Calley Means, Delian Asparouhov, Leif Abraham & Jannick Malling, Alfred Wahlforss & Florian Juengermann, Saman Farid, Erik Palitsch, Netflix's Growth Plans Post Earnings, AMD's Plan to Beat NVIDIA

28:42Anyway, what is on your mind? I'm sure you're thinking about Hill and Valley. I want to pull up the... Wait, first, I have a question. You said you're doing a lot less Zoom since moving to LA. Is that just a lot? You're just meeting with the Varda team in person or is it founder meetings as well? Are you taking more meetings in person now that you're Gundo adjacent? Oh, God. Let's not use that word. It's a dirty word. I am El Segundo. not adjacent within. I'm currently, you know, located within those city boundaries. I think it's honestly, it's basically everything, like everything from the portfolio companies to, you know, FF meetings, you know, to VARTA meetings.

29:22And it's one of these things that it kind of feels like recursive where it's like, when you have less Zooms, then when somebody like, I had this like VC asking me for a Zoom this week, and I was like, cool, you're an SF, just let me know next time you're LA. Like, if it's so important, just like take a five minute flight. And they're like, I don't have any plans to be in LA anytime soon. I was like, cool. Then I don't have any plans to talk to you. Mogged. It's ridiculous. Well, we appreciate you joining this Zoom and this show. You guys are worth it. Yeah, thank you. We appreciate it. Let's run through Hill and Valley over a few short years.

29:56We've made it into the preeminent forum for the top technology leaders and elected officials to gather. you barely scrapped together a single notable name, but somehow Jensen Wong, Alex Carve, you got a ton of people here. Maybe walk me through, you know, who you're excited about. Give me a little bit of history. And then I want to talk through some of what message tech is trying to send to DC these days. Yeah, I mean, the history of Hill and Valleys, it started off with like an intention of being like a 30, 40 person dinner that like ballooned up into a hundred. And like the first one, I think, had like 12, 13 elected officials.

30:33And then it just like kept gaining steam from there. We're just like the, you know, sort of dinner got bigger. And then eventually the dinner was so big, they were like, man, we've got a lot of really great people here and we're doing a private dinner. I think like the public would be very interested in like, you know, some of these people and conversations happening, you know, in the public sphere, too. So we expanded to like including like a, you know, more public daytime forum. And then that just sort of gained momentum. And this year, it's like I just in some ways I can't imagine how much of a better lineup one could have.

31:00I think like the sort of main message is like, look, you know, if we like go back in time to like 2018, you had everything from like Google bailing on the Maven project, like VC saying that like, you know, investing in weapons was just as bad as investing in like porn and gambling. And so there was just so much hesitation and there was like a real rift, I feel like, between Silicon Valley and, you know, Washington, D.C. that is kind of counterintuitive. of like, if you look at the Obama era, like part of why Obama 108 2012 was like a deep integration with Silicon Valley and tech. And it was like the first social media, you know, sort of driven campaign.

31:31But it felt like, you know, partially in Trump era, there was just like this huge rift because like Silicon Valley was so left, Trump was seen as so radical, like people didn't want to work together. And so honestly, a part of the message is like, look, we're all on the same team and we're working together to make the United States better. And so one of my favorite examples of this is I'm moderating a panel that's with Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, um kevin wheel who's the chief product officer of open ai and then reith peratt who's the chief investment officer and president of alphabet um and look like in theory alphabet and open ai are like hugely competitive on the flip side like open ai has the best you know sort of consumer application in ai that's ever existed and alphabet was just awarded a noble prize last year for alpha fold you know predicting protein you know sort of folding and like the you know protein structures based off amino acid sequences and so the like goal of that panel would be like look Like, yes, these companies are competing, but also we're all way better off if these companies can build as many fucking data centers and have as cheap of energy as possible so that, like, you know, we don't have, you know, DeepSeek becoming the, like, default open source model that the rest of the world uses that can't afford the, like, you know, you know, chat GPT and can't afford, you know, sort of AlphaFold.

32:40And there's a lot of soft power that comes from that. Like, do you want the thing that, like, the random person in Bulgaria is using as their AI to be willing to talk about Tiananmen Square or not? I prefer the version where it can talk about, you know, sort of team in square. And the best way that we do that is make sure that we are the best at AI, have the best energy. And the best way of doing that is like tech needs to collaborate with DC and Secretary Interior Burgum needs to unleash a wave of, you know, you know, streamline permitting and, you know, nuclear energy, you know, in the United States.

33:09And what better place to talk about that than literally in the Capitol, you know, sort of Hill Visitor Center. Yeah. Do you know how the Obama era collaboration between Silicon Valley and D.C. happened? Like, was there an instantiation of Hill and Valley that was just like the old big tech companies talking to the Democratic administration in the same way? Because Hill and Valley is bipartisan, right? Like when I was there last year, I was hanging out with Chuck Schumer and stuff. So it's not like you guys are like explicitly conservative, although obviously there is like a pushback against the previous tone in Silicon Valley.

33:48But walk me through some of the history there. Yeah, I don't know like what the history was of the Obama campaign and how it got so social media centric. I remember they had this like, was it like the CTO guy that was like an ex early Google guy or something like that? I heard some crazy stat that, so the president, like whenever the president goes to visit an organization that's non-governmental, it gets logged. And the number one organization that Obama met with was Google during his eight years. And it was just a very, very close tie, I think. And I think that there was, maybe I'm thinking like the precursor to this is more like TED.

34:27Like, you know, the TED Talk era is kind of where like all the elites would come together and there would be some crossover. Maybe that's not a perfect match. But but anyway, we can move on. I want to hear the goal here was to like hopefully make it like sort of more immune from administration changes, basically, where it's like, you know, yeah. So Obama visited Google all the time. Google basically like, you know, would ban Trump from ever going on campus. And so we started Hill and Valley under the Biden administration, and we've tried to keep it as close as we can to bipartisan as possible throughout all of the years.

34:58Right now, look, obviously, right now, Republicans are in control of, you know, sort of both Congress and Senate and presidency, et cetera. They're obviously a little bit more represented this year. But the goal is, like, how do we make sure that that like channel of communication between the top technology leaders and elected officials stays there, irrespective of who happens to be in the White House at that current time? because I don't think what you want is this thing where like the only time that Silicon Valley and, you know, D.C. talk to each other is when like D.C. happens to be crazy left leaning because that happens to align with like a significant portion of Silicon Valley.

35:27Not everybody. I mean, thankfully, the tech right is willing to be a little more sort of vocal. But look, you know, even in this last election when, you know, you had David Sacks screaming from the rooftops about, you know, you know, being willing to vote for Trump. If you look at like, you know, donations, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley was still like 85 percent, you know, Democrat, you know, by on a dollar's basis. And so, yeah, interesting dynamic where the dollars were telling a very different story than the timeline. I actually wrote a piece in PowerWires about that. It was right before Andreessen went full MAGA.

35:56So it was a little bit like I had the data all crunched and I was like, oh, it's actually like very purple, very split. It was almost like 50-50. But it was also like almost entirely driven by PowerLaw donors, like between Peter and Graylock. uh reed hoffman yeah reed hoffman like like those two were like at the biggest in terms of in terms of it wasn't for this cycle it was like over the last four years or something like that um but then uh but and mark uh and andreason was actually like perfectly 50 50 split like they were perfectly bipartisan because a lot of what they were donating to was like crypto stuff and then when they came to partisan stuff they typically donated to both sides anyway um so walk me through uh some of what do you think Silicon Valley is asking for or pitching in DC these days?

36:46It feels like there's a bit of a narrative, at least on X, that, oh, all these tech people supported Trump. They're the dog who caught the car and it's not going their way or they don't even know what to ask for or what they're asking for isn't getting done. What do you think the message will be to DC from tech next week? Yeah, I'll go through, honestly, just like some of the panels that I'm moderating and like the message on each. I kind of gave you the like, you know, AI panel where it's like, look, there are a bunch of like, you know, sort of EPA and permitting restrictions that like are preventing us from setting up energy and data centers that we need.

37:21And like Secretary Burgum is the person that like oversees some chunk of that, not all of it. He doesn't oversee the EPA. But like that's the request there is like let's make some policy changes so that OpenAI and, you know, sort of Google are not restricted by regulations as like the primary, you know, you know, bottleneck to, you know, their growth of data centers and energy. I love my Delta V portion on TVPN, so I'll talk about the space side of things. I'm going to be moderating between Tim Hughes, who's the SVP of all business basically at SpaceX, Representative George Whitesides, who's the former Virgin CEO, now turned congressional representative, junior congressman, and then Major General Bucky, who's head of all things space at the Defense Innovation Unit.

38:07It's a little bit of both, you know, sort of civil plus, you know, sort of DOD. I think there the request is like, look, there's some like pretty ambitious goals that, you know, sort of Trump has set forth. Basically, you know, wants boots on, you know, sort of Mars and Moon, wants to simulate low Earth orbit, you know, sort of economy, wants more of the, you know, sort of academic community to engage in aerospace. And I think the message there is like, look, NASA needs to lean on, you know, sort of commercial space for the things that it provides and, you know, sort of stick to what it does best for like the, you you know, sort of out there things.

38:35And so, you know, Jared Isaacman, you know, made some comments in his congressional hearing around like, SLS is, you know, a big rocket and maybe gets us to the moon soon, but it's probably not the long term solution. And so like, that's a perfect example of like, you know, I think everybody in commercial space largely agrees with the fact that, you know, the commercial industry has better, cheaper, you know, more effective rockets than, you know, anything that NASA is building in-house at this point, we should probably reallocate that budget to just those commercial companies or to other NASA priorities rather than spending a bunch, you know, sort of on SLS.

39:06So that's a tactical thing. You know, I'm doing this fireside chat with Vinod Khosla. One of his big things is just like the integration of more and more AI, you know, basically into healthcare. We have this mutual portfolio company, you know, sort of Sword Health that has gotten really deep. They're now like, you know, $4 billion company. They provide like that. They're basically the largest physical therapy provider, largely done via AI. And it's not just like AI where it's like a chat screen. It's like they've got sensors that they put on you. It like gamifies it, et cetera. How do you get more and more of like, you know, Medicaid and Medicare to, yes, use humans when like you've got some super delicate operation, etc.

39:36But there's so much of like that care that's provided that at this point, you know, could be exported to a bunch of basically like commercial health companies that are largely, you know, integrated into AI and get more aggressive on that, which satisfies honestly a bunch of the current administration's priorities. As much of Vinod is not a huge fan of Trump, he is a fan of basically using sort of AI to improve healthcare. And then that matches Trump's goals of improved government efficiency where you can cut out a bunch of the Medicare and Medicaid cost. Where it's like, look, we can all talk about defense budgets and this and this.

40:05Entitlements are the vast majority of the federal government's budget. And so if you want to go look at efficiencies, you're going to have way more juice to squeeze improving Medicare than – you can cut out all the DEI programs in the world. And that's barely a blip relative to Medicare. How much do you expect the conversation to veer towards Doge and then specifically Trump had promised earlier this month a trillion dollar defense budget, which would be a 12 percent increase over this year? and yeah, do you expect that to be a major talking point as part of some of these conversations or is that just business as usual?

40:48Yeah, and also, I mean, we were talking about the defense budget earlier. It seemed like you were lightly blackpilled on it for a little bit. Have you updated your view? Well, I mean, a part of why, it's always fun with Hill and Valley where we can't decide on the date until Congress publishes its schedule because we are dependent on the elected officials, you know, sort of being there. Otherwise, it's not a very interesting event. And so anyways, a part of why it's next week is because Congress is in session, you know, basically next week and everybody's, you know, sort of flying into town on, you know, sort of Monday, both whether you're Yen-Huang or you're, you know, Senator Banks, both are flying in town on Monday.

41:21And next week is when they're both, you know, sort of discussing the reconciliation bill, where they're basically going to be, you know, increasing defense budget beyond the continuing resolution to match some of the, you know, February bills that we talked about, you know, sort of last time around when we chatted about this. as well as starting to talk about next year's basically sort of defense budget. I think, yeah, there's sort of clear signaling from the top that there's going to be an increase, and in particular around the president's top priorities, which were nuclear weapons modernization, hypersonic boost glide vehicles, sort of ship building, and general reindustrialization.

41:55And so there's been talk of that reconciliation bill being$150 to$200 billion, which obviously gets the total last year bill pretty close to that trillion-dollar mark. And then obviously, you know, sort of next year's budget, you know, sort of being at that trillion dollar mark. And so, yeah, there's a bunch of people that are literally on the House Appropriations and Senate House Armed Services Committee and, you know, Senate Armed Services Committee that will be there. And I'm sure that there will be either sort of the talk of the town. But it's always interesting with this stuff where like Hill and Valley, we've heard from some of the elected officials, is actually some of the one of the few times where even the elected officials gather at that level of density.

42:32because most of the time they're like you know even in these like you know uh um weeks where they're in session man it's like staff running around doing papers that are they might briefly all go to the floor together but they barely have a chance of talking the floor like we've actually heard that like some of the like bills end up getting negotiated like during the cocktail hour and like reception of hill and valley because it's just like one of the few times where it's like oh we like have the entire house armed services committee here and we're not like in a like session where we're like grilling somebody we're actually like hearing like casually chat for a while about like we joke it's like if you you know if you can't put a deal on a napkin like it's probably too complicated adventure it's like if you can't put a bill or a budget on a napkin like it's just too complicated so we're just running the federal government on napkins and it's actually good right yeah it's great it's funny like the last couple cocktail receptions it's so funny where you're like oh it's like everybody's mingling etc it's like literally all the tech dudes are sitting over there and then like all the elected officials are like scrambling like trying to figure out like okay you know you know what is our you know sort of dance, et cetera.

43:29And then it's so funny because it's like, it's bipartisan, but also like some of these people fucking hate each other. And so it's just last year, like, you know, you got Chuck Schumer giving like the, you know, opening remarks, but then you've got his like Republican counterparts, like all like rolling their eyes and scoffing and everything. And I'm like, ah, DC, what a wonderful place. The swamp, the swamp, the swamp, baby. That's funny. Uh, we're going to see you in a suit, right? You know, um, uh, I have finally, uh, been given approval by my government relations team that when I go do one-on-one briefings with congressmen, I can now wear a t-shirt with a blazer.

44:05But at Hill and Valley, that is a time where if I'm on stage with a senator, I'm definitely wearing a fucking suit and wearing matching shoes. What does it take to get a ticket to Hill and Valley these days? You know, I don't think it's a sort of perfect process, but between Jacob Christian and I, we do our best to curate the phenomenal dinner list in daytime. I think with daytime last Last year, we weren't sure how many people to bring. And then the audience wasn't always fully filled. And so this year, we maybe swung a little too hard too soon. And I think now it's going to be a fucking mob.

44:37So anyways, we're learning each year on how to balance and what the proper process should be. But at this point, we are very at capacity on both. But in future years, just hit up, yeah, DalianToFoundersFund.com, Jacob at StateDepartment.gov, Christian at 137ventures.com and beg for forgiveness or beg for hope, and we'll figure out whether or not we can get you in there. That's awesome. What do you expect the dialogue to be around big tech is such a charged word, but at the same time in the AI race, if you ignore upstart labs, even though they have billions of dollars, they're still young companies, which means big tech is like critical to national security.

45:22Do you expect there to be a conversation around, you know, right now you're seeing Facebook, sorry, Meta just being sort of like dragged by the FTC. Kevin Systrom is collaborating. Yeah, collaborating, which is crazy. And a lot of that feels like rehashing an acquisition that was approved, you know, that went through over a decade ago, feels like such a massive distraction at a time when we don't want our big, we want our big technology companies, you know, focused on winning this very important race, right? Yes, but they made such big enemies where it's just like both sides, like, look, Zuck has done his best to cozy up to Mr.

46:07Trump, White House, etc. You know, He's wearing his chains. He's tan. He's looking for Joe Rogan. But also the Dems hate him because they feel like they lost the 2016 election because of him. And Trump hates him because he feels like he lost the 2020 election because of him. And so I don't think he made a lot of friends. And I don't see any politician balking at the FTC going and dredging that stuff up. And even Kevin Systrom has a bone to pick with him. And so I definitely, you know, sort of buy into the like the sort of distraction, you know, sort of narrative. I also kind of buy into the like, yeah, I mean, like, look, like, you know, you know, we maybe are in a like parallel to the Gilded Era.

46:50You know, are we in the Roaring 20s? Are we in the like, you know, sort of Depression 30s? You know, you know, you know, do these, you know, sort of what were they not oligarchs? What's the name that they use for like the Gilded Era? Robert Barons? Yeah. Yeah, the Barons, the Barons of Industry. The Robert Barons, exactly. So like, you know, maybe there is a little bit of, you know, sort of Robert Barron mentality, you know, right now with some of these big tech companies. I mean, who's been advocating for monopolies? I mean, it's a crazy idea. I don't know. Crazy concept. It's almost like someone wrote a book on it and then everyone was like, that's exactly what we should do.

47:23We don't believe in the M word over here at Founders Fund. We want to invest where there's lots of competition and it's really hard to gain market share. Just power law outcomes for whatever reason. It could be any. um what what do you think about the uh the idea that ramp uh should get a government contract the government should run on ramp we were joking about it months ago it seems to be getting more and more serious do you like the idea um you know look i think uh the current smart card system within the gsa um is a pretty antiquated and old school system um you know trump and doge want to root out a bunch of fraud um you know you know ramp has seen you know even with some of the you you know, neo primes, traditional defense contractors, people that work with the government, that even on like the commercial contractor side of things, they're able to root out things that are inefficiencies, et cetera.

48:11Man, can you imagine what happens when they, you know, sort of get implemented within the government? So, you know, not a done deal or anything, a lot of work to be done there, but I think it's pretty damn good for the country if we manage to get them in there. And apologies on that note, boys, I got to run, but great having a little mini Delta V, mini Hill and Valley. Yeah, I'm looking forward to next week. It's going to be very great. You guys in DC. Yeah, we'll see you there. See you soon. We'll talk soon. Bye. Let's go to an ad. We got ad quick. Out of home advertising made. Boom. Easy and measurable.

48:40Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Activate golden retriever mode. Don't know how that ties to ad quick, but I'm sure they'll love it. Golden retriever mode is running a billboard for your series A. Yes. And it's also not overthinking it. Yeah. It's so easy to get into the math of like, oh, I need to be able to measure every single performance metric. I mean, AdQuick makes out-of-home more measurable, but there still is a brand element to running ads. And this is something that you see in every company as they mature. They eventually realize that it is worthwhile to do marketing that is not necessarily perfectly trackable.

49:21Case in point, Jensen Wong, who will be at Hill and Valley, dropping off gold-plated GB200 servers to the future AI builders. you know and uh and endearing that community to him and that's uh and and a great billboard stunt can do that so head over to adquick.com uh i'm interested to see uh next week at hill valley what issues are truly bipartisan yes right energy uh production right uh as uh societies uh produce more energy prosperity tends to go up you could imagine that being uh somewhat bipartisan Yeah. I was working on a, I was, people have been saying, oh, John, are you going to run for president?

50:01I was thinking about like, if I did what my political platform would be, because I want to be bipartisan. And I was thinking my platform would be pretty simple. It would just be GDP up, unemployment down. Boom. GDP per capita up. That's right. Productivity up and government waste down. Hard to argue with any of this. Exactly. I feel like every American could be behind a platform or a president of Canada who just said, my goal is GDP maximization. That seems pretty simple. Yeah. That seems like something everyone can rally around. Give Citadel Security right access to the government. Jane Street.

50:34Speaking of Jane Street, the trading revenue has nearly doubled in 2024 to more than$20 billion. Let's hear it for Jane Street, folks. I know a lot of you were worried that they weren't making enough money, but they're back. Back. Packy McCormick says, man, SBF would be so rich if he stayed at Jane Street. Funny take. Very interesting. I'm always interested to see how these details look. The bowl all twisted up. Very, very funny. Whoa. Whoa. Yeah, what is going on there? But very fun. On the flip side, the information is reporting that lots of tech companies have had their hiring plans impacted.

51:1819 % in the survey said we cut staff. 33 % said we plan to hire less. 30 % said no impact, but we are evaluating the situation. 13 % said our hiring plans stay the same. And 5 % said we plan to hire more. Now, I wonder how much of that is driven just by the fact that only 5 % of venture-backed companies are on the upswing because it's kind of a long-shot game. And so they're not all scaling up. But it is interesting that people could be cutting staff for a variety of reasons. It could be tariff-related, but it also could be AI-related. It could be a bunch of different things. Or we plan to hire less.

51:52Or it could just be if you have the time to fill out an information survey, your business is struggling. You'd be focusing on your business, maybe. I don't know. That's possible. Are the best companies really answering this survey? I do think these types of anonymous surveys are very interesting. I would, it would be great to see them more broken out. There's a bit of game theory to it. Because if I get this and I am hiring, I'm going to want to psyop my competition into firing everyone. So I'm going to respond with cutting staff. Then it becomes a meme. Everyone's like, oh, everyone's got to cut staff.

52:28Everyone fires everyone. You're the last person you have to pick up the litter. You can hire all the best people. You're ramping. That's the way you win the game. Tyler asked for a dedicated supplement rundown from Jordy Hayes. I'm looking to outsource my thinking. So what are you taking? Yeah, I gave a comment. Oh, you did respond. Let me pull it up. There's a nice picture of Tony Soprano in a stained glass window for some reason, I think. Beautiful photo. Ghiblied, Ghiblied. It's not quite Ghiblied. Not Ghiblied. It's more stained glass window. But I like it. It's beautiful. My current stack, electrolytes, heavily weighted towards magnesium.

53:01Magnesium is an electrolyte So it usually comes in Various electrolyte products But taking a lot more magnesium over Isn't magnesium a metal? I feel like it's a metal That would be pretty metal We need a metal sound effect Iron is important Is it iron at all? No, most people To my knowledge Have too much iron And Donating blood is a way to Oh, pull the iron out. Interesting, okay. Then I'm on creatine, of course. I take zinc and vitamin C in a combination. Thiamine, which is a B vitamin. Okay. Your body can become thiamine deficient if you use nicotine. I do use nicotine. So thiamine to boost it back up.

53:47Yes, exactly. And then taurine. That's in Red Bull. Which is in Red Bull. Yeah. They were smart to do that. And then I'll cycle peptides from time to time. We got to get on a peptide cycle. You're on peptides? Not the second, but historically, I've indulged. But those are performance-sensing drugs. They're not legal for most professional athletes to take. You're not natty. Technically, I'm here. I think claiming natty is like claiming you're not doing whatever it takes to win. I agree. I'm very pro-abusing steroids. Yeah, but we should get on a peptide cycle together. Okay. I want to be on the Wolverine thing.

54:25I want to be on the Hugh Jackman. Yeah, BPC-157. Yeah, I want to take whatever the LD50 is. Give me just a hair under that. Yeah. Give me just a hair under that. Anyway, dudes will buy a billboard and SF on the 101 to announce getting a bed frame. That would actually go viral. You should do that if you're trying to raise money. I have acquired a bed frame, folks. Somebody should do it. Reach out to AdQuick. They will set you up. But let's bring in public. We got... There we go. Welcome to the show. Guys, we can't hear you. What's that sound? What's that sound? It's so loud. It's happening. Oh, is that the sound of the Aston Martin F1 team?

55:10It's happening. Oh, I'm at the Fox Miami GP at Las Vegas GP. Oh, is that public advertising on the Aston Martin F1? How did you get my voicemail to run on the show? Yeah. For me, it just sounded like the sound effects of Pacific Rim or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got it from that influencer, Ashton Hall, the guy who has the viral morning routine. He drops that sound effect. So we had to pull that over to our show. But how are you guys doing? Great to see you guys. Can you introduce yourselves a little bit and explain what the news is today? Absolutely. So I'm Yannick, Co-CEO, That's Life, other Co-CEO, co-founders of Public.

55:54we announced today as you can tell from your last we are the new sponsors of the Aston Martin Formula One team amazing so amazing storied team storied brand and they're going to write books about this partnership I think so can we get a gong for that or no? yeah of course we can get a gong we're also going to pull up some some Some video of Aston Martins driving around, entertaining the viewers. Can you break down the process? I imagine we know this has been in the works for a while, but what was the process? When did you even start thinking about doing something like this? Well, so I mean, let's talk about first why it makes sense for us first and then we get into the process.

56:45So we started six years ago, I mean, as a fractional shares platform, we were like the first to do the whole first trading platform to do fractional shares, then it obviously became a big thing. But since then, I'd argue that the platform has matured a lot. I think now we have one of the most powerful investing sort of suite of tools in America, multi asset investing, multiple account types, embedded deep AI research, and customers have evolved kind of with us. So now folks are coming in with hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in their accounts. But to be honest, not everyone knows that we're there.

57:21And so this partnership was a great opportunity for us to sort of raise some awareness around that and kind of get that message across, obviously, to the right demographic as well. Can you talk about anatomy of the deal? How do you meet the folks over there? Did this all start with, is there an agency involved? I know you guys do a lot of stuff internally. Is it just an email? Did you meet someone at an F1 race? How do you even meet these folks? Full power mode. No agencies. I love it. We have a bestseller that happens to be involved with the team as well. And so through that, we got introduced to them.

57:59And this is also a deal where the Aestral Mountain actually took part equity in public as well. And it's, you know, kind of like, I think it's the first time they've really done this. And so it was also a little bit of an experiment for them as well. A lot of good things for them as well. And what was interesting is that the way they also think about it is that, you know, they have a platform, they have, you know, also sponsors that pay them, you know, ridiculous amounts of money and whatnot. So, like, they don't necessarily need another million bucks from another startup and so on, but they like the idea of finding opportunities that they feel they understand themselves as well.

58:45In our case, like, their audience being the type of audience that has money to invest, US markets being one of the fastest growing markets for Formula 1, generally speaking, it's the only country with three races, and so on. And so for them, the viewers focus and the focus of the audience that we had was like a good match. And so that's why, you know, for them, it was also just a good idea to be a little bit closer involved and actually join the cap table as well. How do you guys think about international long-term? You know, do you see a world in the future where you have millions of users outside of the country?

59:26I know the U.S. has obviously been the focus to date. Absolutely. But the way that starts is we actually launched an app called Alpha, which is a little bit of a spin out of our AI product. Launched that in international markets late last year as a separate kind of product. So that's all live and growing well in a bunch of European markets and a few other places around the world. And so that's basically like Apple stocks with AI powers. That's how you think of it. You literally come in, you take a photo of your watch list, wherever you have it. and the auto follows everything and tells you why things are moving in real time, not just they're moving and by how much.

1:00:03And then you can definitely ask questions and do research and all that stuff. So that's like, I would say the first step in our international strategy in building that audience sort of abroad. And then obviously, as you can imagine, investing services could come later because that's the aspect that has a regulatory component to it, which totally. Totally. Yeah. Can you talk about how you actually envision the partnership manifesting in advertisements, obviously, like logo on the car, but there are 21 races. There are so many different places to put logos, integrate, throw, have a box, have a party, have an after show, pre-show, digital.

1:00:43There's so many different things that can package up into these actual partnerships. What did that process look like and where did you land yeah i i want to call out i want to see alonzo uh you know executing trades you know during a pit stop in the pit lane it's that fast by the way that you can actually totally yeah but yeah i mean there's always whenever you do these deals there's this sort of laundry list of stuff that you have access to and can do and what not right that falls into petal club passes at the events and it falls into like you know we will have the logo and the halo and the logo tiny on the side of the car as well, but also doing the US races, for example, and things like that.

1:01:25But one specific thing that we thought about is in our space of like kind of like new broker investing apps, things like referral have been this like mainstream thing of get a free fractional stock and so on. And as we moved more upmarket, the less that stuff worked because if you have a little bit of money, let's be honest, you don't really give a shit about five bucks on free stock. And so for us, it would be a sense of, okay, what do people that have a little of money care about? And it's most cases experiences you might not necessarily have access to otherwise. And so the sense of that, like, this partnership is like one of the first ways for us to have the ability to give exclusive experiences to our customers through, you know, certain giveaways in the app, through referral in the app, and so on.

1:02:14to, for example, win things like access to the paddock, meet and greet with the drivers, and all that kind of stuff. And in the future, obviously, we'll figure out what are other ways to execute on that strategy as well. But the sense of what does referral for an audience actually look like and falls much more into things like experiences. But specifically, also, just to finish the ramp quick, is basically starting today, you can actually, in the app, win access to the paddock in the Vegas race later this year. And especially find, like if you find the three little F1 cars in the app, which is like hidden in different places in the app, and you find all three of them, then you essentially enter the...

1:02:59And they're not easy to find, by the way, either. So it's not like a thing that everybody will double... I'm just going to tweet out where they are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to give the app to my three-year-old and say, you've got 14 hours go get one with a couple hundred keys before you do it yeah yeah yeah so you can do a little day trading along the way how do you think about the evolution of the way brands integrate with F1 obviously Red Bull doesn't make cars or I guess they made that one car once but in general they don't make cars but they're a huge F1 sponsor with the whole team Haas Automation is kind of in a similar boat, but then Aston Martin's more of a car brand.

1:03:46How do you think that that's evolved? And is there a world where we see a public.com F1 team at some point? Well, not in the next couple of years. Because now we have this deal. No, look, I think what's interesting about the Formula One is it is the only sport that I can really think of that has scale and has this sort of thing where whenever Formula One comes into town, it's the whole show, right? It's a Super Bowl event 20 times in a year, basically, right? Because like, yeah, you go to a Premier League match, two hours, you knock down a couple of pints, it's over, and you go about your day.

1:04:25This is like the whole weekend. The circus comes into town. They talk about there's a lot of drivers' wives, obviously. And so therefore, it just lends itself very well to like a very intense focus type of exposure. Yeah. Which I think is really great. And I think you've seen that in and around the Super Bowl and a few other places. But in the Formula One, it just kind of happens many, many times throughout the course of a year. And I think that's what makes it interesting for B2B companies as well as for consumer companies. Yeah. Did Drive to Survive factor into your calculations? I imagine there will be public.com branding that makes it into Drive to Survive just by nature of being on the car.

1:05:03Yeah, but that's the funny thing. It's like, so with Formula One, you either sponsor a team or you sponsor a race slash the league itself. And these are two separate things, right? Yeah. And Drive to Survive is more with the league itself and so on. And so the trick really for folks like us is what can you do that has the chance to make it into the storyline? So like, you know, what kind of beef can we create with a training app that, you know, sponsors another team or something? Or like, you know, like, but like, what kind of job we be part of essentially? So you can't hear yourself, you shout.

1:05:48Yeah, we'd love, we'd love to, we'd love to help. No, but I can imagine just naturally you'll get placement in the show just as Alonso and Lance have their moments in the show, right? So it's very natural. But generally, you always have a multiplier with saying there's a great Formula One game, right? Lego right now has a Formula One kind of thing going on. And so there's always kind of these multipliers kind of happening in and around the sport. Yeah, what about other multipliers more on like a geolocation basis i mean i'm sure you could run geo fenced ads in vegas that weekend by billboards like what are you thinking to get the most squeeze out of uh the event when it kind of comes together i mean there's a long like like there's a long list of stuff you can do uh it's a multi-year deal so we also have a little bit it's starting in the miami race um in a couple of weeks so that will be the first one we've kicked off now this essentially scavenger hunt in the app uh where you can get access to Vegas, Paddock, et cetera, by finding these kind of cars around the app.

1:06:55And so I think there's a lot of stuff we can experiment with. I think relative to, you know, we're not quite as big as Aramco yet. They still have us a little bit on the market cap. And so, but, you know, but we might be one of the more nimble folks that can get a little bit more creative and so i would say expect to see a a bunch more uh kind of stunt how uh how did uh lawrence stroll's kind of leadership factor into the decision like he's obviously has a you know like running the team but then simultaneously like you know has the manufacturer side too with aston martin he's like seems like extremely convicted to winning and and making a statement And, you know, as a car enthusiast, like I've watched what Aston is doing.

1:07:46Again, really, really committed to winning. They've like massively improved there. Did that give you guys extra confidence in going and making a partnership, knowing that, hey, the team by itself is not, when you look at other teams like Haas and things like that, who's had a sort of history of economic challenges, that's not exactly, you know, the team that you want to attach yourself to even though they have uh but also like like generally speaking there's a lot of like change happening in f1 right now right you have a bunch of mix-ups and lots of drivers that switch teams you have uh you know behind the scenes you know um the the you know one of the guys who you know the engineers from the from the red from the rebel team was hired now as smr and so on and so So there's like right now there's a lot of change happening and it's not just, you know, seeing Verstappen win every time and, you know, having like the joke of just like putting a piece of tape on your TV so the race becomes more fun to watch.

1:08:51Like over his name. So, you know, there's so much change happening right now. And I think that is why I think this season and the next season and the winning after I think it would be super exciting. Right. There's a new U.S. team coming in with Cadillac next year. there's coming out in june or july this year and so there's just like a lot happening around it um you know which is quite awesome but i think you're totally right like the where aston martin sits right now is kind of perfect for us right because it's not like it's it's it's it's a team that is still a little bit on the up and off but i think we'll be very competitive over the next couple of years yeah you're already if you're already wearing dark green are we going to see you guys driving around some aston martin street cars do you have any favorite picks or historical aston martins that uh you've been thinking about are you a james bond fan right they literally say something in one of the aston martin movies from royalty to double agents you know in between and so obviously now in new york city doesn't make a ton of sense to on the BB.

1:10:01No, no. In New York, you need to get the Valkyrie, clearly. Exactly. The roads are a little bumpy. I'm sure the clearance on that thing isn't great, but it is street legal, so why not be whipping around Fifth Avenue? You need to basically change your... Yeah, you probably need to change your tires like every 200 miles or something like that. But I'm curious, did you guys get any messages this morning from friends back in Europe? Like, hey, I saw the news. like that's that's awesome i uh you know then you're like hey guys we've been a billion dollar you know company for a while like you know this is like you know the first time like we we were we were in like business insider uh like two weeks ago and and some people were messaging john and i like oh congratulations and we're like i think we get more views than business insider but thank you um i can imagine a lot of people asking for tickets that's for sure yeah yeah yeah Yeah, you guys are going to be extra.

1:10:58All the people that had like a 25K angel investment, they're now coming like, so. They're like, so I'll be in the paddock, right? Yeah, you can get me tickets to the whole season, right? Like, what does that cost? A quarter million. Well, I'm extremely excited. I'm going to be even more excited to watch. Have another reason to, you know, turn it on at like 4 a.m. or whatever, Pacific, whenever, you know, the international races happen. And we should be signing a lease for our new studio. And we're going to have a lot more space, so we should figure out how to get a car in the background one way or another.

1:11:33You'd be surprised how cheap it actually is. I know. I know. I remember our conversation. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say these numbers on here, but it is actually not that bad. Yeah. Cheaper than a regular Aston Martin. It won't drive. It doesn't have an engine or anything. But like show pieces and you find it's an alternative or something sometimes. No, I want it on the back wall of the studio. I mean, I went toward Red Bull's headquarters in Santa Monica a couple years ago, and they had the full F1 car there on the half pipe, and it just made the vibe in the office fantastic. And so, yeah, I highly recommend getting an F1 car.

1:12:15Everyone should, really. It's part of the ideal three-car garage. You need the family hauler, you need the weekender, and you need the F1 car, of course. Absolutely. Why doesn't everyone just do this? I don't get it. I don't know why we're the first to think of this. It's crazy. It's crazy. Awesome, guys. Well, congratulations and congrats to the whole team. It's going to be very excited for Miami and everything to come. Cool, man. Awesome. All right. We will see you soon. Cheers. Great to see you. Later. We're getting an F1 car, folks. We need to. We're getting one. I think we should daily it.

1:12:52you know uh just you know it's gonna be a little rough gonna be a little bumpy um but you pull up in an f1 car you pull up with a fantastic patek philippe on your wrist like the guy in that picture that you picked up on bezel go to get bezel.com your bezel concierge is available now to source any watch on the planet you don't want to be get caught on race weekend with a bare wrist that's right that's that's unacceptable yeah it's yeah it's laughable uh you can't rm would be a good option for race weekend it is a racing machine on the wrist yeah we've been looking at some rms and i can see bezel going over and and you know maybe you know uh getting their own team at some point i would love with the trajectory that they're on i would love that anyway uh our next guest is in the studio let's bring him in we got alfred from listen labs announcing and we got his co-founder.

1:13:43Boom. And they got the jackets. They're not quite... Color coordinated. I love it. Dressing up for the show. We always appreciate people dress up when they coordinate their outfits. How are you guys doing? Doing well. Yeah. Exciting. Can you give us a little overview of the history of the company? Introduce yourselves. Tell us about the round. Give us the basics. For sure. So Listen is an AI customer researcher that can find and interview thousands of users and tell you what they want. And today, or yesterday, we announced our Series A, 27 million in total raised, led by Sequoia, Conviction, and Pair.

1:14:20And yeah, we work with some amazing customers like Microsoft, Canva, and Chubbies. And the core concept of what we do is, like, every company wants to be customer obsessed. So imagine you want to take that to the most, like, fullest extent. And that's basically you would talk to every customer you could, and you talk to them, try to understand exactly who they are and what they think about. And you'd find a way to synthesize all of those conversations into a clear understanding of their behavior. And you wouldn't do this just once. You do it all the time. Every time you make a change to your product or service or marketing.

1:14:57And that's what we do. Cool. I can imagine a ton of different ways to get customer insights out of all the data, just using Microsoft as an example. There's probably one million tickets in some database that's just a bunch of text that hasn't been processed. You you know, run an LLM over that, that makes sense. It sounds like you're doing something more advanced where you're actually calling people up. Maybe there's a screen recording and interaction and some questions back and forth. Is that all AI driven? Walk me through the case study, I guess, with Microsoft or anyone else you want to chat about.

1:15:26Yeah, yeah, for sure. So it's an AI that can have a one-on-one conversation and then you can have hundreds of those conversations in parallel. And what we found is that kind of, you have to reach enough people to really understand what people want. So if you speak to 10 of them, most of them won't have much interesting things to say. And the second thing is the synthesis. If you have like hundreds of conversations, finding the signal over the noise is, you know, AI is amazing, is amazing at that. And, you know, AI is also the ultimate listener. It's more empathetic than myself. And as a case study like one of my favorite ones is chubbies so um they recently launched a new product based on learnings that they made from listen that is growing really really fast um and it's a little bit weird but it was an ai or it was interviewing kids using uh listen interesting and they were much more honest to our ai versus like speaking to a stranger um and it enabled them to learn a lot about like how the how to make their shorts more comfortable and basically created a new product with a new liner in the shorts that um just felt much better for the kids and now that product is growing really fast do you do you believe there's uh sort of a customer love flywheel in a sense where the more uh someone likes a product the more inclined they are to want to talk about how to make it better and is part of what you guys are doing helping to like accelerate that where a product could have some customers, but it's hard to really get scaled feedback because nobody really loves the product enough.

1:17:10Like I get emails all the time. I'll try a SaaS product and I'll churn and then they'll reach out to me being like, Hey, you know, I, you know, can we get feedback? And usually I'm not super inclined to provide feedback. Sometimes I do if I feel like it's just off, but how do you think about sort of like building that sort of customer feedback flywheel and converting it into customer love yeah sorry yeah i mean i think what is interesting is the you know we have this at bigger companies right um but you actually you know you have a lot of feedback as you said before but um actually talking to real customers is is actually pretty complex right it's at the bigger companies that typically outsource it to external agencies because there's a lot of hoops they have to go through.

1:18:04And they charge like 100K and then they schedule like 20 interviews and do that. And what we enable them to do is instead of using these external agencies, they can just use us, right? It's cheaper, it's faster, it's better because we can reach way more people. And yeah, I think that's an exciting opportunity also for, in general, for AI founders to, you know if you can replace one of those like external um you know external partners basically you just just flip a switch and um you know you sell an outcome instead of just the software when you talk to um when you talk to maybe bigger older companies are you surprised at how they sometimes don't have a process in place to talk to customers like i feel like it's part of silicon Valley, like ethos, lore, you know, PG is just sort of like banging, you know, founders over the head saying like, talk to your customers, talk to your customers.

1:19:02And so it's, it's a part of the culture here. But, um, I imagine there's some companies that you're maybe in a sales process with that don't have any infrastructure, uh, uh, or, or very little infrastructure in place, uh, rel, uh, relative to how sort of like scaled they are. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the products and services out there are kind of, they suck, you know, and it's so often that you use a product and you think like, okay, what were they even thinking? Like clearly they're not keeping us in mind here. And for some of these large companies, you know, they do want to invest in talking to users, but it's just so complex because there's a lot of bureaucracy even to reach out to a user, you kind of have to go through legal and it becomes too complicated.

1:19:55And that's why they have to use these consulting firms to kind of go through it. But we've been able to kind of streamline that process. Can you talk about how these interviews happen today and how they'll evolve? I can imagine chatbot interaction to begin with, but the voice interfaces are pretty close. Virtual avatars are getting pretty close. what's the product like today? Where do you see it going? Yeah, so we, Florian and I, we actually started a company by virtue of trying to solve the problem for ourselves. And we had this AI consumer app that had 20 ,000 downloads in one day. And it really blew up out of nowhere.

1:20:37We were running with expensive GPUs, spending like$1 ,000 per hour. And it was our personal credit cards attached. and like the users were turning really fast. So we were like, okay, how do we actually solve this problem? And then we built a very simple prototype. It was a chatbot that could just talk to all the users and summarize what they wanted. And we found things that were really useful, like which template should we add? How should we fix our onboarding? And now we have built out this kind of entire stack where it's essentially three steps. It's first interviewing, and we do that over video, and have the video understanding both of the emotional experience and what they do on the screen.

1:21:24And then it's finding the people. So we actually allow you to kind of find all the customers through a database of millions of users. And then, of course, analysis. And the ceiling for analysis is really high. You can hire McKinsey, and they'll charge you a million bucks to give a PowerPoint deck. And, yeah, we're working on that. Interesting. That makes a ton of sense. What are some kind of edge cases or companies that you would expect to start using Listen that maybe are nontraditional? My immediate thought is that we should throw up basically a number that you can just call and give feedback on the show.

1:22:01Which we're live 15 hours a week, so it's hard to find time for phone calls. But it would be awesome if people could call in and be like, hey, talk more about this or things like that. But how, yeah, do you see this type of user research expanding into industries that maybe just aren't customers of these different consulting firms today just because of the costs? Yeah, exactly. I think there's a huge new market you can open up for, you know, smaller companies or companies that couldn't traditionally afford or couldn't even honestly wait for 12 weeks until you get like this report back. I think that's very exciting.

1:22:39but if you take a step back and think about you know what makes a great company and you can even go back to YC of you know what they think is like you mentioned it before right write code and talk to talk to users and you know that's really the core but those two parts you know we have the writing the code which now AI agents are doing more and more you know it's getting easier to build things so what becomes more important is actually building the right thing and kind of having the feedback, talking to the customers. So that's what we're building. And, you know, it's almost scary, but maybe in the future, that's what we're going to do.

1:23:15That's maybe the last thing that humans will do, like kind of telling the AI what to do, what to build, being the tastemakers. Which podcast to listen to. Yeah, just wire it directly into Cursor or Devon and then it just takes the feedback and immediately implements the change. No, it is an interesting scenario to think about where listen is directly integrated into the basically developer tools where somebody can say like, hey, I want a feature to do this. And then it just immediately gets built. So I'm sure you guys are thinking about something like that. On the post-interview analysis side, I can imagine that AI is very good at aggregating sentiment and tagging things, essentially creating like the top 10 requests, the word clouds.

1:24:00but have you found LLMs or any of the modern AI tooling being useful in finding like the diamonds in the rough like everyone's telling you to build a faster horse there's one person who's clocked it and says no you got to go into the automobile for your product and and you're able to dig that out with modern technology yeah and so we we have like a module that finds surprising statements and outliers sentiment. And I think there's also interesting things around kind of building a profile of understanding who this user is and if they give good advice or not. And we actually have like a quality score of each participant.

1:24:43So you shouldn't listen to all feedback. And as we've done more interviews, we've done now more than 300 ,000, we can kind of build a elite set of tastemakers essentially that you can reach out to that tend to give like great advice that makes sense uh how did the round how did the round come together obviously got basically the who's who of uh venture in uh was anything surprising was it uh uh you know did did you guys go go out to run a process or did did people come to you uh well it's a very competitive fundraising market for the VCs today. But we're very lucky to work with exceptional partners.

1:25:30Brian Schreier at Sequoia, he also led the first investment in Qualtrics, which is the biggest outcome in the customer feedback world. And then it's amazing working with Mike Vernal at Conviction, who's done the best deals. when listen has as big an outcome as Qualtrics, what pro sports team are you guys going to buy? Yeah, I actually spoke to, I'm from Sweden, I spoke to Ryan Smith at Qualtrics, and the first thing he said, like, oh yeah, I just bought a hockey team. You guys love hockey, right? I think table tennis. Table tennis. What is the most popular sport in Sweden right now? yeah um maybe chess boxing no table tennis i don't know table tennis table tennis it is very popular we we went uh we almost won the olympics very China yeah oh that's rough it happens it happens um awesome guys well congratulations uh very exciting and uh let us know when we when it's ready for for podcasting yes you know we'll roll it out for sure we'll roll it out uh Take care.

1:26:44We'll talk to you soon. Bye. See you. Great. And we got an ad for 8sleep. Go to 8sleep.com slash TBPN. Get a pod for Ultra. They got a 30-night free trial, a five-year warranty, free returns, free shipping. Go check it out. Oh, 100. I know how to be close. I don't know how this is possible. I think Autopilot was doing the work. my little one was throwing up last night so credit to my wife real MVP for getting her taken care of but who we got next we got Eric from Freeform coming into the studio talking about manufacturing going back into hard tech Thursday tends to be a little bit leaning heavy on the hard tech every once in a while.

1:27:41We got Delian kicking it off, and then we try and bring in some robotics, some manufacturing founders. Always an interesting discussion to have with those folks. We are talking to Formic as well. They're doing robotics, and I'm sure we'll talk to many more, although we've hit a ton of the companies at this point. When you do 20 interviews a week, you can create a market map pretty quickly. You can churn through. We are the market map. We are the market map. America is our market map. Well, let's bring him in. Eric, how are you doing? Welcome to the stream. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, guys.

1:28:15Yeah, thanks for hopping on. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company? Absolutely. So, Eric Palich, CEO, founder of Freeform. We do, you know, really we're bringing AI to metal 3D printing. My background was early employee at SpaceX, worked there for over 10 years. I ran the Merlin engine program for Falcon 9 and the Raptor program for Starship and kind of saw the potential of 3D printing, metal 3D printing firsthand and then left to go and actually drive it into, you know, industrial commercial use. So I'm assuming you're a key player in transitioning the sort of engine from this like, you know, crazy blob.

1:28:59I'm sure you've seen the image of the reduction. We'll try to pull the image up on the screen. Was 3D, I imagine, was 3D printing a part of how you guys were iterating or were you not able to leverage the tech that you guys have now? Yeah, no, it was. I think the thing that I saw was the enabling potential of 3D printing, but how slow and crappy it was, to be honest. We were doing things with Raptor that we were innovating in the rocket space for the first time in decades. Truly people think rockets are super complicated, but really the technology hasn't changed much in a long time. Then this manufacturing technology comes along that allows you to control physics in a different way.

1:29:47I mean, true, true. If you look at the way you make metal things, there really there haven't been these new disruptive technologies in a really, really long time. So, you know, printing enabled Raptor, which I would argue is one of the most amazing and high-performance rocket engines ever in the history of humanity. Yeah. Can you talk about how metal 3D printing actually works? I think I'm familiar with kind of consumer-level 3D printing, and that makes sense to me. You melt some filament, and it's basically melted plastic through a metal nozzle. If you're melting metal, doesn't that melt the nozzle?

1:30:25How does this all work? So we use lasers to melt metal powder layer by layer. Okay. And so you think of it, you're just slowly building, you know, layer upon layer upon layer of, you put a layer of metal powder out and use a laser to kind of selectively melt where you want and then do that again and again and again. Yep. And then how do you think about the decision to manufacture a part using subtractive manufacturing versus additive manufacturing? I'm sure, you know, you're obviously very bullish on 3D printing, but there must be limits and things that you say, hey, we're not just going to go 3D print a whole bunch of like rebar.

1:31:01because we can just mold that or something. I don't know. No, that's exactly right. I mean, I think one of the things that sets Freeform apart from, I think really every other 3D printing, metal printing company out there, is we aren't developing the technology because we think it's cool. We're not pushing for 3D printing because it's cool. We don't print pencil holder, bottle openers, pens and pencils. We just don't do that stuff because, frankly, people don't care. To get to your question specifically, it's like, what is it actually good at? What is the value proposition of the technology? And it's truthfully today amazing for very complex geometries, very complicated things.

1:31:42And we're very candid with customers about should you machine it, you know, subtractively make it or should you print it? You know, what we're doing is enabling the next, you know, we've built the fastest, highest volume metal printing platform on the planet. We have it here in Hawthorne. We're about a quarter mile from SpaceX. You know, I would then say we, you know, our primary customers are some of the, you know, most exciting and innovative aerospace and defense companies out there. I've heard that line before. Without naming any specific ones. Yeah, not to name names. Of course. And, you know, we're right down the street.

1:32:16And, you know, our take on it was to commercialize the technology, we need to be able to do high volume, you know, and then by doing high volume, then we can bring the price down, you know. And that was the thesis, actually, was got to do a lot of volume and bring the price down. Can you talk about your business model? Are you selling the finished product or are you selling the machine? Are you thinking about that in kind of different stages? Because I imagine in the future, like an end customer would just have one of your devices and they could operate it themselves. Is that where you're going?

1:32:48Yeah. No. So that's a great question. The business model is we just provide turnkey parts. So we actually handle everything. We print them if it needs post machining, it needs holes reamed, it needs surfaces turned. We do all of that in-house, all the metrology, you know, we'll do CMM inspections, high res 3D scanning, anything the customer needs. We, you know, the whole thing, the industry is really complicated and fractured. And so when we went out, you know, six, seven years ago and started figuring out, hey, what is the right business model in this space? I kept my head my brain kept going back to and and by the way I worked directly with Elon for my entire career at SpaceX so this first principles kind of thinking that everybody says they do I feel like I was indoctrinated in the actual school of it you know by him um you know but I kept thinking like man you know we're melting stuff with a laser and it you know we care about single digit microns of of precision this isn't you know traditional metal manufacturing like this isn't a CNC machine.

1:33:50So customers, you know, why are they so unhappy with the space? And when they buy a machine, why are they disappointed? Because they don't know how to use it. So it's more akin to like semiconductor fabrication than like subtractive, you know, metal manufacturing. So we said we need to own all of it to answer the question. Yeah, that makes sense. What it is, you don't have to go into super explicit detail, but I'm curious how you think about, you know, margins, a lot of these, you know, traditional software VCs have have sort of been chirping on X over the last couple years, hey, you're putting hundreds of millions of dollars into these manufacturing businesses, assuming they're going to have, you know, software margins, and that that hasn't been the case.

1:34:35Historically, are you guys getting so efficient that that you can achieve kind of greater margin profiles? Or is it just about sort of scale. Absolutely. I mean, that's exactly where we're at today. Our margins are fantastic. And the technology is fundamentally new and enabling, which means, you know, I get that question a lot. It's like, well, even if you can charge higher margins now, isn't this a race to the bottom? The answer is, you know, that that is true over a long time scale for any industry, right? Anything that gets commoditized over 50 or 100 years and highly optimized, it ultimately becomes a race to the bottom.

1:35:10The question is how long and the technology that we've developed and are the capabilities that we have are enabling new products, new, they're enabling innovation in industries that are, you know, we're providing the tools that people are truly like innovating on the design and integration fronts. So, and performance. And so, you know, I think as long as we continue to stay at the front of that and the technology is getting better every day, When I say, you know, I don't love to use AI buzzwords, but that is what we're doing. We're bringing like AI to 3D printing such that the next part coming off the platform is even better than the last one.

1:35:52And so, you know, because of that and the process is constantly getting better and we're coming up with new materials and new features and new functionality, then, you know, I think I can make the argument that the margins will stay high for a very long time. and especially when you start looking at the places where you know we've developed technology that fundamentally unlocks the ability to develop new materials you know so now we own the material we have the technology to actually leverage it and then it enables something important you know maybe in the semiconductor space or in the air in you know the rocket space or even the automotive space yeah yeah in that in that new materials i mean i've talked to some people who do the subtractive manufacturing with CNC and there's like different types of aluminum, different alloys.

1:36:37Like, is that something you're already doing? And do you just handle that for your customer? Are you testing different like alloys? Is that how you think about that? Or what do you mean when you mean new materials? Yeah. Our business model today is not yet truly development of new materials. That it's we've done some of that. We work with another very large, well-known customer that I would say is in the general broad family of customers that, you know, we won't mention specifically that we've been working with them on development of some new alloys that enable, you know, I think some pretty cool things for them.

1:37:16And but that's like not that's more of a one off today. It's the reason why they're interested in working with us on this is because we've developed the sensing and compute platform and have the data sets and the sensors to actually engineer and develop the materials at the metallurgical level that no other printing company has. I mean, you know, Freeform is really, it's in the 3D printing space, you know, we're like SpaceX, you know, the mindset of those organizations and talent of those organizations, you know, the metal manufacturing market has generally been viewed as this kind of like stagnant dimly lit rusty you know oily machine shop um so we had to go out and find you know like rocket scientists to develop the technology you know to be able to do this you know and that's one of the reasons why like nvidia made a substantial investment in us recently as they saw what we were doing on the compute and data side and they want to be a part of it what are the different vectors of optimization in metallurgy i imagine cost and weight and strength They're important in space, but like, is electrical conductivity important?

1:38:24Like what else is important to think about when you're thinking about the material, either that you're selecting or eventually kind of building from first principles? Absolutely. It depends on the application, you know, for example, like heat exchangers, you know, metal printing is very good today, even at high cost for conventional, like other shops, or if you're buying a conventional machine, it's very good at very, very complicated geometries that you either can't make any other way or they're, you know, prohibitively expensive or difficult to make any other way. And those do generally fall in a couple categories.

1:39:01They're like fluid components or heat exchangers, things that, you know, thermal devices. And so in an application like that, you care a lot about, you know, the thermal performance of the material. In other cases, you might be putting parts inside a gas turbine engine. This is another typical application for 3D printed parts. And in that case, you want something that's like strong when it gets hot, you know. So there are it really does depend on, you know, the application. And I think the thing for us is we actually have the platform and the feedback and the analytics to be able to close the loop on whatever the particular, you know, feature of the material or application that you need.

1:39:42Yeah, I mean, you mentioned putting a 3D printed part in a gas turbine engine. We've been hearing that China has been having a lot of trouble manufacturing planes to compete with Boeing. Specifically jet engines. Why is a jet engine so hard? Can you just 3D printed it at some point? I mean, I imagine that China is capable of getting... Yeah, why is it so hard, Eric? Why did it take you 10 years to figure out how to do... Exactly. Can you just scan the 747 and then print the 747? It's a copy machine. That's what you're making. Exactly. Exactly. Someday. Yes. I mean, you know, the vision for us at Freeform has always been to take the, you know, the complexity out of it and to provide a, you know, a lights out, a truly, everybody says automated factories, you know, to provide a lights out factory that is truly automated.

1:40:34The unique thing about metal printing is this is actually possible. cnc machining and other subtractive methods that were there's no way to do to truly do that um there's just they're they're just today there is not yeah um printing we're already entirely digital it's like take a digital file the machine doesn't care what you're printing it just prints it you know and then automating the rest of that and then you mentioned china so obviously the joke about why are gas turbines hard you know i don't think gas turbines are hard i think rocket engines are harder. Gas turbines, you know, are easier in a lot of ways.

1:41:06But the, you know, China is a good example where, you know, I get quite frustrated that, you know, we are a manufacturing technology company that is developing capability that is not only going to affect and improve the lives of people in general, but also is critically important to our national security as a country. And, you know, China is investing in the 3D printing space. They are building, you know, huge factories full of these conventional machines. They don't have our technology. They don't have the ability to, you know, they can go make 100 laser, whatever number laser machines. Those parts are still junk.

1:41:47and you know we are developing this in the U.S. for the U.S. we obviously do put a bit of defense work and it does get frustrating you mentioned China and it's like I had to put my plug in of you know it's frustrating that I do feel companies like ours there was a question earlier about software margins and businesses and VC stuff you know yeah we're not a software business but the interesting thing about Freeform is it's where the bits and the atoms are combined which I think makes us even more interesting. You know, you want your 5 ,000 X, 10 ,000 X, 20 ,000 X company, you get it at a company like this at Freeform.

1:42:22You know, you're not going to get that. Can you talk about some of the stress of working with space companies? I imagine like, you know, you guys aren't doing launches yourselves anymore. You're probably more relaxed than you were when you were at SpaceX. But at the same time, I'm sure you get, you know, a call or an email now and then being like, hey, we need this by, you know, Sunday night at this, you know, specific time because we're going to space. You know, what's it like kind of like working, you know, with with and customers around that? Yeah. No, that's also a great question. The, you know, truthfully, I'm probably more stressed now than I was when I was sitting face-to-face with Elon three times a week.

1:43:07Because I feel like the scope of what I focus on today is, I don't know. Actually, the scope of what I focused on there was like I kind of knew where I was. Here, it's like all over the, you know, top to bottom, you know, everything kind of ultimately falls on me in some capacity. But it is stressful. We get this with exactly what you just said all the time. You know, we get a call from customer that says, hey, guess what? We tried to get these somewhere else. The supplier let us down. You know, can you guys hook us up and get these done by Sunday? That can definitely be stressful. I think also, you know, the nature of a startup, especially one with as many moving parts as we have.

1:43:53You know, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a company that's more vertically integrated than us truly and does as much as we do in-house. you know, with such a small number of people actually today still, you know, we're building the plane while we're flying it. So, you know, at the end of the day we deliver on time and we've started to build a reputation and, you know, if you will, like a brand with these important customers that they come to us when they want their problem solved, you know, they come to us with the hard stuff. And, and when they, they can rely on us and we do everything we can to make sure we deliver on, you know, before promise and better be, you know, exceed expectations.

1:44:29Do you feel like you have an edge? I imagine a lot of your competitors are family, multi-generational companies and or private equity owned. I just feel like you're clearly in a very different mindset, to say the meme, but founder mode, we need to over-deliver, we need to constantly be faster. Like it's not enough to respond to a customer in two hours. We need to respond in 30 minutes max. Like that kind of thing is that, you know, I think we've heard about from various founders on the show that, you know, when they email somebody in China, even if it's 2 a.m. for them, they respond instantly.

1:45:14And in America, they might get a response two weeks later. And it's like, hey, fill out this form. So talk about kind of like bringing that sort of like mentality that you have to to this industry. 100 percent. So I feel that we have an unfair advantage for a bunch of reasons. I think I was raised in the school of SpaceX, you know, 2005. You know, early on, there were there were 50 people, 60 people. I was there until there were 10 ,000 people. and you know I think that that the things that I learned that that are just second nature to me of immediate you know you do it now call people on the phone this is something that's been lost you know over the last several years and I and I and I do see it you know we hire you know we're hiring we interview all the time this has gotten lost but that is something that we have that I don't think the rest of the 3d printing space you know the industry has you know we don't advertise a lot in fact we very intentionally do not align ourselves with the traditional metal printing you know i'm not trying to alienate anyone but you know we're just i don't even want to be compared because it's not even fair um we have done so much more and moved so much faster with so much less money than the rest of the whole industry and there's just so much noise and i just don't i don't i don't play that game uh i'm like come see it for yourself if you want to see us printing parts super fast, you're welcome to come over and actually see it.

1:46:45I'm not going to put together some pretty marketing stuff and just do it. So I do think you're entirely right. The mentality is everything. Culture of the company and the way that you enforce that culture and reinforce that culture is very important. Can we zoom out a little bit and talk about the 3D printing industry broadly and where you think it's going, even at a consumer level? I I feel like 10 years ago, there was this sense, or at least 3D printing companies were promising, hey, you're not even going to have to order that toy because you're just going to have a 3D printer in your home that just sort of prints it on the fly.

1:47:22And that clearly hasn't happened. And it was a good fundraising narrative. But I'm curious, as somebody who's doing this all day long, again, in a specific niche, But I'm curious how you think about the industry evolving over time and consumer use cases. Yeah, 100 percent. I mean, I think like I had plastic printers, too. You know, before I even I was never a guy, you know, I saw the potential of printing when I was designing and architecting like Raptor and Starship. And, you know, there were three of us sitting talking to Elon about how we're going to colonize Mars. And I'm like, we're going to have to make, you know, we're not going to carry like bar stock and machine it on Mars.

1:48:06You know, we're going to have to use what's there and turn it into, you know, the minimum material we need and then make it. So the conceptually, the idea of, of additive manufacturing, which I don't even like that name, but, um, is, is, it seems legit, you know, like use what you need and just make the shapes you need and you can grow it organically. Like nature, nature is usually a good model for things. that all makes sense to me. I do agree like the over hype by others in the space in hindsight, you look back and you're like, yeah, of course that wasn't gonna be, what happened? You know, plastic printer prices dropped.

1:48:44People started buying them with this promise that they were gonna be able to print all these things. You bought the thing, you built it. You printed a pencil holder that you downloaded off the internet. You realize I don't know how to do CAD or have access to CAD tools. So I'm downloading models from others. It's just a novelty space, you know, and I think has been for a while. Metal printing at least had its roots in something more real that I think there was potential there. But we were clearly so far away from, you know, where we needed to be because the behind the scenes, customers are buying these million dollar machines and then having to hire PhDs to operate them to get maybe one out of every five parts over the course of a month.

1:49:27that might be good. You know, it's just so far away. And one of one of the reasons for that, by the way, I do believe is because they tried to monetize on the machine itself. They were like, we need to make this million dollar box and then sell this to customers. And I think that was one of the mistakes was that's why we rewound and said, hey, if I can unwrap the box, if I don't have to sell a box to a customer, as dumb as this sounds, if I don't have to sell them this self-contained box. Now, what can I do? I can rethink how the process is done. I don't have to have put my powder on in a little spot in the corner anymore.

1:50:03I could use half the room if I need to, you know, what is the right first principles way to do what I'm trying to do as efficient and fast as possible. And then let's engineer a solution for that. So, you know, yeah, such a better, uh, B2B experience is just paying for the end state, uh, versus, But I'm curious, to push you a little bit further, do you think that end state of, just like people today might have a printer in their home, every home in America has a 3D printer, you think that's a reality 10, 15 years from now? I can imagine AI, you can now generate a CAD file, or is it just kind of still going to be unnecessary and inefficient?

1:50:46You know, that's a great question. uh part of me wants to feel you know the future is these are always interesting things to think about you know um my gut tells me that um we should we should uh centralize and and it's a service i feel like the world is going to you know the direction is you own less and less look at like your cars it's like you got people now that literally don't own cars anymore and they just like rent the service. Why? Cause it's easier. It's, it's not because they don't have to drive. It's just easier, you know? So ultimately if you make it easier and you make it cheaper and you can take advantage of economies of scale, I think that that probably makes more, more sense.

1:51:30And then, you know, to, to be clear, like we, the vision for free form was always to be more than just a metal printing company. You know, I think that the, the concept, at least at the beginning in my head was let's dominate the enabling manufacturing technology then let's let's solve the how do i go from the printed part to the end to the end use part that can just be plugged in via make the printing process better post machine it you know heat treat whatever let's solve that problem end to end and then let's vertically integrate on some products um because at the end of the day, why would I, you know, there are some specific areas that we're starting to do some things in that are quite interesting that our technology, our approach uniquely enables that I think, you know, ultimately that's where the money is to be made up and down the stack.

1:52:25But the progression kind of makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. Last question on my set, Have you seen any interesting upticks in demand or interest from the tariff, the trade war, or just given the nature of your existing customer base focusing on aerospace and defense? I can imagine a lot of your customers just aren't too impacted given they were already focused on sort of having U.S. supply chains. Yeah. No, we actually have seen quite a bit of uptick since the tariff stuff is happening. It seemed like there were a lot more companies out there, relatively big name ones, that were doing a lot of business with China specifically, more than I was aware.

1:53:09Well, they don't try to advertise that. They're not yelling that from a rooftop. Yeah, they don't. Yes, which is interesting. But yeah, to answer your question directly, we have definitely seen an uptick. and I think it's also as word has started to get out about us in the space, I think, you know, because we have kind of flown under the radar for quite a while, you know, I think people are now starting to hear about us and, you know, and I feel like they should be worried, you know, about what we're doing and our pace and like ability to disrupt. They should be. So good. I have a couple more questions.

1:53:45Yeah. But first, 3D printing for a long time had this stigma around it as it's great for prototypes, but at a certain point, you're going to want to switch to a different manufacturing strategy. Are you seeing customers come in and say, hey, we just want to work with you for a little bit on the prototyping side, and then maybe we'll do something different. And then do you have to kind of walk them through the vision? Or is it very clear up front that, hey, this is about scale. The part that we're making for your rocket or your plane in 20 years, it's still going to be coming off of a freeform machine because that's the business model.

1:54:26Yeah, absolutely. So we do also, our business is not exclusively aerospace and defense. It's a large portion of it, but we do do automotive work. We work with several semiconductor companies. There's some other kind of energy, you know, I'll put the energy sector kind of companies we work with that are interesting. And yeah, so I guess the, I just completely blanked on the question. So the question is, is prototyping versus scaled manufacturing. I imagine at a certain point, like automotive, if I would, you know, if I'm a car manufacturer, I'd love to come to you and say, hey, let's prototype a bunch of parts.

1:55:06But then once I get it dialed in, I'm like the historical example would be, oh, then I'm going to go get it, you know, subtracted as a machine or cast. Right. But at a certain point, it sounds like, hey, I want to make a hundred thousand cars this year. And you're going to say, yeah, I'm along for the ride and I'm going to be cost competitive. But have you had to is that the right thesis? And have you had to walk customers through that? Yep, exactly. Yes. So we generally turn down today, depending on the company and the potential, we turn down a lot of the prototyping stuff. That makes sense. Because it just doesn't make sense for us to focus on that.

1:55:45Unless it's coming from a huge company that there's something interesting that could come after. Like a path to a real project. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. We generally turn that stuff down. We have the upfront talk with customers about the scale and that's the target. You know, that's what we're interested in. That's how we're going to get, you know, economies of scale and the costs and down to where everybody needs it to be. And ultimately, you know, I think one of the interesting things about the space. So I will say, like, from my time at SpaceX, I always liked solving these extremely complex, interdisciplinary system level problems.

1:56:20You know, and these very, very, you know, how do we colonize Mars? And it's like a lot of people's brains will short circuit. I don't even know where to start. and weirdly enough like i was always like well i'm just not smart enough to figure this out so i'm just gonna like assume that doesn't matter and assume that doesn't matter until i get to something that i'm i'm like well i can calculate this so i'm gonna start here you know and then just go from there um the the interesting thing about printing as as we've started we have started to demonstrate the the the feasibility of truly scaling it up is that it starts to you start to think about the disruption of, um, even the product life cycles, like a lot of the product life cycle stuff today is centered around these very long manufacturing timelines.

1:57:06So meaning like, you know, it's just, and I don't have a conclusion here other than, you know, how much more often would products get updated or customized? Um, if you didn't have to wind up a 12 months of tooling in a casting facility, right? Yeah. Well, speaking of that product update, I imagine that you're building the machine and then you're also scaling up the machine. And once you have a really solid contract, I imagine that then it's like, okay, well, we're going to want to, like, this machine is capable of doing this part and we want to do that at volume. So what is your product release cycle on the actual machine side?

1:57:46Because are you freezing and then doing a V2, V3, or are you upgrading the machines iteratively? What does that look like? We do a little bit of both, actually. We do some level of upgrading. So there's a roadmap that was like the first thing we ever built was just can we put a bunch of lasers on a thing and melt stuff pretty fast? It was not designed to be a throughput maximizer or it was small, the platform wasn't big. It was just like, can I put a bunch of lasers in a small area and melt stuff quickly. The second thing was then can I take that and scale it up to something that's actually useful in size and start to demonstrate some of the architectural elements of the system that enable the lights out factory?

1:58:33Like how do I unpack and get the parts out and get them off the plate and get them ready for the next steps or whatever it needs to do? The third step of that has been to go even bigger. That's what we're building actually right now. So we went from, you know, I don't remember the exact number of throughput capability from Gen 1 to 2. It was something like 20x from 1 to 2, and then 2 to 3. I came from SpaceX, so everything starts at 0. So 0 to 1, you know, 1 to 2. What we're building now is basically the third generation of the technology. And this is the one that is, the platform is quite large.

1:59:13um like the size of this of this platform is is is is for what it can do it's tiny um compared to the industry but it's it's pretty large they make these huge parts and it's like 10 to 20x higher throughput than even the system we're using for production today um so you know we've basically taken these huge steps um every every generation and then there's the the the incremental improvements which are predominantly around software generally because we're implementing better models, faster compute, faster sensors, and we're rolling those out in real time. Luckily, I came from the aerospace industry.

1:59:51I led certification of Falcon 9 and Merlin for the Air Force and NASA. It's like, so I can talk to the aerospace folks. I can talk to the defense folks. I know what they're looking for in terms of product release, you know, that, that, uh, uh, uh, you know, hardware in the loop testing and then releasing software versions, locking certain things down for production and having control of that. Um, so that, that's been helpful too, to kind of, you know, grease the wheels of that with customers that are like, oh wait, you're changing stuff all the time. Like, no, not, not exactly. Um, but yeah. Last question.

2:00:24I'll let you go. I don't know if, Jordy, you have anything. Are you good? I'm good. I'd love to know a few pieces of advice or lessons that you took away from working with Elon that folks might be able to apply even if they don't have a decade of experience at an actual Elon company. What do you think is actually actionable? Oh, man. Boy, there's quite a bit. Surround yourself with the smartest, most accomplished people you can in general and then listen to them. Secondly, there's no problem that we can't solve together. You, you, you, you know, people are their biggest, you know, this is easy to say too, right.

2:01:03And hard to put into practice, but you know, you're your biggest enemy. If you think you can't do it, you definitely can't do it. And then question everything, question everything. You know, Elon is an extremely smart man. I feel obviously like very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work at SpaceX for so along and sit in the room and see how he makes decisions and, you know, and, and the good and the bad, you know, I mean, all of it, I, I just, I had a good experience at SpaceX, um, and, and learned a lot and, and a lot of, you know, even free form today, there are a bunch of current and former execs at SpaceX that are investors, um, in free form and, uh, obviously founders fund and, you know, eight VC and valor and a bunch of, you know, top tier, um, uh, investment firms, threshold and two sigma they'll all get mad at me if i don't list them all out you know i gotta get the credits yeah i gotta say eric uh you make me believe in onshoring manufacturing yes when i talk to you i believe that it's possible it's easy to to be blackpilled and say no we're never going to make it in america but i feel like if we just give you like another 20 years we'll be able to make anything here.

2:02:18Yeah, it sounds chaotic day to day when you read the headlines, but when you actually talk to someone who's working on this and who's clearly going to be working on it for decades more, it feels tractable. Yeah. Yes. It's totally tractable. Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. We have to have you back. This is really, really enjoyable. Thank you. Would be a pleasure, guys. Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Sounds good. And if you're trying to sell some 3D printed metal parts all across the United States.

2:02:48You got to get on numeral, numeral HQ sales tax on autopilot. And I have some breaking news, breaking news. My company Lucy is now on numeral. Let's go double kill. One hand washes the other. The money goes into my pocket and back into numerals pocket. There we go. It's great. But we have been keeping our next guest waiting. We will bring him in. We're talking about robots with Formic. Formic.co is the website. Let's pull it up. Full service robotic automation for$0 CapEx. That's what we like to hear. We love when CapEx is free. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing today? Welcome to the Antec CapEx Club.

2:03:34Good to meet you guys. Thanks for having me on. It's a great club. Yeah, fantastic. Can you introduce yourself? Give us a breakdown of the company, where you're at, and what you're building. Sounds good. Yeah. My name is Salman. I'm the CEO of Formic. We're building the robot army that is helping American manufacturers automate. You can see some of them on the screen behind me. These are our robot babies, as we affectionately call them. We have hundreds of them across more than 100 factories now in the U.S. that are using our robots to produce all kinds of products. We're making everything from metal parts for aircraft and automotive, plastic parts for lawnmowers and golf carts, as well as things like food and beverage.

2:04:11We make all the nachos for Chipotle and dog food and cat food and laundry detergent. You name it, our robots are helping to make it. You make Chipotle nachos robotically? Let's go. We are indeed. The last guy I heard Eric was on, you guys were talking about bringing manufacturing back. It's real. It's happening. We're really excited to be part of it. Yeah. What do you have to say to the naysayers that say we'll never make it in America? The haters. The haters. Look, I lived in China for 25 years and I saw the industrialization of that country. And it's not a two year process. Industrializing is a 20 year journey at the minimum.

2:04:52and probably much more. And we do have 250 ,000 factories in America that are making all kinds of products. So they exist. The problem is we don't have labor force to support them. It's not just about cost of labor. There are millions of unfilled jobs in factories today. The typical utilization rate of a factory in America is less than 2 ,000 hours a year. The comparable number in China is 7 ,500 hours a year. right like there's 8 700 possible production hours in a given year the vast majority of american factories are sitting around collecting dust 75 of the time uh and it's not because like there isn't demand for their products it isn't because there isn't raw materials available right like it basically just boils down to the fact that there aren't people who want to work in these factories and do these back-breaking jobs day in day out um and so until we automate a bunch of them we're gonna have a really hard time uh re-industrializing so uh you know i'm optimistic, Jordy.

2:05:48I think there is a lot of opportunity to re-industrialize and bring more manufacturing back, but it's not going to be in a year or two, right? Like we're helping make that happen faster, but it's going to take some time. Like a really dumb criticism that I don't agree with of this company, and it might be completely wrong, would be like, hey, this is just financial innovation. You're swapping CapEx to OpEx. That allows you to grow really fast. I think that could be good for industrialization. Um, but, uh, how much of that is key to the business? And then what else are you doing? Uh, I imagine that you're not, uh, you know, mining the metal to make the robots.

2:06:25Uh, you might even be purchasing the robots from other people and then designing software suites and integrating. Um, but you know, Palantir goes to, Oh, it's just a consulting shop or whatever. Uh, what is the criticism of your company of like, of like where you're starting? And then why is that the right path to start and then grow out from? Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I think it starts from like the basic premise that people, most roboticists are working on the wrong problem, right? I was a VC for 10 years. I was investing in robotics companies. I funded like 50 different robotics companies and saw all the different ways in which they had challenges.

2:06:56And what I realized is like, look, any roboticist will tell you getting a robot to do a job is 10 % of the work. 90 % of the work is like, how do you do error handling? And how do you solve all the shit that happens after you deploy that robot. And I think that's the part that's generally underappreciated, which is like, we'll see a robot doing a backflip in a cool YouTube video. But once you try to get that robot to do that reliably for 99.8 % uptime, you start to encounter all kinds of issues, right? Joint failures, maintenance challenges, programming issues, your infeed, like your product just has a lot more variation than you expected.

2:07:33And I think it's generally underappreciated. And so the reason that factories in America don't automate today is not because you can't get a robot to do this job. The problem is like all the surrounding infrastructure doesn't exist. And so if you're the factory that focuses on making chocolate chip cookies and you're really good at the best chocolate chip cookie recipe and baking, like you're not also super good at deploying robots and managing them. And so what happens is like, they're just kind of overwhelmed. They don't know what to get. They don't know how to get it. They don't know how to manage it.

2:08:02They don't know how to maintain it. And so what we realized is like, you have to build all the surrounding infrastructure. Like robotics has this last mile problem where if you can make it easy to scope, deploy, manage, and maintain the robot, then you can drive mass adoption. And so we built a bunch of software that does that. We use computer vision and LiDAR scans to do kind of full site evaluation in an automated way. This used to take months to walk through the facility and measure every single thing to figure out what you can automate and what kind of robot you need. We do that in minutes.

2:08:34then you need to figure out what robot to build and deploy. So you need to basically simulate different robot arms doing that job with different grippers, different conveyors, different safety scanners, different fencing. Like you need all of this stuff to make a robot useful. Then you need to actually program the robot to do the job. And so we basically built AI that automates the process of programming the robot. And then lastly, once that robot's deployed, you have kind of all the ongoing management of that robot, right? So how do you do teleoperation? How do you do error handling? How do you preventative maintenance?

2:09:02how do you gracefully recover from all the different types of errors that you're going to encounter there's a ton of infrastructure that needs to be built and so like 90 of roboticists that i meet are working on how do i make the robot a little bit smarter and nobody is working on this giant problem which is the reason that robots don't aren't deployed right i can tell you from the hundreds of robots that we've deployed today less than five percent of my deployment cost is programming the robot to do the thing. It's completely delusional how many people are spending their time trying to make a robot a little bit easier to program.

2:09:36That's inconsequential to me. I need to focus on solving the other 95 % of the cost of deploying robots. So I don't know if that answers your question. Can you talk about landing on CPG, food and beverage, broadly? You said you invested in 50-plus different robotics companies. I'm assuming you saw a bunch of success and failure. And I'm assuming that was super intentional to land here. And then I want to ask, you know, potentially, you know, other categories that you're excited about. Yeah, I'll be honest, it wasn't that intentional. We started out going really broad, we were doing things in metal fabrication, we were doing things in plastic injection molding, we're doing things in CPG and a bunch of other industries.

2:10:17Ultimately, we narrowed back into CPG for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's the actual, it's the industry where there's the most amount of utilization, right? So the typical CPG factory actually runs 20 to 24 hours a day. In things like metal fabrication, like parts of factories that make metal parts for aerospace and automotive, they typically run, you know, eight hours a day of production, but actually only like six hours a day of actual parts being made. There's like two hours a day where people are setting up and tearing down. So high utilization means automation has a much, much bigger short-term impact.

2:10:52Number two, it's the industry where there's actually a lot more of it happening domestically. In metal and plastic manufacturing and other stuff, a lot of it is still being imported today from China, from Mexico, from Canada, from other places. But because CPG products are generally low value and low margin, it's not worth it to ship them across the ocean. So a lot of that is actually happening domestically. So there are a lot of factories that can use automation. And third, those are the jobs that are the most backbreaking, painful jobs, right? Like you can afford to pay a machinist 50 bucks an hour or 60 bucks an hour, because that's like a high value, high margin product.

2:11:28You can't afford to pay somebody who's packing boxes more than 15 bucks an hour. And so they're still picking up super heavy, you know, cases of drinks and things like that. Exactly. Yeah, it's backbreaking. Can you take me through kind of a market map or like the topography of robotics? Because I've watched how it's made. I've seen, you know, a little scooper. I don't even know if I'd call it a robot. It's more just like a machine. Then there's, you know, two axis gantries. I'm seeing a lot of robotic arms, a lot of six axis stuff. And then you get into the humanoid world. uh where's the biggest opportunity in terms of or where's where's the most need to deploy and like what type of robot is the most important to just roll out in america right now um yeah i think like articulated six axis robot arms are still the vast majority of use cases right um i think if you look at what humans are doing in these factories like they're typically using their arms not other parts of their body so i think it's just an indicator of like that That's the most common task, whether you're talking about assembly, whether you're talking about quality control, you need vision, obviously, whether you're talking about packaging, whether you're talking about even kind of primary food handling and sorting.

2:12:47In the metal fabrication world, you need a lot of machine tending, which is picking up a blank part and putting it into a CNC machine. We have a bunch of robots that are doing that. All of those are just kind of articulated arms that can do it. So I think there are use cases for the humanoid form factor to kind of do new types of tasks. We also have some gantry robots that we've deployed that do certain types of applications where it's like very high payload work. But, you know, to be honest, like the form factor is kind of irrelevant because in all of these types of robots that you're talking about, you have a couple of motors and some motion control.

2:13:20Right. Like it's actually if you can abstract away the software enough, like all of those things are essentially different variations on the same on the same problem. I want to talk about the CapEx thing. What's the damage for a company if they're not working with you to buy a bunch of six axis robot arms these days? Can you give me like an order of magnitude for how much these robots even cost? I've seen a couple of them. Yeah, or maybe even some of the history. I mean, we've seen so many companies try to automate you know bring in robotics right like nike has a history of trying to do this in in latin america and just failing miserably despite having seemingly competent partners so um yeah i i'd love some additional context there yeah yeah so um uh i'll start i'll start with the second question first and then i'll move to the first question so uh the vast majority of robots in America today are deployed in very, very big companies.

2:14:23So General Motors, Procter & Gamble are two examples of the biggest buyers of robots in America. They buy a couple hundred robots a year. And they have very large in-house engineering teams who can use those robots to do different kinds of tasks. The problem is 99 % of factories in America are small, medium-sized businesses. And the logic follows, if you take a single General Motors plant that makes cars, there's 4 ,000 small factories that make the components that go to General Motors that get assembled into a car, right? So there's one guy who makes the windshield and one guy who makes the screws and another guy who makes, you know, the tires, right?

2:15:04Like every single one of those smaller factories is not automated at all today. Like 95 % of them don't have any robots. So the cost is a part of the question, right? Which is, yeah, it costs between a couple hundred thousand dollars to a couple million dollars to build a fully automated robot work cell. The interesting thing though is if you break down that cost, about 30 % of that cost is the hardware itself, right? Like the robot arm and the conveyors and that kind of stuff. 70 % of the cost is all the custom engineering that you typically have to pay for, for integrators and consultants and this and that to come in and try to customize it to your process.

2:15:45And if you're a small factory, you don't have the capacity to get rid of that 70 % custom engineering cost because you don't really know anything about robotics. And so the reason that we built all this kind of infrastructure tooling around it is that we're cutting out that 70%. It costs us significantly less to go and buy and build and deploy those robots than it would for them to try to do it on their own. Can you walk me through who the best robot builders are in the world right now? What does the supply chain look like in terms of constructing, building, R &Ding new robots? Who are the major players globally?

2:16:25Who are the up and comers? I don't even know if I could name a single robot maker, but I'm interested to hear kind of like what the landscape looks like who the who the major players are yeah so the the biggest robot companies in the world are all not American right so FANUC is Japanese they're they're one of the biggest ones KUKA used to be a German company it got acquired by a Chinese company

2:16:50ABB Yaskawa you know Mitsubishi you know there's a bunch of these kind of very very large industrial companies that make robot arms. The thing to note though, is that like buying a robot arms is effectively kind of useless on its own. You need a full robot work cell to make that work. So you need PLCs that often come from like Siemens or Rockwell. You need sensors that come from a programmable logic controller. So it's like the control, it's the thing that controls all the peripherals and safety equipment. Got it. Yeah. And then you need like conveyors, You need safety scanners that are often made by like Key and Cognac, so much of a other company.

2:17:29You need grippers, which is the end of arm tool. So today, like the vast majority of people who deploy robots basically hire a consultant that goes and buys all these different components for them and then assembles it and then deploys it for them. Yeah, I saw this at Hadrian. They have a six axis robot arm and they have this like invisible wall that if you put your hand there, it'll just stop. Yeah, a light curtain. Yeah, light curtain. That's what it's called. That's right. But why has automating 3PLs proven to be such a challenge? Amazon had their internal efforts. I think there's like Six River Systems, which was maybe Shopify acquired them.

2:18:10But it just seemingly is such a difficult task. And you would think that grabbing items and putting labels on them and shipping them should be... uh it seems straightforward but uh clearly not yeah i mean i'll i'll i'll note that like we don't know a ton about 3pls because almost all of our work is in manufacturing logistics is a much much smaller industry and like we're not in it today uh i will say right like logistics has to deal with a lot more variability than manufacturing um because if you're if you're running a 3pl like any kind of product could come into your warehouse anytime and so you need systems that can deal with all of them and there's just there's just like physics based constraints on that right like if you're picking up uh you know a a one ounce bag of something versus a 50 50 pound uh box like you just need fundamentally different physical hardware um and that's why i think a lot of this kind of humanoid stuff is is very strange because like if you're picking up a 50 pound box with one of those robots like it's it's very likely to tip over pretty easily like you need and if you want to move at any kind of speed, right?

2:19:20Because if you take a 50 pound box and you move it at, you know, five miles an hour, your effective load during that acceleration is like double or triple that, right? So it's like 100 pounds of load that you have to be able to handle, which is just kind of impossible. If you move to manufacturing, like you have a lot more consistency because every production line is kind of making the same part or the same product at relatively higher rate. And so the technical complexity is lower, but the operational complexity is higher. Interesting. On the note of humanoids, are you worried about depreciation with humanoids?

2:19:55I think this is a concern if humanoids end up, you know, working well, but then following the same path as like EVs, because there's like high, you know, there's high wear and tear on cars, right? They're just like going down a road all the time. And that's challenging. And you can imagine humanoids are walking around with these heavy, uh, loads. And then, uh, simultaneously, like all of that interaction just feels like, um, I worry about the economics of humanoids. If you buy a rope, a robot for 50 K and the next year it's worth 10 K it's like, well, you almost could have hired a human for that kind of, uh, cost, but I'm curious what your point of view is.

2:20:36Yeah. I think it depends on what, um, what the task is, right? Like if you're using that humanoid to do an occasional task, right? Like pick up your laundry and put it into the basket, for example, like you don't worry so much about wear and tear because it's low frequency. If you're talking about manufacturing use case, right? Like these robots behind me, all of them operate 24 hours a day. And so at that cycle rate, like you're doing maybe 50 ,000 cycles a day. At that rate, like the wear and tear you get on all the components is very, very high. and like a six axis robot has six motors a humanoid most of these humanoids that we've seen have something like 30 to 50 motors right and so just you're just talking about like the wear on the motor we have to go out and lubricate these joints and and and and replace motors on a pretty regular basis um i can't imagine if i had to do that for 50 motors instead of instead of three right yeah uh speaking motors um i saw that in the latest uh boston dynamics demo they said that they switched to electric motors is that a meaningful shift in robotics or is that something that's unique to their approach to building humanoids um yeah so most of the robots that we use use servo motors so they're all they're all kind of electric motors it's pretty it's pretty standard.

2:21:56Some of the new humanoids are using linear actuators, which is a newer technology. And I think the Tesla humanoid is doing that. It's like the exact kind of wear and tear profile on that is not clear. And a lot of them are actually building their own motors from scratch. So like the Chinese, like I think this is a place where China has a huge advantage compared to like a lot of the American startups. Like Unitree, for example, which I'm sure you guys have seen those videos like they have uh built an entire team to build uh actuators and a whole team that's building their own custom lidar and a whole team that's building their own kind of custom sensing across the country you know for most of these american companies it's kind of inconceivable to go and try to invent your own motor and try to figure out how to build a humanoid but in china it's possible to be much more vertically integrated that's so odd because you have to imagine back in the dawn of the automotive revolution like ford was certainly building motors and wheels and tires and seats and the frames and stuff.

2:22:57Like we did have the ability to have a vertically integrated supply chain at one point in America. And then we just decomposed it so much that, uh, it's been, it's been a struggle to get back to vertical integration. Uh, very, very tricky. The management consultants got hold of us. They did. They did. Um, uh, But yeah, on humanoids, I don't know if you've been following what physical intelligence has been doing with some of the end-to-end models, this idea of generalization. Are you looking at any software approaches that are more, I don't know, big data or deep learning driven to handle more of those edge cases to automate the last 90 % of the work that you're doing?

2:23:43and what are you following on the AI side of things these days? Yeah. So I think these vision language action models, like what physical intelligence is doing, are very promising. We're running trials on some of those vision language action models for some of our use cases. The problem today is that they're just generally too slow for us to be able to use them in a kind of commercial setting. But I think that'll get better in the next few years. so there are like you know in the common trajectory for us like we'll start out in a factory with one or two robots and then the factory will come to us and say hey can you help me like automate all these other tasks on my production line and today some of those are solved and some of them are not and so as we go you know as these vision language action models get better and other kinds of techniques around deep learning get better we'll start to go and address more and more of those tasks um yeah i mean this is great yeah continue i was just gonna say you know like i think that the the thing to note here is like we're just at a very different place compared to uh like more established automation economies or like in china right now uh last year there were about 400 000 robots uh deployed uh in the entire u.s we had about 30 000 robots deployed so less than a tenth of the amount of robots deployed in a place where the labor cost is so much higher that you could theoretically justify a much higher use case of robots.

2:25:07And I think a big part of the reason is like China just has so many more engineers that they can put towards the problem of design and deployment. Plus they subsidize a lot of the kind of robotics industry to be able to go and make it easy for people to deploy. I think in the US we have this challenge where there's a lot more small and medium-sized businesses and we don't have the historical infrastructure or the engineering capability for all these plants to figure out how to automate on their own. And so like building this set of tooling and helping them figure out what are the latest things that are happening in kind of AI and machine learning and computer vision that we can apply to the different use cases in your facility is, I think, the only way that we can move faster than China in the long run.

2:25:46Is there anything that you want to see from the U.S. government to speed up the deployment of robotics in America? Trillion dollar contract. I mean, yeah, I mean, you could imagine subsidies or incentives or, you know, a strategic reserve of robots. But you could also just look at like deregulation. But I don't know what your take is. Yeah. I mean, so I'm excited to go to the Hill and Valley Forum next week and talk about that a little bit. But like, frankly, I don't think there's much that's necessary, right? Like, I think the incentive is there, right? There's plenty of financial incentive for these small and medium-sized factories to do it.

2:26:24To be honest, the biggest barrier to adoption of robotics in America is a cultural change. These factory owners, a lot of these are third-generation businesses. They've been passed down or they're private equity-owned. In both cases, you end up with these businesses that are very risk-averse. They're afraid to adopt new technology. They don't have the internal capabilities to do it. I think from the government side, things that are being done around educating that group of manufacturers and helping them to deploy automation will have a very big impact. Similar to what China does, actually in the US, we've had subsidies for small, medium-sized factories for the last 10 years to buy automation equipment.

2:27:04There's accelerated depreciation. A lot of states have matching grants where if you buy a$500 ,000 piece of machinery, the state will grant up to 50 % of that cost. And so we've had plenty of these incentives in place, but adoption is super low. When we talk to the states, most of them say, we can't give out these grants. Nobody's using it because people don't know what to buy. They don't know how to buy it. And once they buy it, they can't handle the responsibility of this new piece of equipment. And so there's tons of grant dollars just sitting around not getting deployed because there's this kind of, there's this, there's this barrier at the last mile.

2:27:44Makes sense. Very informative. Thank you. We'll see you at Hill and Valley. Yeah. We'll see you next week. Awesome. Look forward to it. Appreciate you guys having me on. Have a great day. Cheers. And we want to tell you about Polymarket, go to polymarket.com. To get the real news, get the information. We got a new market up there. One billion chat GPT users in 2025. That's great. It is currently at a 64 % chance and feels likely to me. The way that they're pacing is generational. We have some posts in there. Callie's here. I'll let you take the intro. I'll be right back. Welcome in, Callie. I'm going to play a sound effect here.

2:28:34Boom. Uh, what's going on looking good in the suit. You've been wearing those a lot these days. A lot of, a lot of the tech folks have been brushing off the suits these days and coming to DC. Uh, so nice to, nice to, nice to go to the closet. How do you stay healthy when you're in DC? Do you have a good, uh, do you have a workout routine? A couple of favorite restaurants? Are you just, uh, you know, five coffees a day, no breakfast or lunch? I would love to say I'm on the TrueMed Good Energy program, but the sleep has been lacking, I will say. Trying to find good food, but not eating much, just a lot of caffeine.

2:29:15Yeah, I bet. Let's jump right into this food dye ban. I'd love to get your high-level take on it. It seems, you know, the big question, we're a technology and business. There you go. We focus on business, and my big question is how manufacturers will respond to the ban, given that it's hard enough to even just deliver on the existing demand that they have, much less make fundamental changes. And to be clear, I'm very much in favor of the ban. but I'm curious what you think this kind of looks like in practice. Yeah, I mean, I'll back up a little bit. I think there's a lot of lessons for business in this environment we're in right now, but I never expected to be here.

2:30:09I'm at the White House now. I'm a special government employee as well as running TrueMed with Justin Mayers. And Justin and I started the company on the mission of, I think a lot of founders do this. We just wanted to impact the world and change health incentives. And just through the advocacy, Justin and I going on podcasts and talking about this, something started resonating on this idea that our healthcare and food systems are broken in the past year. I got to know Bobby Kennedy, got to know President Trump, helped connect them for the endorsement. Now coming on and helping to advise the next couple of months.

2:30:44But I think the big lesson of this food diet ban, I don't even know, I really like the word ban. I like phase out. because ban implies over-regulation. And I think what people are waking up to is there's mass distrust of legacy industry right now. I mean, I talk a lot about the food industry. It was run by the cigarette industry in the 1990s. Few people remember this, but 50 % of the US food supply was controlled by Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds in the early 1990s. They consolidated the food industry when smoking rates were going down. They were actually some of the largest companies in the world in the 80s, like highest market caps.

2:31:19and some of the biggest balance sheets in history of capitalism, tobacco companies. It's a good business, nicotine. And they consolidated Kraft, U.S. Food, Nabisco, and very deliberately bought off the USDA to recommend the food pyramid, which is basically a recommendation for ultra-processed food. And they shifted very strategically thousands of scientists from the tobacco department to the food department and really added all these chemicals in our food to make them hyper-addictive So through that corporate capture and what I would call the weaponization of food today in America, a child's diet is 70 percent ultra processed food in Japan or Italy.

2:31:58It's 15 percent. So so my big argument is that we don't really have a free market with these outcomes where, of course, the disease rates are just skyrocketing. I mean, the stats are crazy. We're digging into this for a report for the administration. We spend five times more per capita on health care than Spain, but live six years less. I mean, Spain doesn't even have a good health care program. So so these are common sense actions. And I think I think there's a really a moment I'm meeting with a lot of food companies, a lot of pharma companies, you know, and they they're running scared because Americans have lost trust.

2:32:33I mean, we all know this. I think it's why there's such a robust, you know, tech ecosystem building and startup ecosystem. You know, it's because these large companies have really lost trust of the American consumer and the American public, I think, often for good reason. So I would call this not as much a ban, it's a correcting of corrupt incentives where these food dyes, I mean, just total no brainer. They're petroleum based. They're literally crude oil. They add a molecule to crude oil, make that bright neon color, and they're phased out of essentially every other country. So it's an example of common sense actions that I think are quite needed.

2:33:07That phase out in other countries, does that mean that a lot of these manufacturers fully have the ability to sell these products and make these products to sell into the U.S. market and they're just choosing not to for the most part? It's even more shocking than that. They actually often make the product in the United States. So Kellogg's makes Froot Loops with carrot juice and watermelon juice and ships them across the border to Canada and ships them over to Europe. They make the same product with petroleum-based dyes here in the U.S. So a lot of our food can actually be exported to Europe based on just the chemicals in them right now.

2:33:44So actually, the U.S. companies are... What is the... Is it a margin thing? You know, is it... Just economic incentives. Yeah. Is it purely economics or is there something else? Yeah. The food ties... Again, I think this is one of the most no-brainer, unimpeachable things they could start with because it's actually not a cost thing. uh we've done a lot of engagement with the food industry on this um actually they've done a lot of research and they actually cite this as a reason for why they should keep it they say well the kids in focus groups lunge for the neon bright colors and it's like well i'm sure they do but you're feeding them crude oil so so it's really actually they say it's consumer preference and actually when pushed before the food industry said well we believe in consumer choice and kids prefer these bright colors.

2:34:35So that's one reason I think the administration and Secretary Keefe started with the food deniers. My three-year-old would love to eat cake for dinner every single night, but that doesn't mean that he should have the autonomy to just make that decision himself as a three-year-old. Yeah. How do you think about the history here with corn subsidies? Is there a risk of like playing whack-a-mole as the government decides what to push or what to incentivize? What do you take away from not just what the food companies have done historically, but what the government has done historically to kind of like steer the food supply in one direction or another?

2:35:19Yeah, so I've been an entrepreneur for more than 10 years, but I grew up in D.C., started my career early on as a lobbyist for the food industry. And we used to weaponize this nanny state argument and say, you know, you don't want to be nanny state. But what I really have been trying to communicate, you know, and particularly, frankly, a rightward audience, you know, going on Tucker and Joe Rogan, things like that. What I've really been trying to do is articulate that this is not a nanny state regulation issue. It's a correction of corruption. When you look at agriculture subsidies, more than 90 percent go to corn, soy and meat, which are essentially the components of ultra processed food.

2:35:56And the grocery lobbyists and the food lobbyists push for that because at a supermarket, when you can put something in a box and last forever and it's bright neon colors, the profit margins are much higher, whereas natural food is low. So there's a huge incentive to shove ultra processed food down our throats, which has led to agriculture incentives that make a Coke at a supermarket cheaper than water because the Coke has so much subsidized ingredients in it. So that's not a free market. That's totally rigged. 90 percent of corn, soy, wheat, 0.4 percent of subsidies go to fruits and vegetables.

2:36:28Then you get to something like SNAP, the food stamp program. Now, Elon's looking at this. This is the fourth largest entitlement program. It's$140 billion a year. The number one item on food stamps is soda, and more than 60 % go to ultra-processed food. We're the only country in the world where a low-income nutrition assistance program goes to soda and Twinkies. So you're down the list. School lunches, the largest source of calories for kids, federally funded, no nutrition guidelines whatsoever, no sugar limits. So you've actually just very deliberately, you know, from the history of the tobacco companies, really weaponizing these regulations.

2:37:04But by my calculation, it's been a trillion dollars over the last 10 years of subsidies to ultra processed food. So we're trying to take step by step common sense actions to kind of unwind that. I also, quite frankly, think there's a cultural awakening happening where people realize the system is pretty screwed. And, you know, hopefully, you know, we were talking about it more. We're talking about it on a tech podcast. So the fact that people are trying to be healthier, reading labels more, Justin's talking a lot about this, obviously. I think that's a good thing, too. And very unexpectedly, you know, I do think President Trump, Bobby Kennedy, you wouldn't expect that this coalition, they're leading to an awakening where 24 states right now are passing legislation on food ingredients, school lunches.

2:37:47So I think it's very positive what's happening. I always thought it was fascinating that the food issue is it's secretly very bipartisan because you get like the right wing like trad folks who want to clean up the food supply. But then you also get like the left wing hippie who's hanging out at the farmer's market and is just like, yeah, I grew these vegetables myself. They're way better than the processed foods. Yeah, I'm curious. There should be a coalition there. Is food and health as political as it seems in the news? I feel like if you talk to people individually, you know, it's like John said, it's bipartisan.

2:38:24Like we want everybody to be healthier. And then you get into Washington and it feels like, you know, you mentioned you started your career in the lobbying space. So I'm curious, like where you think it's, you know, if it's actually a political issue for the average citizen or it's just manufactured by special interest groups. Oh, there's zero reason food and poisoning our kids should be political. And frankly, these things about reforming food stamps, you know, and taking the dyes out of our food were leftward issues, you know, five to 10 years ago. You know, digging into the health issue, I think one of the most pernicious and chronic conditions in America is Trump derangement syndrome.

2:39:03And I think TDS has led many people on the left to reflexively be opposed to these common sense policies. You know, probably a lot of the tech folks listening. I know politics is complicated. There's a lot going on, a lot of change happening. My hope is that we can all come together on these Maha policies. I mean, these are absolute no brainer. It's taking on incentives of the pharmaceutical industry, which is something the left used to talk a lot about. It's taking on the interest of processed food makers that are really doing some harmful things for kids. But you've had a wild situation where you've had Democrats now passionately arguing to keep food dice in the food.

2:39:43You've had Democrats passionately arguing that we need to continue to have a$10 billion subsidy from the federal government to soda companies on SNAP. Just reflexively because the Trump administration happens to be talking about this, you've had almost no support from Democrats. I called out Cory Booker, a senator from New Jersey, who I've worked with before I've met. I know he cares about these issues. Where the hell is Cory Booker? Why wasn't he at the Health and Human Services Department on Tuesday when Secretary Kennedy was announcing this policy on food dyes? Where is he helping on these issues?

2:40:15I mean, this is as bipartisan as it gets. How much does pharma's position end up influencing media narratives? They obviously spend an exceptional amount advertising with different media companies. This has been maybe a big issue in mainstream television where a television network is not going to bring somebody on to talk poorly about a company that is a big sponsor. if you wanted to come here and talk negatively about ramp, we'd probably change the conversation. Nothing negative. I have nothing negative to say about ramp. We love ramp. Fantastic. Of course. Of course. But how, you know, is that a focal point at all?

2:41:03Do you think we need some reform there? Is it just the sort of free market doing the free market? Yeah, this is how this framework I have. And, you know, I'm so privileged to be fighting this fight with Justin and with TruVet and trying to help the administration. But I think what we're doing with the strategies, we're putting a stake in the ground that everyone can agree with, where that in 10 years, our incentives of our system are changed. And the way I define those incentives is that nobody wants this. But the fact is the healthcare system, you know, a lot of health startups, quite frankly, still, their business model is predicated on more people being sick.

2:41:39The pharmaceutical industry makes more money when people are sicker for longer periods of time, hospitals make more money when the beds are full, not when they're empty. You know, insurance companies actually make more money when people are sicker because of this horrible medical loss ratio issue where they actually have an incentive to raise premiums. So you actually have every single lever of the healthcare system predicated on sickness. Now that same system, the pharma industry particularly, is the lifeblood of news and advertising over 50 % for most news channels. So that creates not a direct, you know, there's not a direct edict going down, but you have a zero lack of curiosity from the media about why people are getting sick.

2:42:18It's really just referees about, you know, hey, you need to take this drug. Ozempic is the standard of care for kids, you know, with COVID. I mean, COVID was a metabolic health crisis. We were 16 % of COVID deaths and 4 % of the world's population. And the CDC said at the time it's because our immune systems are so weak. We're dying very quickly when we get this disease. yet the media was just about the COVID vaccine for six months old. So you do have a very, very damaging situation where there's self-censorship. And the strategy is to get to that long-term world where new startups are thinking about how to make people healthy, not how to take advantage of a system and deliver direct to consumer or a Zimpec or a better UX on medical records.

2:43:03A better UX on medical records is putting lipstick on a pig. The problem is the underlying incentives of the system. You know, shipping pills in a millennial pink packaging is an innovation. You know, a lot of health care startups are just wrappers on the existing broken health incentives that are destroying the country and going to bankrupt us. So that's the stake we have. The way we get there is let's do unimpeachable things. So this food dye thing is one. Obviously, there's been a lot of talk about pharmaceutical ads. Secretary Kennedy and Marty McCary, the amazing new FDA commissioner, have talked about that.

2:43:36I have no announcements right now, but that's, you know, something they've said they're clearly looking at. So it's just getting these things that are 90 percent support issues, bipartisan issues. And I think you'll be seeing them in rapid succession, these announcements. Yeah. Does does the media, you know, incredible growth of drugs like Ozempic scare you? uh the obviously being overweight is uh unhealthy that's uh you know not not a political um uh point but uh when i hear people you know saying that they're sort of like losing more muscle than you know fat that can be uh that that personally um is uh you know can can be concerning and then i'm curious um if you have a general you know just personal personal opinion only on this sort of balance between like compounding and getting drugs that are benefiting people out quickly and affordably versus like, you know, protecting the intellectual property of the companies that, you know, develop these drugs?

2:44:42Great question. So on the first one, I'd say the Maha stance of Ozympic as best I can define it, my personal opinion, is there's nothing wrong with GLP-1s or Ozympic per se. Actually, I think something the administration is talking a lot about. It's not an anti-drug stance. I think with the dawn of AI and very exciting things, quite frankly, in therapeutics, there should be robust innovation and, frankly, deregulation at the FDA. The problem is that with the existence of Ozympic, it's two problems. One is that the drug costs 10 times more than it does in Germany or Sweden. And that's going to come from U.S.

2:45:16taxpayers. So there's a real corruption in the pricing. And then number two, corruption in the standard of care, what I call it. So there was a Medicare ruling from Biden that said that Ozempic should be the frontline defense for anyone who's obese or overweight on Medicare. So, you know, a 15 minute appointment, you get your Ozempic. And then that ruling. You stop diet or exercise, right? Right. And it didn't even mention there's no funding for diet. So we spend$5 trillion on health care, right? And then they were going to push this through where Ozempic's over$1 ,000 a month. which would come from taxpayers not with no other option or no other route for an american to get you know the blood testing to understand their nutrient deficiencies or talk to a dietary coach you know this is what true amended why would you put that flag in the ground it's like there should be flexibility with um with where health care dollars could go so the problem you know is not that ozipic exists it's that that medicare ruling would have gone to medicaid and would have gone to kids because now it's being essentially pushed on six-year-olds in the american academy pediatric So you're getting to a world where, you know, STAB rates, metformin rates, antidepressant rates have exploded among teens.

2:46:2435 % of teens are on some kind of chronic disease drug. And Ozipic would just be added to that repertoire. And of course, that's just not from our medical system incentivizing the root cause. I mean, maybe somebody that's 75-year-old on Medicare who is, you know, 400 pounds and extremely diabetic and set in their ways. Sure. I mean, probably Ozipic. I'd be fine with Medicare funding for that. But for the vast majority of American people, that shouldn't be the first line defense. That's the problem with our healthcare system right now. There's not flexibility for patients to maybe work with a functional medicine doctor or figure out a more root cause intervention because obviously obesity is not an osmetic deficiency.

2:47:06That's a great quote, yeah. Yeah, yeah. What countries do you look at as models? The tech industry loves to poke fun at Europe, you know, they don't tend to make$9 trillion companies very often or ever. They also don't win a lot of bodybuilding competitions. We are the most obese country, but we also, America also wins a lot of bodybuilding competitions. John's point of view, but what can we, you know, what are you looking at in terms of like, this is a, you know, functioning government in the context of personal health? That's really interesting. So I don't like giving Europe any credit whatsoever.

2:47:41They don't deserve much. And I will just say, this is a key point. Europe's healthcare systems are total basket case systems. They're terrible socialist systems. So I think one of the things we can learn from other countries - Just to be clear, the stuff they get right is like saying like, hey, we don't want this dye. We don't want glyphosates. They get a little - Exactly. Actually, what they get right is that the healthcare system is less important, is that people are healthier to begin with. The problem with the US healthcare system is not that we have the wrong Medicare, Medicaid reimbursement rates.

2:48:11It's the fact that we're the sickest country in the world. And that's actually because we rely too much on the healthcare system. So what I like about some other countries in Japan, and I think we need more of this and Bobby Kennedy is pushing this more. I mean, if your kid is obese, you are shamed as a parent, like it is totally society unacceptable. Like you are stunned, like you're like yelled at by the school. Like, I think we need that same type of energy in America. Like children should not be fat and diabetic, like period. Like, like we have totally lost our way right now. There's a whole TikTok craze where they're shaming doctors for weighing patients or even talking about weight.

2:48:47Obesity is a blaring warning sign that our cells aren't working. And it is not, I do not blame the individuals. When 80 % of American adults are overweight or obese, we have a systemic problem. But from the culture, we shouldn't accept that. We should absolutely be declaring that we do not want to have childhood obesity or diabetes and have that culture. Additionally, in Japan and Italy and some of the European countries, there is like total bipartisan just consensus. This sounds so obvious, but it's not the case in the U.S. that we shouldn't be poisoning kids. I mean, this school lunches in America are an absolute dumpster fire.

2:49:22And, you know, in Japan and Italy and France has mandated a daycare, a four course meal, including a cheese course, I think a cigarette and wine afterwards. I mean, but that'd be healthier than what they serve in America. I I mean, it's an absolute disaster. So there is just this cultural thing around food. One thing I look at Europe, they spend three times less on average per capita on health care, but two times more per capita on food in Europe. They do have a lot more respect for their agriculture system and their farmers. And the consumption of whole food there is much lower. The thoughts about pesticides and what's going on in the food.

2:50:02So you always hear you go to Italy, you eat the pasta, you eat the gelato, you lose weight. I mean, that's really true. So I think what needs to happen and what I hope culturally happens with these step by step wins is we move culturally to a system that puts less emphasis on getting sick and then getting drugged and more emphasis on what I really think is a spiritual issue of having more curiosity and awe about what we're putting in our body, our environment, how that impacts the soil, how that impacts the food, and then just getting back to basics on, you know, not poisoning kids. Is there anything that the government can do or even America could do about on the fitness side?

2:50:39Yeah. What happened to the presidential fitness test? Yeah. Yeah. Phased out. There was a new program in 2013. Because I feel like that's half of the battle here. We're addressing a lot of the diet and the food supply stuff. But fitness is extremely important, but it's harder to incentivize or subsidize. Maybe. I don't know. What is your take on fitness? Well, I was just with Secretary Kennedy in Miami at a UFC fight and Shaq was there and a bunch of A-list celebrities talking about how they can help encourage youth fitness and rejuvenate. So I don't want to get in front of any announcements here.

2:51:08But I think that type of education and inspiration among kids for more fitness to not be. I mean, a boy in America, you know, a teenager boy in America has less testosterone than a 68 year old man. Like there's been a depletion of testosterone among kids, obviously, because of our food or sedentary lifestyle. We're soft. I mean, you know, 77 percent of of of military aged youth cannot go in the military in America right now. It's a national security crisis. So my one to kind of framework in my head is let's get the winds like the food dies. But you can't undercount the cultural education elements to this, you know, bringing what Justin Mayers and Mark Hyman and a lot of people have been talking about this for a long time, bringing that to the forefront, these common sense solutions.

2:52:03So you're going to see a lot of initiatives. And one thing I'm excited about is when Secretary Kennedy was sworn in by President Trump, he signed an executive order. And on May 22nd, in about a month, they're releasing a 100 day report on the chronic disease crisis, why kids are getting so sick. It's going to say things that the US government's never said before about environmental toxins, about our water quality, about our food quality, about our sedentary lifestyle. So getting the facts down and having the conversation on a factual basis and not letting industry, and I'll say this, a lot of people in industry lobby not on policies, but actually to prevent transparency about what's happening.

2:52:43There's pressure to not talk about pesticides. There's pressure to not talk about certain topics because it's going to scare consumers or it's going to confuse consumers. There is a good trend right now where the government is going to talk about anything they want to and they're going to give Americans information, not infantilize the American people as we often do. And I think that's the necessary precondition for a long term conversation about policy change to systems that are going to bankrupt the country and cause us to cease to exist, which is I think is true, given the trajectory of our health care budget, which which will bankrupt us and the decimation to American competitiveness when you have 50 percent of teens overweight or obese and 38 percent of teens pre-diabetic.

2:53:27those kind of uh numbers are so shocking living in california or or any you know if you live in california new york it's just you would never believe those numbers you have to go to to places that don't where wellness is not you know the number one trend i'm curious do you think uh this movement around making america healthy would have been possible before decentralized media It feels like we kind of needed podcasts. We needed social media. We needed people. We needed like a mom, some random place to discover that when she removed red dye from her kids food, that this thing happened and then she shared it and people start collaborating.

2:54:07So I feel like, you know, a lot of this movement just would have been impossible when you only could get your news from magazines or newspapers or radios that are all captured in some way by, you know, large corporates. no the uh independent media ecosystem is an absolutely necessary condition to the opportunity we have right now um it can't be overstated how destructive it is that our core information source has been co-opted by an industry that profits from americans being sick and that's had devastating consequences i think what's happened with independent media is one of the major historical events in american history like when you read about the american Revolution, it was really propagated by the ability to easily print pamphlets and Ben Franklin and others, you know, getting ideas out that have never been able to get out before in a mass way.

2:54:54I think this is a huge shift. I mean, for, you know, since World War II, we've had a corporate owned essentially media. And now we're able, you know, you guys and people at a microphone are able to get more distribution than CNN. The, you know, Secretary Kennedy, you know, was called a whack job by everyone. Actually, him and President Trump are the two most popular political figures in America still. He was able to get through on independent media podcasts like Joe Rogan. And actually, Americans determined, a lot of them, that he actually makes a lot of sense with what he's talking about, really about these overarching incentives of health care.

2:55:30I can't stress that enough. In this building, in the White House, there's a shift happening where we are, of course, talking about healthcare policy, like what to do on Medicare and Medicaid, but it's more about the foundational incentives. What is the logic of where the$2 trillion we spend on Medicare and Medicaid going? Is that straight to drugs or is it more root cause interventions? How are we incentivizing our food system? Are we really incentivizing ultimate process food for kids? Is there enough transparency for Americans to make the best decisions? There's more foundational topics being asked, and those are very disruptive topics to the legacy industry.

2:56:08and that's all because of independent media. I'll say the independent media also rightfully has led to record distrust of our major institutions from, frankly, the education system, a lot's happening with Harvard right now, to the pharmaceutical industry, to others. That's warranted. And one of the leverages I think there is for change is that these industries, when I meet with them, really acknowledge that they have to make some major changes, really partner, frankly, with Secretary Kennedy, you know, not to do any Secretary Kennedy or President Trump any favors because they actually have to make changes to maintain their legitimacy with the American people.

2:56:46I mean, it's not working right now. I mean, some of the tech bros on Twitter are saying how incredible, you know, recent American healthcare innovation, how it's how it's been. I'd love to see what they're talking about. I mean, we're literally have life expectancy declining. You know, we spend four to five times more than other countries product disease rates, every single one is at a record high this year in America, with the highest rate of product disease than any country in human civilization. I don't know what they're looking at, but we're not in a good situation right now. How do you think about timelines?

2:57:21You're a special government employee for a limited period of time. This is obviously a monumental task. It's not something that can be solved even in a single admin, how do you think about making sure that obviously we were headed to a really bad place from a nationwide health standpoint, from an economic standpoint, due to the consequences of those health issues. But what's the strategy to make sure that this sort of movement becomes bipartisan and kind of can live on after you guys are no longer in the White House? I personally think we need to think about it as a 12-year strategy. We're not going to reorient the incentives of the largest industry in America, the fastest growing industry in America, because we're getting sick, the most employed industry in America.

2:58:10We're not going to change those incentives overnight or even in the next four years. I think what we need to do, what I'm focused on, is maintain the political coalition of what you call this Maha coalition. The reason we're able to drive change is because millions of women, quite frankly, moms voted for Trump for the first time, people who would have never considered voting for Trump years ago. This issue has galvanized voters into a coalition. President Trump was 50-50 among young people, 50-50 among independents. We couldn't have imagined that four years ago. So multiple factors for that, but clearly this Maha kind of energy led to that.

2:58:47So the reason we have an opportunity to change is because voters have really galvanized around this issue. So to me, if we can solidify that coalition, that coalition is going to continue to drive change. We need to deliver wins for the next two years. I mean, I'd love for Democrats to compete for those voters. They've had their head in the sand. If those voters can help Republicans, which is my hope in the midterms. I think you have 2028 where both sides are basically arguing who's more Maha, which I think is a positive thing. I think we've shifted the paradigm of health. You know, before last year, health care was about how to add more people to the existing broken system.

2:59:23That's insane. You had Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren just a couple of months ago during the confirmation hearings with Bobby Kennedy, eviscerating him for taking on pharma companies. Elizabeth Warren actually said, you know, you're going to hurt their profit margins. These poor companies, like people have lost their minds when it comes to health care, somehow arguing that more resources, more spending to this broken system is how we solve it instead of actual poor reform of the system. I want to get political victories and change the overall bipartisan way we talk about health. And I will say everyone talks about the special interest, the money.

2:59:56The one thing that counteracts that is voters really voting on this issue. And now you have Maha moms and people waking up caring about this issue as a voting topic. So as long as that's solidified, you'll have momentum that changes the incentives of health care where we can look back in 12 years and we have a thriving pharmaceutical industry, but they are incentivized to promote longevity. They're incentivized to cure diseases, not just manage them. All pharmaceuticals right now are managing. And, you know, we have an overall health care ecosystem that's more value based. It's more that's more geared towards keeping people healthy, which can happen.

3:00:33Yeah, there does feel like a way to flip the incentive where the pharmaceutical companies are like if we can just keep this person alive for another hundred years. Imagine how many drugs we can sell them. They should make a lot of money for that. Imagine the impact of the economy if they could do that. They should make a ton of money for that. And they tell you off the record, right? They love to do that, but the incentives are all about disease management. So this isn't a free market right now, and there's a real opportunity to nudge these incentives to a different direction. Yeah, that makes no sense.

3:01:03Well, thank you for the work that you're doing and making the time. Thanks, guys. I think you're doing very important work. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Talk to you soon, guys. Bye. Bye. Let's tell you about Public. You heard the founders on the show earlier, but Public is investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We got some personnel news today. Jason Citrin is out as CEO of Discord. He's bringing on Humam Sakhanini. Sicanini. Building Discord has been one of the most meaningful and rewarding experiences in his life.

3:01:42What started as a simple idea to help friends talk while playing games has grown into something far bigger than I ever imagined. I'll be transitioning to a new member as board member and advisor and continuing to support Discord through this next chapter. I'm incredibly proud of what we've built together and even more excited for what's ahead. Very interesting. It will be interesting to see if Discord gets out at some point. There's been rumors about IPO and so yeah, maybe that's the, maybe this is a move to prepare for the public markets. Being a public market CEO is a different job and maybe Jason wants to step back.

3:02:16But we'd love to have him on the show, do a little gaming day, talk about everything in Discord's world. Fascinating founder, total outlier, not from the typical Silicon Valley elite pipelines, not Stanford or Harvard. built one mobile game at some point sold one company ran it back built up Discord into a really really powerful company so congrats to him on the transition and good luck to the new CEO of Discord we got some listener feedback we got some posts about the show Midwest Tech Bro says after switching to TBPN I got my entire life back no more deciding what podcast to listen to trying to write down important points or worrying that I missed some key news today.

3:03:05TBPN changed the way I consume media and in turn changed my family's life. Thank you, TBPN. Thank you. Thank you, Midwest Tech Bro. He says, from my wife, the palace of pump has rocked our world. Yes, we're happy to have you as a listener. There's more TBPN news. Austin Petersmith says, people will say it isn't scalable to bring on each new podcast listener via direct sales reps, but here's a counterfactual. I got cold emailed by a TBPN rep, ended up doing six calls with them over eight weeks before deciding to become a listener. And then I went on to spend$11 million on eight sleep mattresses with my TriRamp card, providing enough measurable ROI to cover that sales rep for the quarter.

3:03:47Thank you, Austin. So good. Padavan Goon-based Alexander says you should get a notification if your tweet was featured on TBPN. Well, this is your notification. Notification. You have been featured on TVPN. You're featured on TVPN. Let's go. We'll be sure to co-tweet this. We do want to build an automation, something around this. Maybe reply to this post with this clip. We'll figure it out. We're hiring folks every day. Just if you apply, make sure you have at least one of the following. Yeah, you have an opportunity to get into TVPN. We want Navy SEALs, GP at a Tier 1 VC. these types of things, 10 years CUDA experience, 20 years high-frequency trading experience.

3:04:32If you have something like that, you might be a fit for the team. And still an opportunity to get in under 100 people. Exactly. Being in the first 100 is huge. At least if you join in the next couple of weeks. Yeah, exactly. Janan account says, would be insane if there were one company with John Stroman, Daria, Alec Redford, Ilya, Sama, Greg, Andre Carbathy, Mira, and Paul Cristiano. Very, very funny. And the only person left at this company after six months is Sam Olman. No, I think Greg's still there. Yeah, Greg came back. But it is crazy how there's been this, you know, there was insane concentration of talent there.

3:05:09And then as they transitioned out of becoming a research institute into becoming a product company, there was a turnover in the team. And people scattered to the wind to do all sorts of different projects. But, you know, I'm excited. More competition, better products for consumers, specifically in AI. Ryan Peterson shares the Wall Street Journal talking about Flexport. It's a staggeringly tedious job that would be of little interest to anyone in normal times. Absolutely. They called us tariff pencil pushers. So rude. Founder mode. He's in founder mode. He's getting quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

3:05:49Whenever something happens in logistics, shipping, he's the person that everyone wants to call. Many people love to say that Ryan actually created global trade. He did. And so he gets quoted. Created shipping, yeah. Yeah, he invented the ship, basically. Verticalized. The ship, yes, the ship. This post from Tyler Cosgrove. Just fantastic design. Close friend of the show. He adds the soft bank treatment to OpenAI's charge. I agree it looks much better with the unicorns galloping upwards. So the winter projection for winter 2025 projection for open AI revenue is going from$1 billion in 2023 to$4 billion in 2024, to$13 billion in 2025 to$29 billion, then$54 billion, then$86 billion, then$125 billion.

3:06:44We're going higher. It's fantastic. I mean, they're on their way. And yeah, you throw the unicorns on there. You throw the big PowerPoint arrow, and it looks a lot better. But I mean, the business is ripping. I use the product every day. I think most people do. And so good luck to them on their path to$125 billion in revenue in 2029, hopefully. I think that they might blow that out. Who knows? We'll be tracking it here. We'll be breaking it down. We'll be tracking PolyMarket to see where their DAUs end up, Yeah. Or their MAUs. Sean Frank coming on the show tomorrow, but had a good post we wanted to highlight.

3:07:24He said, or a bigger third thing, trend lines don't continue forever. Hard work built this business. COVID scaled it for 24 months. Every single person in America suddenly loved the outdoors. They went out and bought gear to enjoy them. This is the story of solo brands. NYSE has suspended solo brands. Are they a casualty of tariffs or mismanagement? Sean Frank's breaking it down. He says, that gear had negative network effect. Every solo stove sold increases the CAC of the next one because the next buyer is less incremental, less interested, taking more promos or ad impressions to buy. And instead of launching a second bigger skew, they bought non-adjacent brands.

3:08:04Chubby's is great, but solo stove buyers aren't guaranteed to be Chubby's customers and vice versa. There's no flywheel, no cross-sell, no advantage. Just a hard goods company and an apparel brand trying to be managed by the same team. Yeah, I think that the idea of consumer holding companies is very appealing, but consumer products are a full contact sport. Yep. And the best companies that I'm aware of have, you know, management teams that are 110 % in and trying to then, if you're not and you're trying to manage multiple brands while you're competing in the same categories with, you know, founder led or just exceptional management teams.

3:08:42So yeah, well, happy birthday to YouTube. YouTube turned 20 yesterday. And Colin Samir remade the very first YouTube video ever there at the zoo. And I hadn't really watched the original YouTube video. I mean, I probably watched it at some point. This is the first video ever uploaded to YouTube. Us at the zoo, Colin Samir recreated it. And it's 21 seconds. And it's kind of a funny watch if we can pull it up. Let's see. In other news, Erewhon raised a$2 billion valuation. Let's go. Is this a down round? What happened? I feel like if they have just a few customers like you, they should be up at$20,$40,$100,$200 billion.

3:09:33Yeah, the fact that I get to track my LTV in the app is wild. Wild. um but uh yeah somebody was breaking down the math here i don't know uh how accurate this is they have 10 stores um you know i i don't know i i've heard a bunch of rumors uh just being around la over the years uh of just how much money they make but um it's you have to think of it as a grocery store a high margin grocery store which is non-traditional groceries typically low margin they've turned grocery into a high margin business plus adding on a high margin restaurant plus they sell you know home products and beauty products and skincare and things like that so you can't look at it as a purely monolithic you know it's not a it's not a typical grocery store and they also have this like cafe business and I think when you combine all of those they're just cash machines.

3:10:32Andrea here says she's been told by multiple sources that they claim to make$50 million per store, so 10 stores, that's$500 million in revenue, and they also make more money from the smoothie collabs, which is very fun. One of our goals for this year is to get a TBPN smoothie at Erewhon, so if you're listening to Erewhon, give us a ring. Let's watch the Colin Smear YouTube video. Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants. cool thing about these guys is that they have really really really long trunks and that's that's cool and that's pretty much all there is to say all right so here we are that was the first youtube video about a masterpiece a masterpiece a masterpiece Yeah, Chad Hurley, the YouTube team, they threw that up.

3:11:32And YouTube was originally a data site. We got to pull up one of those videos sometime, not today, but of the early YouTube team when they're just talking. They look like they're in a dungeon, basically. They're just talking about how hard it is, how things are working, how they're not working. But they cooked. They did. Let's close out with a post from Sean Frank, who's coming on the show tomorrow. He says he's opening a speakeasy just for Red Dye 40 and microplastics. Don't let Callie Means find out about that, Sean. But I like the way you're thinking. Government can't hold you back. Poison resist.

3:12:09You're just going to get stronger. It can only make you stronger, Sean. I think you're in good shape. I think you can handle all of the microplastics and the red dyes. Good luck to you, though. And we'll ask you more about it tomorrow when we see you on the show. But anyway, thank you for watching, everyone. Thank you, folks. We will see you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Cheers.