$1B GLP-1 Lessons, New AI Careers, China's 2030 Master Plan | Sam Broner, Jonathan Slotkin, Liz Hoffman, Bret Taylor, Ariyan Kabir, Atif Siddiqi

26:44There's more small apps. But will we see one of those break out and become fantastically successful? That's sort of like the next critical moment that I'm eagerly awaiting. But we'll see. What's going on in China, John? 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. So this is from The Economist, and 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.

27:26It 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. It's like they got to cover it like it's a horse race. Like what's going on? It's the pork race. No, it's serious. TBPN for the pork industry in China. That's the real opportunity. There have been plenty of peaks and troughs in the past decade. 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.

28:03The big worry now is that it is doing too well. More efficient farming methods producing ever more pork are colliding with slow consumption of the meat. Now all the news is about overcapacity. She, 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 15-year low in March. Some farmers are losing over$40 per animal. Part of the problem is that some pig farmers have aggressively expanded production in an attempt to gain a bigger share of a shrinking market.

28:39On 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 of industrial agriculture, though not of animal welfare. Tens of thousands of pigs are packed into multi-story concrete buildings. One in Hubei province has 26 floors. It's a swine scraper. It's 26 floors of pigs. Do we know why consumption is declining? just oversupply so they got hit with this uh 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 and like open fields they push them into these literal skyscrapers that are 26 floors tall and but i would assume over over over consumption over production you have oversupply prices come down but they're saying that just overall consumption is dropping too well yes so people are uh moving to chicken and seafood increasingly middle class the middle class chinese see uh pork is less healthy than chicken and seafood but it's really like a supply a supply side story story uh that may be more pork than even china can eat the average chinese person guzzled 28 kilograms of it in 2024, but that was two kilograms less than in 2023.

30:02To 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, last year, it said it would bring the first high rise. It would build the first high rise in Vietnam capable of rearing 1.6 million 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 law with like increased yields because, uh, the, the pigs aren't getting sick.

30:39Anyway, um, America's new best new weapon in Iran is a drone inspired by Iran. Uh, you had asked about this on one interview we did with someone. Yeah. I forget who it was with, but I was, I was, you know, I was surprised to see the U.S. copying the Shahed because it feels like. You were surprised to see them copying it or not copying it? No, it feels like entirely the smart move. It's battle tested. They're cheap. We have a good understanding of their capability because American allies have faced off against them. So there's a lot of reasons that it makes sense. But I feel like America had to swallow its pride to some degree to copy something that the enemy made.

31:27Yeah, they're calling it the Toyota Corolla of drones. The powerful, low-cost attack drone the U.S. 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 U.S. military itself using reverse engineered Iranian technology. From the earliest days of the war, the FLM-136, or Lucas 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.

32:02It is a victory for the U.S. 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 in a sign that the Pentagon can change the way it does business to better prepare for modern conflict. So I want to know so much more about like, so they're not subcontracting this at all? Is this all, like, is the entire supply chain, the U.S. military itself, are they milling the parts in factories that they've built?

32:39During 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 lobbing 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 U.S. 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.

33:08It was the first known occasion in around half a century that the U.S. had reverse engineered another country's military technology for its own use. Former defense officials said the last time it was a Soviet-made pontoon bridge. That's interesting. A former senior defense official described LUCAS, 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 Lucas ranges from$10 ,000 to$55 ,000. That's a big range, according to a Pentagon spokesman in line with the Iranian model.

33:42Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles, several hundred of which have been used in the war with Iran, cost at least$2 million apiece. The Defense Department is committed to scaling cost-effective autonomous solutions for the joint force, and Lucas continues to be a prime example, the spokesman said. Former senior Pentagon official Michael Horowitz, who is one of the leaders of the team that developed Lucas, said that other militaries had the ability to make their own low-cost, long-range precision strike weapons. The issue was the U.S. was spending nothing, zero dollars, on that kind of system. He's now on the Council of Foreign Relations.

34:15Lucas was given a spot in 2024 in a Biden-era initiative to field thousands of autonomous weapons by last August. Its inclusion was controversial, said former military officials. Lucas wasn't just a mock-up, but it beat out more mature systems on the offering. Interesting. Because the government owns Lucas's intellectual property, it is using the same approach it employed in building ships during World War II, enlisting a cross-section of second and third tier manufacturers, okay, who crank out the drones on demand during wartime. Little known Scottsdale, Arizona-based Spectre Works and Huntsville, Alabama-based Integration Innovation were tapped to build the drones.

34:58So they are partnering with private companies to actually build an assembly of these drones. A total of five manufacturers will be selected, each set up to produce 300 drones a month. A former senior defense official familiar with the plan said, Specter Works and Integration Innovation didn't respond to requests for comment. The Marine Corps was first to use the drones and then ordered around 6 ,000 destined for the Indo-Pacific. But then the war with Iran began. The drones were handed over to US CENTCOM in February and made their first appearance in combat. The Trump administration has enacted sweeping reforms in defense procurement, making it easier for the military to quickly buy weapons and emphasizing commercial technology to modernize the US arsenal.

35:36In particular, in August, decision by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to rescind long-held requirements, processes for acquiring technology, made the rapid deployment of Lucas possible, current and former defense officials say. Still, other changes will take longer to trickle through the Pentagon's bureaucracy, and it will take time to reorient America to a new way of fighting wars, even as China is developing advanced ways to strike the U.S. While Lucas has been a success against Iran's degraded air defenses, that isn't a guarantee. It will be a battlefield star in more complex environments, an electronic warfare expert said.

36:14In the Middle East, there is no meaningful jamming of GPS, which can cause drones to crash or fly off course. Every technology gets defeated at some point, he said. There's also still a worrisome lack of cheap U.S. counter-drone technology, which has allowed Iranian-backed militias to continue using small drones to menace U.S. 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. The absence of a broader supply of modern U.S. cheap U.S. systems in the Iran war has served as a wake-up call.

36:51We're not ready, said Julie Bush, co-founder of the defense tech firm Valinor Enterprises and a former Palantir Technologies executive who's been on the show. The government doesn't have what it needs to scale that they need. What it needs at the scale that they need. Yeah. Did you see that AGM post Antonio Garcia Martinez said about how maybe there are actually ships that are going through the Strait of Four Moves right now, but they just turn off all of their transponders? Yeah, I mean, I think the estimate is around 10 ships a day are going through, down from 100 pre-war. Yeah. But there could be more that just aren't, that again, have their transponder turns off.

37:34Yeah, he was saying something about like, people will turn off their transponders even when they find like good fishing spots, because they don't want other people to find their good fishing spots. And so it's done more than people think, I guess. But Satrini is over there. Satrini, research analyst, made it over to the Strait of Hormuz in an absolutely insane move and some real crazy investigative journalism going on. I'm hoping to have Satrini on. I obviously want to be secure about whatever is shared because it does seem like a risky proposition to be over there right now. But love seeing them.

38:12Love seeing the reporting so far. In other tech news, Anthropic is making its own splash with an acquisition. This was on Thursday, April 2nd. $400 million for Coefficient Bio started last fall developing an AI drug R &D platform. The startups team will be joining Anthropic's Healthcare Life Sciences Group, which is aimed at developing tools for biotech workflows, ranging from drug discovery to clinical tests. Very exciting. Dimension Capital owned over 50%. Who is Dimension Capital? Have we had them on the show? I don't think so. We probably should. That feels like a multistage research-oriented investment firm partnering with companies across the frontiers of science and compute.

38:56Well, huge win for them. Congrats to the firm. Yeah, not bad. Not bad at all for six months. There's also an article in the Wall Street Journal about OpenAI Anthropics finances reveal challenge from Berber Gin, Scoop God. OpenAnthropic are racing toward potentially record-breaking IPOs by the end of the year. An inside look at the financials of both companies prior to funding rounds completed earlier this year show their Achilles' heel, the soaring costs needed to train new AI models. OpenAI expects to spend$121 billion on computing power for AI research in 2028. That means the company anticipates burning 85 billion that year, even after almost doubling sales from the years prior.

39:41Such losses would dwarf that of virtually any other public company in history. Anthropic doesn't expect to spend nearly as much, but its rosiest forecasts tell a similar story of mounting computing costs. Both companies are releasing new versions of their AI models at a faster cadence than ever before, while pouring more resources into the training runs that create them. The arms race is showing no signs of slowing. Yeah, so pull up this chart from Andrew Curran. This is from the Wall Street Journal piece. Projected open AI and anthropic model training spend for the remainder of this decade in billions.

40:16The Wall Street Journal says they got the data from financial documents shared with investors. So, yeah, I think, I mean, obviously, absolutely wild numbers here. I think this is for training specifically, which is a cost that can be adjusted. Yeah. This is a question of like, yeah, like each model by itself is profitable, but you keep having to spend more on the bigger model. Tyler, anything about that? This is like emblematic of like the Dworkesh critique of Dario, right? Where he's like, if you basically compare Open Anthropic, like Dario is being way more conservative about spending. Like he's like, oh, well, we don't want to, you know, go broke or whatever.

40:59But yeah, I mean, when you see the chart like this, it's like pretty crazy. What was the YOLO philosophy? It does seem like there's a debate internal at OpenAI, according to the information around IPO timing. This is from the information from Anissa Gagardizzi and Amir Afrati. OpenAI's CEO and CFO diverge on IPO timing. Sam Altman has committed OpenAI to spend$600 billion in the next five years and privately said he wants to go public as soon as the fourth quarter, despite expectations his company will burn more than$200 billion before it starts generating cash. Behind the scenes, according to the information, Sarah Fryer, his chief financial officer, has voiced concerns that reflect the tensions and risk inherent in the CEO's extraordinarily ambitious plans.

41:46opening as committing billions of dollars a year in advance to help finance data centers fryer last year began reporting to the head of applications instead of altman altman has excluded her from some conversations related to financial plans and so you can go to the information to read more about that story but it is it is extremely high stakes there's in general the the ai companies have like Like, are they railroads? Are they SaaS companies? There's this incredible amount of capex. Are they both? Are they electricity? Yeah. No one really has consensus here yet. And it feels like there's an ongoing divergence in how do you model these financially?

42:27How much risk should you take? There's also this question of, like, the end of the curve, the end of the exponential. we're seeing this exponential growth in model capability relative to investment dollars the scaling laws have held for a long time but at the same time you can't just throw endless money because at a certain point you don't want to spend a trillion dollars to get like one more iq point out of the model like there is a limit to this and so yeah yeah if you're thinking about like hiring if you're thinking about like hiring an employee it's like okay so this this one individual is, you know, their base salary is going to be 200K a year, or you could hire this other person, and they're one IQ point smarter, but it's going to cost you$5 million a year.

43:15The choice is obvious. So we'll see when we get to that point. Overall, I think, like, tensions between, this is not the first time there's been tension between a CFO and, like, an ambitious CEO. And so. Have you ever hired a CFO at any of your companies? No. Wow. Goated. No. We hired a CFO at my first company and it was, it was an awesome experience actually, but the tension was insane. But, but I was not, I was not the CEO. And so the CFO came in and she had taken multiple companies public and was like, this is just a widgets business. This is so simple. Like we should just be like running this sufficiently.

43:55and of course there was like a big debate about that. But she was very, very formative in my early business career. Yeah, it's interesting because that was, you know, consumer packaged goods company, but with a lot of Silicon Valley venture capital jammed into it. So the pressure from the board was one thing. And then you have the CFO who's saying, hey, we're selling. Yeah, and so much organic growth. But the nature of like Soylent and consumer packaged goods, It's not a fundamentally different business at the end of the day. It does just become a marketing, manufacturing, margin game, and you eventually trade on EBITDA.

44:35And so the reality distortion field doesn't quite apply. But when you're dealing with an entirely new technology, it's a whole different discussion. Anyway, there's another article in the Wall Street Journal about the new jobs that are being created by AI. Let's go through this. So AI is raising big fears about employment losses, but it's also giving rise to new engineering and training jobs. And we're going to have Liz Hoffman from Semaphore on the show later to talk about the March jobs data. There was a massive jobs beat and a whole bunch more jobs added to the economy. but the chart is crazy.

45:19It's like up and down every quarter. Yeah, the tough thing, you know, every single jobs report has been revised downward so massively that it's hard to look at a new jobs report and actually get excited when you have a print like that. So, yeah, this time it's different. This time it's different. The last 12 have been revised downward. And then now you have a war and major geopolitical tensions and this weird dynamic where the oil prices are driving gas prices, which is driving inflation, which is maybe going to cause less driving-based vacations over the summer, less tourism. You could see inflation plus some economic weakness, regardless of what the technology industry is doing.

46:04And so you could wind up with a situation where rates have to stay high, and so that creates unemployment. And it's a rough time to be a Fed governor, I'm sure. But let's dig into what the Wall Street Journal is talking about, where different jobs are playing a part here. So artificial intelligence has sparked fears it will become a job killer. There's also a research paper, I don't know, a PDF from OpenAI today around the social contract and how the government should be thinking about redistribution and the safety net in the age of AGI. It's a long document and honestly I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but we will go through some of it later this week.

46:45I saw one response. Someone just said, just put the tokens in the bag, bro. But we'll read it and we'll cover it. Yeah, we'll figure it out. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it maps on to like previous political platforms. Like who picks it up? because there's obviously a collection of political ideas and various politicians might say, hey, I've been saying that for a long time. I like that. Or hey, I completely disagree with that. I have a different philosophy, but we'll work through it. So AI is also fueling a crop of new careers. AI created 640 ,000 jobs between 2023 and 2025 in the US, according to an analysis by LinkedIn of job posting data, including new white collar positions, such as head of AI and AI engineer.

47:36That tally doesn't include the huge number of temporary construction jobs tied to building the mammoth data centers AI relies on. And I'm wondering how temporary will they be if the ramp, I mean, if the CapEx ramp continues and you're going to build 10 times as many data centers, you would imagine there's 10 times temporary construction jobs. Many construction jobs are temporary, right? You build a house, job is over, you move and build the next one. Yeah. So LinkedIn's head of economics, Corey Cantenga, says, we're not talking about enough jobs to change the direction of the labor market, but for AI roles, growth has been pretty much straight up.

48:19And Citadel had something else to say. Yeah, and for roles like AI engineer, to me that was just you were going to hire an engineer and you're slapping AI on the front of it because you want somebody that is excited about... Yeah, just somebody that's excited about AI. Yeah, and maybe more greenfield projects, maybe something that's... You know, it's like the new full stack. Like, no longer are you hiring like a back-end engineer, a front-end engineer necessarily. Like, you might be hiring someone who's more flexible. What do you have at? I love how the first example, this guy, Zach, who they're profiling in this, The first picture of him is just him with a surfboard running into the ocean.

48:58Hey, he's surfing after work. He's got a good work-life balance. Let's read it. That looks like the middle of the day to me. Look at where the light is, John. That's not after work. Unless he's wrapping up work. Not another word about surfing. I don't want you getting canceled again for being anti-surfing. What were you? You were anti-surfing before work or after work? I was saying surfing in really cold water before work. Oh, he's bad. It has not worked well for me. Okay, for you. Apparently, there's people out there that death threats. Yeah. Did you get death threats? No. You just got dunked on.

49:33It's fine. It happens. Zach Kinzler, who's 25 years old, got his master's degree in business analytics less than two years ago. In February, he assumed the title of head of human AI solutions at Boodlebox, an AI education startup based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His job involves client training and using AI to speed up tasks for co-workers. That is a good gig. Kinsler works remotely from San Diego, wanted to work with AI, and says he feels lucky to land in a growing field. The conversation about whether artificial intelligence is good or bad needs to go away because it's not going to go away, he said.

50:10One of the biggest questions facing a shaky U.S. labor market that has been especially hard on white-collar workers is whether AI's ability to mimic human skills like research, writing and coding will cause significant layoffs. Big cuts at Oracle this week, while the company invests heavily in AI data centers, underscored some of these worries. Corporate leaders, including some in the tech world, have issued grim forecasts about AI's potential to replace white-collar workers at a massive scale. According to a recent Goldman Sachs research report, AI could automate tasks that account for a quarter of all working hours in the United States, especially in fields such as administrative support, legal work, and architecture and engineering.

50:51One interesting pitch I was hearing, I think it was from the OpenAI doc, was like, you know, I think it was during the Industrial Revolution, the unions lobbied for the weekend, the idea of the weekend, and that just became a thing and stuck around forever, basically. And so there's a question about like, you know, do we pitch a four-day work week somehow nationally, some like, you know, bigger thing. I don't know. There's all these interesting like competitive dynamics and obviously people wind up working on the weekends because they're like, I want to out-compete. David Senter is like, I want all my enemies to move to a four-day work week immediately where they can properly relax and recover.

51:29Mandate that actually. Mandate that for everyone except me. Still, analysts say it's hard to judge how many job cuts thus far are genuinely attributable to AI and which are being made for financial or operational reasons. This is something we've been going back and forth on forever. A new survey of 750 chief financial officers found that AI had essentially no negative employment effect in 2025. But data show employers are increasingly hiring for AI talent. In 2023, AI-related roles made up only 1.6 % of all job postings, according to an AI job tracker co-led by Anil Gupta, professor at the University of Maryland's Robert H.

52:08Smith School of Business, and job market company, data company LinkUp. I've never heard of that before. Two years later, that figure had more than doubled to 3.4 % of all job postings being AI related. One rising job is head of AI. That's a good gig. In the three years from 2023 to 2025, companies sought to fill 225 ,000 such jobs. There are now 225 ,000 heads of AI. You need 20 years of experience prior for most of these jobs, which is tough. Tough to put that together. No, I'm joking. We should talk about China's, what's happening in the Chinese AI talent race over in The Economist. Yes. Dave Freeber was talking about this on stage at Hill and Valley, about how there's been this big flippening from where research is coming from.

53:04The headline stat is something like 50 % of, where is it? 50 %? Okay. This was from Jensen Wong at NVIDIA. He said, is it possible that the United States falls behind China? He asked himself a question during a question and answer session about artificial intelligence late last year. He says, the answer is absolutely yes. That may seem surprising for much of the last decade, America has been comfortably ahead in the AI race, home to the most advanced companies producing frontier models. Its engineers have access to deep pools of capital as well as a regular supply of NVIDIA's cutting edge chips.

53:43But Mr. Wong's concern related to an equally important ingredient of innovation, human talent. Until recently, most leading AI research was produced by experts based in the West. That is changing. In 2025, for the first time, more studies presented at the world's top AI conference had lead authors based in China. Tyler, you have more conversations? Yeah, I think it's just misleading, right? Okay, explain. A lot of the best researchers in the U.S. are studying, but they're not putting that work into studies. You can see, if you scroll down on that article a little bit more, you can see a chart where the U.S., like between 2015 and 2020, it looks like it's starting to go exponential and then basically plateaus, right?

54:27Because all the best researchers basically go to the labs then you don't publish anymore. Wait, so which chart are you referring to? The one in... Oh, I'm looking in The Economist. Is it called Active AI Researchers in the Thousands? Yes. Student, early career. And so in the United States, it's growing, and then up until 2021, and then it stagnates because all the labs went closed. Yeah, and all the Chinese labs are still open source. Are still open source, yeah. So yeah, I think that's a... I don't know. that's a very reasonable mitigating point here. There is just the question of like, do you still need a pipeline of open source researchers of robust research practice?

55:11Also, like if you're in the Ilya Sutsukovar camp of like the age of research, maybe you do need a bunch of bizarre ideas that are happening and you get like more trapped. Yeah, but I mean, Ilya is like definitely not publishing, right? Oh, true. He's like even more secretive. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I think you could like expand from that into like there might be interesting like knock-on research that gets pulled from random places. And like the cross-pollination is valuable. And even if he's not a practitioner of that, you can still make the argument that research is valuable and cross-pollination is also valuable.

55:48And China does have that advantage. Yeah, I just think if you look at China, there's the anecdotal evidence of what happened to the Quen researchers, right? The people running that company are just not... Do we ever find out that they go to XAI or Meta? What's going on? I don't think we know yet. We don't know yet. But clearly, something is different about how they think about researchers than in the US, right? Because those guys are extremely good, and somehow there is some reorg happening. The chat is demanding an ad break. We'll figure it out. A lot of people were saying that the ads were part of the program.

56:22We will figure out a way to do something ad-related. Until now, you have to put up with some random soundboard. And that's the best I can do for you. But there is a different article in The Economist. People were just watching for the ads, I guess. China's new master plan for its tech economy in 2030 and beyond. And so they have this is the 15th five year plan for China's economic development. This was adopted in March and the economist is breaking it down. It talks of industrial upgrading, new quality, productive forces and the like. Yet in plain language, it translates into Elon Musk's fever dream.

57:01So China wants to build skies dotted with flying taxis, fusion power fueling factories manned by humanoid robots, unstoppable quantum computers, 6G mobile devices plugged directly into people's brains. It's a dream come true for you, Jordy. Are you going to renounce your citizenship? Yeah.

57:25You're like, yeah, no comment. Absolutely. Sign me up. Sign me up. 6G. But there's, I mean, obviously they're taking like frontier sci-fi development very, very seriously, and it has a lot of knock-on effects. So past plans also displayed gumption. In 2015, the most high-profile plan in years, dubbed China Made in China 2025, set the goal of catching up with America and ending reliance on foreign technology. But catching up, which China has pulled off in areas like electric cars, clean energy, and even artificial intelligence is one thing. Dominating technologies of the future is another. Can they do it?

58:04One reason for this breathtaking ambition is the desire of Xi Jinping, China's leader to Russia to usher in a modernized socialist state by 2035 remember he thinks he's going to live to I think 150 he was caught on maybe some hot Mike saying so he's thinking in centuries still a modernized Chinese socialist is possible he knew he was miked up and he wanted to kind of downplay how he's thinking right he thought he thought he in his in his head He's like easily a thousand easily a thousand if I don't hit one K. Yeah, I don't want to sound crazy But I don't want to sell my crazy. I'll just gotta give him something Ballparking so currently a modernized China Chinese socialist is One generating between 20 ,000 and 30 ,000 USD in economic value per year That's up from less than $14 ,000 today So in 2035, they want to be more than double what they are today of 14 ,000.

59:03Sorry, I had that backwards. To meet that goal, itself a step towards China becoming a modernized socialist world power by 2049, the centennial of communist rule. GDP per person must grow 4 to 8 percent a year in the next decade. With Chinese consumers in a dour mood and exporters facing geopolitical uncertainty, the party believes only world-beating technology and resulting productivity gains can ensure success. So that requires picking up the pace, says the economist. Whereas earlier plans set distinct objectives for strategic industries and for scientific innovation, industrial policy is now being extended to out-there tech, notes Camille of Rhodium, a research firm.

59:46The latest plan ordains the commercialization of fledgling fields like AI robots, hydrogen power and brain computer interfaces all in the next five years within another five of the party wants breakthroughs and I hate to interrupt you John but chat is saying Ryan and Jeff are saying put a scroller of the guest schedule oh that's good put the guest schedule on the scroller yeah I think is good okay and then we've done that before where should we go to save both time and money. You guys already know the answer. Ramp.com, baby. Time is money. Save both. These years, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place.

1:00:25You know I'm not going to forget the ad reads. I still have them on the tip of my top. John rattled off a lot to me over the weekend. It was just for the two of us. Yes. Subliminal ad reads. This will happen. The point of the plan is to signal to officials and investors, which initiatives to back? This unlocks funds from central and local governments. Private capital follows on the assumption state involvement reduces risk. Research clusters attract not just technologists and money, but also marketers, lawyers, and other professionals needed to take tech from the lab into markets. Host cities enlist armies of bureaucrats who develop domain expertise.

1:01:03Proponents of Chinese techno planning point to AI as proof that it works for cutting-edge innovation when in 2017, China declared its intention to enter the global high-end value chain for AI by 2025. Foreigners scoffed. Have they succeeded in entering the global high-end value chain for AI by 2025? No. Global? I mean, the... When I think global high-end value chain, I think... Semiconductors? Yeah. Yeah. Not quite. I think like the actual end product. I mean, the video model is really good. See dance. Totally. But that's maybe not the... Maybe that doesn't count as the high-end value chain. I don't know.

1:01:48Anyway, let's see what the economist has to say. In January last year, Western markets shuttered when DeepSeek, an AI lab, released a model that rivaled top American ones. No one is scoffing at the new goal of turning China into, quote, the world's primary AI innovation center. I'm scoffing. Are you scoffing? Scoffed up. Scoffed up? What do you think? Yeah, I'm scoffing. You're scoffing, right? The whole reason that Chinese AI is good is because they're just distilling on American models. Like, we know this. This is, like, true now. Like, we know this for sure. And the reason that the video models are good is because they don't follow IP?

1:02:25Yes. Yeah. This is not cope. Yeah, I don't think this is cope. I think the economist is coping. Oh, well. They are doing a lot of other things, though. So early results in several other areas look encouraging, too. The low-altitude economy. Ooh, new buzzword, new coinage. We got the orbital economy up in space. We got the low-altitude economy of delivery drones. and flying cabs born of private sector ingenuity took off after capturing the attention of officialdom around 2021. State Imprimator for Brain Computer Interfaces first named a future industry in 2024 and a subject of its own plan in late 2025 has led universities to set up research projects and startups to launch products.

1:03:11Cities host specialist industrial zones and hospitals have published pricing guidelines for brain implants that's uh they're moving quick um i i would i would expect that the low altitude economy does very very well i mean dji is super legit of course they're going to have to compete with um all of the different i mean not really compete because i doubt yeah does dji have any delivery focus products um i don't know but i mean zipline just raised more money they're doing very well google has a project and there's there's a whole bunch of other companies that are doing truck delivery. DJI Flycart 100.

1:03:45Okay. I wonder what the scale is. Specifically for, it's an 85 kilogram max payload capacity. Yeah. 12 kilometer max flight. But again, that's something that doesn't, I mean, it requires like innovation, but really it's like a lot of manufacturing and regulatory, like it's not necessarily front-team. When I looked at, yeah, looking at the top of their, looking at the top of their plan, It's like they wanted to do electric cars, clean energy, and AI. They have absolutely crushed it for the most part. For sure. Skepticism is warranted, however. Thank you, economist. We will be skeptics here. Earlier plans, including Made in China 2025, missed many goals.

1:04:25It doesn't feel like it. It feels like they crushed that one. They made everything. China beats the world in renewables tech and electric cars and matches it in AI, debatable, but lags behind in critical areas like advanced chips. Capital ends up wasted if it flows to places in which local officials duplicate efforts elsewhere, chase industries despite a lack of tech talent, or are loath to abandon failures. China's apparent desire to dominate every emerging industry may spread resources too thinly. Making a hoo-ha about the plans does not help. Uh-oh, we're in trouble. Made in China 2025 spooked America, which saw it as a challenge to its techno-economic dominance.

1:05:06It hobbled Chinese efforts in areas like chip making by restricting exports of crucial American inputs, the ASML lithography machines, of course. There is now talk of Made in China 2035, but any technology named in the latest plan can still expect a target on its back. Talk of using undefined, unconventional measures to achieve the plan's goals will not put Americans' minds at ease. The biggest challenge for Chinese planners is a function of their catch-up success. Those occurred in fields where the technology, like photovoltaic cells or lithium-ion batteries, had been around for decades and the market for electricity or cars was mature.

1:05:43Moving to tech's bleeding edge involves a lot more unknowns. Is there a business case for hydrogen power? How many people will want brain implants? This guy. This guy over here. Sign me up. Can quantum computers and fusion even be made to work outside the lab? China's plans implies it knows the answer. Market forces may have other ideas. Interesting. Well, we have some advice for young men in China who are trying to unseat America's techno-capitalist dominance. This comes from Sean Frank. He gives 25 practical tips to improve your life. Let's run through them. He says he's about to have his first son, so congratulations to Sean Frank over at Ridge.

1:06:21Here's what he wished he learned earlier in life and I want your agree or disagree So a forty to ninety dollar water flosser can save you a minimum of four thousand dollars on dental work Use it every day. Are you a water pick guy? John does John have his bags? Investor in water pick I guess wordless advanced 2.0. I don't know. I've heard really good things I've never done. Have you ever used a water pick? When I had braces I used it I do the analog. I actually floss, but I use the physical floss. But maybe I should get one of these. I don't know. He speaks highly of it. Are you a big cavity guy?

1:06:58No. Have you ever got a cavity? Maybe once or something. But no, I do pretty well. I like brushing my teeth. I feel like it's refreshing. Two, learn something people will pay you for. Sports are awesome. College will be fun. But you need to learn a skill that the market values. It can be anything. A locksmith will have a better life than a master's in archaeology. Taking shots. Didn't you take a dinosaur class? I did. I did. Wow. Okay. I studied for at least one semester for a specific requirement. You're basically an archaeologist. You should get a master's in archaeology. Archaeology seems like a fun gift.

1:07:38It is interesting because if you want to make$40 ,000 a year and spend all your time thinking about dinosaurs, and that is what you qualify as a great life, then you're probably going to have a much better time, much better life than, you know, being a locksmith. And I think we were predicting that, like, you know, everyone's wondering, like, where will Geordi, where will John go as influencers? And I think, like, the logical place was that you'd become a member of the data sphere, sort of like the manosphere, but for fallerhood. and a true knowledge of dinosaurs is pretty key to rearing a child, especially a young boy.

1:08:18Yeah, I would say when I became a dad, I struggled intensely early on with pronouncing the names of the different dinosaurs, right? There's hundreds. They have these names that are all just kind of like mashed together. It seems like they're always making new dinosaurs. You're getting - And they renamed a bunch of them too. They probably have like over 50 different dinosaur books. They were lied to in Jurassic Park. The Velociraptor is the size of a chicken. I know. That's one of the biggest kind of like moments in fatherhood. I think they refer to it as like the red pill. It's like the red pill moment where you realize like everything you learned in school was a lie.

1:08:56Like when you learn Velociraptor being the size of a chicken. With, you know, a bunch of feathers. It makes you question everything. Yeah. It makes you question everything. It starts a lot of conspiratorial thinking for sure. It sure does. Okay, what about this one? Number three, just buy timeless brands. Head to toe, Ralph Lauren looks good in 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020, and it will look good in 2030. You have no idea when this photo was taken. Could be this week, last year, 2004. It was 2004. What do you think? Timeless brands, bullish, bearish? yeah i think i think a millennial uh late millennial early gen z forgot about the timeless brands because there were so many new d to c brands for every possible category but uh i think ralph loren and and some of the other classics have just continued uh continue to cook yeah so if it doesn't matter buy a second hand my best friend spends less than 500 per year on clothes and shoes gets by just fine.

1:09:55This applies to most things. Um, Oh, buy secondhand clothes, but your wedding suit, let's just buy new dude. Uh, be funny. Being funny is a skill. You can get funnier. You can learn to be funnier. Uh, people will like you more. If you have a sense of humor, you will get dates by being funny. These, those dates will go better. If you are funny in 180 days, you will be top 5 % funny and your life will be 60 % better. How is that possible? Is he selling a course on humor? This is a crazy thing to learn. In 180 days, I can guarantee you'll be in the top 5 % funny or your money back. Funny mastermind.

1:10:35Is he on intro.com? I want to sign up. We need to get him to coach us. He's certainly funny with his post. Be the friend you wish you had. Everyone is lonely. Everyone is sitting at home more than they want. Just do things and invite people. It isn't weird or cringe if they feel that it's on them. Text people out of nowhere and wish them well. Don't wait around for someone to invite you on their adventure. Time for a side quest. You have to make the life you want. It's okay to leave everyone behind and go do something cool. Don't feel obligations to people who are trying to hold you back. Forget about your day.

1:11:05Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. He's taking insane shots of it. But before, I think that, I think I've figured out why Sean's doing this. He's a very busy guy. I would have a kid running a business with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. He's launching new brands, all this stuff. So I think this entire list is trying to, he sees some of the young guns kind of nipping at his heels a little bit. And he's like, I need to distract him. I need to throw him off the scent. I believe it. Well, he's taking shots at me with number eight. He says, being tall doesn't matter. Being lean does. Yeah, this is a good point, though.

1:11:41He says, you have no control over your height. And honestly, it's just cope to care. I'm 5 '8 or 5 '9 and height has never been a factor in anything I do, but you do need to be physically strong Everyone needs to be able to do a pull-up. That's a good point. But with with Inserts he could be 6 '1, 6 '2 cowboy boots cowboy hats. He could be up 6 '3, 6 '4. Yeah No, it sounds like sounds like cope from Sean He says no one is thinking about you Well, I'm thinking about you Sean. He says how often do you think about your old co-workers? Maybe once a year in passing they aren't thinking about you either Don't do things for the opinions of other people because those opinions are fleeting.

1:12:16That's a great point. It's okay to fail because people only remember the wins. You can be a loser for 10 years in a row, failure after failure, bankrupt, but as soon as you hit a big win, everyone loves you. This is a common theme here, but other people's validation is worthless. Money is very important. Speed run making as much money as possible. Leave jobs, move states, change careers, get equity and build leverage in your field. Be an expert, be vocal, share your learning. life gets easier. Don't choose a profession that is someone's passion. If you are competing with someone who would do it for free, get out of the field.

1:12:50You want to be one of one. Your profession has to be your passion. These are good, good mentions. And then he goes back to sunscreen. He's just giving like life wisdom. And then he's just like, and here's two more screenshots from direct to consumer companies, face moisturizer and better screen UB serum. Is he, is he holding keels uh he says i use keels sunscreen and wild roman i i do love wild roman uh shout out south hill bloom but anything is better than nothing the cheapest one dollar tube will put you in the one percent of men are you are you a daily sunscreen guy no but uh lotion anything's moisturizer yeah i'll use i'll use sauna i'll use a moisturizer but uh yeah yeah sunscreen i got I got kind of cooked this weekend.

1:13:36Oh, yeah? A lot of time on the beach. Find your cohort. This is a group of people around your age in your chosen field, most often not school friends. He says drinking is bad. You should still try it and do it, but the risk-reward is pretty low. It would be good to stop drinking by the time you're 25. Weed is bad, and you should skip that. Agree. Maybe old-school weed was fun and free, but now this new stuff is too strong and will make you crazy. That is a good point. Find your relationship with God. God is real and cool and great and everywhere, but someone can't just tell you that you got to find it.

1:14:08This will take your whole life. Never shame someone for doing what they have to do to survive. You don't know how easy you have it. You aren't better than anyone. The world is built brick by brick by every single person doing their part. I don't know how my microwave works or water treatment works, but I love a burrito and a shower. If someone earns less in a different way, they are important. Just tip well. so much fighting and discourse about tipping getting out of hand just forget it and tip well we had this discussion earlier about when they turn the ipad around you got to just tip be generous but logical i'll give anyone in my life money once it's a gift i'm never being paid back but when they ask again they think you are a piggy bank uh you are who you marry will be the most important decision of your life my wife is my best friend we are perfect partners and you You better find that because you are with this person 12 plus hours a day forever.

1:15:03Act with honesty in everything you do. You can be cutthroat, you can be swift and decisive, but never steal and don't lie. If you are going to beat someone, you tell them how and why ahead of time. And number 25, no one is coming to save you. You are a man, no one cares if you are wronged. No one cares if something is unfair. You have to save yourself. Well, Sahil Boon says this. Saved threads. He saved threads? I mean, we haven't seen a thread like this in a long time. This could have been an article, but he went back to the thread meta. I wonder if the thread meta is permanently back in vogue.

1:15:38I don't know. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show in the waiting room. Let's bring in Sam Broner from Better Money. Sam, how are you doing? I'm doing great, guys. First guest of the day. It's fantastic. Yes. Starting the week off strong. And kick us off. The whole problem we're facing is there's not enough noise. There's not enough soundboard. So kick us off with your news so I can slam the gong as hard as possible. Well, look, we raised$10 million to build a stablecoin clearinghouse. We're happy I hit that gong. Yeah, we're here to solve the problem of doing payments with stablecoins and making stablecoins really work for payments companies.

1:16:21Okay, back up and explain what is a clearinghouse broadly? Give me like the TrapFi analogy. Yeah, well, you use clearinghouses all the time. Like when you do an ACH, you're sending money from one bank to another bank. This is a clearinghouse is just how you connect financial institutions. There's a bunch of them. They're used frequently in payments. Today, just so you guys know, for stable coins, when you want to go from one stablecoin to another, it's the equivalent of if you had to sell Wells Fargo dollars to buy Bank of America dollars. And we know that's not how payments work. You probably have an intuitive understanding for that.

1:17:00And if you're a trad payments company, you're confused by this. And so we solve that problem. We make stablecoins sort of work how trad payments companies expect them to work. Okay, and is that going from USDT to USDC or are there a bunch of other pairs? What pairs actually matter? Yeah, there's a bunch of pairs. So we support the Genius Bill compliance stable coins. And we work with a bunch of the stable coin issuance platforms like Bridge, like Braille. We can work with Agora, MZero and Frax. And so we have a bunch of great partners that that we support their stable coins. And walk me through the background, how you got to this moment, launching the company, all that.

1:17:41yeah so i uh i worked at the boston fed on their stable coin initiative pretty trad stuff excellent uh and love that experience and then i was an investor at andreason horowitz crypto for three years priced off the way explain andreason explain andreason horowitz yeah yeah so a169 yeah wait what was the boston fed project technically like a cbdc yeah it was it was it's kind of controversial by the way yeah real stablecoin land they don't love species but uh it was very interesting have have it feels like the cbdc movement has like very much lost momentum is that your read or do you think there will be like a resurgence and central banks will actually play a role in the stablecoin ecosystem maybe a few years down the line.

1:18:31Yeah, I think that stable coins work well now. And the fact that you can send any amount of money anywhere for a fraction of a penny is a good thing. And so the need might have dried up, like private stable coins that are well regulated are working. Are there people in government who are still like, oh, we got to get the Fed to control this? As a matter of political ideology, the Fed must have control over the issuance of something that looks like U.S. dollars. I don't think that's a huge narrative right now, mostly because when you go to a bank, you're relying on their balance sheet to do your banking.

1:19:15So the Fed doesn't really get involved with everyday consumer payments anyway. They like to work through these institutions. there's this big bill called the genius act that came out in July of 2025 that sets for the regulatory tone for, for stable coins. And it builds into that, that meta, like the fed expects to work with other institutions to make it happen. Yeah. Yeah. Walk through the, the genius. You said it's, uh, it's like B still being implemented. Like we've covered it a few times, but like, where are we in the rollout and like the calcification of the actual law and rules that will all be downstream that like wind up getting implemented into stablecoin platforms?

1:19:58Okay. Yeah. So July, the legislation comes out and it has really widespread bipartisan support. Over the last few months, the rules are now getting made more specifically, like, you know, literally how do you do the accounting? What is the compliance obligation? Where does the money have to sit. The more interesting thing, though, is that big companies now feel very ready to adopt stablecoins. We hear about multiple RFPs for stablecoin projects a week. You get to work with some other people. And that's actually for a breakneck pace for these big orgs. A big payments company is not accustomed to shipping a whole new product line on a whole new payment rail in seven months, but that's what's happening right now.

1:20:44So a big institution is like, okay, stablecoin seemed to be sticking around. I kind of need to create a strategy here. What are the things going through their head that they care about in terms of actually integrating them into their product suite? I'm assuming they want to figure out how to make money from them. I'm assuming they are very risk averse early on, but how are they thinking about, you know, setting up a project? Yeah. I mean, the first conversation probably is what should we do about stablecoins? And then, you know, that's not the right time to really launch into a new stablecoin project.

1:21:24You've got to identify a real need. And the real need is typically we can improve the quality of our treasury management or we have a product that involves payments that we could do much better. So that might be remittances. It might be agentic payments. It might be streaming payments. It could be trade finance.

1:21:43And that's often what we do. But this is the kind of thing that they're excited to improve on. At what level of abstraction is integration actually happening? Because I imagine if I'm a big company, can I just go to my bank and say, okay, I'm sick of these ACH fees. I want you to figure out how to use stable coins and then I want to pay less or whatever platform they're using to move money. They like the platform probably jumps on it. Like at what point is a company that's not a financial institution integrating stable coins? So first, I just want to give a little context on this. There's been a long history of big enterprises getting deeper into the payment stack.

1:22:29Airbnb, Shopify, Square these companies kind of own banks now because they want that additional level of control to make their product better and they can do all of this interesting next generation stuff once they get that integrated and so we see a similar thing where for many companies going to your bank or your payments provider is the right place to start but there's a ton of ambitious tech and fintech payments and banking companies that want to get even closer to the rails so they can optimize the quality of their product. We'll see all things happen. I mean, there's always been retailers to simplify the stack.

1:23:07I remember it might've been Uber or maybe it was Airbnb, but there were a few companies that sort of launched like instant payouts for, it happened a lot on like gig work platforms. And it felt like the platform was basically just eating two days of working capital by paying for the service that's rendered immediately, even though they weren't going to get money from their customer for two days because of the transfer. Is that the main motivation, like speed? I love that you brought that up, by the way. That's a pretty deep cut. So that whole thing is unblocked by Durbin-exempt debit cards. This is the ability to charge a higher fee on cards.

1:23:47Yeah, totally a wonk thing. But there's this rule in the U.S. where if a bank has under a certain amount of assets, they can issue a debit card that takes a higher fee on swipes. That's how they pay for the working capital in that example. Like they don't just front the two days. I thought they were just like raising debt or doing some financial engineering and just being like, look, it's going to be so valuable for our customers to pay on Monday. And then the gig worker that delivered the food or delivered the car on that day to get paid the same day that they were just like, yeah and we'll just have this massive two-day growing working capital bill but it's interesting that they've already found a workaround so then does that make the stable current argument like weaker because they already figured out a hack or will stable coins allow them to like drop the cost of doing that project okay so i think it's both like okay it's often about cross-selling the durban exempt card pays for part of that working capital bill but not all of it yes it takes for a more compelling product but probably the most interesting part is to build that product takes a ton of engineers and a ton of money.

1:24:53And there's many businesses who can't afford that and would like to still offer that kind of compelling product. And mind you, that's a pretty limited product. We've only figured out instant payout for that one category, big workers, debit cards. There's a ton of other places. Maybe it's buying groceries, maybe it's agenting payments, where you might want that similar instant payout facility. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What has the launch of the company looked like? Is it like, are you dealing with regulatory filings and getting like banking licenses? Is it writing code? Like what's the shape of the business?

1:25:32Yeah. Well, we, we, we, we write a lot of code. I'm an engineer. Like that's one of my favorite things to do. We rely on great partners for the regs like that, you know, they help us with that. So we build on their infrastructure. But the shape of the company is really figuring out how we can build better products for payments, codes, fintechs, money apps generally, where they get this one-to-one guarantee, one stablecoin equals$1, and they know when the money will arrive. Those are two things that don't exist right now for a lot of stablecoin offerings. It might be surprising, but that's something that payments companies really do require for them to run their business well.

1:26:14How are you thinking about the strength of the dollar broadly? Is that like an important thing to track? I mean, we saw the news about Tether buying like an insane amount of gold. And then there was this sort of narrative violation around the war causing actually a flight to the dollar and the dollar strengthening, even though obviously it's a very tumultuous time. Like, how have you been processing just the demand for the dollar generally? Because that's like the entire stablecoin boom is sort of predicated on it. Yeah. I mean, I'm unabashedly pro-dollar, but it's sort of besides the point. There's no product in the world that has more product market fit in the dollar.

1:26:59There's like nothing you could give anyone in the world that everyone agrees is valuable more than a dollar. And so, look, we can talk all day about why that changes a little bit. But for now, people want dollars. Yeah. And then in terms of your sort of go-to-market growth, are you focused on those big companies, Fortune 500 companies? Are you selling deeper in the stack, B2B or B2B2B? Like, how are you actually sourcing customers growing the business? Yeah, it's a little bit of all of that. We see big companies who really want to be on stablecoins now because they can simplify a global treasury or build a new product.

1:27:43And we see a ton of very fast-moving, very savvy fintechs who want the same. Luckily for us, it's the same platform. It's the clearinghouse. And that's similar to how JPMorgan, Chase, and Wells Fargo all use ACH, but so does Bridgewood Savings Bank and Seattle First Chemical Bank. You know, all types of money. Sorry, we just had something fall in the studio. Just a chair or something. I want to talk about particularly other movements to like stable-ish things on chain. There was talk like a few years ago about like mortgages on chain, real estate on chain. Yeah, what's happening in real world assets?

1:28:29Yeah, RWA is like the buzzword. Have you been tracking any of that? Is there progress? There's a ton of progress. I mean, certainly I think today there's a big announcement about another large trading venue trying to do on-chain securities. Yeah. I think it's likely to happen because people want access to 24-7 trading. There's events that happen outside of trading hours where it's helpful to have deep liquidity to react to it. And certainly at ACC &C, you know, saw so many of these stablecoin companies and so many of the RWA companies that were bringing the rest of finance on chain. In the recent months, I've been pretty narrowly focused on payments, but they touch RWAs because often you're paying into a trading venue in order to do trading there.

1:29:18We'll see a slow drip over months. This is not the kind of infrastructure that gets built in a day, but I think it will surprise people by being the type of infrastructure that gets built in a year or in 18 months. And you start to see a lot more access soon. Yeah. Why is it slow? Is it because I understand with like Bitcoin, you know, you have this consensus of all these different developers. It takes a long time to get agreement. But at some point, it feels like the pace of acceleration in software needs to catch up. Are you feeling that at all? Yeah, it's definitely happening right now. I'll give you one little example.

1:29:54You own some public equity and you, once a quarter, get this thick booklet of paperwork from them that tells you all about their quarterly. This is a requirement. Like when you own a stock, you are getting that paper in the mail with their quarterly earnings. And so you've got to bring all of that infrastructure to interact with on-chain ownership. and there's these little pieces that all need to be solved well in order to bring all these assets on chain a lot of financial assets still involve paperwork and they just aren't situated for a digital world yet but i think we're all going to enjoy it when they are yeah yeah another way to think about it like bringing bringing um uh you know real estate on chain right it sounds like cool and futuristic, but then like for transactions, like somebody buying their own home, if somebody comes to them and says, hey, I can help you buy your home on chain and you'll save, you know, a couple thousand dollars on this part of the process, that's not a very, that's not a super compelling pitch.

1:30:59Whereas, you know, Sam over here, if you're saying like, hey, you're moving, you know, millions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars annually, you can save a very meaningful amount by adopting stables. It's just a very different kind of trade. I agree with that. And I think there's still homeownership records that are in some basement underneath the municipality's building. That's going to take years to digitize those files. So these are the kinds of things where you really got to think through the weeds of how you bring things on chain. I will say, if you're using the same technology every day, people get accustomed them to it much faster.

1:31:39I think that's likely to happen with the payment scenario where you're saving a couple of bucks on a daily transaction and it starts to feel like part of your life. It's something you can really rely on. Last question from the chat. Do you see prediction markets driving stable coin adoption?

1:31:56Easy one. What was that? What was that reaction? Yeah. Well, the truth is that as the on-chain world gets more active, it's a positive feedback loop. Because more people have wallets, more people have identities, and people get more comfortable with the UX. So there's sort of this general network effect, similar to what the internet had, where actually one more popular website begets the next popular website because you're accustomed to going into the search bar and Googling the next thing. And so, yes, I do. I do think that will draw or folks into stables. Yeah, but probably like less important than the genius act.

1:32:36But but still, like, you know, one link in the chain metaphorically. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the round. We'll talk to you soon. See you guys. Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have John Slotkin from Geisinger to revisit the story of the one billion dollar, one person startup. We're getting to the bottom of it. Let's see if he's here. I think he is. John, how are you doing? Good. How are you guys doing? And first of all, congratulations on everything. Great to see you again. Thank you. Yeah. Great to see you again. So, I mean, how did you process this story?

1:33:14Where do you think is good to start? Do you want to maybe set the table with sort of your, a little bit of your background and then some of the understanding of what the claims were made and then we can kind of go through them one at a time yeah sure sounds good so i'm a neurosurgeon i practice i'm also an investor over at scrub capital and i invest in digital health um quite a bit and i look when i saw this story yeah just like i think a lot of us i wanted this story to be true yeah um so we have an extraordinary reporter and a great venue and i think what happened is we ended up with a tech story when what we needed was a health story.

1:33:55So we needed different questions asked of different people to really go a layer deeper before we anointed this as this great example of where we should go. And look, I think part of it is we're all guilty of having wanted this to be exactly what it seemed to be. I think investors were guilty of it, writers, founders. And honestly, guys, probably patients too, because tech stories, they feel consumable, they feel easy. But look, revenue, when it's absent probably some of the needed regulatory context, that's where we need to go deeper. So that's where I came from at this. So yeah, I unpack that idea.

1:34:32Revenue, you know, free of the context or it needs more context because there are like several different pieces to that, the marketing claims, but also the margins, all these different things. Like what popped out to you first where you were like, oh, this seems maybe too good to be true? Yeah, so for me, the biggest thing about the article, and it's a great reporter, a decorated reporter, was what wasn't in the article. So six weeks before the article came out, FDA sent a warning letter to this company. Now, to be clear, they sent them to many, and that's fair. But those weren't featured and anointed in the New York Times, those other companies that received those letters.

1:35:15They are also, some of their supply chain partners named in the article are subject of a RICO lawsuit right now. There are multiple class action lawsuits. And look, some of those look like they're coming from these volume firms, to be fair. But to me, it's that one of those things alone may be one thing. And look, Maggie Harrison reported over a year ago, fake patients, fake testimonials, and AI-generated photos. she actually put out a piece this morning that was a great piece but that's so that's a year old so to me that constantly a repeating pattern in telemedicine of people saying like well real patients don't want their face on a website oh yeah i'll use a name or a fake picture but but then it just keeps coming up as again uh an issue also though as you saw there were fake doctors so there was Dr.

1:36:10Albus Dongledore. There was Dr. Tucker Carl Zinn spelled with a Z. That's another layer. And it's just that I'm saying, when that constellation comes together, I think there's now almost like a burden of, why are we telling this story in this way? And that's where I think we needed a lot more of, well, wait a second, is the medicine work that we're talking about. And I want to make a point here. The day before this article ran, the day before Lilly's Oral got approved, it was not terseptide. In fact, it wasn't a peptide. So it's often been said the last thing that the weatherman needs to do before going on air is look out the window.

1:36:57Well, so we have this company selling and others too, selling an oral version of the medication that has no biological plausibility of working. And to me, the best witness of that is that the day before, Lilly announced an entirely different medication, despite the fact that it would cause market confusion potentially. So you think there'll be, you're expecting there to be sort of issues with the actual product assortment that the company has been selling as well? Well, some of what they sell and others are products that work. And let's be clear, a lot of these work really well. But the problem when we sell ones that don't work is it sets those people back.

1:37:44It sets back their metabolic time. But also, if this administration, and I love that they're doing this, is being so pro-innovation in this regard, then we need to be particularly harsh when people are bringing things that are completely irrational and have zero evidence base and when i say that oral terzepatide has zero evidence base somebody email me if they find otherwise but lily is quoted as saying it's true there are zero no published studies on oral terzepatide in humans none okay and so when when that's that's the subject of the rico lawsuit so what we get into there is in order for there to be innovation we have to punish snake oil yeah and and we do want innovation in peptides how do you think about the uh uh like just the broader boom in peptide prescription telehealth because i i like i'm familiar with the warning letter process it's usually violation of like marketing languages but it can also be used for a variety of other sort of regulatory actions do you think that there needs to be like more clarification from the fda or is it pretty easy for the companies that you've talked to and interacted with to steer clear of fda warning letters in this particular category you've really nailed it um there and let me be clear i not only am I pro-development in this area.

1:39:21I myself have had peptides as part of my own health journey. That's been great for me over the last couple of years. And so let's start here. The demand is real. And part of what leads to this is the supply constraints are also real. So that's true. And these drugs, when done right, they're some of the most powerful agents we've ever seen. Look, I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but this is true. In a subset of people, and before everybody messages me i said a subset we have cured obesity in a subset of people and yes they need to continue on the medications but we all three of us live long enough to see that happen in some people and that's real yeah and so i'm thrilled that this administration is encouraging development here but that's why we need to police better so what do i what you you had pointed an important space a gap that's allowing this to occur and it's a little bit inside baseball but it's important yeah fda regulates substances and devices largely and as you know they cannot regulate the practice of medicine that's key only the states can so that's that's one of the spreads here that's leading to this daylight for operators like this to come in which is FDA approves, you know, subcutor's appetite.

1:40:44Great. Zep bound, Monjaro. Formulations. That gets into the practice of medicine and compounding. FDA is statuatorily forbidden from getting involved in the practice of medicine. So I'm looking to, over in HHS, between Abe and some of these other guys and Marty, There are some extremely smart people that I think we need to now think about. This is an issue of, yes, regulatory lag, but also regulatory gap between federal we get to control the substances, but states we control the practice of medicine. It's allowing too much daylight. That's interesting. What about the gap within the pharma companies themselves around e-commerce?

1:41:28It feels crazy to say, but like the pharma companies, Novo, Eli, they, Eli Lilly, they market a lot. They run Super Bowl ads and they somehow are getting beat on e-commerce or something. Or they just don't, it's not like, it's not like the average customer's journey starts at Eli Lilly.com. Right. And it could, I would imagine. Of course, there's this, you know, compounding loophole because of the supply constraints. But is there something else going on where they don't feel like because of their business relationships with other distributors and doctors and other networks that they can just be their own Amazon.com and just put their own website up and say, hey, look, no one else can buy it.

1:42:16Apple did this. They were a distributor. Right. Yeah, there's plenty of other companies that have said, like, we want to be the sole supplier of our product online. There's going to be fake sites that pop up, but our URL is the only destination where you can go to get the real thing. Everything else is fake. Instead, we've lived in this hybrid where there, I mean, even just among the two venture-backed telehealth companies, one's doing compounding, one appears to have a partnership, very different regulatory structures. That's a lot for consumers to wrap their minds around. I'm wondering, like, do you think that the actual formulators, the drug companies with the intellectual property should just be going deeper into e-commerce.

1:42:55Well, I think we caught them where there was their own internal friction and inertia, right? Where these venture-backed entities that can stand up and move quickly on mobile. And that was lead time here that they had. But I will tell you, and I hear this from a bunch of my patients, they have gotten better. So right now, for example, Lily, if you want to go cash pay, you get an order from your doctor. they send the prescription and i'm not associated with lily i'm sure we go if he has the same exact things i'm not picking those sides here but your doctor goes in and sends the prescription just like it's to a pharmacy you receive a text message the next day you click it you pay easy it shows up the next day at your house in a cooler so that is where they are now now they were way behind in getting that yeah but we also had a point and i'm sure you've heard friends where the lily price for Zetbound is getting pretty darn close to what the compoundings can charge.

1:43:55And the compoundings are starting to not be able to charge even less. But what we really need here, in my view, to make this work right, where we want to reward innovation and punish snake oil, is come up with a structural way. And it may need to be regulated because of this regulation gap, where the right thing to do is the easiest thing to do and the right thing to do is the profitable thing to do right now i don't think we're structured that way and it gets to this federal and state gap yeah amongst other reasons uh last question from my experience uh with the fda in the tobacco industry they would send warning letters but a big problem was that uh there were distributors uh abroad usually that would manufacture illegal unapproved vape devices, basically e-cigarettes, bring them in and then push them through a whole bunch of corner stores and gas stations.

1:44:51And the FDA just didn't really have the enforcement team to go store by store. Do you think that they will face a similar challenge in regulating peptides online? It feels like it can be done a little bit more behind a computer. You don't need as many people going door to door. So maybe they're more equipped for it. But I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on like what it actually takes to play the game of whack-a-mole here. I think Marty and team are the right team to think this through. Because there's this permissive lens above them that wasn't there in prior groups as to these medicines.

1:45:28So once there's a permissive lens, now you can get positively innovative instead of thinking like this all needs to happen in shadow. where Jordy walks up to me with it below a jacket and kind of like hands it to me. This needs to be done right. And look, FTC teaming up with FDA, that's going to be, I think, some of the power here because some of the enforcement we're seeing is already coming from FTC as to the way these things are marketed. But let's get clarity and start collecting evidence, folks. So if you say I'm giving this thing orally and I know it works, We'll write that up and share that news with the rest of us because right now we think we have no evidence that it does.

1:46:10Let's get there and let's realize these are extraordinarily powerful medications. And let's not let a couple of bad actors ruin what could be great progress for us. No, I think it's a great message. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Well said. Have a great rest of your day and great week. Great to see you. Talk to you soon. Have a good one. Up next, we have Liz Hoffman. She is Semaphore's business and finance editor and host of Compound Interest, a podcast from Semaphore Business. Powerful name. You will welcome Liz in to the TBP and Older Dome. She is not here yet.

1:46:46Scoops has some hope for everyone. They say the world's oldest known tortoise is still alive. Reports of death revealed. I heard about the death of the tortoise. I didn't realize it was a host. This was an April Fool's Day post. Oh, it was? Real, yeah. I thought it was real too. Very, very sad, but that's amazing news. How old is the world's oldest tortoise? Over 100, correct? Let's see. Okay. 193. Wow. That is amazing. So this is a chance. Fantastic news. There's a chance. We have to study this tortoise and implement it into our daily lives. Oh, we have Liz Hoffman here. We have Liz Hoffman. Let's bring her in.

1:47:26Liz, how are you doing?

1:47:28Liz Hoffman:Hey, guys. I'm good. How are you? Thank you so much. for joining. It's been a big couple of days for TVPN. It's been a huge couple of days. We logged off. I will say that. Listen, as you noted, we just launched a podcast. So I just appreciate the good exit comp. Yes. Yes. We're very excited. Tell us about the podcast. Where can they find it? What's the flow, the philosophy, the topics of conversation, the structure? Yeah. It's a weekly interview show. You can find it wherever you find all your podcasts, I started calling it a podcast and I was told, don't, it's a show because everything, as you guys know, is video now.

1:48:03Liz Hoffman:Or whatever the next platform is going to be. But no, these are conversations that we're having all the time as reporters where you're trying to squeeze five minutes and shake some information out of someone. But there's a really interesting seat that they're in that they can talk about. Maybe a company, but also just like why do big chunks of the economy work the way they do? And so we had the partner from Andreessen Horowitz, David Yulevich, who's kind of running their defense tech. I've just been obsessed with like, why is venture all of a sudden playing in big, heavy things to blow up? So that's been really fun.

1:48:32Liz Hoffman:Tomorrow's episode, we'll drop. It's the CEO of Aura talking about sort of the future of wearables and really why he's actually running towards really regulated health stuff, which is like sort of counterintuitive. So it's been a lot of fun. You guys look like you were having a lot of fun. So I decided to join you. Yeah, Aura is a monster of a business. Yeah, Aura, Whoop. Yeah, and I think a lot of people were skeptical about these companies. They were like, yeah, gadget, 100 mil revenue, maybe. And now they're like a billion in revenue or something like that. They're big businesses. But it's funny, to me, I've been covering business for a long time.

1:49:04Liz Hoffman:And this is about as wide open a space as I've ever seen. It's clear that something is going to win the intersection of AI hardware and wearables. But it's not at all obvious to me what it is. Yeah. Also, I mean, crazy to go after this while the Apple Watch already killed Pebble and like totally dominated and became, I think like tens of billions of dollars in revenue, just absolutely massive product. But then there's been all these different form factors that have snuck through with different value props. It's been good. Anyway, let's talk about the jobs report. The U.S. added 178 ,000 jobs in March, but weak wages and falling participation signal a softening in the labor market.

1:49:42Yeah, how do you even process a new jobs report? We were saying earlier on the show, I believe nothing, you know, every time there's a jobs report for the last 12 months it feels like we were hitting the gong. And then the revision comes out later and you have to retract the gong hit.

1:49:58Liz Hoffman:Obviously with the big asterisk that we will see what the revisions are. This was pretty good. It's come on the heels of a couple of bad ones. But I actually think that the way to think about the job market right now is that we've sort of been programmed to expect a certain number of jobs every month. And you have to think, well, why? And part of that is that we expect the economy to keep growing. But the input into growing economy in history has been people. And we're not growing the people, you know, mostly because of immigration and demographic shifts. You know, fewer babies started getting born about 15 or 20 years ago.

1:50:32Liz Hoffman:So we have fewer people coming in. And at the same time that AI has just totally scrambled what we need those people to be doing. I actually would like to see less focus on the monthly jobs report, but the market's just so addicted to it. So where would you focus? I mean, I think probably the unemployment rate, if you're trying to stay in the labor market land, that's probably a more helpful thing. And particularly the cohorts in it, right? Like, I think you are going to see youth unemployment that like, you know, 18 to 25 just skyrocket, mostly for AI-related reasons. I think, boy, that class of 2026, 2027, like, I do not know.

1:51:05Liz Hoffman:And then sort of like socioeconomic bans within that. But, you know, this is like maybe the first tech revolution in history that benefits blue-collar workers over white-collar workers. And so just the way we think about the economy and what we're looking for. You know, J-PAL in this last press conference said, you know, the labor market's in a balance. It's a pretty uncomfortable balance, but it is a balance. And I kind of compared the U.S. to a lifestyle business in like a dig that will land with your listeners. It's okay to not be growing as long as the supply and the demand of the things kind of balance out.

1:51:37Liz Hoffman:And that's sort of where we are, but it's not comfortable. Yeah. I was having this debate with Sagar and Jetty about, like, is AI holding up the economy or is healthcare holding up the economy? And I feel like AI is holding up, like, the market and the market caps. And it's the reason that the markets are up or down on a given day outside of the geopolitical stuff. But in healthcare, that's actually where we're adding jobs. Do you have more context on the health of the healthcare market, what those jobs are? can 18 to 24 year olds slot into the growing healthcare sector easily? Is that too complicated?

1:52:12Like what's going on there?

1:52:13Liz Hoffman:Yeah. Healthcare is messy because we're talking about a lot of different things and it's like 20 % of the economy. So it was both big and fuzzy. Um, it tends not to be a very reassuring indicator if you're talking about the job market, because it kind of tends to grow no matter what, um, sort of one of those just like blobs that just keeps getting bigger in part because we're getting older. And, um, you know, there's certain, the massive shortage of clinicians in certain places, but also this is one of those, healthcare is one of those sectors of the economy where the outcomes are really levered.

1:52:43Liz Hoffman:Little unclear whether it's going to replace radiologists reading scans, or if you think about, I don't know if you have any friends who are doctors, the amount of their day they spend doing just really drudge work, literally paperwork and checking the thing and making sure that this application is talking to that one, could be a total tailwind for that industry. So that's a big question mark for me. Yeah. How are you tracking the Iran war from a capital flow standpoint at all? I think a big question the tech and venture community has had. Obviously, the war is tragic first and foremost, but so much of the funding coming in to the technology industry over the last 10 years has been from the region.

1:53:33And I think a lot of people have questions around how durable that will be given how much instability there is in the region.

1:53:42Liz Hoffman:Yeah, I think if you're thinking about the Gulf as a big pot of money, which it has been for a lot of the startup scene and a lot of global investment markets for the last 10 or 15 years, I think that was already starting to change anyway. I remember 10 years ago covering the SoftBank Vision Fund and Uber, and there was a sense that the Gulf was frankly dumb money, that they were sort of the world's ATMs, and they were kind of looking for financial returns, kind of looking to get their name out there, and ultimately kind of did neither. and they've massively pulled back into, okay, yes, they are still willing to write checks for the Gulf.

1:54:16Liz Hoffman:You saw they're a big funder of the EA buyout. But they really want to see that money come back literally on the ground in Saudi Arabia, in the Emirates. And so the calculus of doing business in the Gulf I think had already been changing. I was there in December and I was talking to an executive at Mubadala who said very proudly, he was like, When Wall Street guys used to come here 20 years ago, they would end the meeting and say, and this is how much we want from you. And now they say, where can we partner? What can we do? How can we help you grow an export economy? So I think that was already starting to shift anyway.

1:54:51Liz Hoffman:And I think, look, this really does remind people that these really modernizing economies in the Gulf, they are a nice house in a rough neighborhood. Sure. Sure. How much have you dug into the dumb money and how it played out? Because one of the big rounds that I think Saudi Arabia did was Uber, and Uber has done very well. And yes, there's the WeWorks, and there's a smattering of failures. But if you were just broadly investing in America or tech over the last decade or two, I feel like you should have done well, even if you were just picking randomly. So did they do particularly worse than just random or do they actually feel that way?

1:55:37Liz Hoffman:It's a good question. They were so big in the, in the biggest pot of this, which was the SoftBank Vision Fund, which obviously did not go great, that they're sort of one hand tied behind their back on the investment side. But the answer is that if it was really working for them, they would be doing more of it. And in fact, they're not right. The public investment fund, the PIF has been tilting its portfolio back towards sort of domestic stuff. And by the way, like they need money, but what they really need, they have a lot of oil and we'll talk about, if you want, about where oil goes on all this.

1:56:05Liz Hoffman:But what they really need is a domestic economy and the know-how to build that. So like actually a great example is Lucid, right? I think they control Lucid and it is not an accident. Lucid is building a factory in Saudi Arabia, not because that's like the logical place to manufacture cars, but because Saudi Arabia wants it. Yeah. And that feels like a really big give for a motor company that will probably deliver most of those cars to America or Europe or somewhere far away. And so you have to pay the transit. But for data centers in particular, you know, inference takes time. I don't really care if my tokens come from across the world.

1:56:41I know that a number of companies have already been using data centers in different time zones because the American data centers are really busy during the day. And so during the day, if you can go and generate an image in Malaysia and then have it sent back, it's fine. So maybe that becomes more of the give. But again, big questions about like, is just having a bunch of data centers in the desert, like the backbone of a new economy? Or is it just like one step towards? I mean, it does.

1:57:06Liz Hoffman:It does nothing for employment, which like we're starting to learn here. But also I had a story the other day that the cost to insure an insurance policy on a single asset in the Gulf. Right now you can literally buy war and terrorism insurance. It's gone up 1900 percent in the last six weeks. So if you can't insure it, you can't build it. So you don't have to see that shake out. That's really brutal. What are you tracking on prediction markets? Have this been useful in actually understanding what's going on in the rest of the economy? Are you a fan of them as a data source? Like, do they help you in your day-to-day?

1:57:38Liz Hoffman:I think as a journalist, you're always looking for more inputs and aggregated intelligence is always a good one. As a social force, I don't love it. I think the long tail of nonsense is sucking up attention and, frankly, capital that could go to be doing more useful things. One thing that I am interested there is that I think it's going to replace huge portions of investing. Like if I'm an investor and I think that Coca-Cola is going to beat its earnings next week, it's going to do better than the market thinks. Right now my options are like, all right, I can go buy a call on Coca-Cola, short Pepsi, and hope that there's not like a weird weather thing at the bottling plant in Atlanta or whatever, right?

1:58:21Liz Hoffman:There's a lot of weird risks there. And actually, if you can just hit yes on that contract, it seems to me that a lot of investing is going to move that way. Interesting. And I think that's why New York Stock Exchange put$2 billion in a poly market. I think they think so too. Yeah, yeah. There is, as like democratized as like option trading has become, like it is still complicated to understand like exactly how you should even express something as simple as like, I think the war will end quickly or I think Coca-Cola will beat earnings. There's a lot of different ways to actually build that option strategy.

1:58:54People obviously sometimes really enjoy that aspect of the intellectual pursuit of making the right trade, but it can be it can be hairy sometimes.

1:59:03Liz Hoffman:But I'm sure someone like made and lost money on the desert on the tortoise that you guys were talking about on the way in. Right. Maybe. But actually a human went outside. I think it was like the governor of the island, wherever it is, went outside. He just found the tortoise. I think it's fascinating that suddenly everyone, you know, these mentioned markets seem to be some of the biggest distractions. It's hard to make the case for why the information is important or necessary. And I think if people want to trade it, that's fine. But I think it's generally, you know, we saw something yesterday.

1:59:37Trump had a pretty odd post saying, you know, praise. I think he said praise be Allah. And it seemed very out of place. And so people assumed like, hey, maybe that is because it had somebody either in the ad. Who knows how that could have happened? It's all the draft or something. But yeah, somebody out there thought maybe benefited from that. And the problem is like it just creates this big question with like everything that people say in the world in certain settings.

2:00:12Liz Hoffman:Yeah, I don't love it. Well, I'm sure you'll be able to unpack it more. Well, please say Bitcoin. Unpack it more. Please say Bitcoin right now before you leave. I'm sure you don't have plenty of time to unpack it over the new show. So Compound Interest, is the show launched yet or it is about to launch? Yeah. We're in week six. Oh, amazing. Congratulations. Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. And congrats on the new show. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Yeah, great to meet you, Liz. Bye. Up next, we have Brad Taylor from Sierra. Sierra just launched Ghostwriter, an agent for building customer experience agents through conversation.

2:00:48Let's bring in Brad Taylor. Second or third time on the show. Welcome back. How are you doing? Third time. Thanks for having me back. Appreciate it. Great to see you. Well, kick us off. Give us the state of the union on Sierra. How is it going? What's the traction been like? What's the progress? Sierra's going amazing. We grew to$100 million in ARR in seven quarters,$158. We're in the middle of our ninth.

2:01:15Hopefully we get multiple dogs this show. We're working with 40 % of the Fortune 50 now. Brands like Singtel, Sky, Nordstrom, Prudential. But most importantly, we're just really focused on helping people get successful quickly. One of my favorite stories is Nordstrom went live in four weeks with their voice agent. Ran from 1 % to 100 % in one week. and our whole philosophy is the solution to every problem in AI is more AI. And so we're really trying to kind of orient the whole company around that. That's where Ghostwriter comes in. I'm happy to talk about it, but it's probably what I think the product I'm most proud of that we've developed at Ciro so far.

2:01:53It really kind of just reimagines the whole platform around AI in a way I'm really excited about. Well, first, I maybe want to go back in time a little bit, because you said Nordstrom's was a success case at a four-week implementation. That sounds like a success for implementing any piece of software, really. Especially something that's customer-facing. Anything takes time. But when you started the company with your first clients, how much longer was it? What made it take longer then, and then why is it getting faster? Yeah, actually, it's a good segue into Ghost Rider, too. I mean, first, our first design partners, we were building the airplane as it was taking off.

2:02:32Yeah, of course. What took long is we had to make the product. And, you know, we had some early design partners like SiriusXM and Sonos that were amazing, just very patient with us. And I think it benefited from being now very early to this market. But after the product really existed, it was, you're just really figuring out what does it mean to make an agent? You know, it used to be, if you talked to a chatbot three years ago, I call it BC, before Codex or before CLAW. You know, these things were robotic and rules-based. How you actually model a customer experience, not as rules, but as goals and guardrails.

2:03:03you really want these agents to be human-like. And to be human-like, you can't have them be reading a script, right? But that's a really different way of thinking about software. When you built a website before, you knew every button that someone could click. And now you have this kind of free-form conversational interface. And you're almost putting guardrails around it rather than drawing a path through your customer experience. So it's going to sound funny and almost technical, but we had to design the right abstractions for our customers to actually build their customer experience. And actually, just to take it to Ghostwriter, this new product, we think the era of the web app is kind of over.

2:03:38If you think about what is a web app in the context of enterprise software, we made these databases, these systems of record in the 80s and 90s. And then as the web browser came out, we said, okay, we're going to give you some forms and fields in a web browser to manipulate those systems of record. Now we think in the future, most people are just going to be talking to AI agents and it's going to be performing those actions on your behalf. And we were thinking after December when all of us got pretty AI-pilled with Codex and Claude improving so dramatically. That's when you got AI-pilled?

2:04:11They were just toys. Honestly, talk to any software. That was a very, like, we're just joking around. There was a lot of people that, like, went on winter break and they were like, wow, this actually seems pretty, like, it's going to be a pretty big deal. Well, that's why it does feel like BC, like before Codex. Like December was this point, like there's a before and an after. So we came back to the office after the holidays and we're just, our minds are blown because we're all software engineers, right? We're like, man, if it can do this with code, why are we clicking around forms and fields in a web browser still?

2:04:46And we're like, if we were to start over today, our product, you would be using Sierra like you use Codex. And so that's what Ghostwriter is. It's an agent for building agents. You can just talk to it. You could say, hey, I want a customer service agent that enables people to do a warranty claim. You know what? Make it a little more empathetic. You know what? Let's update our policy from 30 days to 45 days over the month of December so our return window extends past New Year's. You can just talk to it, and it will actually perform all of this on your behalf. So the cool part about it is you have this evolution of how do you build agents, and now we've made it accessible to everybody.

2:05:21And just like I think you probably all, I know so many people who aren't technical have built their first apps with Codex now that it's so accessible. Our view is that anyone in the world can use our platform now to make these incredibly sophisticated agents. Can we bring that four weeks down to four days? And I think that's really the value here. And I think it's exciting just because the era of signing into a web app and filling out forms and clicking the submit button, I think it's sort of a thing of the past. Did you, like, how, at what level of abstraction are, like, the CEOs of Fortune 50 companies operating right now?

2:05:56Because when I hear, like, okay, we made an agent that creates agents. I'm still seeing a text box. And I know a lot of CEOs that are like, I don't do text boxes. I do meetings and I do conversations. And maybe I will literally text my guy who does that for me. But what is the flow? Is there a head of AI at these companies now that's implementing this and they're doing this? Or are they calling you and saying, hey, it's great you built Ghostwriter. I would like you to use Ghostwriter to do what I want. Well, I'll give you the whole spectrum because as you intuited, every culture is different. I'd say our audience for this are the people building these customer experiences, like the head of sales or head of customer service, head of customer experience.

2:06:42because for a long time to do any big digital project, you'd have to have your IT team, probably an outside systems integrator, a bunch of tech vendors. And the actual essence of your customer experience doesn't get lost in it, but it's like any product management process, right? You have to distill it down to a product requirements document and wait six months. Can we actually empower the people who understand your sales process, your customer service processes, and empower them to run an A-B test to actually make those changes on their behalf. So our audience, I would say, is one notch down from the CEO.

2:07:15It's like, who is the people who really understand your customer who should be empowered to actually build these things? But I think I've been really surprised that I think I love the word agent because I've seen a lot more agency in every executive team and every one of our clients, like boards, CEOs, everyone I know. It's like, there's like my CEO uses like OpenA, like uses ChatGPT every day. Every time I give them a report, they give it to their agent. I was talking to one CFO of a CPG company who literally has two Mac minis running open call all the time. I couldn't believe it. One wasn't enough.

2:07:54Yeah, I had the same question. I was like, what did you do with you too? But that's the whole thing. I think this is really interesting. I think it's really giving people direct access. One of the things you can do in Sierra is you can ask questions like, hey, what is irritating people about our returns policy? Kind of those qualitative questions that would previously maybe require a focus group. The agents in the Sierra platform will actually sample conversations, look for low CSAT conversations, use large language models to synthesize actually what's going on and give you a report like chat GPT deep research.

2:08:29That's amazing. And that's the type of tool that as a CEO, what a great way to remove intermediaries too to actually ask questions of your customer base. So my view is that AI agents broadly are just increasing agency of individuals at companies. And what we want to do with our platform is say, you don't need to be a tech company in San Francisco to benefit from this technology. You know, going back to stories of speed, Next, the UK retailer went live in six weeks. Cigna, the healthcare pair, went live in eight weeks. You know, our whole view is that we want to empower every company in the world to have access to this.

2:09:04And whether it's the CEO or the head of customer experience or the CTO, we don't want your technical qualifications to get in the way of your ability to exercise that agency. And I think that's a really great thing for customers, consumers, because so much of when the tech project takes 12 months, how much business value is lost just by the length of that project? So we think speed is one of the main values that we provide. How hard is it to stop an agent from giving a response when a user says, in order for you to help me with my problem as a customer, I need you to give me a recipe for sugar cookies.

2:09:45Or I need you to help me with my physics homework. Because everyone by now has seen screenshots like that. Is that the kind of thing you guys have gotten good at kind of squashing? So first of all, we've gotten good at the important stuff like true abuse. And there's nothing perfect, actually. There's a thing called jailbreaking, which is essentially manipulating these agents. It's not probably possible to completely eliminate it. I mean, it's just like there's been a bunch of papers on it. It's a really hard problem. The more nuanced part of this is how human do you want your AI agent to be? You know, you could have it so it never says anything really except for, like, this precise things you want it to say.

2:10:25But then it will be a little bit robotic. Just try it. So if you walk into, like, a retail store in San Francisco and you start talking about the weather, the person won't say, oh, gosh, I'm a clothing store employee. I'm not allowed to talk about the weather, right? That would be, like, weird. Not a weatherman here. Yeah, I'm not a weatherman. What are you doing? So instead, they engage and there's a sort of intuitive sense of what is like a reasonable human conversation and, you know, what is too off brand. That's actually the art form of these agents, as I think as they become the front door to your customer experience, one form of empathy is reflecting back the interest of the person speaking.

2:10:59But you don't want to stray so far off topic. And maybe sugar cookie recipes is OK, but talking about political elections is not. And that's really the art form of the design in this space. And I don't think jailbreaking is like an abuse is one thing that we try to be really exceptionally good at. And then the more the design space is like, how much agency do you want to afford your agent? And my sense is there will be bolder brands who actually are willing to take a bit more risk here and get some of the benefits of the humanity, the empathy that come with it. For good reason, there'll be companies in more regulated industries that narrow those guardrails in narrow ways.

2:11:36But my sense is we'll have different societal expectations of these things in four years than we do now Just as it becomes prevalent in the way we engage with different companies around the world Yeah, so I mean from a tech perspective like if I'm a company using Sierra How am I actually deciding that the width of those guardrails because? There's totally a world where I have a 30-day return policy But if my best customer shows up at 31 days I want my customer support person and bend the rules in that case I could probably write an algorithm that would encode a lot of my specific philosophy. Am I writing prompts?

2:12:14Am I writing like an MD file for this now? Like how am I actually like setting the rules of the road if I do want somewhat of a fuzzy response curve? Yeah. So this is what we enable on our platform. And under the hood, you can think of it as modeling these conversations as goals and guardrails rather than rules. And so you can put guardrails that are qualitative, like the person's really upset. You can also put goals that are quantitative, like they're a member of our loyalty program. And so it's pretty easy to model. The neat thing about Ghostwriter is, you know, it used to be ancient history two weeks ago.

2:12:50You had to learn, you know, how to use our product to model it. Now you can actually, you could just say what you just said. In fact, you could take a recording of what you just said and upload the audio file and Ghostwriter would make it the agent for you. You know, it's like that flexible. And so, you know, we're trying to, we've created a bunch of abstractions for companies to build these agents we're really proud of. And now I think we've just lowered the bar for people using it. And, you know, just given our traction with some of the largest companies in the world, I hope that it will just accelerate our momentum going into the middle of the year.

2:13:22How do you think agents are changing enterprise sales? Are they valuable to Sierra at all? Do they move the needle? you know I'm curious what role you think they play in like a truly elite enterprise GTM I think it's huge we have a whole team dedicated to this I don't want to pretend we figured it out but when I think about true enterprise sales like I'll say high touch you know fortune 100 type enterprise sales you're really trying to have your best practices consistent across your client base you know if you have a and what's so hard is before you used to just have to train people. There's this, you know this because you know sales.

2:14:06There's like, it's enablement. How do you actually train people with new best practices, new products? I think one of the most exciting parts of agents in the context of go-to-market now is AI agents can assist your frontline sellers or, you know, co-sales team to actually understand those best practices, understand products. Let's just take responding to an RFP, as an example. It's something that used to probably a lot of inconsistency in how you answered those questions, and now you're going to have AI agents assist a lot of that. And what's exciting about that is I think many of the best sellers are really great listeners.

2:14:40They're there to understand your customers' problems deeply. And that doesn't necessarily correspond with understanding agent architectures, like something you have to describe in our world. Can you have these AI agents actually assist it so you can end up with the world's best sellers sort of equipped with like an Iron Man suit of enablement and knowledge to help them do that. And the other thing I think about is just, you know, we're trying to scale faster than any enterprise software company in history. And so far, we're doing a pretty good job of that. But for Clay and me, you know, our big fear is like, as you expand to Japan, we just did an acquisition there.

2:15:15You expand to Southeast Asia, you expand Australia. Well, you end up with these little, you know, Galapagos Islands versions of your company that aren't quite the same. And so can you use agents to make things more consistent as well? So, you know, if we're talking a year from now, I'd like to say like our agents made us like scale our company consistently globally and have kind of that consistency high level of service our clients expect of us. And that's something that would just be a ton more effort with a lot more inconsistency without AI agents. So I think it's huge in enterprise sales. Tell us about the company you bought in Japan.

2:15:51We inquired a company called Opera, 11 people. They self-describe we're creating the Sierra of Japan. I was going to ask. It's a life hack right there. That actually seems like a smart strategy is like find the leading AI companies in America and then build that company for your region. That was genius. They're amazing founders. We said rather than the Sierra of Japan, why not just take out the of and just be Sierra Japan? And they're amazing. And they're like young and hungry and understand AI. And I'm really excited just because we have a lot of, we really believe in the value of humility here.

2:16:29And it's like entering a market like Japan, it's very hard for Western companies to succeed there. And you have this group of 11 people who are not only great entrepreneurs, who I just have an innate respect for all entrepreneurs, but understand the market, had been in the market with some regulated clients. And now they have, you know, sort of the full power of Sierra behind them. So I'm excited for it. I don't know a ton of precedent for doing a technical acquisition to enter a market. We're really excited for it. And I hope I can come back here in six months and tell you it's a wild success.

2:17:01But I'm really excited for it. Well, what's the smallest company that you'll work with? It feels like the headline goal is enterprise, the Fortune 50. But is this going to be a one-click and I'm not even talking to someone sort of self-serve at the very low end eventually? You know, maybe I would say we tend to serve, we serve both mid-market and enterprise, so we're not opposed to smaller firms. And I would say we really care about high-growth companies, so it's important to us to serve high-growth tech, high-growth retail. If you're a startup, we really want SEER to be your first phone call.

2:17:37So we're trying to make it as easy as possible. We're not necessarily going to go into self-serve, not because the technology won't enable it, but to some degree our business model is helping people transform. One of our med tech clients has 40 call centers, and they need to consolidate into one and deploy AI at the first time. And you all, this is not your first rodeo, technology is like one-fifteenth of that problem. It's like we actually come in and we can actually help you say, hey, here's actually the order of operations so you can realize the value quickly. Here's how you can help with the change management.

2:18:13All that stuff can feel boring to a technologist, but if you're actually a company who's reading the headlines about Claude Code and Codex and being like, man, I have 100 ,000 people and 40 business units. How do I get this? We want Sierra to be the answer to that question. And I think as a consequence, you're building a company designed to help with that kind of question. You just create a different shape of company. And so we're really trying to serve the enterprise. And it doesn't mean size. It sort of means, you know, do you want a partner rather than a vendor? And that's how we think about it.

2:18:46Well, thank you for serving the enterprise. Thank you for your service generally. It's so important. Have a great rest of your day. Do you have another minute? Yeah. I just wanted to, what are, when you meet a CEO, how quickly can you clock whether they have an elite enterprise GTM motion? And what are the indicators that you look for? uh yes i i think i can and just because i've partly you want to know why because i just stunk at it when i created my first b2b company i transitioned from being at facebook to starting quip but i had never sold software before i'd only sold ad supported software and so you know when you went through the really awkward transition of sucking at something and learning it the hard way, you learn to pattern match on the old version of yourself.

2:19:41And, you know, my main indicator is, does that CEO spend time with their own customers? So many, like, I would say product and tech founders outsource sales in the way you outsource things you don't care about. And I think it's almost impossible to start an enterprise software company and not personally spend time with your clients. And it's probably the main leading indicator of someone who hasn't figured it out. I'm hearing golf handicap and stakes. Not quite. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot more to it. I spend time with my customers. 36 holes a day. No, of course, there's much to it. You were at Shop Talk.

2:20:21You were out in Vegas. That's a serious conference. It makes a lot of sense that you were out there personally. It's a trip. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming out. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Talk soon. Goodbye. Up next, Gray Matter Robotics. We have the CEO and co-founder joining, bringing physical AI into U.S. shipbuilding, scaling autonomous production for national security. We need this more than ever. And I'll let you introduce yourself. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me, John. Thanks for having me, Jordy. Of course. Arien Kabir, co-founder and CEO of Gravator Robotics.

2:20:55By the way, we're actually neighbors. We'd love to give you a tour. Actually, we should have done this today at our facility with the robots in the background. We neighbors in Hollywood neighbors in Los Angeles neighbors in California How precise are we because we're going right behind us and I haven't seen you on the campus But yeah, why don't you kick us off with a little bit of backstory how you got into the industry how you identified the problem and then what you're building now Yeah, as you as you know as as you both of you just kicked it off that you know We're living in a moment where it's more than critical, more important than ever to accelerate the production, accelerate the capacity building for our industrial base, especially in shipbuilding, right?

2:21:36U.S. makes most of the advanced naval vessels in the world, aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, you name it. And we have more than 5 million man-hour short in shipbuilding in the U.S. Between World War II until now, the amount of ships U.S. has built, China has built more than that in the last 12 months, right? And we are actually today at a milestone moment in the history for shipbuilding, in the history of national security, and our U.S. Navy. We are launching a partnership. Today we are announcing this partnership with Huntington Ingalls Industries, HII. Yeah, they're huge. And together we are bringing factory superintelligence to shipbuilding.

2:22:14Okay. What does the partnership entail? And maybe just to zoom out, Huntington Ingalls, they literally make the aircraft carriers, right? They make the exquisite systems. They ship build at the biggest scales, correct? That is correct. They make all the large aircraft carriers, large submarines, and some of the most advanced vessels. Also, they're launching some of the latest and greatest unmanned vessels for the U.S. Navy. Is there a Shaheed drone of ships that America should be copying? We just read a story. It's called a jet ski, John. Is it a jet ski? I don't know. It's actually what, I mean, they have.

2:22:48I've seen a few of these demos, but I've heard about the Shaheed drone for years, and then it became very important with this latest conflict. And then apparently with that, what was it called, Lucas drone that America built very quickly, it feels like that was copied. Is there some sort of next-gen autonomous surface vessel that you think is coming down the pipe in a major way? We're seeing that. We're seeing that from Andrew. We're seeing that from Lockheed. We're seeing some of that also from Saronic, right? Let it be the existing primes as well as the new primes. They're bringing low-cost, sometimes even dispensable, unmet vessels.

2:23:23Let it be, you know, over-surface or sub-surface. Yeah. So what does the partnership actually look like? I mean, Huntington Ingalls is a huge organization. Like, how are you plugging in? What organizations are you working with? How do you actually… How many rounds of golf does it take to land a partnership like this? Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero rounds of golf. Because we're dealing with such a narrative… we're dealing with such a such a big national security issue we don't have time to play golf we have to go build this autonomous robots that can start building all these autonomous vessels yeah so at grimmel robotics at the floor you know you asked me uh jordy at the beginning like john how did we get into it right yeah so my co-founders and myself we started grimmel robotics about six years ago and when we started at that time anyone doing robotics and ai was doing one of the two things either cell driving cars or pick back and shape our assembly in logistics sure no one was paying attention to this massive need in manufacturing all of our factories vast 90 % of them are done manually by people by hand every single operation yeah and we have this growing demand for physical goods and we have this growing shortage of skilled people skilled trades people in manufacturing especially in ship building and we have to do something to bridge that gap between demand and capacity.

2:24:45And robotics is one thing, but what truly started to change the picture is that when we started bringing in physical AI, marrying it with robotics, but then we also had to start thinking about beyond robotics. If you look at a factory operation, there are manufacturing processes like sanding, grinding, painting, coating, blasting, you name it. A lot of manual labor goes into it. But beyond that, there are a lot of other engineering activities, a lot of industrial engineering, process engineering, material science, a lot of sustainment operations, MRO, you name it. If you don't bring AI and autonomy across the full end-to-end picture, if you don't start bringing AI agents in each layer of engineering, we're not going to unlock our factories.

2:25:27So that's our mission at Grim at Robotics, connecting it all by bringing domain agents and factory superintelligence. Yeah, how agent-ready are manufacturing systems? Do they have APIs? Are there CLIs? I imagine that they don't have MCP. Like, give me an example of like, there's one machine that makes a part that goes on the, you know, the aircraft carrier. Like, how is the agent interacting with that? What is it doing? Right. If you look at a manufacturing operation, it's a sequence of different processes. Sure. In each process, you take a tool, you make some value added change to an object using a tool.

2:26:06Yeah. welding the parts together, welding the weld, blasting the surface, coating the surface, a lot of inspection. So we deliver autonomous robot cells that are capable of working on a six-axis robot arm. Is that what I'm visualizing? Yeah, we work with, you know, we're agnostic to hardware. We embody our physical AI into different form factors. Okay. Maybe industrial robots sitting on the floor or industrial robots on a rail on a mobile base that can work, you know, move around a submarine and work on these very large structures. We work with anything from as small as a military helmet to a fire truck to fighter jets to a submarine component.

2:26:47You name it. So we are agnostic to shapes and sizes of robots. Interesting. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down. Yeah, great to meet you. And amazing job navigating my soundboard. I was throwing a lot at you I want to learn more about Huntington Ingalls at some point it's such a fascinating company congratulations on the deal with them thank you this is a big moment for national security and US Navy have a great rest of your day great to meet you up next we have Atif Siddiqui from Branch he's the founder and CEO he's in the waiting room let's bring him in Atif, how are you doing?

2:27:25what's going on? doing well, how are you guys? We're great. Thanks so much for taking the time to join the show. Since this is the first time on the show, would you mind giving us a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company? Absolutely. Yeah, Tiff, founder, CEO. Ranch is the leading workforce financial infrastructure that delivers faster, more flexible options for people to get paid. So we focus on the majority of the American economy that works in an hourly job, gig job, tip job. So it could be gig workers, nurses, restaurant workers getting their tips instantly. And I think really companies are turning to branch because they know faster payments can help them strengthen work loyalty, saving time and money.

2:28:09I was actually tuning in earlier. I heard your convo with the Better Money guys around the Uber driver payouts. That's us. Wait, oh, no way. companies yeah we work with companies like uber instacart that's amazing that's perfect uh quick question what is the screw award or the spring award behind you what is that this one right here it looks like a spring like a giant spring 2020 webby award winner that's a webby did you win that for branch for a branch yeah in 2020 no one that's amazing yeah webby is deeply underrated um anyway uh give us the give us a a tour of the business currently i mean if you're working with uber obviously big company but uh how how can i think about the shape of the business are you in person multiple offices uh scale fundraising just get me up to speed on the on the scale of your operation yeah uh we're we're distributed uh we have a couple offices uh sales office one in tampa but uh distributed workforce about 230 employees raised over a million dollars of equity and yeah it's uh it's been we're off to the races now uh you know i think um you know one area where we've been really leaning into as of late is just the embedded finance offerings and that's kind of the news today right so is that is that embedding into another b2b company that is acting as like the the the master payroll provider for an organization That's right.

2:29:41Yeah. So think platforms. Sure. Right. It could be a vertical SaaS where they touch our end users around, you know, these gig or hourly workforces where we can live right there and make it really frictionless for those end users. Yeah. I've had a few like HR platforms where I've had like a few employees on hourly and they've sort of added like, oh, if you want to add this plugin or add on, I could, and I don't know if we were using Branch back then. This was years ago, but yeah, it makes a lot of sense that that would need to seep through the rest of the HR, HRIS software suites across the pros and cons and building in an important, but let's say less hyped category than stable coins and something like AI.

2:30:26Like, do you feel like you have to perform even more than you would? Because like, if you want to get the attention of the capital markets, you really need to prove that you're, you know, basically have to prove everything in the numbers. That's right. Yeah, I think, you know, oftentimes a lot of this is just education and how big the problem is. Right. Especially when it comes to like attracting and retaining talent. I don't think a lot of people know how fast these workers churn. So anything you can do to kind of slow down that churn is huge impact to the bottom line of these companies. We've seen companies retain using a service like branch is retaining users 60 % longer than it normally would.

2:31:10So if you think about everything that goes into getting a new worker on, onboarding them, that's a huge cost. What are the key features that result in lower churn, higher retention? yeah i think a lot of it has to do with this idea of just really improving workers cash flow at the end of the day right so if you look at the industries we work in um especially uh as of late more of these 1099 industries cash flow is huge for them right it's the difference between uh them going out and using that to go earn more money right uber drivers putting gas in their car to go out there and drive yeah so if there's two if there's two competing platforms where someone could go to work, one's going to pay them every two weeks, one's going to pay them every single day, they were more likely to go and stick around or stay or choose the one that's paying them on a daily basis, essentially.

2:31:59Yeah, absolutely. And it's becoming table stakes, right? I think a lot of this was driven by like gig economy, the Ubers of the world. We're seeing this now across W2 workforces as well, right? Traditional industries there. You mentioned the 1099 trend or can you get me up to speed? I remember what, five years ago, there was debate over how Uber drivers were going to be paid, whether they were contractors or not. Like what do you mean when you talk about like a 1099 workforce? Like what are some examples of that? Yeah, I think there's a, you know, I think a lot of the headlines focus around sort of ride sharing and the Ubers of the world.

2:32:38But like we're seeing 1099 workforces rise, even industries like health care. Right. We work with some of the largest nurse marketplaces out there where nurses are turning to these platforms to supplement their income, pick up additional shifts on their off hours. Right. The other big trend we see is the rise of like the solopreneur. Right. You're an individual that wants to start their own business. And like, what are the tools and out there that really help you grow? Yeah, which brings me to my other thing. You know, one thing we announced, too, is that last week we announced that Stripe will be embedded into their Connect platform, right?

2:33:17So now if you're a marketplace or platform in Stripe, you can get up and running with a digital wallet, a debit card instantly from the Stripe system. Okay, so yeah, give me an example of a customer or company that would wind up using Branch through Stripe. Yeah. Let's say, I mean, obviously the marketplace example makes sense of the Uber's over. I'll give you maybe like a mind body, right? There's a lot of, they service a lot of like salons. Oftentimes they're independent contractors working for these salons and they want to get them paid faster. Right. So they can kind of now offer this as a branded solution to their independent contractors.

2:34:01And so if I'm in this hair salon example, I imagine that I have some sort of like general W-2 focused payroll system set up for like the corporate employees. But is there an advantage to having the money sort of stay within the Stripe ecosystem and then get 1099 to the contractors that I'm paying because I don't have to move the money around or something like, is that it? Yeah, that's it. I mean, in addition to just like minimal API lift, right? The other is like no pre-funding. Like Stripe has the money. And so we can move that money right there. So it's not like you're having to come up with a capital, pre-fund it, send in an Astro account, and use that organ cap.

2:34:41Okay. So in this example, like a customer comes in, they pay, it's processed on Stripe rails. And so the money's right there. So it's much easier to move directly into the bank account of the of the worker who provided the service all in the same day So we're just sort of squeezing days out of the working capital budget as much as possible That's right. And I think for the work themselves, right? It becomes like a financial hub for them, right? As a solopreneur, you're starting out We've offered, you know, in addition to just like fee-free banking and there's like cashback rewards that are very relevant Yeah, the workplace expenses.

2:35:15I mean Uber drivers are getting up to like 10 % cashback on gas in certain cases, which is which is huge Yeah. Is a big piece of, basically, are you seeing any acceleration in like form filling and regulatory filings alongside 1099s and the workers actually onboarding? Is that like a point of friction or something that you've been working on like improving? That's right. Yeah. You know, the other announcement we had was that we did end-to-end tax filing capabilities for 1099 workers, right? So in addition to, like, faster payments, I think another critical infrastructure needed is, like, collecting W-9s, IRS verifications, earnings trackings, right?

2:35:55Just all in a seamless experience. Well, congratulations on the progress. Great to meet. And thanks so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Yeah, great to finally meet. Yeah, thanks, guys. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. You too. Goodbye.

2:36:09we have some more stories that we will go through tomorrow uh is there anything that you want to close with jordy uh hopefully we need to get trini's analyst it's a long post great uh we're also going to try and get someone from satrini on the show to break it down because uh it is it is a crazy story and i don't think we can do it justice with just uh you know a few random posts 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 16Z says Hunter S. Citrini number three.

2:36:51Last post from Francis. He says, I think the next LinkedIn post I read about the TVPN acquisition might finally reveal the future of media. Just need to find one more. That's true. there was one more post that was good there were so many good posts it was a lot of fun uh and uh nate you with uh with with an absolute banger and a place that we will end it he says hear me out tbpn for sports there very well could be something here and i liked it and i got screenshotted because it's official uh 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.

2:37:34It 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... TBPN, the only place you can get technology coverage and... Buzz ball coverage. Hard-hitting buzz ball analysis. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I sign up for the newsletter at tbpn.com and we'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Goodbye. Love you.