Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 12 - 3 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN live. We got a happy day today. It's Thursday, 03/20/2025. That's right. Sound, Jordy?
Speaker 1:What's that sound? This is the energy we're bringing to the show today. Get ready. Technology needed a Greek weather show.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Just to be clear, we were blasting this all morning. I don't even know where you got this. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. We're live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance, the capital capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you guys today. Folks, Apple is firing people.
Speaker 1:They're shuffling. When when Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're normally gonna get transitions, John, but that was a little rough. We went from the craziest high to a very low moment. We'll find Business is good. Business efficiency
Speaker 1:The headline says shuffle. Shuffle. Should could be shuffling out of the organization, could be shuffling into the organization. We're going to find out because Mark Gurman has the exclusive. Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri.
Speaker 1:Obviously, we've talked about this a lot. No one likes Siri right now, but they have a complete monopoly over the Siri button on your iPhone. And And no one's leaving iPhones, so they gotta get it together and figure out what product to build. Apple is undergoing a rare shakeup in its executive ranks aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and
Speaker 2:You know I like to track name popularity in United States. Give it to me.
Speaker 3:And in
Speaker 2:2024, let's see, in
Speaker 1:Oh, Siri. You're thinking Siri?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the name Siri in 1973, '15 babies per million were named Siri. And that peaked in 02/2008 actually at '74. So more than quadruple. And now it is back in the depths back to Well,
Speaker 1:makes sense for using the name again because if you're bearish on Siri, the product, you think that that white space is now available for baby names.
Speaker 2:It's a good time to go
Speaker 1:long Exactly. Expect that it'll be replaced. They'll come up with a different brand name. They'll have to refresh. It will
Speaker 2:be Yeah. It'll just be fair.
Speaker 1:It'll be
Speaker 2:A greenfield Green field. Blue ocean opportunity Exactly. In in naming.
Speaker 1:Well, CEO Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giandrea to execute on product development, so he's moving over another top executive to help Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. Mean A little controversial. Why are you laughing, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I mean, I got to put He's
Speaker 1:taking risks.
Speaker 2:I want Tim to take some responsibility here.
Speaker 1:He's in the arena. These guys
Speaker 2:in the making products. We love Apple. We want to be clear. Yes. We want if Apple's training their intelligence on this show, just know that we love you.
Speaker 2:Yep. We just want you to reach your full potential.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I just laughed briefly because moving over the gut, the Vision Pro has not been a fantastic, you know, at least hasn't hasn't had a lot of commercial success. It's probably a better product than Apple Intelligence.
Speaker 1:It is a magical product.
Speaker 2:It's magical.
Speaker 1:In terms of the software,
Speaker 2:the execution has been It does make sense. It's like, hey, this guy built a magical product.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Maybe the tech isn't ready yet. Let's take our
Speaker 1:And just some fresh blood. Yeah. Just someone to come in and rethink things, try and
Speaker 2:Just take an MVP. Yep. Yep. Swap
Speaker 1:them. I mean, vision the vision pro, it was it was just it executed in a very different way. It took a lot of risks. Yeah. Some of those paid off, some of those didn't.
Speaker 2:There was a world where we would have been doing the show in Vision Pros.
Speaker 1:I thought about it actually. I was specking out an interview show that was going to be filmed in Apple Immersive Vision and I was going to interview, start with like the history of VR and interview all the VR legends, the John Gramax, the Palmers and stuff and have it be only available in Vision Pro. But then I wanted an audience of more than five people, so I had to pivot to X, the everything app. Anyway, Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell, he's in in the new role. He'll be in charge of Siri Virtual Assistant.
Speaker 1:And Rockwell had reported to chiefs to software chief Craig Federighi removing Siri completely from Giannrea's command. Apple is poised to announce Have
Speaker 2:has there been an Italian takeover of Apple? Giannrea. Sounds like the the Ferrari
Speaker 1:Giannrea. Is that what's going on?
Speaker 2:I think you have a certain confidence around doing bad Italian accents. Because
Speaker 1:The worst.
Speaker 2:We have some Italian roots.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Of course. But but seems like there's been an Italian takeover over at Apple. Maybe.
Speaker 1:Apple is joining us to announce the changes to employees this week, but it's leaking on Bloomberg now. Somebody told somebody told Gurman the
Speaker 2:iPhone Brent and Ben, you guys are swapping roles Yeah. Tomorrow. Lock it. We were gonna tell you,
Speaker 1:but we we just linked to Bloomberg instead. Yeah. The iPhone maker senior leaders known as the group, known a group known as the top one hundred just met at a secretive annual off-site gathering to discuss the future of the company. I think that's a project that Steve Jobs kicked off. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Take the top one hundred performers. They all get to go to this awesome off-site.
Speaker 2:Hang out. Imagine you just know you're in the kinda 95 to one zero five territory. It's just like the waiting around to to to figure out Are you gonna make it easier? Did I not?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Trying to understand.
Speaker 1:AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit. Moves underscore the plight facing Apple. Its AI technology is severely lagging industry rivals, and the company has shown little sign of catching up. The a the Apple intelligence platform was late to arrive and largely a flop despite being the main selling point for iPhone 16.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting point. Does it lag Android or does it just lag the foundation model providers?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That is interesting. You don't really hear about Android being like leaps and bounds ahead on the integrated AI stuff. Certainly Especially because it's a Green bubble situation?
Speaker 2:No. It's just that it's not exact it's not exactly true that Google's had a
Speaker 1:fantastic Yeah. Google has been executing that well either. I have seen some side beside side by side comparisons of, okay, let's just zoom in on very, very micro features within the Apple intelligence ecosystem. One of those is object removal in images. So, you know, you take a picture of this desk.
Speaker 1:You wanna remove this Celsius can. You circle it. How well does Apple do that? How well does Google do that? It's a very, very narrow feature.
Speaker 1:And at least in the one post that I saw kind of comparing the two, it seemed like Apple was doing okay and Google was doing very well. And that's kind of been the case for most of these, but still probably not enough to actually get people shipped over. Anyway, a little bit of background on Rockwell. He's currently the vice president in charge of the Vision Products Group, the division that developed Apple's headset. As part of the changes, he'll be leaving that team and handing the reins to Paul Mead, an executive who has run hardware engineering for the Vision Pro under Rockwell, which is kind of interesting.
Speaker 1:It's like, do they are they pivoting here from metaverse to AI, which is Yeah. Obviously the most the biggest tectonic shift in
Speaker 2:Honestly over
Speaker 1:the last few years.
Speaker 2:They Mark Gurman should consult with Deal on how to not get spies caught because clearly this guy's got
Speaker 1:He's great.
Speaker 2:Bugs Yeah. In in the top 100 to be figuring this stuff out they're willing to even talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The need to rescue Siri is especially urgent. The company has struggled to release new features that were announced last June, including the ability to tap into a user's data to fulfill queries despite the technology not being ready. Apple advertised the enhancements for months on TV in order to sell the iPhone 16. The Apple manager who'd who has led Siri until now told his team in a recent meeting that the delays were ugly and that staffers may be angry and embarrassed.
Speaker 1:The executive, Robbie Walker, also said he was unsure when the features would actually arrive due to competing development priorities. Apple has publicly stated that the features will be ready sometime in the coming year. Apple shares have declined 14% this year, part of a broader retreat in tech stocks. They fell less than 1% on Thursday. By tapping Rockwell, Apple is betting on an executive with proven technical experience.
Speaker 1:He he has demonstrated the ability to ship new products and run an an engineering organization with thousands of people. Rockwell
Speaker 2:an absolute dog, John.
Speaker 1:Has a knack for solving problems and often takes the role of evangelist for futuristic technology. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:This sounds like an amazing LinkedIn description. Yeah. I am a technology evangelist and problem solver. It's rough. It's what it takes.
Speaker 1:But I wonder if so everyone's reading into this and seeing, okay. It seems like Apple is really feeling the heat from the Mark Gurman coverage, from the daring Fireball They are now taking it seriously. They're making some leadership changes to try and address Apple intelligence, Siri, make it better, make it great. Which I think everyone knows that it Clearly,
Speaker 2:everybody at this point is saying, I enjoy the comedic relief from Apple intelligence, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing for Apple.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Who does things highly intentionally with specific goals and they haven't been hitting those to date.
Speaker 1:My question is, by moving Rockwell over, is this a sign that Apple is pulling back and less excited about Vision?
Speaker 2:I mean, that's been obvious.
Speaker 1:You think so?
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:Because there is a world where I mean, Zuck and Meta, they released headsets and some of the headsets didn't sell super well or had high churn and they still haven't broken through. But Zuck has just said, look. We're on this release cadence. We're keeping it going. We're continuing to invest.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The shareholders are gonna have to deal with, what, 20,000,000,000 in CapEx on Reality Labs or something like And, you know, I own this company. I'm in founder mode, and I'm gonna make this happen because I think everyone agrees, you know, anyone who's read sci fi or like what Cyan Bannister was talking about yesterday with Snow Crash, like, it makes sense that at some point VR is going to be a thing. Yeah. Like, it will be solved.
Speaker 1:It's just a physics problem. Yeah. It's an engineering problem. Things will get there.
Speaker 2:No. And Mark is Zuckerberg that is is committed to he knows how important it is, how much bigger a business meta can be if they own the underlying platform. Totally. And so he's just saying, I will spend tens of billions of dollars. Where Apple doesn't seem to have that same they have a willingness to spend, but less of a willingness to fail.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yeah. It will be it will be interesting. I the other the other interesting thing is I would love to take a peek at what's happening in the VR space over in China.
Speaker 1:Because we've seen, not quite leapfrogging, but certainly a sprint to the cutting edge, especially in the hardware sector for drones. We've seen this with EVs. We've seen this with phones. Where is China on the adoption curve with VR? Is there anything special going on there?
Speaker 1:Or are they just kind of copying our products and not seeing the same churn numbers? Anyway, Rockwell has been one of the few Apple executives to take a major hardware device from zero to one. He joined Apple's hardware engineering group in 2015, and the company released Vision Pro in February of last year. Giandrea has a different background, a former Google star. He was hired in 2018 to run Apple's AI work.
Speaker 1:He's been one of Alphabet Inc's most senior executives overseeing the search and AI divisions. Rockwell, in contrast, doesn't have prior experience as an AI leader or clout with the burgeoning machine learning community.
Speaker 2:And to be honest, I think that's fine Yep. Because Apple is not trying to innovate at the model layer right now. Yep. And they just need to deliver great consumer products. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, they need a a chat GPT moment Yep. In order to regain their respect. It's not, hey, you need to be innovating and Yep. You know, pushing the boundaries and and and nobody's expecting them to set up their own sort of x AI Memphis Memphis data center and just like go all in on training foundation models. Nobody cares about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're just like, you, we're all running our lives on your devices. You should be able to unlock the power of these technologies in a more meaningful way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, know that they wanna they maintain control over Siri and over the Siri button and the ecosystem. But if you look at so much of Apple's software, they were fine letting there be competition for a while and then eventually coming in with a really polished product. You think about the the iPhone launched with Google Maps as a default app. And then over time, they launched Apple Maps.
Speaker 1:Now Apple Maps is the default, but you can still pick your map provider. I would love to see that in the virtual assistant Siri button. Could make
Speaker 2:Makes so much sense. You could swap.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you can even
Speaker 2:set And they still gain that leverage where they could go in five years and say, actually, if you want to, we're going to sort of limit your abilities here. Or You remember with maps, there was a long period of time where maybe it's still the case, but if you you were using Google Maps, it wouldn't preview on your on when you just had your phone sort of not unlocked.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Apple clearly had more APIs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was just very frustrating to use Google Maps because you had to open your phone every time you wanted to understand where you were. And so I just actually defaulted back to Apple Maps even though it wasn't as good. And so they're always going to have that leverage.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:I think that it would potentially take some heat off if they were letting people be more innovative on the platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And yeah, I mean, could definitely see a situation like what happened with maps. I mean, I tried to go all in on Apple Maps and just be like, I'm not even going to use it. But then for searching for certain businesses, like Apple, Google Maps is still better. And then if you wanna take a really really crazy route home and get home like two minutes earlier, but like potentially go on a dirt road, Waze is just the best for that.
Speaker 1:You know that for a while
Speaker 2:Waze in LA is so unhinged.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just go on and off the on
Speaker 2:ramps So you're gonna get home two minutes faster, but only if you drive 60 miles an hour through this residential neighborhood. This is why in LA, have to be very careful around which neighbor if if you're gonna you live in the actual city.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:You could be on the most quaint, nice street.
Speaker 1:And then the way it decides
Speaker 2:It's like, this is the new route.
Speaker 1:And then it's just like a barreling A lot of neighborhoods would lobby Waze. They would like write letters and say, hey, please like hard code, like do not take like the full traffic through our account.
Speaker 2:How's that work? Yeah. Probably not very well.
Speaker 1:Gruising the wheels. Anyway, Siri, the a AI division's main consumer product, has had a number of bosses over the years when Apple first launched the voice assistant in 2011. It was overseen by Scott Forstall, then it was given to services chief chief Eddie Q in 2012 and transferred to Federighi in 2017. Giandrea took it over a year later. Now it will be read led by Rockwell, with oversight returning again to Federighi.
Speaker 1:Giandrea will remain at the company. A little bit of fake news with the firings not happening, at least not yet.
Speaker 2:Just a mix up.
Speaker 1:Just a mix up, but, certainly shuffling. That's the term. The corporate shuffle. Even with Rockwell taking over Siri, an abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous, something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. Deandrea's other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing, and technologies related to AI.
Speaker 1:The company has also, has a team reporting, investigating robotics. They're working on robotics. Federigh Rockwell's new manager is the company's senior vice president. He oversees development of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, operating systems, as well as development tools. Along with Geandrea, he was a key figure in the development of Apple intelligence.
Speaker 1:And so that's a little bit about the shakeup at Apple, but we'll see. Anyway, whether you think this is good for Apple or bad bad for Apple, you gotta get on public.com. It's investing for those who take it seriously. That's They're multi asset investing, industry leading yields, they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com to sign up.
Speaker 2:The absolute best. Stocks low key prediction market for the financial, the future financial performance of the most fantastic companies in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 2:You know, we had Joe on, he said treasuries are basically their own prediction market.
Speaker 1:Prediction market for the discounted for the present value of all future cash flows. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's what we need.
Speaker 2:Speaking of Apple, Apple streaming is losing over a billion dollars a year. Apple TV is the only money loser in Apple's broad portfolio of services, which is why its executives have started taking a closer look at its costs. I wonder if they're on ramp yet. If they're not, I would just be silly.
Speaker 1:You know that's the sponsor I had lined up, I'm pretty sure. Something like that.
Speaker 2:Anyway. Anyway, so last year Apple CEO Tim Cook had questions about several pricey movie deals executives of Apple TV plus the company's video streaming service had been striking, including for Argyle, a spy action comedy starring Henry Henry is this Cavill?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Henry Cavill.
Speaker 2:Dua Lipa. Quite the star studded lineup. The movie which cost $200,000,000 to produce hadn't found much of an audience or generated more subscribers for the service. Cook told his colleagues according to a formal Apple TV plus employee, he's like, what kind of value are we getting here? I he's probably a big Dua Lipa fan, but but not enough of a fan clearly to just be down to burn $200,000,000 for Yeah.
Speaker 2:For not a lot of impact. I didn't even know this movie released.
Speaker 1:Was a rumor. Yeah. I I did. And I I saw some news about it. I think there was a rumor that like Taylor Swift wrote it or something like that.
Speaker 2:It's funny that they don't send you a push notification to your phone marketing these films that they spend $200,000,000 on.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. They're not more annoying. Like, that would be terrible.
Speaker 2:No. It would. But but you remember when they just put the YouTube out?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You should just open your phone and just start playing
Speaker 2:the game. I guess people didn't people didn't like that.
Speaker 1:And so It just It should just know that, hey, you're bored right now. Stop stop scrolling TikTok and just flip over to this movie. You got it installed. It is I I feel like I wonder I wonder if Cook is actually into Argyle and liked it, and then he greenlit it. Because we've seen examples of that.
Speaker 1:Like, Bezos is always, like, greenlighting these cool sci fi things, and I love I'm like, this is awesome. He bought The Expanse from SciFi Network. And The Expanse was amazing show, amazing book series. You should definitely go check it out. But it was like pretty underfunded at SciFi Network.
Speaker 1:And he just put like Game of Thrones money behind it basically. And then it got canceled after like six seasons because it was like too niche and weird. Yeah. But it's a fantastic show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We saw
Speaker 1:And he did that with Three Body Problem.
Speaker 2:Was it Amazon that did the Melania Trump?
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Oh, wait. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That that was little different. Don't think that was because he thought it was like a great foundational piece of cinema but
Speaker 2:You never know.
Speaker 1:You never know.
Speaker 2:Didn't get the pitch. Yeah. Netflix has the stomach to burn cash
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:On these kind of things. Yeah. And again, this is Apple's not focused on innovation and risk right now. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:So they have 70 they have 45,000,000 subscribers for Apple TV plus Also, terrible naming
Speaker 2:convention You're probably subscribed right now even if you don't. That's just every every now and then they just charge your card. Every few days, they just hit you with like a 10 or $15 charge. Yeah. And they're just like, oh, they're they're not gonna
Speaker 1:because there's the Apple TV, the device. There's the Apple TV app on Apple TV devices. And then there's Apple TV plus which is a subscription service that you access through the app on the device.
Speaker 2:That's right. But then you can also get them through, there's then Great name, Samsung.
Speaker 1:You can watch Apple TV plus on Samsung stuff?
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's weird. Anyway, Apple show Apple shows no sign that it's getting cool
Speaker 2:to you
Speaker 1:about the streaming media business. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can't. You can watch Apple TV on Samsung smart TVs.
Speaker 1:By some measures, the company has found success with Apple TV plus. The service currently has one of the buzziest shows in television, Severance. And in 2022, it won a best picture Oscar at the Academy Awards
Speaker 2:for COVID. Gotta understand. To get a Severance, you gotta have a couple dogs. You know?
Speaker 1:Yes. You
Speaker 2:gotta He needs to act like a gross stage
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:VC where, yeah, you're gonna have some some misses Yeah. But you just need those, you know, you need at least one severance
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A year and you're pretty good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, a couple of years ago, was talking to Christopher Nolan's brother, Jonah Nolan, who did Westworld and had worked with very closely with HBO. And he was saying that one of the things that Apple might run into with Apple TV was this idea that Apple has such a premier brand. Everything has to be so polished. We've seen this with the ads that they run the apps that they put out that Hollywood is more random.
Speaker 1:There's just a lot more risk that you need to take and you're going to get flops. And to run a high performing movie studio, it's almost like a venture portfolio.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Where you're going to have a huge Power Law winner that's the next Star Wars, but you're going have a lot of dogs that get forgotten and that doesn't matter. But if you're Apple and you think that the dogs are going to tarnish your brand, you're going to be much less risk on and you're going to be much more like heads will roll when something like Arguile doesn't rip. Yeah. When really that's part of the game if you're in Hollywood. So he was highlighting this like culture, this cultural problem.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, is going crazy like Yeah,
Speaker 2:comps are true Discovery. Growth equity is so real. Totally. The challenge is just you're investing basically with a deck a team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's like a, it's a pre seed, you know, sort of traction.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Gross stage investment. That means you're going to have these huge outliers and you're going have some real misses and you got to build a model that
Speaker 1:works for Let's talk about the audience, give some people some background here. The Apple TV audience remains relatively small. Media measurement firm Nielsen regularly reports that Apple TV plus comprises less than 1% of total viewing each month of streaming services on connected televisions in The US. By contrast, Netflix and Amazon represented 8.23.5% of total viewing. Amazon, Netflix up at 8.2%, eight times the size of Apple TV plus They only offer a fraction of content So
Speaker 2:what is, I wonder if this data tracks YouTube because I imagine that they would be
Speaker 1:in the double digits. Like linear TV too, you know, just Yeah.
Speaker 2:But this is streaming services for connected televisions. So that, would that count ESPN on a
Speaker 1:I guess. Yeah. Peacock, I don't know. I mean there is a huge value for free content. Like you forget that like a huge selection, a huge swath of the populace is just so price sensitive that even a few dollars a month is just, I'll just watch the free version with ads.
Speaker 1:And that's why a lot of these streaming services have been offering easier ways to get in at lower prices. That's what Netflix did with their ads plan. That's what Amazon has done by bundling it with Prime. But Apple TV plus they give you these benefits. They give you these little handouts when you buy a new phone.
Speaker 1:Hey, get three months free. But it's not quite the same as, hey, you can get into this ecosystem regardless of what hardware you have for $5 a month with its ad supported. Because again, that erodes the brand. It feels weird to be watching some prestigious severance level Academy Award nominated film on Apple TV plus and then just see an ad for beer or something. I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's funny watching. Do you get ads before White Lotus? No. I'm on the must have at some point signed up for the HBO Max plan that's
Speaker 1:So you're like really down in the market right now.
Speaker 2:Premium. Yeah. Yeah. This tech sell off, I was gig along. Yep.
Speaker 2:Apple sold off by 14% this year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You took a bath on it.
Speaker 2:I just had to my subscription by $5 a month. I'm somehow on the the the premium whatever plan is like, you know, this is ad free content after this message.
Speaker 1:It's like gives you like an ad Well, do see I I often will see it's like an ad for another show on Apple TV. They throw one of those in. But I find those actually pretty valuable.
Speaker 2:This is an ad for Founders Podcast.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Before you before you tune in to TBPN, check out Founders Podcast. We're actually having David Center on the show today, so stay tuned. Our number one Let's, let let's continue here. Apple has a reputation of being a disruptor with its hardware and App Store, but I didn't see the core value here, says Horace DiDiu, founder of a market analysis firm Asymco.
Speaker 1:Picking winners and losers is not what the company is known for. This is what we were getting at. Apple's overall corporate profits are so vast. It reported 93,700,000,000.0 in net income in its last fiscal year that it can easily absorb the losses from its streaming service. And I think it should.
Speaker 1:You were joking about them buying an f one team. I think I think they should be investing in Yeah. More content.
Speaker 2:It's it's more how do you get even more aggressive and just eat Netflix alive. Like Wouldn't that be the strategy?
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 2:If you wanted if you wanted just, know, there there's a lot of money sloshing around the system. Right? You don't you can't go and overpay by two x for every piece of content probably. Yep. But you could maybe do that for long enough to get people to start churning from other services and, you know, who knows?
Speaker 2:Or or we're just or it'd be interesting to think about Apple being the final boss and trying to pursue a bundling strategy and just say like, hey, we are actually gonna just tax this like we tax everything Yep.
Speaker 1:I think there's two lenses to analyze this through. One is like what I think would be cool, which is I think it'd be cool if a company that's throwing off a hundred billion dollars just poured billions of dollars into creating the most beautiful and cinematic and powerful stories in the world and just like kind of we're just a patron of the arts. I think that that's really cool. And I think that when you think about the the the mega billionaires of previous eras, they gave us museums, they gave us libraries, they gave Us art. And I think that there's something awesome about that.
Speaker 1:Now flip it around and think about as a shareholder, maybe the optimal thing is truly just, hey, you're not good at this. This isn't your core business. Get out of it. Tax everything out. Else figure out how to take, you know, a dollar for every
Speaker 2:10 Yeah. Or to me to me the inspire and I'm sure there's a reason for this, but the inspired strategy is to build the best television and then tax every single streaming service that runs on it and just take a bunch of revenue and pursue a bundle. I I always was shocked that they didn't that they that they went with like the smart TV device that makes your TV an Apple TV Yep. Versus just making the most beautiful TV because I think that there's everybody that owns an Apple computer would buy that.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Even a lot of people that are ThinkPad, Chads would still opt for the Apple TV in their home. One of the most frustrating things for me with modern TVs is just the software, the hardware. Yep. It feels like slop. I happen to have like Samsung TVs all over my house and the software is so buggy, it's so slow.
Speaker 2:And I just don't even end up wanting to turn on the TV because it's just like, okay, I've got to like click around and
Speaker 1:My whole hack was I'd get a TV that was as dumb as possible but had this technology called HDMI CEC which is like it controls the TV through the HDMI. And so Got it. If you hook up an Apple TV to that, you can just use the Apple TV remote. You push it on the TV. It actually turns on the TV and controls the TV.
Speaker 1:And then you can use the Apple TV remote as the volume Yeah. Button as well. Because the Apple TV remote is Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's just
Speaker 2:crazy to think that Apple could easily have a TV business that was significantly bigger than I agree. Than AirPods.
Speaker 1:I agree. I asked Ben Thompson this and I was unsatisfied with the answer.
Speaker 2:But What was it?
Speaker 1:I asked him like, why don't They make a $5,000 display, the Apple Pro display XDR. Me a thousand dollars Designers pay for that
Speaker 3:and they
Speaker 1:love it. Yeah, me a 20,000
Speaker 2:dollars have multiple of here. I have it at home And
Speaker 1:I think there were a few things that went in there where you know, the like the market is moving so quickly that the like the install rate is is odd and there's something about like the the the like the price per inch of TVs in HD is like declining quickly
Speaker 2:that pay Apple is a luxury brand.
Speaker 1:I know. And having an Apple TV on the wall would be iconic and I think it would sell very well. I I would love it. And the integration would be fantastic and you could imagine it working very, very well. But you got to stay focused at some point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's probably a startup opportunity to just build the most beautiful TV. If Pebble's saying, you know, we're going make a smartwatch again. Yep. You can go build.
Speaker 1:I would certainly hope It
Speaker 2:is like the most deeply competitive market and a lot of the buyers are just like purely fixated on price to value and don't care about design.
Speaker 1:The other thing is that I think if they're really, really looking forward to the future, it's It's VR. And you put on the Apple Vision Pro and there's a lot of apps that don't work and the dinosaur thing is like two minutes long and like talking to your friends, all that stuff is like crazy future. But just putting on the Apple Vision Pro and watching a movie is a fantastic experience and it feels like having a private movie theater. And if they just make it lighter and a little bit more comfortable, the visuals were there. The pixel density was there.
Speaker 1:The price point doesn't matter, I think, for the Apple consumer. I think $5 for something that's actually light and comfortable and you can put on every night to watch a fantastic movie in a movie theater. And you can have someone for your whole family. Think that will sell very well if they really focus the software and the strategy on that. And I mean that was one of the best parts about the Apple Vision Pro is that the app that was in the top left corner, the one that they want you to click on the most was just the Apple TV store where you could just buy And you could go there and immediately with a couple clicks, pay a couple bucks and be watching Avatar in three d in a theater and it was a magical experience.
Speaker 1:Was great. Just a lot of other problems with that thing. But I think that that's where they're going to bet and that's where they're going to invest and they're just going to skip over the wall mounted TV entirely. Yep. Anyway, if you don't want to watch Apple TV, maybe you should buy a watch on Bezel.
Speaker 1:Go to getbezel.com. They have over 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts.
Speaker 2:One thing they don't have on Bezel What? Apple Watches.
Speaker 1:They don't.
Speaker 2:Just don't.
Speaker 1:Make a statement Some reason. People know that you care about craftsmanship.
Speaker 2:I guess they I think they have they have a case for a certain app. No, no, they don't. They have some watches. Anyways Anyway. Absolutely no watches on the platform.
Speaker 2:But if you're listening to this, you owe yourself a little treat and go get a silver watch on Bezel. You can always find a reason. Yeah. There's always a bull market somewhere.
Speaker 1:There's always a bull market somewhere. Let's stay with the Vision Pro. Apple released a new piece of immersive content, a Metallica concert, and it was absolutely panned by Ben Thompson, a scathing review. And he makes a very clear argument
Speaker 2:to Before we Anyway. Before we drag this through the mud, I just want to go out and say that Metallica is awesome. And it was a core part of my childhood.
Speaker 1:That's it's so funny. I love metal. Never really got into Metallica. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Were you into?
Speaker 1:More like Slipknot, you know, the really hardcore stuff, I Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was never a Slipknot guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But even I
Speaker 2:was never big into that world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Even like Iron Maiden, better for me than I don't know why. I think I think I you know what it was? I think I got turned off because I grew up in the Napster era and Metallica was very hostile to piracy.
Speaker 1:And a lot of, you know, my generation was very into the Napster, the Kazaa, downloading stuff illegally, the precursors to Spotify. And Metallica left a bad taste in everyone's mouth by being so prosecutorial
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Doing lawfare really against us, us hackers on the internet. And so I I was just like, you know what? I'm not gonna I'm not gonna give you a chance, Metallica. But they're back and they're partnering with Apple, and they launched a new immersive concert experience. It's coming to Apple Vision Pro this Friday.
Speaker 1:It's filmed in Mexico City during a sold out second year finale of the band's world tour. It, features full performances of three longtime staples, Whiplash one and enter and enter sandman. And it was captured exclusively in Apple immersive video, the remarkable storytelling format. That's only possible with Apple Vision Pro. And so Ben Thompson kind of hated this.
Speaker 1:And the reason is that it is not immersive because they cut it like a documentary, and they keep cutting from one camera to the next. And every time they cut, it feels like, okay, I'm not just sitting there.
Speaker 2:You would almost want a drone Yep. That's just flying around the event.
Speaker 1:Even flying around is gonna be a little bit jarring. Really, all you need, this is Ben Thompson's thing is like, just take the immersive rig, put it courtside at the Laker game or the basketball game or whatever that UFC thing you
Speaker 2:can talk about Yeah, the octagon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Put it And then you
Speaker 1:just look around. If want to look at the scoreboard, look up at the scoreboard. And if you wanna look at the one team, you look at and you turn your
Speaker 2:head Think about if Apple's great. I I I love that from a go to market just strategy. Hey, we're gonna create this Apple like orb thing that just goes and we're gonna put it Yeah. In Prominent. We're gonna put it at the US Open.
Speaker 2:We're gonna put everywhere. We're gonna put it all these places. We're gonna get we're gonna get the partnerships that allow us to do that. We're gonna put you, you know Yeah. Right next to the ring in UFC.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we're gonna put you on the track at f one.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 2:And I think people would buy the Apple Vision Pro just to be able to teleport into these crazy
Speaker 1:cool Totally cool. Then yeah, if you want to do the cut down version, you can do that. That's just repurposing. This is just like your short form thing, but give the fans the full experience as they want it.
Speaker 2:WorldCoin can scan millions of eyeballs all over the world.
Speaker 1:You can drop immersive video rigs and At the Lakers game. At the Lakers game. And they clearly have the money to go pay for those rights and, and it's super complimentary and you could even upsell them. Like, I would imagine that, you know, you could you could charge someone, I mean, a hundred dollars for, you know, like, a fully immersive livestream. It's like pay per view, but just in VR.
Speaker 1:But for some reason, they're not doing it. It's very unclear, and Ben Thompson doesn't like it at all. They also did this with soccer. So when they first demoed the Vision Pro, they brought in all the reporters. Ben Thompson was among them and they said, Put on the headset and we're going to show you this reel of all the things that you'll be able to do with this headset.
Speaker 1:And one of them was a basketball game and Ben Thompson's a huge basketball fan and he's just sitting there courtside for like a couple seconds and he was like, this was my like epiphany moment where I realized that I would watch an entire game here because you don't need any graphical overlays. The production's actually easier because you can just hear the sound of the stadium. If you want to look at the scoreboard, you just look up at the scoreboard. It's a fantastic experience.
Speaker 2:Maybe you can get audio. You don't need the actual comment commentator
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Track. You just need the what's happening. You need the feeling of being at the Exactly.
Speaker 1:People pay for courtside seats and they don't need anything else. They're not saying like, oh, like, I wanna be over there
Speaker 2:right now. Apple c r into that Greek weather
Speaker 1:report and just get
Speaker 2:immersed in in the moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, he he breaks down, another Apple immersive video that they released, the ML season in review. And so instead of just saying, hey. The season's over. You can go watch the full game.
Speaker 1:They do they they they released a five minute video with 54 distinct shots. It's a it's one cut every six seconds. There's not that much gameplay, only two minutes and thirty two seconds of gameplay. Worse, some of the cuts happen in the same highlight. There was one play where there was a sideline view of the ball being passed up the field, and then it switched to a behind the goal for the goal.
Speaker 1:I actually missed the goal the first time because I was so discombobulated that it took a few seconds to even figure out where the ball was. And this is like a classic problem in VR. When you're teleporting around, it's really jarring. Even if you don't get motion sick, it's just you have to reestablish yourself because you're so immersed.
Speaker 2:Wyatt Wyatt in the chat right now just had a good idea. Imagine being in Apple VR and watching Tracy Morgan throw up on
Speaker 3:the court.
Speaker 2:And you could be at you could have the perspective of the court and just
Speaker 1:watch It'd be fantastic. Yeah. Or or you look over and hey, it's Bill Gurley right there.
Speaker 2:Hey. Gurley.
Speaker 1:What's up, Bill Gurley?
Speaker 2:Gurley. That's something you'd pay pay per view for. Who is somebody was messaging me on x. Will Quist over at Slow says, by the way, the dude Gurley was sitting with was Bob Cagle, one of the Benchmark founders who was on the eBay board.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:Which is a top 25 legendary venture deal. And he's a Warriors co owner. So we gave Gurley all the credit. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think Gurley replied to that post and was like, yeah. I was actually, the owner was right there. Like, you probably should have clocked him, you idiots. It was a lot of fun. Well, Ben Thompson goes back in time and talks about Ping.
Speaker 1:Do you remember Ping at all? This was kind of interesting. Don't think I was Social Network
Speaker 2:This was in 2010?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You weren't born yet. But maybe I thought you might have seen it in like your you know, your tech history book in middle school
Speaker 2:or something. Yeah. Yeah. One of those textbooks
Speaker 1:probably had So this launched in 2010, and the idea was, Peng lets you follow your favorite artists such as Lady Gaga, Coldplay, YouTube, Jack Jack Jack Johnson, Yo Yo Ma, and more to find out what they're up to. Check out photos and videos they've posted, see their tour dates, read comments about other artists and albums that they're listening to. Spotify has since integrated all of this. You go to an artist page. You can see their tour dates.
Speaker 1:You can see their bios, all this stuff. But Apple thought that this would be big for iTunes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They just released a new feature, I think, today. I saw Daniel
Speaker 1:Which one? Oh, Spotify.
Speaker 2:Around specifically around this.
Speaker 1:Well, Ben Thompson says, Ping is an old standby when it comes to making jokes about past Apple failures, but that last paragraph actually helps explain why Ping never had a chance. And in the press release, the it closes with this very boilerplate PR thing. Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world along with iOS x, OS X, OS 10, iLife, iWork, and professional software, blah blah blah blah. When you think of Apple, you think about their jewel like devices, about the integration of hardware and software, Joni Ive in a Johnny Ive in a white room, etcetera. Indeed, you think about of putting on the Apple Vision Pro and having your eyes seamlessly tracked as you touch your fingers together to enter your passcode.
Speaker 1:All of this is basically the exact opposite of the reality of social media and user generated content. I wrote this about Quibi's failure. It's the same thing. So it all it it it all relates. It's the same thing with these the like, when things get messy and user generated and AI generated and hallucinatory, Apple struggles.
Speaker 1:But when it's a super, super tightly integrated polished product of aluminum and steel and titanium, Apple wins. And so the the the thing that we want is stick to Speaking of stainless Yeah. Aurora. Go to Aurora and check it out. I mean, thing that we want is Apple to do what they're really good at and let other companies that are better do what they're best at, but that's not the nature of Monopoly.
Speaker 1:They have control. And so if they can get 10 times as much value with a product that's half as good, that's a trade they take all day. I was listening to a film critic talk about kind of gripe about the fact that films are no longer released in theaters. He was saying, like, I think that there should be a rule that if you release a film, you have to have it in theaters for six weeks. And because a lot of Netflix and Apple, like, they're no longer even doing theatrical runs.
Speaker 1:It's on streaming the next week or it just goes straight to streaming. And the filmmakers sometimes get upset about this and the fans sometimes get upset about this. Yep. But I was thinking about it. I was like I was like, that's kind of like an authoritarian thing.
Speaker 1:Like, that might not be what's best for shareholders. Like, sure, you can want that, but if the market doesn't want that, you're kind of just saying, like, I want to force you to do something that's uneconomical. It's just like a tax, basically. Yeah. And it's kind of the same thing here where, you know, I want Apple to open up Siri or I want Apple to invest billions of dollars in amazing films that probably lose the money or or I want them to, you know, ditch their current Apple Vision Pro strategy.
Speaker 2:The f one team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just and and just broadcast f one. Buy an f one team and just put let me just sit in the paddock all all race long.
Speaker 2:They genuinely buy an F1 team and let you be in the car for the entire race via Apple Vision Pro exclusively.
Speaker 1:Yes. They could. But is that in their business plan? Who knows? Is that what profit maximizes for them?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Yeah. And so that's
Speaker 4:I mean,
Speaker 2:it's just that's the question. Funny to think we're gonna do this concert. We're gonna do we're gonna make this big deal about a Metallica concert, a band that I hadn't heard about in five years Yep. Even though when Apple was at its best, I was into I was like listening to Metallica as a Yeah. So it's just not the music partnership Yep.
Speaker 2:That you would do if you were building for the next generation.
Speaker 1:One of one of the things I did love about the Apple Vision Pro was was using it in bed right before I'd go to sleep. I'd be able to put it on and then there would be no light. If you turn on TV, it's going to disturb your wife or whoever is in the bed with you. But if you have an Apple Vision Pro on, you can actually just lay back and watch amazing IMAX quality film. The problem was is that the software was so bad that it would freak out and say, I can't track because I the lights aren't on.
Speaker 1:So then I had to use it with the lights on, which made no sense. And it was just very janky, so I returned it. But if you're looking to upgrade your bed, you gotta go to 8sleep.com. Nights that fuel your best days, turn into
Speaker 2:bed and the ultimate smart
Speaker 1:sleeping experience.
Speaker 2:Apple of smart beds. Yeah. So Many people have said that.
Speaker 1:So go to eightsleep.com/tvpn and
Speaker 2:Get $350 off your pod.
Speaker 1:It's a fantastic I put
Speaker 2:up a hundred last night.
Speaker 1:You put up a hundred? Yeah.
Speaker 2:You didn't
Speaker 1:tell me. You're you're
Speaker 2:I I took it very seriously when I got the worst night sleep How did I do? Of the last year on Monday.
Speaker 1:84, not enough. Six hours and thirty eight minutes, I need to step it up. Routine was a little bit rough too.
Speaker 2:Anyway I got over two hours of deep sleep. Who's doing that?
Speaker 1:You know who's sleeping pretty well these days?
Speaker 2:Masayoshi san.
Speaker 1:Of course, SoftBank bought chip designer Ampere computing for $6,500,000,000. Ampere will remain will retain its name and operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank. And so, this is an interesting deal. They just inked the deal that just broke recently. It's a series of investments to advance its artificial intelligence initiatives, and this is one of those deals that you don't hear about as much because it doesn't have the crazy PowerPoint.
Speaker 1:It's not this high flying thing. But this is like when Masa went and bought ARM, it was of a boring deal. And so people weren't like, oh, top on ARM and of course ARM did really Early
Speaker 2:and
Speaker 2:right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean Early
Speaker 2:and right.
Speaker 1:This is kind of where I disagree with Sam lesson a little bit. It's like like, yes, he does get over his skis a lot, but also he does
Speaker 2:get back skiing is awesome.
Speaker 1:Skiing is awesome, Sam. Yeah. The Japanese technology investment company's purchase of Ampere will help improve its AI capabilities. The deal comes as SoftBank is starting a giant data center project in the How
Speaker 2:much is SoftBank spending on OpenAI agents this year if they wanna spend $3,000,000,000
Speaker 1:this year
Speaker 2:just on OpenAI, which is amazing.
Speaker 1:And so Ampere They're
Speaker 2:saying it's one of the best SaaS deals of all time.
Speaker 1:It's really remarkable. I wonder if agents had anything to do with this deal. Maybe they used Hevia to get in the data room, crunch some numbers. That's right. Maybe they used deep research.
Speaker 1:We'll have to get Masa on and ask him about how he's using agents to speed up his multibillion dollar acquisition process. But in this case, Ampere designs energy efficient processors for cloud and AI computing and has about 1,000 skilled chip engineers. Ampere's expertise in developing chips can complement the design strengths of ARM holdings. So they're kind of like creating this Kiretsu, which we love.
Speaker 2:We love.
Speaker 1:Love a Kiretsu. Buoyed by a rush of AI chip buying ARM in February reported record quarterly sales for the three months ended in
Speaker 2:We should help facilitate a Gundo Kiretsu.
Speaker 1:They really should. Already doing it between all
Speaker 2:of our sponsors. Diamond's investing in all the different companies.
Speaker 1:Some of our sponsors, all of our sponsors are now on ramp. All the founders are wearing watches from Bezels, sleeping on eight They're running ads on Act That's It's great. Their personal portfolios are on public. It's great.
Speaker 2:It's beautiful.
Speaker 1:You know, if you join the you join the KBPN sponsorship, Kiretsu
Speaker 2:Everybody's gonna be
Speaker 1:Everyone benefits.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Pause or some
Speaker 2:said
Speaker 1:that realizing AI realizing AI that surpasses human capabilities requires breakthrough in com a a breakthrough in computing power. Ampere's expertise in semiconductors and high performance computing will help accelerate this vision and deepens our commitment to AI and innovation in The US.
Speaker 2:I really just wanna know how this deal got done. I imagine it was Masa writing on a napkin. He probably has specially designed napkins that have, you know, space for two different SigBlocks Yep. And signatures and just like like a mini Excel model.
Speaker 1:Yep. I think it might have been maybe a little bit more boring. I mean, look at who was who owned Ampere at the time. It was Carlyle Group and Oracle. Carlyle owned 60% of the gold and 32 The
Speaker 2:VCs typically when SoftBank invests would love to be able to sell. Yep. Usually doesn't, Not really able to to exit.
Speaker 1:It's PE benefits this time around. Yeah. SoftBank is borrowing from Mizuho Bank to finance the deal over the past few years.
Speaker 2:It's already working.
Speaker 1:Operating losses as its revenue dropped and its liabilities exceeded its assets. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the later half of the year subject to customary closing considerations
Speaker 2:I love Masa. Levering up to buy an asset that's losing money.
Speaker 1:Well, it doesn't have to lose money because I was thinking about this. Like, the real bull case is that Ampere gets on ramp because time is money, and they could say Exactly. So you think about the Ampere team. If they had easy to use corporate cards, great bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place, that could really drive the accretion of that deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's very possible that Masa's running a ramp oriented M and A strategy where he just looks at all these businesses. Hey, I know you're losing $2,000,000,000 a year.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, I have a great fix.
Speaker 1:We're go around. See more of this.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, you can see a lot of do roll up and
Speaker 1:we drop AI on top. We do a roll up and we drop ramp on top. It's the same idea. Yeah. Anyway, go to
Speaker 2:ramp.com. Sprinkle a little bit of ramp acquisition.
Speaker 1:We got big news in the in the world of Ozempic. Sale of Ozempic knockoffs is supposed to end soon. Telehealth companies aren't happy. We've covered this on the show before. Fascinating industry.
Speaker 1:Obviously, the creators of Ozempic are printing, but also the telehealth companies that have been selling Ozempic and compounded versions of Ozempic, which are manufactured independently, have also been doing quite well. And so pharmaceutical giants are squaring off against telehealth companies and pharmacies selling custom made versions of the hot medicines. Today was supposed to mark the beginning of the end for a chapter, knockoff versions of hot weight loss drugs. The FDA wants bulk production of the copycats to stop starting Wednesday for the pharm for pharmacy prepared versions of Zepbound and later in the spring for knockoffs of Ozempic and Wiguvi. But telehealth companies and pharmacies have fueled wide use of copycats.
Speaker 1:They have other plans. Telehealth platform Hims and Hers Health says it will keep offering pharmacy made or compounded versions of Ozempic and Wagoovie tweaked to individual prescriptions. And some of the pharmacies making GLP-one drug products will continue according to people familiar with the industry. The firms are seeking to take advantage of current law, which allows compounding pharmacies to make special individualized versions of the drugs that aren't available commercially. And so what happened here was that Ozempic became so popular in America that they could not supply the market.
Speaker 1:And for most things, like, when the iPhone dropped, the iPhone was extremely popular and it would sell out. There'd be lines out the door. And so for years, Apple's Apple hit their earnings perfectly, and it was amazing. It was an amazing stock because they knew we're gonna sell every iPhone we make. So how many iPhones can we make?
Speaker 2:Many can we make?
Speaker 1:If we can make five iPhones, we're going to sell 5,000,000 iPhones. And so they hit their earnings every single quarter, and it was great. Then now we're in the era of abundance of iPhones essentially. And now it's much harder to predict how many Apple Vision Pros will sell, how many new iPhones will sell because the the demand is much more sticky or loose, and and and iPhone production is essentially unlimited at this point. Drugs are different.
Speaker 1:Drugs, you know, you can say whatever you want about Ozempic, but abstract it away to the classic, like, cancer drug, insulin, these drugs, when they're approved, the FDA is saying, like, these are important. These help people solve health problems. And so it is critical that these, if doctors are prescribing them, they need to be available. And yes, we respect your intellectual property. We are granting you a monopoly on your patent for a certain amount of years.
Speaker 1:But if you can't supply the market, we are going to invalidate your IP temporarily while you're out of stock and say, hey, there's a supply shortage. Anyone can make these, including the compounding pharmacies. As soon as the big companies
Speaker 2:Great side hustle last year.
Speaker 1:Great. Yes, were
Speaker 2:in high school. Buy the compounds.
Speaker 1:Start compounding.
Speaker 2:Online, compound them in your garage. Yep. Go door to door. Yep. Pay for college.
Speaker 1:And so Ozempic and Roguevi are a little bit different, but, you know, the general scientific consensus is that obesity causes tons of diseases and losing weight causes you to live a lot longer. So these are important medicines. And so if Novo Nordisk couldn't supply the market, then it was okay for compounding pharmacies to, to make their own and sell them. And, of course, Hims and Hers, large telehealth public company, was able to use that compounding pharmacy. I don't even know if you'd call it a loophole.
Speaker 1:It's more just like a rule by the FDA. They were able to use that to sell a lot of this product and it really benefited the stock. But, of course, Novo was eventually going to catch up and that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 2:And at the beginning of this year, Hims and Hers Health went on a generational run.
Speaker 5:They
Speaker 2:did. They had really struggled after they went public. I think it was a couple of years ago at this point. People were writing them off completely.
Speaker 1:Yep, it was a SPAC, I And then they dropped like most SPACs, but never went down 99% or anything like that.
Speaker 2:Yep. And people have critiqued their business for a bunch of different reasons, but ultimately consumers like to be able to buy their medicine easily and directly Totally. Online. And so they peaked on February 18, just about a month ago at $15,000,000,000 and then they've dropped almost 50% since then.
Speaker 1:So 7.5 now. Yeah. Yeah. And there's kind of a question about like, what's the next act? They clearly have a lot of customers.
Speaker 1:They have a lot of people on their platform. Think even a lot of subscriptions. And they still sell a lot of hair care drugs and ED medicines.
Speaker 2:They're basically saying we are going to keep selling these drugs.
Speaker 1:But they want to
Speaker 2:find Because it's this interesting balance, right? Because it is this sort of tough position to be in where they're saying we can make hundreds of millions or potentially billions of in revenue from selling these drugs. Even if we're very clearly proven to be in the wrong, the settlement to Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk would probably be in the 9 figures, but maybe not.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's worth it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's worth it potentially.
Speaker 1:Yeah. These are high priority I mean, just legally, you know, no one's ever done compounding pharmacies at this scale. The law might not be written in a way that makes this illegal. Like, it's it's it's an open question. There are lots of pundits and people that have been saying, hey.
Speaker 1:This can't last or this can't happen. But, you don't really know until you run through the legal process fully and look at what all the judges and what all the presidents
Speaker 2:Yeah, mean him's and hers and and these other players Yep. Can go to Washington. They are doing this. They they've they have two different lobbying firms that they just hired in January. I'm sure they had others historically And they can say, hey, obesity is the biggest health problem in America.
Speaker 2:The best way to help Americans is introduce a massive amount of competition.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:We're not trying to lobby to say we, you know, we're not going to let Norton, you know.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's just saying consumers should have choice. They should be able to buy these, but it will set a crazy precedent around just IP laws in America, which is the biggest pharmacy pharmaceutical market in the world. Right? Don't we spend more the people will fact check me if I'm there, but I believe we spend more money on pharmaceuticals than any other country.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty sure. Yeah. The firms are seeking to take advantage of current law, which allows compounding pharmacies to make special individualized versions of drugs that aren't available commercially, telehealth firms and pharmacies.
Speaker 2:We we account for nearly half of global pharmaceutical spending.
Speaker 1:Let's go. And what was Jensen Huang was saying we need a hundred x that? Or he was talking about AI production.
Speaker 2:Check spend.
Speaker 1:But maybe
Speaker 2:Yeah. The
Speaker 1:Maybe we got Andrew Demond and he says the same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Andrew from him saying we need a hundred x per capita spending on on my compounded.
Speaker 1:I mean, the, like, the crazy thing is that, like, you know, everyone was projecting, like, I mean, like, runaway takeoff of these drugs and, like, obesity rates do seem to be coming down, but it's not, like, it's not this fast takeoff like we hear in AI. These drugs take a long time to work through the system. They're expensive. They really are. And a lot of people are skeptical about them, and they don't want to be the first person to take them.
Speaker 1:They want to say, Okay. Yeah. Sure. The FDA has approved them, but maybe I'll wait a couple of years. Even if I am obese, I'll wait a couple of years and see where does this shake out?
Speaker 1:Are there some unknown complications? What what are the bro scientists saying about it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We really gotta wait till Joe Rogan chimes in here to really
Speaker 1:You gotta trust the bro science on this one.
Speaker 2:For sure. The brother scientists.
Speaker 1:For sure. The FDA deadlines come after the agency declared the official end of obesity drug shortages that allowed pharmacies to make copies of the drugs in bulk. The shortages have led to a fierce fight in the courts on airwaves and around Washington with the pharmaceutical heavyweights Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk that sell branded drugs. And there was actually a a Super Bowl ad from HIMSS that was framing them as a challenger to the entrenched incumbents, the large pharmaceutical companies that are raising prices, decreasing demand, monopolizing the these important drugs in their in their in their view. Telehealth companies often sold the compounded drugs at a hundred dollars to $300 a month, well below the $1,000 a month price tags of the branded medicines.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, I mean, for a lot of Americans, even if they're obese, a thousand bucks is a lot. And and even though, you know, you could say that the benefit of not being obese is very high, a thousand bucks is a thousand bucks, and not everyone has that, unfortunately. Anyway Yep. Let's move on to Wander.
Speaker 2:I I was really thinking how do you how do we get a a Kugen transition into this next sponsor? And I and I tried to do the work for you. Couldn't come up with anything. But we do have a good way to transition, and that is find your happy place.
Speaker 3:Find your
Speaker 2:happy place.
Speaker 1:Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge services, vacation home, but better, folks. Go to wander.com. Go to wander.com/tbpn and use code t b p n and
Speaker 2:I was really excited. So Kyle, who's the CMO of Wander, he posted this incredible house. Yeah. And it happens to be like a quarter mile from my house in Malibu. Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:So I hit him up and I said, hey. Let's do it. We get some early access. That's Fantastic. So we're working on that.
Speaker 2:Very excited.
Speaker 1:Can't
Speaker 2:wait. And, yeah, can't wait to to get over there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let's move on to oh, we only have four minutes. Let's just do some timeline, folks. We gotta do some timeline. Let's go to, Zabi Elmgren.
Speaker 1:Says Zabi. We'll lead your series a if you can hang. And it's
Speaker 2:I saw this earlier. I thought it was fantastic.
Speaker 1:Iconic in this.
Speaker 2:I would like to make this the new kind of like Y Combinator. Basically, Zobby takes you down the most aggressive, gnarly run. Yeah. And then afterward, there's like VCs at the bottom that you can pitch to.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like Keith or Boyce's like, you shouldn't hire anyone over 30 VC. You shouldn't fund anyone if they're skiing less than 30 degree inclines.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Something like that.
Speaker 2:And to be clear, something about skiing when you take a picture of a cliff like this, it doesn't necessarily look super significant. Yeah. But that is a serious drop. Yeah. And she really is going full send.
Speaker 2:Next time Zabi posts the video, would love to see the the the entire the entire run. Let's go to the next post.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Chris Kirsten Green over at Forerunner. She says, today, we're sharing our annual consumer trend report, our primary research and analysis on where consumers are at and what trends are driving new needs, priorities, and business opportunities. We focus on three key forces, health and wellness, generative AI, and personal security. Interesting. So you wanna have her on the show?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I had a friend reach out to her this morning about coming on the show. Think it'd be awesome. I always love these trend reports. They put them out pretty frequently.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to find it. I can't find it on 4runner.com.
Speaker 1:Well, she says this past year was marked by contradictions, yo yoing in consumer sentiment and markets, explosive new tech and out of pocket health care spending, a strikingly resilient jobs market, and mounting fear about career, financial, and personal safety, our full report here. So Interesting stat here.
Speaker 2:Interesting stuff. Yeah. Wanna have her break it down, but just some interesting stats. Forerunner's historically been heavily consumer focused. Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, they'll do a b to b company here or there from from what I know. But they're and the reason for this, a lot of people sort of write off consumer because it's really hard. It's really hard to get right. But many of the biggest outcomes ever have been in consumer. And interesting stat here, two thirds of US GDP is from consumer activity.
Speaker 2:And so that's why the outcomes end up being so massive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's also interesting just to hear her talk about these brands because they're they're just so much more tangible business cases than the b two b stuff that's harder to dig into. It's more spreadsheet based. You need to really understand what's going on in in the these, like, niche submarkets. Everyone can have opinion on liquid death
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or Dollar Shave Club.
Speaker 2:You can
Speaker 1:kinda understand that. It's very tractable. Anyway, we have our first guest.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the temple of technology. Brendan from Merkor, how you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 3:I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me, guys. I'm excited to be on the most profitable podcast.
Speaker 2:Yes. There we go.
Speaker 1:Well, you're live. Can you introduce yourself, break down a little bit about your history, your story, and what you're building, what your company does?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Usually, when somebody gets to your stage, they've been in market for five, six years, so people have more of an opportunity to get to know you. So, yeah, we'd love to we'd love the full intro.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So I grew up in the Bay Area, met my cofounders, Adarsh and Surya, when we were 14 in high school.
Speaker 3:And so we're all in the speech and debate team together. They were the winningest speech and debate team of all time in high school debate, but I was always building companies in one form or another. So I didn't wanna go to college. My parents insisted that I had to. And so I went to Georgetown for two years where Suri was my roommate there, and Adarsh was at Harvard.
Speaker 3:And we started Recore when we were 19 to train models that predict how well Sun will perform on a job better than a human can. Similar to how a human would review resume, conduct an interview, and decide who to hire. We automate all of those with LMs. And then fast forward two years, we'd scaled from 1 to a hundred million in revenue in eleven months. And so we're only 21 and running this really exciting company that's working with most of the most prominent companies in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1:It's more of a more of a line than a curve over there. It's not really just a hockey stick. It's a
Speaker 2:How do you It's hockey stick. You're you're you're very smiley right now. You look like you're having fun, but your your LinkedIn profile is dead serious. Do I'm sure internally as a team, guys are focused on not letting the hype and the crazy initial traction get to your head. How do you think about running the team when the team has only experienced massive sort of immediate success?
Speaker 3:Totally. And I think one thing that compounds this is that so much of our team is, like, college dropouts and new grads. Right? Because it was the extension of our initial network at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etcetera. And so a lot of them haven't seen what normal companies look like.
Speaker 3:This is all that they're used to, and it's easy to get caught up and lost in so much that's happening. But I think the most important thing to stay grounded is just focusing everyone on the numbers that matter long term. Right? The network effects of the business, how do we build up the marketplace, how do we learn from all the performance reviews that we're getting to build our usage data flywheel rather than focusing on a lot of the lagging indicators like revenue or, you know, or more of the customer signals.
Speaker 1:Can you talk about some of the jobs that you're actually placing? Like, you go to Merkor, you get placed. Are you placing people in white collar jobs, blue collar jobs, everything? Any specific niches?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when we started
Speaker 3:out, it was that we were very amazed with the caliber of talent in India. And so we would hire these software engineers in India and use LMs to assess them, hire them for our friends. But what we realized was that there was this really large shift happening in the human data market where large AI labs are hiring thousands of people to train the next generation of LMs. And it used to be this crowdsourcing problem that was super low skilled, right, of how do you get a bunch of people writing barely grammatically correct sentences for the early versions of ChatGPT that was moving towards this vetting problem of how do we find the most exceptional people in the world in high volumes that wanna work exact work directly with researchers to push the frontier of model capabilities. And so to your question, we now hire roles across almost all domains or the vast majority of popular domains ranging from software engineers to consultants, people in finance, medicine, law, etcetera.
Speaker 3:Podcasters. Both help more traditional customers as well as these AI labs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about robotics? I mean, there there, obviously, there's this question of, like, a data wall in robotics. Google had that famous, like, arm farm where they were trying to generate reinforcement learning data with, like, 17 robotic arms just working on grasping. Are are we gonna see a future where people are getting placed into jobs kind of wearing motion tracking suits to generate robotics data?
Speaker 1:How do we solve that problem?
Speaker 3:That's a phenomenal question. I I'm not sure I think so.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:There is a lot of questions around, like, what kind of data production are most efficient robotics. And I will say we don't provide True. People to create robotics data as much yet, but it's certainly something that's top of mind as these companies start to mature and really scale up the kind of data that they're interested in.
Speaker 1:What about what about, like, revenue volatility? I I feel like a lot of these like, if you're if you're placing individuals into, you know, some big foundation model company or some big hyperscaler is doing a massive training run. They need to really nail down math, and they're gonna bring in a ton of mathematicians, generate a ton of training data. And then they're like, hey. We're actually good.
Speaker 1:We're moving on to the next thing. That can kind of create a massive oscillation in your revenue. How are you thinking about, like, scaling out and make making sure that the growth curve's smooth? Because, obviously, it's very fast. But, you know, the the the iron law of the universe is like, what goes up quickly comes down quickly, but then maybe there's a second act and you go back up again.
Speaker 1:And over time, it looks smooth, but it can be very, jostling in the in the next few years.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think the most important thing to think about is the leading indicators in fast moving markets.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? And that if you look at the most sophisticated labs and what they're really investing in, it's a super high caliber expert data that is, like, far beyond the model frontier of capabilities. And so so long as we focus on, like, the leading indicators, the things that, you know, all the big tech budgets are starting to move towards, that positions us really well. And, obviously, like, the leading indicators evolve over time, and we need to position ourselves there. I think where companies get themselves into trouble in these fast changing markets is when they aren't looking at the leading indicators and they're sort of sitting with the large incumbents that are doing a lot of the legacy systems that get phased out.
Speaker 3:And so that's how we think about it. But my broader take on the human data market is that it's going to grow dramatically because so we're getting to the point where RL is so effective that you can create almost any eval, and it will be able to solve that eval. And so the barrier to applying AI throughout the entire economy is just creating evals for everything, right, which is a process that inherently requires humans in the loop. And so I'm very excited about building that world.
Speaker 2:What are some customers that you can talk about or maybe allude to that have been kind of surprising? We talked about yesterday Yum Brands, which is like a $44,000,000,000 public company that owns a bunch of fast casual restaurants. They're partnering with NVIDIA and like buying chips and like actually building, effectively building their own AI in house. Has there been any sort of, you're working with all the big sort of foundation labs, I would say most of them would be my guess, but there been any customers that you're working with that you've been surprised by?
Speaker 3:Not too surprising yet. Like, most of our customer base we work with all of the top five labs in The US, and we're starting to see, maybe, actually, one interesting thing is we're starting to see a lot more customization at the application layer. And I think a big reason for this is that it's now much more data efficient to customize models with RL environments and a lot of this, like, new kind of data versus fine tuning data that people would do historically. And so it's now becoming, you know, this, like, gold rush for all these application layer companies. Without too much CapEx, they're able to get these incredible results.
Speaker 3:And so we're seeing some of that, but at least for the most part, the, like, legacy Fortune five hundreds haven't really caught on to this yet. And I imagine that that might take a year or two.
Speaker 2:Well, that'll be a nice rush of revenue once once they realize what's happening.
Speaker 1:I have a question.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Go for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We I mean, we've been talking a lot about agents and kind of wondering obviously, agents are breaking through in the enterprise, in the coding sector, but we've just been kinda tracking against, like, when can you actually use an agent to just book a flight reliably. And I'm wondering if we're in this weird thing where you see a foundation model company do a press release, it's like, we're working on, you know, fundamental math innovation or we're gonna solve, you know, I forget that that, like, really, really hard problem in in math. And it and it seems like maybe there's a gap in the the human RL training loop just around, like, a really good executive assistant. Is is that the gap?
Speaker 1:Is it we need more data there to actually break through, or is that just a product issue? Like, why can't Siri reliably book me a flight?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think there's
Speaker 3:two challenges. One is the interest of researchers has historically been in these, like, super hard reasoning problems. Yeah. Right? They're interested in GPQA of how do we solve PhD level reasoning.
Speaker 3:They're interested in IMO level math of how do we have models that are beating all of these incredible mathematicians and have historically just been less interested in, like, how do we automate a McKinsey consultant or an executive assistant? And I think that shift is starting to happen, and so that's, like, a big part of it. And that ties into the data that they create because, of course, if you wanna automate a McKinsey consultant, you need evals for everything a McKinsey consultant does. If you wanna automate an EA, you need evals for everything that an EA does. I think the other part of it is the models are just starting to get really good at tool use.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Like, tool use is still relatively immature relative to all of the reasoning capabilities. And so I think as that starts to happen, I would really expect that this year, you're able to use operator or Yeah. Whatever the equivalent agent is to start booking flights and doing a lot of these more mundane tasks.
Speaker 2:Have you ever been approached by any of the labs around help us make our models funny? Like, is there a world is there a world where you guys are you show up to the comedy store here in LA and you're you're trying to, you know, grab something eat and say, hey,
Speaker 1:hey, come on. Come on. On. Come Come on.
Speaker 2:Come on. Come on. But it seems like that's, like, when when every model's, like, pretty good at at some of these sort of, like, foundational, like, problems and thinking, then the way to differentiate is is can a model be more entertaining for consumers? Can and and there's value in that itself.
Speaker 3:Yeah. A lot of our customers at the frontier, as as you've you've seen in recent releases, are starting to think a lot more about humor and and these exciting things. We have been hiring a bunch of people out of, like, the Harvard Lampoon and equivalent places that have these comedic skills to help teach models how to get there. And so it it's really like every capability you want, you need evals for. So we we
Speaker 2:John has been doing, like, the Kugen eval, which is just he asks, you know, various models to to tell a joke. And then they end up just taking you on this winding thing that sounds like a joke, but it's not actually it it doesn't actually have a punch line.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's hard because there's not there's not a quantitative eval for humor. It's so subjective and so Another
Speaker 2:question just related just broadly to the future and and how these labs you know, the labs are your customers. The critique of the labs broadly in the model companies as they raise tens of billions of dollars has been, you know, if the models are commoditizing and intelligence just becomes too cheap to meter, where does the value come from? John's point of view has been there are many commodities in the world that have a ton of value and there's a bunch of great businesses that, you know, drill and, you know, produce oil and then sell it. Right? Even though oil is like a commodity that just sort of trades on the open market.
Speaker 2:How do you how do you see the the the model market long term? And do you see a world where there's constantly new companies being spun up to create these sort of bespoke specialized models for different use cases?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think the value will accrue to the product layer. Like, I don't think about OpenAI as much as an API business, and it it seems like most people are really placing a bet on the product side of things
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Which will start to get very exciting, especially and spread out across many companies considering that customizing models is so much more affordable than it used to be. So that's sort of how I see it playing out. I think one of the things that a lot of investors don't quite realize when they're not, like, in the code of building these products is how low the switching costs are for API. Right? Like, it's a line of code to switch back and forth and, like, see how new models are doing.
Speaker 3:And so it's it's hard to build a business when when that's the switching cost. And and I think it's really gonna be in the in the product layer.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, given that, do you have a view on why every single x OpenAI employee seems to start the exact same foundation model company instead of doing something else? I was really hoping for, like, a supplements company from Ilia or, you know, like, a hair loss or something fun, something different, t shirt company. But everyone just seems to be, hey. I I I'm gonna do what I know. I've been building foundation models.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna stick with it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It that's a good question. I I think a lot of it ties to just, like, the ideology around AGI. Right? This is the most important problem in the world.
Speaker 3:And so how do we all race as fast as possible to get there rather than a lot of the, you know, unit economics and competitive dynamics that investors would be thinking about?
Speaker 1:Yes. They're basically just disregarding the fact that the, like, sure, the value might accrue to the application level or layer for ten years, and then it's completely irrelevant once ASI arrives.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I think that's an interesting strategy if value in the short term short to medium term accrues to the product layer. But then if you actually can build artificial superintelligence, then none of it actually potentially matters Yeah. In the end.
Speaker 2:So it's an interesting strategy. Last question for you. I know we have a minute left. This is the most champagne problem that founders ever have. And when you were fundraising, you probably couldn't even drink champagne.
Speaker 2:But do you have any funny stories? I'm sure you raised a series of like very competitive rounds. Yeah. Any funny stories of like offers investors made to just like try to get you? You know, the classic is like Did you go in a helicopter?
Speaker 2:Like Yeah. The classic Yeah. Helicopter. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. A private jet Vegas to race Ferraris.
Speaker 2:There you go. There we go. I knew there was gonna be something. Yeah. You're like, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I've never actually got my driver's license. Yeah. You're like, it's fine. It's a private track.
Speaker 1:Are those effective? Did they win you over? It sounds like you went with benchmark after thing.
Speaker 2:So I
Speaker 1:think it's effective.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. No. They could they could be very tempting because we we never actually, for our series a and our series b, we didn't create a slide deck because we weren't both times, like, people asked for it, and we were like, just, no. Not not really willing to create one, but the the sales processes could be a lot of fun.
Speaker 3:It's sort of like Christmas where you're getting all of these, like, gifts and fun experiences, but also trying to balance that with it not being too much of a distraction from building the company.
Speaker 1:Well, that's fantastic. Love it. Congrats to you. Good luck. And we'll have to check-in soon when you have new fundraising news.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Next
Speaker 2:week. Every other week.
Speaker 1:Every other week.
Speaker 3:Let's get
Speaker 1:it on schedule. Yeah. Same time next week for the series f. Right? Okay.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 3:We'll we'll
Speaker 5:make
Speaker 3:it happen, John. There we go. Alright.
Speaker 2:Give our best to the team. Thanks for coming on. Bye. Thanks. See you guys.
Speaker 1:It was great. It was fun one.
Speaker 2:Oh, to be 21 again.
Speaker 1:I know. In '21 getting flown out to Vegas to fly or fly helicopters and race Ferraris. That's very TB coded. Well, we got David Sedner coming on the show. Gonna ask him about NVIDIA.
Speaker 1:Gonna ask him about Jensen Huang. Gonna ask him about great founders. I'm gonna ask him how he's doing today. How are you doing?
Speaker 6:What's going on, brothers?
Speaker 2:Looking fantastic. Amazing.
Speaker 6:Look at this.
Speaker 1:Look at this. Professorial, if I might
Speaker 2:say something I honestly 99% of the time that I see Sunro, he's got the black founders tee on. Yeah. It's good to see you in a it's good to see you in a jacket.
Speaker 6:That's great. I know people say I shouldn't wear my own merch. I completely disagree.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. What? It's the
Speaker 1:greatest merch in the world. It is it is honestly like one of the most comfortable t
Speaker 6:shirts To work to work out in. Yeah. Yeah. If think about how important that random me and Jordy ran into each other after not talking for like six months True.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:At at a gym in Malibu. Yeah. And I don't know if you would have recognized me if I didn't have the without the founder shirt on. So
Speaker 1:Well, now that you're doing video, you know, you're a lot more recognizable. You're gonna get stopped on the street all the time. I'm sure
Speaker 6:Let's hope not.
Speaker 1:Dream that you've been waiting for.
Speaker 6:No. Let's hope not. Please don't. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He only wants to get recognized in the Amman.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's the most
Speaker 2:common place that it happens, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Anyway
Speaker 6:Our friend Justin Mares told me he's opening the new factory for Kettle and Fire and he texted me last night and he texted me where it is. I was like, is there Amman in that city?
Speaker 4:It's like Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm on Lancaster. Yeah. I'm on Caster. Yeah. One of the most historic locations.
Speaker 1:The Caster. The Caster. That's great. What what was the what was the last episode you dropped?
Speaker 6:Oh my god. It's the the episode's actually going kinda crazy.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 6:Most people like it. Some people are very upset. It's Todd Graves, the the founder of Raising Cane's.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:So Raising Cane's, this guy's been running his business for thirty years. He owns over 90% of it. It's worth at least $10,000,000,000. And he truly believes that God put him on Earth to be great at chicken fingers, making chicken fingers so he can help other people.
Speaker 1:Life's worth.
Speaker 6:And people So a lot of people love his approach. He's essentially what I what I would describe is I did this episode on the founder of In N Out a long time ago, Harry Snyder. Yeah. It's essentially, like, Harry Snyder's reincarnated, but instead of making hamburgers, he's making chicken fingers. They have, like, the very same philosophy.
Speaker 6:But people are, like, really upset that he feels this is his mission. But he, like, does a ton of good for the community, like, gives to charity. Like, let the guy make his fucking chicken fingers.
Speaker 1:That's funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Didn't so he he basically just was building the company while he was still in college. Right? I
Speaker 6:I No. So there there's a funny there's an interesting thing that reoccurs at the history of entrepreneurship. It's like these these founders write a business plan in business school about their idea and they get terrible grades. So like Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, c minus.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Todd Graves, lowest grade in the class. Phil Knight for Nike, same thing, bad grade. Completely disinterested.
Speaker 1:The professors don't know. The professors don't know. I I remember in college I wrote a bull case on Twitter at like 1,000,000,000 and they got like a b minus. And they're like just because he like disagreed me with me on the valuation. And it's like, I was completely Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was completely correct.
Speaker 6:A %. But the crazy thing about Todd Graves isn't like no one would give him money. So, he never raised again. And so he raised from, he actually to to save money or to make money, he worked as a boilermaker. And so they do these fucking crazy things where you have to work, like, five or six weeks because you're fixing a refinery.
Speaker 6:And every day, the refinery is down. It's, like, very detrimental to the health of the company. So they pay you a ton of money where you just have to work like a dog for, like, hundred hour weeks, six weeks straight. So he meets a bunch of boil makers, then he risks his life doing commercial fishing. Do remember this show like Catch?
Speaker 1:Deadliest Catch, yeah. Of course.
Speaker 4:That's what he did.
Speaker 6:Did that when he was like 23. Legend. And then he goes and he borrows money from his bookie and then a boilermaker named Wild Bill. So he never talks about this anymore, but I know I just I I love the idea, like, there's some boilermaker named Wild Bill there that has, a couple hundred million dollars with the racing cane stockers bookie made, hundred or $200,000,000.
Speaker 2:Wow. Because his kid wouldn't shut Is the
Speaker 6:His 23 year old kid wouldn't shut up about wanting to live a chicken finger dream. That's what he repeats over and over again. Chicken finger dream.
Speaker 1:Chicken finger dream.
Speaker 2:And those guys have the 10% of raising canes?
Speaker 6:No. He never says the percentages. Who has the rest of the he says over 90%.
Speaker 4:But, you know,
Speaker 6:he said he rolled them into the he rolled them into the main company because they just they just invested in the first Raisin Canes. Another thing that's interesting, he had a co founder who quit after the second store.
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. Miss.
Speaker 2:No conviction.
Speaker 1:There's always a story like that with like all these power lock companies.
Speaker 2:No. It's interesting. It's it's funny. Restaurants and CPG are so tangible that it attracts people that have dreams but not necessarily extreme conviction. Sure.
Speaker 2:They can see the idea in their head and there's a there's a sandwich shop in LA and I've and I've sat down, I'm blanking on the name right now but they've got probably twenty, thirty locations around the West Coast now. And he was just telling me how the first year he had been a successful restaurateur, he had multiple locations, he'd done night clubs and all this stuff. And then the first year of his business, he went into massive debt. He was working fourteen hours a day. He he went into this business like knowing food and beverage really, really well.
Speaker 2:And it was just the most devastating like couple years where it didn't matter that they were making a good product and people liked it. He was getting, you know, he was having high schoolers sort of like talk smack to him. Yeah. You know, saying like make my sandwich faster, know, like getting angry at him. And so it just like we, you know, it weeds out the people that don't have that like ridiculous can, you know, didn't have maybe the the co founder didn't have the chicken finger dreams.
Speaker 6:Listen, I would I think the episode's like an hour long. So if you listen to it on 1.5 x speed, you can get it in forty minutes.
Speaker 1:Do it.
Speaker 6:It's exactly that. He almost lost so he was, like, heavily geographically concentrated in Louisiana, and he almost lost everything in in, during hurricane Katrina because it it knocked out 21 of his 28 restaurants. And it was all personal debt, so no one would lend him money. So he'd have to go find like an angel investor. He had a very interesting way to, to finance each individual store.
Speaker 6:He was like, hey, invest like $200 in this. He would take that, he called it an angel investment, but it's really an angel investment. He's like, give me $200, I will fill out a one page contract, I will guarantee you personally that I will pay you back your money and 15 with 15% interest. He would take that contract to the bank, the bank would loan him like a million dollars to give him the startup money, And he did that all the way up until the first twenty restaurants. And he was like, we're rolling.
Speaker 6:We have so much cash flow. Nothing's gonna go wrong as long as I don't lose out on any day sales. And then hurricane Katrina comes and knocks out, you know, 21 out of 28 restaurants. And so he talks about we he says this over and over again. He's just like, don't do the things I did because they were wildly reckless.
Speaker 6:They just happened to work out for me, which I thought was also really funny.
Speaker 1:Now, he's still alive. Are you planning on doing one of those episodes where you go sit down with him, have dinner, eat some chicken fingers, break it down?
Speaker 6:So I said on the episode, if anybody knows him Yeah. Please, I would like to meet him. Because I'm upset, you know, like you guys know this because we talk all the time. Like, I'm obsessed with people that do one thing. The only thing I'm really interested in is, like, I'm not interested in your stupid fucking startup or your latest company.
Speaker 6:I'm interested in your last company. Like, the thing that you were going to do until that you thought you were put here on the earth to do
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And the thing that you're gonna do until you die. And so, yeah, I'm I'm fascinated by talking to people like that. Most of the most interesting, like, unknown founders that I've met recently, the most impressive ones are all in, like, their seventies and they've been building their company for, you know, forty or fifty years. You just talk to them. It's like the the level of detail they know about the world they've built is, like, on it's one of the most unique experiences you can have in your life because that that compounded knowledge.
Speaker 6:There's things that they know that they can't even really explain why they believe what they believe. But it's just, a very, like, deep intuition, sense of intuition. Jensen is the same I I would imagine the same way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like,
Speaker 6:he's I think he's the longest running Texio, if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1:My question is, do you think that these founders who wind up running their companies for forty years know it's their life's work in the first month, in the first decade No. Do they fall into it? And because I feel like a lot of it's just luck. Like, no one ever made them an offer they couldn't refuse. They never wound up big like, being in a situation where they had to, you know, pay some bill and they wanted to cash out or something.
Speaker 6:So I I don't think, they know it that early. Yeah. Now that is separate from, like so, like, Todd Graves. Right? Was like, he's been offered billions of
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And he's like, I never thought of it for a second. What I also love about him is he he talks about the need. We need more founders and we need more entrepreneurs to not sell their company. Yep. So he's like, I'm competing.
Speaker 6:The reason he's like running through the QSR industry right now is because he's like, he's competing against these very old corporate run businesses. There's no founders competing against him. And he like, he's just, we need more diversity of thought. We need more ideas. You need more innovation.
Speaker 6:You need people to actually care.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And so people somebody asked him, like, you've been offered billions of dollars. What was the the offer that was the most tempting? He's like, none of them. Not nothing was ever tempting. He's like, isn't going to be a multigenerational business.
Speaker 6:I'm going to give it to my kids. So let me let me give you another hilarious story about this.
Speaker 1:Please.
Speaker 6:And I'm gonna paraphrase this, but so James Dyson, who still owns a % of Dyson, which I've done four episodes on. Right? My my number one autobiography recommendation out of, you know, the almost 400 biographies of entrepreneurs I've read so far is James Dyson's first autobiography, which is called Against the Odds. Like, few weeks ago so he still owns a % of the company. The numbers you see thrown out there, they say it's worth 10,000,000,000, it's worth 20.
Speaker 6:I've heard he's pulling out 5,000,000,000 a year, more than 5,000,000,000 a year dividends personally, from what I hear, okay? That's amazing. So I was at this like super fancy invite What do do with it?
Speaker 1:Where's he investing? Does he have a family office or something? Like
Speaker 6:So so that's how Yeah. So there there'll be hints because like you you're He's been pulling out a ton of money Well
Speaker 1:turns out he owns 5% of Apple now because he's been building position for a decade like
Speaker 6:No way better than that. Way better Okay. He he's like owns more
Speaker 2:Federal Reserve.
Speaker 6:He owns most the most sheep than anybody in the world.
Speaker 1:I love it. He's like You gotta be sheep maxing. You just like You have to be sheep maxing.
Speaker 6:You run out of things to invest in. So he's like, he's the largest green pea producer in Europe,
Speaker 1:like Amazing. So
Speaker 6:this this
Speaker 1:is true.
Speaker 6:Well Sorry about this there. So I'm at this, like, super fancy, invite only investor conference. There's, like, 15 people there, and all of them, like, controlling massive amounts of capital. Yeah. And one guy was telling a story, like, he the more assets under management, the like, they're they're trying to buy private businesses and, you know, you start out buying, you know, $500,000,000 businesses, then a billion dollar businesses.
Speaker 6:Now he's like, he's gotta shoot really, really fucking high.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so the I'm gonna paraphrase this. This is why I love people like James Dyson, like Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg, like Todd Graves. Steve Jobs is obviously is is similar though even though it's a public company. They go to they approach Dyson to see would you be interested in selling? And the response, I'm paraphrasing was, fuck you.
Speaker 6:This is a family heirloom. Love it. I'm not selling for any price.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 6:There's actually there's actually a really important idea here to and I think another way to answer your question, John, is I I realized I remember exactly where I was. You guys have both met my wife. I was supposed to be on a date with her at Harry's Pizzeria in the Design District in Miami. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And I'm not even paying attention to what we're talking about. I'm thinking about founders. And I remember like it just where I was, like the epiphany I had was like, oh, people say if like you love what you do, like Yeah. You you would do it for free. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I was like, no no no. There's a different level. If you there's a there's a there's you can have such a deep love for what you're doing that people couldn't pay you to stop. So it's like the idea has like, how much
Speaker 2:would you have to
Speaker 1:pay Steve
Speaker 6:Jobs to not build to not work on Apple or build products? There's no money. You can can give them $2,000,000,000,000. It didn't even matter.
Speaker 1:This is the sort of know The the Zuck acquisition attempt. Yeah. They said, hey. Here's a billion dollars. You're 23 or something.
Speaker 1:And he's like, but I would just start another social network. This is what I wanna work on. Like, what am I gonna do? I like this one. Amazing.
Speaker 6:That is the perfect example because there's a bunch there's a bunch of young kids that, you know, sell their companies and have a bunch of money. But, like, look at the difference of his life. You no one would know his name. No who knows what would happen. It's like now he's, like, working, you know, the best, you know, the best 40 year old public company CEO in the world by far.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Working in the most interesting time, having access to, like, build some of the most interesting products, and then essentially unlimited resources.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep. Question. Todd Graves, I'm sure has like an extreme loyalty to his team and employees at the corporate level and the individual restaurant level. There's sort of a broader playing trend playing out in restaurants. People have been attacking the sort of like one of the biggest cost centers for restaurants is or probably the biggest is labor.
Speaker 2:And so you have we covered yesterday Yum Brands, is like a $44,000,000,000 public company. They own KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut. They're trying to in integrate sort of robotics on both sides, both on the ordering process. They're partnering with Nvidia to like do like voice models and process, you know, you're driving through the drive through or calling or texting or whatever. And then they also are trying to integrate robotics on, you know, within the actual kitchens just to produce food more cheaply.
Speaker 2:How do you think Todd Graves, I haven't found any commentary from him online about robotics, but how do you think he would think about that in a world where I'm sure he has a deep loyalty to his team and loves that it's this human experience going to a Raising Cane's, but at the same time, his competitors are just gonna be trying to drive costs down as low as possible.
Speaker 6:Yeah, that's a good question. I'd love to ask him that. Based on what he says, he's pretty anti making decisions just based on financial reasons. Like, he he talks a lot of shit in his interviews about like PE people, what like, he's just not a big he's not a fan at all.
Speaker 1:Woah woah woah. We love private equity here on this show. Okay. Let's not slander the good folks over at
Speaker 6:Blast Dude, some of my one of my Two two of my closest friends, who I love all the time, I talk to all the time, they are literally, might be the most successful PE people rolling up QSRs. Patrick just did an interview with
Speaker 4:Matt and Alex. Yeah. So
Speaker 6:I love them too. Yeah. But but Todd Graves does not. He is very anti PE in QSR.
Speaker 1:Timeline and turmoil if they start chirping each other. I have a question about, your point about founder control over the long term, never selling, owning a %. Do you think that there's a need for some sort of maybe cultural shift or even a shift in the way startups are financed in Silicon Valley? It's just so like, the the standard YC playbook, for example, is, like, you get three cofounders. You split it equally.
Speaker 1:Then immediately, YC takes 10%. Then it's, like, back to back to back 20% rounds. You're diluted down to a few percent. Maybe you get some supervoting, but you're not paying yourself a good salary. And so, you know, Jordy's kind of talked about maybe we need to normalize some sort of secondary sales so that the the founders can take a little cash out of the business and then actually go in it for the really long term.
Speaker 1:Maybe we just need, hey. It's okay to pay yourself a really, like, reasonable salary. A lot of founders are out there kind of, like, starving even after they've raised $20,000,000. What do you think about the structure of Silicon Valley? Like, is the Silicon Valley playbook setting us up for to create the next James Dyson or the next, or or or the next Todd Graves?
Speaker 6:So when you say what do I think about that, I don't think about it. So I like, the the the it's really bizarre to me. Again, like, I have an unfair advantage because essentially I just talk to dead people all day. I have one-sided conversations with history's greatest founders. Right?
Speaker 6:So, like, for, like, first four or five hours of my day, I'm usually just reading biographies and then, I usually have lunch and then in the afternoon I like reread highlights of the stuff I read over the last like, eight years while building the podcast. And one of the main lessons from all that is just like they do like, the people that usually get to the top of their profession are the best at what they do. They do what's best for them regardless of what works for other people. And so the weird thing that I have is like when I open up Twitter and people arguing about, like, you should raise from this person or you shouldn't raise at all or you should do this. It's just, you should do whatever's best whatever is best for, like, whatever mission you happen to be on.
Speaker 6:So I don't have, like, an opinion of, like, how other people should do it other than, what do you actually wanna do and then figure out what's the best way to go about doing that. And then, this is this this is my issue. Like, remember when Paul Graham released, like, the founder mode episode or essay? So many people sent it to me and and, like, asked me what I thought of it. It's just, I it just was a bizarre reading and I'm a huge fan of his essays in general, but I just think like it missed, which something that he obviously knows, which is like, it just depends on who the founder is as a person.
Speaker 6:Like, one of my favorite lines was this random book on Steve Jobs, you know, I've done like, I don't know, 10 or 12 episodes on Steve. And it said that Apple is just Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives. And I think like the the good news, like, one of the best benefits of being a founder is like, get to create your own world from scratch. You get to choose like, what you work on, who's around you, how you go about doing everything. And so I would start with, like, what do you actually wanna do in the world and then work backwards from that.
Speaker 6:So, like, I am tech I am, like, obsessed with control. So, you know, us three talk basically every day and especially about what's going on with, like, TPBN. I told you what's gonna fucking happen because it's happened to me. It's like you guys are blowing up. Your podcast is gonna get a ton of attention.
Speaker 6:All the people in your audience wanna do deals. They're investors. They're entrepreneurs. They're gonna come to you with all this crazy shit because they do the same thing. And for me, it's like I had an insane amount of investment opportunity, people offering to invest in the podcast and or already acquired it.
Speaker 6:And like, I said no to all of them because the most important thing to me is like control for long term. I believe this is my life's work. Just like Todd Graves on a chicken finger dream, I believe I was put here to do this. I think I'm the right person at the right place with the right set of skills at the right time. And, like, I was watching yesterday, I was watching my my son turned five and he's obsessed with dinosaurs.
Speaker 6:Right? And so, was like, oh, it's a good idea. Let's watch Jurassic Park. I didn't fucking realize how scary that movie is for a five
Speaker 1:year Yeah. It's so scary.
Speaker 2:I tried to do that once too. Was like, oh, Jurassic Park, dinosaurs. My son loves dinosaurs. Yeah. It's dinosaur time.
Speaker 2:And then, was like, pop the brakes. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But I had the thought because like you see the computers and like everything else and like, wait a minute, this movie came out in '93.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And like, if I wanted to do what I'm doing now, twenty years ago and you guys too, what would you do? You couldn't You'd have to go knock, you'd to go to a physical building and be like, please put me on the air.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's
Speaker 6:just so important that like we're doing this at the right time.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 6:Again, for me, it didn't matter. Like, the money was not what I'm optimizing for. It was the control and the long term control because I wanna do this until I die. Yeah. And so for me, it's like control is way more important than than money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think the question maybe you were getting at it is at a high level is, are we losing the like true generational founders because they do four back to back rounds and then they own 10% of their company and they've got a big board and they and they and and somebody comes and says, hey, you're experiencing all this like Yeah. You know, craziness. We'll just buy the company. You'll do an earn out and then you're gonna be like worth a hundred million You
Speaker 1:get the
Speaker 2:But the question that the the when when you look at, you know, the the Mark Zuckerberg example, it's somebody who maintained extreme control despite doing a bunch of venture And I feel like many founders aspired to that path over the last twenty years, fifteen years, whatever?
Speaker 4:I know
Speaker 1:a guy with eight board seats. Not I wouldn't recommend it, but it is a path to control. Yeah. That's one path.
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 6:like the the the main thing is, like, you find something you wanna do, like, again, I don't think you could pay Zoc to not work at Meta.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 6:Yeah. He's got all the money. You know, I I have just admired people that do things for a very long time. Some of these people I talked to a lot of PE people. They one of my friends has the funniest lines.
Speaker 6:I think that's just like he says VC gets all the attention, PE gets all the money. And his whole point was just like VC's so loud. Most of like, the media is obsessed with, like, fundraising and everything else. So to to a founder, looks like this is everything that's going on. I have a weird, like, vantage point in the founder ecosystem because, like, yeah, a lot of tech people listen to the podcast, but a lot of people, like, that have billion billion like, multi billion dollar family companies listen to the podcast.
Speaker 6:So, like, there's just a ton of businesses out there. Some of them raise money, some of them don't. I I don't think you're losing anything. I just think they're just it's there's a
Speaker 2:I think one of the
Speaker 6:It's you're there's like a what's the word I'm looking for? It's like, there's just a lot of noise that don't that doesn't exactly represent, like, everything that's going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The the next Todd Graves or the next, you know, James Dyson might be quietly building out there some behemoth that we're just not even hearing about because there's no VCs chattering about it.
Speaker 6:So I just I just tweeted this out where it's just like I had
Speaker 1:Midjourney's kind of like that, know? No no outside capital, people know about it, but Midjourney could become some behemoth that David Holes just downloads.
Speaker 6:If you're not raising, like, there's a reason that you have to be loud if you're constantly having to raise money, like So I I just did this tweet, was like I had dinner with one of the wealthiest people in the world and his family has commissioned two biographies. It's for the family use only,
Speaker 1:right? Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I was like, dude and he we got along. Like, we had a fucking fantastic dinner. I thought he was charismatic, smart, great storyteller. I'm gonna hang out with him again, again, in the seventies. And I was like, dude, dude, let me get those biographies.
Speaker 6:Like, I would do such a good job. He's like, absolutely not. I have no interest in educating my competitors. I've met a ton of founders like this
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Where I get to go to their company off-site. I've met, I've tore their warehouses, gone to their company, and and they're usually all family owned businesses. And I'm always like, you're so fucking talented. Why don't you write an autobiography? Why don't you write a bi do something.
Speaker 6:They're absolutely not. They're just very, very quiet because there's no reason to make noise. There's also it's also dangerous where this is something Charlie Munger said that was fascinating, where he thought it was very it was against human nature for him and Warren to be so wealthy and so loved. And his point was that most, you know, there's that greed doesn't run the world. Charlie has a great line.
Speaker 6:Says, greed doesn't run the world, envy
Speaker 1:does. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so when you're really wealthy, there's a lot of envy and so it's like she's smart to not advertise that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So it we flip it over Again, think it's just
Speaker 1:Can we flip it over to Jensen? I want to know Yeah. I mean, obviously, he's in the news. He put on the Super Bowl of artificial intelligence, made a bunch of announcements at NVIDIA GTC. And I wanted to know where do you see gaps between Jensen's archetype as a founder from maybe the other magnificent seven founders, the Steve Jobs of the world, the Zuck of the world, whoever else you've you've studied.
Speaker 1:Where are the similarities and differences?
Speaker 6:I think they're more similar to each other than they are to like Obviously, they're more similar to each other than they are to like the general population. I don't feel like I don't think there's a single founder that I've covered that is like the only one. Like, he's got a lot of interesting ideas. Like, they're all usually, you know, what would be considered like micromanagers. They're obsessed with the details.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Like, Graves' example, right? He's got 50,000 employees, 800 stores. He's opening like a hundred stores every every year. And before he does the interview, like, interrupts the interview so he can approve the Instagram reel that's going out.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 6:Same thing with Steve Jobs did the same thing where, like, there's a great book called Insanely Simple which talks about this and it didn't matter if it was like a billboard in Missouri or a full page ad in Wall Street Journal. Steve Jobs would approve every single ad before it came out and then he'd be calling up the guy that wrote this book called Insanely Simple was the guy that was actually running Steve Jobs ads And he says, Steve would call me at fucking midnight and we'd debating for an hour over a single work.
Speaker 1:So Doesn't feel like that's happening anymore at Apple. No. It's been a little messy lately.
Speaker 6:No. No. So I think Jensen's the same way. What I thought was most interesting about him, he is definitely one of the more extreme, like, is every single person I cover on Founders is hardcore and extreme. Yep.
Speaker 6:He is, you know, an he's a he's he's unusual. He's uncommon amongst uncommon people. One of my favorite things that he said was that, he likes to torture people to greatness. I thought that was, like, a a really interesting line. And his whole point was, like, you know, people kinda, like, clip through people and fire people, really fast.
Speaker 6:If he felt somebody had potential and they're fucking up, like, he's just gonna torture them into greatness. He's going to make them great. And what you realize is the longer you read this book There's a book called NVIDIA Way by Tay Kim, which is the one I did the episode on. What you realize is he does that to himself. He tortured he's tortured himself to greatness where they just had there's a great story in the book where they had won a blowout quarter, they absolutely fucking killed it, and he comes in and he tells his team.
Speaker 6:He's like, every morning I wake up, look in the mirror and I say, you suck.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 6:Anti the anti
Speaker 2:manifestation or
Speaker 1:visualization. Something odd. How do you how do you square his micromanagement with his he's stated that he doesn't have one on one meetings very often. He is a very, like, kind of scattered organization. It's an interesting thing.
Speaker 1:It's, like, kind of, like, you just dive into a specific thing. How do you think about
Speaker 6:Yeah. He's got 60 direct reports, I think, in the book. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 6:when they start writing the book, it's like 30 and I think it goes up to 60 because the book just came out. It's like, it it covers stuff up up until like the recent last few months. Yeah. He actually has a great way to to to describe this. That is most interesting.
Speaker 6:Where people are saying like, how are we going to handle all these agents when they're smarter than we are? And he's like, I'm already doing that. He goes, my 60 direct reports
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Are agents.
Speaker 1:They're all smarter at what they're
Speaker 6:in charge of than I am and yet I'm able to direct them. Yep. There's a great line. Let me see if I can find it. He has this line where he says something about the company has to be like an F1
Speaker 1:Pit crew, probably.
Speaker 6:Well, he he's describing the way, like, he organizes it and essentially, like, nobody He he designs He believes the founder or the the leader should design the company, not for, what's necessarily best, like, after they leave, but literally what's best for what they're doing now. He says, ultimately, my e staff, which is his direct ports. Ultimately, e staff is something that I have to know how to work with. The company's organization is like a race car. It has to be a machine that the CEO knows how to drive.
Speaker 6:And so if you think about it, it's like he made an f one organization that is tailor suited to him and may not be it's obviously not gonna be tailor suited to the person that takes over after him.
Speaker 2:I have a totally separate but somewhat related question. And that certain high profile investors sold a huge stake in Nvidia in 2019 that would be worth a hundred and $60,000,000,000 as of last year. That person is Masa Masayoshi Son. Haven't done an episode on Masa? Feels like
Speaker 6:No, won't. I fucking won't. So, this I I Sometimes I get sad because I feel like great thing about podcasting is like, actually know the person, like, when people meet you and you guys and me, they're like, oh, I feel like I know you. It's like, you've heard me talk for a hundred fucking hours, you do know me. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so I had so many people that listen to the podcast, like, there's this new first English biography of Masa called The Gambler. You have to do It's gonna be a great episode. I started reading it and I was like, oh, is interesting. It's kinda like nutty and then, this happened this week. This was supposed to be the next episode of Founders and no listen, rule number two in the center of family is mind your own business.
Speaker 6:So, like, I don't I I don't care what other people do for a living, I don't care how they do it, it really bother me. I wind up fucking hating this guy
Speaker 1:halfway through the month. Oh, no.
Speaker 6:Like, I I found it I found it disgusting. Like Yeah. And it's it's like so we have a bunch of mutual friends. We've spent a lot of time together. We're, like, legit friends off camera.
Speaker 6:Right? We talk all the time. I'd be very concerned if I, like, ran into people and, like, Kuhnman's a fucking liar. He's fucked me over. The entire book, the first half of the book is all these people that Masa did business with that is like, that guy lies all the time.
Speaker 6:He screwed me over. So then I then I fast forward and I read the last chapter and it's like, he's super depressed. He's like, I've wasted my life. Have an He says I have an ugly face, which is kinda weird. And he's just like And then would you realize, like, he never He was just so obsessed with He is a legit gambler and it's like a sad existence.
Speaker 6:He didn't build a product that made somebody else's life better. He didn't do any of that. And so I was like, I don't give a fuck about weight sunk cost of spending half a week. I if I'm gonna make an episode on this guy, that means I have to live inside his world for like another forty hours and I'm just not willing to do that. So I just threw the book across the side of the room.
Speaker 6:I was like, I'm not doing this.
Speaker 2:Crazy. Wow. That
Speaker 1:makes Let's I mean, I'm glad that you have a beautiful face and it's always great to have you on the show. Thanks. We'll have to have you back soon. This is fantastic.
Speaker 2:It's great seeing you in a jacket. I'll say it again. Appreciate it. Now that you set the bar, make sure hey, this summer when we're doing this live in person
Speaker 1:in Malibu. Yes. Yeah. I mean, seriously, still we still have to do the GOAT debate, the greatest entrepreneur of all time. We have a bunch of we've been debating it in chat room for a while.
Speaker 6:Let's do that in person We have to. And in tuxedos. If it's the GOAT debate, have to take it one step Bob O'Don pairing
Speaker 1:on hopefully. I would
Speaker 3:love that. That's right.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for stopping by David. This is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Always great chatting. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Bye. Love you.
Speaker 1:Bye. Love you too. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:I told David last time we talked, he ended the call. He's like, love you guys. And I'm like, if you're just tuning into the show for the first time Yeah. And you're a Senra fan and it's a it's a it's great. It's a treat.
Speaker 2:It's crazy about Masa. It makes sense. We'll have
Speaker 1:to get Dalian's take on Masa.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, I'm I'm I'm sure that
Speaker 1:I think I think David changes changes his tune if Masa comes in and says, hey. Look. We're gonna lever you up. We're gonna take find Founders Podcast. We're gonna put, 20,000,000,000 in at a hundred billion pre, and we're really gonna take this to the next level.
Speaker 1:I think David all of a sudden says, well, yeah, that's enough to live in an Oman for the rest of my life. And so he does it.
Speaker 2:No. There's no there's no price.
Speaker 1:You can't buy him out.
Speaker 2:There's no price. He he Masa could get us on his side if he took PETA into a for profit.
Speaker 1:That would be a fantastic move.
Speaker 6:I would
Speaker 2:love Anyway,
Speaker 1:I think we got Deleon in the temple of technology. Welcome to the show, Deleon. How you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 4:What's up, boys? Thanks for having me on again. Excited to catch up.
Speaker 1:Appreciate it. We're calling this, Delta v with Deli in, our little space update. We're still workshopping the name, but, we gotta come on we gotta come up with a catchy, pithy phrase for for all the regular guests. But very excited to have you Can you give us an update? Let's start with the rescued astronauts.
Speaker 1:You got community noted. Know, the the the Ax army really came out for you. How'd you process the landing? Break it down for us.
Speaker 4:You know, I already have enough vindigo that I don't need to, like, you know, overly, you know, sort of praise myself even more. But all I'm gonna say is, you know, they go up. I forget the exact timing, but, you know, June.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:I sent out this tweet that's, like, June where I was just, like, losing my mind because I was like, how is nobody talking about this? Like, these guys are, like, totally stuck up there. It's clear that, like, you know, Boeing and NASA clearly are panicking and realize that, like, they can't take these guys down on Starliner, and nobody's even begun a plan for how to bring these guys down. So I tweeted, basically, hey. Why is nobody talking about the fact that there's, two American astronauts, like, stranded in orbit?
Speaker 4:And, like, look. If there were, like, Apollo days or, like, space shuttle days and, like, you know, they were stuck up there for an extended period of time, people would a % be using, like, the word stranded. And so I was just, like, so confused to why, like, this just was getting no attention. And then I literally just felt like I was being fucking lied to, and I get community noted. It's like, oh, like, they're totally fine.
Speaker 4:They're doing some, like, final checkouts on Starliner. I'm like, has anybody, like, read the comms that NASA and Boeing are putting out? Like, this thing is clearly in, like, a very bad state. Definitely in no way they actually, like, decide to bring astronauts, you know, sort of down on it. And the word stranded had not yet been used a single time in any, like, NASA comms and anybody's, like, comms about the entire mission.
Speaker 4:Within twenty four hours of my tweet going viral, NASA put out a press release explicitly saying the astronauts are not stranded. And, like, then the word stranded became, like, totally in the lexicon around the mission. Yep. I'd like to think that it had something to do with that, you sort of viral tweet. Maybe there are other people that, you know, sort of influenced it.
Speaker 4:And then it got even, like, literally, you know, the White House's communications this past week said, you know, we brought back the stranded astronauts. So I'm gonna claim credit on stranded being the case. The entire thing to me was, you know, sort of crazy. You know? Not to give you know, there's a lot of history that we could give here.
Speaker 4:But, like, when commercial crew was originally getting started, the original plan by NASA was to only, you know, do it as a sole source award just to Boeing. SpaceX was seen as a bunch of, you know you know, cowboys, hoohaws that had no chance of actually being able to be trusted with, you know, some human astronauts on board. They actually had to delay the announcement because in, like, the final hours, they basically decided to do it as a split award where they gave Boeing by the way, it's crazy. Like, they literally just gave Boeing twice the price per seat. So it's just like Boeing, it's like, hey.
Speaker 4:The price is, like, $10 for SpaceX, and for Boeing, it's $20. And, like, we're just gonna pay them more. Why? Because. You know?
Speaker 4:It's because Boeing has a 200 person lobbying team. And so there was, like, a very near world where, like, we only had Boeing as the only option. It was only, like, in the final hour hours of that program that, like, SpaceX was, you know, sort of given an alternative. And, like, thank god. Otherwise, like, we would have been begging the Russians to bring our astronauts back.
Speaker 4:And, you know, it's a little tricky to do when you're also, like, you know, providing, you know, weapons to their, you know, enemies. So, you know, that
Speaker 2:would have like,
Speaker 4:a A
Speaker 2:lot of people, you know, would say this was poll like, political. Was it do do you think these astronauts are coming back, like, deeply radicalized? Like, are they you're you're up in space a long time. You got a lot of time to think. I don't know how the internet connection is up there.
Speaker 2:If if there if there even is one, you know, they don't have necessarily the the bandwidth to doom scroll. Were are they coming back sort of like deeply, know, are are are they gonna be, like, kept off camera? Like, you know, you guys gotta kinda stay off the mics for a while while you cool off? Or, you know, what what do you think their reaction is to the whole thing?
Speaker 4:Well, now that it's the Trump administration, I don't think that Trump will, you know, sort of limit them from the mics. But I think what's incredibly clear is SpaceX offered to bring the astronauts back sooner. And because it was in the midst of the election cycle and because Musk was campaigning for Trump, the Biden administration turned down that offer.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:There's a whole lot of fucking, you know, Jackos and Wahoos that will try and convince you otherwise. Hey. This is the preexisting ISS schedule. This is when Dragon was scheduled to go up, etcetera. So they had to stay up there.
Speaker 4:No way. If somebody had gone to Elon and said, yes. Like, according to the standard NASA budgetary process, this was supposed to fly then. But, like, one of the astronauts has, like, you know, bone density issues and is having health problems up there. We wanna bring her down, like, this week because it was planned to be, like, a three week long mission, not a nine month long mission.
Speaker 4:They a % could have done that. Mhmm. The Biden administration very much so tried to challenge those, you know, sort of facts and deny that. Dems today even have tried to deny that. Crazy is, like, typically, NASA astronauts, at least in, like, you know you know, past twenty years, have not ever really made even the slightest inklings of political statements.
Speaker 4:Butch and SUNY, like, basically confirmed these facts. Like, they basically made it clear, hey. We could have been brought back earlier, and we were, like, denied the opportunity to be brought back earlier. And if I were that, I'd be pretty pissed because, like, you know, SUNY, I believe, like, did suffer bone density issues and was not supposed to be up there, you know, sort of for, you know, for that long. And so I wouldn't be surprised if you you've already seen them push the fold on what they've been willing to say behind the mic.
Speaker 4:I wouldn't be surprised if they, like, do that even more now that they're on the ground and you're in a Trump administration.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Do you think that NASA has a talent crisis? You could imagine that Boeing is finding it difficult to compete on, you know, getting the best talent when there's SpaceX and VARTA and all these other players that are sort of competing for the the best and brightest in the world. I imagine NASA's very prestigious, but at the same time, you're going to work in this government organization and there's a bureaucracy. And, you know, if if you're 22 years old right now and your your your hero is Elon Musk, and Elon Musk is beefing on the timeline with NASA, like, where do you where are you gonna go? Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, you know, I do think they have a real challenge. They also have a bit of an identity crisis where they are turning more and more to buyers of commercial off the shelf hardware
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Versus, like, developers of it. And so what does that transition look like? But then if you only have people internally that are just buyers and don't have an engineering background, how do you know that they're buying the best stuff? At the same time, look. Like, you know, NASA also, like, flew a helicopter on fucking Mars.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's insane. Like, that's, like, a crazy capability. Nobody else would be capable of doing that. Yes.
Speaker 4:They worked with AeroVironment as, like, the contractor for that, but they had, like, such a heavy hand in that. They're now talking about, like, flying a helicopter on Mars. They did, like, the, you know, sort of six minutes of, what is it called? Like, when the Curiosity River came down, like, the six minutes of, you know, hell or whatever it
Speaker 2:is. Yeah.
Speaker 4:They're, like, you know, literally using, like, retro boosters to, like, sky crane down a, you know you know, a rover. So, like, there's a lot that NASA does that is, like requires crazy talent. But I think what they need to, you know, sort of go through I think, like, you know, Trump administration is likely aligned with this, Jared Isaacman, the likely incoming, administrator, is NASA needs to basically just focus on two core parts. One, the core of space capabilities, they just become buyers of, and they just buy things off the shelf. And then where they're developing technologies directly themselves, it should only be the really radical super far out things.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, there's just not commercial space companies that are, like, talking about, like, we're gonna build, like, off the shelf Mars helicopters. Like, that's
Speaker 2:We talked about this we talked about this last time. Like, asteroid deflection is something that NASA should work on because it's not that commercial. Right? It's like we maybe need to do it once every 50 years. Hopefully not.
Speaker 2:And then and NASA, you can be the hero.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Move on to the continuing resolution? Can you break that down for us?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it kinda relates to some of the NASA stuff too where, you know, it's been interesting to see, you know, this quarter feels like it's been the most active in, you know, sort of defense tech, aerospace investing in a long time, some of which feels rational, some of which we feel sort of crazy over top over the top. And it's interesting to have this, like, massive flow of capital, you know, from, you know, venture investors going into this field, while at the same time, the flow of capital from DC literally has been halted. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, you know, for the, you know, sort of less informed, you know, viewers, ultimately, defense tech and aerospace companies that are selling to the government. Yes. There's commercial, you know, sort of use cases for these technologies. Those aren't related to government budgets.
Speaker 4:But are ultimately, you know, a lot of these reliant on government budgets. You know, about 10 ago, the, house and senate agreed upon a year long continuing resolution. And so what that basically means is, both the house and the senate had previously passed budgetary bills that increased, basically, defense spending, had various NASA spending, etcetera, couldn't come to an alignment on that, couldn't come to an alignment with the president. And so the ultimate, you know, sort of call by all parties was we're actually just gonna freeze to whatever fiscal year twenty four levels, you know, basically are. Now in that CR, they did give the DOD, hey.
Speaker 4:We know that you guys are thinking about, like, you know, sort of reprogramming. And so as you're shifting budgets around, make sure that it reflects whatever, like, you know, house appropriators, you know, and, know, senate appropriators basically had in those budgets that they basically put out, you know, sort of February. But in the grand scheme of things, this mostly means a freezing of new ads, any new programs. And as you can imagine, who's the biggest, you know, sort of beneficiary of that? Well, incumbents have their programs continuing to be funded.
Speaker 4:Right? And so the, you know, Lockheed's, Raytheon's, etcetera, Northrop's, you know, might not be experiencing as much growth as usual, but, you know, they're, you know, they're generally, you know, continuing to be funded, versus all of the net new entrants while are experiencing massive inflows of venture capital dollars have literally been told by the US government, like, expect zero starts. And so it's just a little odd to me that that's not a thing that is being talked about by all these people that are talking about, like, the Gundot dynamism, this, that. It's like
Speaker 2:Well, who talks the most on x? It's it's founders and investors and neither have an incentive to really say like, hey, by the way, none of us are making anything back anytime soon.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I don't know. It's like a paranoid founder. I like to talk about this stuff because Yeah. You know, want to make sure that like the thing that I'm working on, you know, survives for a very long time and is, like, sustainable.
Speaker 4:But, like, to be clear, what this means practically is, like, you know, basically, this year's budget, you know, was basically end September 31, is completely frozen. Now what's being, you know, begun to be worked on is, like, the fiscal year, you know, so 26 vehicle. That's gonna, you know, first have to come from, like, you know, sort of the president, you know, putting forth, you know, sort of a plan that you'd expect to make it over to, you know, sort of the house and senate in, like, roughly the May period. That means it's gonna make it onto the floor from, like, you know, of June, July. Hopefully, it gets passed by, like, September, October.
Speaker 4:Realistically, though, we basically have not hit that September 31 deadline for the past. I don't even know what it is, like, ten plus years. And so that continuing resolution is probably going to extend for at least another thirty, potentially sixty days. So, you know, potentially until the end of the year, means that, like, new budget actually doesn't start until, you know, basically January of next year. And so all these companies that are raising all this capital for all these things that they would like to start, yes, there's gonna be reprogramming.
Speaker 4:Yes. Like, the president is, you know, doing shipbuilding and CIA, etcetera. But, like, a lot of this stuff is very much so frozen. And, know, what people don't realize is, let's say, you know, you have, you know, sort of CAA or CCA. Sorry.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And, you know, sort of shipbuilding. Those five year plans that the DOD put together where they were like, look. In order to do the early r and d in 2024, we need a hundred million. In '25, we need 200,000,000.
Speaker 4:In '26, we need 300,000,000. Well, because we're now frozen at 24 levels, that means it's only a 24 and a 25. So now when you're looking at '26, it's like, are you making up for the fact that '25, you know, sort of was, you know, low and you're trying to, like, scale all the way to 26? You're, like, in a real budgetary hole. So, like, new programs are also in a way worse state because it's typically the new programs that are the ones that grow that are growing.
Speaker 4:And so if it's flat, you're both trying to figure out, do you make up for last year and how do you keep up with, like, what the program needs, or are you, like, really pushing out milestones? But if you're pushing out milestones, now is it relevant to to Taiwan if people are thinking about that needing to be ready in 2027, '20 '20 '8? And so does that now make the DOD just wanna keep shifting budget to incumbent programs that can deliver by 2728 even if they're not as capable? Right? So there's just, a lot of things where it's just like you know, I'm a you know?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Obviously, mega bull on, like, the team at Androle because, like, they have the, like, bench, the capability, the, you know, set of different product suite, different programs going. Like, they will navigate this. But, like, I don't know if there's gonna be, like, five and rolls. And I think VCs are investing like there's going to be, you know, sort of five and rolls right now.
Speaker 4:But without even understanding, like, the basics of, like, the budgetary, you know, sort of process on the hill, they're just, you know, sort of slinging checks, you know, based off of, you know, the, you know, ZIP code of where somebody's office is.
Speaker 2:If you're a if you're a yeah. Yeah. If if you're a an American dynamism defense tech investor, are you looking at, you know, are are you seeing more pitches in Europe right now? If the anderol of anderol is anderol here in The US, but then European Europe is like remilitarizing at least Western Europe, you know, are you seeing pitches come in? Would people just kind of divert dollars over there because there's potentially a lot more willingness to spend?
Speaker 4:I think you're starting to see that happen. Obviously, both the Overton window has changed there, that, like, know, sort of budget, you know, sort of growth there is is insane. And if you think that, like, US incumbents are, like, stodgy, old school, etcetera, EU incumbents are, like, you know, sort of that, you know, jacked up to the nines. And so I do think there's a real opportunity there. There aren't a ton of, like, super competent players.
Speaker 4:And so, you know, I wouldn't say that, like, the quality of what we get, you know, sort of inbound, at least at Founders Fund, is, you know, something, you know, super high in Europe. The thing that I will say, though, is at least the biggest check that I've ever, you know, sort of led is, like, a net new, you know, portfolio company investment. So not just, follow ons. Obviously, we, like, we we've deployed mega checks in a ramp, but that was after doing seed in series a. But we're investing about $36,000,000 into basically a European aerospace defense, you know, sort of type player, and that's our first check into the company.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Now part of it is that the company was already performing very well irrespective of the EU tailwinds. And then now with reindustrialization, etcetera, we're, like, even more bullish, you know, sort of on the, you know, company. But we're also getting to do it at a price that is, like, highly differentiated relative to, the, you know, 94129, you know, sort of, oh, sorry. Shoot.
Speaker 4:That's the SF Units or ZIP code.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:056 or ZIP code. Yeah.
Speaker 1:With all this turmoil at the DOD and with the budget and the continuing resolution, is it more important than ever that these companies figure out commercial applications? We talked to a company, Albedo. They're a satellite company yesterday. It seemed like even if the government doesn't wanna buy the ISR capabilities, there are hedge funds and oil and gas providers that want, you know, high resolution images from VLEO. And so is that something that you I mean, you've thought about this at Varda with pharma and DOD contracts.
Speaker 1:How do you think about that, and is that more important going forward?
Speaker 4:Yeah. But I think it's, like, one of these things that's, like, very, you know, sort of hard to pivot to depending on how you've set up your business. Right? So, you know, to take a business and say like Cyronic. I'm not sure there's that many commercial use cases for, you know, sort of small scale autonomous surface vessels.
Speaker 4:Or take a company, you know, like Apex that is, you know, mostly selling, you know, sort of commercial satellites. Now some of them are to, like, know, various defense groups, but they also have a bunch of commercial sales. Right? So I think it's one of these things that it it's really hard to, like, pivot from one approach to the other. Maybe somebody like Palantir has clearly shown it where they were super duty focused for a long time and now have a massive commercial business, but that felt like it happened at, like, the very, very late stages of the company.
Speaker 4:I think your ability to, like, pivot from, you know, either being dually used from the get go or being defensive from the get go, you kind of have to choose one. And we've obviously chosen the, like, you know, sort of dual use from the get go. Does that give us some cons when it comes to, like, defense programs? Yeah. Because, like, we're not as willing to, like, change around our architecture to totally match defense needs.
Speaker 4:But the pros is also in a continuing resolution year. I also have a lot of commercial work that I can continue to go pursue. There's pros and cons, I think, to, you know, sort of both with approaches.
Speaker 1:But the DOD But I don't
Speaker 4:think you're gonna see that much shifting. It's just too hard to shift.
Speaker 1:Well, if the DOD isn't buying kamikaze drones, I'm happy to buy them personally for my next hunting trip. Give me the c four. Let's lift the ITAR control rules. Get me the suicide drone. I wanna go hunting for some big
Speaker 2:Wild boars.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Delian, for coming on. Do you have a last question? Oh, last We got Jake coming.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we got another guest coming on, but quick question. Do you think that the deal without commenting on real rippling a deal, do you think that was a wake up call for the defense industry around, hey, If this is happening in HR tech, like, we gotta take everything way more seriously. Right? Because obviously, you know, people probably anybody that would be competing with VARTA knows who else is, like, bidding on the contract.
Speaker 2:It's, like, common knowledge. It's not the same type of information advantage. But if people are willing to like break the law to steal customer data, CRM data for HR tech, you know, it it to me should just be this massive wake up call around. If you're doing anything that's critical to national security, you need to take your your your own security at your company 10 times more seriously.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at the, you know, sort of SpaceX, the Andros, the Vardas, the Hadrian, etcetera, on down, the per capita number of, like, IT security people you basically need on staff because you're just, like, ITAR compliance, etcetera, means these companies are thinking about it all the time. Now at the same time, are there, like, Chinese spies and, you know, foreign spies sniffing around all these? Almost certainly. Are there other corporate spies sniffing around this all the time?
Speaker 4:Absolutely. But I do think you see this stuff a bit less in terms of, you know, actually having these, like, you know, sort of totally negative effects. Partially because, like, know, with Rippling and Deals, like, there, it's like, okay. Let's pull, like, which software features, etcetera. When it comes to something like Varda, man, it's like, what would you even pull from our servers to figure out how to do what we do?
Speaker 4:It's like, you could get this CAD file, this thing, but it's like, you need the supply chain. You need to cut the metal. You gotta integrate it. You gotta know how to test it, etcetera. It's like, even if you gave me access to our full server base, you gave me a team of, like, 30 engineers.
Speaker 4:You tell me go replicate Varda, it would still be, like, a really hard problem. Like, if you look at the, you know, sort of Chinese rockets, they look a hell of a lot like the Falcon nines, and they're still not landing. Right? And so, you know Yeah. I think it's clear that, like, the Chinese definitely ripped a lot of stuff from SpaceX at some point or another.
Speaker 4:It's really hard to, you know, sort of prevent that from happening. You know, so I can't blame, you know, anybody for having that happen to their company. But, also, the Chinese still aren't landing rockets. Now their solution has just been let's build as many rockets as possible and screw it. You know, rather than purposely landing them on barges, just gonna ditch them over Chinese villages and like, you know, dump propellant on like our, you know, support villagers, but like, whatever.
Speaker 4:We're gonna set up, you know, the first Chinese lunar base before the Americans because like, we're just willing to murder citizens nonstop on the way to a goal. And, you know, unfortunately for America, you know, we don't, you know, murder our citizens. Only murder our presidents.
Speaker 1:Oh. Woah. JFK files. Good deep cut. I love it.
Speaker 2:At we didn't at least we didn't land on the dolphins yesterday.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's good. The dolphins seemed like they were good. Let's end on a high note.
Speaker 4:Look, maybe the dolphins work for Masada though. That's all I'll say.
Speaker 1:Maybe. You never know. As soon as we get off the dolphin text,
Speaker 2:there's some crazy
Speaker 1:What happened on the ISS? No. There's some
Speaker 2:crazy NASA lore around dolphins. Don't Google it.
Speaker 1:Don't Google it. But Okay. Well, thank you, Deli. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great one.
Speaker 2:Always a good time.
Speaker 1:I think we got Jake Adler coming in the temple of technology in just a few minutes. He is building military medicine, biotech for the next generation soldier.
Speaker 2:Very true. And we gotta see if there's some dual use application for that because we podcast pretty hard Yep. Harder than anyone else we know.
Speaker 1:We're still going live. So let's talk to Jake about it. I believe he's here. Welcome. Come on down.
Speaker 1:Oh, the big Celsius.
Speaker 3:I got the
Speaker 1:small Celsius mug. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers, Jake. How are you doing?
Speaker 5:I'm good. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:Doing fantastic. Can you give us the update? What what did you announce? What are you doing? What are you building?
Speaker 1:What's behind you?
Speaker 5:Oh, so behind me is our lab. This is the PSL 2, so biosafety Level 2 facility. So it's a biosafety cabinet.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So we're handling any, like, pathogens, like any anthrax or botulinum. We're gonna be doing it in there Cool. Just for for protection of the operator. But but yeah. So, you know, we just announced a 3 and a quarter million dollar round
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Led by Peter Thiel, Kantos, and Refactor Capital to transform really the battlefield with advanced biotechnology. And really, if we consider like the state of affairs today, you know, military medicine hasn't really changed much since Vietnam. You know, we've seen a little bit of improvement in tactical combat casualty care, but we very much still have war fighters who are going on the front lines and and die in combat. So, you know, what we're trying to build here is is really advanced and novel biotechnology that we can really equip war fighters with to make them more, you know, more lethal, more resilient, and more ready in combat environments. So initially, applications of that look like, you know, a nano composite for rapid wound healing
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Along with something we're exploring with more intelligence partners, which is a novel, like, biosurveillance, network that would effectively be able to monitor, for for biological and, chemical threats.
Speaker 1:I remember reading about QuickClot back in the day. Yeah. Can you talk to me about the evolution in just wound healing on the battlefield, kind of the different eras and where you see it going with your company?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So so Quicklaw is a really, really interesting example. It was started by a guy named Frank Hersey, and and they basically, you know, this guy would cut himself when he was shaving. And he realized that this mineral called zeolite, he would pour it on his skin, and it would stop the bleeding. Yeah.
Speaker 5:The challenge with Quick Claw, at least its initial formulation, was that it used to burn warfighters. So it actually would cause, like, second or third degree burns. So it would it would effectively stop the hemorrhage, but it would it would also burn them in the process of doing that. I mean, and they've now transitioned the technology. But but, really, the the issue with the traditional Quick Claw idea and the concept is that it's it might have supported warfare in in in in a more traditional context where we can medevac that troop.
Speaker 5:But military is heading towards like, the military doctrine is heading towards this environment where, you know, troops are gonna be deployed in combat for an extended period of time and military medics. We won't we won't even be able to retract them for maybe upwards of two weeks. Mhmm. So, you know, the the almost in many ways, the the definition of what a casualty is is changing. It's not somebody who's just been shot and is completely, you know, completely gone.
Speaker 5:It's now somebody who can't even pull the trigger. So what we're trying to explore with Kingsfoil is is moving beyond just that initial hemorrhage control and that hemostatic agent and building a product that would actually enable the warfighter to heal faster, so reducing that convalescent period and having them return to duty sooner.
Speaker 2:Talk as much as you can about sort of broad, I would I would call it almost like drug use in the military. I've heard stories of fighter pilots. You know, the the funny thing is from what I know when f 35 pilots are deploying to The Middle East, they sort of like take off in The US and fly And you can imagine it's a pretty long flight. Anybody that's been on, you know, sixteen hour flight to The Middle East fundraising. It's usually wanna fall asleep at some point.
Speaker 2:You know, Adderall and some of these sort
Speaker 1:of like Midafinil.
Speaker 2:Midafinil, those types of drugs are obvious. World War two has some crazy examples. Would love to hear the history of like kind of drug use in the military, super abbreviated everything from like stimulants to stuff more like quick clot.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So, you know, the the the medications you you guys mentioned are typically categorized as no and no go. So your your your stimulants, and then you have, like, your z pills or your benzodiazepines to help with drowsiness. And and look. It's it's really interesting.
Speaker 5:The the military is is relatively constrained for for what they can actually provide to warfighters. I've heard some crazy stories. I I think I heard the story about an Air Force pilot who yeah. He he basically took a bunch of benzos. He was, like, unable to fall unable to fall asleep, so he started taking more and ended up, like, trying to, like, go use the bathroom and started, like, completely pissing himself.
Speaker 5:So they don't have, like, a lot of, control over and and and they they don't really, I I would say they they don't really advise, how to use them so well, but modafinil is definitely a big one for vigilance and awareness. Obviously, your benzodiazepine class is is pretty big as well, although the military is trying to move away from those. So so there's quite a a broad history here. But but, really, I I think I don't think pharmacological is necessarily the right or immediate approach. I I think in many ways, we should be targeting the the more of the root causes.
Speaker 5:So for example, one of the early technologies we were exploring was a device called NuSleep, which is a closed loop brain computer interface that would effectively shock you to sleep. And and this has been a really big point of interest for the military is can we build neuromodulation or brain stimulation devices that can control sleep architecture and make it so when warfighters sleep three hours, they really feel like they're they're sleeping five hours. Right? So we're trying to find alternatives that are are not addictive or habit forming, and and don't really carry that their their secondary or or next day effects that many benzodiazepines would.
Speaker 2:Talk about Yeah. Talk about sort of like dual use applications of sort of stuff on your roadmap, right? I imagine there's some things that you're developing that are gonna be so powerful that eventually we'll wanna get Consumers will be like, hey,
Speaker 3:we want some of that
Speaker 2:too, right? And there's a long history of the sort of military.
Speaker 1:Aren't you a consumer of this stuff? I see pictures of you testing yourselves.
Speaker 5:So you what whenever we're whenever we're thinking about a new initiative, my my brain immediately goes to the dual use implication. And that's sort of one of the beautiful things we get to do at this intersection of biotech and defense. You know, a lot of the companies today that are getting funded are building, like, cruise missiles, and you can't really sell that to to the consumer or civilian population. Right?
Speaker 2:So John wants John wants some
Speaker 1:I I really do big game hunting, and I I wanna take it to the next level, move past the sniper rifles and the long guns and go into the kamikaze drones and the cruise missiles. That's my goal for this year.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, I
Speaker 1:But but but I take your point. Yeah. So continue. Sorry.
Speaker 5:But but yeah. So, you know, we're
Speaker 1:we're
Speaker 5:consistently thinking about that dual use implication. And and, really, in in many ways, see that DOD and and our work with with federal partners as a launch pad. Right? We kinda get to offload a lot of this initial experimental and financial risk kinda deployed into this first customer market and and be able to eventually, you know, leverage that market for for really extreme validation in in the most austere conditions and then bring it back to the civilian market. So practically everything we're building has a dual use implication.
Speaker 5:Yep. And I think another interesting implication as well is that, you know, a lot of a lot of technology we're building is potentially maybe too early for the civilian market. So we kind of get that initial footing with a partner who can actually help us build out the technology, you know, provide us with the necessary revenue to grow as a company and and really, you know, grow as an organization and grow out our product portfolio and eventually bring it back to the market when it's the right time for civilians.
Speaker 1:How do you we were just talking to Deleon about kind of the continuing resolution and the fact that the DOD isn't adding a lot of new programs. You're obviously still in the early stages here, kind of seed round level. Are you thinking about, hey. Let's just go heads down for a couple years, r and d, and then sprint towards program of record, or are you are you seeing there's there's pockets of money that you can be responsive to and little programs that you can build up very quickly?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So we're pretty aggressive with our approach. You know, one of the the last conferences we we went to to present our technology, we we got, like, removed by armed security and present to the PMs on on garbage bins outside the conference center. So we're we're definitely in in the mode of of of trying to get our technology in the warfighters' hands.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Sort of the the chasm we're trying to cross here is that if you look at the state of things today, you know, academia rules military medicine, and they do a horrible, like, totally shitty job of of taking technology from the benchtop to the battlefield. So the way we've been approaching things is thinking, like, how can I build something in four months that we can then present to a federal partner, get it in the hands of the warfighter, and deploy this rapidly? So QuickClot, which is an example you brought up, got cleared in nine months with no human trials. Right? So so there's kind of this really interesting opportunity for us to leverage the the DOD and FDA memorandums, which enable expedited approval and clearance.
Speaker 5:And notably, like, big companies right now with big startups like Neuralink and Synchron, like these big brain computer interface companies, you know, which have breakthrough designation, which was, you know, prized as, the the fastest, most expedited pathway in the FDA. If you work with the DOD, you can move faster. Right? So this this this really interesting opportunity for us to build technology and actually get it in the hands of the warfighter and and make sure that the troops we're putting in the most austere conditions aren't just surviving, but they're thriving. Right?
Speaker 5:It's really hard to to ask a 20 year old to go into combat without the tools that they need to survive.
Speaker 2:I'm curious how much of what you're developing is based on, you know, sort of studies that have existed for a long time that just nobody cared about, right? Like I imagine, I imagine there you can, there's just this treasure trove of like information and research that people just never acted on. And now that you're, you sort of this high agency, you you you have this, like, kind of core thesis for the company, I imagine there's a lot of basically, like, off balance sheet r and d work that you can just kind of absorb and and sort of run with.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So the the first thing I mentioned, I I, you know, I think I think Palmer actually said this, which is that, you know, he he doesn't he hasn't really invented anything new because a lot of these concepts are already in sci fi. And, you growing up being a big sci fi reader, you know, a lot of the ideas I have are coming directly out of science fiction. So, you know, rapid wound healing, you know, artificial and synthetic blood, biosurveillance and biodefense. So a lot of these are are are deeply tied to to to fiction because of the the the limited constraints on the reality.
Speaker 5:But in terms of existing literature, you know, we we really do stand on this on the shoulders of giants. I think my primary skill set has been how do I take really compelling literature from this one field that has no real practical application and combine it with something else, right, and kind of find these really interesting points of convergence between different ideas and turn that into a practical product. Right? So in in many ways, we're we're we're we do a really good job at taking, you know, this cutting edge research and perfecting it. And I owe a lot to academia for that.
Speaker 5:And that's really, in my view, with the role academia should be serving. Right? Academia should be that that foundational doing that that breakthrough science without very much thinking about the translational ability. But then you do need that partner to cross that bridge and actually build technology that can translate and get in the hands of the warfighter, and that's what we're trying to do at Pilgrim.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. The biological weapons convention in 1972 said the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological and toxins are effectively prohibited. So bioweapons are are illegal, that doesn't mean they're not gonna be used, right? Do you think the DOD if I'm a if I'm a soldier being deployed to some, you know, far off land to fight some enemy that I don't know what their sort of ethics are. I don't know if they're gonna follow the sort of like laws, right, against these things.
Speaker 2:Maybe they get super desperate. Do you think that the DOD generally takes these sort of threats seriously enough? And I imagine, you know, a lot of the stuff you're thinking about is reactionary to, you know, a certain situation on the battlefield. How do you make sure that you're keeping our war fighters safe in a sort of unpredictable environment?
Speaker 5:Totally. So first off, you know, the the DOD has a a very kinetic frame of reference. So when when they're thinking about things and threats, they're thinking about big, shiny explosions. I always joke with our team that I wish there was more explosions in bio, but there there just really isn't. I can't just do, like, an off drill demo an Altius or or Fury just, like, crashing into something.
Speaker 5:It it just doesn't really work that way. So so to your point, the DOD's response has been largely reactive. You know, you you look at COVID nineteen spread across the globe in nine months, killed, one point two million Americans and wiped out sixteen trillion in in our GDP. It also took took off, like, for for ten weeks. We had an operational gap in The Pacific due to the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
Speaker 5:So it's very reactionary. So so, you know, in terms of the the biological weapons convention, we we should not be at the mercy and trust of other states. The US has a somewhat of a grandstanding policy around this, which is that we will not build bioweapons, and the best offense is really stronger defense. The problem is that we have no defense. You know?
Speaker 5:So so we're we're kind of in this in this really precarious position right now where we are very vulnerable, to to a biological weapon attack. And and we've seen that we've seen that, with COVID. We saw that very briefly with h five n one, but that didn't really have a much spillover risk. So even if it if it's man made or or or natural, it's it's still a threat. So, you know, the the reality is that, you know, most of our foreign adversaries are are building out these laboratories.
Speaker 5:They're building out these weapons. You know, in many ways, these systems are tend to be referred to as, like, poor man nukes, because they're they're a lot cheaper and and also don't really respect order, so they can proliferate a lot faster and don't really require that direct confrontation. So it it really underscores a frightening reality where where these these weapons can be used in in really novel ways, to really really take down and and break down the resilience of our military and also the critical infrastructure around The US. So even with the even with the biological weapons prevention, there still is, an outlasting and and really, real threat that's impeding, with, with these systems.
Speaker 1:How do you think about the, the legacy of Theranos? I'm sure if you're successful, people are gonna be like, oh, this this dropout, you know, raising all this money, building this stuff. It's it's tough in bio because, obviously, there's so many real drugs that make it to market and quietly make billions or trillions of dollars. Novo Nordisk is bigger than the entire GDV of Denmark. But at the same time, it's harder for someone just to, like, download the app and verify that it's a real thing like they can with a cursor, for example.
Speaker 1:What what's your take on the legacy of Theranos?
Speaker 5:So Theranos is obviously a a very concerning it it was a very concerning situation. You know, Elizabeth Holmes had had had basically this this ability to to keep the FDA out and and and prevent them, you know, proper inspectors from from coming in and and checking out their work. And this is actually something I'm seeing again with noninvasive neuromodulation today. A lot of the companies in this space are building brain computer interfaces and trying to circumvent the Food and Drug Administration by trying to fall into this general wellness category. Seen, like, dozens of companies do this.
Speaker 5:And right now, like, they're gonna be fine. Right? Like, they they'll they'll get away with it for the time being, but if they hit a billion dollar vow, you know, they're gonna get a horrible enforcement action. Like, you know, at that point, it's it's it's fraud. Right?
Speaker 5:So you can even be seeing jail time, and you can be seeing massive fines. So it isn't like this this cycle has gone away since there, it's still very prominent. One thing that we do at Pilgrim, which is something I've been very adamant about since day one, is that we do that preliminary validation. So if we don't see the results on our benchtop, we don't even bring it to the US government. And and the belief there is that we're trying to not only save taxpayer dollars, but also save our time.
Speaker 5:Like, I don't have any interest in working on tech that doesn't work. So I wanna see it work for myself. And, clearly, I you know, if if if it wasn't clear with the demo I did on myself, I have a pretty high conviction to get to results. Right? So on limited time, I had to cut holes in my legs on camera to demonstrate the the rapid healing, abilities of of one of our composites.
Speaker 5:So, you know, that that's sort of the approach we've taken. But but in terms of Theranos' legacy, it obviously has scarred the biotech industry. I'm pretty bearish on biotech as a whole, which is a pretty hard thing to say being in the industry itself. But I just don't think many companies here are actually thinking about the practical and commercial implications of their work. Many people come in, they'll raise a couple million and buy, like, hundreds of thousand dollars worth of equipment and and, you know, run with that idea, but not actually think about how they're gonna make it to the market.
Speaker 5:And I think that's a really concerning reality when we're thinking about startups, even on that that ten to fifteen year timeline.
Speaker 2:Have you had any luck finding the you have a roll up here called Pathfinder. It says, as a Pathfinder, you're the stormtrooper who stares down critical near impossible challenges. You'll take on miss missions that break lesser souls, problems with no playbook, trekking into combat zones to deliver our tech, restoring a nineties scanning electron microscope without a manual, crashing a DARPA event with a fake badge to snag itself on top brass, tasks so wild they'll call you insane. Has it been challenging to find the right person for that?
Speaker 5:That's barely no. We've gotten a lot of really compelling submissions for that. One one thing one thing I was I was very smart smart to do ahead of the the announcement of the company was put, like, the the question as part of the job post. So we've gotten some really interesting information out of people. So when people are instead of just, like, submitting a bullshit application, they actually have to spend the time and write something compelling.
Speaker 5:But but we we found some really cool people. Like I said, our our approach is is very much based in in guerilla warfare. Right? So so we do what it really takes to to get the meetings that we need to get. And and thus far, you know, it's it's worked very well in our favor.
Speaker 5:I I think in many ways, we're we're kind of battling a lot of entrenched interests. I I somewhat compare, you know, with with limited limited perspective on on precisely what what it looked like, but I somewhat compare our experience to o five pound here, you know, going up against the government, going up against these primes, and and really trying to to make a name positioning ourselves in our company. So the Pathfinder role is is one that I was really excited by. It really even, like, fired me up writing it. And I we really wanted a a stormtrooper who could go on the front lines.
Speaker 5:I could put them into combat environments, and and they would just kill it. You know, if we need to get a meeting with SecDef, if we need them to break into a DARPA conference, if they need to go, you know, beyond enemy lines, whatever it may be, we just needed somebody who who would basically take the task, you know, and and sign off and and get it done.
Speaker 2:Needed an absolute dog. Well, I I want one more question. One more question, then I'll I'll cap it
Speaker 3:off.
Speaker 1:Okay. Cool. You talked about, brain computer interfaces. We've talked about this in the past. You know the industry very well.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you saw this, but a couple weeks ago, someone burned something close to, like, a couple million dollars of Ethereum to encode a message in the blockchain that alleged that China had developed brain computer interface technology that was being used to control workers like ants, and it was very scary sounding sci fi. If it's happening, it's terrifying. Why would someone spend so much money? Is this a some sort of false flag just try and freak out the Americans by spending this money? Is it even possible?
Speaker 1:Do you what's your timeline for that type of thing? The the ender's game of BCI, you know, controlling all the all the soldiers on the battlefield. Give us the most sci fi take you have.
Speaker 5:So notably, first of address the the China thing. China is is beating out The US in patents around neural interfaces. They've been doing that, I think, for a few years now. So they they've really taken the lead. China also thrives on this belief of military civil fusion.
Speaker 5:So, basically, any any civilian corporation has basically has a direct in line to the government for military applications. So, you know, it's it's realistic in in many ways that that China is is gonna get there. And and also, like I mentioned before, The US maintains a somewhat of a grandstanding approach to bio. So, you know, we we've been pretty anti modification or genetic enhancement of our warfighters, for for for for good reasons. But but notably, that's gonna inhibit our timeline to get to potentially the same outcomes that China might eventually move towards.
Speaker 5:So in in terms of neural interfaces that can control warfighters, it's something I I've looked into and something that that I've explored. And and there's a interest a couple interesting modalities that are are still semi or or noninvasive. The the biggest challenge with neural interfaces is spatial and temporal resolution. So most of the the solutions today that rely on, like, EEG, you have really high temporal resolution. So you see the signal really, really quickly, but you're basically looking at as a a like, a a a bowl of soup.
Speaker 5:You know? It could be with millions of different things mixed in. You don't know precisely where that signal is coming from. And we've been leveraging AI. Like, there's just been researchers who've been using AI to, like, isolate it a little bit more, noninvasive modalities are still pretty unclear.
Speaker 5:But in terms of a timeline or or really approach to build technology that would, you know, be able to control the warfighter, it's it's a lot sooner than than you would imagine.
Speaker 1:It's terrifying.
Speaker 2:Terrifying. Amazing.
Speaker 1:Thanks for
Speaker 2:a break in the I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. Last thing I just wanna leave you with, if you're working on anything that would help us do this show twenty four hours a day for for weeks in
Speaker 1:a row. You could just eliminate sleep entirely,
Speaker 2:that'd great. Just get it over here.
Speaker 1:We have Celsius, but we're looking for something stronger. Make it happen, Jake.
Speaker 2:We appreciate you dogfooding your product. We'll step up. We're confident. Can test the craziest stuff
Speaker 1:pre FDA. We we'll we'll get ITAR compliant. We'll get regulated as a DOD effort if we if you need to test stuff on to assess stuff on us.
Speaker 2:Thank you for doing what you do. It's great having you on.
Speaker 1:Jake. Thanks for stopping by. We'll talk to you What
Speaker 2:an absolute dog.
Speaker 1:Wild. Should we move on to the timeline? Close it out?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have a post here
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Breaking news.
Speaker 2:That's breaking news.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 2:This was sent right when we started going live. This is from Barrett Ames. He says, yo at TBPN. Ramp just sent us cookies. Talk about customer service.
Speaker 2:I reached out to them because of you also keep chilling. It's working.
Speaker 1:Thank you. It's here.
Speaker 2:And so we love to we love to see it. Nice work. Barrett. Nice work. Ramp on sending these look like some fantastic cookies.
Speaker 1:Ramp, when
Speaker 2:you hear this, we like cookies Yeah.
Speaker 1:Send us some cookies. Make sure Jommal has no carbs and it's all protein. It's actually made out of filet mignon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Well said.
Speaker 1:Anyway, should we move on to Will Menidas?
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Obscure hobbyist of the year, if you're following our award show last year. He said, the end result of vibe coding, a hundred million dollars in thirty days, and all this software prosperity gospel junk isn't hundreds of venture scale AI companies. It's just junk food. It's a return to artisanal software. Software that fits right in the hand, distribution passed down over generations.
Speaker 1:Amazing. A wordsmith. What a wordsmith.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Will's one of those people, again, right? He's he's sort of in that rune category of he he should be writing great, you know, novels
Speaker 1:and But
Speaker 2:instead he's
Speaker 1:just He's posting bangers.
Speaker 2:You know, bangers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I've been seeing that there's this whole trend of the Levels. I just vibe coded a flight simulator. And now a lot of developers are realizing that they can take work that they've already done and spent a lot of time on and been like, I just vibe coded this in the day. And so I saw someone post a website that they designed and it was like a beautiful website that was so pixel perfect and like you'd scroll down and you'd go on this crazy Three.
Speaker 1:Js thing and it was like so complicated and everyone in the comments was just you didn't vibe code this. There's no way. Like, show us the prompts or it's not I love that. I gotta hide the secret sauce. Like, my prompt is so good.
Speaker 1:I, know, I was able to build this thing.
Speaker 2:Jeremy's Jeremy's comment on that, I long to pay $59.99 for a one time download of a download of a handcrafted German to do app.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I'm I'm totally on that.
Speaker 2:I I I could see a return to the one time purchase model. Like, everything comes in cycles.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yep. I'd like that. Well, should we should we move on to a ramp employee, Jeff Charles?
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is a great post. He's has a screenshot of Gemini's make a presentation that summarizes these trends highlighting key statistics and takeaways. I'm still learning how to create multiple slides at once. Can you describe one slide you want me to create?
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Create one slide with main takeaways and then
Speaker 2:it's I'm still learning how to create multiple oh, I'm sorry. I can't help with creating slides yet, but I'm still learning. Gemini. Oh.
Speaker 1:Come on. You have pay for this. You have to pay
Speaker 2:for Yeah. Charge for this product.
Speaker 1:Oh, This is like $20 a month. And then it just annoys you in every app you're in. Like, hey, wanted to use Gemini? And then it doesn't
Speaker 2:Clippy would never do this to you. No. It would never make it sound like it could do something Exactly.
Speaker 1:Clippy was just there with like fun little positive messages. Like, hey, I'll help you out. Here, have you heard of control v, control c? We got it all here in Microsoft Word 95. Anyway, should we move on to Joe Wisenthal?
Speaker 1:Oh, the post was deleted. Anyway, he was just giving a shout out to bros. He says they love using bros as an epithet. That's sad. I only have warm feelings toward my bros.
Speaker 1:And this is because, there is a new phrase on the timeline, the abundance bros. This is popularized by Ezra Klein saying that we need to focus on a on a on a a basically, a democratic platform around abundance and building a pro builder political party. And and a lot of people are trying to take them down, Calling them abundance bros. Bernie bros was the same thing. Whenever someone wants to take down something, it's just SaaS bros, tech bros, business bros, finance bros, they throw bros around.
Speaker 2:I saw another post from, that was relevant to this, from someone named Grace Freud. She says, hi. I'm Ezra Klein. I've spent the past two weeks or so thinking about how to fix the world and I think I have the answer. What if things were good?
Speaker 2:I love it. But no, I'm pro abundance. I mean, I It's easy to rally around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We mean, we don't really talk about politics here, but like Ezra Klein is is on the vanguard of a significant shift politically Yeah. Where if you listen if you read his book or you listen to his his YouTube video breaking it down, it sounds very, very different from anything we've heard from his camp over the last few years. So I don't know. Check it out if you're into politics, but there's other podcasts for that.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Certainly are. Unsubscribe from us if you to listen from Patio eleven a k a Patrick McKenzie. He says, so Atlantic came out with this new article that said there are two kinds of credit cards. Yet another way the poor are subsidizing the rich. The credit card market is quietly transformed into two credit card markets.
Speaker 2:One offering generous benefits to wealthy Americans and the other offering expensive debt to the poor with the latter subsidizing the former. And so this is sorry, he's
Speaker 1:Patrick He's
Speaker 2:on credit cards. Yeah. So Patrick says, the thesis is that interchange fees redistribute money from poor to rich. I do not subscribe to this thesis. So he's obviously
Speaker 1:Put him in the truth zone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You gotta put this one in the truth zone. I mean, credit cards take fees from payment processors when they swipe a card
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Because they're taking on some amount of risk related to that transaction. And
Speaker 1:I would love to hear his
Speaker 2:The credit card companies pass some of that back
Speaker 1:to The people that pay them off.
Speaker 2:People that pay them off. And if you really want the best rewards, just constantly switch credit cards and debit cards and just always use the latest neo bank that's offering you 5% cash back or a 10% bitcoin match, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:We should have him on the show because I want to hear his thesis because I've talked to consultants and kind of investors who have looked at consumer credit card products and they've basically said that, you know, that is the business model. Like like, revolvers are the way, like, revolvers, people that revolve the debt and actually they collect interest on. And then there's a whole core there's a whole cohort that they never make any money on That's kind of always been the business model. Yeah. And so I wonder
Speaker 2:Well, you can still make money on the people just from the spread between the interchange fee and what gets passed
Speaker 1:And I guess there. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The rewards.
Speaker 1:I I I guess it's not redistributed in the sense that like the rich person is still generating a lot of money for the credit card companies. It's like
Speaker 4:That's what
Speaker 1:I'm saying. The credit card companies make a lot of money on everyone and probably more money on the rich person.
Speaker 2:Turns out Anyway. It's a good business.
Speaker 1:This was an interesting post by Tyler Huggie Huggie? I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that. But he says the the venture capital Mount Rushmore. Ready? Arthur Rock, Don Valentine, John Dorr.
Speaker 1:And for many years
Speaker 2:Arthur Rock, the anonymous poster?
Speaker 3:I was just kidding.
Speaker 1:Don Valentine, the creator of Valentine's Day?
Speaker 2:Yeah. By the way, you made that joke in like 10 Flopped. I don't even know if 10 people got it. No. I don't know if anybody got the joke.
Speaker 2:I don't think he's that iconic in the image. Thought it funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, we scheduled that one like months ahead and it went out and it was a complete flop. Anyway, and for many years, he couldn't pick a fourth. Today, he's calling it Doug Leone. And then a lot of people in the comments are saying Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Khosla, Teal, Moritz are all interesting.
Speaker 1:I wanted to go back and look through, who who wrote the seed checks into the hyperscalers, the MAG seven. I thought this was an interesting thing and I wanted to go through it really quickly. Apple had Mark Mark Mike Markkula, who did not become a bit a large venture capital firm. So he kind of doesn't count as a generational VC even though obviously he invested Yeah. $92,000 plus the secured credit line, made a huge amount of money.
Speaker 1:And interestingly, he was introduced to Apple through Don Valentine and Arthur Rock. Like No
Speaker 5:way.
Speaker 1:Literally every major company went through them. Microsoft had David Marquette of technology venture investors. He got 1,000,000 for a 5% stake. And when you talk to David Sutter, he's, oh, Microsoft didn't raise venture capital because they didn't really do more than that. They only did one VC round and, of course, TVI did not go on to become like a big generational firm.
Speaker 1:Amazon, Jeff Bezos' family came in, but they had other angel investors and later Kleiner Perkins came in. Andy Bechdelsheim at Google. There's a lot of folks that like the early rounds of these Mag seven were just kind of like random people that never fully scaled up. Like you even look at Meta.
Speaker 2:They just became post economic too fast.
Speaker 1:Basically. They
Speaker 2:lost the dog in them.
Speaker 1:Of course with Google, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins eventually came in very, very early and got huge stakes. Meta, formerly Facebook, Teal put in 500 ks on a convertible note, which converted to 10% equity stake and then he turned it into Founders Fund. Tesla, Elon Musk, you can kind of think of the first investor, but then Sequoia and Kleiner came in, of course. That's right. And then Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tesla with Elon Musk and then Nvidia, Sequoia Capital again. So just some generational firms putting up big numbers, the holy trinity for a reason. It's it's it's crazy to think about, you know, investing in in Apple or Microsoft and then just being like, yeah, I'm not going to raise a massive growth fund. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, it's a different era. Now, you know, the LPs be beating down your door Yeah. If you had 10% of a trillion dollar company. But, anyway, should we move on to this to this robot? Do we have this video pulled up?
Speaker 1:Can we play this?
Speaker 2:Boston Dynamics wants to do another demo.
Speaker 1:No. Oh, no.
Speaker 2:The demo, bro. No.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's do Mads posting first while Ben tries to pull that up. Mads posting, science girl says, what massively improved your mental health? And Mads is sharing a picture of a book. Caller, I'd like to I'd like to know how you handle your stress.
Speaker 1:Trump, I try and tell myself it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn't matter like you do shows, if you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where four hundred thousand people get killed, honestly, it doesn't matter. What a bizarre quote. And it just sounds like a ramble.
Speaker 1:I don't even get it.
Speaker 2:I think there's some more context here. I remember when this was first shared, was during the height the
Speaker 1:drama
Speaker 2:You
Speaker 1:love 30 ks lights. And
Speaker 2:everything like that. And and I think this is good a good and bad philosophy. It's very nihilistic. If you're dealing with problems
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you want to sort of detach from them and understand like, you know, okay Yeah. This is frustrating or I'm not happy with the situation. Yeah. I need to resolve it. But you can sort of detach and look at it from a different perspective and say, you know, I still have there's still a lot of good things in life and this one thing doesn't make everything else bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Is he a nothing ever happens guy? This feels very nothing ever happens coded.
Speaker 2:Maybe. We should ask him when he comes on the show.
Speaker 1:Yes. After he's his business.
Speaker 2:No. I'm just saying after
Speaker 1:Yeah. After he gets done with all his politics side quests. He Goes back to just building social networking and crypto technology.
Speaker 2:That's right. Ben, do we have a video?
Speaker 1:Hey, we got it.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Looks like a normal Boston Dynamics demo. Let's see it do
Speaker 2:a kickflip.
Speaker 1:It's Okay. Pretty impressive. Kneeling. Okay. Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:Falling. Not bad. This is pretty good. I'm I'm excited. I I still don't understand what's going on with Boston Dynamics because, you know, Unitree is getting all the attention now.
Speaker 1:Wow. Okay.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 1:That's pretty good.
Speaker 2:I like that.
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 2:Anytime you're going vertical, doing flips.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Woah. Oh, okay. Breakdancing. That's pretty good.
Speaker 1:So there's a
Speaker 2:human in the suit. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. I mean, honestly, the robots look so crazy. You it's so easy to think, like, this is CGI. This is AI generated.
Speaker 1:Wow. Okay. Doing some breakdancing.
Speaker 2:Interesting to start with a very unimpressive
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. That's getting really, really good. Wow. Very interesting. I'm really wondering when is Boston Dynamics gonna get more aggressive about the commercialization?
Speaker 1:Like, they're not in the conversation at all.
Speaker 2:You called this the best marketing strategy for any robotics company is to figure out a way to make 10,000 of them and just march them across a field.
Speaker 1:Yep. That would be very intimidating to anyone and there'd probably be a program of record the next day.
Speaker 2:I would try to lead their round.
Speaker 1:Yes. I would get all the group sets
Speaker 2:together and say
Speaker 1:There's a lot of companies working on counter UAS technology. You're invested in the company, Allen Control Systems, gun on a truck. Right? Yep. And they can demolish DJI drones if they were coming to attack.
Speaker 1:And those drone light shows, we now have counter to that. We have Anderrill's Anvil. We have Neutronics. Drones are are
Speaker 2:good for drones. Drones.
Speaker 1:Drones. There's I've even seen beagles being to to capture drones, nets, all sorts of stuff, shotguns.
Speaker 2:Beagles, hunting But
Speaker 1:I have yet to see a company build counter humanoid technology. I think it's just a gun. But I want to see it in a I want to see a Gundo defense tech company just showing, you know, a mini gun just spitting out a thousand rounds at a hoard of unit trees.
Speaker 2:There's this thing, I don't think you've ever seen it, but where two guys get in an octagon and they fight. Oh. And you could imagine a world where we take some of our best MMA athletes.
Speaker 1:That's the United Fistocuffs Championship, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. It's not mixed martial arts, It's muscle man attack.
Speaker 1:Muscle man attack.
Speaker 2:You called it?
Speaker 1:Muscle man attacks.
Speaker 2:And you can imagine where all where we just take our UFC champions and face them off against the humanoids
Speaker 1:and The boss in dynamics.
Speaker 2:And that's the final the final boss,
Speaker 1:really. The final boss. Anyway.
Speaker 2:And you could a humanoid take take out of of, you know, John Jones in his prime, you know, Bo Nickel today.
Speaker 1:I think Bo Nickel makes short work of that Boston Dynamics robot.
Speaker 2:No problem. Rear naked choke. Rear naked
Speaker 1:choke on that. I don't know. Mean, that that robot seemed like you could just flip around and just grab them.
Speaker 2:The hard thing is you can't
Speaker 1:I think it's more like a strike to the head. A foot to the head really does
Speaker 2:it in. Kick it over. Maybe. It's kind of crazy. How do you submit a robot?
Speaker 2:You can break their arm and the rest of them are still
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's going to be tricky.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Our producer Ben is a former almost champion of a of a jiu jitsu tournament recently. Go for number one, Ben.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to Chet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Chet.
Speaker 1:No cap capital.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is a good one. I've heard this before. I just wanted to highlight it again as a word. If you're running a city, don't do this.
Speaker 2:Just learned about how Chicago sold the rights to all of its parking meter revenue to The UAE for 1,100,000,000.0 in 02/2008. The city is currently collecting a hundred and 50,000,000 a year and growing in parking meter fees and sends it straight to Dubai until 02/1983.
Speaker 1:Not a good inflation hedge, But maybe they put that 1,100,000,000.0 in some high growth asset and it's now sitting at 20,000,000,000. You know? They could be outpacing the inflation. We don't know what they did with the money. Probably just did nothing with it though, let's be honest.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Sam Rudikoff says Rudikoff says, my dad uses these speakers to watch MSNBC. And this is what we expect our future to be when you're enjoying TVPN live. You know, throw it on a TV, but get some nice speakers. Get some bass there.
Speaker 2:We we we
Speaker 1:record nice microphones for The
Speaker 2:ideal way to listen is is through sort of handcrafted European Yes. Very artisanal speakers Yes. Where the maker makes one of one or two of them a year.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And it's sort of like a thirty year waiting list. Get on the waiting list.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. And get a nice recliner to sit there and watch us. What else should we cover before we wrap up? What's interesting to you? Do you want to do Carp Madness?
Speaker 1:Palantir? This is kind of an interesting one. Eliana Eunice over at Palantir has created a March Madness bracket for the greatest, doctor Kart moments, the infamous sound boy bites, cockroach holders, steak dinners, self self pleasuring, rusty crusty, don't play golf, fake religion, coke short sellers, AI revolution. And he and he posts all the different video clips, and you can go and vote on this post and have a lot of fun picking the best carp sound bite, the most electric carp sound bite, the player haters, the PowerPoint, the Motel six. They're all great clips and Eliana has done a great job of collecting I so go and figure it out.
Speaker 2:I have one more post from Steven Schwartz over at So Arthur Rock posted twenty four hours ago. WAP just crossed $90,000,000 run rate and closed an unannounced series b at $800,000,000 from Bain Capital. Congrats. And then Stevens quote quotes it and says, this is nearly one year old news. Sorry.
Speaker 2:We hadn't told anybody yet. WAP has grown significantly since then, and we have enormous plans for the rest of the year. So totally sleeper company. Yeah. We should we should have them on.
Speaker 2:I mean, I don't fully understand. They they run sort of a a substack esque platform that helps people sell like information products from what I call
Speaker 1:the make money app.
Speaker 2:Great name. And, yeah, we should have the founders on to talk about it. I remember they reached out to about PMF or Die. Yeah. When when we got started.
Speaker 2:But very cool. They they have, like, live streaming functionality, like, a bunch of bunch of stuff. So sleeper company, excited to have them on at some point.
Speaker 1:And congrats to Steven Schwartz on the round. You gotta announce the next one with us. Come on the show. Don't let Rock leak stuff. Leak it here.
Speaker 2:Take control. Go direct. Love scoops.
Speaker 1:We love scoops.
Speaker 2:As much as John loves scooping his protein powder, we like scoops.
Speaker 4:And
Speaker 1:We don't like leaks. It's very disrespectful. Stop leaking numbers folks.
Speaker 2:Never leak. We will never leak your fundraise.
Speaker 1:We will never leak.
Speaker 2:What we will do though is say thank you to Ramp, Public, Adquik, Eight Sleep, Wander and Bezel for their support of the show. Thank you all for the support of the show. Thank For supporting the show. We love doing this and I can't wait for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:I can't wait for the next one. Was gonna say the same thing. It's Really need and you gotta really
Speaker 2:like wonder if we could commission Jake over at Pilgrim to develop just like the sort of pod call it like podcast alpha. Know that Joe Rogan had alpha brain.
Speaker 1:Alpha brain, yeah.
Speaker 2:If we could develop like our own proprietary drug and then not release it to the world. Or some
Speaker 1:sort of drug that just as soon as the camera stopped rolling, it just puts me to sleep in hibernation and I just wake up twenty four hours later. Welcome to TBPN live. That would be ideal. So I don't have to spend a minute away from
Speaker 2:the show. Guys, moving to a new studio soon and we're actually just gonna set up our mics on our Eight Sleeps right here. So the second the camera goes off Yep. We just kind of go.
Speaker 1:Yep. That's great. Anyway, thank you for watching. Thank you.
Speaker 2:We will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Go leave us five stars on Apple and Spotify. We're climbing up the charts, by the Climbing
Speaker 1:up the charts. Thank you to everyone. Seriously, if you've subscribed, if you've if you've listened on any of those platforms, it's really cool and really awesome to see. We really appreciate
Speaker 5:it.
Speaker 2:The score takes care of itself.
Speaker 1:Truly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But thank you all for being a part of this and we will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:See you tomorrow. Thank you. Bye.