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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.
How was your weekend, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Good. I bought a project hail Mary. Oh, you did?
Speaker 1:Yeah, did. I finally saw it. Did you see
Speaker 2:it, Tyler?
Speaker 3:I did not see it.
Speaker 1:Have a Ben, you saw it. Right? Yeah. What was your review?
Speaker 2:It was great. I was telling you, I think it was it was fresh. It was fun.
Speaker 1:People put it on
Speaker 3:Yeah. Didn't like it.
Speaker 1:He said it was Interstellar for Judd's. Right? Isn't that what he said? He said something like
Speaker 2:You liked it. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I thought it was great. Was a very enjoyable watch.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Should I see it?
Speaker 1:I think you should see it.
Speaker 2:In theater? In theater, for sure. Okay.
Speaker 1:It's definitely a good
Speaker 2:That's a high bar.
Speaker 1:Too long. It's like two and a half hours. But it's an Andy Weir. It's Have you seen The Martian? It's brutal.
Speaker 1:It's basically just like endless stream of problems and then like quick solutions. So there's some sort of problem they need to figure it out. Problem they need to figure it out. All of it's, I don't know, like loosely like hard sci fi, like somewhat believable. It does have aliens in it and stuff.
Speaker 1:But it's a fun time.
Speaker 2:Anyway Well, speaking of real space, what's going on Yes. With Artemis two?
Speaker 1:Artemis two is is live streaming right now to almost a million people on YouTube on the NASA YouTube channel. I believe it's also on Netflix. The stream title is just we are about to fly around the moon with authority from from NASA. We can actually pull this up and see. I would love to hear what is going on right now because I think it's happening like as we speak.
Speaker 3:One minute ago, NASA posted that the crew are now the farthest any human has ever traveled. 250,000 miles from the Earth.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Matthew Gallagher, he's the founder of MedVee. And we were supposed to have him on the show today. He unfortunately cannot make it. We do have John Slotkin coming on, the Chief Medical Officer from Gelsinger Geisinger to talk about claims around oral GLP-one drugs. We read the New York Times story on Thursday, and then over the weekend, there was a whole bunch more analysis about the company.
Speaker 1:And there were
Speaker 2:blatant Yeah, so interesting rumors because you would think that someone else would write the one person, 1,000,000,000 company. Totally. And then The New York Times would take it down. Yep. The But in this sort case, stuff it happened in reverse.
Speaker 1:So last week, The New York Times broke down the story of MedVee, a telehealth provider of GLP-one weight loss drugs. And the framing was basically that this was the first time in history a single person had built a billion dollar company. And that's what went viral. Digging in, there were some small caveats and some big caveats. The small caveats were that the founder, Matthew Gallagher, had hired his younger brother.
Speaker 1:So technically, it was a two person startup. Most people were like, yeah, Okay, we'll count that. It doesn't matter. It's a family member. Right?
Speaker 1:And then also, the other one
Speaker 2:It's only twice as many people as But the original
Speaker 1:they had almost twice the revenue, 1,800,000,000.0. So but the question was the valuation. So the headline stat in the article was that they are on track to do $1,800,000,000 in sales this year. And that the on track is doing a lot of work, of course, because that's clearly an ARR number that's extrapolated out. And the GLP-one market's moving very quickly.
Speaker 1:It's not like Roe and HIMSS and all the other providers are going to be just sitting down and letting this company run away with whatever secret sauce they've discovered around customer acquisition, although they might not go into this, which we'll go into. And it was insane scale, but companies don't unilaterally trade at 1x revenue. Like, that's sort of a given in this article. It's sort of presupposed that if you're doing 1,800,000,000 in revenue, you would trade above $1,000,000,000 and so this counts as a $1,000,000,000 company. I always thought that the $1,000,000,000 company would be on market cap,
Speaker 2:not Yeah, valuation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because you could if you're going to say, Okay, just try and say the biggest number, would want to set up some sort of payment network where basically you could report GMV really, really high. And you actually have a very, very small business because you're taking like 1% as your true net revenue. So there was always a question about the margins and then also revenue durability matters. So like the ongoing question around building these one person high growth companies is, is there durability?
Speaker 1:Because if you can do it and then I can do it and then Tyler can do it and anyone with access to a coding model can build it, very quickly we're going to erode each other's markets and trade market cap very quickly. And I think any VC that would look at this, they might get to a point where they're like, yeah, this is a unicorn company. Look at the growth. I think there's something here. But at the same time, you could see someone like a private equity guy valuing this and saying, well, I I need to
Speaker 2:see A lot of risk.
Speaker 1:I need to see durability.
Speaker 2:There's some lawsuits.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And we'll get into that. So MedBee uses two companies, CareValidate and Open Loop Health, to handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping, compliance. And we'll get into the compliance thing. But that's a lot of outsourcing.
Speaker 1:And of course, that outsourcing takes a toll on margin because you have to pay the doctors, you have to pay the pharmacies, you have to pay the shipping, you have to pay the compliance. And they're paying CareValidate and Open Loop Health to flow that value through to those individual stakeholders. So it's still a good Yeah.
Speaker 2:I started asking, what does this company actually do itself?
Speaker 1:Just marketing. Maybe they're too aggressive about it. We'll get into it. So these GLP-one drugs also aren't cheap. And even when you sell them legally, even as a telehealth wrapper, a lot of the value is going to accrue to the pharmaceutical companies that own the intellectual property.
Speaker 1:At least that's how it should flow when things are functioning properly. So you can effectively build a telehealth company on top of a pharmaceutical company like Novo where you are taking a thin margin on top. You can get to big numbers, but the pharmaceutical companies are going want to be paid because they did all of the expensive FDA trials, all the expensive R and D, and they need to recoup that. So then the other question is you add in the CAC from digital ads. They were apparently spending a lot on Facebook to acquire customers, and you quickly get you quickly wind up an estimate of pretty thin margins.
Speaker 1:I think the estimate Shiel shared Shiel Monat shared was like 15% or something like that. It's it's totally possible to get to a valuation that's lower than a billion dollars depending on how everything flows
Speaker 2:through the the same time, though, if they're outsourcing all of the kind of key areas of the business to these other players, OpenLoop
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Etcetera, it's possible that of that, those very thin margins, right, the 15 ish percent, the margins on that are very, very extreme. Right? Sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you could still get to a number that was in the hundreds of millions of dollars of Yeah. Of EBITDA.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Mean the 15% margin looks like $150,000,000 maybe $200,000,000 in like basically profit. That is crazy. But we'll see what the FDA has to say long term about that, whether there will be lawsuits or settlements.
Speaker 1:There was already a warning letter, and this turned into a big drama about the company. The drama
Speaker 2:was And was there any mention of this in the original story?
Speaker 1:I don't think so. And so there were a lot of people that were and I believe I pulled up the New York Times piece, there was no like correction or anything yet. Maybe there will be more follow on. I feel like the founder does need to respond and have their opportunity to kind of correct the record because these things can kind of run away in either direction. Even with all the drama, there were a ton of super legitimate questions about how valuable the company really is and how long they'll be able to continue their current business model without pretty serious changes.
Speaker 1:That's around the marketing stuff. So Medvy received an FDA warning letter just two months ago for misbranding violations. So warning letter, if you're not familiar with the FDA's language, it can be pretty wide ranging. Like sometimes it requires just a small change to marketing materials to remain compliant. And sometimes it's basically like a shut down the company moment.
Speaker 1:This happened a lot with the nicotine category with illegal vape vapor products.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And sometimes, like the warning letter would be, you are warned in that if you continue to sell these, like we will put you out of business. And some of them are, okay, we're warning you about this particular claim on your website. You need to change this language. And it's pretty minimal. I went through this ten years ago.
Speaker 1:We started Lucy, 2016. And while I was there, we were extremely nervous about warning letters because if we got a warning letter, we thought it would mess up the FDA applications that we had in progress. It would mess up distributors. Like anyone who you're partnering with would say, Well, I don't want to work with somebody that has a warning letter. Have you dealt with this?
Speaker 1:We were able to avoid all this, but one kind of concrete example is that like Lucy, cannot make quit claims about the nicotine gum product. So even though most people think, Oh, this is like Nicorette, it's actually regulated in a different category. It's regulated as tobacco product, not as a pharmaceutical product. And so you can't run a digital ad that says, Hey, you're a smoker. Quit smoking with Lucy.
Speaker 1:That's a violation because it's not regulated as a pharmaceutical. As a smoking cessation aid is the term.
Speaker 2:And so in the nicotine category, you would have companies create a product. Yep. Usually, would be no founder associated with said products because More or less. People didn't wanna put their face on it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they would do a lot of things. They would they would make sales grow incredibly quickly.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, making marketing claims, just where and how they decided to sell Yep. Etcetera etcetera. That the ad channels that they use. Not the enterprise. They would go from 0 to hundreds of millions or billions of revenue very, very quickly.
Speaker 2:But the enterprise value of the company would be near zero. Because nobody would want to buy a company that had all that kind of baggage. And so if you were going to value it, it'd be like, what is the very, very, very near term sort of like revenue opportunity? Opportunity?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the famous comparison is Juul versus PuffBar. So Juul went raised a bunch of money, got very big, put in FDA applications, got those applications denied, marketing denial orders, then got them stayed in the courts. They set up a I think their whole headquarters was in D.
Speaker 1:C. They were working very closely with the FDA, truly engaging to sort of clean up all of the problems around marketing and sales and formulation, just really try and get to a clean bill of health with regard to the government relations. They were successful and they got approved as not as a smoking cessation aid, so they still can't make the claim that Juul will help you quit smoking. But they did get approved as a tobacco product, which I think the FDA says it has to be suitable for the protection of public health, which is a very vague way of saying it's a net benefit, net good that it's on the market, which is people can debate that back in the But back in the Juul days, they also could not say, Quit smoking with Juul. They wanted to put say they wanted like a lot of people that were smoking cigarettes did switch to Juul, and they were pushing for that.
Speaker 1:But they couldn't actually make quit claims, so they used the word switch. They said switch to Juul instead of quit with Juul. And that seemed fine for a long time. I think they eventually trademarked it, then I think they had to pull away from it at various points in time. But there's clearly like this gray area in your marketing.
Speaker 1:Can you say you want smokers to upgrade to nicotine gum? You know, all of these things need to be sort of litigated with the FDA.
Speaker 2:And what has MedVee been up to?
Speaker 1:We wound up playing it very safe. And that probably kept us from mooning in revenue to 1,800,000,000.0 overnight. But I still think it was the right decision for Lucy. Now MedVee appears to have taken a much more aggressive approach. They are apparently running 800 fake doctor accounts on Facebook to sell compounded GLP-one.
Speaker 1:Xilmenot verified that the accounts are not actually doctors. Some even have cartoonishly fake names.
Speaker 2:Doctor. Tucker Carlson, MD.
Speaker 1:If you like, feel this is one of those things where I feel bad for someone who clicked on an ad that was deceptive.
Speaker 2:From Doctor. Tucker Carlson, MD.
Speaker 1:But if you're getting your GLP-1s from Doctor. Carl Tucker, you probably are in on the joke to some extent. I don't know. It's clearly not above board, and they have to clean this up and deal with this. They were also sued in a class action lawsuit last month for violating California's anti spam law.
Speaker 1:That stuff can be crazy expensive because a lot of the fines are on a per instance basis. So it'll be like, Okay, yeah, dollars 10 fine for every text message you sent. And it could be like you sent 50,000,000 text messages or something. So you could have some massive, massive liability. Of course, that will be litigated in the court of law and there might be a settlement and they can figure out what the right damage is.
Speaker 1:If they are even guilty, they're still early in the process. And so the end result is more of a story of pushing over aggressive marketing tactics.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, so pull up pull up the actual picture of of Shields' post because I think that you can just see how confusing this would be to somebody maybe a little bit Yeah. Zoom in. You can just see. You see somebody that looks like a doc.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. They get the 70 stuff
Speaker 2:years old on Facebook Yeah. You're not necessarily putting it together. It's doc Doctor Tucker Carlson, So
Speaker 1:my co founder, Lucy, is a he he has a PhD from Caltech, but it's in biophysics. And so he's not a medical doctor. But he is a doctor of science from Caltech. Like he has a really good background, but he's not a medical doctor. And I would always joke with him like, We've to put you in a stethoscope.
Speaker 1:We've got to take some photos of you in a stethoscope. Like the aura is so high. And he was like, No, that's like such bad practice. Like, we can't do that. Like, doctor is associated with medical doctor, even if you have a doctorate in something.
Speaker 1:It's like the famous, like, I'm dying. Does anyone have a doctorate?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like, yeah, have a doctor in a juris doctor or whatever.
Speaker 2:The other interesting thing, Medvy uses the .org What? Domain.
Speaker 1:Isn't that for nonprofits, typically?
Speaker 2:I would think so.
Speaker 1:There's I gonna be a
Speaker 2:don't I don't know that it's technically illegal to use it But as a for certainly, you add that to all the other things
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you land on that site, and then
Speaker 2:you think, It looks like, oh, a doctor advertised this to me. Yes, yes. And now I'm on a nonprofit
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2:Medical website.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In general, I think the story is pushing overaggressive marketing tactics to the limit more than AI allowing low headcount scaling. And this has happened for a long time. Back in the old days I want to say like 2014, Facebook era but the early days of online marketing, there were countless stories of questionable supplement sales or telehealth operations scaling on the back of insane ads. The classic formula for mega scale was if you could get an ad approved, if you could get it sort of like white listed or through the approval process, it wouldn't automatically get reviewed that often.
Speaker 1:So once you were approved, you could spend $1,000 or you could spend $50,000,000 And early on, there wasn't a natural trigger to refact check. It was like if you could get approved for a small ad, you could scale it up. And so people would do all these crazy things to try and get the ads approved. There were all these tricky things where they would route to one website. And then after the ad was approved, they would change the website.
Speaker 1:And you know, all the ad platforms had to eventually figure out, like, Okay, we need to be making a layer. Scraping a layer deeper, like, consistently or, like, every day. But the canonical example of the health supplement or telehealth operation that would always go viral and always just print was if you could get an ad approved that had Harvard scientists, brain pill, and Johnny Depp all in one call to action. I'm not kidding about this. This is real.
Speaker 1:So it was like always this picture of Johnny Depp coming out of the ocean. That was the one that was like really scroll Like
Speaker 2:Pirates of the Caribbean?
Speaker 1:No, no. Was like a paparazzi photo, which they didn't have the rights to use. They would not partner with Johnny Depp. They should not be running that ad at all. And then something about brain boosting or like making like limitless pill, make you a genius, that type of marketing would all like it's very general.
Speaker 1:Like who doesn't want to be smarter? So everyone would click on that. And then like Harvard scientists would like lend its credibility because, oh, if it's from Harvard, like it's good. And so if you could get those three terms approved, there were a whole bunch of sketchy operations that would get ads approved and then just pump $100,000,000 of sales behind them. And it seems like maybe there's a little bit of that going on here where a lot of these ads should not have been approved.
Speaker 1:Maybe there needs to be a validation. I know that a lot of companies that partner with doctors, even just to sell like skin care supplements, sunscreens, really anything, the rate to advertise with an influencer who's a, who actually has some sort of medical credential is like way higher.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because it's way more effective.
Speaker 1:And that yeah. And it's way more effective. But if you can just like fake that, then you're basically arbitraging that. But you shouldn't be.
Speaker 2:So We have we had two employees Yeah. But 800 fake doctors on Facebook.
Speaker 1:Not great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe I want to be the one person, $1,000,000,000 company, but I want to win more. So if adding incremental people helps me build a better company
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's Ryan
Speaker 2:Peterson's point. Yeah, why would I not add add at least a handful of people?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? Yeah. Totally. So yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, think I think software is an interesting category, especially if it's open source software somehow, where there was some sort of flywheel where you could verify what was actually built and then you could verify what the sales were because it was done on some, you know, sort of open platform or some sort of thing where the the actual reporting and the analytics. I mean, apparently the the New York Times did verify the run rate that they that they used, so their their money was flowing through the business. But having having a much cleaner representation of what the financial picture is, I think, would would help. I was personally excited about the prospect of a video game and just more video game developers seeing breakout success. So a couple years ago, in the olden days when I had free time, I got woefully addicted to a poker themed roguelike deck building game called Bellatro, which I don't think anyone here has played.
Speaker 1:But this game is amazing. So much fun. So it's, you're basically playing poker, but there's no financial stakes, there's no money, there's no micro transactions at all. Interestingly, the game actually got banned, I think, in Japan or some other country for being like poker and being
Speaker 2:Banned for being anti gambling.
Speaker 1:No, no. For No, no. Banned for for being like gambling aesthetics because you are playing with cards. Yeah. There's no real money.
Speaker 1:You pay, like, $10.15 dollars for the game, and then you can just play unlimited. But it's done extremely well. So sold over 5,000,000 units. I saw some reporting there might be 7,000,000 and maybe even more now because they've gone multiplatform. And I think at $15.20 dollars a download, that might be close to a $100,000,000 in revenue.
Speaker 1:And it was made by a solo developer who goes by LocalThunk. Over a two and a half year period, he originally wanted the game to be a side project that he could put on his resume, but it wound up being a massive success. And so depending on your valuation methodology, you could probably underwrite Bellatro close to a billion dollars if it's generated a $100,000,000 of basically free cash flow. There's obviously two and a half years of R and D, but that was just this developer's time, the future revenue streams, the offshoots, the merge. You get to a number that's close, and you have to imagine that his two and a half year development life cycle would have been pulled forward by the help of AI.
Speaker 1:So he basically developed the game entirely in the pre AI period. It came out
Speaker 2:Does it still have momentum?
Speaker 1:I think it's probably trailed off a little bit because people sort of You get to the end of the game after, I don't know, ten, twenty, fifty hours or something. And then, there are some people on YouTube that will do like tons and tons of like try and break the game because you can get really really crazy with like combinations of different things. But at a certain point, like you do kind of finish the game and then you're like, okay, I'm I'm moving on.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, of the stuff that I've seen internally at TBPN Yeah. It's like gonna blow.
Speaker 1:Already vague posting?
Speaker 2:Vague posting.
Speaker 1:Are you the vague post king? Have you stared into the abyss the abyss yet? Because everyone talks about at the AI labs, they they all have abysses. And I feel like I feel like abyss one zero one is like, don't do not stare into it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like maybe first
Speaker 3:day at onboarding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I Or just the Abyss. I think a is okay. Or maybe like like saddling up to the Abyss and just kind of peeking your head in is fine. But I would not stare into it.
Speaker 1:I I I think that's something
Speaker 2:Let's go over to the App Store. Yeah. The App Store saw an 85% increase in new apps this past quarter. Let's pour one out Yeah. Pour one out for the App Store review team.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They worked hard. Most recent quarters, new app count has grown less than 10%. So it was just ticking up quarter over quarter and then jumped massively. No surprises here.
Speaker 2:Everybody that I know outside of tech has has an app now. They're on unconstrained.
Speaker 1:They have an app but at the same time, I have yet to find an app that's on my home screen that was solo developer, vibe coded, something like that. So I'm waiting for the Flappy Bird moment or the Bellatro moment, this like solo thing. Even if it's, like, a productivity tool, there's clearly more apps. Actually going viral, like, what is the Harry Potter Balenciaga moment? What is the, you know, the viral moment that breaks through and actually makes it to the top of the app charts?
Speaker 1:Because right now, it just feels like the long tail of the app store is getting potentially fatter because there's more single use apps, there's more small apps. But will we see one of those break out and become fantastically successful? That's sort of like the next you know, critical moment that I'm I'm, you know, eagerly awaiting, but we'll see.
Speaker 2:What's going on in China, John?
Speaker 1:The pork industry is a victim of its own success. This story is incredible. They got swine scrapers over there. Skyscrapers filled with swine. I'm not kidding about this.
Speaker 1:So this is from The Economist, I read this yesterday and really enjoyed it. Pork holds a unique place in the Chinese diet. It was once a symbol of the good life. The Chinese character for home is a pictogram of a pig under a roof. It is so important that the government has a strategic frozen pork reserve and the news media are always full of the ups and downs of the pork industry.
Speaker 1:It's like they they gotta cover it like it's a horse Like what's going on? Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's the pork race.
Speaker 1:No. It's serious. TBPN for the pork industry in China. That's the real that's the real opportunity. There have been plenty of peaks and troughs in the past decade.
Speaker 1:The trough is active over there, literally. In 2018 to 2019, when African swine fever ravaged pig herds, many smaller backyard farms were wiped out. Prices went through the roof. Before long, the industry came trotting back. The big worry now is that it is doing too well.
Speaker 1:More efficient farming methods producing ever more pork are colliding with slow consumption of the meat. Now all the news is about overcapacity. Xi, who sells cuts of pork at a market in Beijing, says she only got to eat the meat on special occasions with a child. These days, she says, it's so cheap, people can have it whenever they fancy. The oversupply pushed live pig prices to a fifteen year low in March.
Speaker 1:Some farmers are losing over $40 per animal. Part of the problem is that some pig farmers have been aggressively expand have aggressively expanded production in an attempt to gain a bigger share of of a shrinking market. On top of that, big companies save their bacon in the downturn by concentrating their pigs into mechanized modern facilities where they could be kept isolated from the swine fever. Modern farms are a marvel at industrial agriculture, though not of animal welfare. Tens of thousands of pigs are packed into multistory concrete buildings.
Speaker 1:One in Hubei province has 26 floors. It's a swine scraper. It's 26 floors of pigs.
Speaker 2:That's Do we know why why consumption is declining?
Speaker 1:Just oversupply. So they got hit with this they got hit with the swine flu and they were worried about all the pigs getting sick and dying. And so they instead of having them cross pollinate in like open fields, they push them into these literal skyscrapers that are 26 floors tall And But I would assume
Speaker 2:over over overproduction, you have oversupply, prices come down. Yeah. But they're saying that just overall consumption is dropping too.
Speaker 1:Well, yes. So people are moving to chicken and seafood. Increasingly, class the middle class Chinese see pork as less healthy than chicken and seafood. But it's really like a supply a supply side story. That may be more pork than even China can eat.
Speaker 1:The average Chinese person guzzled 28 kilograms of it in 2024, but that was two kilograms less than in 2023. To boost prices, officials have slashed subsidies, ordered farms to cull droves, and told the pork reserve to buy more meat to little effect. Some big firms are looking elsewhere. That is wild. China's biggest pig producer hopes to export its business model instead.
Speaker 1:Last year, it said it would bring the first high rise it would build the first high rise in Vietnam capable of rearing 1,600,000 swine a year. Pig farms are going vertical as profits flatline. And so they are moving the pigs inside, which is what which is, you know, winding up with with like increased yields because the the pigs aren't getting sick. America's new best new weapon in Iran is a drone inspired inspired by by Iran. Iran.
Speaker 1:You had asked about this on one interview we did with someone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I forgot who it was with. But I was I was, know, I was surprised to see The US copying the shahed because it feels like
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:were
Speaker 1:surprised to see them copying it or not copying it?
Speaker 2:No. It it feels like entirely the smart move. Yeah. It's battle tested. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're cheap. Yeah. We we have a good understanding of their capability because American allies have faced off against So there's a lot of reasons that it that it makes sense. But I feel like America had to swallow its pride to some degree Yeah. To to copy, you know, something that, you know, the the enemy made.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're calling it the Toyota Corolla of drones. The powerful, low cost attack drone The US is using in its war with Iran doesn't come from one of America's more than 400 venture backed drone startups, and it isn't the product of Silicon Valley ingenuity. Instead, the drone having its moment in the Middle East conflict was designed by the US military itself using reverse engineered Iranian technology. From the earliest days of the war, the FLM One -thirty six or Lukas, as it is known, has been wiping out Iranian military targets while better funded hardware systems and drones from defense startups have had little involvement.
Speaker 1:It is a victory for the US military, which went from blueprint to battle ready drone in less than two years, jettisoning its tradition of slowly buying very expensive equipment. The creation of Lucas is an early proof point That's a narrative violation. A new strategy of making cheap drones quickly and a sign that the Pentagon can change the way it does business to better prepare for modern conflict. So I I wanna know so much more about, like so they're not subcontracting this at all? Is this all like, is the entire supply chain the US military itself?
Speaker 1:Are they milling the parts in factories Yeah.
Speaker 2:They built? During the Biden administration, a small group in the defense department seized on the idea of America building its own version of the Iranian Shahed, a fearsome attack drone that militaries and proxy militias across the globe have sought to duplicate. Russia, which is lobbying about 4,000 modified Shaheds at Ukraine every month according to Ukrainian government data, did more than any other country to demonstrate the drone's capabilities. A small team in the US military's research and engineering office put together plans to build an attack drone based on deconstructing a Shahed the military had recovered from Ukraine. It was the first known occasion in around half a century that The US had reverse engineered another country's military technology for its own use.
Speaker 2:The last time, it was a Soviet made pontoon bridge. Interesting. A former senior defense official described LUKUS, which stands for low cost unmanned Combat Attack System, as the Toyota Corolla of drones. It may not have all the features or top end components, but it was built to be affordable and plentiful. The cost of LUCUS ranges from 10,000 to 55,000.
Speaker 2:That's a big range, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
Speaker 1:There's also still a worrisome lack of cheap US counter drone technology, which has allowed Iranian backed militias to continue using small drones to menace US military bases in the Middle East. The small number of unmanned surface vessels in the region are still years away from being the autonomous fighting machines their manufacturers have promised. Citrini analyst number three got picked up by the CID, the Gulf CIA, because of the tweets about him. So I think everyone needs to be careful talking about Citrini analyst number three, based 16 z says Hunter S. Setrini number three.
Speaker 2:Last post from Francis. He says, I think the next LinkedIn post I read about the TBPN acquisition might finally reveal the future of media. Just need to find one more. It's true.
Speaker 1:There was one more post that was good. There were so many good posts. It was a lot of fun. And
Speaker 2:Nate Nate Yu with with an absolute banger Yes. A place that we will end it. He says, hear me out. TBPN for sports. There very well could be something here.
Speaker 1:And I liked it, and I got screenshotted because it's official. There very well could be something there. Well, get out there. Build something. Maybe go treat yourself to the largest buzz ball that has ever been built.
Speaker 1:It weighs 3,000 pounds. It opens up as a lemonade stand capable of holding 17,000 drinks, which will be served around The United States. That's a good way to
Speaker 2:TBPN. The only place you can get technology coverage and
Speaker 1:Buzzball coverage.
Speaker 2:Hard hitting Buzzball is buzzball the lorence. Analysis.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thank you so much for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at tbpn.com. Yeah. And we'll see you tomorrow at 11AM.
Speaker 2:See you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Love you.