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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVBN. Today is Thursday, 04/24/2025. Are live from the Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We
Speaker 2:got some new
Speaker 3:sound effects today.
Speaker 4:We do.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 4:I'm very excited.
Speaker 3:Expect the unexpected.
Speaker 4:Expect the unexpected. We got a lot of great breaking news. Netflix had earnings and they recorded record profits. Let's hear it from Netflix, folks. It's fantastic from Bloomberg.
Speaker 4:Netflix Inc reported record profit to start the year, allaying concerns of a slowdown or fears the streaming leader might be hurt by growing economic uncertainty. First quarter earnings rose 25% to $6.61 a share. The company said Thursday, easily beating analyst estimates. It's bad day to be a Netflix analyst. Just getting beaten up by Beaten up.
Speaker 4:The corporate results. Sales grew to 10,500,000,000.0 in line with projections. The results were boosted by a recent price increase and strong slate of programming across the globe, like The UK hit series adolescence. Investors have come to see Netflix as safe bet during a great time of economic uncertainty and challenges for conventional movie and TV business. With global audiences of more than 700,000,000 viewers, the company said it has seen no impact on its business from president Donald Trump's tariffs or the market volatility that has followed.
Speaker 4:And so interesting. Congratulations to all the Netflix shareholders. Congratulations to everyone at Netflix. But I thought it was interesting because, you know, we've been we we were talking earlier about, like, we saw the stats on all the different tech companies, how much they're off peak from the start of the year. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And even Meta's down 25%. We were kind of
Speaker 3:working through Just 28% over over their over the last twelve months.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And we were kind of working through it. We were like, okay, how did we get to this point? How how is Meta affected by tariffs? Like, they don't make stuff in China.
Speaker 4:I mean, I guess they do make the Oculus, they're not selling that many of them. But in general, you know, the question was, why is Meta hurt by tariff uncertainty or or the chaos of of the the last few months? And, you know, you can kinda talk to Sean Frank over at Ridge Wallet and say, okay. Well, you know, if d to c advertising that's happening on Meta is impaired by tariffs, they could pull back on advertising, so you could get there. But with Netflix, like, there truly is nothing that affects them on the tariff side.
Speaker 4:Like, they truly are just a digital content farm, basically.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The the economy Yeah. Would have to be pretty bad for people to start thinking, I want to be less entertained. Yes. Exactly.
Speaker 3:And historically, things like Netflix have done very well during economic downturns. Yep.
Speaker 4:Because things are rough, but you want to kill some time. And on a dollar per hour basis, Netflix is probably the best bank you've
Speaker 3:seen. Yes. People say, TBPN, you guys put out three hours of content a day. Well,
Speaker 4:they're
Speaker 4:saying
Speaker 4:it's
Speaker 1:Netflix
Speaker 4:puts out three hours of content every minute.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, well, and and if you look at, I think, some of their usage numbers, I think it's like the average user is using it for, two hours a day.
Speaker 4:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep. Is just insane.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 3:crazy. I actually think we should
Speaker 4:Distribute on Netflix. Absolutely. Yeah. Give us a call. Netflix.
Speaker 4:Read. Read Hastings, if you're listening.
Speaker 5:Come
Speaker 3:on. We'll fly up to Los Gatos.
Speaker 4:Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'd love to partner with them. Anyway, interesting development.
Speaker 4:Couple years ago, there was this customer segmentation push. They went for higher tiers. They will charge you an arm and a leg for four k streaming across a bunch of devices. If you're if you're sharing the passwords, they they they crack down on the password sharing. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And they also introduced the ad supported tier, which isn't free. You still have to pay for it, but it's gen it's working, basically. And that's driving platform growth, higher engagement beyond raw subscriber counts, and really, they're price discriminating. Right?
Speaker 3:It used
Speaker 4:to just be, oh, Netflix, it's like $10 a month for everyone. Well, there are some people that are willing to pay more for four k and more screens and whatnot and no ads. And then there's other people that, you know, are more price sensitive. And so they've done a great job at this. And they basically so their their their target for 2029 is to double revenue and expand margins.
Speaker 4:We love doubling revenue and expanding margins, folks. It's fantastic. Double Overnight success. Yeah. 2020 I mean, it's a thirty year old business at this point at that point.
Speaker 4:Pretty wild. Thirty year old overnight success.
Speaker 1:It will It's possible. Yeah. It's possible.
Speaker 4:And so, they're they're pivoting the strategy. The company is moving beyond simply adding subscribers to maximizing revenue per user via segmentation. By introducing ad supported tier and multiple price points, Netflix can capture price sensitive users and retain them with a cheaper ad backed option while raising prices on standard and premium plans for those who value an ad free experience. That would be a lot of folks. Dissegmentation
Speaker 3:I would expect our I wanna pay more
Speaker 4:and get more ads
Speaker 3:community to, Yeah. Wanna pay more and get more ads. So, hopefully, they they recognize that and start
Speaker 4:rolling out. Tier as well. That tier as well. So let's break it down. Ben Thompson's analysis of Netflix's q one twenty twenty five results underlines the robust financial performance and ambitious growth plans.
Speaker 4:Record quarterly profits, $10,500,000,000 revenue beat expectations aided by recent price hikes and popular content releases. Notably, Netflix ceased reporting subscriber additions this quarter. That'll frustrate a lot of analysts because everyone always likes to have as much data as possible to
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Project these things.
Speaker 3:And a company that was adding a ton of users would probably want to include that
Speaker 4:Yes. But there was also a very like, when you dig into the subscriber additions, you would see weird things like, oh, they're growing a ton of subscriber additions, so maybe the stock should go way up, but then you'd find out that they were in lower priced markets.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so there was there were all these anomalies where they were doing okay in The US, but they were growing a lot in, Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, and all of those, have very different economic impacts on the business. And so, Netflix is saying like, hey. We're a mature company. We're, like, twenty years old at this why don't you guys just focus on revenue, profit, and cash flow, which we love? And so internal forecast oh, and this was interesting.
Speaker 4:There was actually a leak to The Wall Street Journal show, that Netflix is aiming to double revenue to 78,000,000,000 by 2029 and even target a $1,000,000,000,000 market cap. And now there was a recording of, I believe, the CEO on the earnings call saying, like, you know, we have a very high trust environment here at Netflix. You know, we we we share a lot of information with our entire team. Sometimes that gets leaked to the press. We don't like when it gets leaked to the press.
Speaker 4:But you have to wonder if it's an intentional leak. Right? Because it's like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, like, we we we have that internal forecast of of our our streaming hours going to forty hours twenty four hours a day, trillion dollar market cap. Yeah. You know, a hundred billion dollars in in in ad deals. It would be terrible if that leaked. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But but you at the same time, you could imagine a situation where we would, you know, accidentally, intentionally leak that just to make us look better. And so maybe that's what's going on here. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's possible to ask them.
Speaker 4:But, you know, it could be it could be bad to have that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Jamie Jamie Dimon audio leak. Remember we talked about this? I love a good Where he sounds like a great leader.
Speaker 4:I love a good leak.
Speaker 3:Know, ambitious and wants to know, push his team to be their best and work hard. Yep. What a terrible leak.
Speaker 4:And so they're gonna they're gonna roll out more new monetization streams, grow their advertising business that's projected to be 9,000,000,000 a year by 2029, and continued price increases alongside moderate rise in subscribers. So they basically hit saturation. Like, everyone has Netflix that is interested. They're not really interested in in bringing new people on, and that's probably the what's going on with the with the app one deal that we discussed earlier. And so they're basically saying that, like, we are confident in economics of scale and we're going to just, you know, focus on monetizing our audience more significantly.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Has kind of dropped out of the big tech narrative. You know, it used to be Fang. The n stood for Netflix. Now, we're on.
Speaker 4:We've moved on from Fang. We're on mag seven. Tesla's in.
Speaker 3:Well, it's hard to call a $500,000,000,000 company big technology. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's not It's quaint. It's quaint. Quaint. Quaint tech.
Speaker 4:A quaint lifestyle business,
Speaker 3:for sure. More much more of a lifestyle business.
Speaker 4:Anyway
Speaker 3:And it's amazing that a business like this can, you know, have reached sort of full market saturation and still trade at almost a 50 x PE ratio.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like,
Speaker 3:gotta give them credit for that.
Speaker 4:They got destroyed during didn't they get destroyed during COVID or something? At some point, like, they had some major, major drawdown in the stock. But I actually remember back in high school,
Speaker 1:I got in
Speaker 4:a kind of a drunken fight with a high school friend late night once about whether or not Netflix was a good stock.
Speaker 3:This is very funny. Super on brand for you, I'm sure.
Speaker 4:Well, this is high school. You know?
Speaker 1:You're you're
Speaker 3:Oh, okay. It was in high school. I thought you were saying it was recently No.
Speaker 4:No. No. No. This was back this was back
Speaker 1:in So you were 21 when you
Speaker 3:were in high school?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm You got
Speaker 3:held back a little bit.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But this was this was probably, you know, around 02/2007, something like that.
Speaker 3:Okay. And So you were feeling the heat from from the financial crisis?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah. Feel like basically, friend was Netflix is like overvalued, like it's not a good stock.
Speaker 4:And I and I was just like and and I laid out like, no, like I think in the future, like you will have Netflix like maybe even on your phone. Maybe you'd have it on multiple screens. Woah. And he was like, no. Like, this is like a terrible stock.
Speaker 4:It's not going anywhere. And then it became like the the best stock of all time. And I should have bought it instead of just like, you know, arguing with him. But Yeah. But it was just fine.
Speaker 3:Well, you also should have angel invested in Coinbase and a bunch of other companies in your YC batch.
Speaker 4:Yeah. If they if they accepted credit card debt as collateral for angel investments, I would be doing very,
Speaker 3:very well. But be near.
Speaker 4:Instead, I I had negative net income or negative net worth. Anyway, they're trying to aim for 36% subscriber growth. They're trying to hit 410,000,000 users by 2029, and ARPU should rise significantly through segmentation, adds higher pricing. They're they're going for that 1,000,000,000,000 market cap. You'll love to hear it.
Speaker 4:They're Just
Speaker 3:an just an easy two x. Right?
Speaker 4:Yep. They're only yeah. I mean, that actually isn't that crazy on a five year plan to double. Like, that doesn't seem that crazy. But they got to get more people.
Speaker 4:And so, yeah, the the the takeaway from Ben Thompson is that, you know, he was advocating for an ads tier for a long time. He's called it a success. Even if the ads aren't material yet, it it is putting them on the path. And there was a lot of of work that they needed to do. At one point, they were they were I don't know if they actually landed with Microsoft, but they were thinking about partnering with Microsoft to do kind of the back end ad exchange.
Speaker 4:Yep. And there was a lot of And
Speaker 3:the bolt the bolt case for Netflix's ad product, as far as I know
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Is just the targeting potential and Netflix's ability to, like, basically verticalize from the content to the user to the to the user's interest.
Speaker 4:It certainly should be more targetable than just over the ads. Or or not over the top, but, like, over the air TV ads. But I don't know that they have that much data. Mean, it's like this person it's nowhere near as much as an Instagram where, you know, you're following all these things, they know where you are on the web, they know what you're what what oh, you're you're you're clearly shopping for a, you know, suitcase this week because you've been you've
Speaker 3:been Yeah.
Speaker 4:Hovering over the suitcase content that we've been sending you randomly. Much harder to do that. So I think that's why there might be a benefit to to partnering with an ad exchange that has a little bit more tracking information. But still, I mean, you you can probably tell just you can probably do more segmentation than in a normal in a normal linear TV context. It doesn't seem anywhere as efficient as meta.
Speaker 4:But
Speaker 3:Sure. But that's not the point. Right? These are gonna be brand marketing dollars.
Speaker 4:I think so.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And that's okay.
Speaker 4:And there was a big there was a big debate over, like, when Netflix first opened the the floodgates of ads, they were gonna get a lot of experimental budget because it's very interesting. Oh, I could put my brand next to Yeah. Some prestige TV potentially on Netflix or something. That seems interesting. But ultimately, the ad buyers were gonna just wanna see results.
Speaker 4:And it's probably harder to track if you're just showing someone an ad, then they're not necessarily clicking through. It's more brand advertising. So all that attribution could be difficult. But it seems like even though even in the face of all of that, ads are just such a great business that it's working.
Speaker 2:Yep. Very interesting.
Speaker 3:It's interesting to think about mobile watch time too. Yeah. Right? It's not it doesn't feel as common for people to be watching television.
Speaker 4:For you could actually put the link right Yeah. Yeah. You could actually direct the link there. Instead of like the QR code on the screen, which I don't think many people are doing if they're watching Netflix, like, on their TV late But a lot of people are just, like, going around with their phone doing their, you know, chores and then watching Netflix in the background. Interesting.
Speaker 4:Anyway, Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis has a great breakdown on AMD's transformation and how they are trying to beat NVIDIA. This is AMD two point o, a new sense of urgency. And it's a very interesting deep dive into how the these big companies are interacting with the next generation of analysts like Ben Thompson and Dylan Patel. And so Ben Thompson's been, you know, advocating for different strategies at Intel and and many other companies. But there's always been a question of like, oh, is he he like an armchair quarterback?
Speaker 4:Like, does he really could he possibly know better than, like, the entire Intel executive team? And seems like maybe now it's yes.
Speaker 1:Very possible.
Speaker 4:With AMD, like and semi analysis, the answer is like absolutely. Because semi analysis back in December of twenty twenty four, about four months ago, they published an article detailing mediocre AMD software and lack of usability. This was something that had been flagged by George Hots before, basically saying that, like, the chips themselves on a flop per dollar basis are quite competitive with NVIDIA. But the software in infrastructure on top, like the middleware that goes in between, like, the model that you're trying to train and the actual silicon is bad, basically.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to put
Speaker 4:it nicely. So but Dylan is saying that AMD has turned it around.
Speaker 3:You're listening.
Speaker 4:They kicked it into high gear, and they've made rapid progress in the last four months on many items semi analysis laid out. They view AAMD's new sense of urgency as a massive positive in its journey to catch up to NVIDIA. AMD is now in wartime mode, but there are still many battles ahead. And so Founder mode.
Speaker 6:For sure. Switch your business to Rampcom.
Speaker 4:Are those connected somehow? They are? And so the Ramp. Just plays every time we play Founder mode now?
Speaker 1:Like, right?
Speaker 3:We have two versions.
Speaker 4:So basically, I mean, everyone knows that NVIDIA has like completely run away with the data center game for AI training. Especially on the on the pre training side. There's some stuff that you can do on the inference side once you've trained the model and distilled it. But when you need a huge cluster of a hundred thousand GPUs, the game is NVIDIA
Speaker 3:to Jensen.
Speaker 4:And, yeah, you've seen you've heard these stories about, like, Elon and Larry Ellison getting dinner with Jensen and being like, give us the give us all the chips. And then, obviously, every other big tech company wants the NVIDIA chips. NVIDIA stock has been mooning. And all of that is because of the CUDA ecosystem that sits on top of NVIDIA and how reliable those chips have been. Because when you're running a really big really big and expensive training run, one little flaw could cost you a lot or could throw the throw the training run off.
Speaker 4:And so, AMD has an equivalent of CUDA, I believe, ROCM, RockM, software and developer tools, But there's still a bunch of software gaps, scaling challenges, a need for community driven breakthroughs. That's what has made NVIDIA so strong. They have an ecosystem of developers who build software and test suites and all sorts of open source stuff.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 4:And there's a bunch of interesting anecdotes here about what made NVIDIA really so dominant that we should go through. So, basically, the takeaway is that AMD is in wartime mode, and it's very cool. Like, Lisa Hsu actually met with Semi Analysis after they published the December AMD article and acknowledged many of the gaps in the software stack. And they've done a bunch of other things. They hired a developer relations czar, This is the DevRel to actually interact with external developers.
Speaker 4:And they do this on tech Twitter and at at at real life events. Like, this is actually where it's happening. And in January, AMD recognized that external developer community are what made CUDA great. And so it's a very big pivot from the previous comm strategy, which was never admit that there are any flaws in the software publicly.
Speaker 3:Claim victory.
Speaker 4:Always claim victory. Now they are coming from it with, coming to the to the market with a much more humble approach, and I think it's been very well received. And so a m AMD has shifted into high gear to compete in AI. They know that there's a lot of money at stake. They're overhauling the culture and software stack with a focus on developers.
Speaker 4:They've done I've already rolled out, you know, massive improvements to, their software stack, and they have this new, developer first strategy. They're addressing long standing issues from poor Python tooling to slow multi GPU communications. So there were actual points in the software stack where there was no Python library. Like, could not
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You could not write Python to do something. You had to go to a different language. And that's obviously a point of a friction for developers. Totally. If you have a developer who loves writing Python, then you're like, actually, to do this thing, you have to write something else, maybe C
Speaker 3:plus plus or Yeah. The key here is that all the big potential customers and existing customers value speed above, you know, pretty much anything like this. Right?
Speaker 1:Totally. If you're people are getting paid a
Speaker 4:million dollars, like, you want them just to move as fast as possible.
Speaker 3:Totally. Yeah. Totally. And Elon doing the new data center and and whatever it was. Was it a year that they pulled it off?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's like they're not gonna wait around for an inferior solution.
Speaker 4:Yes. Dylan actually highlights the x AI team catching up to the frontier so quickly as an example for what how m a how AMD should be thinking. Like like, they should think, hey. We are behind. But if we are realistic about that and we sprint and we change the culture, we could potentially catch up to the frontier very quickly, which is very cool.
Speaker 4:And so the there's plans for a community GPU cloud, which anyone could use to train. Google had a great example of this where there was this open source GPTJ moment, which I wasn't I I I, like, heard about a long time ago, but I didn't know the full story. Basically, there was, a high school kid who got access to for free to a cluster of TPUs on Google's cloud. So they're free, but it was a very powerful cloud. And he trained a a language model, an LLM, that was roughly equivalent to GPT two.
Speaker 4:And everyone was like, this is incredible if, like, some random kid can just build something that's, like, at at the same level as OpenAI. This is like a testament to like how awesome Google is with their TPUs. Yep. And and and and same with with NVIDIA does the same thing. NVIDIA actually gives out servers to universities.
Speaker 4:And some of them, I I don't know if this is actually important at all, but they're gold plated. It's just like
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 7:It's just
Speaker 4:like, I think it's just to make a just make a statement. Just to be like, we're delivering this thing. It's awesome. Like, we want you to be excited to build on NVIDIA, so we're delivering you a
Speaker 1:gold plated
Speaker 3:rack. Spend your annual tuition as a college student just on energy for that free on that free NVIDIA GPU rack if you were aggressive enough. So put it to use.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so, basically, it's all it all comes down to, like, this cultural transformation, but Lisa Su has acknowledged the company's software shortcomings, and AMD is now in wartime mode fixing bugs and engaging developers. The company has launched developer relations initiative, and they're increasing the r r and d budget, boosting AI engineering compensation, and scaling internal GPU cost clusters. And so there there's a couple other interesting things in here. They're focusing on continuous integration and whatnot, catching up on tools and libraries, more Python support, and and really focusing on cluster scaling, which has been a big problem.
Speaker 4:Where is the I need to find the the story about George Hotz because that was interesting. Geo. Let me see. Geo Hotz. Let's see.
Speaker 4:Okay. So let me see.
Speaker 3:Found a post on hacker news from four months ago from somebody saying, is there no hope for AMD anymore after George Hots gave up on AMD? I feel like there's no realistic chance of using their chips to break CUDA dominance.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so here's here's some from the actual semi analysis article. Although George Hotts could have settled for AMD's earlier offer of cloud hosted MI 300 x systems with full BMC access, He insisted on physical hardware so he could hack the metal directly. And so George Hoss was saying, like like, we need an alternative to NVIDIA. We need to break the NVIDIA monopoly.
Speaker 4:This was something that he was he was pushing for, and he wanted to develop a new, like, PyTorch competitor, basically, for training machine learning models on AMD hardware. But he was running into tons and tons of problems with the software stack. And he was posting about these, and he said like, hey, if you guys just send me the latest and greatest, I want to be able to hack them, but I don't want to pay because I'm doing your job for you, basically. And AMD initially balked even though Hots' goal was to help open source tooling on their GPUs. It's exactly something like Jensen would jump at.
Speaker 4:Jensen knows the value of the open source community on top of CUDA and NVIDIA. And so he's he's given stuff out all over the place. But AMD, that wasn't in their culture. And so the stalemate turned into a public spectacle when the widely respected PyTorch cocreator tweeted in support of George Hotz receiving the physical boxes, which is interesting because, like, PyTorch, obviously, it's a it's an open source library, but, like, it he's kind of creating this competitor with TinyGrad. But, obviously, the the PyTorch creator just wants cool and efficient AI training software to go out there.
Speaker 4:And so he says Sumit Chintala says, for what it's worth, if George Hotts was offering to work on my stuff for free and wanted two boxes, I'd drive them out to him myself. Tiny Grad is a beautiful, phenomenal piece of software in my opinion. Tiny Grad has some sort of limitation. I think he I think George Haas is trying to keep it under a thousand lines of code or something. And so it's this, like, remarkably, you know, optimized and and interpretable program for training AI models on GPU hardware.
Speaker 4:But he ran into a bunch of problems with AMD and started pushing them. And so seminalysis says, we believe that this nudge worked, and a George Hot's March eighth blog revealed that AMD had relented, sending him two m I 300 x boxes. With this, AMD finally passed the Geohot's cultural test for AMD. This is arguably a bigger reputational coup than a technical one. Shipping real silicon to a high profile hacker signals a newfound developer first ethos that marketing dollars alone can't buy.
Speaker 4:And it finally turns a bruising Twitter saga into a story demonstrating AMD's new developer first ethos. In addition to sending Geohots boxes, we believe that AMD can also score another easy reputation and marketing win by donating physical AMG AMD GPU boxes to academic labs. Jensen and Ian and Ian Buck has had a long history of donating GPUs to academic labs going back as far as 2014. This year, this year, Jensen continues to support academic labs such as Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, UCSD, and others for some time by donating physical gold plated b 200 boxes to them in addition to providing free cloud access to NVIDIA GPUs. So he's just like, you can use the cloud for free.
Speaker 4:You can have the boxes for free. Like, we just walk you anything. Yes. 100%. It's amazing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So interesting to follow what's, like, the the the the change in management. Like, this is something like, you know, a going direct type of change. Like, this is a big change for the for the company culture. But I think that they finally realized that, like, it had to be done because they'd done they'd done so much right on the actual they'd done their job on the chip side and they'd built a great product, but it was not getting adopted.
Speaker 4:And it was because of the lack of focus on nurturing the open source community, building developer relations, and actually making it easy to work with their product that they made. But it's different. You know, I don't think Overall this is the same dynamic with I don't think it was the same dynamic in gaming. Yeah. I think gaming was much more simple and much lower stakes.
Speaker 4:And so if you have a shader that doesn't run perfectly, the gaming company will just kind of figure it out. It's not that big. Whereas if if a training run goes wrong, that's, you know, potentially like a billion dollars out in download drain.
Speaker 3:It's just fascinating that Lisa and Jensen could be cousins and she wouldn't pick up at least a little bit of So of her cousins' moves.
Speaker 4:So I invited Dylan Patel on the show. He's traveling. He should be joining us in a week or two, hopefully. And I definitely wanna know, you know, this is great. I love this.
Speaker 4:Let's go for AMD. I'm super happy for them. And and congratulations to Semi Analysis for, like, making this happen. At the same time, like, why did it take so long? Like, this feels like this was foreseeable.
Speaker 3:Potentially missed out on a a part of the bubble. Right?
Speaker 4:Totally.
Speaker 3:We're in a bubble. Yep. We love bubbles on the show. But they they were pretty much asleep at the wheel for at least the initial run, which cost them a massive amount. You know, they they could have raised Yeah.
Speaker 3:Tens of billions of dollars of of cheap equity Totally. Through that process. And and, you know, I'm sure they they conducted, you know, a bunch of different, you know, fundraisers over that period, but they didn't really get much of a you know, the the stock's up like 60% over the last, like, five years. So it's not like they haven't really been a winner in the in the boom.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, let's put up the guest lineup for today, and we have Delian coming into the studio first, and we have a bunch more folks.
Speaker 3:We got co founders of Public. Public coming in. They announced a partnership with Aston Martin today
Speaker 4:Very exciting.
Speaker 3:We're very excited about. Got Listen Labs, Freeform, Formic, and of course, Callie coming in from TrueMed to talk about the food dye bands and a bunch of other stuff. So very excited for that.
Speaker 4:But next up, we have Delian. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome to Delta v Magellan. What
Speaker 8:is up?
Speaker 1:Let's think I lost a button. I think I
Speaker 6:I think you just got excited when you saw me. It's okay.
Speaker 3:That was It happens. I did. It happens.
Speaker 4:It's not every day you get to hang out with one of the most cutthroat venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Now, Los Angeles
Speaker 3:Space men in the world.
Speaker 4:The Bulgarian bruiser in the building. How you doing?
Speaker 6:What is it like being down to one job? I fantasize about, you know, only having one job all the time. Yeah. I'm somehow stuck with like five jobs.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Has anyone told you about like the value of focus? Maybe you should just focus on one thing.
Speaker 9:I know.
Speaker 6:I know. I wish I was a little less ADD.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Anyway, what is on your mind? I'm sure you're thinking about Hill And Valley. I wanna pull up the Wait.
Speaker 3:First, have a You said you said your your Zoom, you're doing a lot less Zoom since moving to LA. Is that just a lot you're just meeting with the Varda team in in person or is it founder meetings as well? Or you taking more meetings in person now that you're Mhmm. Gundo adjacent?
Speaker 6:Oh, god. You know, let's not use that word. It's a dirty word. I am El Segundo, not adjacent within. I'm currently, you know, located within those city boundaries.
Speaker 6:I think it's honestly it's a it's basically everything. Like, everything from the portfolio companies to, you know, FF meetings Mhmm. You know, to, you know, to Varda meetings. And it's one of these things that it kinda feels like recursive where it's like when you have less Zooms, then when somebody like had this, like, VC asking me for a Zoom this week, and I was like, cool, you're an SF, just let me know next time you're in LA. Like if it's so important, just like take a permanent flight.
Speaker 6:They're like, I don't have any plans to be in LA anytime soon. I was like, cool, then I don't have any plans to talk to you.
Speaker 1:Mogged. Talking about this.
Speaker 4:It's ridiculous. Well, we appreciate you joining this Zoom, and this show.
Speaker 6:You guys are worth it.
Speaker 4:Let yeah. Thank you. We appreciate it. Let's run through, Hill and Valley. Over a few short years, we've made it into the preeminent forum for the top technology leaders and elected officials to gather.
Speaker 4:You you barely scrapped together a single notable name,
Speaker 6:but
Speaker 4:somehow Jensen Wong, Alex Carrve, you got a ton of people here. Maybe walk me through, you know, who you're excited about. Give me the give me a little bit of history, and then I wanna talk through some of, what what message tech is trying to send to DC these days.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, the you know, the history of Hillen Valley is that it started off with, like, an intention of being, like, a thirty, forty person dinner that, like, ballooned up into a hundred. And, like, the first one, I think, had, like, twelve, thirteen elected officials. And then it just, like, kept gaining steam from there. We're just, like, the, you know, sort of dinner got bigger, and then eventually the dinner was so big.
Speaker 6:Were like, man, we got a lot of really great people here, and we're doing a private dinner. I think it like, the public would be very interested in, like, you know, some of these people and conversations happening, you know, in the public sphere too. So we expanded, like, including, like, a, you know, more public daytime forum. And then that just, you know, sort of gained momentum. And this year, it's like, I just, in some ways, I can't imagine how much of a, you know, sort of better, you know, lineup one could have.
Speaker 6:I think, like, the, you know, sort of main message is just like, look. You know, if we, like, go back in time to, like, 2018, you had everything from, like, Google bailing on the Maven project, like VC saying that, like, you know, investing in weapons was just as bad as investing in, like, porn and gambling. And so there was just so much hesitation, and there was, like, a real rift, I feel like, between Silicon Valley and, you know you know you know, Washington DC that is kinda counterjudable. Like, if look at the Obama era, like, part of why Obama won August '2 thousand '12 was, like, a deep integration with Silicon Valley intact, and it was, like, the first social media, you know, sort of driven campaign. But it felt like, you know, partially in Trump era, there was just, like, this huge rift because, like, Silicon Valley was so left.
Speaker 6:Trump was seen as so radical. Like, people didn't wanna work together. And so, honestly, a part of the message is like, look. We're all on the same team, and we're working together to make The United States better. And so one of my, like, favorite examples of this is I'm moderating a panel that's with secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, Kevin Wheel, who's the chief product officer of OpenAI Yep.
Speaker 6:And then Reef Peratt, who's the chief investment officer and president of Alphabet.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And look. Like, in theory, Alphabet and OpenAI are, like, hugely competitive. On the flip side, like, OpenAI has the best, you know, sort of consumer application in AI that's ever existed. And Alphabet was just awarded a Nobel Prize last year for AlphaFold, you know, predicting protein, you know, sort of folding and, like, the, you know, protein structures based off amino acid sequences. And so the, like, goal of that panel would be like, look.
Speaker 6:Like, yes, these companies are competing, but, also, we're all way better off if these companies can build as many fucking data centers and have as cheap of energy as possible so that, like, you know, we don't have, you know, DeepSeek becoming the, like, default open source model that the rest of the world uses that can't afford the, like, you know, you know, ChatGPT and can't afford, you know, sort of AlphaFold. And there's a lot of soft power that comes from that. Like, do you want the thing that, like, the random person in Bulgaria is using as their AI to be willing to talk about Tiananmen Square or not? I prefer the version where it can talk about, you know, sort of Tiananmen Square. And the best way that we do that is make sure that we are the best at AI, have the best energy, and the best way of doing that is, like, tech needs to collaborate with DC, and secretary interior Burghum needs to unleash a wave of, you know you know you know, streamlined permitting and, you know, we have nuclear energy, you know, in The United States.
Speaker 6:And what better place to talk about that than literally in the capital, you know, sort of hill visitor center.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Do you do you know how the the pre the the Obama era collaboration between Silicon Valley and DC happened? Like, was there an instantiation of Hill And Valley that was just, like, the old big tech companies talking to the Democratic administration in the same way. Because Hill And Valley is is bipartisan. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, when I was there last year, I was hanging out with Chuck Schumer and stuff. So, like Yeah. It's not like you guys are, like, explicitly conservative, although, obviously, there is, like, a pushback against the the previous tone in Silicon Valley. But walk me through some of the the history there.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I don't know, like, what the history was of the Obama campaign and how it got so social media centric. I remember they had this, like was it, like,
Speaker 1:the CTO guy that was, like, an ex early Google guy or
Speaker 7:something like that? Yeah. That
Speaker 4:that, you you so the the president like, whenever the president goes to visit a, an organization that's non governmental, it gets logged and the number one organization that Obama met with was Google during his eight years. And it was and it was just a very, very close tie, I And and I think that there was maybe maybe I'm thinking like the precursor to this is more like TED. Like, you you know, the TED talk era is kind of where, like, all the elites would come together and there would be some crossover. Maybe that's not a perfect match, but, but anyway, we we we can move on. I wanna hear
Speaker 6:The goal here was to, like, hopefully make it, like, sort of more immune from administration changes, basically, where it's like, know Totally. Yeah. So, yeah, Obama visited Google all the time. Google basically, like, you know, would ban Trump from ever going on campus. And so we started Hill and Valley under the Biden administration, and we've tried to keep it as close as we can to bipartisan as possible throughout all of the years.
Speaker 6:Right? Now, look, obviously, right now, Republicans are in control of, you know, sort of both congress and senate and presidency, etcetera,
Speaker 1:as they're obviously a little
Speaker 6:bit more represented this year.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But the goal is, like, how do we make sure that that, like, channel of communication between the top technology leaders and elected officials stays there irrespective of who happens to be, you know, sort of in the White House at that current time? Because they don't think what you want is this thing where, like, the only time that Silicon Valley and, you know, DC talk to each other is when, like, DC happens to crazy left leaning because that happens to align with, like, a significant portion of Silicon Valley. Not everybody. I mean, thankfully, the tech right is willing to be a little more, you know, sort of vocal. But look.
Speaker 6:You know, even in this last election when, you know, you had David Sacks screaming from the rooftops about, you know, you know, you know, being willing to vote for Trump. If you look at, like, you know, donations, Silicon Valley, cross Silicon Valley, was still, like, 85%, you know, Democrat, you know, by on a dollars basis. And so Yeah.
Speaker 3:Interesting dynamic where Yeah. The dollars were telling a very different story than the timeline. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I actually wrote a piece in Power Wires about that. It was right before Andreessen went full MAGA, so it was a little bit like like I had the data all crunched, I was like, oh, it's actually, like, very purple, very split. It was almost like fifty fifty. But it was also like almost entirely driven by power law donors. Like, between Peter and Awesome.
Speaker 4:Greylock. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Reid Hoffman.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Reid Hoffman. Like like, those two were like at the biggest in terms of in terms of it wasn't for this cycle. It was like over the last four years, something like that. But then, but and then Mark, and Andreessen was actually, like, perfectly fifty fifty split.
Speaker 4:Like, they were perfectly bipartisan because a lot of what they were donating to was, like, crypto stuff. And then when they came to partisan stuff, they typically donate to both sides. Anyway, so walk me through, some of what do you think Silicon Valley is asking for or pitching in DC these days? It feels like there's a bit of a narrative at least on x that, oh, all these, like, tech people supported Trump. They're the dog who caught the car, and it's not going their way, or they don't even know what to ask for, or what they're asking for isn't getting done.
Speaker 4:What what do you think the message will be to DC from tech next week?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'll go through, honestly, just, like, some of panels that, like, you know, I'm, either moderating and, like, the message on each. I kinda gave you the, like, you know, AI panel where it's like, look. There are a bunch of, like, you know, sort of EPA and permitting restrictions that, like, are preventing us from setting up this energy and data centers that we need. And, like, secretary Bergum is the person that, like, oversees some chunk of that.
Speaker 6:Not all of it. He doesn't oversee the EPA. But, like, that's the request there. It's like, let's make some policy changes so that OpenAI and, you know, sort of Google are not restricted by regulations as, like, the primary, you know, you know, bottleneck to, you know, their growth of data centers and energy. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I love my, you know, Delta v portion on TVPN, so I'll talk about the, you know, sort of space side of things. Yeah. I'm gonna be moderating between Tim Hughes, who's the SVP of all, you know, sort of business basically at SpaceX, representative George Whitesides, who's the former, you know, sort of Virgin, CEO, now turned, you know, congressional representative, you know, sort of junior congressman, and then, major general, Bucky, who's head of all things space at the defense innovation unit. So it's a little bit of both, you know, sort of civil plus, you know, sort of DOD. I think the other request is, like, look.
Speaker 6:There's some,
Speaker 8:like, pretty ambitious goals that, you know, sort
Speaker 6:of Trump has set forth. Basically, you know, wants boots on, you know, sort of Mars and moon, wants to simulate lower earth orbit, you know, sort of economy, wants more of the, you know, sort of, academic community to engage in aerospace. And I think the message there is, like, look, NASA needs to lean on, you know, your commercial space for the things that it provides and, you know, sort of stick to what it does best for, the, you know, sort of truly, you know, sort of out there things. And so, you know, Jared Isaacman, you know, made some comments in his congressional hearing around, like, SLS is, you know, a big rocket and maybe gets us to the moon soon, but it's probably not the long term solution. And so, like, that's a perfect example of, like you know, I think everybody in commercial space largely agrees with the fact that that, you know, the commercial industry has better, cheaper, you know, more effective rockets than, you know, anything that NASA's building and has at this point.
Speaker 6:We should probably reallocate that budget to just those commercial companies or to other NASA priorities rather than spending a bunch, you know, sort of on SLS. So that's a tactical thing. You know, I'm doing this fireside chat with Vinod Khosla. One of his big things is just, like, the integration of more and more AI, you know, basically into health care. We have this mutual portfolio company, you know, sort of Sword Health has gotten really deep in, like, you know, $4,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 6:They provide like, they're they're basically the largest physical therapy provider largely done via AI. And it's not just like AI where it's like a, you know, chat screen. It's like they've got sensors that they put on you. They, like, gamifies it, etcetera. How do you get more and more of, like, you know, Medicaid and Medicare to, yes, use humans when, like, you've got some super delicate operation, etcetera, but there's so much of, like, that care that's provided that at this point, you know, could be exported to a bunch of basically, like, commercial health companies that are largely, you know, integrated into AI and get more aggressive on that, which satisfies honestly a bunch of, like, current administration's priorities.
Speaker 6:As much of a node, you know, is not a huge fan of Trump, he is a fan of, you know, basically using, you know, sort of AI to,
Speaker 8:you know, improve health care, and
Speaker 6:then that, you know, matches Trump's, you know, goals of improved government efficiency where you can cut out a bunch of the Medicare and Medicaid cost. Where it's like, look, we can all talk about, like, defense budgets and this and this. Entitlements are the vast majority of the federal government's budget. And so, you know, if you wanna go look at efficiencies, you're gonna have way more juice to squeeze, like, you know, you know, improving Medicare than, like, you know, you can cut out all the DEI programs in the world, and that's barely a blip relative to Medicare.
Speaker 3:Yeah. How how much do you expect conversation to veer towards Doge and then specifically Trump had promised earlier this month a trillion dollar defense budget which would be a 12 increase over this year. And, yeah, do you expect that to be a major top talking point as part of some of these conversations, or is that, you know, just just businesses?
Speaker 4:Yeah. And and and, also, I mean, we were talking about the defense budget earlier. It seemed like you were, like, lightly black pilled on it for a little bit. Have you updated your view?
Speaker 1:Well, mean, a part of
Speaker 6:why, yeah, it's always fun with Hillen Valley where we can't decide on the date until congress publishes its schedule because we are dependent on the elected officials, you know, sort of being there. Otherwise, it's not a very interesting event. Yep. So, anyways, a part of why it's next week is because congress is in session, you know, basically next week, and everybody's, you know, sort of flying into town on, you know, sort of Monday, both whether you're Yunsin Huang or you're, you know, senator Banks, both are flying in town on Monday. And next week is when they're both, you know, sort of discussing the reconciliation bill where they're basically gonna be, you know, increasing defense budget beyond the continuing resolution, to match some of the,
Speaker 8:you know, February bills that we talked about, you
Speaker 6:know, sort of last time around when we chatted about this, as well as starting to talk about next year's basically, you know, sort of defense budget. You know, I think, yeah, there's, you know, sort of clear signaling, you know, from the top that, there's gonna be an increase and in particular around the president's top priorities, which were nuclear weapons modernization
Speaker 4:Golden dome.
Speaker 6:Hypersonic boost glide vehicles, you know, sort of shipbuilding and then general reindustrialization. And so there's been talk of that reconciliation bill being a 50 to 200, you know, sort of billion, which obviously gets, you know, sort of the total last year bill,
Speaker 8:you know, pretty close to that, you know,
Speaker 6:sort of trillion dollar mark. And then, obviously, you know, sort of next year's budget, you know, sort of being at that trillion dollar mark. And so, yeah, there's a bunch of people that are literally on the house appropriations and senate, you know, house armed services committee and, you know, senate, you know, armed services committee that will be there. And I'm sure that they'll be, you know, sort of the the talk of the town. But it'll it's always interesting with this stuff where, like, Hillman Valley, we've heard from some of the elected officials, is actually some of the one of the few times where, even the elected officials gather at that level of density.
Speaker 6:Because most of the time, they're like, you know, even in these, like, you know, weeks where they're in session, man, it's like staff running around, doing papers, etcetera. They might briefly all go to the floor together, but they barely have a chance to talk on the floor. Like, we've actually heard that, like, some of the, like, bills end up getting negotiated, like, during the cocktail hour and, like, reception
Speaker 3:complicated an adventure. It's like if you can't put a bill or a budget on a napkin, like, it's just too complicated. So we're just running the federal government on napkins, and it's actually good.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 6:It's funny, like, I the last couple cocktail receptions, it's so funny where you're like, oh, it's like everybody's mingling, etcetera. It's literally, all the tech dudes are sitting over there, and then, like, all the elected officials are probably, like, scrambling, like, trying to figure out, like, okay. You know? You know, what is our, you know, sort of stance, etcetera. I know it's so funny because it's, like, it's bipartisan, but also, like, some of these people fucking hate each other.
Speaker 6:And so it's just, you know, last year, like, you know, you got Chuck Schumer giving like The US opening remarks, but then you've got his like Republican counterparts like all like rolling their eyes and scoffing and everything. I'm like, ah, DC, what a wonderful place.
Speaker 4:The swamp. The swamp.
Speaker 6:The swamp, baby.
Speaker 4:That's funny. I I we're gonna see you in a suit, right?
Speaker 6:You know It's the mayor. I have finally been given approval by my government relations team that when I go do one on one briefings with congressmen, I can now wear a t shirt with a blazer. Okay. But at Hill and Valley, that is a time where if I'm on stage with a senator, I'm definitely wearing a fucking suit and wearing matching shoes. What
Speaker 4:does it take to get a ticket to Hill And Valley these days?
Speaker 6:You know, I I am not I I don't think it's a, you know, sort of perfect process, but, you know, between Jacob, Christian, I, we do our best to, you know, securate the phenomenal, you know, sort of dinner list in daytime. I think with daytime last year, we weren't sure how many people to bring and then, like, the, you know, audience wasn't always fully filled. Mhmm. And so this year, we maybe swung a little, you know, too hard too soon, and I think now it's gonna be a fucking mob. So anyways, we're we're learning each year on how to, you know, sort of balance and what the proper process should be.
Speaker 6:But at this point, we are very at capacity on both. But in future years, you know, just hit up, yeah, delaney to founders fund dot com, jacob at state department dot gov, christian at one thirty seven ventures dot com, and, you know, beg for forgiveness or beg for hope and we'll figure out whether or we can get you there.
Speaker 4:That's awesome.
Speaker 3:What do you expect the dialogue to be around big tech is is, you know, such a charged word, but at the same time in the sort of AI race, you know, if you ignore Upstart Labs, even though they have billions of dollars, they're still young companies, which means big tech is, like, critical to national security. Do you expect there to be a conversation around you know, right now, you're seeing Facebook sorry, Meta just being sort of like dragged by the FTC The
Speaker 6:kind of system is collaborating.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Collaborating, which is which is crazy.
Speaker 6:And it's very important to feels like
Speaker 3:rehashing an acquisition that was approved, you know, that went through over a decade ago feels like such a massive distraction at a time when we don't want our big we want our big technology companies, you know, focused on winning this very important race. Right?
Speaker 6:Yes. But they made such big enemies where it's just like both side like, look. Zuck has, you know, done his best to cozy up to, you know, to Trump, White House, etcetera. You know, he's wearing his chains. He's tan.
Speaker 6:He's, you know Yeah. Looking again. He's in
Speaker 1:The USA. Hanging with
Speaker 6:Joe Rogan. But also, like, you know, the Dems hate him because they feel like, you know, they lost the twenty sixteen election because of him. And, you know, sort of Trump hates him because he feels like he lost the twenty twenty election because of him. And so Mhmm. You know, I don't think he made a lot of friends.
Speaker 6:And, you know, I don't see any politician balking at, like, the FTC going and dredging that stuff up. And, like, you know, even Kevin Systrom has a, you know, sort of bone to pick with him. And so I I definitely, you know, sort of buy into the, like, you the sort of distraction, you know, sort of narrative. I also kinda buy into the, yeah. I mean, like, look.
Speaker 6:Like, you know, I'm you know, we maybe are in a, like, parallel to the Gilded era. You know? Are we in the roaring twenties? Are we in the, like, you know, sort of depression thirties? You know you know you know, do these, you know, sort of were they not oligarchs.
Speaker 6:What was the name that they used for, like, the Gilded era? Robber barons?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. The barons. The barons.
Speaker 7:Barons The
Speaker 6:robber barons. Exactly. So, like, you know,
Speaker 7:may maybe there is a little
Speaker 6:bit of, you know, sort of robber baron mentality, you know, right now with some of these big tech companies. Man.
Speaker 4:I mean I mean, who's been advocating for monopolies? I mean, it's a crazy idea.
Speaker 6:I don't know. Crazy contact.
Speaker 1:It's almost
Speaker 4:like someone wrote a book on it and then everyone was like, that's exactly what we should do.
Speaker 6:We don't believe in the m word over here at Founders Fund. Yeah, want to invest where there's lots of competition and it's really hard to gain market share.
Speaker 4:Exactly. Just power law outcomes for whatever reason. Exactly. It could be any. What do you think about the, the idea that RAMP, should get a government contract, the government should run on RAMP?
Speaker 4:We were joking about it months ago. It seems to be getting more and more serious. Do you like the idea?
Speaker 6:You know, look, I think, the current smart card system within the GSA, is a pretty antiquated and old school system. You know, Trump and Doge want to root out a bunch of fraud. You know, know, ramp has seen, you know, even with some of the, you know, neoprimes, traditional defense contractors, people that work with the government, that even on, like, the commercial contractor side of things, they're able to root out things that are inefficiencies, etcetera. Mhmm. Man, can you imagine what happens when they, you know, sort of get implemented within the government?
Speaker 6:So, you know, not a done deal or anything, a lot of work to be done there, but I think it's pretty damn good for the country if we manage to get them in there. And apologies on that note, boys, I gotta run, but great having a little mini Delta V, mini Hill and Valley.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm looking forward to next week. It's gonna be very great.
Speaker 6:You guys in DC. Yeah. You in sea.
Speaker 1:See there.
Speaker 3:See you soon.
Speaker 1:We'll talk
Speaker 9:to Cheers. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 4:Let's go to an ad. We got Adquik, out of home advertising made
Speaker 8:Boom.
Speaker 4:Easy and measurable. Say goodbye to them.
Speaker 1:Makes an out of home advertising my trailer mood.
Speaker 4:Don't know how that ties to AdQuick, but I'm sure they'll love it.
Speaker 3:Golden Retriever mode is running in a a billboard for your series a.
Speaker 4:Yes. And and it's also it's also not overthinking it. Like Yeah. You're it's so easy to get into the the math of like, oh, I need to be able to measure every single performance metric. I mean, out of AdQuick makes out of home more measurable, but there still is a brand element to running ads.
Speaker 4:And this is a something that you see in every company as they mature. They eventually realize that it is it is worthwhile to do marketing that is not necessarily perfectly Correctly. True. In point, Jensen Huang, will be at Hill and Valley, dropping off gold plated GV 200 servers Rats. To the future AI builders, you And and endearing that community to him and that's and and a great billboard stunt can do that.
Speaker 4:So head over to adquick.com.
Speaker 3:I'm interested to see next week at Hill Valley what issues are truly bipartisan. Yes. Right? Energy production. Right?
Speaker 3:As societies produce more energy, prosperity tends to go You could imagine that being somewhat bipartisan.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Was working
Speaker 1:on a
Speaker 4:I I was people have been saying, oh, John, are you gonna run for president? I was thinking about, like, if I did, what my political platform would be, because I wanna be bipartisan, and was thinking my platform would be pretty simple. It'd just be GDP up, unemployment down Boom. GDP per capita up
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 4:Productivity up and government weeks down.
Speaker 3:Hard to argue with any
Speaker 4:of this. Exactly. Feel like I feel like every American could be behind a platform or a presidential candidate who just said, my goal is GDP maximization. Yeah. That seems pretty simple.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That seems like something
Speaker 3:everyone Give Citadel security right access to the
Speaker 4:Jane Street. Speaking of Jane Street, the trading revenues nearly doubled in 2024 to more than $20,000,000,000. Let's hear it for Jane Street folks. I know a lot of you were worried that they weren't making enough money, but they're back. Hackie McCormick says, man, SBF would be so rich if he stayed at Jane Street.
Speaker 4:Funny take. Very interesting. I'm always interested to see how these these details look. Bowl all
Speaker 1:twisted up. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Very, very fun.
Speaker 4:Woah. Woah. Yeah. What is going on there? But very fun.
Speaker 4:On the flip side, the information is reporting that lots of tech companies have had their hiring plans impacted. 19% in the survey said we cut staff. 33% said we plan to hire less. 30% said no impact, but we are evaluating the situation. 13% said our hiring plans stay the same, and 5% said we plan to hire more.
Speaker 4:Now, I wonder how much of that is driven just by the fact that only 5% of venture backed companies are on the upswing because it's kind of a long shot game, and so Possibly.
Speaker 10:They're not
Speaker 4:all scaling up. Yeah. But it is interesting that people could be cutting staff for a variety of reasons. It could be tariff related, but it also could be AI related. Could be a bunch of Or
Speaker 3:we plan to hire less could be Or
Speaker 4:it could just be if you have the time to fill out an information survey, your business is struggling. You're focusing on your business, maybe. I don't know.
Speaker 3:That's possible.
Speaker 4:Are the best companies really answering the survey? Well, I don't know.
Speaker 3:I do think these I do think these types of anonymous surveys are very interesting. I would it would be great to see them more breaking out broken out. Right?
Speaker 4:There's bit of game theory to it because, like, if if if if I get this and I am hiring, I'm gonna wanna sigh out my competition into firing everyone. So I'm gonna respond
Speaker 2:Say weak cuts staff.
Speaker 4:Then every then it becomes a meme. Everyone's like, oh, everyone's gotta cut staff. Everyone fires everyone. You're the last person you have to pick up the litter.
Speaker 1:Can hire
Speaker 4:all these people. Exactly. That's the way you win the game. Tyler asked for a dedicated supplement rundown from Jordy Hayes. Looking to outsource my thinking.
Speaker 4:So what do think of off? Give a comment. Oh, you do
Speaker 1:your poll.
Speaker 3:Let's pull it up.
Speaker 4:There's a nice picture of Tony Soprano in a stained glass window for some reason,
Speaker 2:I think.
Speaker 3:Beautiful. Giblied. Giblied.
Speaker 4:It's not quite Giblied. It's more stained glass window. But I like it.
Speaker 3:It's beautiful. Current stack, electrolytes heavily weighted towards magnesium.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 3:Magnesium is an electrolyte.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:So it usually comes in in various electrolyte products. But taking a lot more magnesium over
Speaker 4:Isn't magnesium a metal? I feel like it's a metal.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:Anyway That would be pretty metal. We need a metal sound effect.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, iron's important. Right? Mineral? Iron at all?
Speaker 3:No. Most people Don't
Speaker 4:do iron?
Speaker 3:To to
Speaker 1:my knowledge have
Speaker 3:have too much iron.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:And donating blood is a way
Speaker 4:to pull the iron
Speaker 3:out. Interesting.
Speaker 11:Okay. Then I'm
Speaker 3:on creatine, of course. I take zinc and vitamin c in a combination. Thiamine, which is a b vitamin. Okay. Your body can become thiamine deficient if you use nicotine.
Speaker 3:I do use nicotine.
Speaker 4:Thiamine to boost it back up.
Speaker 9:Yes.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 3:And then taurine Taurine?
Speaker 7:That's in Red Bull.
Speaker 3:Which is in Red Bull. Yeah. They were smart to do that. And then I'll cycle peptides from time to time. We we gotta get
Speaker 1:on a peptide cycle. You're not peptides?
Speaker 3:Not not the second, but historically, I've I've indulged.
Speaker 4:But those are performance sensing drugs?
Speaker 3:They're not legal for most professional athletes
Speaker 4:to
Speaker 3:See,
Speaker 4:you're not natty.
Speaker 1:Technically, I'm Yeah.
Speaker 3:Wouldn't I wouldn't I think claiming natty is like claiming you're not doing what
Speaker 4:it I I agree. I'm very pro abusing steroids.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But we should get on a peptide cycle together.
Speaker 4:Okay. And I wanna be on the Wolverine thing.
Speaker 1:I wanna be on the Yeah.
Speaker 3:PPC one five seven.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I wanna take whatever the LD fifty is. Give me just a hair under that. Yep. Give me just a hair under that.
Speaker 4:Anyway, dudes will buy a billboard and SF on the one zero one to announce getting a bed frame. That would actually go viral. You should do that if you're trying to raise money.
Speaker 3:I have acquired a bed frame, folks.
Speaker 4:Somebody should do it. Reach out to Adquick. They will set you up. But let's bring in public. What do we got?
Speaker 1:There we What's up guys? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4:Guys, I
Speaker 3:can't we can't hear you.
Speaker 8:What's that sound? What's that sound? What's that sound? It's so loud. It's happening.
Speaker 1:It's oh, is
Speaker 4:that the sound of
Speaker 8:the Asimarc, not Martin?
Speaker 1:What's show? It's happening. Oh, I'm at the Box
Speaker 4:Miami GP, Las Vegas GP. Oh, is
Speaker 1:that public advertising on the Master Martin f one?
Speaker 8:How did you get my voice mail to run on the show? That's Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's good.
Speaker 5:It just sounded like the sound effects of, like, Pacific Rim or something.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We got it from that influencer, Ashton Hall, the guy who has the the viral morning routine. He drops that sound effect, so we had to pull that over to our show. I see. But how are guys doing?
Speaker 3:Great to see you guys.
Speaker 4:Can you introduce yourselves a little a little bit and explain what the news is today?
Speaker 8:Absolutely. So I'm Yannick Kosio. That's live. Other Kosio cofounders of Public. We announced today, as you could tell from your last intro, we are the new sponsors of the Aston Martin Formula one team.
Speaker 3:That's right. Amazing. Oh, yeah. Love it. So amazing.
Speaker 3:Fantastic.
Speaker 4:Storied storied team, storied brand.
Speaker 3:And they're gonna write books about this partnership.
Speaker 4:I think so.
Speaker 1:I think so. We get gong
Speaker 8:for that or no?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Get a gong.
Speaker 1:Get a gong for that.
Speaker 3:We're also gonna
Speaker 4:pull up some some
Speaker 1:some video
Speaker 4:of of Aston Martins driving around, entertaining the viewers.
Speaker 3:Can you break down can you break down the process? I imagine, I I we know this has been in the works for a while, but what what was the process when, you know and and when did you even start thinking about doing something like this?
Speaker 8:Well so, I mean, let's talk about first why it makes sense for us first and then begin the process. So we started six years ago, I mean, as a fractional shares platform. We were, like, the first to do the whole first trading platform to do fractional shares, then then obviously became a big thing. But since then, I'd argue that the platform has matured a lot. I figured out we have one of the most powerful investing sort of suite of tools in America, multi asset investing, multiple account types, embedded deep AI research, and customers have evolved kinda with us.
Speaker 8:So now folks are coming in with hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in their accounts. To be honest, not everyone knows that we're there.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And so this partnership was a great opportunity for us to sort of raise some awareness around that and kinda get that message across, obviously, to the the right demographic as well.
Speaker 4:Can you talk about anatomy of the deal? How'd you meet the folks over there? Did this all start with the is there an agency involved? I know you guys do a lot of stuff internally. Is it just an email?
Speaker 4:Did you meet someone at an f one race? Like, how do you even meet these folks to
Speaker 8:Oh, power mode. No agencies.
Speaker 4:I love it.
Speaker 5:No. We have a we have a we have an investor on the cap table that happens to be involved with the team as well. And so through that, we got introduced to them. And this is also a deal where the asset management actually took part equity in public as well. And it's, you know, kind of like I think it's the first time they've really done this.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And and so a little bit of, like, experiment for them as well. Yeah. Well, like, we're seeing for them as well. And what was interesting is that the way they also think about it is that, you know, they have a platform.
Speaker 5:They have, you know, also sponsors that pay them, you know, ridiculous amounts of money and whatnot. So, like, they're gonna sitting, like, need another
Speaker 8:bill in box from a from a from another start
Speaker 5:up song, but they like the idea of finding opportunities that they feel they understand themselves as well. In our case, like, Global Wealth Transfer, their audience being the type of audience that has money to invest, US markets being one of the fastest growing markets for Formula One, generally speaking. It's the only country with three races Mhmm. And so on. And and so for them, The US focus and the focus of the audience that we had was, like, a good match.
Speaker 5:And so that's why, you know, for them, it was, you know, also just a good idea to to, you know, be a little bit closer involved and actually, like, join the cap table as well.
Speaker 3:How do how do you guys think about international long term get you know, do you see a world in the future where you have millions of users outside of the country? I know US has obviously been the been the focus today.
Speaker 8:Absolutely. But the way that starts is we actually launched an app called Alpha, which is a little bit of a spin out of our AI product. Launched that in international markets late last year as a separate kind of product. So that's all live and growing well in a bunch of European markets and and a few other places around the world. And so that's basically like Apple stocks with AI powers.
Speaker 8:It's how you think of it. You literally come in. You take a photo of your watch list, where you have it, and the AI if the auto follows everything and tells you why things are moving in real time, not just they're moving and by how much.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 8:you can definitely ask questions and do research and all that stuff. So that's, like, I would say, the first step in our international strategy in building that audience sort of abroad. And then, obviously, as you can imagine, investing services could come later because that's the aspect that has a regulatory component to it, which takes
Speaker 1:a lot of time.
Speaker 3:Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Can you talk about, how you actually envision the partnership manifesting in advertisements? Obviously, like logo on the car, but there are twenty twenty one races. I there are so many different places to put logos, integrate, throw have a box, have a party, have an after show, preshow, digital. There's so many different things that can package up into these actual partnerships. What what did that process look like, and where did you land?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I I wanna call out I wanna see Alonzo, you know, executing trades, you know, during a
Speaker 1:A pit stop. In the pit lane. During the stop.
Speaker 8:It's that fast, by the way, that you you can actually. Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But yeah. Totally. I mean, there's always whenever you do these deals, there's this sort of laundry list of stuff that you have access to and can do and whatnot. Right? That falls into at the passes at the events.
Speaker 5:So that falls into, like
Speaker 8:you know, we will have the logo and
Speaker 5:the halo and the logo tiny on the side of the car as well, but also during The US races, for example, and things like that. But one specific thing that we thought about is in our space of, like, kinda new broker investing apps, things like referral have been this, like, mainstream thing of get a free fractional stock and so on. And as we move more upmarket, the less that stuff worked. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Because if
Speaker 5:you got a little bit of money, let's be honest, you don't really give a shit about $5 of free stock. Yeah. And and so for us, we have a sense of, like, okay. What do people that, you know, have a little of money care about? And it's most cases experiences you might say have access to otherwise.
Speaker 5:And and so the sense of, like, this partnership is, like, one of the first ways for us to have the ability to give exclusive experiences to our customers through, know, certain giveaways in the app, through referral in the app, and so on to, for example, you know, win things like access to the pedagog, meeting greets with the drivers,
Speaker 4:and all that kind
Speaker 5:of stuff. Right? And in the future, obviously, like, we will figure out what are other ways to execute on that strategy as well. But the sense of it, like, what does referral for a more affluent audience actually look like and Yeah. Falls much more into things like experiences.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But this, specifically, also, just to finish the ramp quick, is, like, we like, basically, starting today, you can actually, in the app, win access to the paddock in the Vegas race later this year. And Amazing. It's actually find like, if you find the three little f one cars in the app, which is, like, hidden in different places in the app, and you find all three of them, then you essentially enter, you know That's awesome.
Speaker 8:And they're not easy to find, by the way, either. So it's not like
Speaker 4:a it's not like a
Speaker 8:thing that everybody will double It's fun.
Speaker 5:It's fun. It's just gonna twist out where they are. I mean, it's awesome. Go ahead.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna give the app to my three year old
Speaker 4:integrate with f one? Obviously, Red Bull doesn't make cars, or I guess they made that one car once. But in general, they don't make cars, but they're a huge f one sponsor with the whole team. Haas Automation's kind of in a similar similar boat, but then Aston Martin's more of a car brand. How do you think that that's evolved?
Speaker 4:And and is there a world where we see a public.comf1 team at some point?
Speaker 8:Well, not in the next couple of years. Because now we have this deal. No. Look. I I think what's interesting about the Formula one is it is the only sport that I can really think of that has scale and has this sort of thing where whenever Formula One comes into town, it's the whole show.
Speaker 8:Right? Yeah. It's a Super Bowl event 20 times in a year, basically. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 8:Because, like, yeah, you go to a Premier League match, two hours, you knock on a couple of pints, it's over, and you go about about your day. This is, the whole weekend.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 8:The circus comes into town. They talk about there's a lot of drivers and why, obviously. And so, therefore, it just lends itself very well to, like, a very intense focus type of exposure
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Which I think is really great. And I think you've seen that in and around the Super Bowl and a few other places, but in the Formula one, it just kinda happens many, many times throughout the the course of a year. And and I think that's what makes it interesting for b two b companies as well as for consumer companies, actually.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Did, did Drive to Survive factor into your calculations? I imagine there will be public.com branding that makes it into Drive to Survive just by nature of being on the car.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But that's the funny thing. It's like so with with Formula one, you either sponsor a team or you sponsor, you know, a race slash the league itself. And these are two separate things. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And Draft of Survive is more with the with the league itself and so on. And so the trick really for folks like us is what can you do that has the chance to make it into the storyline of
Speaker 1:the show?
Speaker 5:Alright. And so, like, you know, what kind of beef can we create with,
Speaker 1:I don't know, some
Speaker 5:other training app that, you know, sponsors some other team or something or, like you know? Like but, like, what kind of job we be part of, essentially? Yeah. So if you have ideas, I'll be shout. But, know Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'd love we'd love to we'd love
Speaker 3:to help. No. But I I mean, I can imagine, you know, just naturally the the you'll get placement in the show just as Alonzo and Lance have their moments in the show. Right? So very natural.
Speaker 8:And I but but, generally, you always have a multiplier with thing. There's a great Formula one game. Right? LEGO right now has a Formula one kind of thing going on. And so there's always kind of these these multipliers kinda happening in and around the sport.
Speaker 4:Yeah. What about other multipliers more on, like, a geolocation basis? I mean, I'm sure you could run geofenced ads in Vegas that weekend by billboards. Like, what are you thinking to get the most squeeze out of the event when it kinda comes together?
Speaker 8:I mean, there's a long like like I said, there's a long list of stuff you can do. It's a multiyear deal, so we also have a little bit it's starting in the Miami race in a couple of weeks, so that will be the first one. We've kicked off now this essentially scavenger hunt in the app where you can get access to Vegas Yeah. Paddock, etcetera, by finding these kind of cars around the app. And so I
Speaker 11:think there's a lot of
Speaker 8:stuff we can experiment with. I think relative to we're
Speaker 1:not
Speaker 8:quite as big as Aramco yet. Mhmm. They still have us a little bit on the market cap side. And so but, you know, but but but we might be one of the more nimble folks that can get a little bit more creative. And so I would would say, expect to see a a bunch more kind of stunt.
Speaker 3:How how did Lawrence Stroll's kind of leadership factor in the into the decision? Like, he's obviously has a, you know, like running the team, but then simultaneously, like, you know, has the manufacturer side too with Aston Martin. He's like seems like extremely convicted to winning and and making a statement. And, you know, as a as a car enthusiast, like, I've watched what Aston is doing. Again, really, really committed to winning.
Speaker 3:They've, like, massively improved their did that give you guys extra confidence in going and making a partnership knowing that, hey, the team by itself is not when you look at other teams like Haas and things like that who's had a sort of history of of economic challenges, that's not exactly, you know, the team that you wanna attach yourself to even though they have
Speaker 5:But, also, like like, generally speaking, there's a lot of, like, change happening in f one right now. Right? You have a bunch of mixed ups and those drivers that switch teams. You have, you know, behind the scenes, you know, the the, you know, one of the guys who, you know,
Speaker 8:builds engines, one of the the the the engineers from
Speaker 5:the from the rep from the rep team who was hired now at and so on. And so there's, like right now, there's a lot of change happening, and it's not just, you know, seeing Verstappen win every time that's, you know, having, a joke of just, like, putting a piece of tape on your TV so the race becomes more fun to watch. Like, over his name. So and, you know, it's like there's so much change happening right now. And I think that is why I think this season and the next season and the win after, I think, are gonna be super exciting.
Speaker 5:Right? There's a there's a new US team coming in with Cadillac next year. Mhmm. There's a movie with the fifth coming out in June or July this year. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And so there's just, like, a lot happening around it Yep. You know,
Speaker 6:which is quite
Speaker 1:awesome.
Speaker 8:But, yeah, I I think you're totally right. Like, the where Aston Martin sits right now is kinda perfect for us. Right? Because it's not like it's it's it's it's a team that is still a little bit on the up and up, but I think we'll be very competitive over the next couple of years.
Speaker 3:Yep. You're
Speaker 4:already Cool. If you're already wearing dark green, are we gonna see you guys driving around in some Aston Martin street cars? Do you have any favorite picks or historical Aston Martins that you've been thinking about? Are you a James Bond fan? Absolutely.
Speaker 4:You need to say
Speaker 8:Bond's car. Right? They literally say something in one of the Aston Martin movies. From royalty to double agents Yeah. You know, in between.
Speaker 8:And so, obviously, now in New York City, it doesn't make a ton of
Speaker 2:sense of the DB.
Speaker 4:No. No. In in New York, you need to get the Valkyrie, clearly. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Roads are a little bumpy. I'm sure the, you know, the clearance on that thing isn't great, but it is street legal, so why not be whipping around Fifth Avenue? You
Speaker 3:need to basically change your yeah. You probably need to change your tires like every 200 miles or something like that. But I'm curious, did you guys get any messages this morning from friends back in Europe like, hey, I I saw the news. Like, that's that's awesome. I I you know, then you're like, hey, guys, we've been a billion dollar, you know, company for a while, like, you know.
Speaker 3:This is like, you know, the first time. Like, we we were Yeah. We were in like Business Insider like two weeks ago, and and some people were messaging John and I, like, oh, congratulations. And we're like, I think we get more views than Business Insider. Like but thank I
Speaker 5:can imagine. A lot of lot of people asked us the tickets. That's for sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You guys are gonna be extra All the all the people
Speaker 8:that had, a 25 k angel investment, then I'll come in, like, so
Speaker 1:They're like Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I'll be in the I'll be
Speaker 1:in the paddock. Right? Yeah. Yeah. You can get
Speaker 4:me tickets to the whole season. Right? Like, what does that cost? Oh, great. Quarter million.
Speaker 4:Well,
Speaker 3:I'm extremely excited. I'm gonna be even more excited to watch. I have another reason to, you know, turn it on at, like, 4AM or whatever Pacific whenever, you know, the international races happen. And we we should be signing a lease for our new studio. And we're gonna have a lot more space, so we should figure out how to get a car in in the background one way
Speaker 5:or You'd be surprised how cheap it actually is.
Speaker 3:I know. I know. I remember our I remember our conversation.
Speaker 5:I'm not sure if I'm allowed to, like, say these numbers on here, but Yeah. It is actually not that bad.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Cheap cheaper than a real ass you know, a regular Aston Martin.
Speaker 5:I can go drive. It doesn't have an engine or anything. Yeah. Yeah. But, like, like, show pieces and you, find this hotel lobby or something sometimes, you know.
Speaker 3:No. I want the I want it, like, on, like on the back on the back wall of
Speaker 4:the I mean, went toward Red Bull head Red Bull's headquarters in Santa Monica A Couple Years ago, and they had the full f one car there on the half pipe, and it just made the vibe in the office like fantastic. And so, yeah, I I highly recommend getting an f one car. Everyone should, really. You know, part of the three car garage, you know, you need the family hauler, you need the weekender, and you need the f one car, of course.
Speaker 1:Okay. Absolutely.
Speaker 4:Why doesn't everyone just do this? I don't
Speaker 3:get it. I don't know why we're the first to think of this.
Speaker 9:Yeah. That's crazy. Job of. I
Speaker 3:agree. It's crazy. Anyway, awesome, guys. Well, congratulations and congrats to the whole team. It's gonna be, you know, very excited for for Miami and everything to come.
Speaker 5:Cool, man. Awesome. Alright.
Speaker 1:We will see you soon.
Speaker 3:Cheers. Great to see you. Later. We're getting an f one car, folks.
Speaker 4:We need to. I I I think we should daily it, know? Just you know, it's gonna be a little rough, gonna be a little bumpy. But you pull up in an f one car, you pull up with a fantastic Patek Philippe on your wrist, like the guy in that picture that you picked up on Bezel. Go to getbezel.com.
Speaker 4:Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source any watch on the planet. You don't wanna be get caught on race weekend with a bare wrist.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 4:That's that's unacceptable. Yeah. It's Yeah. It's laughable. You can't
Speaker 3:RM would be a good option for race weekend.
Speaker 4:It is a racing machine on the wrist.
Speaker 10:Yeah. We've been
Speaker 4:looking at some RMs.
Speaker 3:I can see Bezel going over and and and, you know, maybe, you know, getting their own team at some point
Speaker 4:I would
Speaker 3:love the trajectory that they're on.
Speaker 4:I would love that. Anyway, our next guest is in the studio. Let's bring him in. We got Alfred from Listen Labs announcing and we got his co founder.
Speaker 3:Boom. And they got the jack they got the jackets. They're not they're not quite
Speaker 1:Color coordinated. Love Dressing up
Speaker 4:for the We always appreciate people dress up when they coordinate their outfits. I am. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 9:Doing well. Yeah. Exciting.
Speaker 4:Can you give us a little overview of the the history of the company? Introduce yourselves. Tell us about the round. Give us the basics.
Speaker 9:For sure. So Listen is an AI customer researcher that can find and interview thousands of users and tell you what they want. And today, we're or yesterday, we announced R Series A and 27,000,000 in total raised led by Sequoia, Conviction, and Pear. Mhmm. And, yeah, we work with some amazing customers like Microsoft, Canva, and Chubbies.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And the core concept of what we do is, like, every company wants to be customer obsessed. So imagine you wanted to take that to the most, like, fullest extent. And that's basically you would talk to every customer you could, and you talk to them, try to understand exactly who they are and what they think about. And you'd find a way to synthesize all of those conversations into a clear understanding of their behavior.
Speaker 9:And you wouldn't do this just once. You do it all the time, every time you make a change to your product or service or marketing, and that's what we do.
Speaker 4:Cool. I can imagine a ton of different ways to get customer insights out of all the data. Just using Microsoft as an example, like, there's probably 1,000,000 tickets, in some database that's just a bunch of text that hasn't been processed. You, you know, run an LLM over that. That makes sense.
Speaker 4:It sounds like you're doing something more advanced where you're actually calling people up. Maybe there's a a screen recording and interaction and some questions back and forth. Is that all AI driven? Walk me through the case study, I guess, with Microsoft or anyone else you wanna you wanna chat about.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So it's an AI that can have a one on one and then it can have hundreds of those conversations in parallel.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And what we found is that kind of you have to reach enough people to really understand what people want. So if you speak to ten ten of them, most of them won't have much interesting things to say. And the second thing is the the synthesis. If you have, like, hundreds of conversations, finding the signal over the noise is is you know, AI is amazing is amazing at
Speaker 1:that. Sure.
Speaker 10:And and,
Speaker 9:you know, AI is also the ultimate listener. It's more empathetic than than myself. And as a case study, like, one of my favorite ones is Chubbies. So Sure. They recently launched a new product based on learnings that they made from Listen that is growing really, really fast.
Speaker 9:And it's a little bit weird, but it was an AI or it was interviewing kids using Listen.
Speaker 3:Interesting.
Speaker 9:And they were much more honest to our AI versus, like, speaking to a stranger. And and it enabled them to learn a lot about, like, how the how to make their shorts more comfortable and basically created a a new product with a new liner in the shorts that just felt much better for the kids, and now that product is growing really fast.
Speaker 3:Do you do you believe there's sort of a customer love flywheel in a sense where the more someone likes a product, the more inclined they are to wanna talk about how to make it better and is part of what you guys are doing helping to like accelerate that where a product could have some customers but it's hard to really get scaled feedback because nobody really loves the product enough. Like, I I get emails all the time. I'll try a SaaS product and I'll churn and then they'll reach out to me being like, hey, you know, I I you know, can can we get feedback? And usually, I'm not super inclined to to provide feedback. Sometimes I do if I feel like it's just off.
Speaker 3:But how do you think about sort of, like, building that sort of customer feedback flywheel and converting it into customer love?
Speaker 9:Yep. Sorry, Andrew. I mean,
Speaker 2:I think what is interesting is the you know, we we have this at bigger companies, right, what you actually you know, you have a lot of feedback as you said before, but actually talking to real customers is is actually pretty complex. Right? It's at the bigger companies that typically outsource it to to external agencies because there's a lot of hoops they have to go through. And, you know, they touch, like, a hundred k, and then they schedule, like, 20 interviews and and do that. And, you know, what we enable them to do is and instead of using using these external agencies, they can just use us.
Speaker 2:Right? It's cheaper. It's faster. It's better because it can reach way more people. And, yeah, I think that's an exciting opportunity also for, you know, in general for, you know, AI founders to you know, if you can replace one of those, like, external, you know, external partners, basically, you just you just flip a switch and, you know, you sell an outcome instead of just the software.
Speaker 1:When you talk to when you
Speaker 3:talk to maybe bigger, older companies, are you surprised at how they sometimes don't have a process in place to talk to customers? Like, I feel like it's part of Silicon Valley, like ethos, lore, you know, PG is just sort of like banging founders over the head saying like talk to your customers, talk to your customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, talk to your customers.
Speaker 3:And so it's it's a part of the culture here, but I I imagine there's some companies that you're maybe in a sales process with that don't have any infrastructure or or very little infrastructure in place relative to how sort of like scaled they are?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, a lot of the products and services out there are kind of, they they they suck. You know? And and it's it's it's it's so often that you use a product and you think like, okay. What were they even thinking?
Speaker 9:Like, clearly, they're not keeping us in mind here. And for some of these large companies, you know, they do wanna invest in talking to users, but it's just so complex because there's a lot of bureaucracy even to reach out to a user. You kind of have to go through legal, and it becomes too complicated. And that's why they have to use these consulting firms to kinda go through it. But we've been able to kind of streamline that process.
Speaker 4:Can you talk about how these interviews happen today and how they'll evolve? I can imagine chatbot interaction to begin with, but at the like, the the voice interfaces are pretty close. Virtual avatars are getting pretty close. What's the product like today? Where do you see it going?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So we Fern and I, we actually, like, started a company by virtue of, you know, trying to solve the problem for ourselves. And and we had this AI consumer app that had 20,000 downloads in one day, and it really blew up out of nowhere. We're running with expensive GPUs spending, like, a thousand dollars per hour, and it was our personal credit cards attached. And, like, the users were churning really fast.
Speaker 9:So we're like, okay. How do we actually solve this problem? And then we we built a very simple prototype. It was a chatbot that could just talk to all the users and summarize what they wanted. And we found things that was really useful, like which template should we add?
Speaker 9:How should we fix our onboarding? And now we have built out this kind of entire stack where it's essentially three steps. It's first interviewing, and we do that over video.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And we have, like, the video understanding both of of the emotional, like, experience and the what they do on the screen. And then it's finding the people. So we actually allow you to kind of find all the customers through a database of millions of users and then, of course, analysis. And the ceiling for analysis is really high. You can hire McKinsey, and they'll charge you a million bucks to give a a PowerPoint deck.
Speaker 9:And, yeah, we're we're working on that.
Speaker 2:That makes a
Speaker 3:ton of sense. How how many what what are some kind of edge cases or or companies that you you would expect to start using Listen that that maybe are nontraditional? Like, my immediate thought is that we should throw up, like, you know, basically a number that you can just call and Yeah. Give feedback on the show, which, you know, we we're live fifteen hours a week, so it's hard to find time for phone calls. But it would be awesome if people could call in and be like, hey, like, talk more about this or Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, thing things like that. But how yeah. Do you do you see this type of user research expanding into industries that maybe just aren't customers of these different consulting firms today just because of the the costs?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. I think there's a huge new market you can open up for, you know, smaller companies or companies that couldn't traditionally afford or couldn't even honestly wait for twelve weeks until you get, like, this report back. I think that's very exciting. But if you take a step back and think about, you know, what makes a great company, and you can even go back to YC of, you know, what they think is like you you mentioned it before.
Speaker 2:Right? Write code and talk to talk to users. And, you know, that's really the core. But those two parts, you know, we have the writing the code, which now AI agents are doing more and more. You know, it's getting easier to to build things.
Speaker 2:So what becomes more important is actually building the right thing and
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Kind of having the fee per feedback talking to the customers. So that's what we are building. And, you know, it's almost scary, but maybe the future, that's that's what we're gonna do. Like, that's maybe the last thing that humans will do, like, of telling the AI what to do Yeah. What to build, being the tastemakers, which podcast to listen to.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Just wired directly into Cursor or Devon, and then it just takes the feedback and immediately implements the change and
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 3:It is it is an interesting scenario to think about where where Listen is directly integrated into the Agent. Into the basically developer tools where somebody can say, like, hey. I want a feature to do this, and then it just immediately, you know, gets built. So Pretty awesome. I'm sure you guys
Speaker 4:are thinking about something like that. On on the post interview analysis side, I can imagine that AI is very good at aggregating sentiment and tagging things, essentially creating, like, the top 10 requests, the word clouds. But, have you found LLMs or any of the modern AI tooling being useful in finding, like, the diamonds in the in the rough? Like, everyone's telling you to build a faster horse. There's one person who's clocked it and says, no.
Speaker 4:You gotta go into the automobile for your product, and and you're able to dig that out with modern technology.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So we we have, like, a module that finds surprising statements and outliers sentiment.
Speaker 4:That's cool.
Speaker 9:And I think there's also interesting things around kind of building a profile of understanding who this user is and if they give good advice or not. And we actually have, like, a quality score of each participant, so you should listen to all feedback. And and as we've done more interviews, we've done now more than 300,000, we can kind of build a elite set of taste makers, essentially, that you can reach out to that tend to give, like, great advice.
Speaker 3:Makes sense. How how did the round how did the round come together? Obviously, got basically the who's who of Venture in. Was anything surprising? Was it you know, did did you guys go go out to run a process, or did did people come to you?
Speaker 9:Well, it's a very competitive fundraising market for the for the business today. But, you know, we're we're very lucky to work with exceptional partners. Brian Shrier at Sequoia, he also led the first investment in Qualtrics, which is
Speaker 8:Yep.
Speaker 9:The biggest outcome in in the customer feedback world. Mhmm. And then it's amazing working with Mike Vernal Conviction
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 9:Who's done, yeah, the best deals.
Speaker 3:When when Listen has as big an outcome as Qualtrics, what pro sports
Speaker 4:team are you guys gonna you
Speaker 1:guys gonna buy?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I actually spoke to I'm from Sweden. I spoke to Ryan Smith at Qualtrics. And the first thing he said, like, oh, yeah. You you I just bought a hockey team.
Speaker 9:You guys Yeah. You guys love hockey. Right? Maybe So maybe think table tennis sport.
Speaker 1:That would be.
Speaker 3:Table tennis.
Speaker 1:Table tennis. Yeah. What what
Speaker 4:is the most popular sport in Sweden right now?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Maybe chess boxing? No. Table tennis, I don't know.
Speaker 4:Table tennis?
Speaker 1:Table tennis.
Speaker 2:It is very popular.
Speaker 9:We we went we almost won the Olympics. Very cool. There
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Oh, that's rough. It happens. It
Speaker 3:Awesome, guys. Well, congratulations. Congratulations. Very exciting. And let us know when we when it's ready for for podcasting.
Speaker 4:Yes. You know?
Speaker 1:We'll roll
Speaker 3:it for sure. We'll roll it out. Take care.
Speaker 1:We'll talk
Speaker 9:to you See you. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 3:See you.
Speaker 4:Great. And we got an ad for Eight Sleep. Go to eightsleep.com/tbpn. Get a pod for Ultra. They got a 30 free trial, a five year warranty, free returns, free shipping.
Speaker 4:Go check it out. Oh, 100.
Speaker 3:Know how close. Don't know how this is possible. I think autopilot was doing the work. My little one was throwing up last night. Oh.
Speaker 3:It's rough. But so credit to my wife, real real MVP MVP. For getting her taken care of. But who we got next?
Speaker 4:We got Eric from Freeform coming into the studio, talking about manufacturing, going back into hard tech. Thursday tends to be a little bit leaning heavy on the hard tech. Every once in while, we got Deleon kicking it off, and then we try and bring in some robotics, some manufacturing founders. Always an interesting discussion to have with those folks. We are talking to Formic as well.
Speaker 4:They're doing robotics and I'm sure we'll talk to many more. Although, we've hit a ton of the companies at this point. When you do 20 interviews a week, you can you can create a market map pretty quickly. You can churn
Speaker 3:through We are the market map.
Speaker 4:We are the market map.
Speaker 3:America is our market map.
Speaker 4:Well, let's bring him in. Eric, how you doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome to the I'm
Speaker 4:doing great.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me, Yeah.
Speaker 4:Thanks for thanks for hopping on. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company?
Speaker 10:Absolutely. So, Eric Pilich, CEO, founder of Freeform. We do you know, really, we're bringing AI to metal three d printing. My background was early employee at SpaceX, worked there for over ten years. I ran the Merlin engine program for Falcon nine and the Raptor program for Starship Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And kinda saw the potential of three d printing, metal three d printing firsthand, and then left to go and and and actually drive it into, you know, industrial commercial use.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I'm assuming you're a key player in May in in transitioning the sort of engine from this, like, you know, crazy blob I'm sure
Speaker 4:you've seen the image
Speaker 3:of the we'll try to pull the image up on the screen. What was three d I I imagine, was was three d printing, you know, part of of how you guys were were iterating? Or were you not able to leverage the tech that that you guys have now?
Speaker 11:Yeah. No. It was.
Speaker 10:I think the the thing that I saw was the enabling, you know, potential of three d printing, but how slow and crappy it was, to be honest. Like, we were doing things with Raptor that, you know, we were invented we were we were, know, innovating in the rocket space for the first time in decades, truly. People think rockets are super complicated, but really the technology hasn't changed much in a long time. Then this manufacturing technology comes along that allows you to control physics in a different way. I mean, true true.
Speaker 10:If you look at the way you make metal things, the really there haven't been these new disruptive technologies in a really, really long time. So, you know, printing enabled Raptor, which I would argue is the one of the most amazing, and high performing rocket engines ever in the history of humanity.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Can you talk about how metal three d printing actually works? I think I'm I'm familiar with, like, kind of consumer level three d printing, and that makes sense to me. You melt some filament, and it's basically melted plastic through a metal nozzle. If you're melting metal, doesn't that melt the nozzle?
Speaker 4:How does this all work?
Speaker 10:So we use lasers
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 10:To melt metal powder layer by layer.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 10:And so you think of it, you're just slowly building, you know, layer upon layer upon layer of you put a layer of metal powder out and use a laser to kind of selectively melt where you want and then do that again and again and again. Yep.
Speaker 4:And then, how do you think about the decision to, manufacture a part using subtractive manufacturing versus additive manufacturing? I'm sure, you know, you're obviously very bullish on three d printing, but there must be limits and things that you say, hey. We're not just gonna go three d print a whole bunch of, like, rebar because we can just
Speaker 10:A %.
Speaker 4:We can just mold that or something.
Speaker 1:I don't know. A hundred.
Speaker 10:But No. That that's exactly right. I mean, I think one of the things that sets Freeform apart from I I think really every other three d printing metal printing company out there is we we aren't developing the technology because we think it's cool. You know, we're not pushing for three d printing because, you know, it's cool. We don't print pencil holder, you know, bottle openers, pens, and pencils.
Speaker 10:We just don't do that stuff because, frankly, like, people don't care. The to get to your question specifically, it's like, what is it actually good at? What is the value proposition of the technology? And and it's truthfully today amazing for very complex geometries, very complicated things. And we're very candid with customers about should you machine it, you know, subtractively make it, or should you print it?
Speaker 10:You know, what we're doing is enabling the the next you know, the oh, we've built the fastest, highest volume metal printing platform on the planet. We have it here in Hawthorne. We're about a quarter mile from SpaceX. You know, I would then say we we, you know, our primary customers are some of the, you know, most exciting and innovative aerospace and defense companies out Without naming any specific Yeah.
Speaker 1:The name names.
Speaker 4:Of course.
Speaker 10:And you know, we're right down the street and you know, our our take on it was to commercialize the technology, we need to be able to do high volume. Yes. You know? And then by doing high volume, then we can bring the price down. Yep.
Speaker 10:You know, and and that that was the thesis actually was Yep. Gotta do a lot of volume and and bring the price up.
Speaker 3:Yep. You talk about your business model? Are you selling the finished product? Are you selling the machine? Yep.
Speaker 3:Or are you thinking about that in in kind of different stages? Because I imagine in the future, like, an end customer would just have one of your devices and and they could operate it themselves. Is that where you're
Speaker 4:going?
Speaker 10:Yeah. No. No. So that's a great question. The business model is we just provide turnkey parts.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. So we actually handle everything. Mhmm. We print them if it needs post machining, it needs holes reamed, needs surfaces turned. We do all of that in house.
Speaker 10:All the metrology, you know, we'll do CMM inspections, high res three d scanning, anything the customer needs. We you know, the whole thing of the industry is is really complicated and fractured. And so when we went out, you know, six, seven years ago and started figuring out, hey. What is the right business model in the space? I kept my my head my brain kept going back to and and by the way, I worked directly with Elon for my entire career at SpaceX.
Speaker 10:So this first principle's kinda thinking that everybody says they do. I feel like I was indoctrinated in the actual school of it, you know, by him. You know? But I kept thinking like, man, you know, we're melting stuff with a laser and it you know, we care about single digit microns of of precision. This isn't, you know, traditional metal manufacturing.
Speaker 10:Like, this isn't a CNC machine. So customers, you know, why are they so unhappy with the space? And and when they buy a machine, why are they disappointed? Because they don't know how to use it. It's so it's more akin to, like, semiconductor fabrication than, like, subtractive many you know, metal manufacturing.
Speaker 10:What So we said we need to own all of it then and to to answer the question. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That makes sense. What what it is you you don't have to go into super explicit detail, but I'm curious how you think about, you know, margins. A lot of these, you know, traditional software VCs have have sort of been chirping on x over the last couple years. Hey. You're putting hundreds of millions of dollars into these manufacturing businesses, assuming they're gonna have, you know, software margins, and that that hasn't been the case historically.
Speaker 3:Are you guys getting so efficient that that you can achieve kind of greater margin profiles, or is it just about sort of scale?
Speaker 10:Absolutely. I mean, that's exactly where we're at today. Our margins are fantastic. And the technology is fundamentally new and enabling, which means, you know, I get that question a lot. It's like, well, even if you can charge higher margins now, isn't this a race to the bottom?
Speaker 10:The answer is, you you know, that that is true over a long time scale for any industry. Right? Anything that gets commoditized over fifty or a hundred years and highly optimized, it it ultimately becomes a race to the bottom. And the question is how long, and the technology that we've developed and are the capabilities that we have are enabling new products, new they're enabling innovation in in industries that are you know, we're providing the tools that people are truly, like, innovating on the design and and and and and integration fronts. So, and performance.
Speaker 10:And so, you know, I think, as long as we continue to stay at the front of that and the technology is getting better every day. When I say, you know, I don't love to to use AI buzzwords, but we that is what we're doing. We're we're bringing, like, AI to to to to three d printing such that the next part coming off the platform is even better than the last one. And and so, you know, because of that and the process is constantly getting better and we're coming up with new materials and new features and new functionality, then, you know, I think I can make the argument that the margins will stay high for a very long time. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And and especially when you start looking at the the places where, you know, we've developed technology that fundamentally unlocks the ability to develop new materials. You know? So now we own the material. We have the the technology to actually leverage it, and then it enables something important, you know, maybe in the semiconductor space or in the air in, you know, the rocket space or even the automotive space.
Speaker 4:Yeah. In that in that new materials, I mean, I've I've talked to some people who do the subtractive manufacturing with CNC, there's, like, different types of aluminum, different alloys. Like Mhmm. Is that something you're already doing? And do you just handle that for your customer?
Speaker 4:Are you testing different, like, alloys? Is that how you think about that? Or or what do you mean when you mean new materials?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Our business model today is not yet the truly development of new materials.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 10:That it's we've done some of that. We work with another very large well known customer that I would say is in the general broad family of customers that
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:You know, we won't mention specifically
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 10:That we've been working with them on development of some new alloys that enable, you know, I think, some pretty cool things for them. And but that's, like, not that's more of a one off today. It's it's the the reason why they're interested in working with us on this is because we've developed the sensing and compute platform and have the the datasets and the the sensors to actually engineer and develop the materials at the metallurgical level
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 10:That no other printing company has. I mean, you know, Freeform is really it's it's in the three d printing space, you know, we're we're we're like SpaceX, you know, the the the the the mindset of of those organizations and talent of those organizations. You know, the metal manufacturing market has generally been viewed as this kinda, like, stagnant, dimly lit, rusty Yeah. You know, oily machine shop. So we had to go out and find, know, like, rocket scientists to develop the technology, you know, to be able to do this.
Speaker 10:Know? And that's one of the reasons why, like, NVIDIA made a a substantial investment in us recently as they saw what we were doing on the compute and data side, and they wanna be a part of it.
Speaker 4:Are the different vectors of optimization in metallurgy? I imagine cost and weight and strength are important in space, but, like, is electrical conductivity important? Like, what else is important to think about when you're thinking about the material, either that you're selecting or eventually, kind of building from first principles?
Speaker 10:Absolutely. It depends on the application. Mhmm. You know? It for for example, like heat exchangers.
Speaker 10:You know, metal printing is very good today even at high cost if for conventional, like, other shops or or if you're buying a conventional machine. It's very good at very, very complicated geometries that you either can't make any other way or they're, you know, prohibitively expensive or difficult to make any other way. And those do generally fall in a couple categories. They're like fluid components or heat exchangers, things that you know, thermal devices. And so in in an application like that, you care a lot about, you know, the thermal performance of the material.
Speaker 10:In other cases, you might be putting parts inside a gas turbine engine. This is another typical application for three d printed parts. And in that case, you want something that's, like, strong when it gets hot. You know? So there are it it really does depend on, you know, the application.
Speaker 10:And I think the the thing for us is we actually have the platform and the feedback and the analytics to be able to close the loop on whatever the particular, you know, feature of the material or or application that you need.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You I mean, you mentioned, putting a three d printed part in a gas turbine engine. We've been hearing that, China has been having a lot of trouble manufacturing planes to compete with Boeing.
Speaker 3:Specifically jet engines.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Why is a jet engine so hard? Can you just three print
Speaker 1:three d printed at
Speaker 4:some point? I mean, I imagine that, like, China is
Speaker 3:capable of Yeah. Why is it so hard, Eric? Why did it take you ten years
Speaker 4:to Yeah. Exactly. How to do it? Exactly. But can you just, like, put this, like, scan the seven forty seven and then print the seven forty seven?
Speaker 4:It's a it's
Speaker 1:a copy machine. That's what
Speaker 10:you're Exactly. Someday. Yes. That I mean, you know, the the vision for us at Freeform has always been, to take the, you know, the complexity out of it and to provide a, you know, a a lights out, a truly everybody says automated factories. You know, to provide a lights out factory that is truly automated.
Speaker 10:The unique thing about metal printing is this is actually possible. Mhmm. CNC machining and other subtractive methods that were there's no way to do to truly do that. Mhmm. There's just they're they're they're just today.
Speaker 10:There is not.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Printing, we're already entirely digital. It's like you take a digital file. The machine doesn't care what you're printing. It just prints it, you know, and then automating the rest of that. And then you mentioned China.
Speaker 10:So, obviously, the joke about why are gas turbines hard, you know, I don't think gas turbines are hard. I think rocket engines are harder. Gas turbines, you know, are easier in a lot of ways. But the the you know, China is a good example where, you know, I get quite frustrated that, you know, we we are we are a a manufacturing technology company that is developing capability that is not only gonna affect and improve the lives of of people, in general, but also is critically important to our national security as a country. And, you know, China is investing in the three d printing space.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:They are building, you know, huge factories full of these conventional machines. They don't have our technology. They don't have the ability to you know, they can go make a hundred laser, whatever number of laser machines. Those parts are still junk. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And, you know, we are developing this in The US for The US. We obviously do quite a bit of defense work, and it does get frustrating. You mentioned China, and it's I had to put my plug in of you know, it's frustrating that I do feel companies like ours. There was a question earlier about software margins and businesses and VC stuff. You know?
Speaker 10:Yeah. We're not a software business. But the interesting thing about Freeform is it's where the bits and the atoms are combined, which I think makes us even more interesting. You know, you want your 5,000 x, 10,000 x, 20,000 x company, you get it at a company like this, at at Freeform. You know, you're not gonna get that.
Speaker 3:Can you talk about some of the stress of of working with space companies? I imagine, like, you know, you guys aren't doing launches yourselves anymore. You're probably more relaxed than you were when you were at SpaceX. But at the same time, I'm sure you get, you know, a a call or an email now and then being like, hey. We need this by, you know, Sunday night at this, you know, specific time because we're going to space.
Speaker 3:You know, what what's it like kind of like working, you know, with with end customers around that Yeah. Type type of business?
Speaker 10:That's a great question. The you know, truthfully, I'm probably more stressed now than I was when I was sitting face to face with Elon three times a week. Because because I feel like the the scope of what I focus on today is I don't know. Actually, I can't I don't the scope of what I focused on there was, like, I kinda knew, you know, where I was. Here, it's, like, all over the you know, top to bottom, you know, everything kind of ultimately falls on me in some capacity.
Speaker 10:The but it is stressful. We get this with exactly what you just said all the time. You know, we get a call from customer that says, hey. Guess what? We tried to get these somewhere else.
Speaker 10:The supplier let us down. You know? Can you guys hook us up and get these done by Sunday? Mhmm. That can definitely be stressful.
Speaker 10:I think also, you know, the nature of a start up, especially one with as many moving parts as we have, you know, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a company that's more vertically integrated than us truly and does as much as we do in house. Yep. You know, with such a small number of people actually today still. Yeah. You know, we're building the plane while we're flying it.
Speaker 10:So, you know, at the end of the day, we deliver on time, and we've started to build a reputation and a and, you know, if you will, like a brand with these important customers that they come to us when they want their problem solved. You know, they come to us with the hard stuff. And and when they they can rely on us and we do everything we can to make sure we deliver on, you know, before promise and better be you know, exceed expectations.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you do you do you feel like
Speaker 3:you have an edge? I I imagine a lot of your competitors are, you know, family kind of multigenerational companies and or private equity owned. And, like, I I just feel like you're clearly in a very different, you know, mindset, right, of, like, you know, to to to say the the meme, but, like, founder mode, like, we need to over deliver. We need to constantly be faster. Like, it's not enough to respond to a customer in two hours.
Speaker 3:We need to respond in thirty minutes max, like, that kind of thing is that, you know, I think we've heard about from various founders on the show that, you know, when they email somebody in China, even if it's 2AM for them, they respond instantly. In America, they might get a response two weeks later, and it's like, hey. Fill out this form. So talk about kinda, like, bringing that sort of, like, mentality that you have to to this industry.
Speaker 10:A %. So I feel that we have an unfair advantage for a bunch of reasons. I think I was raised in the school of SpaceX, you know, 02/2005. You know, early on, there were there were 50 people, 60 people. I was there until there were 10,000 people.
Speaker 10:And, you know, I think that that the things that I learned that that are just second nature to me of immediate. You know, you do it now. Call people on the phone. This is something that's been lost, you know, over the last several years, and I and I and I do see it. You know, we hire you know, we're hiring.
Speaker 10:We interview all the time. This has gotten lost, but that is something that we have that I don't think the rest of the three d printing space, you know, the industry has. You know, we don't advertise a lot. In fact, we very intentionally do not align ourselves with the traditional metal printing. You know, I'm not trying to alienate anyone, but, you know, we're just I don't even wanna be compared because it's not even fair.
Speaker 10:We have done so much more and moved so much faster with so much less money than the rest of the whole industry. And there there's just so much noise, and I just don't I don't I don't play that game. I'm like, you come see it for yourself. If you wanna see us printing parts super fast, you're welcome to come over and and actually see it. I'm not gonna put put together security marketing stuff and, you know, like, just do it.
Speaker 10:So I I do think you're you're entirely right. Like, the mentality is everything. Culture of the company and and the way that you enforce that culture and reinforce that culture is is is very important.
Speaker 3:Can we zoom out a little bit and talk about the three d printing industry broadly and where and where you think it's going even at consumer level. I feel like ten years ago, there was this sense or at least like, you know, three d printing companies were promising, hey, like, you're not even gonna have to order that toy because you're just gonna have a three d printer in your home that just sort of like prints it on the fly. And I and that clearly hasn't happened. Yep. And it was a good fundraising narrative, but I'm I'm curious as somebody who's doing this all day long, again in a specific niche, but I'm curious how you think about the industry evolving over time and and consumer use cases.
Speaker 10:Yeah. 100%. I mean, I think, like, I had plastic printers too, know. Before I even, I was never a a a guy. You know?
Speaker 10:I saw the potential of printing when I was designing and architecting, like, Raptor and Starship, and, you know, there were three of us sitting and talking to Elon about how we're gonna colonize Mars. And I'm like, we're gonna have to makes you know, we're not gonna carry, like, bar stock and machine it on Mars. You know? We're gonna have to use what's there and turn it into, you know, the minimum material we need and then make it. So the conceptually, the idea of of additive manufacturing, which I don't even like that name, but it is is it seems legit.
Speaker 10:You know? Like, use what you need and just make the shapes you need, and you can grow it organically like nature. Nature is usually a good model for things. That all makes sense to me. The the I do agree, like, the overhype by others in the space.
Speaker 10:In hindsight, you look back and you're like, yeah. Of course, that wasn't gonna be what happened? You know, plastic printer prices dropped. People started buying them with this promise that they were gonna be able to print all these things. You bought the thing.
Speaker 10:You built it. You printed a pencil holder that you downloaded off the Internet. You realize, I don't know how to do CAD or have access to CAD tools. I'm downloading models from others. It's just a novelty space, you know, and I think has been for a while.
Speaker 10:Metal printing at least had its roots in something more real, that I think there was potential there, but we were clearly so far away from, you know, where we needed to be because the the the the behind the scenes, customers are buying these million dollar machines and then having to hire PhDs to operate them to get maybe one out of every five parts over the course of a month that might be good. You know? It's just so far away. Yeah. And one of one of the reasons for that, by the way, I do believe is because they tried to monetize on the machine itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:They were like, we need to make this million dollar box and then sell this to customers, and I think that was one of the mistakes was that's why we rewound and said, hey. If I can unwrap the box, if I don't have to sell a box to a customer, as dumb as this sounds, if I don't have to sell them this self contained box, Now what can I do? I can rethink how the process is done. I don't have to have put my powder on in a little spot in the corner anymore. I could use half the room if I need to.
Speaker 10:You know? What is the right first principles way to do what I'm trying to do as efficient and fast as possible? And then let's engineer a solution for that. So Yeah. You know, yeah.
Speaker 3:Such a better b to b experience is just paying for the end state Yeah. Versus, you know, trying to but I'm curious to push you a little bit further. Do you think that state of, you know, like, just like people today might have a printer in their home, you know, every home in America has a three d printer. You you think that's a reality ten, fifteen years from now? I can imagine AI, you can now generate a a CAD file that that or or is it just kind of like Unnecessary.
Speaker 3:Still gonna be unnecessary and inefficient?
Speaker 10:Man, you know, that's a great question. Part of me wants to feel you know, the future is these are always interesting things to think about. You know? A my gut tells me that we should we should centralize and and it's a service. I feel like the world is going to you know, the direction is you own less and less.
Speaker 10:Look at, like, your cars. It's like you got people now that literally don't own cars anymore, and they just, like, rent the service. Why? Because it's easier. It's it's not because they don't know how to drive.
Speaker 10:They it's just easier. You know? So, ultimately, if you make it easier and you make it cheaper and and you can take advantage of economies of scale, I think that that probably makes more more sense. And then, you know, to to be clear, like, we the the vision for Freeform was always to be more than just a metal printing company. You know?
Speaker 10:I think the the the concept, at least at the beginning in in my head was, let's dominate the enabling manufacturing technology, then let's let's solve the how do I go from the printed part to the end to the end use part that can just be plugged in via make the printing process better, post machine it, you know, heat treat what whatever. Let's solve that problem end to end, and then let's vertically integrate on some products. Because at the end of the day, why would I you know, there are there are some some specific areas that we're starting to, do some things in that are quite interesting that our technology, our approach uniquely enables that I think, you know, ultimately, that's where the money is to be made
Speaker 11:Oh. Up and down
Speaker 10:the stack. But the progression kinda makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That makes sense. Last question on my side. Have you seen any interesting upticks in demand or interest from the tariff, the the the trade war? Or just given the nature of your existing customer base focusing on aerospace and defense, I can imagine a lot of your customers just aren't too impacted given they were already focused on sort of having US supply chains.
Speaker 10:Yeah. No. We actually have seen quite a bit of uptick since the tariff stuff is happening. There that seemed like there were a lot more companies out there, you know, relatively big name ones that were doing a lot of business with China specifically, more than I was aware. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:You know, given some of the recent
Speaker 3:advertise that. You know, they're not They don't. From
Speaker 10:a rooftop. Don't. Which is interesting. But, yeah, to answer your question directly, we have definitely seen an uptick. And and I think it's it's also as word has started to get out about us in the space.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. I think, you know, because we've have kind of flown under the radar for quite a while, you know, I think people are now starting to hear about us. And, you know, and I feel like they should be worried, you know, about what we're doing and and our pace and, like, ability to disrupt. They should be.
Speaker 4:So good. I I I have a couple more questions.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But first, three d printing for a long time had this stigma around it as, it's great for prototypes, but at a certain point, you're gonna manufacturing Yep. Strategy. Are you seeing customers come in and say, hey. We just wanna work with you for a little bit on the menu on the prototyping side, and then maybe we'll do something different? And then do you have to kind of walk them through the vision, or is it very clear upfront that, hey, this is about scale.
Speaker 4:The the the the part that we're making for your rocket or your plane, in twenty years, it's still gonna be coming off of a free form machine because that's the business model.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Abs absolutely. So we do also, we our business is not exclusively aerospace and defense. It's a large portion of it, but Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:We do do automotive work. We work with semi con several semiconductor companies. Mhmm. There's some other kinda energy, you know, up up in the energy sector kinda companies we work with that are interesting. And and yeah.
Speaker 10:So I guess the, I just completely blanked on the question.
Speaker 1:So the
Speaker 4:question is is is prototyping versus scaled manufacturing. I imagine at a certain point, like automotive, if I I would you know, if I'm a car manufacturer, I'd love to come to you and say, hey. Let's prototype a bunch of parts. But then once I get it dialed in, I'm I I I, like, the the historical example would be, oh, then I'm gonna go get it, you know, subtractive machine or or cast. Right?
Speaker 4:But at a certain point, it sounds like, hey. I wanna make a a hundred thousand cars this year, and you're gonna say, yeah. I'm along for the ride, and I'm gonna be cost competitive. But have you had to is that the right thesis? And have you had to, walk customers through that?
Speaker 10:Yep. Exactly. Yes. So we generally turn down today depending on the company and the potential, we turn down a lot of the prototyping stuff. That makes sense.
Speaker 10:Because it it just doesn't make sense for us to Yep. To to focus on that. Unless it's coming from a huge company that there's something interesting that could come after.
Speaker 4:Project. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Exactly. We generally turn that stuff down. We have the upfront talk with customers about the scale and that's the target. Yep.
Speaker 10:You know, that's what we're interested in. That's that's how we're gonna get, you know, economies of scale and the costs and the the down to where everybody needs it to be. And, ultimately, you know, I think one of the interesting things about the space so
Speaker 8:I will say, like, from my
Speaker 10:time at SpaceX, I always liked solving these extremely complex interdisciplinary system level problems.
Speaker 3:Massive.
Speaker 10:And these very, very you know, how do we colonize Mars? And it's like a lot of people's brains will short circuit. I don't even know where to start. And weirdly enough, like, I was always like, well, I'm just not smart enough to figure this out. So I'm just gonna, like, assume that doesn't matter and assume that doesn't matter until I get to something that I'm I'm like, well, I can calculate this.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So I'm gonna start here, you know, and then just go from there. Yeah. The the interesting thing about printing as as we've started we have started to demonstrate the the the the feasibility of truly scaling it up Mhmm. Is that it starts to you start to think about the disruption of even the product life cycles.
Speaker 10:Like, Like, a lot of the product life cycle stuff today is centered around these very long manufacturing timelines. Mhmm. So meaning, like, you know, it's just that and I don't have a conclusion here other than Yeah. You know, how much more often would products get updated or customized, if you didn't have to wind up twelve months of tooling in a in a in a in a casting facility. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, speaking of that product update, I imagine that you're you're building the machine and then you're also scaling up the machine. And once you have a really solid contract, I imagine that then it's like, okay. Well, we're gonna wanna like, this machine is capable of doing this part, and we wanna do that at at volume. So what is your product release cycle on the actual machine side?
Speaker 4:Because are you are you freezing and then doing a v two, v three, or are you upgrading the machines iteratively? What what does that look
Speaker 10:We do a little bit of both, actually. We do we do some level of upgrading on the the so there's a road map that was like, the first thing we ever built was just, can we put a bunch of lasers on a thing and melt stuff pretty fast?
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:You know, it was it was not designed to be a throughput maximizer or it was small. The platform wasn't big. It was just like, can I put a bunch of lasers in a small area and and melt stuff quickly? The second thing was then can I take that and scale it up to something that's actually useful in size and start to demonstrate this some of the architectural elements of the system that enable the lights out factory? Like, how do I, you know, unpack and get the parts out and get them off the plate and get them ready for, you know, the next steps or whatever it needs to do.
Speaker 10:The third step of that is has been to go even bigger. That's what we're building actually right now. Mhmm. So we went from, you know I I don't remember the exact number of throughput capability from gen one to two. It was something like 20 x from one to two and then two to three.
Speaker 10:Or I I I came from SpaceX, so everything starts at zero. So zero to one, you know, one to two. What we're building now is basically the third generation of the technology, and this is the one that is the platform is quite large. Like, the size of this of this platform is is is is for what it can do, it's tiny compared to the industry, but it's it's pretty large.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:It make these huge parts, and it's, like, 10 to 20 x higher throughput than even the system we're using for production today. Amazing. So, you know, we've basically taken these huge steps every every generation. And then there's the the the inter incremental improvements, which are predominantly around software, generally, because we're implementing better models, faster compute, faster sensors, and we're rolling those out in real time. Luckily, I came from the aerospace industry.
Speaker 10:You know, I led certification of Falcon nine and Merlin for for the air force and NASA. It's like, I you know, so I can talk to the aerospace folks. I can talk to the defense folks. I know what they're looking for in terms of product release, you know, that that, you know, hardware in the loop testing and then releasing software versions, locking certain things down for production, and having control of that. So that that's been helpful too to kinda, you know, grease the wheels of that with customers that are like, oh, wait.
Speaker 10:You're changing stuff all the time. Like, no. Not not exactly. Yeah. But yeah.
Speaker 4:Last question. I'll let you go. I don't know if, Jordy, you have anything or you're good?
Speaker 3:I'm good.
Speaker 4:I'd love to know, a few pieces of advice or lessons that you took away from working with Elon that folks might be able to apply even if they don't have, you know, a decade of experience at an actual Elon company? What do you think is actually actionable?
Speaker 10:Oh, man. Boy, there's a there's quite a bit. Surround yourself with the smartest, most most accomplished people you can in general and then listen to them. Secondly, there's no problem that we can't solve together. You you you you know, people are their biggest you know, this is easy to say too, right, and hard to put into practice, but, you know, you're your biggest enemy.
Speaker 10:If you think you can't do it, you definitely can't do it. And then question everything. Question everything. You know, Elon is an extremely smart man. I feel, obviously, like, very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work at SpaceX for so long and sit in the room and see how he makes decisions and, you know, and and the good and the bad.
Speaker 10:You know? I mean, all of it, I I just I I had a good experience at SpaceX Yeah. And and learned a lot. And and a lot of, you know even Freeform today, there are a bunch of current and former execs at SpaceX that are investors That's right. In Freeform.
Speaker 10:And, obviously, Founders Fund and Yeah. You know, ATC and Valor and a bunch of, you know, top tier investment firms, Threshold and Two Sigma. They'll all get mad at me if I don't list
Speaker 4:them all out. Of course.
Speaker 1:Just keep
Speaker 3:listening to that.
Speaker 10:Keep listening. I gotta
Speaker 8:get the we need to get all the credits. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I gotta say, Eric, you make me believe in onshoring manufacturing. Yes. When I talk to you, I believe that it's It's easy to to to be black pilled
Speaker 4:and Yep.
Speaker 3:Say, no, we're never gonna make it in America. But I feel like if we just give you like another twenty years Yeah. We'll be able to make anything Yeah.
Speaker 4:It sounds chaotic day to day when you read the headlines. But when you actually talk to someone who's working on this and who's clearly going to be working on it for decades more, it feels tractable. Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 10:Love it. It's totally tractable.
Speaker 4:Yep. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping This
Speaker 3:was fantastic.
Speaker 4:We have to have you back. This is this is really, really enjoyable. Thank you.
Speaker 10:Would be a pleasure, guys. Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 9:Thank you. We'll talk to
Speaker 4:you soon.
Speaker 1:Sounds good.
Speaker 4:And if you're trying to sell some three d printed metal parts all across The United States, you gotta get on numeral numeral h q sales tax on autopilot. And I have some breaking news.
Speaker 3:Breaking news.
Speaker 4:My company, Lucy, is now on numeral. Let's go. Kill. Double kill. One hand washes the other.
Speaker 1:They pay me. I pay them.
Speaker 4:What the the the money goes into my pocket and back into numerals pocket.
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 4:It's great. But we have been keeping our next guest waiting. We will bring him in. We're talking about robots with Formic. Formic dot co is the website.
Speaker 4:Let's pull it up. Full service robotic automation for zero dollar capex. That's what we like to hear.
Speaker 1:We love when capex is free. Welcome to the stream. How are doing today?
Speaker 7:Welcome to the Anti CapEx Club. Good to meet you guys. Thanks so much for having me on.
Speaker 3:It's a great club.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Fantastic. Can you introduce yourself, give us a breakdown of the company, where you're at, and what you're building?
Speaker 7:Sounds good. Yeah. My name is Salman. I'm the CEO of Formic. We're building the robot army that is helping American manufacturers automate.
Speaker 7:You can see some of them on the screen behind me. These are our robot babies, as we affectionately call them. We have hundreds of them across more than a hundred factories now in The US Mhmm. That are using our robots to produce all kinds of products. We're making everything from metal parts for aircraft and automotive, plastic parts for lawnmowers and golf carts, as well as things like food and beverage.
Speaker 7:You know, we we make all the all the nachos for Chipotle and Really? Dog food and cat food and laundry detergent. You name it, you know, our robots are helping to make it.
Speaker 4:You make Chipotle nachos robotically?
Speaker 3:Let's go. We are indeed.
Speaker 6:Let's go.
Speaker 9:Yeah. The last guy
Speaker 7:Eric was on, you guys were talking about bringing Yeah. Bring manufacturing back. Like, it's real, it's happening.
Speaker 6:That's So
Speaker 7:we're really excited to be part
Speaker 9:of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What do you what do you have to say to the naysayers that say we'll never make it in America? The haters.
Speaker 4:The haters.
Speaker 7:Look, I lived in China for twenty five years and Woah. I saw the industrialization of that country. Yeah. And it's like, it's not a two year process. Right?
Speaker 7:Like, industrializing is a a twenty year journey at the minimum and and and probably much more. And, you know, we do have 250,000 factories in America Mhmm. That are making all kinds of products, so they exist. The problem is we don't have labor force to support them. Right?
Speaker 7:It's not just about cost of labor. There are millions of unfilled jobs in factories. Today, the typical utilization rate of a factory in America is less than two thousand hours a year. This the the comparable number in China is seven thousand five hundred hours a year. Right?
Speaker 7:Like, there's eight thousand seven hundred possible production hours in a given year. The vast majority of American factories are sitting around collecting dust 75% of the time. Mhmm. And it's not because, like, there isn't demand for their products. It isn't because there isn't raw materials available.
Speaker 7:Right? Like, it basically just boils down to the fact that there aren't people who wanna work in these factories and do these backbreaking jobs day in, day out. And so until we automate a bunch of them, we're gonna have a really hard time reindustrializing. So, you know, I'm optimistic, Jordy. I think there is a lot of opportunity to to re industrialize and and and bring more manufacturing back, but it's not gonna be, in a year or two.
Speaker 7:Right? Like, we're we're helping make that happen faster, but it's gonna take some time.
Speaker 4:Like, a really dumb criticism that I don't agree with of this company, and it might be completely wrong, would be like, hey. This is just, this is just financial innovation. You're just you're you're you're you're swapping CapEx to OpEx. That allows you to grow really fast. I think that could be good for industrialization.
Speaker 4:But how much of that is key to the business? And then what else are you doing? I imagine that you're not, you know, mining the metal to make the robots. You might even be purchasing the robots from other people and then designing software suites and integrating. But, you know, Palantir goes to, oh, it's just a consulting shop or whatever.
Speaker 4:What is the criticism of your company of, like, of, like, where you're starting, and then why is that the right path to start and then grow out from?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think it's a really good question. I think it starts from, like, the basic premise that, people most roboticists are working on the wrong problem. Right? I I was a VC for ten years.
Speaker 7:I was investing in robotics companies. I I funded, like, 50 different robotics companies and saw all the different ways in which they they had challenges. And what I realized is, like, look, any roboticist will tell you, getting a robot to do a job is 10% of the work. 90% of the work is, like, how do you do error handling, and how do you solve all of the shit that happens after you deploy that robot? Yep.
Speaker 7:And I think that's the part that's generally underappreciated, which is, like, we'll see a robot doing a backflip in a cool YouTube video.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But once once you try to get that robot to do that reliably for, you know, 99.8% uptime, you start to encounter all kinds of issues. Right? Joint failures, maintenance challenges
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 7:Programming issues, your in feed like, your product just has a lot more variation than you expected. Yep. And I think it's generally underappreciated. And so the reason that factories in America don't automate today is not because you can't get a robot to do this job. The the problem is, like, all the surrounding infrastructure doesn't exist.
Speaker 7:Got it. And so if you're the factory that focuses on making chocolate chip cookies and you're really good at the best chocolate chip cookie recipe and baking, like, you're not also super good at deploying robots and managing them. And so what happens is, like, they're just kinda overwhelmed. They don't know what to get. They don't know how to get it.
Speaker 7:They don't know how to manage it. They don't know how to maintain it. And so what we realized is, like, you have to build all the surrounding infrastructure. Like, robotics has this last mile problem where if you can make it easy to scope, deploy, manage, and maintain the robot Mhmm. Then you can drive mass adoption.
Speaker 7:And so we built a bunch of software that does that. Yep. We do we use we use computer vision and lidar scans to do kind of full site evaluation in an automated way. This used to take months
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 7:To walk through the facility and measure every single thing to figure out what you can automate and and what kind of robot you need. We do that in minutes. Mhmm. Then you need to figure out what robot to to to build and and deploy. So you need to basically simulate different robot arms doing that job with different grippers, different conveyors, different safety scanners, different fencing.
Speaker 7:Like, you need all of this stuff to make a robot useful. Then you need to actually program the robot to do the job, and so we basically built AI that automates the process of programming the robot. And then lastly, once that robot's deployed, you have kind of all the ongoing management of that robot. Right? So how do you do teleoperation?
Speaker 7:How do do error handling? How do you preventative maintenance? How do you gracefully recover from all the different types of errors that you're gonna encounter? There's a ton of infrastructure that needs to be built. And so, like, 90% of roboticists that I meet are working on how do I make the robot a little bit smarter.
Speaker 7:And nobody is working on this giant problem, which is the reason that robots don't aren't deployed. Right? I can tell you from the hundreds of robots that we've deployed today, less than 5% of my deployment cost is programming the robot to do the thing. That's like it's like it's For you. It's it's completely, you know, delusional how many people are spending their time trying to make the robot a little bit easier to Yeah.
Speaker 7:Like, that's inconsequential to me. Like, I need to focus on solving the other 95% Mhmm. Of the of the cost of deploying robots. So I don't know
Speaker 1:if that answers your
Speaker 3:question. Can you talk about landing on CPG, food and beverage broadly? You had you said you invested in 50 plus different robotics companies. I'm I'm assuming you saw a bunch of, you know, success and failure, and I'm I'm I'm assuming that it was super intentional to land here. And then I I wanna ask, you know, potentially, you know, other categories that you're excited about.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I'll be honest. It wasn't that intentional.
Speaker 1:We started out going really broad. We were
Speaker 7:doing things in in metal fabrication. We were doing things in plastic injection molding. We were doing things in CPG and a bunch of other industries. Ultimately, we narrowed back into CPG for the for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's the actual it's the industry where there's the most amount of utilization.
Speaker 7:Right? So the typical CPG factory actually runs twenty to twenty four hours a day. In things like metal fabrication, like like parts that factories that make metal parts for aerospace and automotive, they typically run, you know, eight hours a day of of production, but actually only is, like, six hours a day of actual parts being made. There's, like, two hours a day where people are setting up and tearing down. So so high utilization means automation has a much, much bigger short term impact.
Speaker 7:Number two, it's the industry where there's actually a lot more of it happening domestically. In metal and plastic manufacturing and other stuff, like, a lot of it is still being imported today from from from China, from Mexico, from Canada, from other places. But because CPG products are generally low value and low margin, it's not worth it to ship them across the ocean. So a lot of that is actually happening domestically. So there are a lot of factories that can use automation.
Speaker 7:And third, those are the jobs that are the most backbreaking painful jobs. Right? Like, a you can afford to pay a machinist fifty bucks an hour or $60 an hour because that's, like, a high value, high margin product. Yeah. You can't afford to pay somebody who's packing boxes more than $15 an hour.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And so And they're
Speaker 3:still picking up super heavy, you know, cases of drinks and things like that.
Speaker 7:Exactly. Yeah. It's back breaking.
Speaker 4:Can you take me through kind of a market map or like the the the the topography of robotics? Because I've watched how it's made, I've seen, you know, a little scooper. I don't even know if I'd call it a robot. It's more just like a machine. Then there's, you know, two axis gantries.
Speaker 4:I'm seeing a lot of robotic arms, a lot of six axis stuff. And then you get into the humanoid world. Where's the biggest opportunity in terms of or where's where's the most need to deploy and, like, what type of robot is the most important to just roll out in America right now?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think, like, articulated six axis robot arms are still the vast majority of use cases. Right? I think if you look at what humans are doing in these factories, like, they're typically using their arms, not other parts of their body.
Speaker 1:So so I think it's, you
Speaker 7:know, just an indicator of, like, that that's the most common task. Whether you're talking about, assembly, whether you're talking about, quality control, you need to get a vision, obviously. Whether you're talking about packaging, whether you're talking about even kind of primary food handling and sorting. In the metal fabrication world, you you need a lot of machine tending, which is, you know, picking up a blank part and putting it into a CNC machine. We have a bunch of robots that are doing that.
Speaker 7:All of those are just kind of articulated arms that can do it. So I think there, you know, there are use cases for the humanoid form factor to kinda do new new types of tasks. We also have some gantry robots that we've deployed that do certain types of applications where it's, like, very high payload work. But, you know, the to be honest, like, the form factor is kinda irrelevant because in all of these types of robots that you're talking about, you have a couple of motors and some motion control. Right?
Speaker 7:Like, it's actually if you can abstract away the software enough, like, all of those things are are essentially different variations on the same on the same problem.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. I I I wanna talk about the CapEx thing. What's the damage for a company if they're not working with you to, buy a bunch of six axis robot arms these days? Can you give me, an order of magnitude for how much these these robots even cost? I've seen a couple of Yeah.
Speaker 3:Or maybe even some of the history some of the history. I mean, we've seen so many companies try to automate, you know, bring in robotics. Right? Like Nike has Yep. A history of of trying to do this in in Latin America and just failing miserably despite having seemingly competent partners.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I'd I'd love some additional context there.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. So I'll I'll start with the second question first, and then I'll move to the first question. So the vast majority of robots in America today are deployed in very, very big companies. So General Motors, Procter and Gamble Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Are two examples of, like, the biggest buyers of robots in America. They buy, like, a couple hundred robots a year. Wow. And they have very large in house engineering teams who can use those robots to to to do different kinds of tasks. The the problem is 99% of factories in America are small, medium sized businesses.
Speaker 7:And the logic follows, like, if, you know, if you take a single General Motors plant that makes cars, there's 4,000 small factories that make the components that go to General Motors that get assembled into a car. Right? So there's one guy who makes the windshield and one guy who makes the screws and another guy who makes, you know, the tires. Right? Like, every single one of those smaller factories is not automated at all today.
Speaker 7:Like, 95% of them don't have any robots. So Mhmm. The the cost is a part of the question, right, which is, yeah, it costs between a couple hundred thousand dollars to a couple million dollars to build a fully automated robot work cell. Mhmm. The the interesting thing, though, is if you break down that cost, about 30% of that cost is the hardware itself.
Speaker 7:Right? Like, the robot arm and and and the conveyors and that kind of stuff. 70% of the cost is all the custom engineering that you typically have to pay for for integrators and consultants and this and that to come in and try to customize it to your process. And if you're a small factory, like, you don't have the capacity to kind of get rid of that 70% custom engineering because you don't really know anything about robotics. And so the reason that we built all of this kind of infrastructure tooling around it is that we're cutting out that 70%.
Speaker 7:It costs us significantly less to go and buy and build and deploy those robots than it would be for them to try to do it on their own.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Can you walk me through, who the best, robot builders are in the world right now? What does the what does the supply chain look like in terms of constructing, building, r and d ing new robots? Who are the major players globally? Who are the up and comers?
Speaker 4:I I I don't even know if I could name a single robot maker, but I'm interested to hear kind of, like, what the landscape looks like, who the who the major players are.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So the the biggest robot companies in the world are all not American. Right? So FANUC is Japanese. They're they're one of the biggest ones.
Speaker 7:KUKA used to be a German company. It got acquired by a Chinese company. ABB, Yaskawa, you know, Mitsubishi. You know, there's there's a bunch of these kind of very, very large industrial companies that make robot arms. The the thing to note, though, is that you'd like, buying a robot arms is effectively kind of useless on its own.
Speaker 7:You need a a full robot work cell to make that work. So you need PLCs that often come from, like, Siemens or Rockwell. You need sensors that come from a company like PNC. Programmable logic con controller. So it's like the Control.
Speaker 7:It's the thing that controls all the peripherals and safety equipment. Got it. Got it. Yeah. And then you need, like, conveyors.
Speaker 7:You need safety scanners that are often made by, like, Keyence and Cognex and much other company. You need grippers, which is the end of arm tool. Yep. So today, like, the vast majority of people who deploy robots basically hire a consultant that goes and buys all the different components for them
Speaker 11:Got it.
Speaker 7:And then assembles it and then deploys it for them.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I saw this at Hadrian. They have a they have a six axis robot arm, they have this, like, invisible wall that if you put
Speaker 7:your hand Yeah. A light curtain.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Light curtain. That's what it's called.
Speaker 3:That's right. How why has automating three p l's proven to be such a challenge? You know, there's been a bunch of you know, Amazon had their internal efforts. I think there's like six River Systems, which it was maybe Shopify Yep. Acquired them, but it it just seemingly is such a difficult task and you would think that, you know, grabbing items and putting labels on them and, you know, shipping them should be it seems straightforward, but clearly not.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I'll I'll I'll note that, like, we don't know a ton about three PLs because almost all of our work is in manufacturing. Yeah. Logistics is a much, much smaller industry, and, like, we're not in it today. I will say, right, like, logistics has to deal with a lot more variability than manufacturing.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. Because if you're if you're running a three PL, like, any kind of product could come into your warehouse anytime, and so you need systems that can deal with all of them. And there's just there's just, like, physics based constraints on that. Right? Like, if you're picking up a, you know, a a one ounce bag of something versus a fifty fifty pound Yeah.
Speaker 7:Box, like, you just need fundamentally different physical hardware. Yeah. And that's why I think a lot of this kinda humanoid stuff is is very strange because, like, if you're picking up a 50 pound box with with one of those robots, like, it's it's very likely to tip over Mhmm. Pretty easily. Like, you need and if you wanna move at any kind of speed right?
Speaker 7:Because if you take a 50 pound box and you move it at, you know, five miles an hour, the your effective load during that acceleration is, like, double or triple that. Right? So it's, a hundred pounds of of load that you have to be able to handle, which is just kinda impossible. If you move to manufacturing, like, you have a lot more consistency because every production line is kinda making the same part
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 7:Or the same product at relatively higher rate. And so the the technical complexity is lower, but the operational complexity is higher.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Saw that On
Speaker 3:on the note of humanoids, are you worried about depreciation with humanoids? I think this is a concern if if humanoids end up, you know, working well, but then following the same path as, like, EVs because there's like high, you know, there's high wear and tear on cars. Right? They're just like going down a road all the time and that's challenging. And you can imagine humanoids are walking around with these heavy loads and then simultaneously, like, all of that interaction just feels like I worry about the economics of humanoids if you buy a rope a a robot for 50 k and the next year it's worth 10 k.
Speaker 3:It's like, well, you almost could have hired a human Mhmm. For that kind of cost, but I'm curious what your point of view is.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think it depends on what what the task is. Right? Like, if you're using that humanoid to do an occasional task, right, like pick up your laundry and and put it into the basket, for example, like, you don't worry so much about wear and tear because it's low frequency. If you're talking about manufacturing use case, right, like, these robots behind me, all of them operate twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And so at that cycle rate, like, you're doing maybe 50,000 cycles a day. At that rate, like, the wear and tear you get on all the components is very, very high. And, like, a six axis robot has six motors. A a humanoid most of these humanoids that we've seen have something like 30 to 50 motors.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. Right? And so just you're just talking about, like, the wear on the motor. Like, we have to go out and lubricate these joints and and and and replace motors on a pretty regular basis. Can't imagine if I had to do that for 50 motors instead of instead of three.
Speaker 7:Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Speaking of motors, I saw that in the latest, Boston Dynamics demo, they said that they switched to electric motors. Is that a meaningful shift in robotics, or is that something that's unique to their approach to building humanoids?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So most of the robots that we use use use servo motors, so they're all they're all kind of electric motors. Okay. It's pretty it's pretty standard. Some of some of the new humanoids are using linear actuators, which is a newer technology, and I think the Tesla humanoid is is doing that.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. It's like, the exact kinda wear and tear profile on that is not clear, and a lot of them are actually building their own, their own motors from scratch. So, like like, Chinese like, I think this is a place where China has a huge advantage compared to, like, a lot of the American startups. Like, Unitree, for example, which I'm I'm sure you guys have seen those videos. Like, they have, built an entire team to build, actuators and a whole team that's building their own custom LIDAR and a whole team that's building their own kind of custom sensing across.
Speaker 7:You know, for most of these American companies, it's kind of inconceivable to go and try to invent your own motor and try to figure out how to build a humanoid. But in China, it's possible to
Speaker 11:be much more vertically integrated.
Speaker 4:It's so odd because you you have to imagine back in the dawn of the automotive revolution, like Ford was certainly building motors and wheels and tires and seats and the frames and stuff. Like, we did have the ability to have a vertically integrated supply chain at one point in America, and then we just decomposed it so much that it's been it's been a struggle to get back to vertical integration. Very, very tricky.
Speaker 7:The management consultants got hold of us.
Speaker 4:They did. They did. Yeah. On on on humanoids, I don't know if you've been following what physical intelligence has been doing with some of the end to end models, this idea of generalization. Are there any are you looking at any software approaches that are more, I don't know, big data or or or, you know, deep learning driven to handle more of those edge cases to automate the the last 90% of the work that you're doing?
Speaker 4:And what are you what are you following on the AI side of things these days?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I think these vision language action models, like what physical intelligence is doing, is are are very promising.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:We're running trials on some of those vision language action models for some of our use cases. The problem today is that they're just generally too slow Mhmm. For us to be able to use them in a kinda commercial setting, but I think that'll get better in the next few years. So there are like, you know, in the common trajectory for us, like, we'll we'll start out in a factory with one or two robots, and then the the factory will come to us and say, hey. Can you help me, like, automate all these other tasks on my production line?
Speaker 7:And today, some of those are solved, and some of them are not. Yeah. And so as we go you know, as as these visual language action models get better and other kinds of techniques around, you know, deep learning get better, we'll start to go and address more and more of those tasks.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Jordan, mean
Speaker 4:This is great. Yeah. Yeah. Continue.
Speaker 7:I was just gonna say, you know, like, I think that the the thing to note here is, like, we're just at a very different place compared to, like, more established automation economies. They're like in China right now, last year, there were about 400,000 robots deployed. In the entire US, we had about 30,000 robots deployed. So less than a tenth Yeah. Of of the amount of robots deployed in a place where the labor cost is so much higher that you you could theoretically justify a much higher use case of robots.
Speaker 7:And I think a big part of the reason is, like, China just has so many more engineers that they can put towards the problem
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Of design and deployment, plus they subsidize a lot of the kind of robotics industry to be able to go and make it easy for people to deploy.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I think in The US, we have this this challenge where, there's a lot more small and medium sized businesses, and we don't have the historical infrastructure or the engineering capability for all these plans to figure out how to automate on their own. And so, like, building this set of tooling and helping them figure out what are the latest things that are happening in kind of AI and machine learning and and computer vision that we can apply to the different use cases in your facility is, I think, the only way that we can we can move faster than China in the long run.
Speaker 4:Is there anything that you wanna see from the US government to speed up the deployment of robotics in America?
Speaker 3:Trillion Dollar Trillion Dollar contract
Speaker 4:for mean, yeah, I mean, could imagine subsidy subsidiary subs subsidies or incentives or, you know, a strategic reserve of robots. But you could also just look at, like, deregulation. But I don't know what your what your take is.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, that so I'm excited to go to Hillen Valley Forum next week and talk about that a little bit. But I like, frankly, I I don't think there's much that's necessary. Right? Like, I think the the incentive is there.
Speaker 7:Right? There's plenty of financial incentive for these small, medium sized factories to do it. To be honest, like, the biggest barrier to adoption of robotics in America is, like, it's a cultural change. Right? Like, these factory owners, a lot of these are third generation businesses.
Speaker 7:Right? They've been passed down or they're kind of private equity owned. And, like, in both cases, you end up with these businesses that are very risk averse. Mhmm. They're afraid to adopt new technology.
Speaker 7:They don't have the internal capabilities to do it. Mhmm. I think from the government side, like, things that are being done around educating that that group of of manufacturers and helping them to deploy automation is will have a very big impact. Like, similar to what China does, actually, The US, we've had subsidies for small, medium sized factories for the last ten years to buy automation equipment. Right?
Speaker 7:There there's accelerated depreciation. A lot of states have matching grants where if you buy a $500,000 piece of machinery, the state will grant grant up to up to 50% of that cost. And so, like, we've had plenty of these incentives in place, but adoption is super low. Like, when we talk to the states, most of them say, like, we can't give out these grants. Like, nobody's using it Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Because people don't know what to buy. They don't know how to buy it. And once they buy it, they're like, they can't handle the responsibility of this new piece of equipment. And so there's tons of grant dollars just sitting around not getting deployed because there's this kind of there's this there's this barrier at the last mile.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Makes sense. Very informative. Thank you. We'll we'll see you at Hill Hillen Valley.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 7:Awesome. Look forward to it. Appreciate you guys having me on.
Speaker 4:Have a great
Speaker 1:rest of your Cheers.
Speaker 9:Goodbye. And
Speaker 4:we wanna tell you about Polymarket. Go to polymarket.com
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Speaker 4:Get the information.
Speaker 3:Figured out. We got a new market up there. Where? 1,000,000,000 chat GPT users in 2025. That's great.
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Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 3:Is generationally.
Speaker 4:We have some posts in there. Callie's here. I'll let you take the intro. I'll be right back.
Speaker 3:Welcome in, Kali. I'm gonna play a sound effect here. Boom. What's going on? Looking good in the suit.
Speaker 3:You've been wearing those a lot these days.
Speaker 11:A lot of a lot of the tech folks have been brushing off the suits these days and coming to DC. So it's been nice to nice to nice to go to another closet.
Speaker 3:How do you stay healthy when you're in DC? Do you have a good do you have a workout routine, a couple favorite restaurants, or are you just, you know, five coffees a day, no breakfast or lunch?
Speaker 11:I would love to say I'm on the TrueMed Good Energy, program, but the sleep has been lacking, I will say. Try try trying trying to find good food, but
Speaker 3:not eating much. Just a lot of caffeine. Yeah. I bet. Let's jump right into this food dye ban.
Speaker 3:I'd love to get your high level take on it. It it seems, you know, the big question, we're a technology and business. There you go. Yeah. Looking good.
Speaker 3:We we focus on business and my big question is how manufacturers will respond to the ban given that, you know, it it's hard enough to even just deliver on the existing demand that they have much less, you know, make, you know, fundamental changes. And to be clear, I'm I'm very much in in favor of the ban, but I'm I'm curious what what you think this kind of looks like in practice.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I mean, I'll I'll I'll back up a little bit. I think there's a lot of lessons for business in this environment we're in right now, but, you know, I never expected to be here. I'm I'm at the White House now. I'm a special government employee as well as running TrueBev with, you know, Justin Mayers.
Speaker 11:And and Justin and I, you know, started the company on the mission of I think a lot of founders do this. We we just wanted to impact the world and change health incentives. And just through the advocacy, you know, Justin and I going on podcasts and and and talking about this, something started resonating on this idea that our health care and food systems are broken in the past year. I got to know Bobby Kennedy, got to know president Trump, helped connect them for the endorsement. And now coming on and and helping to advise the next couple months.
Speaker 11:But I I I think the big lesson of this food dye ban I I don't even know if I really like the word ban. I like phase out because because ban implies overregulation. And I I think I think what people are waking up to is there's mass distrust of legacy industry right now. I mean, you know, I talk a lot about the food industry. It was run by the cigarette industry in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 11:Few people remember this, but 50% of The US food supply was controlled by Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds in the early nineteen nineties. They consolidated the food industry when smoking rates were going down. They were actually some of the largest companies in the world in the eighties, like highest market caps.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And some of the biggest balance sheets in history of capitalism, tobacco companies. It's a good business, nicotine. And they they consolidated Kraft, US Food, Nabisco, and very deliberately bought off the USDA to recommend the the food pyramid, which is basically a recommendation for ultra processed food. And they they shifted very strategically thousands of scientists from the tobacco department to the food department and really added all these chemicals in our food to make them hyperaddictive. So through that corporate capture and what I would call the weaponization of food, today in America, a child's diet is 70% ultra processed food.
Speaker 11:In in Japan or Italy, it's 15%. Wow. So so my big argument is that we do we don't really have a free market with these outcomes where, of course, the disease rates are just skyrocketing. I mean, the stats are crazy. We're digging into this for a report for the administration.
Speaker 11:We spend five times more per capita on health care than Spain, but live six years less. I mean and Spain doesn't even have a good health care program. So so these are common sense actions, and I think I think there's a really a moment. I'm I'm meeting with a lot of food companies, a lot of pharma companies, you know, and they they they're running scared because Americans have lost trust. I mean, we all know this.
Speaker 11:I think it's why there's such a robust, you know, tech ecosystem building and start up ecosystem. You know, it's because these large companies have really lost trust with the American consumer and the American public, I I think often for good reason. So I would call this not as much a ban. It's a correcting of corrupt incentives where these food guys I mean, just total no brainer. They're they're petroleum based.
Speaker 11:They're literally crude oil. They they add a molecule to crude oil, make that bright neon color, and they're phased out of essentially every other country. So it's an example of common sense actions that I think are are quite needed.
Speaker 3:That that phase out in other countries, does that mean that a lot of these manufacturers fully have the ability to sell these products and and make, you know, these products to sell into The US market, and they're just choosing not to for the most part?
Speaker 11:Oh, it's it's even more shocking than that. They actually often make the product in The United States. So Kellogg's makes Froot Loops with carrot juice and watermelon juice and ships them across the border to Canada and ships them over to Europe. They make the same product with petroleum based dyes here in The US. So a lot of our food can actually be exported to Europe based on just just the chemicals in them right now.
Speaker 11:So so, actually, The US companies are yeah.
Speaker 3:What is the is it a margin thing? You know? Is it is it a is it
Speaker 4:Just economic incentives. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is it purely economics, or or is there something else?
Speaker 11:Yeah. It's a the food diet is again, I think this is one of the most no brainer unimpeachable things they could start with because it's actually not a cost thing. We've done a lot of engagement with the food industry on this. Actually, they've done a lot of research, and they actually cite this as a reason for why they should keep it. They say, well, the kids in focus groups lunge for the neon bright colors.
Speaker 11:And it's like, well, I'm sure they do, but you're feeding them crude oil. So so it's really actually they they say it's consumer preference. And actually, when pushed before the food industry said, well, we believe in consumer choice and kids prefer these bright colors. So that's one reason I think the administration and secretary can
Speaker 3:be started with the food. My my my three my three year old Yeah. Would love to eat cake for dinner Yeah. Every single night, but that doesn't mean that that he should have, you know, the the, you know, autonomy to just make that decision himself as a three year old.
Speaker 4:Yeah. How do you think about the history here with like corn subsidies? Is there is there a risk of like playing whack a mole as the government decides what what to push or what to incentivize. What do you take away from not just what the food companies have done historically, but what the government has done historically to kind of, like, steer the food supply in one direction or another?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So so so I've been an entrepreneur for more than ten years, but I grew up in DC, started my career, you know, early on as a lobbyist in the food industry. And we used to weaponize this nanny state argument Mhmm. And say, you know, you don't wanna be nanny state. But what what what I really have been trying to communicate, you know, and particularly to, frankly, a rightward audience, you know, going on Tucker and Joe Rogan, things like that, what what I've really been trying to do is articulate that this is not a nanny state regulation issue.
Speaker 11:It's a correction of corruption. Mhmm. When you look at agriculture subsidies, more than 90% go to corn, soy, and meat Mhmm. Which are essentially the components of ultra processed food. And the grocery lobbyists and the food lobbyists push for that because at a supermarket, when you can put something in a box and last forever and it's, you know, bright neon colors, the profit margins are much higher, whereas natural food is low.
Speaker 11:So there's a huge incentive to shove ultra processed food down our throats, which has led to agriculture incentives that make a Coke at a supermarket cheaper than water because the Coke has so much subsidized ingredients in it. So that's not a free mark. That's totally rigged. 90% to corn soy wheat, point 4% of subsidies go to fruits and vegetables. Yep.
Speaker 11:Then you get to something like SNAP, the food stamp program. Now Elon's looking at this. This is the fourth largest entitlement program. It's a hundred and $40,000,000,000 a year. The number one item on food stamps is soda, and more than 60% go to ultra processed food.
Speaker 11:We're the only country in the world where a low income nutrition assistance program goes to soda and Twinkies. So so you have you know, you go down the list. School lunch is the largest source of calories for kids, federally funded, no nutrition guidelines whatsoever. No sugar no sugar limits. So so you've actually just very deliberately, you know, from the history of the tobacco companies really weaponizing these regulations.
Speaker 11:By my calculations, it's been a trillion dollars over the last ten years of of subsidies to ultra processed food. So we're trying to take step by step common sense actions to kind of unwind that. We're I also, quite frankly, think there's a cultural awakening happening where people realize the system is pretty screwed.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And, you know, hopefully you know, we were talking about it more. We're talking about it on a tech podcast. So Yep. The fact that people are trying to be healthier, reading labels more, Justin's talking a lot about this, obviously, I think that's a good thing too. And and very unexpectedly, you know, I do think president Trump, Bobby Kennedy, you wouldn't have expected this coalition.
Speaker 11:They're leading to an awakening where 24 states right now are passing legislation on food ingredients, school lunches. So I think it's very positive what's happening. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I I always thought it was fascinating that, the food issue is it it it it it's secretly very bipartisan because Yeah. That's because you get like the right wing like trad folks who want Right. To, you know, clean up the food supply. But then you also get like the left wing hippie who's hanging out at the farmer's market and is just like, yeah, grew these vegetables myself. They're way better than the processed foods.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Curious. Is is There should
Speaker 4:be a coalition there.
Speaker 3:Is food and health as political as it seems in the news? I feel like if you talk to people individually, you know, it's it's like John said, it's bipartisan like every we want everybody to be healthier and then you get into Washington and it feels
Speaker 4:like It's really partisan.
Speaker 3:You you mentioned you started your career in in the lobbying space. So I'm curious, like, where where you think it's you know, if it's actually a political issue for the average citizen or it's just manufactured by special interest groups.
Speaker 11:Oh, there's zero reason food and poisoning our kids should be political. And, frankly, these things about reforming food stamps, you know, and taking the dyes out of our food were leftward issues, you know, five to ten years ago. You know, digging into the health issue, I think one of the most most pernicious and chronic conditions in America is is Trump Arrangement Syndrome. And I I think TDS has led many people on the left to reflexively be opposed to these common sense policies. You know, probably a lot of the tech folks listening.
Speaker 11:I know politics is complicated. There's a lot going on, a lot of change happening. Mhmm. My hope is that we can all come together on these MAHA policies. I mean, these are absolute no brainer.
Speaker 11:It's taking on incentives of the pharmaceutical industry, which is something the left used to talk a lot about. It's taking on the interest of, you know, processed food makers that are really doing some harmful things for kids. But you've had a wild situation where you've had Democrats now passionately arguing to keep food dice in the food. You've had Democrats passionately arguing that we need to continue to have a $10,000,000,000 subsidy from the federal government to soda companies on SNAP just reflexively because, you know, the Trump administration happens to be talking about this. You've had almost no support from Democrats.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. I called out Cory Booker, a senator from New Jersey who I've worked with before I've met. I know he cares about these issues. Where the hell is Cory Booker? Why wasn't he at the health and human services department on Tuesday when secretary Kennedy was announcing this policy on food dyes?
Speaker 11:Where is he helping on these issues? I mean, this is as bipartisan as it gets. How much You know?
Speaker 3:Yeah. How much does pharma's, you know, position end up influencing media narratives? They obviously spend, you know, an exceptional amount advertising with different media companies. This has been, you know, maybe a a big issue in in mainstream television where, you know, television network is not gonna, you know, bring somebody on to talk poorly about a company that, you know, is a big sponsor. If you wanted to come here and and and talk negatively about Ramp, we'd probably change
Speaker 1:you out of here. Conversation.
Speaker 11:Nothing negative. I have nothing negative to say about Ramp. We love Ramp.
Speaker 4:Fantastic. Of
Speaker 3:course. Of course. But how how, you know, is that a is that a focal point at all? Do you think we need some some reform there, is it just the sort of free market doing the free market?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I this this
Speaker 11:is how this framework I have, and, you know, I'm so privileged to be fighting this fight with Justin and and with TrueMed and and and trying to help the administration. But I think what we're doing with the strategy is we're putting a stake in the ground that everyone can agree with where that in ten years, our incentives of our system are changed. And the way I define those incentives is that nobody wants this, but the fact is the health care system you know, a lot of health startups, quite frankly, still, their business model is predicated on more people being sick. The pharmaceutical industry makes more money when people are sicker for longer periods of time. Hospitals make more money when the beds are full, not when they're empty.
Speaker 11:You know, insurance companies actually make more money when people are sicker because of this horrible medical loss ratio issue where they actually have an incentive to raise premiums. So so so you actually have every single lever of the health care system predicated on sickness. Now that same system, the pharma industry particularly, is the lifeblood of news advertising, over 50% for most news channels. So that creates not a direct you know, there's not a direct edict going down, but you have a zero lack of curiosity from the media about why people are getting sick. It's really just referees about, you know, hey.
Speaker 11:You need to take this drug. Ozempic is the standard of care for kids, you know, with COVID. I mean, COVID was a metabolic health crisis. We were sixteen percent of COVID deaths and four percent of the world's population, and the CDC said at the time it's because our immune systems are so weak. We're dying very quickly when we get this disease.
Speaker 11:Yet the media was it was just about the COVID vaccine for six month old. So, you you do have a very, very damaging situation where there's self censorship. And, you know, what I the strategy is to get to that long term world where new start ups are thinking about how to make people healthy, not how to take advantage of a system and, you know, deliver direct to consumer Ozempic or, you know, a better UX on medical records. A better UX on medical records is putting lipstick on a pig. The problem is the underlying incentives of the system.
Speaker 11:You know, shipping pills in a little pig packaging is an innovation. You know, a lot of health care startups are just wrappers on the existing broken health incentives that are destroying the country and gonna bankrupt us. So that's the stake we have. The way we get there is let's do unimpeachable things. So this food dye thing is one.
Speaker 11:Obviously, there's been a lot of talk about pharmaceutical ads. Secretary Kennedy and Marty Makary, the amazing new FDA commissioner, have talked about that. No announcements right now, but that's, you know, something they've said they're clearly looking at. So it's it's just getting these things that are 90% support issues, bipartisan issues, and I think you'll be seeing them in rapid succession, these announcements.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Yeah. Does does the meaty, you know, incredible growth of drugs like Ozempic scare you? They obviously, being overweight is unhealthy. That's, you know, not not a political point.
Speaker 3:But when I hear people saying that they're sort of like losing more muscle than fat, that can be that personally is can be concerning. And then I'm curious if you have a a general, you know, just personal personal opinion only on this sort of balance between like compounding and and getting drugs that are benefiting people quickly Mhmm. And affordably versus like, you know, protecting the the intellectual property of of of the companies that, you know, develop these drugs?
Speaker 11:Great question. So on on the first one, I'd say the MAHA stance of Ozempic as best I can define it, my personal opinion, is is there's nothing wrong with GLP ones or Ozempic per se. Actually, I think something the administration is talking a lot about is it's not an antidrug stance. I think with the dawn of AI and and very exciting things quite frankly in therapeutics, there should be robust innovation and, frankly, deregulation at the FDA. The problem is that with the existence of Ozempic, it's two problems.
Speaker 11:One is that the drug costs 10 times more than it does in Germany or Sweden. So and that's that's gonna come from US taxpayers. So so there's a real corruption in the pricing. And then number two, corruption in the standard of care, what I call it. So there was a Medicare ruling from Biden that said that Ozempic should be the frontline defense for anyone who's obese or overweight on Medicare.
Speaker 11:So, you know, a fifteen minute appointment, you get your Ozempic, and then that
Speaker 4:way exercise. Right?
Speaker 11:Right. No. No. Didn't even mention it. There's no funding for diet so we spent 5,000,000,000,000 on health care.
Speaker 11:Right? And then they were gonna push this through where Ozempic's over a thousand dollars a month, which would come from taxpayers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very true.
Speaker 11:Not with no other option or no other route for an American to get, you know, the blood testing to understand their nutrient deficiencies or talk to a dietary coach. You know? This is what Truman did. Why would you put that flag in the ground? It's like there should be flexibility with with where health care dollars could go.
Speaker 11:So the problem, you know, is not that Ozempic exists. It's that that Medicare ruling would have gone to Medicaid and would have gone to kids because now it's being essentially pushed on six year olds in the American Academy of Pediatric. So you're getting to a world where, you know, STAG rates, metformin rates, antidepressant rates have exploded among teens. 30 five percent of teens are on some kind of chronic disease drug. Ozempic would just be added to that repertoire.
Speaker 11:And, of course, that's just not from our medical system incentivizing the root cause. I mean, maybe somebody that's 75 year old on Medicaid Medicare who is, you know, four hundred pounds and extremely diabetic and set in their ways. Sure. I mean, probably Ozepic. You might be fine with Medicare funding for that.
Speaker 11:Yeah. But but for the vast majority of American people, that shouldn't be the first line defense. That that's the problem with our health care system right now. There's not flexibility for patients to maybe work with a functional medicine doctor or figure out a more root cause intervention because, obviously, obesity is not an Ozempic deficiency.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. That's a great quote. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. What what countries do you look at as models? The the tech industry loves to poke fun at Europe. You know, they don't tend to make Right.
Speaker 3:Trillion dollar companies very often or or ever in the
Speaker 4:last They also don't win a lot of bodybuilding competitions. We are the most obese country, but we
Speaker 1:also America also wins a lot of bodybuilding competitions.
Speaker 3:John's point of view, but but what can we, you know Okay. What what are you looking at in terms of, like, this is a, you know, functioning government in the context of Yeah. Personal health?
Speaker 4:Really interesting.
Speaker 11:So I don't like giving Europe any credit whatsoever. They don't deserve much. And I will just say, this is a key point. Europe's health care systems are total basket case systems. They're terrible socialist systems.
Speaker 11:So I think one of the things we can learn
Speaker 3:from other countries just to be clear, the stuff Yeah. With some stuff they get right is, like, saying, like, hey. We don't want this dye. We don't want glyphosates.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 11:They get a little Exactly. They get little bit Actually, what they get right is that the health care system is less important, is that people are healthier to begin with. The problem with The US health care system is not that we have the wrong Medicare, Medicaid reimbursement rates. It's the fact that we're the sickest country in the world, and that's actually because we rely too much on the health care system. So what I like about some other countries in Japan and I think we need more of this, and Bobby Kennedy is pushing this more.
Speaker 11:I mean, if your kid is obese, you are shamed as a parent. Like, it is totally society unacceptable. Like, you are stunned. Like, you're, like, yelled at by the school. Like, I think we need that same type of energy in America.
Speaker 11:Like, children should not be fat and diabetic, like, period. Like like, we have totally lost our way. Right now, there's a whole TikTok craze where they're shaming doctors for weighing patients or even talking about weight. Obesity is a blaring warning sign that our cells aren't working, and it is not I do not blame the individuals. When eighty percent of American adults are overweight or obese, we have a systemic problem.
Speaker 11:But from the culture, we shouldn't accept that. We should absolutely be declaring that we do not want to have childhood obesity or diabetes and and have that culture. Additionally, in Japan and Italy and some of the European countries, there is, like, total bipartisan just consensus. This sounds so obvious, but but it's not the case in The US that we shouldn't be poisoning kids. I mean, the school lunches in America are an absolute dumpster fire.
Speaker 11:And, you know, in in in Japan and Italy and Frank France has mandated at day care a four course meal, including a cheese course.
Speaker 1:I I think
Speaker 11:a cigarette and wine afterwards. I mean Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 11:But that'd be healthier than what they serve in America. I mean Yeah. It's absolute disaster. So there is just this cultural thing around food. One thing I look at Europe, they spend three times less on average per capita on health care, but two times more per capita on food Mhmm.
Speaker 11:In Europe. They they do have a lot more respect for their agriculture system and their farmers, and the consumption of whole food there is much lower, the the, you know, thoughts about pesticides and what's going on in the food. So so you always hear you go to Italy, eat the pasta, eat the gelato, you lose weight. I mean, that's really true. So I think what needs to happen and and what I hope culturally happens with these step by step wins is we move culturally to a system that puts less emphasis on getting sick and then getting drugged and more emphasis on what I really think is a spiritual issue of having more curiosity and awe about what we're putting in our body, our environment, how that impacts the soil, how that impacts the food, and then just getting back to basics on, you know, not poisoning kids.
Speaker 4:Is there anything that the government can do or or even America could do about on the fitness side of
Speaker 3:things? Happened to the presidential fitness test? Yeah. Yeah. Phased out.
Speaker 1:There was
Speaker 4:a new program in 2015. The battle here. We're we're addressing a lot of the diet and the food supply stuff, but fitness is extremely important, but it's harder to incentivize or to subsidize. May maybe. I don't know.
Speaker 4:What what is your take on fitness?
Speaker 11:Well, I was just with secretary Kennedy in Miami at a UFC fight, you know, Shaq was there and a bunch of A list celebrities talking about how they can help, you know, encourage youth fitness and rejuvenate. So I don't wanna get in front of any announcements here.
Speaker 8:Sure.
Speaker 11:But I think that type of education and inspiration among kids for more fitness to not be I mean, a boy in you know, a teenager boy in America has less testosterone than a 68 year old man. Like like like, there's been a depletion of testosterone among kids, obviously, because of our food or sedentary lifestyle. We're soft. I mean, you know, 77% of of of of military aged youth cannot go in the military in America right now. It's a national security crisis.
Speaker 11:So my one two kind of framework in my head is let's get the wins like the food dies.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:But I you can't undercount the cultural education elements to this. You know, bringing what Justin Maers and and Mark Hyman and a a lot of people have been talking about this for a long time, bringing that to the forefront, these common sense solutions. So you're gonna see a lot of initiatives. And one thing I'm excited about is when secretary Kennedy was sworn in by president Trump, he signed an executive order. And on May 22, in about a month, they're releasing a hundred day report on the chronic disease crisis, why kids are getting so sick.
Speaker 11:It's gonna say things that the US government's never said before about environmental toxins, about our water quality, about our food quality, about our sedentary lifestyle. So so getting the facts down and having the conversation on a factual basis and not letting industry and I'll say this. A lot of people in industry lobby not on policies, but actually to prevent transparency about what's happening. But, you know, there's pressure, you know, to not talk about pesticides. There's pressure to, you know, not talk about certain topics because it's gonna scare consumers or it's gonna confuse consumers.
Speaker 11:There is a good trend right now where the government is gonna talk about anything they want to, and they're gonna give Americans information, not infantilize the American people as we often do. And I think that's the necessary precondition for a long term conversation about policy change, two systems that are gonna bankrupt the country and and cause us to cease to exist, which is I think is true given the trajectory of our health care budget, which which will bankrupt us, and the decimation to American competitiveness when you have fifty percent of teens overweight or obese and thirty eight percent of teens prediabetic.
Speaker 3:Those kind of numbers are so shocking living in California or or any you know, if if you live in California and New York, it's just you would never believe those numbers. You have to go to to places that don't where wellness is not, you know, the the number one trend. I'm curious, do you think this movement around making America healthy would have been possible before decentralized media. It feels like we kind of No. Needed podcasts, we needed social media, we needed people, we needed like a mom, some random place to discover that when she removed red dye from her kid's food that this thing happened and then she shared it and people start collaborating.
Speaker 3:So I feel like, you know, a lot of this movement just would have been impossible when you only could get your news from magazines or newspapers or radios that are all captured in some way by, you know, large corporates.
Speaker 11:No. The independent media ecosystem is an absolutely necessary condition to the opportunity we have right now. It can't be overstated how destructive it is that our core information source has been co opted by an industry that profits from Americans being sick, and that's had devastating consequences. I think what's happened with independent media is one of the major historical events in American history. Like, when you read about the American Revolution, it was really propagated by the ability to easily print pamphlets and Ben Franklin and others, you know, getting ideas out that have never been able to get out before in a in a mass way.
Speaker 11:I think this is a huge shift. I mean, for you know, since World War two, we've had a corporate owned essentially media, and now we're able you know, you guys and and people at a microphone are able to get more distribution than CNN. The the you know, secretary Kennedy, you know, was called a whack job by everyone. Actually, him and president Trump are the two most popular political figures in America still. He he he was able to get through on independent media podcasts like Joe Rogan.
Speaker 11:And, actually, Americans, you know, determined a lot of them that he actually makes a lot of sense with what he's talking about, really about these overarching incentives of health care. I can't stress that enough. There's a there's a in in this building, in in the White House, there's a there's a shift happening where we are, of course, talking about health care policy, like what to do on Medicare and Medicaid, but but it's more about the foundational incentives. Where where what is the logic of where the $2,000,000,000,000 we spend on Medicare and Medicaid going? Is that straight to drugs, or is it more root cause interventions?
Speaker 11:How are we incentivizing our food system? Are we really incentivizing ultra processed food for kids? Is there enough transparency for Americans to make the best decisions? There's more foundational topics being asked, and those are very disruptive topics to the, you know, legacy industry. And and and that's all because of independent media.
Speaker 11:I'll say the independent media also rightfully has led to record distrust of our major institutions from, you know, frankly, the education system, you know, lots happening with Harvard right now, to the pharmaceutical industry, you know, to to to others. That's warranted. And and and one of the leverages, I think, there is for change is that these industries, when I meet with them, you know, really acknowledge that they have to make some major changes, really partner, frankly, with secretary Kennedy, you know, not to do any secretary Kennedy or president Trump any favors because they actually have to make changes to maintain their legitimacy with the American people. I mean, it's not working right now. I mean, some of the tech pros on Twitter are saying how incredible, you know, recent American health care innovation, how it's how it's been.
Speaker 11:I I'd love to see what they're talking about. I mean, we literally have life expects declining. You know, we spend four to five times more than other countries. Chronic disease rates, every single one is at a record high this year in America with the highest rate of crime scenes than any country in human civilization. I don't know what they're looking at, but we're not in a good situation right now.
Speaker 3:How do you think about timelines? You're, you know, special government employee for a limited period of time. This is obviously a monumental task. It's not something that can be solved even in a single admin. How how do you think about, you know, making sure that obviously, you know, we were headed in a to to to a really bad place from a from a, you know, nationwide health standpoint, from an economic standpoint due to due to the consequences of those health issues.
Speaker 3:But what what's the what's the strategy to make sure that this sort of movement becomes bipartisan and kind of can live, live on after you guys are are no longer in the White House?
Speaker 11:I personally think we need to think about it as a twelve year strategy. We're not gonna reorient the incentives of the largest industry in America, the the fastest growing industry in America because we're getting sick, the most employed industry in America. We're not gonna change those incentives overnight or even in the next four years. I think what we need to do, what I'm focused on, is is maintain the political coalition of what you call this MAHA coalition. The reason we're able to drive change is because millions of women, quite frankly, moms voted for Trump for the first time, people who would have never considered voting for Trump years ago.
Speaker 11:The this issue has galvanized voters into a coalition. President Trump was fifty fifty among young people, fifty fifty among independents. We couldn't have imagined that four years ago. So multiple factors for that, but, clearly, this MAHA kind of energy led to that. So the reason we have an opportunity for change is because voters have really galvanized around this issue.
Speaker 11:So to me, if we can solidify that coalition, that coalition is gonna continue to drive change. We need to deliver wins for the next two years. I mean, I'd love for Democrats to compete for those voters. They've had their head in the sand. If if those voters can help Republicans, which is my hope in the midterms, I think you have 2028 where both sides are basically arguing who's more MAHA, which I think is a positive thing.
Speaker 11:I think we've shifted the paradigm of health. You know, before last year, health care was about how to add more people to the existing broken system. That's insane. You had Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren just a couple months ago during the confirmation hearings with Bobby Kennedy eviscerating him for taking on pharma companies. Elizabeth Warren actually said, you know, you're gonna hurt their profit margins, these poor companies.
Speaker 11:Like like, people have lost their minds when it comes to health care, somehow arguing that more resources, more spending to this broken system is how we solve it instead of actual poor reform of the system. I wanna get political victories and change the overall bipartisan way we talk about health. And I will say everyone talks about the special interest, the money. The one thing that counteracts that is voters really voting on this issue, and now you have MAHA moms and people waking up, caring about this issue as a voting topic. So as long as that's solidified, you'll have momentum that changes the incentives to health care where we can look back in twelve years.
Speaker 11:And we have a thriving pharmaceutical industry, but they are incentivized to promote longevity. They're incentivized to cure diseases, not just manage them. All pharma's profits right now are managing. And, you know, we we have an overall health care ecosystem that's more value based. It's more it's more geared towards keeping people healthy, which can happen.
Speaker 2:Yep. That makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There does feel like a way to flip the incentive where the pharmaceutical companies are like, if we can just keep this person alive for another hundred years, imagine how much, you know, how many drugs we could sell them.
Speaker 1:They should make a lot of money for that. Like like Yeah. Like, imagine the impact of
Speaker 11:the economy if they could
Speaker 1:do that. Like, they should make a ton of money
Speaker 11:for that. And they tell you off the record. Right? They'd love to do that, but the incentives are all about disease management. So so so this isn't a free market right now, and there's a real opportunity to nudge these incentives to a different direction.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Yeah. That makes some sense.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you for the work that you're doing
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having time.
Speaker 11:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 3:I think you're doing very important work.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We'll talk to
Speaker 1:you soon.
Speaker 4:Thanks, Talk
Speaker 11:to soon, guys.
Speaker 3:Bye. Later.
Speaker 4:Bye. Let's tell you about Public. You heard the founders on the show earlier, but Public is investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We got some personnel news today.
Speaker 4:Jason Citroen is out as CEO of Discord. Bringing on Humam Sakani Sakanini.
Speaker 3:We need a
Speaker 4:Building Discord has been one of the most meaningful and rewarding experiences of his life. What started as a simple idea to help friends talk while playing games has grown into something far bigger than I ever imagined. I'll be transitioning to a new member as board member and adviser and continuing to support Discord through this next chapter. I'm incredibly proud of what we've built together and even more excited for what's ahead. Very interesting.
Speaker 9:Very cool.
Speaker 4:It will be interesting to
Speaker 3:see Crazy run.
Speaker 4:Discord, gets out at some point. There's been rumors about IPO. And so, yeah, maybe maybe that's the, maybe this is a move to prepare for the public markets. Being a public market CEO is a different job and maybe, Jason wants to step back. But we'd love to have him on the show, do a little gaming day, talk about everything in Discord's world.
Speaker 4:Fascinating founder, total outlier, not from the typical Silicon Valley elite pipelines, not Stanford or Harvard, built, you know, one mobile game at some point, sold one company, ran it back, built up Discord into a really, really powerful company. So congrats to him on the transition, and good luck to the new CEO of Discord. We got some listener feedback. We got some posts about the show. Midwest Tech Pro says, after list after switching to TBPN, I got my entire life back.
Speaker 4:No more deciding what podcast to listen to, trying to write down important points or worrying that I missed some key news today. TBPN changed the way I consume media and, in turn, changed my family's life. Thank you, TBPN. Thank you. Thank
Speaker 3:you, Midwest Tech Bro. Says, from my wife, the palace of pump has rocked our world.
Speaker 4:Yes. We're we're
Speaker 3:good we're happy
Speaker 1:to have
Speaker 4:you as a listener. There's more TBPN news Austin. Peter Smith says, people will say it isn't scalable to bring on each new podcast listener via direct sales reps, but here's a counterfactual. I got cold emailed by a TBPN rep, ended up doing six calls with them over eight weeks before deciding to become a listener, And then I went on to spend $11,000,000 on Eight Sleep mattresses with my tri ramp card, providing enough measurable ROI to cover that sales rep for the quarter. Thank you, Austin.
Speaker 3:So good.
Speaker 4:Based Alexander says, you should get a notification if your tweet was featured on TVPN. Well Working
Speaker 1:on that.
Speaker 4:Your notification. We you have been
Speaker 1:We haven't
Speaker 3:been notified.
Speaker 1:Featured on TVPN. You're featured on TVPN. T shirt.
Speaker 8:Let's go.
Speaker 4:We do wanna build an automation, something around this. Maybe reply to this post with this clip. We'll figure it out. We're hiring folks every day. Just if you apply make sure you have at least one of the following Yeah.
Speaker 3:You have an option to go ghetto Into TVO.
Speaker 4:We want Navy SEALs, GP at a tier one BC. These types of things, ten years CUDA experience, twenty years high frequency trading experience. If you have something like that, you might be a fit for the team.
Speaker 3:And still an opportunity to get in under a hundred people.
Speaker 4:Exactly. Being in the first hundred is At least if
Speaker 3:you join in the next couple Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 4:Janon account says, would be insane if there were one company with John Schulman, Daria, Alec Redfer, Ilya, Sama, Greg, Andre Carpathi, Mira and Paul Cristiano. Very very funny.
Speaker 3:And the only person left at this company after six months is
Speaker 1:Sam No.
Speaker 4:I think Greg's still there. Yeah. Greg came back. But it is it is crazy how there's been this, you know, there was insane concentration of talent there. And then as they as they transitioned out of a becoming a research institute into becoming a product company, there was a turnover in in the team.
Speaker 4:And people scattered to the wind to do all sorts of different projects. But, you know, I'm excited. More competition, better products for consumers, specifically in AI. Ryan Peterson shares the Wall Street Journal talking about Flexport. It's a staggeringly tedious job that would be of little interest to anyone in normal times.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. They call they call this tariff pencil pushers. So rude. Founder mode. He's in founder mode.
Speaker 4:Sweet. He's getting he's getting quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Whenever something happens in logistics, shipping, he's the person that
Speaker 3:everyone wants Many many people love to say that Ryan actually created global trade.
Speaker 4:He did.
Speaker 3:And so he gets Yeah. Invented the ship basically.
Speaker 4:Verticalized. The ship. Yes. The ship.
Speaker 3:This post from Tyler Cosgrove.
Speaker 4:Just fantastic design.
Speaker 3:Close friend of the show.
Speaker 4:Show adds the soft bank shield.
Speaker 3:Bank treatment to OpenAI's charts. I agree. It looks much better with the the unicorns galloping upwards and
Speaker 4:So the winter projection for, winter twenty twenty five per debt projection for chat, for OpenAI revenue is going from 1,000,000,000 in 2023 to 4,000,000,000 in 2024 to 13,000,000,000 in 2025 to 29,000,000,000, then 54,000,000,000, then 86,000,000,000, then a hundred and 20 5 billion.
Speaker 3:We're going higher.
Speaker 4:It's fantastic. I mean, they're they're on their way and, you know, yeah, you throw the you throw the unicorns on there, you throw the big PowerPoint arrow, and it looks a lot better. But, I mean, the business is ripping. I use the product every day. Think most people do.
Speaker 4:And so good luck to them on their path to a hundred and $25,000,000,000 in revenue in 2029, hopefully.
Speaker 1:I think that they might
Speaker 4:blow that out. Who knows? We'll be tracking it here. We'll be breaking it down. We'll be tracking Polymarket to see where their DAUs end up Yep.
Speaker 4:Or their MAUs. Sean Frank coming on the show tomorrow, but had a had a good post we wanted to highlight, he said. Or a bigger third thing, trend lines don't continue forever. Hard work built this business. COVID scaled it for twenty four months.
Speaker 4:Every single person in America suddenly loved the outdoors. They went out and bought gear to enjoy them. This is the story of, solo brands. NYSE has, suspended solo brands. Are they a casualty of tariffs or mismanagement?
Speaker 4:Sean Frank's breaking it down. He says that gear had negative network effect. Every solo stole every solo stove sold increases the CAC of the next one because the next buyer is less incremental, less interested, more taking more promos or ad impressions to buy. And instead of launching a second bigger SKU, they bought non adjacent brands. Chubby's is great, but solo stove buyers aren't guaranteed to be Chubby's customers and vice versa.
Speaker 4:There's no flywheel, no cross sell, no advantage. Just a hard good company and a hard goods company and an apparel brand trying to be managed by the same team.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Think that ultimately sold solo. The idea of consumer holding companies is very appealing.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But consumer products are a full contact sport. Yep. And the best companies that I'm aware of have, you know, management teams that are a 10% in Yep. And trying to then if you're not and you're trying to manage multiple brands while you're competing in the same categories with, you know, founder led or just exceptional management teams. So
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, happy birthday to YouTube. YouTube turned 20 yesterday, and Colin Samir remade the very first YouTube video ever there at the zoo. And I hadn't really watched the original YouTube video. I mean, I probably watched it at some point.
Speaker 4:This is the first video ever uploaded to YouTube. Us at the zoo, Colin Samir recreated it, and, it's twenty twenty one seconds, and it's, kind of a funny watch if we can pull it up. Let's see. In other news, Erwan raised a $2,000,000,000 valuation. Let's go.
Speaker 4:I Is this downer?
Speaker 3:I mean, we we spend
Speaker 4:What happened? I feel like if they have just, like, a few customers like you, they should be up at, like, twenty, forty, a hundred, two hundred billion.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Fact that I get to track my LTV in the app is Wild. Wild. 10 stores. Somebody was breaking down the math here.
Speaker 3:I don't know how accurate this is. They have 10 stores. You know? I I I don't know. I I've heard a bunch of rumors just being around LA over the years of just how much money they make, but it's you have to think of it as a grocery store, a high margin grocery store, which is nontraditional.
Speaker 3:Grocery is typically low margin. They've turned grocery into a high margin business plus adding on a high margin restaurant. Mhmm. Plus they sell, you know, home products and beauty products and skincare and things like that. So you can't look at it as a purely monolithic, you know, it's not a it's not a typical grocery store.
Speaker 3:And then they also have this like cafe business and I think when you combine all of those, they're just cash machines.
Speaker 4:Andrea here says she's been told by multiple sources that they claim to make $50,000,000 per store. So 10 stores, that's $500,000,000 in revenue. And they also make more money from the smoothie collabs, which is very fun. One of our goals for this year is to get a TBPN smoothie at Erawan. So if you're Working hard on it.
Speaker 4:Give us a ring. Let's watch the Colin Smear YouTube video.
Speaker 9:Alright. So here we are in front of the elephants.
Speaker 7:Cool thing about these guys is that is that they have really really really long trunks and that's
Speaker 9:that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say. Alright. Can we believe that?
Speaker 1:That that was the
Speaker 3:first YouTube video. About
Speaker 4:masterpiece. A masterpiece. A masterpiece. Yeah. Chad Hurley, the the YouTube team, they threw that up.
Speaker 4:And YouTube was originally
Speaker 3:gotta we gotta pull up one of those videos sometime, not today, but of the early YouTube team when they're just like, you know, talking, like they look like they're in like a like a like a dungeon basically. Like they're just talking about how hard it is, how how things are working, how they're not working, but they cooked.
Speaker 4:They did. Let's close out with a post from Sean Frank who's coming on the show tomorrow. He says he's opening a Speakeasy just for Red Dye forty and microplastics. Don't let Callie Means find out about that, Sean, but I like the way you're thinking. Government can't hold you back.
Speaker 3:Poison resists.
Speaker 4:You're just going get stronger. It can only make you stronger, Sean. I think you're in good shape. I think you can handle all of the microplastics and the red dyes. Good luck to you though.
Speaker 4:And we'll ask you more about it tomorrow when we see you on the show. But anyway, thank you for watching, everyone.
Speaker 3:Thank you, folks.
Speaker 4:We will see you Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Cheers.