, everybody can have it's so easy to create variations and and get get get the you know, make it more like fan experience that, like, the sports teams are doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So they they're really interested in all of that potential. But like you said, they wanna make sure it's top notch quality. They wanna make sure their IP is protected and that they're not, you know, even unwittingly stepping on somebody else's toes. And they wanna make sure that, they're doing it in a way that's monetizable and that, you know, it's, gives them a recurring revenue stream. So, exactly like you said, they're threading that needle.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Did you have a product request, by the way?
Speaker 1:I did. I want you to bring back p I, Photoshop Mix. I was a huge user of Photoshop Mix, and my favorite features got deprecated. And I moved to Photoshop Express, And then I got a new phone, and one of the features, the one random feature that I use got deprecated again. And so Oh.
Speaker 1:I am on the full Photoshop iOS app, the official Photoshop iOS app, and I'm learning it. But, I do feel like one of my children was left behind in the on the Titanic or something, and I was left
Speaker 3:in there. So I I will ask the product team to take a look. Have you tried Firefly? Have you checked Firefly out? I haven't.
Speaker 3:I haven't.
Speaker 1:But but I understand. Like, this is the nature of of of building a large scaled, you know, business. You need to, move people through the different feature funnels. You can't keep every otherwise, it just becomes all tech debt. So, I understand why things go the way they do.
Speaker 1:But as as a dedicated user of of legacy app
Speaker 2:Why in as as few words as possible because we're running out of time. Yeah. Why what what's your read on on, like, specifically, I think people, the bear the bears out there think that that AI is disruptive, could be disruptive to the Adobe ecosystem. Give we're a creative business. We're a media company.
Speaker 2:We're constantly media and Yeah. Advertisements and things like that. Our view has been that it's it seems more obviously to be an extending innovation, or or people being able to generate a video, an image or a video and then suddenly have that asset and be like, well, now I wanna change it. Well, what tool are you gonna use? Right?
Speaker 2:It that's probably a tool within the Adobe ecosystem. So in as few words as possible, what's your view on why AI, would be an extending innovation for the Adobe kind of suite of products?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, we look at it as the evolution of a new operating system and we are the creative AI platform that runs on new operating systems. You know, when you look at our history, when it was desktops, I mean, we ran on macOS and Windows OS. When it became cloud, you know, whether it was with AWS or Microsoft Azure or with, you know, with GCP and others. When it became mobile, whether it was iOS or Android.
Speaker 3:So we have the history and the track record of making sure that we work very well with the emerging new operating systems, and the new AI is the new operating system. Now, you know, you have to believe, and it's I think it's a simplistic view that the operating system will do everything that the apps do. And, yeah, I mean, that just seems in our view very simplistic. So we think much obviously from our perspective that we're good at working with these new operating system. That's what we announced with Google yesterday.
Speaker 3:And, you know, we actually showed within chat GPT how you can work with Adobe tools like Express. So it's evolving of how they you know, what do the operating systems do and what do the apps continue to do. Yeah. And there's new layers of AI, but, you know, that's the architecture is evolving fast. But we think that, you need both.
Speaker 3:I don't think it's, either or, and that's where we think the world is gonna be.
Speaker 1:Yep. I I mean, I've used so many of these little point solution, AI tools, and I've just I feel like I've seen a glimpse of where this all goes, and it's like, I actually do want a platform that then can sub out different models so I can get Firefly or VO or Midjourney or, you know, hopefully, you wind up building a platform that's so open that all the different features and models are there. And it's just like having the lasso tool next to the rectangle tool next to the text tool. And that's a very natural progression for Adobe, in my opinion. It seems very logical.
Speaker 3:Now we gotta get you in our consumer advisory board. I mean, you really summed it up, really.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I I hate that I I lost my photoshopped me.
Speaker 2:Some strong opinions. You'll have But I understand bring it
Speaker 3:back for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I no. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:No. I I don't I don't actually think you need to. I think you actually do need me to suffer a little bit to get into the proper full fledged ecosystem that has all the tools in one place because that's where the actual value is right now. Everyone knows that you can spin up a website that's a text box, and it generates one asset, one image, one video, but that's not how creativity works. We're not just gonna one shot a two hour movie.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Exactly. No. You should really check out FarFi. I think you'll enjoy.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to meet you. Great to chat. And congratulations and
Speaker 2:Have fun.
Speaker 1:Fun at Adobe MAX. I've I've been seeing a ton of people, friends of mine posting that they're there. Wish I could be there. Hopefully, in a future year, we'll be able to attend. It'd be great.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1:Appreciate it. To you soon. Have a good one. Before we bring on our next guest, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 1:You can get started for free.
Speaker 2:And up next, we have Brynn Putnam. From board. Board. Board. It's just board.
Speaker 2:I was looking for the name and it was right in front of me. So great to meet you. Incredible launch yesterday. I think Thanks. I love I my favorite launches to see our ideas that when you see them, they just seem so incredibly obvious and yet no one thought of it or or thought to take it seriously enough and and take it into into a real product.
Speaker 2:So it's great to meet you. Would love sort of introduction and quick background on yourself, and then we can talk all about the business.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So nice to meet you as well. I'm a huge fan. I'm I'm excited for the Gong. I'm here for the Gong.
Speaker 10:So, yeah, so founder and CEO of Board. Board is the first ever face to face gaming console that blends the best of board games and video games into an entirely new way to play. What we've done is taken a 24 inch touchscreen and trained it to do something that no other screen does, which is recognize not just fingers and gestures, but also physical game pieces. It knows what the piece is, where it is on the board, and what it's doing. So it's an entirely new way to play together.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Walk through, the kind of moment when you decided to build this because, again, it it's so obvious people love board games. People love video games. Why not put it together? Did you when you started thinking about this, was did you look throughout history at kind of was there any other attempts that stood out on on things like this?
Speaker 2:Like, walk us through that kind of early creative process.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So I always end up just building from personal frustration and pain. So I am the proud mom now of five kids. Got two kids three step kids. So Amazing.
Speaker 10:Maybe
Speaker 1:I'll get
Speaker 10:my gong there, you know, ranging from two to 21. So, we were just trying to figure out ways to connect and we would play board games and we'd have to play Candy Land so my two year old could join, or we'd try to play video games and the teenagers would smoke us because they've clocked so many hours on modern controllers. It just felt like there had to be something that was a lot more fun and intuitive. So really, the unlock was like, could we use a piece like a controller? So, you put the spaceship down and it shoots, you put the stairs down and the characters walk up it, and it was just really a way, personally, for me to bring my family together.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. John is back with a gong. Hit it hit it again once for board, once for the five kids. Second time. That's so so how do you what what's it like kind of building building the console and the games themselves at the same time?
Speaker 2:And then do you plan till I'm assuming you're planning to open up kind of a platform over time, but but maybe start with the first question.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So, you know, I've always felt like if you really care about a great experience, you kind of always end up wanting to control the full stack. Mhmm. In my last gig, I built a company called MiR and we built custom hardware, software, and content. And same thing here, as you start to design the experience you want, you realize you need to control the hardware, the software, and also the games.
Speaker 10:I think the hard part this time was the games. So finding the fun is not an easy formula. Getting the hardware and software to all work is incredibly challenging and required of a lot of deep technical knowledge. But, you know, you could keep making the games forever, and then eventually just decide you you gotta ship. But ultimately, for us, we're building a platform and an ecosystem.
Speaker 10:So we wanna build a place where people can come and build cool experiences around this shared screen using physical pieces. So it's really about building a place where other multibillion dollar businesses can be born.
Speaker 1:This is one of the greatest, like, second company serial entrepreneur stories because I I don't wanna simplify it, but it's like Mirror was like a big screen on a wall, and now it's a big screen on a deck. Like, the like
Speaker 2:On a table.
Speaker 1:A lot of the there has to be so many, like
Speaker 2:Well, it's also it's also so many When the so many hardware just don't make it. So there is no second companies because the factory gets so burnt out that they're like, I'm not doing that again. Real.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's for sure.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I guess I guess, like, how do you think about, I I feel like part of the success with board is, like, there will be a specific game that ultimately drives, I would I mean, I imagine it'll be somewhat of a power law. Video games are very power law driven. So it's like, I'm sure you have confidence in the first game, but it's possible that it'll take a little bit or or a while to have, the hit that makes the product go totally mainstream. So it's like, how do you balance that needing like, the games being like a hits business. Right?
Speaker 2:There's been a bunch of board games Yeah. And there's one monopoly. Right?
Speaker 10:Totally. I mean, we think about it really as our job is to show off what's possible with this new technology. So our job is to show the breadth of the portfolio. So we've got quick arcade hits to deep three d spatial strategy games and really a lot of incredible physical digital interactions. And we think that the great game is probably gonna come from someone we don't know yet.
Speaker 10:So really our job is to just let a thousand flowers bloom and then see what happens. But we feel confident that with this this first set of 12 launch games, kind of showing what's possible with this new way of playing, and we're really excited just to get people building on board.
Speaker 1:Do you think that there are, like, it is exciting to see where the v two of the technology where you can do unique games that take advantage of this hardware specifically, understanding that the pieces touch the screen and they're identifiable. But is there also some value just to being like, like, I've played Settlers of Catan on an iPad. Like, it is a good experience just because it's a good game. And so is there a world where you want to, on day one, take advantage of a particular App Store or catalog that's already there? Even if you're not taking a big cut, you're just kind of bootstrapping the experience so that people are like, oh, well, you know, I I I didn't like that game, but it's a 24 inch iPad, and I was able to use, you know, the game that I liked on day one.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, this was, the big debate. Right? New and native are porting IPs, and we made the less safe choice, would say, to go new and native because we felt we were doing something really novel and we had a really novel technology and we needed games that fit the tech. So, you know, the Wii Remote unlocked Wii Sports and Swipe on Mobile unlocked Angry Birds and we felt like have a similar, you know, a similar technology.
Speaker 10:But I think there's definitely a future where characters or IP that you're familiar with come alive in a new and native way on board. We've had a lot of exciting outreach
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah. Mean, even in
Speaker 2:the last twenty four hours.
Speaker 10:Brands. Yeah. So it's been a it's been a quite a quite a twenty four hours of inbounds on social for us. Not every day you get a Mick Jagger posting about your product within the first twenty four hours.
Speaker 2:That's incredible. That's amazing. Well, I also just bought one live here on the air. You can check Shopify. I love I love I'm Shop like, I'm on the website.
Speaker 2:It's for sale. What you're shipping these already? Is that correct? Or is it I didn't even check. So
Speaker 10:Yeah. We start shipping the
Speaker 1:Yeah. We arrive in 2030, Jordy. Okay. 2035. Right around AGI is when you're gonna get it.
Speaker 1:No. No.
Speaker 10:No. We ship at the week of 11:10. So shipping in a week or two.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. Okay.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. Amazing. This feels like the like, this could be the holiday gift of the season if you have the supply. Like, how do you plan around? How have you been planning around inventory?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So one of the the nice things about it being kind of the the second go around is we're working with a tier one Centimeters out of Thailand who has a lot of experience with display products. And so they're really adept at being able to scale inventory quickly as we start to get demand signals. But it's definitely gonna be busy holiday for all of us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's crazy. John, can we get a Gong for Mick Jagger? Kevin, one of the designers, asked for it. Gong for Mick Jagger.
Speaker 2:Well, congratulations to the whole team. This is super exciting. I I can't wait to, can't wait to try it. We'll have to well, I'm sure there'll be a game that we can play here, on on air to settle disputes, and I'm excited to play with, with my family, back home.
Speaker 10:I love it. Fantastic. Thank you guys so much for having me.
Speaker 2:Awesome. We'll talk soon.
Speaker 1:What's the domain, by the way? Board.fun. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Board.fun. Available today at board.fun.
Speaker 1:Board.com.
Speaker 2:.Com purist, but board.fun works. Yeah. Love it.
Speaker 10:Me too. But you gotta go with the .fun.
Speaker 2:Yep. Very fun.
Speaker 1:This is such an exciting story. I'm seriously so excited about this company. It's amazing. Just like the perfect founder of everything. I'm I'm I'm very excited.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Did you did you announce last question. Did you announce Fundraise already? Did you ever announce it? Is that
Speaker 10:We haven't yet. So we raised $15,000,000 in funding. We were lucky to have funds we've worked with before, Lair, Box, and then First Round, and then some new folks, adjacent patron, Metrodora, SV Angel join. So, kicking off our series a now.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Alright. Well, chat about that. Another Gong then. There you This was a very Gong heavy segment.
Speaker 1:Gong heavy.
Speaker 2:But putting on putting on a master class and, yeah, can't wait to play.
Speaker 1:Very excited.
Speaker 10:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Shop Pay is just so good.
Speaker 1:So good.
Speaker 2:You can just buy stuff I'm very excited.
Speaker 1:Interviews. Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. But quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 1:Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. We have George Kurtz from CrowdStrike in the recent waiting room. Welcome to the show, George. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with us on this busy GTC, part time of the year.
Speaker 1:We'd love to get an introduction on you and and just just a little bit of an overview of what's new in your world, what's new at GTC.
Speaker 11:Sure. So, George Kurtz, founder and CEO of CrowdStrike. Yeah. Leading provider of security solutions. And, I think the big announcement, many big announcements at GTC, but certainly on the security side, was continued partnership with NVIDIA.
Speaker 2:We have
Speaker 11:AI's leader and security's leader coming together to provide greater protection, for customers, and that was a big part of our announcement that Jensen went through. And, you know, we're excited to be working with them. We've been working with them for for years now. And, to see it all come together as part of GTC, I think, was just fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Take us a layer deeper. You could be, they they could be a customer of yours. You're securing them as a company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're baking it into the chips. There's a wide row. You're buying chips from them. There's so many different ways to partner with NVIDIA these days.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So, as you know, and I think a big part of his talk was in NVIDIA being the platform company. Yeah. He sort of joked saying, like, hey. I you know, we don't even sell things to people.
Speaker 11:Like, everything's embedded into other systems and you gotta use the platform, which is part of what we've done. If you look at what they've come out with, they've got something called Nemotron, which are open models that, customers can use and build their own AI agents. So, really, this particular announcement was focused on bringing security and visibility from an AI agent perspective to the edge. Mhmm. So we've got something called Charlotte, which is our agentic technology, which allows our customers to identify and, understand threats and do a lot of the work of what a security analyst would do, which many times is, sort of a one to one relationship between a threat and an analyst.
Speaker 11:And now with our security AI agents, we can do the work of many analysts, and one analyst can control those agents. So that's what Charlotte does. Now Charlotte, with this announcement, has the ability to actually talk to other AI agents leveraging the Nebotron models and the Nim, inference microservices. So as those agents are closer, to where AI is created or on prem or in a data center, you wanna have very quick visibility into what's happening. And in many times, customers have their own AI agents where they're not shipping maybe sensitive data to the cloud.
Speaker 11:It might be a network diagram or might be other sensitive information. So Charlotte can now talk to these other AI agents that are at the edge to make better decisions, and they're always continuously learning. So, we're one of the premier security partners for NVIDIA, and that that was part of our announcement.
Speaker 2:Does vibe coding scare you?
Speaker 11:I love vibe coding. I'm an investor. I do it myself. Well, my
Speaker 2:own That's also good for good for CrowdStrike. Right? It's like people are gonna just make a lot of software quickly. They probably need to spend more on cybersecurity too.
Speaker 11:They they they do so. You know, the the old joke in, many years ago was like, you know, you'd have, people come out of university and they would just go to any number of the repositories and they would just grab their code snippet and slap it in.
Speaker 2:And Yeah.
Speaker 11:If something was poorly written, it would just propagate everywhere. Right? You'd have this big problem. And now, you know, some of the coding that you get some is very good, but you have to give it the right prop. Is a inefficient and it looks like an intern wrote it.
Speaker 11:So it's gotten a lot better, you know, in the later generations, but that does become, potentially problematic. And given the rise of AI, the ability to actually find these software vulnerabilities has increased dramatically. I mean, we're seeing AI find more and more and more vulnerabilities and sort of leading the charge on these bug bounties because they're so efficient at finding software flaws.
Speaker 1:CrowdStrike has, something like 10,000 employees. How do you think that how how are you thinking about human capital allocation over the next decade? Is it is AI changing your philosophy about the shape of the workforce? Yeah.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think there's there's two pieces to it. One is on the security side, which is specific to how do you leverage AI agents to do more work on behalf of customer. What we found is, at least in my mind, the more AI you have, the more work you can actually get done. And security is that you're always up against it.
Speaker 11:You're up against the clock from an adversary perspective. And there's just a, just so much data to get through and so many threats that let the machine do what it's really good at. Let it sift through this data. Let it figure out what's happening. And then, again, what happens is those security analysts become really the pilots, right, where they're they're piloting, these AI agents.
Speaker 11:And you can think about it akin to, maybe, you know, a, a Waymo Mhmm. Or, you know, automated taxi or autonomous taxi, I should say, where you've got all these autonomous chauffeurs, but then you have sort of the pilot in the cloud if you get stuck. And I've been in, you know, these things where they've gotten stuck and they wait and, you know, somebody pilots it, gives it a waypoint or what have you. Yep. And that's really how tran how, secure is gonna be transformed where the human is not gonna be out of the loop, but they're gonna be able to do so much more.
Speaker 11:So it's about helping people up, not out. That's the way I look at it from a security perspective. Now if I put my CEO hat on, I think most CEOs are looking at, well, how do you get efficiencies from AI in running a business, you know, and looking in areas, like legal and sales, obviously, in coding. Like, how do you do more with the people you have? And I think the big thing is always, like, how do you flatten the hiring curve?
Speaker 11:It doesn't mean you're getting rid of a whole bunch of people. But if you could be more efficient because the people you have can do more, you can flatten the hiring curve, which, you know, ultimately adds leverage to to the business model. So we're always looking at how to take people and upscale them and train them up, and, that's what we've done internally. And that's also what we're looking at for customers that are using security technologies like CrowdStrike.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:What's the, in your view, the most significant, like, gen a Gen AI related security incident to date that's public? Is there one that comes to mind?
Speaker 1:He's like We were thinking.
Speaker 2:You're like, I usually hear about the ones that we try to keep them out of the headline. No. But we were talking the other day the fact that that there's been this explosion of software and we I it didn't we didn't immediately have one that came to mind Yeah. That felt
Speaker 1:like squarely pinned on GenAI. It actually feels like we've been doing pretty well on security.
Speaker 11:Yeah. There there's actually, and this is sort of the scary part of where the industry is going. There was some some new malware that was found that was basically GenAI malware or what I would call autonomous malware. So if you think about malware, you might you know, you and your audience might be familiar with it. You know, you have a program that's bad.
Speaker 11:And in the old days, the McPhee and semantics the world used to have these databases that would go, okay. That's a bad file. We're just not gonna let it run. Yep. And over the years, companies like ours, we've created this sort of math model where without even seeing it, we can tell if something's bad and and we block it.
Speaker 11:That's kinda old hat. But now the new malware is basically GenAI, meaning, if it drops on your system
Speaker 2:Oh, that makes sense.
Speaker 11:Okay, it looks like a like a like a script. It doesn't look like a like a compiled program. Mhmm. And essentially, it uses prompts to figure out, okay, what system are you on? Yep.
Speaker 11:What is unique about that system?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 11:What data can I harvest? And how do I learn more about the network I'm on so I can pivot and I can jump to another system that we might might be more interesting? So the fact that it doesn't necessarily have a command and control back to the pilot and Yeah. It can do this anonymously.
Speaker 1:That's fast.
Speaker 11:It can reason.
Speaker 1:It can reason.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Like the like the best Yeah. Security pen testers or like the best of the nation state actors that are, you know, piloting it themselves. So it's a pretty scary thought to have autonomous malware.
Speaker 2:Did you did you start CrowdStrike so you could, get more involved with motorsports?
Speaker 11:Well, it's, it's been a passion of mine, but it's been a big part of our overall, brand. You probably see
Speaker 5:us We
Speaker 11:love it. It's like huge fans. And, you know, our customers like it and it's just kind of part of the ethos. But, it's, you know, it's been just part of what we've done early on.
Speaker 2:Do you try to do you try to get to as many of the f one races as you as you can? Or what's your do you try to do you have to limit yourself? Because I know we know we know some sponsors and and and like they've got a pretty heavy travel schedule. They're like, we sponsor this team for the next two seasons. We're gonna be at every race.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, you might wanna work on your business. But
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. We we actually just, picked up the big ones for us, obviously, the big US ones. Yeah. And then we host customers at those.
Speaker 11:Yeah. We actually have what we call CXO roundtables. So we combine security and the technology of motor racing and, it's a passion. You know, security is a mission for a lot of people at Crouch Rack and a lot of our customers. I mean, we can be doing lots of things, but we love the fight against the bad guys.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And to bring those people together to talk about the technology and the speed of cybersecurity and the risk management of cybersecurity, there's a lot of analogs into motor racing. It's speed, it's technology, it's data, it's risk taking or managing risk. And it's been a big part of, I think just our brand.
Speaker 1:It's incredible. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Well, we will, we'll hope hopefully run into you at, in Vegas for
Speaker 6:Be great.
Speaker 2:Have fun. Looking If forward you're
Speaker 11:gonna be there, let's coordinate. We'll give you a give you a whole tour of the Mercedes paddock and the garage. We'll go, we'll go have some fun.
Speaker 2:That'd fantastic. Well, next time there's a massive public security incident in Gen AI, we're gonna give you a ring and we'll get you back on and
Speaker 11:You got it.
Speaker 2:Have you break it down. But, thank you thank you for coming on and, congrats on all the progress and thanks for thanks for keeping us, safe out there.
Speaker 11:You got it.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 11:Thanks, guys. I'll talk soon.
Speaker 2:Great to hang, George.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 2:good one.
Speaker 6:Bye.
Speaker 1:We should have done more time with him. I love CrowdStrike because every time I I get one I get nerd sniped by CrowdStrike reports, like, all the time. Whenever there's like like, when solar winds happen, like, CrowdStrike tells the story of it, and they're always gripping, and, they do a ton of good work out there. So thank you to everyone at CrowdStrike, to all 10,000 plus employees. And thank you to Eight Sleep.
Speaker 1:8sleep.com. Get a pod five ultra. Get a five year warranty. So Thirty hours free trial.
Speaker 2:I I I Also,
Speaker 1:you to Bezel. Course. Bezel Concierge available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
Speaker 2:I I, ran, off screen for a second and caught Brian, on the way out, and he was saying like, yeah. I I told him like, yeah. I've been a little less healthy, the last year running the show than historically. And he's like, yeah. I've heard some of your, you know, eight sleep updates.
Speaker 1:Oh. Your sleep scores. You said your eight sleep?
Speaker 2:Then you're in my sleep scores. Brutal. Well, I got a 90 last night. I Oh, went you back in the game. I I completely
Speaker 1:lost my phone. I don't know. This is the this is the issue.
Speaker 2:Do we have any more time Meta? Meta is reporting earnings, believe, right now, or they already did. Meta stock sinks after tax hit weighs on earnings.
Speaker 4:What? They're down like 9%.
Speaker 1:Wait. What? Wait.
Speaker 2:Is that good?
Speaker 1:Wait. Who's down 9%?
Speaker 6:Meta.
Speaker 1:Meta? Why?
Speaker 4:Earnings. Missed earnings.
Speaker 1:They missed earnings?
Speaker 2:Oh, no. Microsoft syncs on beat. Meta crashes 6% on EPS miss.
Speaker 1:Is it
Speaker 2:good that Microsoft is syncing on a beat? Is it over?
Speaker 1:Is it over? No. It's not over for me. I got a 94. How'd you do?
Speaker 2:I got a 90.
Speaker 1:You got a 90? I beat you. Seven hours, nine minutes. Let's go. I'm sleeping well, and that's all that matters.
Speaker 1:There's also a bombshell guest essay in the New York Times about OpenAI. One of the senior researchers who led product safety at OpenAI is taking shots at their at their messaging around erotic content. They have some data around how many people use AI or use a chat GPT in this erotic faction, fashion. That's going to be a bigger bigger story for sure. This is definitely gonna grow.
Speaker 1:But, hopefully, there's guardrails. Hopefully, there's more clear messaging on, on the, on the actual transparency reports and and the and the the the bounding the boundaries of how these apps get used. I realized that, I don't know if I've actually age verified with OpenAI. Like, I don't know if I've ever actually scanned my ID. And, I mean, like, I maybe this is a bull case for WorldCoin or something, but I feel like I have a moral duty to upload my ID to ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:Because What's that? Because I care about I care about
Speaker 2:I keep it pretty PG. I don't I don't want I don't want them releasing any of those adult features on on
Speaker 1:On your accounts. Yes. But but I want them to be able to clearly understand what an what an what an adult person is versus a versus a a an underage person. And so it's important that they have a really strong data set of adults versus people who haven't age verified so they can classify the users effectively. What do you think, Tom?
Speaker 4:I actually have uploaded my ID to OpenAI. There's a bunch of, like Your
Speaker 1:your real ID?
Speaker 4:Yes. Obviously, I don't have any other kinds of
Speaker 1:It was like, chatty p t operator agent mode. Buy me a beer. Deliver a six pack to me. She's like, yes, Tyler. We're thinking.
Speaker 1:Contacting the Instacart API and buying you a six pack.
Speaker 4:But okay.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 4:There are some products that you have to use the ID for. At least it's like the early version. So
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 4:Like the agent builder.
Speaker 1:Oh, agent builder. You have to you have to ID verify
Speaker 2:with it?
Speaker 4:It was in in the days following, like, right right when it came out. Sure. Sure. Sure. ID.
Speaker 4:I I think I
Speaker 1:haven't heard anything about agent builder recently. What's what's going on over there?
Speaker 4:I have not used it either.
Speaker 1:You haven't been in building agents? I don't know.
Speaker 4:I mean, it it's not like a
Speaker 1:We should try. We should try to build a we should try and build an agent that does something for TBPM.
Speaker 4:That buys beer?
Speaker 1:That buys beer for interns. Yes. Bobby Cosmic. Shout out to John for providing data to improve the system. Thank you.
Speaker 1:That's what it's all about. No. But seriously, if you wanna keep if you wanna keep the the bad stuff out of the underage users, you gotta know who's of age and who's underage. And so you should be strongly in favor.
Speaker 2:People have said you have the mind of a of a child.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Brian Johnson, I you know, he has, I think his biological age is like 19. My I did a test on my brain and said I have mind of a five year old.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of dinosaur questions. Yeah. Constantly running deep research reports on
Speaker 1:I love I do love slapstick comedy. Nothing like a story of a of a leopard and a monkey falling off a boat and going splat. That's the pinnacle of comedy.
Speaker 2:Or or just being having the mind of a five year old and being like, why are clouds? Exactly. And then running a deep research report.
Speaker 1:Yes. This is the key. You mean This is the key to
Speaker 2:what are clouds? And you're no
Speaker 1:This is the key.
Speaker 2:Why? More news. Apparently, Mastercard is is, planning to acquire, Zerohash for nearly two billion. Zerohash is a crypto infrastructure player. They've been at it, quite a long time, and, pretty serious move from, from them.
Speaker 2:We should wait to kind of assess earnings since we can't, listen or read any of the trans transcripts, live exactly. Yeah. But, fortunately, we'll be back, tomorrow. And, John In the meantime,
Speaker 1:find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home but better, folks. There's a bunch more stories, but we can get to them tomorrow. We will talk to you later.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 2:great Beautiful, productive evening.
Speaker 3:Night.
Speaker 2:See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.