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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, 03/23/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, safe, easy, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:I think you get the whole
Speaker 2:Very barnyard themed this morning.
Speaker 1:Very barnyard themed. Let
Speaker 3:me
Speaker 1:pull up the linear lineup. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces are using agents if they're on
Speaker 2:Very fun day today. We got Martin Shkreli
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Coming on with Max Max. Over at Superpower to The peptide debate. Peptides. Two very different stances on these compounds and Now, in will see how it goes. Bring the popcorn.
Speaker 1:Is there a peptide that helps with debating?
Speaker 2:I'm sure there is.
Speaker 1:Is there like a d b t one? D b t one five seven that you can take and then you become
Speaker 2:a credible candidate? Can make one before
Speaker 1:We'll see. Then we have Mitchell Green, Lead Edge Capital coming on 12:30. Shane from Air, we're going into a lightning round. And then David Senra's coming on at 01:15, hanging out in person.
Speaker 2:Don't forget.
Speaker 1:Gonna ask what the meaning of life and
Speaker 2:why Of course. And Matt from Doctronic. Yeah. It's a very fun day.
Speaker 1:Anyway, over the weekend, you you watched this live. Right? Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, the CEO of SpaceX, got some folks together, gave a big keynote presentation about his vision for the future.
Speaker 2:Basically, something that looked like an It
Speaker 1:did look like an And so you you watched this. Right?
Speaker 2:I did watch it.
Speaker 1:I watched I watched a little bit of it. And overall And if you were taking a shot every time Elon
Speaker 2:said epic, you were
Speaker 1:Hammered by the
Speaker 2:not in any in any state to drive after about three minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's got so much going on at this point. I mean, he's doing sports cars, cyber trucks, you know, Model three, Model y, just consumer cars.
Speaker 2:Model y, XL.
Speaker 1:Space Internet, space data centers, space launch capacity. Point to point, he's gonna take us from one on a rocket from New York to Tokyo in an hour, thirty minutes. Neuralink, brain chips, tunnels. These Elon projects have just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Of course, owns X and Twitter, XAI, training foundation models, trying to make a consumer app where you chat with it as well as, you know, solve math and physics.
Speaker 1:So the big Yeah. This was super rough. It was I I listened to it and it was a rough delivery. Like, he seemed like Yes. He seemed a little like just like, woah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Got another thing to present. And so the cadence wasn't quite there and he wasn't able to get the crowd going.
Speaker 2:There was
Speaker 1:a lot of waiting a little bit for the audience to, like, realize that that was a flawless
Speaker 3:line. Never
Speaker 2:bet against Elon. True. I'm not dumb enough to bet against Elon.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I'm not dumb enough to try to short any of his company. Yes. For sure. And I'm not, you know, you by now, you should have learned not to doubt Yeah. What his organizations can do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And even though this TerraFab concept, there's you a lot of reasons that you would wanna bet against it. Yep. There's a lot of I don't don't know that many people that are genuinely sold on on the space data centers in the near term. It's still it is not clocking for me Sure.
Speaker 2:John. It's not clocking
Speaker 1:It's not for clocking That he's standing on business? It's not clocking for clocking clocking
Speaker 2:to me that he's standing
Speaker 1:He's standing on
Speaker 2:on base data centers. And so so this entire pitch, you know, notable seemingly the first time he's put the the Tesla XAI SpaceX logos together Sure. The whole
Speaker 1:No. The tunnel project, Hyperloop, was a blog post that he wrote and it appeared both on the Tesla blog and the SpaceX blog at the same time. And everyone was like, who's going to be involved in this? And it turned out it was like a couple people from both sides. It became its own
Speaker 3:company I'm at some not saying it's the
Speaker 1:first time. No. No. But it does feel like Elon Megacorp. Gearing gearing
Speaker 2:up for the Elon Megacorp.
Speaker 3:And, yeah. So so just overall
Speaker 2:Yeah. The pitch is he's basically saying like, okay, we're gonna do TeraFab. Mhmm. It's this really hard project. And the evidence for why you should believe that it's gonna work well.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Because he's like, we've done a lot of hard things in the past. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 2:then talks a little bit about space data centers. Mhmm. And then he talks about needing something in the order of a thousand times more compute
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Than He says to
Speaker 1:reach a petawatt, we'll build an electromagnetic mass driver on the moon with robots like optimists and humans.
Speaker 2:No. But but before the mass driver
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's talking about how Oh, we're chip constrained, which is true. Elon He gets it. Chip chip constrained by a thousand x. Sure. And so we have to do this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have to build a
Speaker 2:But fab he doesn't he doesn't lay out like a super compelling case of what all the chips will be used for. Right? Is it Are they gonna be Is SpaceX gonna be a Neo Cloud? Is it just for their own internal products like, you know, self driving, humanoids? Yeah.
Speaker 2:It it You know, again again, my criticism is not of any individual company much as the presentation I just came away. He he kept saying like, if we can do this, it's gonna be epic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and It wasn't if there there wasn't a strong justification
Speaker 3:I hear.
Speaker 2:Other than it's gonna be epic. Yeah. And then he just closes out with this render of Yeah. The mass driver which is again, it's tight.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I didn't I didn't What was the takeaway on like what we're even gonna use the mass driver for other than to get to a Kardashev three civilization which again, all this stuff just feels so so so
Speaker 1:So far in the future.
Speaker 2:Far out. But He did he did he did did drop the line turning science fiction into science sci Science facts? Science facts.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Which is I think
Speaker 1:It's a Josh Wolfe line. I mean, I don't know
Speaker 2:if Josh Wolfe the first
Speaker 1:one to ever say it, but it's a good line.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think of it as a as a wolfism.
Speaker 1:I do too.
Speaker 2:And it's funny because Josh Wolfe was like the hardest critic of Elon.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And he was
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Like, he basically had to stop at some point. Yeah. Of course. But but, yeah, he kept saying these lines that he was, like, expecting, like, kind of laughter
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was really hard. I mean, doing, like like like, the actual delivery of a speech on stage I mean, Jensen just went through this with a keynote at GTC where he didn't have a teleprompter and he was able to deliver moments and get the crowd going and the crowd size at GTC is really big and so even if you just have a couple hardcore fans that really get you and have listened to every Jensen keynote You'll get it. They know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They start clapping and then everyone starts clapping because it's infectious. And then pretty soon everyone's clapping.
Speaker 3:This is
Speaker 5:how it works.
Speaker 1:So yeah. Yeah. I mean, the comedic timing, the delivery timing of like when to clap, when to be woah. You know, that was a little tough. I don't know if actually know who was in the audience.
Speaker 1:It might have just been employees. It has a certain aesthetic to it. But interestingly about the tariff fab, this is something I was advocating for back in 2022. So when the Biden Chips Act happened, there was this question about, like, what's gonna happen with Intel? Intel should be at the, like, the center of the Chips Act because the whole pitch for the Chips Act was that America is not on the leading edge of semiconductor fabrication.
Speaker 1:And so we need to sort of pull our weight with our intellectual property laws to stop Taiwan from exporting them. Remember, Taiwan is its own country. They should, in theory, be able to sell their products anywhere. Like, what say do we have over, you know, if Japan wants to sell PlayStations to China or anywhere, why do we have authority over them? Well, comes down to the intellectual property.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of patents that have been licensed to ASML, to TSMC. And so we do have the ability to pull levers and strings to sort of limit those, especially if they're packaged by NVIDIA, an American company. We have export rules, but it's it's a stretch. But the whole thesis was America is gonna lose to China unless we do this. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so Intel was a very logical one. And I remember there was like 60,000,000,000 or something up for grabs around the CHIPS Act. At the same time, Elon was marshaling around 60,000,000,000 for to buy out Twitter, something like that, 40 something billion. And then Intel's market cap, what they're a $220,000,000,000 company now. I think that they were lower back in 2022.
Speaker 1:They were maybe a 150,000,000,000. And so it would have been a stretch, but between the Chips Act money, the all the private equity dollars that came in, all the venture capital dollars that came in to buy Twitter, there was a world where Elon just bought Twitter and there was also that that that rumor that he was maybe meeting with global foundries. There were a number of different like, oh, like, what is Elon really great at? He's great at engineering efficiency. What does what does Intel need?
Speaker 1:It needs engineering efficiency. There was a world where, you know, they they teamed up and and Intel, you know, like really delivered on building new facilities much quicker. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. So so Here
Speaker 1:we are.
Speaker 2:I I I think it makes total sense for Elon to make chips. Yep. I think I think it will make sense over time for xAI to start offering cloud services to other companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Having compute is valuable.
Speaker 2:But but still, it this seems like a kind of just kind of a blatant Mhmm. Sci fi Mhmm. Hump going into the IPO?
Speaker 1:Maybe. I will take the other side of that. But first, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.
Speaker 1:CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Hopefully, we'll see.
Speaker 2:We have BNY was the first Bank of New York was the first company to go public Yes. On the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:And we'll have them joining later today. So the the other side of this is that is that it is good to have a long term vision even if it is decades away. And that's what mass driver on the moon is. It's not going to be realized this quarter. It's not gonna be realized this year.
Speaker 1:Probably not even this decade. Elon, interestingly, didn't really put a date on it. Like, he's yeah. Did did did he say something specific?
Speaker 6:He said, I hope to see it in my lifetime.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In his Which is like, I
Speaker 6:mean, he's 54. He's got a while. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, if he's a radical life extension guy, he could be like three hundred years from now. Who knows? That's a very vague timeline where whereas in the past with point to point, with Roadster, with Cybertruck, with Space Data Center, all the other Elon pitches have been very focused on, we think we can do this in five years. We think we can do this in two years.
Speaker 1:We think and he always gets criticized for being Elon math, too aggressive. But then history has shown that you know, he he overpromises, underdelivers, but he typically does deliver eventually. And and if the technology is completely new, no one else was going to build it and he's the first one to build it, like, it's fine because Starlink works. It was the first LEO constellation for satellite Internet, had it turned into a huge business, wound up being a great technology. And so even if even if it was late I don't even remember the the the Starlink predictions.
Speaker 1:But if even if that was late, it's fine. It was still good business. Now, the mass driver is a lot crazier. I was going back and forth with Tyler about this, trying to get him to nail down a prediction. We started with one hundred years.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's possible to put a mass driver on the moon in next one hundred years? Yeah. But And you said yes. No. So So it's possible.
Speaker 6:Yes. There's all sorts of qualifications. Okay. Think the thing, it was like 300 metric tons.
Speaker 1:Okay. We will go through we will go through my my conditions. We will also go through my timeline and then we will get everyone's predictions for how long this will actually take. So first, there was an interesting moment last year when everyone sort of like came around to the same AGI predictions or the same superintelligence predictions saying eight, ten years, George Hott's, Dwarkesh, Karpathi, Sam Altman. There were a number of people that were all saying in various words, like Sam said, a few thousand days.
Speaker 1:Dwarkash had this probability distribution that said 2,032. And so everyone was sort of in the in the seven to ten year range. And it was just this interesting moment in the AI industry at least where everyone had a clear definition of what superintelligence would be. And then simultaneously everyone was like, yeah, it's not this year. It's more like 10.
Speaker 1:And so it was a cool set of discussions and I enjoyed that moment from last year, sort of around November year, fall. But there's way like, we are so far away from consensus around mass driver timelines. I thought it'd be interesting to start developing a thought process around what is a mass driver? What does success look like, and what are reasonable timelines here, even though I agree with everyone and with what you're thinking, which is that it's really far away because it is. First, we have to define what a mass driver actually is.
Speaker 1:In simple terms, it's an electromagnetic launch system fixed on the lunar surface that converts energy. So you put down some solar panels. You take energy. That's the electromagnetic. You're not putting up fuel.
Speaker 1:And then because that's extra cost, you once you're there, you can just repeatedly get sunlight, turn that into energy. And you it's fixed to the lunar surface and it's going to successfully accelerate a payload to lunar escape velocity, which is one fifth of Earth's escape velocity. You've got to be going 5,000 miles an hour to escape the moon's gravity well. You have to be going 25,000 miles per hour to escape Earth's. So from an efficiency and energy efficiency standpoint, it's much better to leave from the moon than to leave from earth.
Speaker 1:So then the payload needs to go somewhere useful. Like you make this thing. In this video, he's talking about making satellites on the moon. That's even farther away. But those have to go somewhere.
Speaker 1:So you can't just launch them into deep space, I mean, unless you that's where you're going. Usually, you would go to a lunar orbit or an Earth orbit or some point in between the moon and Earth. And there are more intermediate steps. You don't need to go straight to satellite with a chip on it from the moon to wherever it's going. You can start just by launching rocks, which sounds crazy, or water or hydrogen.
Speaker 1:If there's ice on the moon, you can split that into hydrogen. That can be used as fuel with electricity. Electrolysis is the is the technique for that. Even just moon rocks can be used as radiation shield.
Speaker 2:Gabe says, what is this mass driver you speak of SpaceX is getting in the supplements game?
Speaker 1:That's a great name
Speaker 4:for They
Speaker 2:should make a
Speaker 1:They've done the Tesla tequila. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They should make a a mass gainer
Speaker 1:Mass that they
Speaker 2:released now and say, hey, you'll get If you buy this, you'll get priority access to the mass driver on the moon.
Speaker 1:I like this. I like this a lot. I would definitely be a a daily driver of the mass driver. And so the yeah. There's this question of like, you you set up this thing.
Speaker 1:It's gonna take forever, be really expensive. What are you actually pushing into space? You probably start with basic materials. So rock, literally rocks, metal, oxygen, water. A lot of useful space
Speaker 2:What if the asteroids that we get into our atmosphere Yeah. Or just an advanced civilization somewhere else? Just hurriedly.
Speaker 1:Mass driving. I saw I saw
Speaker 2:We're whole we're downrange, guys. Relax.
Speaker 1:I I saw a hilarious take that the first UFO that will arrive on Earth will just be a car guy from another galaxy who like got into building a crazy, you know, cars effectively.
Speaker 2:Taking it out
Speaker 1:on the And someone's like, you can't get to earth in that thing. That's too modded. That's too crazy. You're not yeah. You're gonna break down.
Speaker 1:There's no way. And he's like, I'll show
Speaker 2:You're gonna be too old but I'll
Speaker 1:show you. I've modded this thing. So a lot of useful space infrastructure needs heavy shielding. That means water, regolith, other dense materials are good for shielding humans and sensitive equipment to radiation. There's been a lot of fear around the radiation around affecting different instruments or humans in space.
Speaker 1:So you wrap them in moon dust or water, and then that reflects the or diffuses the radiation. You can also potentially get propellant from the moon. If you can extract water from from ice, from the moon, especially near the poles, that water can support people because you can drink it, or you can split it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant. So here are the four conditions I think need to be met in order to say, yes, we have a working mass driver on the moon. This is how I'd formulate this bet with Tyler Cosgrove over there.
Speaker 1:One, you need a permanently installed electromagnetic launcher, and it has to be on the lunar surface. This should be obvious. Two, it has to launch at least 300 metric tons over a twelve month period. This means it's driving significant mass, not just test payloads. Let's aim for 95% mission success and at least 200 launches per year.
Speaker 1:Failures are going to happen, but we want to get this reliable and at commercial scale, that means that it can't be breaking down all the time. Lastly, the mass launch from the moon has to actually be put to use. You can't just have this demo unit that's just blasting rocks into the sun. It's got to go to something useful. And that could just be water that's going somewhere else or or, you know, rocks that are going somewhere else.
Speaker 1:But it needs to be like, we're catching them somewhere. There's a reason that it's going there.
Speaker 2:How do you adjust the direction?
Speaker 1:I think at the last second, if you have the trajectory right, it's like how much do you go up, how how much do you go over, how much do you go left. And it's just
Speaker 2:like once whatever is launched is
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Floating in space, and you can use propulsion to kind of move around. But it
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I mean, with that, it seems like it's a pretty basic satellite that doesn't have any propulsion on it, but you could potentially put some, you know, like even just a gas can
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was more was more asking because it's just like, okay, do we need do we need every possible angle of mass driver? How many mass drivers do we need? Because I'm assuming we don't wanna send every single thing that we wanna send into space.
Speaker 1:The exact same direction. Okay. We're gonna sell that one later. That's a 2065 issue. We'll get there.
Speaker 1:Quickly, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, cryptos, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So once all four of those conditions are met, it will be hard to argue that we're in some sort of demo phase or publicity stunt.
Speaker 1:We know we love a publicity stunt, but this needs to be actually commercial. I'm looking for Model three level success, not Tesla Semi level success. I want to see this actually working, reviews, economics. I want other companies being like, yes, I benefit. I'm a buyer of mass from the driver.
Speaker 1:So how long will this take? My like You you should you
Speaker 2:should put the goalposts on the driver because the way that you you keep moving them
Speaker 1:is Okay. Moving the goalposts for this? I feel like I'm just trying dial
Speaker 2:Oh, it needs to be economically Okay. Viable.
Speaker 1:I mean, he what what Elon showed was extremely economically viable. If you're just up on the moon and the moon's just producing satellites with chips that are fabbed and they just go into space, like, that's extremely economically valuable as long as he can get the cost down Yeah. And build it in some reasonable amount of time. And it's gonna take a long time. So how long will it take?
Speaker 1:I put the over under at, like, fifteen to twenty years, which is about as aggressive as I could get. I think Tyler's gonna take the other side of this.
Speaker 6:Well, I'm gonna take the over.
Speaker 1:You're take you're gonna take over 20.
Speaker 6:Fifteen years is, I think, kind of crazy.
Speaker 1:Fifteen years is a blink of an eye. It really is.
Speaker 2:Well, personally, you know, I think I'm a bit more AGI pill than you, Tyler. Okay. So
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, let's go through the six
Speaker 2:Just say The you six lost steps.
Speaker 1:Six steps. Okay. So first off, we got to get to the moon. We can't really get to the moon right now. We're we're like we're pretty close with like really small payloads.
Speaker 1:We need reliable heavy lunar launch capacity and that's gonna take some time. So Starship needs to be refueling in orbit, landing on the moon with and without crews because you're probably gonna need some humans up there, some robots, and we need to start routine cargo flights to the moon. So this is straight up like three to five years away, like minimum. Then you need to build the power infrastructure. So mass driving hogs electricity.
Speaker 1:You need to deploy a 100 kilowatt solar array, then build out energy storage systems so you can burst power during launches and ultimately scale to multi megawatt continuous power generation plant. So that's another couple of years. Because once you're actually going up and back, you have to put down a bunch of solar panels, stored in batteries, and then the batteries need to be able to deliver a lot of power all of a sudden. Now this is what the Tesla does. Right?
Speaker 1:You can charge your Tesla Model s Plaid off of solar panels. It'll take, you know, a couple days. And then when you're ready to go zero to 60 in two seconds, like, it can deliver that energy very, very quickly. And that's what you need for an electromagnetic mass driver because it's a railgun, basically.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. And to SpaceX team's credit, this stuff can a lot of this stuff can be done in parallel. Right? By the time like, I would I would hope that five years from now, Optimus is is quite good Yeah. Functional, valuable Yeah.
Speaker 2:At that point in time. Maybe we can get to the moon Yeah. And back.
Speaker 1:And I've I've talked to SpaceX folks who have been working on, on putting solar panels out on Mars. The problem with Mars is they're farther away from the sun, so you have to put out a lot of solar panels. And that's why maybe they're thinking nuclear on the on Mars. But it's it's not like they've thought about how do you deploy solar once you get to another celestial body. They've been thinking about this for at least over a decade that I know of.
Speaker 1:So robotic construction capacity, you've got to get autonomous construction rovers at least up and running to lay the electromagnetic track. You have to set you have to solve for all the insane forces during high acceleration, deal with thermal expansion. So you're basically you're basically laying train tracks that have electromagnetic coils in them. So they're way more particular than just like railroad tracks. But then those coils, all that infrastructure has to deal with being negative 280 degrees Fahrenheit during the night and then positive 260 Fahrenheit during the day, I think.
Speaker 1:So, like, massive, massive temperature fluctuations and that means everything expands, contracts. If you have metal there, gets it gets brittle during the night. It gets warmer during the day. That's maybe three years of work, maybe a lot more. Who knows?
Speaker 1:Then you actually have to build the mass driver on Earth, like you because you don't have the infrastructure to build anything up there yet, so you have to build most of it on Earth. You need to ship hundreds of tons of superconduction coils to the moon. These fit the the physics behind all this stuff actually comes from a navy scientist back in the nineteen seventies. And so
Speaker 2:Isn't isn't his pitch we're just gonna just drop a bunch of robots on the moon and they're gonna just like mine and and refine rare earths and then build out the manufacturing facility with those rare earths and like just kind of become a self replicating civilization, fully autonomous civilization. Like, I thought the whole pitch was that we didn't have to send I
Speaker 1:think we definitely have to send, like, close to finished goods. I would be very I would be very surprised if you can go and just scoop up some lunar regolith and be like, okay. Step one, make a wrench. Make a hammer. Okay.
Speaker 1:Now I have a hammer and a wrench. Now let's make some there's some rebar. Let's make some cement. All of that is is you would you would just logically, you would pull it forward by delivering some of that premade because it's just it's just one extra space SpaceX launch to get up there and then have, you know, a CNC machine or something. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Whatever you put up there. Like, you're not gonna go with nothing. So you're looking at another five years here at least. You'll need dozens of dedicated cargo flights just to get the several 100 ton system up there. Then you need to assemble the track sections with humans or more likely robotic crews, integrate the supply, the power supply and cooling systems, test everything rigorously, integration hell can take years but should overlap with some of the other milestones.
Speaker 1:Lastly, you need to shift into operational launches. Your first payload needs to achieve escape velocity. And at no point can a catastrophic failure result in permanent damage to the mass driver or the energy infrastructure. And obviously, we've seen, you know, test failures at SpaceX where things blow up and it can hurt other support infrastructure and that can delay things.
Speaker 2:You the mass driver is roughly?
Speaker 1:I think like one kilometer is about enough. But I'm not I'm not a 100% sure on where that is. But that's a long way to go.
Speaker 2:If the California government thinking about one one kilometer of track. That's fifty years
Speaker 3:right there.
Speaker 1:So, you know, just testing all that, not damaging things, any unforeseen setbacks, that's another five years with lots of variability. The good news is that once you build it once you built it, like, the benefits are really good. Like you don't have an atmosphere. There's no drag, no weather, no air resistance. And of course gravity is a lot less.
Speaker 1:So you still need a plan for where the mass goes after it's driven. You gotta catch it, kind of. And that's a whole another problem. But and and when you add all these projects up, you start easily getting into the decades. But
Speaker 2:And what and and and the render just kind of played. Yeah. Everyone clapped. And then the the the presentation was over.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But the idea is to put more space data centers Yeah. On these?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, if you think about this in, like, the most grand project you can imagine, which is like the Dyson sphere, basically, solar panels directly around the sun all the way around the sun to capture all of its energy. You're gonna need to send a lot of solar panels to the sun. Making those on the moon is lower cost potentially than making them on Earth. That's the that's the theory.
Speaker 1:But then in the meantime, Elon's clearly thinking about making at least part of the satellite up there and then I mean, you could you could ship up the chips and just make the the the housing up there if that's the most if that's the heaviest part. You can make them more economically precise, valuable piece up here. Drop off a bunch of chips, drop them into the actual, you know, housing that's been made and then launch those into orbit. There's a whole bunch of
Speaker 6:other Yeah. But then you're sending chips from here to the moon and then they're being sent back. Right?
Speaker 1:No. They're not being sent back. They're sent they're they're being sent into various orbits.
Speaker 6:Okay. So these are not
Speaker 2:the Yeah. And then and then again, my concern, and again, I'm not a mass driver expert. I'm just kind of thinking through this is like, what if the like, you got like one shot Yeah. Basically.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, the moon's the moon's, like, movements are pretty predictable. And it's not like the moon's just up there going crazy. Right? Like, moon is, like, rotating on
Speaker 6:It's like extremely predictable.
Speaker 1:It's pretty
Speaker 2:it's perfectly predictable. It predicted a 100 Yeah. Years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so and so if you have it lined up so that every day at least it lines up to be the perfect angle, like, then you just launch right then.
Speaker 2:I know. But you're saying we're launching them back into like, just into Earth's orbit.
Speaker 1:Earth's orbit. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Toward where the SpaceX
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You are kind of round tripping. But but it's the equivalent of like of like dropping a ball versus throwing it up. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like you're dropping stuff. But the whole
Speaker 3:point is more massive starts up.
Speaker 2:That that the it's gonna require, like, the vast majority of the components for these satellites being made
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Entirely on the moon. Otherwise, it could very well not make sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. Totally. Like like, there is no benefit to bring a fully complete Starlink satellite up there and then driving it from the moon down to low Earth orbit.
Speaker 1:That makes no sense. The only thing that makes sense is if you're able to get something, like, the vast majority of the mass, ideally a 100% of the mass from what's already on the moon because that's already been driven up there. It's already at low gravity. Like, the energy is stored effectively.
Speaker 2:I'm seeing a tourism angle when the mass driver is pointed back at the earth to like be in a little like bob bobsled type thing Yeah. A little pod to be launched like at the Earth. It does And then you kind of break through the atmosphere and then you parachute. Yeah. That could be good for like gender reveal birthday parties, you
Speaker 1:know? Potentially. Yes. Well, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations.
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Speaker 2:Okay. Predictions. Tyler, you're going over twenty years.
Speaker 6:You're going over twenty have us us
Speaker 1:Are you coming under seventy years?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's just so hard because, like, right now, I don't it's it's hard to see, like, a a real economic incentive to do this. Mhmm. Like, because even even space data centers, it's like still pretty hard to like figure out how like like why that like really makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But then, like, for for this to work, you need maybe space data centers but you also need them to somehow be built on the moon for them to make sense. Right? Yeah. So I I think, yeah, maybe I'll I'll like, median is, like, something like seventy years.
Speaker 1:Seventy years? Okay. Median, seventy.
Speaker 6:Give me fifty fifty years.
Speaker 1:Fifty years. Okay. Fifty years. Getting more techno optimist over here. Jordy, if I'm at 20 and Tyler's at 50, where are you?
Speaker 1:And while you think about it, let me tell everyone about Apple. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:You got it?
Speaker 2:My concern is that an Elon like, Elon is equal
Speaker 1:I didn't specify Elon. Okay. It could be anybody. But I'm just
Speaker 2:saying there's there's a lot of there's I'm
Speaker 1:just saying mass driver on the moon.
Speaker 2:This needs an Elon esque figure to accomplish. Yeah. And, yeah, I'm I'm I'm thinking more in that fifty fifty year.
Speaker 1:Over 50 or under 50? We gave Tyler exactly.
Speaker 6:I I changed I'm going 30.
Speaker 1:30. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 6:I think what changed? Was just like, you know, AGI is like basically here. There's no way it's gonna take that long.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 6:There we go. It's like everything will be so I
Speaker 2:I was thinking five years.
Speaker 1:Five years. I was
Speaker 3:thinking
Speaker 1:months, specifically fifty thousand months.
Speaker 6:I mean, when, you know, OpenAI Codec six comes out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally possible. One shot it. Yeah. No.
Speaker 1:No. No. Even even even in the software only singularity. So there is just amount of time that takes to
Speaker 3:I have
Speaker 2:I I have a pull to mid curve this one. Okay. And just and just think. Yes. Okay.
Speaker 2:This is just a big pump. Yes. It's just a big pump. You're mid curve. We need the semiconductor pump.
Speaker 2:Okay. The space pump, the mass driver pump
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To get to the $2,000,000,000,000 valuation. We need a lot of pumps going on. Right? Space data centers, mass drivers, semis. Like, it's the final pump, basically.
Speaker 2:That is the mid curve.
Speaker 1:That's the mid curve.
Speaker 2:That's the mid curve.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 6:What's the left curve?
Speaker 2:The left
Speaker 1:curve is Elon Good. Elon Good Businessman.
Speaker 2:AI accelerate
Speaker 1:Yeah. Elon Good Businessman. Five years. Elon make thing. Elon put a thing in space.
Speaker 2:Elon do hard thing.
Speaker 1:Elon do hard thing.
Speaker 2:And then and then the the the right would be just like insane Yeah. AI acceleration. Yeah. What does Elon know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:Who else is gonna do it? He has all the infrastructure. He's cornered the launch market. He's shown a big track record.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The politics thing Yeah. It's hard to see how real it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? I don't know. Because these data centers on land do generate a lot of local revenues. Yeah. And there are gonna be plenty of places that want them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But
Speaker 2:so hard not to make
Speaker 3:while you think
Speaker 1:of your final estimate knowing that I'm at 20, Tyler's at 30 and you are undecided, let me tell everyone about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. What's your final answer?
Speaker 2:Ten years. Ten years. Ten years. Until we have Until we have
Speaker 1:Jordy, that's too aggressive. Never said ten. Don't
Speaker 2:want ten me to years to an MVP.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. It needs to specifically be launching 300 metric tons, 95% mission success, 200 launches a year.
Speaker 1:It needs to be pumping mass. Never. It needs to be driving. Never? Never.
Speaker 3:I think No. I think I I I I think I think
Speaker 2:pumping mass?
Speaker 1:Driving mass.
Speaker 2:Driving mass. It's gotta be I'm thinking I'm thinking 2,100.
Speaker 1:Okay. Based on just average life expectancy, he's got another twenty years. 54. Average life expectancy is 75, 76. He has access to all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 1:You know? Could go for 30. Could go for 40. Plus, like, you forget that, like like, Apple introduced products after Steve Jobs passed away. Like, companies continue to exist.
Speaker 1:Company and and projects will be picked up. There will be other competitors. This isn't even specifically an Elon thing. This is a humanity thing.
Speaker 6:I I think there actually is like
Speaker 1:a What about China? Like China could do it.
Speaker 6:Maybe if if there's some economic incentive found on Mars or like asteroid mining, like it actually does make sense to to do to to to launch from the moon. Right? Because it's like so much easier. Yeah. It requires way less energy.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So
Speaker 2:Twenty one hundred.
Speaker 1:Seventy five years. Seventy five years. There there is another there is another mass driver idea, which is you you build this, you take a shuttle to the moon, and then if you want to go to Mars, you are mass driven from the moon
Speaker 2:to Ryan says Roadster has been ten years since they sold out pre orders. This isn't gonna happen. The Roadster is happening.
Speaker 1:Ryan, is it never going to happen? Like you would say Roadster is not gonna have I mean Roadster could just get completely canceled. But no one does it. I'm not even saying Elon. I'm saying humanity, mass driver, moon, over under twenty one hundred.
Speaker 1:Seventy five years. You got seventy seventy four years. Seems possible.
Speaker 3:I don't know.
Speaker 2:But I I
Speaker 1:Okay. Which one
Speaker 3:do you about what about what about so
Speaker 2:here's here's the here's the thing. You have to make so many Mhmm. You have to come to terms with so many incredible technological leaps Mhmm. To get to the point where the mass driver Yeah. On the moon Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is is mass driving.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If assume we get all those leaps, can we not just mass drive from, let's say, the Earth?
Speaker 1:I don't think so. I mean, there's a company that's
Speaker 2:this 25,000 miles per hour.
Speaker 1:There's a company that's doing this called like spin loss.
Speaker 2:The fastest plane has been is like that that NASA plane. It's like 7,000 miles an hour.
Speaker 1:7,000? Thought it was like I thought was like a couple thousand. I don't know. A fastest plane. Look up the fastest plane.
Speaker 1:We'll tell you about the McCallop default, which Andrew McCallop, friend of the show over at Varda Space, was in The Economist. The cost of a one gigawatt data center in space, he pegged it at 50,000,000,000. Star Cloud is aiming for 16,000,000,000. Star Cloud at $200 $200 a kilogram is around $1,011,000,000,000 dollars Okay. Per gigawatt.
Speaker 1:Fastest fastest aircraft
Speaker 2:fastest aircraft speed ever recorded is Mach 9.6
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:By an unmanned NASA x 43 scramjet Yeah. On November 16
Speaker 1:How fast
Speaker 2:2,004. It's nearly 7,000 miles per hour.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we gotta five x that or something to get to you know, four x that to get to escape velocity, to escape the to just, like, do the thing from interstellar and just drive the plane into the into the atmosphere and just go to space. Maybe. Maybe. Do you think we will have mass driver on the moon first or mass driver on the moon first or?
Speaker 2:Z I t says the mid curve is definitely right.
Speaker 3:Okay. Nobel victory.
Speaker 1:Mass driver on the moon first or Atlantis first. Atlantis. Society Oh. Of people living underwater in like some sort of glass dome where it's fully sustained. You can go, you can move there and be like, yeah.
Speaker 1:I got a buddy who moved to the new Atlantis, and he I haven't seen him in three years. He's just been down there, happy, living life. Which one do you think happens first?
Speaker 6:I've been very bullish on on Atlantis? Atlantis data centers. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Atlantis data centers. Go under Atlantis data centers actually make a ton of sense. Right? Don't you get a ton of cooling for free?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Sorts of stuff that that
Speaker 1:You get no energy.
Speaker 2:No. The vents.
Speaker 1:The vents?
Speaker 2:Geothermal Geothermal.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:No one's talking about underwater data centers.
Speaker 1:No one's doing this. James Call up James Cameron. He'll he'll be on this. Let me tell you about vibe.co. We're d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure just like on Meta.
Speaker 1:And let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. Okay. So we have
Speaker 2:It's so hard to be Barrett on the technology business programming network. I'm sorry everyone. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:We got a decel over here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Got a decel over here.
Speaker 1:True true decel with a crazy IP doom over here.
Speaker 2:No. I mean, 2,100 is is is pretty acceleration pilled if you look at the fact that going to the moon is now a lost art that we're
Speaker 3:lot of
Speaker 1:people in tech that say the 2100 milestone is Dyson sphere. And so, like, you probably get the mass driver before you get the Dyson sphere. Like full Dyson sphere? Full maybe over 50% coverage. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Twenty twenty one hundred. Because the like, this is based on super intelligence.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, this is like, you know Singularity. Every AI company is a is a Dyson sphere company.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day. Yeah. Potentially. Yeah. And then and then the question of what what what is it?
Speaker 1:Kardashev one is all the sunlight that falls on the Earth. Kardashev two is all solar panels all the way around the entire sun. So we get the sunlight that doesn't just hit Earth. It also hits the it also hits Mars, also hits the backside. You get all of that power.
Speaker 1:So much more power than the than than just Kardashev one. But then I think Kardashev three is every you you're harvesting energy from every sun in your soul in your not your solar system, but your galaxy or something like that, like everything in the Milky Way. It gets really crazy.
Speaker 6:In the galaxy.
Speaker 1:In the galaxy. And that's a lot of power. That's a lot of power. By then, it's totally possible that, like, you won't be able to tell the difference between, like, AI generated imagery and, like, real imagery. With that much power, it's it's entirely possible that that it it could be funny.
Speaker 6:Be automated workflows.
Speaker 1:The automate yeah. It'll be able
Speaker 2:to do high school level
Speaker 1:Yeah. Homework For sure. Reliably. For sure. Well, we have a related prediction from Kalshi about Tesla.
Speaker 1:Will the Tesla Optimus be released this year? It's sitting at a 25.4 chance and it jumped a little bit. Just over the past week. It was down at 19%. It's pumped to almost 30%.
Speaker 1:Now it's down at 25 based on the more recent announcements from Elon Musk.
Speaker 2:Anyways, to end on some positivity Yes. I am glad that Tesla and Elon Inc. Are going to be focused on chip manufacturing. Mhmm. I think we'll get some very, I think we'll get some Yeah.
Speaker 2:Real progress there. And, it is good for
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:America. It's good for the world that they are choosing to work on this very hard problem.
Speaker 1:I agree with that. I had a different positive conclusion as well, which is that I think it's fine to think in decades and share a vision that is decades away. The last thing I want is for technologists to be devoid of long term vision. I really don't want there to be like an end of the tunnel, oh, we're just working towards superintelligence and then we can all become complacent. I'd much rather get excited about projects many years away or decades away that only have a slight chance of working rather than the alternative, which is just stagnation.
Speaker 1:And so I'm sharing for the masked driver. And there's that old phrase, shoot for the moon. If you miss, you'll land among the stars. And I couldn't agree more with that.
Speaker 6:I think it's the other shoot for the stars, you'll land on the moon.
Speaker 1:Right? No. It's not that. It's shoot for the moon. If you miss, you'll land amongst the stars.
Speaker 1:If you shoot for the stars, you're just gonna randomly land anywhere. The chance that you land on the
Speaker 3:moon the
Speaker 6:moon is closer than the stars.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:You shoot for the moon, is this narrow target. And if you miss, you go off into the stars.
Speaker 6:Okay. You're talking about directions. I'm talking like distance. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 6:If you're shooting for stars, you
Speaker 1:don't get all the way there. You're once you've reached escape velocity, if you miss the moon, you'll just keep going until you hit a star. It might take you a long time, but you will land there.
Speaker 6:I I think I'm right about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't think look it up. Look it up. So
Speaker 2:Let's head over to
Speaker 1:Take us somewhere else, Jordy. Let's head
Speaker 2:over to suspended cap. Okay. Do they say? Are they bullish on is suspended cap bullish on the presentation?
Speaker 1:TeraFab suspended cap says TeraFab is a blatant pump. It actually disgusts me. There will never be leading edge chips from them. There will never be data centers in space. It's such a blatant effort to IPO SpaceX on the back of some pie in the sky BS and then merge with Tesla, do humongous rays, keep blah blah blah blah blah for five years.
Speaker 1:Anyway, not specifically, Cap's not a not a fan. D cell. This is ready Cap's a D cell. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider.
Speaker 1:Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers and databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Should we go over to the Mall King? Where should we go next, Jordy? Okay. So there was an obituary in the Wall Street Journal for David Simon.
Speaker 1:He was a Mall King who was both feared and admired. He had ruthless negotiation tactics, an obsession with details and the sheer force of will that turned his family's real estate business into the largest mall owner in the country. He passed away on Sunday after a cancer diagnosis in 2024. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2024. He was 64 years old.
Speaker 1:During his more than three decades as Simon Property Group's chief executive, the inveterate dealmaker gobbled up competitors and defied critics who said malls were obsolete. Over a decades long buying spree, he cobbled together an empire that spanned 250 properties and 2,000 or 206,000,000 square feet, giving Simon control of more retail space than anyone in the world. His success helped propel the family to the wealthiest echelons with an estimated net worth of 11,600,000,000.0, ranking number 38 on Forbes Magazine's list of the richest American families. The Simon family, through a charitable donation, donates to many causes, including a $5,000,000 gift to Columbia University. At a time when malls were failing and retailers were filing for bankruptcy, Simon invested in his properties, beefed up their luxury offerings, and added non shopping tenants such as high end fitness centers, high-tech mini golf courses and upscale residents.
Speaker 1:I feel like that has been the secret to success with the modern mall. There's a lot of malls that have sort of mid tier or low end retailers where it is it is actually pretty comparable to shopping online. You go in, there's no one that's really gonna talk to you, the stuff's just there, it might be on the floor, it's messy. But then there are certain malls that have leaned into the higher end experience and they're, oh, would you like a drink? Like, let let's talk about what you're thinking.
Speaker 1:Let's, you know, show you all this stuff. Try this on. And it's much more it's just in a completely different tier than ecommerce shopping. And so I feel like those properties and those chains have done very well. So along with partners, he snapped up ailing retailers, including Aeropostale, Nautica, Eddie Bauer, JCPenney, Forever twenty one, Lucky Brand, and Brooks Brothers.
Speaker 1:The arrangement propped up the chains, prevented large vacancies in Simon malls, and turned out to be moneymakers for the company. Effective Monday, Simon import board Simon's board appointed Eli Simon, one of David Simon's five children, as its CEO and president. The mall king was both feared and admired and could be both charming and terrifying. Simon unleashed a tirade at coach executive Todd Kahn during their first meeting in the decade of the February after the handbag maker tried to renege on deals to open stores in Simon Malls. There was no shortage of profanity, Kahn said.
Speaker 1:The two came to an agreement and became friends. Nothing like a screaming match to kick off a lifelong friendship. David's word was You his could have bang out meetings, but if you came to a resolution and you shook hands, it was golden. That's a good way of doing business. Well,
Speaker 2:RIP to To the mall the mall king. And hopefully, we'll get a chance to meet Eli at some point.
Speaker 1:Yes. OpenAI is offering private equity firms a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5% as well as early access to models not yet in public release. There was a lot of, chatter on the timeline going back and forth like, is this some sort of weird guarantee? Is this not normal for private equity dealing? Market participant had
Speaker 2:a breakdown Broke it all down.
Speaker 1:And to take you through it. Why don't you read through some of this? But first, will tell everyone about MongoDB. What is the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB.
Speaker 1:Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.
Speaker 2:Many are saying OpenAI's $10,000,000,000 private equity joint venture is giving a desperate feeling. A lot of people are throwing up the red flag emoji saying vendor financing dressed up as venture capital guaranteed returns. It smelled like a Ponzi. A company burning 14,000,000,000 this year buying distribution it can't earn organically. I'd push back.
Speaker 2:TBPN, Capital, Advent, and Brookfield put up 4,000,000,000. They get preferred equity with a 17 and a half minimum return, board seats, and early access to OpenAI's newest model. OpenAI gets instant distribution into hundreds of portfolio companies. No traditional enterprise sales cycles. No selling company by company.
Speaker 2:The part people are missing, a huge number of software companies are privately held. Tomo Bravo alone owns 75 software companies generating 30,000,000,000 in annual revenue. PE firms collectively did 1,800,000,000,000.0 in buyouts last year. These companies are shifting to heavy token consumption. AWS knows this.
Speaker 2:They run a dedicated PE sales function.
Speaker 1:Talk about a dream job. That would feel for that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You love private equity
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Hard to imagine. Anyway. Anything better. Advisory programs, transformation consultants, the whole apparatus. Azure and GCP do the same.
Speaker 2:OpenAI is running the cloud distribution playbook. Wholesale tokens to PE portfolios at scale. The difference is exclusivity. AWS doesn't ask PE firms to put up 4,000,000,000 to take board seats. They give the advisory away.
Speaker 2:OpenAI is asking for capital commitment, buys preferential access, dedicated forward deployed engineers, a financial incentive for the PE firm to actually push adoption across its portfolio. A PE firm that invested 4,000,000,000 in this JV isn't running a parallel RFP with Anthropic. That's the point. The 17 and a half percent return looks like a red flag until you look at it closely. It's preferred equity hurdle, not a coupon on debt.
Speaker 2:This is the main Yeah. Thing that the hundreds of posts I saw are missing. Priority on returns before common shareholders. So it's preferred equity Yep. Plus a return on top of that.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. OpenAI is buying captive distribution channel into enterprises they'd otherwise spend years trying to reach. Anthropic is running a parallel deal with Blackstone, Hellman, Friedman Mhmm. And per MIRA. It's 1,000,000,000 common equity, no guaranteed return, more of a Palantir style consulting venture.
Speaker 2:Both companies doing this simultaneously tells you where enterprise AI is heading. The bear case is real. 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to deliver ROI. It's already gone Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's not true anymore. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. That that was one study. And again It was every
Speaker 1:agent coding.
Speaker 2:Yeah. 14,000,000,000 in projected losses this year. Profitability not expected until 2021. '9. All true in OpenAI's enterprise business is already 10,000,000,000 of 25,000,000,000 in revenue.
Speaker 2:40% and growing to 50% by year end. The distribution problem is what's left to solve. And anyways, goes goes on and on. But yeah. Overall, I think, like, people are taking one data point out of context, kind of spinning it into something that that looks, like quite extreme and concerning when in reality it's just giving them a preferred return which is somewhat normal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good good takes here. Yeah. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer.
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Speaker 1:Secure any agent.
Speaker 2:Financial Times had some reporting Saturday. OpenAI to double workforce as business push intensifies. I love a business push, so this is fantastic news. Matt Slotnick says, TBH, the biggest risk to incumbents may be that labs absorb all the top talent. Labs already get great engineering talent but this will spread to product sales, marketing, etcetera.
Speaker 2:When they become the optimal destination to solve the problems of your customers, it's going to get ugly. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, you have a big enterprise instead of going and doing and trying to figure out like the right SaaS
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Solution for a specific problem, you can go to a lab and get something similar. As part of that workforce push, OpenAI tapped former Meta executive to lead their ad push.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Why is no one talking about Dave Dugan?
Speaker 2:The Duganator.
Speaker 1:The Duganator. It's it's crazy.
Speaker 2:Dave Dugan, a former top advertising executive at Meta, is gonna lead sale ad sales. Dugan, announced earlier this month he was stepping down from his role as vice president of global clients and agencies at Meta, has been named vice president of global ad solutions for OpenAI. He will report to Brad Whitecap. The light capinator. The high profile hire underscores OpenAI's urgent push to generate new revenue streams to support its enormous funding requirements for its computing needs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Eric Souffert had some good good commentary around, like, the ad sales strategy. People were complaining that, like, the advertisers that bought the first ad campaigns on ChatGPT said the process was low tech and that they haven't received much data showing if their ads worked. Two executives at agencies working with early ChatGPT advertisers said they haven't yet been able to prove the ads have driven any measurable business out from their outcomes for their clients. Eric Suvert over at MobileDeb Memo shared two thoughts on reporting that early ChatGPT ad campaigns lacked performance data.
Speaker 1:One, this is to be expected. Any early offering will feature limited functionality. Early adopters should be prepared to fill measurement gaps themselves with polling or any other sort of pixels or tracking. You should be able to work this together. There's been plenty of times.
Speaker 1:This was the early podcast ads. You know, you'd run a bunch of podcast ads and be like, okay, some people use the coupon code but a lot of people don't. What multiplier should apply to that? And then you wind up surveying your customer base and being like, wait, we spent 10% of our marketing budget on podcast ads but 20% of our customers said they found out about us from a podcast like maybe we should spend more there, right? And that's the role of a good ad agency.
Speaker 1:Measuring incredibly asserting performance is precisely what ad agencies are paid to do, says Eric Souffert. He says, if an ad agency says it can't provide performance data because the channel doesn't provide it, it is merely a media buying intermediary. If you're an ad agency, you've got to figure out whether or not the ads that you pitch to your clients are actually working. Quickly, let me tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs.
Speaker 1:Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 2:Big scoop. Huge. From Megan over at the Journal. Mark Zuckerberg is building a CEO agent to help him do his job. Employees are also adopting AI agents and AI tools internally, namely Myclaw.
Speaker 2:Myclaw.
Speaker 1:Myclaw. Mydude. And Secondbrain in a bid to speed up work as they get graded on AI use. And so
Speaker 2:Tyler, where is rMyClaw and rSecondBrain? I think it's And our cohost
Speaker 1:That's Chad GBT. Yeah. I don't know. I'm so interested to know what most Probing. Are
Speaker 2:Probing. Probing z stack? Yeah. It is Honestly, Zuck's z stack is like it's like god I
Speaker 1:mean, it does make sense in his position to have a model that's fine tuned on the internal KPIs, the internal org chart, all this information that's private. And he probably doesn't want to hand that off to another to another lab that's just going to maybe look at the data and be like, oh, okay. So Mark Zuckerberg just add just asked, how do I poach from from all the other labs? Maybe we should go on the defense today. But there's got to be so many other questions that he's asking all the time when you're walking into a meeting with executives you want to know, well, how is this division performing?
Speaker 1:How much money am I spending on meta Ray Ban displays? What's the turn rate? Who are our biggest partners? Yeah. There's a million questions.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're we're joking around, but ZStack does make sense.
Speaker 1:It does make sense.
Speaker 2:You should be able to have Yeah. God
Speaker 1:And I mean, this this has the the the there are there are companies that are starting to do this where they're they're pitching their, you know, agent stacks for CEOs. Boardy is sort of one version of that. Right? But there there there's there's more and more people that are like, okay. We will come in and and fine tune something for your organization specifically Yeah.
Speaker 1:And maybe do that on the fly. Maybe that's just JGPT Enterprise or Anthropic Enterprise or whatever. But Zuck clearly wants something built from the ground up. And it's also a great great product demo because if it works really well for him, then it can probably the lessons and the learnings from there will probably apply to other people in the ecosystem. So the agent, which is still in development, is currently helping Zuckerberg get information faster, for instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get.
Speaker 1:Zuckerberg's agent project reflects a drive across the 78,000 person company to accelerate the pace of work, eliminate layers from its organizational structure, and change the day to day jobs of its employees to remain competitive with AI native startups with much smaller staffs. The company views AI adoption as critical to the future of success. Zuckerberg has been spending more time coding recently. He previewed some of the efforts of the company's earnings call in January. Quote, we are investing in AI native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done.
Speaker 1:We're elevating individual contributors and flattening teams, he said. If we do this, then I think we're going to get a lot more done, and I think it'll be a lot more fun. I love that. We have our guests in the Restream waiting room, I believe. First, let me tell you about Plaid.
Speaker 1:Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to improve money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And let me also tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And without further ado, let's kick off the peptide debate. Welcome to the stream, guys.
Speaker 3:How are you Hey.
Speaker 1:How's it going?
Speaker 5:Good to you guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for taking the time. Why don't you both start with an introduction on yourself and maybe your core thesis around peptides? Martin, why don't Max, you please. Oh, Max. Okay.
Speaker 1:Sure. Let's start with Martin.
Speaker 7:Yep. So I'm I'm the farmer bro. I represent the interests and the Of the pharmaceutical industry. Guess viewpoint of the pharmaceutical industry Sure. Including but not limited to Pfizer, Merck, Eli Lilly, etcetera.
Speaker 7:I'm sure those guys love that.
Speaker 2:And You're the face of pharma
Speaker 3:whether they like There it or
Speaker 7:you go. Sort of a self trained biopharmaceutical expert. I think I can speak at a pretty high level about every inch of the pharmaceutical industry. I've discovered brand new drugs. I've acquired drugs.
Speaker 7:I've commercialized drugs. Just about anything you can do in the drug industry, I've done it. And so I'm very concerned about the peptide craze. I think it comes mostly out of psychological issues which we'll discuss. The need for identity, control, distrust of institutions, all kinds of things like that are leading to what we're seeing today.
Speaker 6:Great.
Speaker 1:And Max? Hi.
Speaker 5:I'm Max. Former peptide skeptic turned peptide believer. I run a healthcare company called Superpower And our thesis is that the health system today does a good job when you're sick. It doesn't do a fantastic job at preventing things and actually allowing people to be their best selves. I say a former peptide skeptic because they they seem scary and I say a converted believer because I spoke to dozens of doctors and heard, hundreds of clinical vignettes from people who had their lives changed.
Speaker 5:Now, I don't believe all peptides are safe. I do believe we need more research. But I think there are subset of things that have improved people's lives. I also think as a modality, peptides are one that are more interesting than before now that injecting is normal. Now the wellness and optimization is normal, not just treating disease.
Speaker 5:And now that we have AI for things like computational discovery. So we're We need more research. But I think peptides are exciting.
Speaker 1:Martin, I'll let you just respond. Yes. Seems But like it's up in your it would be useful to at least define the conversation a little bit more because when we say peptides, we could mean Ozempic prescribed by a doctor for someone who has diabetes and is very overweight. It could also mean the Wolverine stack taken by a 15 year old in a gym in Miami, right? And like there's a wide gap here so let's maybe narrow it down a little bit to probably off label use.
Speaker 1:I don't know exactly where where things start to get fuzzy for you guys, but defining a little bit more of where the actual point of debate because I imagine there's agreement with the extremes. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I mean, isn't isn't there a problem when we have to redefine semantics that have been defined forever?
Speaker 1:Okay. You
Speaker 7:know, isn't this like somebody saying, you know, I'm using, you know, GPT instead of using AI or something like that?
Speaker 1:Like Sure.
Speaker 7:There's a specific meaning. Like peptide has this very specific meaning and they're not new. They're 80 years old. People have been using peptides forever. And in fact, in pharma, try to avoid peptides because of their inherent weaknesses.
Speaker 7:You go for small molecules or really large molecules like antibodies. Peptides are sort of the worst of both worlds. So the idea that we've taken this kind of like last place drug class and then turned that into like the standard bearer for do it yourself medicine is kind of humorous to anybody who actually understands pharma.
Speaker 5:Except that the last drug class has the potentially most impactful drug of all time or set of drugs of all time, the GLP-one receptor agonists. So I'm not saying we only have peptides in the toolkit. I'm saying the genie is out of the bottle and we cannot ignore peptides as a tool in the toolkit. Small molecules, just like framing it for people who don't understand the difference between these things. Small molecules are made synthetically.
Speaker 5:Peptides tend to be derived from what already is happening in the body. Right? DNA is the building block of the body and encodes for RNA which produces proteins and peptides. So these peptides naturally occur. Now, can sometimes be hard to patent a naturally occurring thing.
Speaker 5:You can, but it's a little bit harder. Small molecules on the other hand are things that humans design to block biology, to block typically block something that is happening in the body. And again, I'm not saying small molecules are bad, but they're they're kind of the the two different modalities we're talking about here. And we've seen one category of peptides. GLP one has already changed the world.
Speaker 5:And my contention is that there are other categories of peptides that are under researched that have really interesting kind of clinical vignettes that might change the world going forward.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Martin?
Speaker 2:But but the but the but I think like why we're having this conversation is because people are just, you know, injecting a a number of them into themselves now, and you're saying they might change the world, but people are going through the process of self experimentation, and there's a bunch of companies, private companies that are happily facilitating this and profiting off of it when it seems to be a large number of risks that are still unknown. At least, that's my point of view.
Speaker 7:Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Think that's right.
Speaker 1:So maybe let's start with stuff that's not fully FDA approved. I think the canonical example would be like the Chinese peptides, the rettas, the stuff you buy online and inject. And it's based on some interesting scientific literature but it hasn't actually been through the full FDA process yet. Where do both of you stand on that?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, why why do you have a right to pirate somebody's intellectual property? Oh. You know, this this is this is the property of Eli Lilly. They discovered it.
Speaker 7:They spent billions of dollars on it. Mhmm. You want to steal it? You want to work with a Chinese company stealing it? I mean, that's not good for America.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. That's not good for the drug industry. And guess where these where do these drugs come from? They come from American r and d labs. And if you keep stealing them and pirating them in this like weird Twilight like, you know, DIY drug system, which is not very large, at least compared to pharma.
Speaker 7:You know, I don't know if you make a big impact, but if if it went very large scale, you would. I mean, you'd you'd stop having drugs the same way pirating music would would, you know, have huge ramifications for the music ecosystem. So you have to respect intellectual property to some extent. And then taking a retardrum tide, which is just sort of a GLP plus, if you will, instead of just waiting it for it to be FDA approved or using Ozempic, I think this is the worst risk reward decision you could possibly make. It's like some of the decisions I used to make in the past.
Speaker 7:What is your upside to to taking illegally manufactured resitrutide from some other place and you can't verify it, etcetera, versus just taking Ozempic? The people that are take peptides and have these peptide stacks are mostly people in SF, maybe New York. They're very wealthy people. They don't know what the rest of the world looks like. Nobody else in Middle Middle America is excited to do this.
Speaker 7:It's not normal, Max, to inject yourself with things. You know, this isn't like a a thing everyone should be doing. And so to me, the retreutide case is really insane because this is a drug that Eli Lilly is going to get approved eventually. And and the fact that, you know, there are people dying of certain terrible diseases and they need compassionate use. They need to get on extension programs.
Speaker 7:But nobody needs retrotect now, right now, before
Speaker 5:FDA approval. Think the things we agree on are that the existing FDA approved GLP one receptor agonists are an interesting category of drug and they're a peptide and they're impactful. I think we also agree that companies should not do things illegally and infringe on the patent for Reta. Right? I do think the patent system incentivizes innovation.
Speaker 5:I think the crux of where we disagree is not and just quickly on the this is the NSF thing. That is not true. If you speak I know dozens of people who own these research use companies. And if you speak to them, the majority of their audience is Middle America, not not not not SF tech bros despite the tech bros being noisy on Twitter. I think the crux of where we probably disagree is the 14 or so peptides that RFK has said they might move from category one two, meaning they cannot be compounded, back to category one, meaning they can be compounded.
Speaker 5:And I guess my, like, general statement here is that people are taking these compounds. Right? They're already using them at scale. Right? And the way to minimize risk the main way to minimize risk is to move them from category two to category one, right, to legalize them.
Speaker 5:Because the risky thing is the dodgy supply chain we have today. The risky thing
Speaker 2:Well, isn't the isn't the risk isn't isn't the risky thing just doing like massive sort of unofficial, you know, human trials when we
Speaker 5:don't No. I I I don't think so. So I think I think that is true for peptides that we do not have longitudinal clinical experience and patient experience with. Let's take something like b p c one five seven, which is one of the most controversial ones. So let's let's go right to the meat of things.
Speaker 5:Let's take something like b p c one five seven. My contention is that thousands of doctors prescribe this. They do. And have prescribed this for
Speaker 7:10 prescribe this drug.
Speaker 5:Give it to their patients. Right? You can prescribe it to the semantics. It to their patients.
Speaker 2:It's not
Speaker 7:a drug.
Speaker 5:Thousands do
Speaker 1:that. No. No. No.
Speaker 5:My statement is not the semantics of prescribing. My statement is thousands do this. My other statement is that millions of patients have taken this. At least hundreds of thousands, I believe millions, have taken this. Yeah.
Speaker 5:That clinical experience, again, is not an RCT, but we cannot ignore it.
Speaker 3:Yes, you can.
Speaker 7:Yes, you can.
Speaker 3:Okay. You can
Speaker 1:absolutely Wait, wait, It sounds like there's some sort of fundamental disagreement here about like the way BPC 157 is being distributed right now because I know people that have told me that they've taken it. I thought that they were getting it prescribed or recommended to them like, Martin, what is your
Speaker 2:We can agree that it's being given to them.
Speaker 1:I think I I think they're getting it. They're getting what's actually happening here? How is this happening?
Speaker 3:Out out in the back alley. Is that what's happening? Meet in the back alley. It doesn't
Speaker 1:seem like that. It seems like it seems like there are doctors that do have the
Speaker 3:ability to
Speaker 5:best doctors in the world. So when I was first introduced to peptides, one of the most esteemed doctors in The US said to me, Max, you take so many supplements. Have you explored peptides? Because I think they're a really interesting modality with a few decades of clinical use. Sure.
Speaker 5:Right? And when he said that to me, was like, no way. This is this is bullshit. I'm not injecting myself with something. That was weird.
Speaker 5:So what I did is I went around to around 20 different doctors whose
Speaker 7:Should have trusted your gut.
Speaker 5:Whose opinions I respect. Yeah. And I asked them about peptides. And normally, when you ask these doctors about anything, you ask them about red meat, ask them about spinach, they're all divided. Yeah.
Speaker 5:They're all like, one view, another view, punches with peptides. Just about all of them except one said these are really interesting. I have used these in my patients.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:I believe the endogenous molecules, peptides that exist in our body are gonna be the future of medicine. And those doctors have the incentive to not be wrong. If they're wrong, they could go to jail. If they're wrong, they can have their license stripped. If they're wrong, patients don't come back to them.
Speaker 5:So they have the maximum incentive. Over ten to twenty years, they still give this to their patients and their patients say my life changed. Now, you might say it's placebo. My statement is the patient says their life changes and the doctor sees that.
Speaker 1:Okay. Martin, I want you to react but but I also want you to to sort of set aside the intellectual property argument. I I like that argument but let's focus on the the what doctors are doing, how b p c y one five seven is being delivered, that type of thing.
Speaker 7:So so I'm a drug hunter. Right? People like me, Vivek Ramaswamy, we look all around the world for medicine to buy and medicine to put into companies that great firms like a sixteen z and Founders Fund and other more health care maybe focused firms will fund, take it to the IPO, which I've done before Sure. And get paid huge amounts of money. That's what I do.
Speaker 7:That's what I'm good at. That's why I'm the farmer bro. BPC one five seven is the biggest scam I've ever seen. It does absolutely nothing. There's no redeemable value to this.
Speaker 7:Do you know the story about it? Do you guys know? No.
Speaker 1:Please tell us.
Speaker 7:This guy in Croatia made
Speaker 2:it.
Speaker 7:My my hinterland brother. And the only publications about this drug are by him. Nobody else has published about this drug. It's not a drug in fact. Nobody has even confirmed that it's a peptide from the gastric juice as he claimed.
Speaker 7:Nobody can find a sequence that matches that. And the gastric juice of human beings has been thoroughly profiled. It's a 15 mer peptides. So it's 15 amino acids. Half life is minutes.
Speaker 7:There's no plausible physiological basis for it to work. And it's been in clinical trials. Pleva was a local drug company in the Balkans. Very well respected, might add. Pleva actually licensed BPC and tried to do clinical trials for it.
Speaker 7:And guess what? They failed. So this weird like Do think it's placebo effect?
Speaker 1:Of Do think placebo effect? Because yeah. I I talk to people that say it's good for recovery and I can imagine if you're sticking yourself with something, might feel like, I'm less sore today. While are recovering, you think that
Speaker 7:the drug is helping you. Of course, it isn't. It's the recovery process you're going through. And there's an app for this. If you want to make real money, go make BPC CGMP conditions and go do a clinical trial.
Speaker 7:And you can be a trillion dollar company like Eli Lilly. Instead, you can putz around buying fake Chinese stuff and then injecting yourself and dreaming that you're
Speaker 5:doing well.
Speaker 7:I have a drug here that if I take might also aid my recovery.
Speaker 1:No. No. Get my options.
Speaker 7:Should I try this? Should I tell
Speaker 3:you that it worked?
Speaker 7:It's an n of one. My god. I did so great with
Speaker 5:this n
Speaker 7:of one. It healed my recovery. This is nonsense. This is not science. Science is controlled experiments that are well done, very carefully documented and so forth.
Speaker 7:Why are we going backwards? Why do we go forwards in in in civilization and society? What is this urge by the valley,
Speaker 5:and I blame the valley, to go backwards of
Speaker 8:time and space.
Speaker 5:I I hear of you, and I think other people will have it. And we don't know whether these are placebo or not. We can't make a definitive statement. And we don't have the RCTs.
Speaker 2:But I thought you said there was studies done on PBC 157.
Speaker 5:No, are no human studies done.
Speaker 7:There was one done by Pliva and it failed.
Speaker 5:Pleva gave the There are dozens of studies of drugs that become commercialized that previously failed. Anyway, my view is we don't know whether it's placebo or not yet. That is true and some people will say it's placebo, some will say it's not. My statement is really simple, which is you can have Martin's view or you can have the view of thousands of doctors who have used this for ten to twenty years and have their license on the line. The view of millions of patients who talk about their lives changing.
Speaker 5:You can have that view. My dad's visiting from Australia and he's been taking painkillers for the past four months and can't walk upstairs because his back is bad. Sorry. He took BBC one five seven for three days and he said to me, Max, this is the first time in four months I haven't taken a painkiller. Again, I'm not saying this isn't placebo.
Speaker 5:I'm saying we don't know. Yeah. What I'm saying is I am God. I'm really happy my dad's not in a pain killer. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Right? My co founder, he lost three organs in hospital. He had an autoimmune disease. They put him in biologics. He took b p c one five seven.
Speaker 5:He's off biologics and he doesn't have an autoimmune disease anymore. Again, we need study We will put our money office and fund the studies.
Speaker 7:Put your money where your mouth is. Exactly. But
Speaker 5:ignore we the real world evidence.
Speaker 7:Again Well, you are ignoring it if you're not putting your money where your mouth is. If you believe that's true
Speaker 5:No.
Speaker 9:Are. No. No. No.
Speaker 3:We are.
Speaker 7:Do a do a clinical trial. We are. Tell me about it.
Speaker 5:We're we're we're in the process of chatting with the people required to set up a clinical trial for this because we will put our money where our mouth is because I've seen thousands of doctors, millions of patients, and even the FDA, right, who who have said they're gonna start legalizing, even the FDA.
Speaker 7:Okay. But Max
Speaker 5:But you can have your view and I don't that's okay. People will have that view. I will have my view and I'll put my money where my mouth
Speaker 7:Max, you've never done a clinical trial before. Right? You you've never invested in drug companies before, but you wanna do your first clinical trial on on this drug, which you did in an event. You know, you've seen you've heard anecdotal evidence about. Why?
Speaker 5:Because I have seen thousands of doctors, millions of patients over one to two decades. Right? Go say to my friend, go back on biologics. Go back to hospital. Lose another organ.
Speaker 5:Go say go say to my dad, go back on painkillers every single day. I don't want my dad on painkillers every single day. Now you might say that's placebo. I say I don't know. But I say with the evidence that we currently have, I believe there is more You should see
Speaker 7:you should see what this galaxy gas does for me.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Okay.
Speaker 3:It's really good. But what's
Speaker 2:your question is your question Martin more that like okay you
Speaker 7:No pharma guy in their right mind would do this.
Speaker 1:Well hold on hold on. So no pharma guy would do it. Max clearly believes in this and and what is the intersection of these two things? Is it possible to do the type of study that you're talking about with Silicon Valley backing? A Is $30,000,000 series a enough to get started or do you need to go to Wall Street IPO do the biotech thing?
Speaker 5:No. You
Speaker 7:can I I mean plenty of private plenty of private companies do this?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:There's hundreds if not actually I would say there's thousands of private biotechs. Okay. Generally, they would pass on something like this.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. Yeah. So why so there's this body of body of anecdotal evidence.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Unpublished evidence. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So so certainly a a The Martin Shkreli certainly a drug hunter
Speaker 3:would have looked
Speaker 5:at this
Speaker 2:already. Right?
Speaker 5:Martin, as you're saying, the only admissible evidence is an RCT. Yes. And what about all of all of the examples of when something works? Before anything works with RCT, there's a time when it works pre RCT.
Speaker 10:Do you
Speaker 7:know Yes. In animals.
Speaker 5:No. In humans, there are times
Speaker 7:In animals.
Speaker 5:When before there's RCT, it
Speaker 7:will It does happen sometimes. Yes.
Speaker 5:Yes. Look Look at that.
Speaker 7:They're intelligently because they're intelligently designed drugs Mhmm. That were designed to do a specific thing Mhmm. And they do the specific thing and then they work. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Yep. This is not that.
Speaker 5:And you think your statement your singular statement of placebo outweighs the again, we don't know, but I'm saying on the facts we have today, there is more to support the fact this is more likely than not placebo than the alternative.
Speaker 7:No. I would I would bet anything. I would I would bet anything. No trial of BPC would work.
Speaker 5:Okay. I guess we'll see. What
Speaker 2:else so so Max, are you is superpower facilitating people getting BPC one five seven today?
Speaker 5:No. We won't sell anything that is not legal to compound. But I I believe the FDA will make it legal to compound soon.
Speaker 3:And then you can And do can sell it.
Speaker 5:And I believe the FDA should make it legal to compound because the genie's out of the bottle, people have seen their lives changed and they're getting it anyway.
Speaker 2:Else what else are you excited about? Because when people say peptides with an acid, so
Speaker 5:The Thymosin Alpha-one is fascinating. Approved in 35 countries. I take it and I never get sick. I used to get sick four or five times a year. I had the most elaborate immune stacks.
Speaker 5:None of those elaborate immune stacks, the 100 things placeboed me. Thymosin alpha one, everyone around me had co COVID a few few months back, and I didn't get it. A bunch of people around me had influenza. I didn't get it. Every time I get a sore throat, I take b b one five seven well, dimer snapper one and the sore throat disappears.
Speaker 5:Now this is a drug that is approved in 35 countries, right, has, has some some human human data. Now, pharma in The US hasn't hasn't brought it through trials because they can't patent something that had existed for several years. So I think Thymose Napha one is a really interesting one as well.
Speaker 1:Okay. Martin, your reaction.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Well, drug drug companies can and do patent things that that have existed before. I did
Speaker 5:not say that. I said, by most NAPA one in the form that is approved in other countries, they cannot patent.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, you don't even have to patent a drug. Right? You can get seven years orphan exclusivity, five years of NCE exclusivity. There's a lot of ways to make money in pharma.
Speaker 7:And pharma, if you haven't I noticed agree
Speaker 5:with that. I agree that they could find some rare disease indication and use thymosin alpha one against them and get a patent. My statement is that they could not get a composition of matter patent for thymosin alpha one in the way that doctors and patients are using it today. Sure.
Speaker 7:I mean, you you can change molecules too. I mean, there there's a lot of ways
Speaker 5:I I I know. Why would that do medicine. And so we're saying the machinery of the FDA required something works. You see in 35 countries. The only way to get a patent is we're to change the molecule and spend 300,000,000 to $3,000,000,000.
Speaker 5:What is that? What is that for a system? That's regulatory captured by pharma to me.
Speaker 7:I wouldn't say that necessarily. I think that there there are benefits to to making drugs stronger. Like I said earlier, drugs peptides are the weakest form of drug. They're not the
Speaker 5:Except the best but maybe the best drug of all time is a peptide.
Speaker 7:Yeah. But it's very it's one of very few. I would say 5% of drugs by revenue. Today,
Speaker 5:right? Five years ago, we didn't even have GLP-one. Ten years ago, we didn't we
Speaker 3:didn't really
Speaker 5:have GLP-1s.
Speaker 7:No peptides were and probably always will be a backwater just because they're very weak. They have no pharmacological properties that are beneficial like a good half life. And in fact, the naked peptide GLPs don't work either. They have to be heavily modified by pharmaceutical chemistry.
Speaker 5:We know this is not true. An FDA approved peptide with a very short half life, semirelin. Dymosin alpha one has a very short half life.
Speaker 7:Yeah. The drugs that can
Speaker 5:an effect. We know this. We know this. The FDA knows. 35% of the countries know this.
Speaker 7:Are some drugs that can work with short half life, but almost every drug guy will tell you that you want a long half life so you don't have to keep taking the drug. There
Speaker 1:are some
Speaker 5:drugs Correct. That is fine. And we we have methods now with science to extend the half life of these compounds and that's part of where the research is going.
Speaker 7:This is called pharmaceuticals. That's correct. That's what the industry is. We have an FDA for it. We have all these rules for it.
Speaker 7:And I don't think we should change that. I mean, these are the things that have made American pharmaceuticals one of the greatest industries ever. To start to move away from evidence based medicine is you know, is potentially a very risky and scary thing.
Speaker 5:I think the riskier thing is there being a gray market. Because the genie's out of the bottle and people are getting these regardless. I think it's far safer to get them through GMP certified compounding pharmacies in the way that the FDA has oversight over rather than the state we're in today, which is the gray market. And this isn't a debate between no peptide and legal. It's a debate between gray market or white market.
Speaker 5:I contend white market is net less harm, net higher benefit for The US people. I think we
Speaker 7:should treat them like we treat controlled substances. Right? I mean, why there's a very specific set of laws that states what you're allowed to traffic on interstate commerce or not. And you need a a BLA or an NDA or a five zero five b two to traffic a drug across interstate commerce in The United States Of America. And that that changing that, I I don't think is useful or or helpful.
Speaker 7:No matter how many people on Reddit think that they wanna play Doctor House today, that's not something that, you know, they should be engaged in.
Speaker 5:So this is why I think they need to be legalized because I don't think what we have today is safe. I don't think people go to gray market pharmacies and injecting anything into their body is safe. What I do think is far safer and net lower harm and high benefit of the American people is these things being regulated in category one and produced in GMP certified facilities and prescribed by doctors. That is safe. So the net harm reducing case is making these category one illegal to be prescribed by doctors.
Speaker 5:Not all of them, but the ones where we have a sufficient safety signal and a sufficient effectiveness signal.
Speaker 7:Yeah. There there is an arbitrator for that already. It's called the FDA. I mean, why you want a second, I guess, special, like, special ed version of the FDA for drugs that didn't quite make it so clearly efficacious?
Speaker 5:What what I'm saying is many of these things the FDA might not ever want to research because the patent is hard, because they target wellness and prevention and human optimization rather than disease. And the FDA loves their cancer therapeutics. And my statement is if we have sufficient safety and efficacy signals, we reduce net harm by making them legal today. We reduce net harm. And try saying to the person who used to be in biologics with autoimmune disease, you have to wait twenty years for something that might never be researched by by by big pharma.
Speaker 5:Right? Try saying to my dad who was on painkillers the past four months every single day that you know what? This compound you took for three days that has been used for two decades, go back to your painkillers. Try saying that to them. And maybe maybe one day pharma, maybe in ten, fifteen years, research this.
Speaker 5:We don't even know. Say that to them.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Martin, it sounds like there's a there's a sort of a mischaracterization of your argument that I'll let you push back on that you're arguing that the FDA has no problems, that the FDA is perfectly efficient. And that seems crazy. I feel like everyone's upset with every aspect of the government all the time. Is it are you saying that the FDA is anywhere near approving anywhere near to the speed required to approve new drugs, new research as quickly as they could?
Speaker 7:I'd say they're pretty good. Really? You know I hate almost every part of the US government.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 7:But that's that's that's that one I do like. And I advise the US government, and and I feel like this is something that, you know, could not be further from our our collective benefit. Company companies love making money. It's capitalism. You the gray market?
Speaker 7:You think the gray
Speaker 5:market?
Speaker 7:I prefer no market. You don't have a
Speaker 5:choice of no market. No. It's the genie. It's out of
Speaker 6:the bottle.
Speaker 2:What does that mean?
Speaker 6:It's out of the bottle.
Speaker 5:What does that What what that means?
Speaker 7:We can arrest the genie. We can give the genie
Speaker 2:cocaine in the eighties.
Speaker 5:Doctors have prescribed these compounds and they're doing everything they possibly can to get their hands on them. And that can be very risky. And what I'm saying is we have safety and efficacy signals in millions of patients with that in the past twenty years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Max is arguing that like a war on drugs will not work. It hasn't worked in the past. It is impossible to to try.
Speaker 3:It doesn't have to try because
Speaker 1:if these are if it's gray market, that means illegal. Like, Martin is arguing that we can arrest the genie. But can we, Martin? Can we actually arrest the genie?
Speaker 3:Because it seems like there's
Speaker 1:a lot of genies, and you had a product behind you that I think might be not legal either, and that was probably available in a corner store. And I know that there are dozens of illegal flavored, e cigarettes and vaporizers that come over and they make their way into bodegas all over The United States and like this just those things
Speaker 5:are provably harmful. And they still I think provably harmful things do it. I'm saying these things, doctors have their license on the line.
Speaker 7:I don't think doctors want to recommend peptides. I don't think doctors like recommending non FDA approved drugs. I've never met one that did.
Speaker 5:Well, know thousands of doctors who do and I'm saying
Speaker 8:Thousands of doctors?
Speaker 3:I don't know thousands of doctors.
Speaker 6:I spent my whole Thousands is such a
Speaker 2:big number.
Speaker 1:So many doctors. And
Speaker 5:what I'm saying is I agree they shouldn't recommend things gray market. What I'm saying is let's legalize because that is net safer for the American Yes.
Speaker 1:And Martin, you're saying that you can win. You're saying you're saying that that if we hang out in the gray market, you think it's actually possible to shut down gray market activity. Is that true?
Speaker 7:I think you can shut it down. And then I also think that we have a perfectly great system which is the normal regulatory body we've had for sixty years.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:And creating, like I said, a new special ed version of it for drugs that couldn't quite get on the school bus.
Speaker 3:Yes. You
Speaker 7:know, it's not something that we should do because we have a rigorous way to determine if drugs work or not.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's get rid of all
Speaker 5:gray market and my friend can go back in biologics. And that can go back in painkillers. You should. All of the a farmer can continue making hundreds of thousands of dollars from these biologics. Let's do that.
Speaker 5:Sure. And you know what? We're not gonna start there. You get what I'm saying?
Speaker 2:Closing arguments. One more thing. So Martin, your stance is generally that these drugs just haven't proven to be that good. They've been around for long enough that a bunch of smart pharma bros and sisters would have like you know taken them through trials already if they We
Speaker 7:take a lot of bad stuff through trials. Yeah. Know, BPC isn't even doesn't even come close to the muster of of a farmer bro.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Okay. And so so it's it's it's weak. You're saying there's a placebo that you think is probably real.
Speaker 2:But then what is the what is the risk? Right? Because if somebody's saying like, okay, it's a weak drug, I maybe get a placebo effect, maybe maybe maybe But it just why should somebody
Speaker 1:Avoid these
Speaker 2:Avoid it entirely regardless of if they're available on the gray market or on this like, you know, new version
Speaker 3:of I
Speaker 7:just think we shouldn't normalize making drugs in your bathtub. I think that there's no evidence that any of these things are well made. I think we should leave medicine to the experts. I think that's something SV is very reluctant to do. Many people want to feel in a world where maybe they feel like they're losing control.
Speaker 7:They want to control this thing. Or in a world where we're losing confidence in government, we want to take this into our own hands. And it's just not the way to do things. Medicine has progressed dramatically thanks to the capitalist system and the biopharmaceutical system in league with the FDA, which doesn't always get it right, but is quite good. And thanks to that, we have drugs for cystic fibrosis.
Speaker 7:We have a cure for cystic fibrosis. We have drugs for SMA. We have these terrible diseases. And one last thing is that a lot of these people in SV, you're perfectly healthy. You know, you're talking about two sick people there a second ago.
Speaker 7:But most of the people I know in these peptides, they're taking a modafinil. They're taking drugs for diseases they don't have. Mhmm. And this is not a great use of people's time or or or or great for their health. And in some some to some extent, the government does exist to help protect people from them themselves and their own stupidity.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And then, Max, you're planning to take b p c one five seven through clinical trials? Are you planning to take any of these other peptides through? Yeah. So What what is the where where does that ultimately where does that ultimately
Speaker 5:Yeah. So we're working with a handful of different biotech companies that are taking these through clinical trials. We're in the early days of setting that up. And statement is not anti FDA or anti the machinery we have. I think it solves a lot of purposes.
Speaker 5:I just think it doesn't solve all purposes. And my statement is not that the current system is always perfectly right. I think when new data comes along, when new science comes along, when there's a dangerous gray market, we need to accept that the times have changed and adapt the regulation. It has solves a lot of purposes. There are many parts of it that are exceptional, but it is not complete.
Speaker 5:And I'm saying that we should do what the FDA has said they're doing which is legalize several of the category two peptides that have the strongest safety and efficacy signals because that reduces net harm for patients and increases net benefit even if pharma doesn't necessarily like it because they're not making money from their $100,000 biologic drug anymore.
Speaker 1:Sure. Martin, any closing statements? It's been great.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Just want to say pharma did try to develop VPC and failed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We went through that. That's a good point.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for joining today. Thank you to you both. Everyone had a great time.
Speaker 2:Job keeping it boys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very
Speaker 2:civil. Very
Speaker 1:again again, a new peptide goes viral. We'd love to have you both on the show. Let's go. Independently or together. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 1:Have a great week and we will talk to you soon. Guys. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security.
Speaker 1:Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Up next, we have Mitchell Green, the founder and managing partner at LeadEdge Capital. The news, LeadEdge has closed at $3,500,000,000 seven fund.
Speaker 2:What's going on, Mitchell? Great to see you.
Speaker 4:How's life? By the way, somebody likes Diet Coke. I like Coke Zero. I got Coke Zero better.
Speaker 2:Coke Zero guy. Coke Zero. Did you go through a Diet Coke phase or you
Speaker 4:I did in the I did back in the day, and then Coke Coke Zero came out and I started drinking that. I'm pretty sure both of them are gonna kill us, but that's fine.
Speaker 2:Well, you and John are running the AB test. I'm I'm having the podcast in a can from Andrew Eberman. Congrats on the new fund. Big big number. Take us through it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So no. It's good. So it's just a continuation of fund six. You know, fund seven, 3 and a half billion.
Speaker 4:We really raised it late late last fall. Raised it raised it late last fall. But, no, it was it was good. Look. The I we really didn't know what to expect about the fundraising market.
Speaker 4:Everybody had said it'd been really, really hard, but then you see these big giant funds get raised. And so, no, we had we had a lot of interest from existing LPs and some new LPs and things like that.
Speaker 2:What is contrarian about LeadEdge's stance as a fund or or messaging to LPs? You know, this is a software focused fund. Some people, at least on X, would say you guys are crazy to have that positioning. But certainly, the the results have been fantastic.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And, look, I mean, prior history means nothing about the future, as well. I think the things that make us contrarian and, like, different in the world, one, our LP base and how unique it is. We have all these, like you know, while we do have big institutions, 95% of our capital comes from people that are, like, know, world class execs and entrepreneurs. You guys probably had a bunch of our LPs on the show.
Speaker 4:You can look at our website and see examples of a bunch of these people, and then how we leverage these people throughout the investment life cycle, whether they help with diligence, whether they help with, you know, helping customer intros, recruiting, advisory for companies. I think that makes us different than most people. What we invest in is you know, look. We just take a very focused approach, and we're just like, listen. You have to meet x number of our eight criteria five criteria.
Speaker 4:And and I'll say, are you 25,000,000 in are you 10,000,000 plus in revenue? Are you growing 25% a year? Are you profitable? You know, are your revenues greater than your historical cash burn cumulatively? Like and, again, you have to meet five of of the eight.
Speaker 4:And so that just that kills a lot of companies we might otherwise, you know, see. And, again, we just find companies that meet those criteria until, you know, a first couple deals in the fund, you know, without naming the companies, you know, one is a $500,000,000 you know, last year, 500,000,000 of ARR software business, growing 50 plus percent a year. We funded another private equity fund that owned it. They're, like, continuation vehicle because what makes us contrarian is we're very unique in that way. We're like, we'll buy 10% of a company in a minority deal, put money on the balance sheet.
Speaker 4:We'll buy, you know, secondary from an early investor. We'll buy 80% of the company. You know, we'll everything. It it's it's really kinda just we just wanna get into the best businesses. And, look, we invest in businesses that grow, that have super high gross that have 70 plus percent gross margins, that are hopefully capital efficient, that have, like, really happy customers with high gross protect gross dollar retention.
Speaker 4:Software is one of those buckets
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:As well as, you know, financials financial information technology companies, information services companies, payments businesses, Internet marketplaces. We've invested in logistics businesses. If it meets the criteria, we'll invest. There are still a whole idea that software is all going to zero is a bunch of complete utter nonsense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were talking to Carl Eschenbach on the day he rejoined Sequoia last Thursday about the SaaSpocalypse, and he was just stressing the the fact of how sticky these relationships are and the fact that people buy things from other people. They're not just going to overnight switch everything and how they do their business. What what are you actually seeing? How have you processed the SaaS pocalypse?
Speaker 1:Have you processed this idea of all these legacy systems just being upended overnight?
Speaker 4:I mean, it's like complete utter nonsense. I told him to vote on a board meeting, actually. Awesome.
Speaker 1:That was great.
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 7:we're fine.
Speaker 4:I think we're fine. I think I'm literally going to go back with him from the board meeting. Yes. No. No.
Speaker 4:He's fantastic.
Speaker 6:I think
Speaker 4:let's not forget that the US government still runs, I think like, think we think the huge opportunity we do some public stuff as well, we actually own own Workday. And by the way, I think a 99% gross dollar retention business. Yeah. The US government still runs on PeopleSoft, and most banks that people use in America run off of mainframe computers.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So, you know, open source. When people say the apocalypse, that's apocalypse, all software is going to zero, I think what people fundamentally get wrong is is that they think, like, r and d is the is, like, the most important thing in these companies, like, writing the code.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It hasn't been for decades. Like, open source software is a big industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Companies like Grafana, Databricks, Elastic, HashiCorp, Red Hat. There's there's 20 more of them.
Speaker 3:Get one.
Speaker 4:You can get that stuff for free. Yeah. The reason that enterprises pay for it is they need somebody to deal with with, you know, customer support, security patches, user authentication. Stuff's, like, very complicated to do. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think I think with software companies, they're gonna become and by the way, there's there's gonna be ones that survive, and there's gonna be ones that don't. All that we see you see in periods of technological change is, like, things can happen really fast. And it's not only software companies. Right? It's if we like, automotive companies.
Speaker 4:If you're Stellantis and you have tons of debt and you're I'm totally making this up, and you're Ford and you have no debt, well, if you believe AI and robotics are gonna come to to manufacturing, well, like, Ford can invest, Stellantis cannot. Yeah. And, like, they very well may disrupt, you know Ford may completely disrupt Stellantis. Yeah. It's gonna happen across industries here.
Speaker 4:Right. Right. We saw it '99 and 2000 with, like, you know, ecommerce companies. Some traditional retailers like Walmart and Home Depot did great. Some people did not.
Speaker 4:The same thing is gonna happen with, you know, with software companies. By way, the same thing is gonna happen with accounting firms. The same thing is gonna happen with Yeah. Like, this stuff is gonna completely revolutionize the world. It won't do it as fast as people think.
Speaker 4:It's funny. I I asked, Claude yesterday to try to, like, book me, like, an appointment, like, to get a haircut, and I could do it online. He had no idea how to do it. Like, I I, you know, literally could've just picked up the phone and made a phone call, and, you know, I saved myself fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what has your interaction been with private credit throughout your career? There's a lot of headlines around the the debt load for some of these software companies. And if the business model changes, if that retention does shift, that those private credit funds could be in trouble. How have you been processing the stories around
Speaker 4:private credit? Look, about a third of what we do is control buyouts.
Speaker 3:K.
Speaker 4:A buyout tends to have debt on it. Yep. You know, that be you know, what I would say is now, again, the buyouts we're doing are not big enough, and they tend to be growth buyouts. Like, our average portfolio company grows 50% a year. So we might just happen to find a company that's 25 of revenue owned owned by one guy that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Wants to sell 60% of his company but still wants to run it. So we're not our deals are not big enough for when you need to go to the private credit funds. Mhmm. I agree with Jamie Dimon, though.
Speaker 1:But Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's a canary in a coal mine, but it's not software.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:This is what people are getting around.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You don't think the private equity firms overpaid for industrial companies or services companies
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Or anything? Like, I tend to believe where AI is gonna be disruptive is if a private equity firm bought a company, put a ton of leverage on it, and it's been running it for margin because they need to drive margins to pay the debt load because they put too much debt on it. They won't be able to innovate. So their competitor that doesn't have a lot of debt is going to, you know, could win. I think that is that isn't a place to offer companies.
Speaker 4:It applies to everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I suspect there were a in an in any unregulated industry where you take a bunch of people it was a Wall Street. A bunch of people have done probably stupid things. It's probably not the people getting it's probably not the people getting blamed for it. It's probably the ones doing the blaming Yeah.
Speaker 3:Frankly. If you've got to learn, you know, from, from history on Wall Street Yep.
Speaker 4:But, again, if if the the private credit guys get paid, like, they're gonna get they'll get paid before the private equity funds. Like, I think we're gonna sit here in 2030, and there are gonna be a ton of these deals that were done in 2019, 2018, 2020, 2021 that Scrooge is software. It's like everybody at all the industries where, like, you're gonna be looking at, like, very low
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Single digit, you know, low single digit IRRs
Speaker 10:in companies.
Speaker 1:What's the oldest company you've ever bought or or invested in? Have you ever looked at anything that's like over 50 years old or I mean, I've just seen some of these like Oh my gosh. Are like, you know, oh, you'll see like AOL is transacting now and we're and I'm like, oh, haven't heard that name in a long We can hear you. That's only 30
Speaker 4:Hold on. I'm actually I'm looking to see what Okay. Company Yeah. So we own a business
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Called Growth Zone
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:That makes like chamber of commerce association management software. Business, nice and profitable. We the company was founded in 1996.
Speaker 1:1996? Okay.
Speaker 4:So We own another We own another business
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That it's like that business started in '96. It's a different name. Yeah. In 2019, it was bought by like a small private equity fund. We then bought that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But, no, we own a business that we bought through an interest in a fund Mhmm. Called Work Human. Mhmm. And this is a huge business.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Super profitable, big company.
Speaker 2:That's an anti AGI AGI bet.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. And so Work Human used to be called Global Force. It's a big, like, HR software company Sure. And, like, a play benefits company based up in Boston.
Speaker 4:But I think the venture fund we bought out, it was, a 2002 vintage venture fund.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 4:And the investment was made in like 2004.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And the company has never raised capital since. Wow. And it's a very large, you
Speaker 9:know Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:9 figure type like prop business.
Speaker 1:That's remarkable. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to come and hang out. Congratulations. We gotta hit the gong.
Speaker 2:Did it. Congratulations. Thanks the whole team.
Speaker 4:See you, guys.
Speaker 1:See you soon.
Speaker 3:See you.
Speaker 2:Cheers.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about LabelBox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about Sentry.
Speaker 1:Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And let's kick off our Lambda lightning round, and we are going to be bringing in we nailed it. We nailed it. The cloud is active.
Speaker 1:We are now in the land of lightning round. Let's bring in Shane from Air. Shane, how are you doing?
Speaker 9:How are you doing, guys? Thanks so much for having
Speaker 1:me. Of course. Of course. Great to great to see you. Give us an update on what's going on in your world.
Speaker 9:We just released a new ad campaign yesterday in the New York Times
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 9:And have our our biggest product release we've ever pulled together here launching tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Give us the pitch. What's the tagline For the ad. For the ad.
Speaker 9:The tagline for the ad is is AI will never smoke a cigarette with you.
Speaker 1:As someone who as someone who started a a company that directly competes with cigarettes, I have to boo. But as someone who loves a good ad, I have to cheer.
Speaker 7:I you know,
Speaker 9:I wanna be clear. I'm not endorsing smoking in any way, shape, or form.
Speaker 1:No. I get it.
Speaker 9:I think you know, look. I I feel like I feel like this is
Speaker 5:a this is a this
Speaker 9:is a Goodwill Hunting crowd, isn't it? I feel like you guys Yeah. Jordy definitely has seen Goodwill Hunting.
Speaker 1:No. He's he's no. He's never seen a movie in his life. He's only seen Borat. It's the only movie he's
Speaker 3:ever seen.
Speaker 1:Well, I
Speaker 9:think the the inspiration for the campaign came from scene between Matt Damon, who's this cocky, overconfident sort of orphan, and his therapist Robin Williams. Yeah. And they're sitting on a park bench, and Matt Damon is just going off. He's doing his thing, you know, preaching the gospel of where the world is going. And Robin Williams looks at him and he says, look.
Speaker 9:If I asked you about art, you would give me every history of every artist. You would talk to me about Michelangelo, but you have no idea of what it smells like below the Sistine Chapel. And if I asked you about love, you would probably send me a sonnet, but you have no idea what it feels like to be desperately vulnerable in front of someone else. Mhmm. And then he looks at Matt Damon, he says, look.
Speaker 9:If I needed to learn what it what it was like to be an orphan, do you think I would just read Oliver Twist? And I think I think the reality is today that there's so many of these generative AI companies right now emerging through YC or starting to raise money, and they're projecting what's gonna happen with creative work. And and let me be clear. I believe everything from nano to banana and seed dancing, these models are so powerful in what they can do today. But the reality is that creative work is deeply illogical.
Speaker 9:It is two things. It is both extremely subjective and it starves for perfection all at the same time. And so, you know, the belief that we have at AIR fundamentally is that AI will never replace creative work. And we're saying this as a technology company that's on the precipice, you know, of launching its most AI centric feature set ever tomorrow. So,
Speaker 1:I mean, I completely agree with you. Like, AI is a tool. I've loved using creative tools from the first version of Photoshop that I probably downloaded illegally all the way to Yeah. After Effects and Cinema four d, Houdini and now generative AI tools. And I feel like there's every time there's a new tool, you just increase the amount of amount of art, the amount of creativity and things we usually get the good ending.
Speaker 1:It feels like it. It feels like we're not Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, we wish we could go back to the time before Photoshop, get rid of Figma. Like, no.
Speaker 1:No one wants to move backwards. Everyone's happy with the tools. Everyone's adapted. But it feels like there's still a lot of anxiety. Like, how how what do you think it takes to get people into the mindset of, hey, as an artist, your job's just gonna get more interesting, more creative.
Speaker 9:You're gonna
Speaker 1:be able to do so much more. And, yes, that will mean putting food on your plate and earning recognition for your work and being all the things that you why you do what you do will still be there in a decade, two decades, a century?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Well, I I I think the first thing, John, is that as as an industry, within the tech industry or as technologists, we can't keep pontificating, you know, a narrative about, like, about this reality that, like, creative work is the CMO killer. If I see one more billboard on the one zero one about the CMO killer, I mean,
Speaker 2:there's become lot a killer yourself.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna lose my mom.
Speaker 9:And and I think that, you know, you in what way, shape, or form is it a good idea
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:To tell your customer that they're irrelevant? Yeah. And and and, you know, look, the the fundamental belief that we have here at Air is that the work is changing. It's going to be less humans and more machines. That's an acknowledgment that I will be the first to admit.
Speaker 9:But we have to stop imagining that these machines, this AGI concept we have for the future will get to a state where everything is automated and you don't need anybody in the loop. And instead, if we built both products and brands in this industry that meet humans where they are and start to actually attack jobs to be done with automation
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Then great. You know, at AIR, we talk about giving creative space to breathe. Mhmm. Space to actually work on the stuff that they think matters and to deploy technology into areas of their work that they think should be automated.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What's a launch tomorrow? What's the exact product? Tell us
Speaker 9:Exact product. Alright. So five things. I'm gonna be plain vanilla here. Five things.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. One is access to 50 models inside of our product. Mhmm. Everything from Nana Banana to Sea Dance, you can now access that directly on air. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Two, you can access those models through a canvas editor. So you can grab your assets which are already on air. You can create variants of ad units. You can change out the text in something. You can take an image and turn it into a GIF or a quick video, whatever you need.
Speaker 9:Three is agents who can go out and make those edits for you should you want to, you know, communicate with a machine instead of doing it yourself. Four is a context layer. This is the sort of biggest differentiator for us. We you know, today, organizations store and manage all of their assets inside of our product. We're their memory.
Speaker 9:And so we're taking that memory and allowing your creative team to deploy that. Deploying the context means that the agents can start saying no to edits, or that when an agent makes an edit, it can do something that's actually on brand and uses your font or your styling or your photography style. So this context layer is where creatives can actually add instructions so that non creatives can create and compound assets from what they already have. And then the fifth one is what every organization, you know, like us is going through right now, is we're transforming pricing, going fully to usage based pricing across our product. So all of that hits tomorrow.
Speaker 1:What about search? I feel like there's you know, I've watched my iPhone camera roll push the search bar bigger and bigger. They really want me to search. Yeah. And it's okay.
Speaker 1:But if I if I know that there's a I I screen recorded a video and it has Arnold Schwarzenegger in it, he's not in the still frame. He's not in the thumbnail. He's deeper in there. Yeah. And I search Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Speaker 1:It's probably not going to go inside the video, understand the context. And I feel like Air has all this, like, tagging infrastructure. There's an opportunity for just the best in class search. You see people complaining about Gmail search. Same same Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thing is true for for Google Drive. At one point, I had every file name for every video in Google Drive was just like 75 keywords all the way out, so I could actually search through videos. Is AI accelerating you there?
Speaker 9:It's good question. You know, we my my co founder Tyler and I have been building this business for eight years, and we've been very thoughtful. You know, our our approach is to try to build a system of record for creative work. So a Salesforce or GitHub specifically for visual data. You know, our AI journey began, to your point, with search, natural language search and the enrichment of assets.
Speaker 9:And from our perspective, the models got to a point over the last two years, products like BDA, as an example from AWS, where you can do a lot of really powerful things, facial recognition, scene detection for videos, custom object detection, and then you can power that through really elegant natural language search experience. That functionality exists in the product today. Mhmm. And we've been leaning into that work for the last two years. The shift for us into generative editing and variant creation really began in October as these models started to progress in the quality of the output.
Speaker 9:And we realized that the quality of the output was going to be decided by the quality of the context around it.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:So, you know, starting tomorrow on air, we'll marry both of those things, both the amazing world class search experience you can now have enabled by AI and the variant creation that can stem from it. So that, you know, a year from now, if you wanna look up Martin Shkreli rage bait, you know, on TBPN
Speaker 1:You'll find
Speaker 9:it. You you can go and find that.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you're in the audience. Well, you so much for taking the time to come chat with the launch. Yeah. Great to Absolutely see beautiful. We'll talk to you soon, Shane.
Speaker 2:The launch. Goodbye. Cheers.
Speaker 4:Let me
Speaker 1:tell you about Turbo Popper. Serverless vectoring full text search built from first principles in object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma may clog code, codex, or a sketch.
Speaker 1:The Figma canvas is where ideas take shape and products connect, build in the right direction with Figma. Without further ado, we
Speaker 3:have Doc Tronic. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Doctor, Doc
Speaker 8:guys. How are you?
Speaker 1:We're doing great. Please introduce yourself and the company a bit for us.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So, Adam, I am one of the cofounders of Doc Tronic. Doctronic is an AI doctor. We call it that because it's easy for people to understand. Yeah.
Speaker 8:We have an AI native care platform. You can come to it, chat with it 20. It's always free. Yeah. And then when you're ready, you can press a button and the AI conversation, the summary and a doctor's note is sent off to one of our doctors and you can get care.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:That could be urgent care, primary care, So, anything you
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean WebMD has existed for a long time. ChatGPT has a health functionality. But the key insight here is that you're actually linking to a network of licensed doctors throughout America. Are there particular states that you're starting with? How does it actually work to onboard these doctors?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So we're actually live in all 50 states, 50 plus one. And we have a network of 50 doctors that are employed by Doctronic.
Speaker 1:And that
Speaker 8:includes both primary care, urgent care, women's health, mental
Speaker 1:What does it look like if somebody already has their own doctor and they want to bring them to the platform? I imagine that the same way someone might show like, oh, here's my eight sleep, sleep data doctor. What do you think this says about the other symptom I'm having? Somebody might share, Hey, had this conversation with Chachi Patti. Can we use this as a jumping off point?
Speaker 1:What does it look like to bring your own doctor to the platform?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So our AI system is always free and at the end of it you get a doctor's note that you can take to your own doctor if
Speaker 1:Oh, you Cool.
Speaker 8:That's great. So there are some people that do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. And then in terms of the actual business model, who's paying? How would how do you see that evolving?
Speaker 1:Where do you think that goes?
Speaker 8:Right, so right now we make money by providing care. So when you see one of our doctors you can either pay out of pocket, it's $39 or you can use your insurance.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:And we take almost every insurance out there including Medicare. Yeah. In addition, we're in the process of building out a number of different partnerships with other businesses that will both license our technology and use our physicians as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about the opportunity for prescription management? It feels like there's been a boom in telehealth. A lot of work has been done. Some controversial, but some very by the book where they're partnered with a pharmaceutical company and there's licensed doctors in all 50 states that can prescribe.
Speaker 1:Is that in the path or is that tangential to your work?
Speaker 8:Directly in the path. So we launched a program in Utah, first of its kind, where we actually are able to renew prescriptions without a doctor. Our AI makes a clinical decision. That's great. That was launched eight weeks ago.
Speaker 8:I think it was a big first step and we're hoping to build upon that.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Jordy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm trying to understand, like, are you guys kind of limited from a growth standpoint due to like, how do you scale basically? You have these 50 doctors that are employed by Doctronic. Do you need to scale that or is the idea you can make them, you know, a 100 times more efficient? You know, how are you
Speaker 3:thinking Yeah, about
Speaker 8:physicians are, I would say, in order of magnitude more efficient than a traditional telehealth practice. And so instead of a doctor being able to see four patients in an hour, they can all of a sudden see 15 or more. And that allows us to scale much faster than a traditional telehealth platform.
Speaker 2:And then you mentioned partnerships with other companies. Would that be with like major LLM providers? Is that where this is going? No,
Speaker 8:partnerships come in three different flavors. The first one would be with payers, TPAs or large employers that want to utilize our services because we're going to be cheaper than most other telehealth practices. There are large health systems that we're in discussions with that want to utilize our technology because we can make their doctors more efficient. And then there's a whole slew of digital health companies, hardware companies out there that are also interested in leveraging our technology to extend what they can do on their service potentially providing care.
Speaker 1:Was listening to Terrence Tau, the mathematician, on Durkesh Patel, and Durkesh was asking him about the impact of AI on his job, which is mathematical research, and was trying to say, like, how much more efficient are you? And and, and Terence Tao was saying, well, I use AI a lot, but I don't It's not like it's helping me with the core work. It's more like in a paper, I would like to put a chart. Normally, that chart would take me ten hours or five hours to put together. So normally, I just wouldn't put it in.
Speaker 1:Now, I can just put it in. So he was like, I'm doing five times the work, but it's not replacing work that I was doing before. And it was this very, like, Jevan's Paradox type of answer. And I'm wondering about the amount of medical advice that's being dispelled. How much of it is displacing conversations with existing doctors versus just purely additive conversations where someone would have said, you know what, I do have that, you know, I do have some symptom but I'm just going to go to work today and I'm not going to go take the time to schedule an appointment and meet with a doctor.
Speaker 1:How much of what you're doing is seen as additive versus replacing labor?
Speaker 8:I think it's almost all additive, to be quite honest. And when you think about medicine, it's always had this fundamental supply demand mismatch. Think about how many times you've wanted to go see a doctor and you just didn't do it because it was too hard, right? I think there's probably 10, a 100 times more care that could occur if there's zero friction in the system. And a lot of what we're seeing today is it's just so easy to utilize our system that you're going to come in and ask questions that you would never ask a doctor.
Speaker 8:We have people who use our system 10 times a day. They'll come in and say, Hey, I have high cholesterol. What should I eat for breakfast? You would never ask that of a doctor. But when there's no friction in the system, you can do that.
Speaker 1:We got to fire and up ask whether or not we should take BPC-one hundred fifty seven because it's been hotly debated on this show today and I want a real
Speaker 2:doctor or
Speaker 1:AI doctor.
Speaker 2:Know exactly what you
Speaker 3:got To get to to the bottom of it. Think that they would
Speaker 1:probably Yeah, fall defer
Speaker 8:that to our system. I don't know what that is.
Speaker 1:It's a very controversial peptide that some people claim works very well, other people claim it's a placebo effect. But hopefully people are referring to real medical advice for this particular question. But you raised some money. Tell us, how much did you raise? I want to hit the gong for you.
Speaker 8:We raised 40,000,000 for our series b. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much Man, to that's some come give us the update and have a hope I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to meet you.
Speaker 8:You as well.
Speaker 1:Thank We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about fin dot a I, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.a I and we are in the Lambda lightning round. This concludes our Lambda lightning round, but let me tell you about Lambda.
Speaker 1:Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And without further ado, we have Robin Vince from the Bank of New York Mellon. Robin, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 1:What a wonderful backdrop. I think we are struggling.
Speaker 10:Really, really remarkable.
Speaker 1:Oh, how are you doing? Sorry. We we we missed you on that intro because of the audio. Can you introduce yourself and the company, I suppose?
Speaker 10:Sure. Well, it's great to be with you. Congrats on the show and everything you've been achieving. It's been been fun to watch your progress. Thank So BNY, we are the world's real looking after the wiring and financial security of the financial system.
Speaker 10:We also are America's oldest banks. We've been around for a while. We've seen a few cycles over time. Were just 20,000 people
Speaker 1:in New
Speaker 3:York and
Speaker 1:we Who started the bank again?
Speaker 10:Alexander Hamilton, the now famous dude.
Speaker 1:That's incredible. Incredible. So obviously, a lot of a lot has changed over the, what, two hundred and fifty roughly year history of the of the firm. What is your day to day like? What is what what is on the top of your list of goals for 2026?
Speaker 1:What are the challenges to running an institution as old as BNY?
Speaker 10:Well, we've been really reimagining the company over the course of the past three years. We've been a strong and safe part of the financial services system and The US financial system as you say for two hundred and fifty years. We were the first stock ever traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 10:That's right. There's some there's value to longevity, but to get old means that you learn how to adapt. And this is a world full of change. And so it means laser focused on really bringing ourselves truly into the modern age. AI, very focused on AI and everything we're doing with our platform, we can get to that.
Speaker 10:Yeah. But actually, taking the company and making it be the performer that it can be. We do all these great things, these different businesses that we have. Yeah. Living up to potential has really been the motto of the past three years for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. As as you've witnessed AI progress over the last couple years, what do you think the biggest opportunities for AI within I would say, just legacy financial institutions Sure. Overall. You know, we we had someone on earlier that was talking about, you know, a lot of some of this code is still running on mainframe Sure. Computers and and how much how much modernization that I'm sure you've been working on that's not even related to AI and then how can AI kind of continue to serve that?
Speaker 10:I think for us there are three vectors and to be fair, think they're probably the same for most firms these days, and I think that's true for technology software firms. I I think it's true in the financial services sector as well. One is just doing what we do, but just doing it in a better and more efficient way. So that could be modernizing code. You're right.
Speaker 10:Cobalt, we have some mainframes. Mainframes are actually actually pretty good, super high volume use cases, but
Speaker 3:we don't want
Speaker 10:them to run on old code. So having the opportunity to make that change and frankly just make it easier to be able to make the change. We've been putting it off for a while. Now we've got great tech. It's cheaper and easier and quicker to be able to do it.
Speaker 10:Yeah. But also reimagining processes end to end. Being able to essentially take multi step things and collapse them down to be just more efficient quicker. So running the company better using AI is number one. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Second vector of change is actually the products and services, just enriching what we do and actually what we offer to clients with AI that they perform better, provide additional insights, can actually be executing quicker for clients. And so we just become better as an institution in our actual delivery of our products and services. And then the third one, I think it's actually expanding the perimeter of the firm. We're not trying to turn ourselves into fundamentally a different company, but we are interested in taking inspiration from other things that have happened in the world like Amazon is a good example. Amazon Web Services, once upon a time it just served Amazon, then they externalized it as a service and it essentially became their cloud service.
Speaker 10:We've got lots of things that we do at super scale for ourselves that we could also do for our clients. We are the number one custodian in the world. We custody $60,000,000,000,000 of assets. We have monthly payment rails. Yeah.
Speaker 10:It's it's it's fun to have scale.
Speaker 2:You just said the biggest number ever of any companies, any CEO on the show and that's
Speaker 1:hard to day moves through BNY. It's
Speaker 10:20% of all investable assets in the world. So that is mega scale. You could sound it again if you want that. I
Speaker 3:love it.
Speaker 10:Throughput Yeah. The data from that throughput allows us to be able to deploy AI into really making a company kind of different. So this third one, spanning the perimeter, doing for other people things that we currently can only do for ourselves Mhmm. Is kind of an interesting thing too.
Speaker 1:There was an interesting story in The Wall Street Journal today about Mark Zuckerberg looking to build a custom AI or use AI to answer questions in his role as the CEO of Meta Platforms. And I'm interested in how you, as the CEO of BNY, could either are currently using AI or think in the future you might be using AI as a copilot for what you do, answering questions about the business. What's on the top of your wish list if someone were to build an AI system that knew everything about your business and could help you do your job as CEO better?
Speaker 10:Well, we have the beginning of that right now inside our company. So we have our own AI platform that we built. We started the journey three years ago. It's called Eliza.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Homage to Alexander Hamilton again. And Eliza connected to all of the LLMs but is really a multi agentic platform that our people build agents and we have live agents, multi agent solutions in production doing work today. We also have digital employees
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That
Speaker 10:are essentially multi agent solutions wrapped with a user ID, a login, a persona, a name that actually make them addressable and deployable in the company to work alongside our human employees as teammates and Eliza's an app and I do exactly what you just asked basically multiple times a day.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 10:So I put the client earlier on, hey, I'm going
Speaker 4:to be seeing
Speaker 10:this client. Could you please tell me what are the additional things that I should be talking to them about? Give me the top three ideas that are meant to be my pitch to the client. It goes through, it looks through every call report that we've interacted with the client, what I did last time I met with them, what's happened in the news so far, what's pertinent and news to their business, and actually just advises me on how to be a better kind of extension to the client rep team when I'm meeting with them. So I do that today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. Very good. I mean, can you explain to us a little bit about what you're standing in front of? Is this some situation room to understand the global economy, your business particularly?
Speaker 1:It looks amazing, but I'd love to know more.
Speaker 10:So you can you can just see a glimpse of it behind me. But yes, it's a it is exactly all of what you just said. It is a situation room. It's our cyber technology command center. It is AI powered.
Speaker 10:So AI is kind of the first line in actually looking at it, So triaging we're watching $3,000,000,000,000 of money every day. We're watching 25 to $30,000,000,000,000 worth of US treasury settlements every day. Yeah. We're watching our $3,000,000,000,000 worth of wealth assets, and we're basically helping our clients to be able to get insights into their business that's running through our technology. Because we're kind of a platforms company these days.
Speaker 10:We're a bit of a non traditional bank in terms of what we actually do. So this is a virtualization, so it's all real data, real time, that is actually and we have this in three places in the world that runs off private and public cloud that actually allows us to get the insight into what's happening in our business all the time, real time.
Speaker 1:I'm sure clients are asking you about disruption from artificial intelligence, geopolitical instability. What else is at the top of the minds of your clients as we go into 2026? It's a it's an uncertain time. Where are people searching for certainty right now?
Speaker 10:Well, you know, it's a it's an important question, John. And so AI is for sure right. You're right about the geopolitics. Yeah. The world's complicated place.
Speaker 10:Digital assets is another example.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 10:We've positioned our investment in digital assets, tokenization, tokenized deposits, stablecoins, tokenization of other security types, and and frankly other financial assets or maybe welcoming new financial assets into the system. That is something that our clients are super interested in because they want us to help them manage that transition from the old or traditional rails into the new ones.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And we can be a partner for them with that.
Speaker 1:What is what do you think is next? I mean, there was a lot of there was a lot of talk years ago about tokenizing assets, bringing, you know, assets that we know and trade every day onto, you know, digital rails, cryptocurrency, on chain. That it feels like that happened with the dollar. It feels like stablecoins are here. They've arrived.
Speaker 1:Real estate has been slower. Stocks have been slower. What do you think
Speaker 2:has Is been
Speaker 1:oil on chain now? I was not familiar with that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:People are trading oil on chain, but it but it's We where do see some some you have some questions around how that's actually being done.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Well, look. Remember with oil as well, it's a physical commodity at the end of the day. The whole concept of on chain to to the mirror world is like if if ever there was an example of of just a reminder that it's a physical asset Yeah. Today.
Speaker 10:But look, let me give you my gen one, gen two, gen three view of that. And even before I do, let's just acknowledge where we are in gen one. So tokenization, yes, we're underway. We're beginning. You mentioned stablecoins.
Speaker 10:They have market share this big right now, and so it's early days. It's a little bit like AI. You can see the promise of the tech. You can see the opportunity, but at the end of the day, adoption, full integration into the system is very different than just having the tech. And we talk all the time in our company about AI.
Speaker 10:Great. Great. Exciting. But it's got to be deeper. It's got to be everywhere.
Speaker 10:It's got to be for everything for everyone. Mhmm. So I'd say digital assets, similar situation even in gen one. We're beginning. It's early days.
Speaker 10:Lot of promise. Opportunity. Mhmm. But just taking an existing asset or even a physical asset that exists that isn't really part of financial system putting it on, that'd the beginning. Then, how do we actually make things work better and differently?
Speaker 10:Because for some existing assets, they're not necessarily better just because we tokenize them. You know, we take a share of Microsoft and we declare victory because it's a token. We haven't really changed much in the world. If you take a bond, the question is not only can you tokenize the security but what can you do with the indenture? How can you have the if and therefore statements that are all part of that piece of documentation and actually encode them in a chain in a way that it actually is going to add additional value?
Speaker 10:That's a different thing than just tokenizing the security itself. And then gen three, you actually think about financial securities as ultimately being a cash flow and terms and conditions, then maybe you can just rerender financial assets in entirely different ways because of the fact that you now actually have the blockchain and you actually have capabilities that didn't exist today in the traditional rails. Now today's l ones aren't really up to that task, so there's innovation that's required at the l one layer level as well as in the l twos and then for for participant firms. But that's how I see the world. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:We're early. This is a five year, ten year journey. It'll happen, I think. It'll happen more slowly than AI. Yeah.
Speaker 10:But that's another example of an innovation right now.
Speaker 1:Earlier in the show, we were talking to Mitchell Green from Lead Edge Capital about private credit, and there's been some reporting around just how big that nonbank lending industry is. How should average investors who aren't maybe specifically in a private credit fund, but just, you know, your average American trying to make sure that their portfolio goes up every year, how should they think about private credit, the risk in the system, how they can protect themselves or potentially benefit? Where is America when it comes to the private credit industry right now?
Speaker 10:So first of all, just a reminder that private credit is first of all credit. Yeah. And so we've got private credit, we've got public credit, and they're essentially two different markets, different investor types potentially go in, but at the end of the day they're trying to solve for the same thing which is leaning in to being able to lend money into the into the financial markets and capital system, give entrepreneurs and other business builders or business runners access to more capital. Mhmm. And so there are some types of borrowers who are more suited to the private markets and some who are suited to the public markets and some who do both.
Speaker 10:Yeah. There's a lot of drama at the moment in private credit and there are some good reasons for it because there have been some exposures that are a bit been a bit idiosyncratic to private credit. Yeah. And also, there are always liquidity issues when people see headlines and they say, oh my gosh, is my money safe? And then people want their money back and then you have the old elevator, elevator door problem.
Speaker 10:More people want to get out, but there's not necessarily enough space and there's a bit of a rush for the exit. So that's exactly the problem we're seeing right now. But the market I would observe is today still pretty strong because the credit market's strong and ultimately the economy drives the credit market. Now, we have high energy prices for a long period of time or we have a real weakness in the economy, then we're going to have problems in the credit market, and then we're going to have real problems in the private credit market and public credit market. So I think today, we're in this spot where there's a lot of focus.
Speaker 10:It's a large but not huge market compared to the scale of the public credit market, but the underlying fundamentals are mostly pretty good. But there's a huge watch out with energy, and as a result, a huge watch out into the readout into the real economy. And if we have high energy prices or other cracks and they persist, then it's a different story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. With the the health of the underlying economy, I feel like people track inflation. They track GDP. They track the stock market. If someone's trying to, you know, now today they're an oil expert.
Speaker 1:If someone's just trying to get an understanding of how The U. S. Economy is growing, what are the signals that you would recommend that they actually look through or try and understand?
Speaker 10:Well, there's first of all, when you're really looking to the economy, you're looking at employment is super important. Mhmm. People who have jobs feel more comfortable and people who feel more comfortable go about their lives and they spend
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And they pull away back and they help the economy to grow. Mhmm. So it's really important to watch employment and also to watch sentiment. Mhmm. Then then consumer sales and spending and kind of credit card health, and are people being over leveraged in how they're going about their spending?
Speaker 10:Those things are important. What is the what is the profitability ultimately of companies, and are they growing? Are they are they investing? Are people capital deploying? Energy is a huge input.
Speaker 10:High energy prices have a very negative impact on The United States. We sit here and we feel very good about the fact that we've got a lot of security and energy supply. So actually having the molecules that can flow because we have access to supply is a really big deal. But we're an export market, so at the end of the day, the world prices sort of set the price domestically here as well, and if we have high energy prices, it ripples through into food, It ripples through all into all of the different things that are energy dependent. And these days, kinda everything is energy dependent.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I guess the good news is that oil's down 10% today. I I feel odd saying that, but it was it was very nerve racking when oil seemed to be going up and up. And as you mentioned, high energy prices can really put a drag on the economy. So hopefully, I think we're all hoping for stability in financial markets, stability in energy markets and all of the above.
Speaker 1:But thank you so much for taking the time
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I really enjoyed your break it down. Come back on soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'd love to talk to you more. Thank Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Robin.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you too soon, Robin. Let me tell you about Graphite Review for the Age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Our next guest is live in person in the TBPN.
Speaker 2:The one and only.
Speaker 1:The one and only. David Senra, how are doing?
Speaker 3:Miss you, man.
Speaker 1:Nice watch. Good to see you. Tell us, how are you how are you feeling?
Speaker 3:What is this?
Speaker 1:How are you feeling? That's just the Yahoo button. Does that reflect your your your inner feelings? I wanna hear I wanna talk about your inner monologue. Want you I want you to introspect.
Speaker 1:I want you to introspect. How are you feeling? You're doing well? Yeah. Like unbelievable.
Speaker 1:And do you feel aligned? Do you feel like you're you're you're reaching your goals in life? Do you feel like you're doing what you're meant to be doing?
Speaker 3:Oh, I mean you didn't answer that question. What kind of question is that?
Speaker 1:I'm just messing with you. Is it introspection questions? Yeah. It it was Do wanna give the background to what you're Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:So so David Senra, host of David Senra and host of Founders went viral last week after an interview with Marc Andreessen where you were both in discussion, in agreement around this idea of maybe you don't need to you don't need to be constantly introspecting. You need to have some forward motion in your life. You need to
Speaker 3:be ruminating. Wasn't like advice. It wasn't advice for other people.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:At all.
Speaker 1:That's funny.
Speaker 3:Like, so it was an observation. Yeah. Like, I wanted to talk to Mark for a long time. Yeah. And I actually had dinner with him last year in Miami.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And it took him a while to warm up, then once he gets going, the same person you see on the podcast is like the same person in person. Right? And I've like consumed everything. I I told him before, was like, think you and Palmer are lucky you're probably like the two best podcast guests on the planet.
Speaker 1:He's great.
Speaker 3:Right? Yeah. And, you know, because he doesn't have any notes in front of him. I spent eight hours knee to knee with Palmer and I couldn't he was inexhaustible. I've never come across a mind like that before.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And Mark's the same way. It's like you can ask him anything and he'll just he has this crazy recall. And the difference between like me and most people that talk to Mark is like, I've read all the same books that Mark has done. I read his blog archive like eight years ago Yeah. And which was excellent.
Speaker 3:Before long before he was like tweeting.
Speaker 1:Do have episode about
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 1:Blog articles?
Speaker 3:I think it's episode 50 of founders.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:And I think it was in 2018.
Speaker 1:Episode 50. Wow.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. I should redo it because there's a lot of really good advice for like founders
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:In there. And so like, I was just excited to to talk to him.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It was the by far I think we've done like 13 or 14 of these that we've released so far. We've Yeah. Now we're recording like mad, so we have a ton Yeah. Banked. But it's like one of the people I was most excited to talk about just because like we have the same passions.
Speaker 3:And he had he was the only person I've come across in today that came to the same conclusion that like I would read all these biographies and these people that went on to build great companies, invent new technology, everything else, they talk about this all the time. They actively avoid introspection. And so the reason I brought up, I was not trying to be provocative. Yeah. I'm not in like, I have a ten year fucking history of not being But
Speaker 1:So I mean, I understand the pushback, which is that there's so many examples of of history's greatest entrepreneurs introspecting. I think that maybe the the the nuance here is when does the introspection happen? I always go back to that Disney chart. You know, the Disney napkin map of how Disneyland fits into Disney films, fits into the radio business, fits into the merchandise business. It all is crystal clear right now.
Speaker 1:And a lot of founders, a lot of content creators, a lot of people like us will look at that and be like, I need seven things that all piece together. But Disney drew that map and then died like two years later. It was a reflection on his life. He was introspecting about what made his business successful but he did it after he had I done all of the
Speaker 3:think people were confusing thinking with introspection. So I was actually thinking about you. We're like, the the again, I went back and listened to the first like ten minutes of that episode. Yeah. There's nothing remotely like controversial about this.
Speaker 3:And I guess one part, you're like, yeah, there should be more nuance. Yeah. No shit.
Speaker 2:The inter Internet. No one needs the context. They're They're not gonna watch for ten minutes. They're just gonna see the caption and then disagree with the caption.
Speaker 3:So what I would say is like, this is the difference between pre and post life's work. And so like, you're a perfect example. Yeah. This is like, we've talked about this a few times on the show. It's like, there was a huge prehistory of me and you Yeah.
Speaker 3:Pre TBPN. Yeah. And where you're the EIR at Founders Fund. Yeah. You're making these fucking incredible I I can't cuss.
Speaker 3:Right? You guys got on me last time about that. You can.
Speaker 2:You can. It's up to you.
Speaker 1:Depends on how you want So
Speaker 2:if kids start swearing, they're be mad at you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm I'm gonna take the stand that no none of history's greatest entrepreneurs have ever sworn.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You'll go far with that. So what I would say is like, the prehistory here is like, you were a EIR fund. You were making these incredible long form documentaries on a lot of the same interests that you I and I found you, I started talking to you, was like, you're gifted at this. Like, you're a generational media talent.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I because I I was like, the first thing I saw of you was your history of Silicon Valley documentary That's fun. Which I read at least 40 books on the same topic, and I'm learning stuff I didn't even know. So I like, oh, this guy's like this is incredible. And if you remember at the time, you were trying to figure out what's that?
Speaker 1:Go go.
Speaker 3:Go goats. And you were trying to figure out it sounds like a sheep. You were trying to figure out, okay, do I start another company? Do I become a VC? So
Speaker 1:you were trying to
Speaker 3:figure out, do I start another company? Do I become a VC, God forbid?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Do I and I was like trying to push you to podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then
Speaker 7:you went to
Speaker 1:was a good business.
Speaker 3:And then you went through multiple different variations. Goddamn majority, stop. This is your show and I'm So you went through multiple different variations, right, of Yes. Different forms of podcast. You even tried something like this with like a a few different times.
Speaker 3:I saw all of them.
Speaker 1:Lulu and Jason Carmen. And then I also had a solo show that was sort of a copy of yours, but about live people instead of dead
Speaker 3:people. And we were I remember because we were walking in Miami. Yeah. We were walking to dinner. We actually ran into Keith Raboy We
Speaker 1:on the
Speaker 3:way there randomly. Was great. And we had this dinner and you're like, this show just doesn't feel right. You didn't like the the the the power law.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. The power law was not like it it wasn't getting me out of bed because I would make a I would make an episode and then somebody would be like, I'm alive and I'm I'm gonna debate you about this.
Speaker 1:Like, you got this wrong. And I was like, oh, okay.
Speaker 3:I don't wanna do this. You're
Speaker 1:like, this is No.
Speaker 3:No. Rockefeller not coming from the grave yelling at me.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. You can say whatever. You can say, you know, Steve Jobs never introspected and then he's not gonna hit you up and be like, I did.
Speaker 3:Again, we're not saying like never. Yeah. And but even like Elon commented on this. I sent it to our group chat. We should pull up the tweet that even commented on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He said reinforcing negative neural pathways via therapy or introspection is a recipe for misery. Don't cut a rut in the road. But isn't this just like don't ruminate?
Speaker 3:Some people were saying, oh, you guys are using the term wrong. Whatever Yeah. Yeah. But let me finish But it was like negative introspection. Let me finish the we have friends that all they do is introspect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One of them has still
Speaker 3:not done his first deal. We will not name him. Like, thinks too much and not enough action. That is the point. It's just like, yeah, people that built this is not controversial.
Speaker 3:People that built great shit turned out to do a lot of action. Like, they take a lot of action Sure. As opposed to like just sitting there thinking about how Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And even even the isn't it Blackstone whose first deal? Like, Steve's first deal was like a total flop, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 3:Don't know. I remember. Let me let me go back to John.
Speaker 1:It's like I wasn't I wasn't sitting there thinking about like what's the perfect media product. I was trying things, being very forward motion, being aggressive about these different things.
Speaker 3:The important part is you were trying to figure out a business that fits for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then
Speaker 3:this is why when I immediately saw you guys, you were in like the wrinkled t shirts. You were filming at the Jonathan Club. I was like, this is it. Yeah. You found it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The reason I bring that up for you is because I think it's a great illustration of the point. It's like, I talk to you guys every day. You don't wake up thinking about like, how do I feel today? Or like, what should I do?
Speaker 3:You guys just are unbelievably dedicated to because you found your nice work. Yeah. And I know this because like how many people try to buy the show? How many people to invest in the show? Yeah.
Speaker 3:How many people try to get you to do other things? Yeah. And you're like, no. Like, we just wanna do this and we
Speaker 1:just wanna
Speaker 3:do this forever. Yeah. And the example I used on the episode was Sam Walton. Yeah. Like Sam Walton was figuring retail out.
Speaker 3:He had one store for the first five years of his life. Yeah. Right? But then you fast forward twenty five years into his life, he wasn't waking up like, what should I do today? He's like, no, I like Walmart.
Speaker 3:I like building Walmart. I'm gonna make more Walmart. So just keep doing this until I die. Yeah. That's the point we're making.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then I love that Mark just down. Oh, he just like it was
Speaker 1:like Ten day x down.
Speaker 3:Oh, day after day after day after day of just not fighting this back.
Speaker 1:And then He
Speaker 3:did very well. And then what I would say about this is like Perfect. We hit on this like weird unintended like political divide where like
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:A lot of like my liberal friends were texting me and saying like this is wrong, is evil, and I'm just like
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 3:I think you know I'm not a wrong, like, you're a person. And then, you know, more of my conservative friends like, yeah, no shit. And that again, that was unintentional. So a lot of the the hate comments came from like the socialist side of Twitter, which okay, fuck them people. Like, I hate socialists.
Speaker 3:Like, good.
Speaker 1:By the socialist. Good. Good. More Yeah. More more inspiration to grind harder.
Speaker 1:Tell us more about the show. What's coming down the pipe? How are you thinking about it? How much are you on the road these days?
Speaker 3:A lot of people so Jordy has seen the new studio
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Which you gotta come out and
Speaker 1:see. Okay.
Speaker 2:It's crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's crazy?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's probably actually the craziest podcast studio
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 2:Ever in history. Wow. Just just like the actual dirt that it's on.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Love it.
Speaker 3:We just had Evan Spiegel out there. Thank you for making that But he started watching the show and he's like, can I be on the show? Yeah. And then He's he had known because he's like, I love these guys. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The answer is just like, I'm not I mean, we will travel if we have to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm trying
Speaker 3:to push as many people as possible to Malibu.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'm having
Speaker 7:a lot
Speaker 3:of success with that. And, you know, you we're all really friends of my good friends of my co founder Rob Moore, and like every time, like, the Andreessen one we did. I probably did that like three weeks before he came out. And I was like, again, don't do any drugs, but was like, as a kite. And I was just like shaking Rob.
Speaker 3:I was like, just put a founder in front of me every single day. Yeah. Like that's the biggest thing. So yeah, definitely feel like I'm not waking up thinking, what should I do today? It's like I'm completely
Speaker 2:pipeline of people that that are that are coming on the new show that have never done a podcast?
Speaker 3:Okay. So one okay. So we all know
Speaker 2:because that's the real alphas. Like there's there's a thousand there's there's not not I'm saying like all of it, I'm just saying like there's a thousand people out there
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That are that would break the internet if they did a show and they just for one reason or another Who
Speaker 1:who's your Sarah Payne? Okay.
Speaker 3:So there's there's two things here. One, I there's a lot of other podcasters. A few have tweeted this publicly and I I don't really respond to anybody on Twitter, but I've said, hey, you know, I I think of this differently. They're like, I don't like doing people that have the podcast circuit. Sure.
Speaker 3:And when you say that, you're just admitting that you you have no differentiation, you have no unique perspective. So like, I really wanted you Mark because We would
Speaker 1:never interview someone here if they were if they had done a different podcast.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. But I wanted to interview What?
Speaker 1:This is your sixth show today?
Speaker 3:Let's ring the gong. I wanted to have conversation with Mark because of all the things that I knew about him that I had never heard anybody else.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 3:Of if you listen to episodes
Speaker 1:like And and and the virality is evidence that you had a new conversation. You got to a different place.
Speaker 3:Well, not only that, but like, that was the the stuff that was controversial, but there's stuff in there like, okay. The fact that when Mark was 20 years old, he was mentored by like the Elon of his day. Jim Clark was the first person to ever in history to ever found three separate billion dollar technology companies. Woah. And he didn't start his first company till he was 38 years old.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then 38. He started his first company. And then check this out. And then there was this book from like 2001 that was published that I read by Michael Lewis.
Speaker 2:And before he was 38, was he just like introspecting or
Speaker 1:No. No. No.
Speaker 3:He was an academic.
Speaker 1:The moment he stopped
Speaker 3:He he was an he was an academic, but Straight to the top. He describes himself in the book. He just said as a self described loser because he was smart and he had papers written and he was teaching, but he had no money. And then I think his second or third divorce the guy's
Speaker 2:like Literally, he was literally just
Speaker 1:Who who is this again?
Speaker 3:Jim Clark.
Speaker 1:Jim Clark.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Under Silicon Graphics Yes. Netscape, the company that turns into WebMD.
Speaker 1:And Marc Andreessen was really young when he cofounded Netflix, but he had Jim Clark or sorry. Netscape. But but he had Jim Clark as, like, this older His mentor. He cofounded. Mentor.
Speaker 3:It'd be
Speaker 1:like wild thing because normally if you walk into Andreessen's office and you say like, I'm 20 and I have a 40 year old co founder, people will be like, this is odd. Like normally we fund like two Stanford grads.
Speaker 3:So I read an entire book on this.
Speaker 1:Very interesting.
Speaker 3:It's it he talks about it in his blog archive and I did two other episodes on the same book like two or three years apart. Yep. Don't I know how no one ever brought that up to Mark, but it was so fascinating. And he tells three different stories on the podcast spread by like thirty minutes in between each story Mhmm. About how formative this was.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The reason he is the way he is is because he was mentored by Jim Clark at 20.
Speaker 1:That's How
Speaker 3:is that not interesting? Yeah. So there's a I I wanna That's fine. Have my own spin on people that Yeah. You know, or do other podcasts.
Speaker 3:There is another one coming out. We're actually flying to New York to do this one because it's gonna be one of the craziest locations that you could possibly film in. Okay. This was suggested by somebody I can't name on the show. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:He's a good friend of us three.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:He's probably the smartest person that we all know.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:And he's like, hey, we were at dinner in Miami and he's like
Speaker 2:He who shall not be named.
Speaker 3:Exactly. And so basically, he's like, what are you talking about this guy? I can't tell you who it is Mhmm. Yet, but this guy's product, if you are wealthy in the world, you will know and probably have, you know, frequented this guy's product. And it's outside of tech.
Speaker 1:But that's
Speaker 3:Nothing to do with technology. And so he's never What'd you say?
Speaker 2:Chrome Hearts. Yeah. Chrome Hearts. No.
Speaker 3:No. But he's never done a podcast. He doesn't even have any this guy doesn't even have any social media.
Speaker 1:He designed raps that go on Hurricanes.
Speaker 3:The chat is saying you're bringing vague posting to
Speaker 1:podcast. You're posting. Who?
Speaker 3:Vague posting on a pod
Speaker 2:which is which is innovative.
Speaker 1:Let's be less vague. What do you think about the AI podcast that's at the top of the charts right now? Is programming
Speaker 5:It's coming for all
Speaker 2:of us.
Speaker 1:Integrated. It's putting us all out of a job.
Speaker 3:Is this the is this the Epstein one?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. But I think they're transitioning to
Speaker 1:They're going do more. They're going to do a bunch of stuff. Everything that you want like if the if it's a hot topic, they're gonna have a podcast that's you know single narrator like, very fact based, deep researched Yeah. And the
Speaker 2:reason that it's interesting is like it's not it's not an AI app. Yeah. It is like somebody used AI Yep. To make the media product and then just uploaded it to traditional channels.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Kareem from RAM showed me this like a month ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, there's gonna be great AI generated podcasts. Mhmm. Like, of course.
Speaker 3:Now, they I think they got to the top of the charts not because they have a large listenership, if I'm not mistaken, but the frequency in which you produce. Oh. And so that's a way to actually, like, manipulate that.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:Where you see this with this this some other media companies doing this record for three hours and they just break up every all the episodes are like fifteen minutes long and they upload like, you know, 15 a day or whatever. And they're like, look, we're on top of the charts. But if you actually look at overall relationships, it's like really low.
Speaker 5:Yeah. We would But
Speaker 3:yeah, like, there's there's there's obviously like
Speaker 1:Three a day.
Speaker 3:I mean, I spent I got I got to spend I think I can talk about this. Pretty sure. I got to spend some time with Dennis from from DeepMind. And just like, you know, that is the most a a a g I pilled fucking person I've ever come across in my life. So he thinks it's coming for everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, obviously, there's gonna be great AI generated podcasts.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think the people making AI podcasts would stop if they knew they were competing against you.
Speaker 3:I found this hilar I was looking back Like,
Speaker 2:this is the Chuck Norris podcasting.
Speaker 3:You guys are hilarious because I I went through our Look at this. Here. You guys text me this when I did the new show and you didn't like the profile picture that I that I originally picked? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because you smiled You were smiling. Was like
Speaker 3:wanna read it? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I said, you you you created a new account for the new show and I just immediately texted it to you. And I said, I think no smile on profile picture. John says, agree. And I says I said, you look good. It just doesn't seem on brand.
Speaker 2:You're more serious than 99% of people. And then John said, unless it's a deliberate ploy to make enemies underestimate how seriously you take podcasting. And I said, you look like you should look like you're going to kill someone.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So anything, like, I I think, like, being the best in the world, like trying to like dominate whatever niche you like, guys are dominating your niche right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm amazed. Hear listen, every single interview you guys do and like just your your relentless focus of like this is what we do. Yeah. You don't even wanna travel, which I heard like you changed something, you know, plans recently.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Been
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think like the the key for us and anybody is just like whatever your core competency is, it's like focus in on that, try to get as far down that line as possible, and then just say no to everything else. And again, is that even new? Like
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's usually on on the AI topic, like, the the, like, the speed with which AI can produce an audio deep dive on a hot topic like the Epstein files, which drops. It has thousands of thousands of pages of documents. Like, the human team's not gonna be able to read through that, and people want to consume that media through audio. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:At the same time, it does feel like interviews, you know, with particular people that everyone knows is not AI like Marc Andreessen and then they can react to that and feel something emotionally because it's a real person with a real impact on the world. That feels very very sticky.
Speaker 3:So Okay. I have
Speaker 1:to debate Debate Debate We on
Speaker 3:we just had this conversation. So Yeah. Some of the stuff like how we're using AI for the new show, like I'm not gonna talk about publicly. I always tell you guys because we information. But it's just like I'm not giving an edge to Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Competitors. It's not gonna happen. Yeah. What I would say is So you have a course.
Speaker 3:No. Never do that. Never. Okay. So what I would say is like we had I had dinner like a month ago and this is exactly it was with Kareem and the guy that we can't mention.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And they're just like, you're moving way too fucking slow. Mhmm. These are close friends, it's like they're not like being mean to you.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. You're moving way too slow. You're not using AI enough. Like, Founders is more like susceptible to being overtaken by AI Sure. Than the new one
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And you should drastically ramp up production on the new one. Yeah. And they made the exact same point that you did. Yeah. But I do think again, like, everything the world is like run on parallels, I think podcasting is the same way.
Speaker 3:And it's just like, yeah, you guys are making media, and you're you're delivering news and commentary, but your audience has a relationship with you. Yeah. Like, I see when they come up to you, like, they act. They act like you're Jordy and John are my best friends. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That's what I keep I've been saying this. You can go I've been going on podcasts for half a decade. Like, you're not making media. I'm creating relationships to scale.
Speaker 1:And that's why your your shows are not just like you ask one you like, it would be very different to like use AI and walk into an an interview with Mark Andrews and just with like 10 questions and be like, Mark, how did you start your career?
Speaker 2:I didn't have can put up an insane podcast Yeah. Just with that format where the guests could say like a total of a thousand words Yep. He just like goes off. But no. You're yours are more like, you know, all of your Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of your episodes will end up being like fifty fifty
Speaker 3:I'm trying to like I didn't have anything I I think they're better if I don't have anything in front of me. Like, I I prepared for last decade. Like, I can just sit down and
Speaker 2:talk to you.
Speaker 3:I we do have one. So I met Tony from DoorDash here. Remember, he came on your show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And we had this crazy conversation. You were writing the newsletter, but me, you, Patrick, and Tony had this crazy conversation for like forty five minutes. And in fifteen minutes, I was like, hold up, dude. You gotta do more podcasts because this so impressive.
Speaker 3:That one, I think it's coming out Cool. Next weekend. That one I had maybe too much in front of me just because like, the way I think about Tony is just he he's like, again, like not financial advice, but he just gives me out of any anybody I've ever spoken to, think he's 41, just gives me like Jeff like young Jeff Bezos vibes.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like I have no idea the quality of the DoorDash. I don't look into the stock, anything like that. All I know is if you think that guy's gonna stop being a food Yeah.
Speaker 2:The other thing that's notable there is all three of the original co founders are still working in the business and it's what are they? Fifteen years in or
Speaker 1:It's a crazy
Speaker 2:Maybe a little bit less. But but that it's so so rare to have that much success. Yep. All the all the founders
Speaker 1:Normally
Speaker 2:You know
Speaker 1:But on. Somebody steps back normally.
Speaker 2:Think think about Somebody's gotta start a venture fund.
Speaker 3:Think about how humble he is, though.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? And, you know, I even said this on the episodes, like, you're not gonna like what I'm about to say, Tony, but I'm gonna say it anyways. This is like, your competitors are afraid of you. Like, I've I've I had a dinner in Stockholm with the guy that sold his company for like $8,000,000,000 to to Tony. His name's Mickey.
Speaker 3:The company's called Voalte or something like that.
Speaker 2:Was like DoorDash. European.
Speaker 3:And it was he told this crazy story I tell him in the episode with Tony. He still reports directly to Tony to his day, and we're like he he's like, I thought of myself as an entrepreneur my entire life. I thought there's no way in hell it'd ever work for anybody else. We had we had a term sheet right in front of me. We could raise a fresh billion dollars of capital to fight them.
Speaker 3:And I'm looking at it thinking about this, and something involuntarily came out of my mouth that I never thought I would admit. And he's looking at it he goes, I can't beat him.
Speaker 1:Woah. You can't beat him
Speaker 3:I can't beat him. So I either could like sell for life changing money
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then learn from him or I could fight this ego and maybe light this billion dollars on on fire. Yeah. And he did the difficult decisions like I'm gonna go and sell.
Speaker 1:You're still gonna get stock in
Speaker 5:the Yeah.
Speaker 1:New company and be able to grow that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. But I would say that out out of all the conversations I've had so far, the one that they're all like, I've all enjoyed them. But what I would say is like, Toby Lucay was if Yeah. No one the people listening to this have not listened to any of the new show yet. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I would if if you wanna go in tech, go Toby Luque. If you wanna find these these crazy people that are not in tech, go Todd Graves.
Speaker 1:Todd Graves.
Speaker 3:But Toby Luque was very fascinating to me because he's your favorite founder's favorite founder. So everybody that you admire, you ask who they admire and they'll bring up Toby. And what they like about him is that he thinks through every single thing independently, so therefore he has all these beliefs that are not correlated with one another. Which means when you have a conversation with him, you are unable to predict what his response to your question or your statement is going to be. And that, we talked for four hours.
Speaker 3:So we talked for a half hour before we recorded, then we recorded for three hours, we headed down to whatever it was. Then we recorded for another thirty or talked for another thirty minutes after. And I could've kept talking. Was like, dude, I gotta catch a flight. I'm gonna have dinner Charlie Rose that night.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. I had to like fly down there. Was like, we would've kept talking. Yeah. Like, he just blew my mind.
Speaker 3:And one thing he said that I think would be interesting to your audience is he believes, and I think he said this on the episode, that we're gonna look back on the year 2026 as the year that every single business in the world was up for grabs.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That AI is coming for everything. Every single other business will have to be reimagined. And you're gonna look back at this is the year where it was it should have been obvious to you that you can rebuild the AI native version of whatever exists out there.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Meta has scaled back their metaverse plans, kind of refocused the company. A lot of people over the last couple weeks have been kinda dunking on Zuck for that. Anything stand out in history where great entrepreneurs, CEOs made like massive massive bets and they didn't pan out. I would say, as a Meta shareholder, I think it's great that Zuck is willing to like bet heavy heavy heavy on, you know, trends that he really believes in. And also, it's great if you kind of run it down and then realize you're hitting a dead end or need to refocus.
Speaker 2:But what's your view on on, you know, swinging for the absolute fences and missing sometimes?
Speaker 3:I I mean, it's obviously inevitable. Jeff Bezos has this great line in shareholder letters where it's like, the size of your failure has to scale with the size of your company. So he's like, I can't make a $300,000,000 mistake anymore. I need to making I think the fire phone was like a $3,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's good. Like, okay. Yeah. Because I wanna I'm going to somewhere, like, like, have to it's just inevitable.
Speaker 3:What I will say is I I I have spent some time with Zuck. I don't I don't think he has a peer. Like, I told him
Speaker 1:this.
Speaker 3:It's like, who else is his age? And he's still somewhat of a puzzle and mystery to me, that's why I'm, like, interested in, like, to continue to talk to him. Because it's just, like, I've read every single book on Facebook. They're all bad. There's no good books on Facebook.
Speaker 3:They're some of his, you know, most of his interviews, like, they just there's just certain things I wanna talk to him about that because I'm just naturally curious about. I think this is the whole point where, you know, people like, you guys are having this immoral conversation about introspection. It's just like
Speaker 1:It's funny because, yeah, you actually want him introspect. You want the interview that you would do with Zuck would be very reflective. It would not be, tell me how you're thinking about MSL's product roadmap.
Speaker 3:No. It's I don't even think it be introspective. It would be like, just I wanna know how like, the the reason I I I signaled signaled out the Toby Luque episode Yeah. Because when I sat down with Toby and did this with Brian Armstrong too, who was awesome, just like, I wanna make like a how Toby Luque works episode. Yes.
Speaker 3:Like, and this is what I just wanna know. I'm not there's no gotcha here. It's just like, how do do think about building businesses? How do think about retaining talent? Why did you do this product?
Speaker 3:Like, just tell me the stuff that you have twenty five years as a in his case, twenty I think twenty years experience as an entrepreneur. Like, that's one very rare, especially one in a single company, like Mhmm. You've learned all kinds of crazy stuff. Like, just like, let's get some of this on record and let's talk about this. So same thing with Zuck.
Speaker 3:I'd just be very interested. What I like about him is, like, he has this just like inner clock where, you know, he's he's to make these massive bets. And, you know, so obviously he knows. He's obviously not stupid. Like, some of them are going to fail, of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What do you think about retired interviews? People out of the game. The risk with a live player, someone who's actively running a public company is that the SEC is listening to what they're saying, that they wanna stay on talking points, that they have a bunch of different incentives. Well, if they say, oh, well, you know, the easiest thing I ever did was cut back my marketing spend because none of that stuff was working well, then their head of marketing is gonna be upset.
Speaker 1:There's internal politics. Whereas, when you do an interview with somebody who's retired and no longer in the game, sometimes they can speak a little bit more freely about their industry, their life's work, their career, etcetera.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I would if if I could have a show of just 80 year old billionaires like, that would talk. Like Yeah. I got to spend time with Sam Zell before he died. The fact that I was never able to able to record a podcast with him, like, now that I have this new vehicle, it's like, man.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Because he's just like, doesn't care. He's dying of cancer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, he's gonna say whatever. So my friend Sam Hegde, I just saw him like two weeks ago, and he actually gave me advice. He's like, you should organize your guest list in reverse chronological order. Because Oh, sure. Like, there's one guy we're working on right now who's, you know, one of the most successful people.
Speaker 3:We already had to reschedule with him. He's 87.
Speaker 1:87.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And he is like unfiltered. What about you know. Incredible.
Speaker 1:What about the the tension between a name brand live player? Like a like a Toby Look, he's somebody who has done other podcasts. People know Shopify. Maybe they built a business on Shopify. Like it is not fully a consumer brand, but it will draw a certain level of attention versus 80 year old billionaire who's been you know, owns half the farmland in Montana might have had a fantastically rich life, but one behind the scenes.
Speaker 1:Is there still an interview to be done there?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, how do you guys choose the people you wanna talk to? Like
Speaker 1:Well, lot of it's news driven. So a lot of it's about, you know, what's happening right now in the world. Who can we talk to to contextualize that? And so I enjoy those reflective moments when they come up, but they aren't as much of a driving force at all.
Speaker 3:So I I I just like try to so I was went on a walk yesterday or maybe yesterday. I don't know where I was yesterday. Yeah. I was yesterday morning. And a really good friend, really smart person.
Speaker 3:He's just like, you have one of your gifts is like, distilling everything down to like what is actually essential.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so and he's like, you help me talk through all these issues I'm having with my business this way, but you do it for yourself. Where it's like, this I'm just going after things I'm intensely interested in. Yeah. Especially in the age of AI. If you're not following what you're obsessed with, like, don't I think you're doing it wrong.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Founders is just the books that I'm intensely interested in reading, and the new show is just people I'm intensely interested in speaking to. Some of those stuff, the the people we have recorded, they'll like, maybe known as like small niche thing. I'm not going after like just big names Mhmm. That's not interested in me.
Speaker 3:It's like, the the rubric is very or the the like the decision making here is very simple. It's like, am I intensely interested to sit down and talk to this person? Like, Evan Spiegel. I I I showed him too this. It's like I did an episode of Founders on him.
Speaker 3:I think it's episode like 25 or 24. It's like a long time ago. And what I would there was like one thing that happened with Evan because I talk about Edwin Land all the time, founder of Polaroid, Steve Jobs hero. Steve Jobs copied a lot of Edwin Land how Edwin Land built Polaroid and used those ideas in in building of mentoring technologists. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And like he's the patron saint of founders. And so I read this book about Evan and Evan is 21 years old and he's talking about that he's got two heroes. And it happens to be Steve Jobs, which makes sense. Every 21 year old kid trying to be an entrepreneur at the time had Steve Jobs and then Edwin Land. I was like, how the hell does a 21 year old even know We got another land head.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We had we had incredible conversation about that. No. Yeah. It's a different land.
Speaker 3:Stop. Yeah. And so like that you see what mean? Like, I just like, we have the same interest. This is a guy that has influenced my thinking.
Speaker 3:He influenced your thinking. And of course, you wind up with a camera company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, it makes perfect sense to me.
Speaker 1:Oh, that makes sense.
Speaker 3:And I I don't care. Everybody's like, oh, market cap. I don't care about the
Speaker 2:iPhone is also
Speaker 3:But but people are like, what about what about like if the stock price is down on the market cap, so I don't give a shit. I want him to win. He he's like a very interesting person to
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:Okay. Saturday, I watched Elon's kind of new pitch for Tesla, XAI, and SpaceX. Mhmm. One of the products that he was kind of presenting was a mass driver. Did you follow this at all?
Speaker 3:Do you think I did?
Speaker 2:I know I know you didn't.
Speaker 3:Have hold on. We have
Speaker 2:two episodes on HBO Max show, by the Yeah, yeah. So we were we were having a debate on the show at the beginning around the timeline for the products and we were pretty John, where did we actually land? You were saying under twenty years?
Speaker 1:I said I said under twenty, Tyler said under thirty, and you said seventy five or something like that. And so Or you you said ten, but then also seventy five.
Speaker 2:But also five. Five. I I I no idea. I'm not gonna pretend that that I I think I have like an accurate read on it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But has there any any entrepreneurs throughout history that were kind of pitching their business overall on on timelines where the market was like, I don't know if this is like Yeah. Like like going back to like inventing flight. People telling the Wright brothers like, you're never gonna be able to fly. Is it possible?
Speaker 1:People were saying that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I know. I know. Know.
Speaker 2:But they did it on like a
Speaker 1:They they weren't being like like like like this chain of events will lead to the seven forty seven fifty years
Speaker 2:from Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Exactly. So get ready This is like the right for investing. My bicycle plan Yeah. Because the July coming. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was coming in fifty years.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I would say about Elon in particular. I did this episode of Founders, which I'm really proud of. It's probably the most downloaded episode ever. It's called How Elon Works.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And it strips away all the biographical details and just talks about him speaking about the way he runs his companies. Mhmm. And in that episode, I'd said like, usually there's some kind of like historical equivalent for everybody operating today. And you know, you could name a person, could find somebody in history that Sure. You know.
Speaker 3:But for him, I do think he is like a singular character. I can't think of anybody living or dead that is like him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's It's weird because he's an industrialist, he's also incredibly promotional and like very good at the marketing side as well as the building side. He's
Speaker 3:the the best in the world at that.
Speaker 1:That's very
Speaker 3:Might be the best salesperson in that the
Speaker 2:why the week the weekend presentation was tough
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I didn't think the This is all the technology was cool and I have zero doubt that Elon can do hard things that no other set of companies Yeah.
Speaker 3:Can do.
Speaker 1:And you
Speaker 2:see it today this wasn't
Speaker 1:A decade ago, people were like Roadster's coming next year. Everyone's talking about Roadster and no one's really talking about Mass Driver. So it break through in the same way.
Speaker 3:So probably because of the name like
Speaker 1:Mass Driver? They got to get a new name. Yeah. They should call it
Speaker 3:I didn't see it, so I don't know what that means, but that's fine. Hold on. There is to answer your question though, Jordy, there is tons of examples from history of somebody having an idea saying that they're going to dedicate to that life of like their life to making that idea come to fruition and taking multiple decades to to to actually do that. So like the the thing that comes to mind just because I'm I'm rereading about him now and I'm probably gonna do another episode on him. I've done like six episodes on Henry Ford.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And Henry Ford had one idea. He will tell you, I had one idea in my entire life Mhmm. And that was to figure out a way to make the car for an everyman. Meaning at the time when you made less than a dollar a day, cars were like $6,000.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You can't afford the people making them cannot afford them. How can we learn to mass produce that? And it took him, you know, twenty years Yeah. Of pounding on that idea till he actually accomplished that goal.
Speaker 3:So he probably thought it was gonna be done in '3 or five or 10. Mhmm. And it took twenty. But yeah, you're you're gonna find a ton of examples like that. It always takes longer.
Speaker 1:And that's why the Raptor R exists. It's the car for the everyman. Henry Ford would
Speaker 2:thing that that doesn't quite satisfy this this example because this pitch is like, these eight things need to happen perfectly synced together in order for this other thing to be possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But again So betting against Elon has not worked. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Curve alert. There Mid curve alert.
Speaker 3:There is there's a book by our mutual friend Eric Jorgensen that's
Speaker 2:coming out tomorrow. Mid Curve. Oh. Mid Curve.
Speaker 3:We yeah. I think we I mean, we can show the
Speaker 2:cover, can't we?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You can read the whole thing right now live. You guys want to for seven hours?
Speaker 2:Let's do a table reading.
Speaker 1:Is the book So can we a forward by Nivalu Ravikant by none other than Eric Jorgensen. And the visuals are by Jack Butcher. Oh, that's great.
Speaker 3:So in the book, Elon talks about the fact that he gets a lot of shit on the fact that his timelines are usually, you know, off.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And he explains why and everything else. But I think what Eric we're actually doing something Eric was actually the first American to ever put me on a podcast. Really? And so, like, the first podcast I ever did of somebody else's podcast was this one that only went in, like, China. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so it was like really popular on WeChat. But no one but Eric, he just like gave me a shot when no one really knew who I was.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 3:And they would wind up being important because one of the listeners of that episode, there's only like a thousand people listen to it, was Patrick
Speaker 2:And Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:Matt Russell who was running Colossus. And there's a
Speaker 1:Oh, boy.
Speaker 3:There's a a there's a comment in the Colossus Slack, the Colossus Podcast Network Slack, which Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the founder of Mhmm. Talking about the episode. This is before I was signed to them. And he's they said, guy sounds like he's going to bite the microphone. And so they're like, oh, he's actually like Yeah.
Speaker 3:Might be good at this. But I think what Eric is the reason what I'm doing is I'm dropping an episode of Founders on this book tomorrow, which is a normal solo episode. Then I did something different for the new show, which I think could be another another, like, not just having conversations with great founders, but conversations with charismatic authors who are writing about great founders. Eric, which is a friend, he's also very articulate and charismatic. And so we essentially that episode's coming on the the David Senra feed tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did you say because he's a friend, he's articulate?
Speaker 3:No. Charismatic. No. Because I spent a lot of time talking to him. We're like, you guys have interviewed authors.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Know. Some some of them are like
Speaker 2:Authors are almost universally fun to talk to in the moment that they're launching their book because they've spent more
Speaker 1:time than anyone else on earth material.
Speaker 2:Just thinking about that one.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we when you see the the shot tomorrow, it's like we have like, you know, I don't know, a thousand pages of Elon documents front of us. A lot of it is just me going through asking my notes and highlights with Eric, and then you essentially can prompt him, and then he could tell you crazy Elon stories.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you think that there's a lot of the CEOs that you're talking to, the ones that are kind of in their prime, let's say, you know, five to ten years or twenty years into their company, do you think they are more AGI pilled than they let on on the Internet? Because a lot of them will, talk about how they're using AI and talk about how they're excited about it. But I feel like you've given me some examples where behind the scenes are actually, like, much stronger believers
Speaker 3:I mean, you guys had think I Lulu, I think, has been on here talking about that AI has, like, a communication, like, branding
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Problem. It's like Totally. Very unpopular with the general population. Yep. Actually talking spent over an hour with Karim yesterday talking about about this topic, and about ways to actually get good information.
Speaker 3:What I would say is, yeah, like most of the stuff they're talking about, they're not gonna talk about on a podcast, they're not gonna talk you'll about see this in group chats to some of the ones that, like, you and I are in. But even that, like, yeah, most of them is, like, whispers and, like, private conversations and completely off the record stuff.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Do you think you'll ever write a book?
Speaker 3:Do you think I'll ever write a book?
Speaker 1:I The
Speaker 3:things that we no, man. The thing that we No. The thing that we
Speaker 4:That's a narrative violation.
Speaker 3:What we share is like, do you want to do anything else than than the show? Why haven't you raised the fund yet? Yeah. Why aren't you starting a new company? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Why aren't you on a plane right now traveling
Speaker 1:I I I'm just thinking like, I don't know, like like the book of David Senra with Eric Jorgensen
Speaker 3:He's writing it.
Speaker 1:Could make sense. But Oh. But basically
Speaker 3:Eric's already writing it.
Speaker 1:Yes?
Speaker 3:Yeah. He tried to work on it with me and he's just like, you you're you don't answer my phone. Yeah. And I talked to you because I can't get a hold of you. And I talked to you, you have your idea changes all the time.
Speaker 3:Was like, I can't be the bottleneck of anything. This is why have to run my own shit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fair. I I'm just thinking about in terms of like just Are you trying
Speaker 3:to like sabotage me or trying to like No.
Speaker 1:Seen I've just seen more and more like Dorcasch wrote that book with with Stripe Press that was heavily based upon the interviews that he did. It had a bunch of interesting graphics. It was clearly a collaborative project. And I feel like there's an aura effect to to writing that can work very well. I mean, we had we've had a number of people on that that have been able to stick the landing.
Speaker 3:No. I I think again, it like just focus is more important than ever in in this age and focus on things that you're just you think about all the time and that you're like obsessed with. Yeah. Like the reason I could do a new episode every day is because I'm I never get tired of talking about how people build their business or think about their products or like, I find that shit infinitely fascinating because you could do it this is what I loved about Toby. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's just like, he's like, the reason he think he said this on the episode. The reason he thinks through every single thing because he's like, there's not one right way to do it. There's probably a 100 and I'm looking for the right way for me. Mhmm. And so like talk about AGI Pill, he said something that was shocking on that episode where, you know, because he's like, I started Shopify in my in I was he had no money.
Speaker 3:He was living in this like mother in law's house at a small desk in a bedroom there.
Speaker 2:It was inside of a cave. Right?
Speaker 3:No. I don't think so.
Speaker 1:It was scraps.
Speaker 2:It was scraps. No. He built the company with scraps.
Speaker 3:And and then what was interesting about that is he right right before all the the new innovation in AI happened, he said that he was like act he he thought like, I'm not the right person to run this company anymore. Oh, interesting. I shouldn't be CEO anymore.
Speaker 1:And then he stayed.
Speaker 3:And then he's like, if it wasn't for age for for AI, I wouldn't be running the company anymore.
Speaker 1:So many stories about of like like that where someone had a really good business growing and it's just stable growth, 20% top line. They're doing fine but they are just lost for purpose or energy. And then AI happens and they're like, I'm back in gear. I love seeing it, especially with the folks who are at that like multi billion dollar phase. It's just been it's been a remarkable remarkable moment in tech.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I wouldn't you you want those people to be playing as long as possible. He's still relatively young. He's probably what? His forties?
Speaker 3:45 or something like that?
Speaker 7:Like, that's way too early.
Speaker 1:But it's so easy to step back and think about something else, get distracted or do a fund or something or just retire. Like, there's a lot of people
Speaker 3:And he went
Speaker 1:knocked out.
Speaker 3:And also he went public really early. I think he said on the episode they they they went public at $1,500,000,000 valuation or it was like some crazy number
Speaker 2:for Ants.
Speaker 1:It's high for Canada. There's a of stuff in the TSX that's like tiny.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But they I think at one point he's at 200,000,000,000. I don't know what he's at now. Yeah. And so it had to feel like he was sprinting Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, for for twenty years.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 3:But Fantastic. No. You want I'm glad these people are like that. Like I do think that, you know, the point somebody was making this point to me yesterday where it's just like these technical founders just have, you know, a massive advantage over everybody else. Yep.
Speaker 3:And you see this with like Toby constantly writing more code. Brian Armstrong is doing the same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You just see this over and over again.
Speaker 1:There's a of folks.
Speaker 2:There is a peptide you could take that would allow you to podcast for twenty five hours a day. Would you take it?
Speaker 3:Well, okay. What Here's the thing. I keep hearing about peptides. I think I accidentally took one one time. What what happened?
Speaker 2:Justin Justin I think had some
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:Oh, no. That was yeah. Justin gave Justin had like we I don't even know if we could talk about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was the laughter's.
Speaker 3:He gave me and you. Justin Mayer's.
Speaker 2:There was some sleep peptide but it was like something you get on Amazon. Okay.
Speaker 3:But I thought his friend, he said his friend made it in like his own compound pharmacy. We might get any Justin arrested for this. I don't think so. He we us and we were hanging out and then you text or maybe hung up the next day, you text him. He's like, I didn't feel anything about this.
Speaker 3:No. Mhmm. I am one of the benefits of partnering with Andrew Hegde Oskreli, you should get access to like weird health shit. Mhmm. And so I was like over like I remember recording with like John Mackie.
Speaker 3:Was the day I recorded with John Mackie. It felt fine. We we stopped at like 1PM. By like 5PM I felt like I'm going to die. And I had an unbelievably important thing to do.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Like thirty six hours later I could not mess mess around. And so I just texted the group and they sent like this IV guy.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And it was like a four hour IV. Cool.
Speaker 4:And I
Speaker 3:was like listen, and I don't know anything about it. So I I was like telling Rob, I was like I trust you. So like you don't give me like I don't want to this has to be good. Would you take this? And it's something they do to make sure that like they're when they're on the edge of getting sick.
Speaker 2:Well, the next the next meta or goat?
Speaker 3:One of them there was some kind of peptide in there. One of them It was by the next morning, I woke up feeling a 100%. Like I went from deadly sick to I feel like a completely normal person.
Speaker 2:Well, next meta is leeches.
Speaker 1:No. You're gonna be What
Speaker 3:happened? Terrifying walked walked in You can get medical leeches. There's there's every Stop. Podcaster
Speaker 2:Stop. Oh, yeah. You don't like snakes.
Speaker 3:What what happened? Because I walked in and all the guys were talking about you guys had some kind of debate? We
Speaker 1:had a debate. Martin Shkreli.
Speaker 3:What happened?
Speaker 1:From Superpower.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Whether or not like the the more out there peptides that are not fully FDA approved yet, maybe there's some data, should those be sold? What's the correct path to bring the next generation peptides to market? Martin Shkreli's position was that the FDA has the pathway down. These companies should be products should be developed by biotech companies, approved by the FDA, then sold in the pharmaceutical context prescribed by a doctor. And Max from Superpower had a more liberal view.
Speaker 3:Does he sell does one of the guys sell peptides?
Speaker 1:I I don't know if Superpower does, but a lot of a lot of Silicon Valley companies are getting into that market. And a lot of people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley broadly are like taking Chinese peptides quote unquote. Meaning that they're like going to a gray market marketplace that then manufactures these drugs that are not FDA approved and not made in FDA approved facilities and certainly are not to the economic benefit of the pharmaceutical companies that spent a lot of money developing these drugs. So there's some company out there that's been working on something. They developed the intellectual property.
Speaker 1:They're hoping to recoup 100% of that because they have patent on it and so that they should be able to sell it and get all the value. And there are a whole bunch of third parties that are going around copying the homework, maybe changing it a little bit, maybe making it worse, maybe making it less effective, maybe making it less safe, and and then selling it. And so, there there there's a big debate in Silicon Valley right now about like the
Speaker 3:Are you taking any of this stuff? No. You, like, protect your body like a temple. Yeah. I'm surprised you took what Justin gave you.
Speaker 2:I trust Justin. Justin and I have a very similar ethos around health.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, this has been a fantastic conversation.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to continue this podcast as soon as we go off the
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:Podcast never stops.
Speaker 1:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We are now the number two technology show on Spotify. Thank you to everyone who supported Who's ahead of you? This way. All in.
Speaker 6:All in.
Speaker 1:All in's on a big run. You know, they're doing well. We're coming for you all in. Watch out. Just kidding.
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Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. They're running ads. Are we now?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Our job is
Speaker 3:On the podcast?
Speaker 1:Our job is finished. Yeah. That was that that was one of our early bits. We wanted all in to run ads and they're running ads so we're happy.
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