Chad Byers, Car Dealership Guy, Scott Wu, Soren Monroe, Joe Weisenthal, PepsiCo, Fooling Tesla FSD

32:45Well, you know, they have a flavor called Pepsi Max. And so they could lead and, you know, literally buy every single billboard on AdQuick for Pepsi Max. Yes. Sort of max out the AdQuick platform. Max it out. Max it out. And if you're a founder that's working on a consumer good, go buy a billboard, go viral, have some fun with it. Talk to the AdQuick team. They will get you set up. They will have it. I have a buddy who really noticed that out of home demand in LA dropped dramatically after the fires oh really just bought up pretty much he has a you know a nine-figure revenue cpg company he he bought up basically every grade a billboard in all of the jeremy defon of billboard buying yeah special situations guy um and the amount of just like like attention he received off of it was insane i mean every single day there was you know tons of people taking pictures.

33:44It's one of those things that's really, really hard to measure because you'll get text messages from people that just like your company feels more real. It's similar to PR and press where it's hard to measure, but that person who's considering joining your company, they see the billboard and they think like, okay, this is a more serious company or potential distributor or potential investor. It just makes you feel more like you've broken out of just, oh, you exist in this hyper-targeted online flywheel that might be working, but you do something else. The beauty of out of home versus traditional media is you don't have to talk to journalists when you do ad quick.

34:22You just sign up and do it. Anyway, should we talk about this, Mark? Yes, we should. So Mark Rober put out a YouTube video testing can he fool Tesla's full self-driving system. And I mean, it's a very funny idea. He built a wall that looks like the road straight out of Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. And of course, the Tesla, which is using a camera, is fooled and smashes through the wall. Completely, you know, impossible situation. Not something that you should be worried about if you are purchasing a self-driving car. But it was extremely controversial because... I don't know if you have any enemies like...

35:02Like Wile E. Coyote style enemies. Or I guess the Roadrunner is the one who puts it out, right? If you're feuding with someone with Roadrunner strategy, and aesthetics, then yeah, maybe stay away from the Tesla. But if you're not, you're probably fine. Was there another, what was the other company that was? Luminar. And so that's another interesting thing. Luminar founded by Austin Russell, a Teal fellow, took the company public during the SPAC boom. I also believe Luminar's Austin Russell, at one point he was trying to buy Forbes. And at another point, I think he bought the succession house that burned down during the fires.

35:41I think that was him, right? A hundred million dollars. A hundred million dollar house or something like that. And so the stock has been, it fell from its SPAC peaks. It's down at around$213 million now. And I, as a market cap, and I think the company was at one point valued in like the 4 billion range, like most of these SPACs. And so Luminar sells LIDAR for self-driving car companies. It was a very hot topic, very hot product during the self-driving car boom. There was a question, okay, if Waymo really takes off or something like it and Luminar is one of the providers, well, then Luminar is going to be a really key component in the supply chain.

36:21They'll be a very successful company. Obviously, the stock is down. But since that Mark Rover video dropped, the stock's up 27%. And it's very interesting the way it's filmed because they actually, they're using a Lexus SUV for the LIDAR car, but they black out the logos. So you can't, like you can tell if you just know what a Lexus looks like. To be clear, Luminar has not really made progress on getting back towards its 2020. What was the peak? February 12th of 2021, it peaked at$565 a share. Wow. You're on public.com looking at that? Yeah. And it's at$6. $6. $6.70 right now. Wow, it's down 99 % still.

37:04So if you loved Luminar at$565 a share, you're going to love it at$642. Wow. No, but this seems like an interesting strategy to potentially get retail investors reengaged with the stock. Yeah, totally, totally. And so let's go through kind of the story here. So Alex Finn breaks it down in what is a pretty controversial thread. I think pretty much every single one of these tweets that he posted got community noted. But he does do a good job of just kind of laying out exactly what happened. He says, you know, Mark Rober's built one of the strongest reputations on social media. Absolutely true. I've talked to Mark briefly in a clubhouse room.

37:47Very nice guy. You know, Mark's background is he worked at NASA. Just total science guru, like, you know, just science nerd. He just loves doing these little tests. has grown this massive YouTube channel where he kind of tests different scientific ideas. And Alex Finn is claiming that today he obliterated it all with one 18-minute video. It's a story of greed, deception, and cowardice. And you can tell from the writing, this is as click-baity as a YouTube video. But it got 90K likes and 22 million views. So Mark is a longtime YouTuber who spent years accruing over 65 million subscribers. That is a massive, massive number.

38:25He was the Mr. Beast before there was a Mr. Beast. And then he says, yesterday he let money, politics, and greed get in the way of all that. Mark put out a video called, Can You Fool a Self-Driving Car? The concept is simple. Drive a Tesla in full self-driving mode on a road where there's a wall painted like a road. There's actually six tests he does. One is just there's a mannequin with a kid in the road. Then they sprayed some water. Then they sprayed some fog. Then they had the kid pop out at the last second. and they did a number of different tests to kind of show different scenarios. And basically, the gist of the video is like, LiDAR succeeded in six out of six, and the Tesla succeeded in I think only three out of six.

39:07Yeah. But the Tesla fanboys really came out in strongly against this, and there are some reasonable critiques of this. So Alex Finn says, Wrong! The video was filled with deception, lies, and illegal, undisclosed advertising. In the video, Tesla does not detect a wall and goes right through it. on top of that there's a mannequin that gets absolutely nailed it is very funny uh the but there are a few things mark doesn't tell you first of all he lied about full self-driving he didn't even use fsd he used autopilot which even tesla admits is an older not a strong technology and this is where it gets really confusing because obviously in the context of like a highly edited youtube video mark rober's not giving you all of the details on like this is the exact hardware i'm using this is the exact software i'm using i've updated the software here's how i'm engaging it.

39:50Like it's edited to be entertainment. And so it's pretty, it's pretty hard to tell exactly what's going on. There's, there's actually an ongoing debate on whether or not he deactivated it by accident or on purpose before it hit the wall. Um, as opposed to whether or not the system disengaged and technically if the system disengages, you have to be ready to step on the brakes. And that's the, that's the car signaling to you, Hey, I need you to take over. It's time for you to press the brakes. And so if you don't press the brakes when the car tells you to press the brakes, it's kind of on you. It kind of goes back and forth.

40:23Alex's writing is really funny, saying he sold his soul. I know. He betrayed his country by attacking by the most American-made car company in the world. He deceived his entire audience, all for a paycheck. It's so sensational. I love it. But so in the description, they do, Mark Rober does mention, thanks to Luminar for allowing us to test their LIDAR equipped car. They provided the vehicle for testing purposes, but no compensation was given. And this is not a paid promotion. And so it turns out that I think Austin Russell and Luminar and Mark Rober are like independently connected and like kind of friendly.

41:07And Russell had donated to one of Mark Rober's fundraising efforts. And it seems like they're just kind of like buddies more or less. And I think the other like subtext here is that Elon has just become such a lightning rod that if you are in the business of just getting attention and getting clicks, you can get millions and millions of views on YouTube right now with any video attacking Elon. because the audience is just so ravenous for something to push back against Elon's new kind of political arc. And so I saw a video by a live streamer who's just sitting there just talking about Tesla and what the stock's done, 2 million views.

41:52And he normally gets like 400K views on a video, but like the Tesla stock crash got like 2 million views showing that like there's super high demand for this type of like anti-Elon content on YouTube right now. Everyone who's a YouTuber can see that. And even if you're not anti-Elon, like for a long time, there was a whole sub niche of like, you put Elon with a clown nose on him. And you say like, Elon's tunnel company is stupid. Or it doesn't make any sense. Or like Tesla just crashed. Why would you want to go underground? Yeah. And then there was another genre of like Tesla glazing videos that got millions of views that were like, Elon Musk just announced a nuclear reactor.

42:33It's confirmed. Like, this changes everything. And they would just produce completely fake videos, but pro-Elon, because there were like pro-Elon people that would just click on anything that was pro-Elon. And so Elon's just become this like vortex of content nonsense. But even the big YouTubers are clearly feeling that. Johnny Harris, this video essayist, when Elon started getting political, wanted to do a deep dive on like, how did he get here? What's his evolution? Like, you want to just address the things that are in the news. and Elon is in the news. And so very, very, very controversial.

43:07We have a post from Nick Carter here. I don't know if you want to read that, but he says, I'm not a big Mark Rober fan and not a Tesla fan boy at all. I've never owned the stock or the car, but Tesla has a case if they want to sue him for this video. It's clearly deceptive with the aim to disparage Tesla. And that was kind of the vibe on X. um but uh overall wild story yeah it's an interesting position for tesla to be in because suing a big creator is not gonna necessarily get you more fans totally it does feel like the right way to do it is to potentially have the engineers just do like an entire breakdown like if you did a two-hour breakdown of the video and we're pointing out you know here's here's why the scenario you know yeah we're not building these cars for the sort of road exactly that it it's literally just a trade-off between do you want a cheap self-driving car that is susceptible to roadrunner scenarios or do you want an expensive car that is roadrunner proof and most people will say yeah you know what like i could i could wear a five-point racing harness and a helmet every time i drive that would be safer but like i can also just wear a normal seat belt in an airbag and like try not to crash drive safe right like there's obviously a spectrum of capabilities with every one of these vehicles the lidar thing i mean elon's been beating that drum for years saying anyone who's using the lidar is doomed like it has its own edge cases i think it doesn't work in maybe the rain or something like that the rain confuses it and so it has its own drawbacks but it's also very expensive and so unless you're running a waymo style business where it's fine if the car has 500k CapEx, it hasn't made sense.

44:54I've always heard that and been like, but can't we just make LiDAR cheaper over time? Like it has to be possible to make that cheaper. Like Starlink's making millions of satellites. Or is the right system to leverage both because you want to manage all the different edge cases and be able to work in different environments. Yeah, I mean, George Hatz, yeah, I talked to him about this and he just said like, look how does a human drive two eyes two ears two hands two feet that's all you need yes yeah no he even said like it has like like the comma ai self-driving kit that you attach to your windshield that adds self-driving functionality to your car it has a mouth because it breathes air to cool the cpu he sees it as like a human head it's very funny it's very cool um but yeah He just says like fundamentally, like we don't have LIDAR and we can drive cars.

45:51Therefore, software must be able to drive cars with just two eyes and two ears and a couple other things. And that's it. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes. It'll be interesting to see if any car companies see this demo and say, yeah, let's roll that out. Because I think everyone wants more competition and no one wants less safe vehicles on the road. And so my most disappointing thing was that they used this Lexus SUV to demo the LiDAR. And it seemed to be a good system, but you can't buy that car right now. Like if you're driving behind a Lexus and they engage their autopilot, like they're just as likely to crash into you as anyone else because they don't have these systems engaged yet.

46:34At least I don't think they have it on offer yet. There are some companies that are obviously working on it. but we got to talk to Joe about Tesla. Oh yeah. And the stock. Okay. Where does it go from here? Okay. We had, uh, I'm just curious to get his just like analysis on, obviously he's not a, uh, you know, hedge fund manager, but it's such a stock that, that trades on the future. Elon's, yeah. Elon's popularity. Yeah. You're talking about Joe Weisenthal, right? Yes. Yeah. I mean, from what I know, I've only talked to him like once, but it seems like he's a person that takes investing seriously and thinks about multi-asset investing.

47:19He prioritizes industry leading yields. You know, he would only use a platform that's trusted by millions. And that's why if I were talking to him, I would recommend that he sign up for public.com. That's right. Fantastic choice. Stocks, bonds, crypto, options, T-bills. You can get it all. at public.com and yeah we're we've got a video with public in the pipeline that I'm very excited about should we make that video over the top anti-woke potentially kind of do like the salon thing one way to get a lot of attention with with an ad in 2025 is to make it so anti-woke that people decide I'm actually woke I'm actually a liberal now.

48:09So if you missed it yesterday, Solana put out an advertisement. What was it called? The blockchain put out. Solana blockchain. The foundation. The foundation. Put out an ad and Sam Lesson broke it out here. He was an early Solana investor. And he says the Solana ad completely comically misunderstood the 2025 media assignment re-authenticity. I love Solana and I actually agree with a lot, but not all of the points of this video. Seed investor in Solana. Yeah, wow. But let's be honest, it's a terrible ad. Hilariously terrible. The tone is completely wrong. They were right to take it down, even if the internet and of course the blockchain in particular never forget.

48:47Lol, irony. The reason it doesn't work isn't the content. It's that they used actors in a polished scripted scene. That is completely wrong in 2025. Interesting take. I don't know how much I agree with that, but I'm getting there. What people care about, what works in media is authenticity, warts and all is real people in raw form speaking their truth. I'm not suggesting it, but if the Solana leadership had made the exact same points in a speech on the street, like them or dislike them, the content would have worked. When other tech leaders make these points in their own voice, it works. But this, these points packaged in pristine background with scripted actors, it honestly just shows whoever made this completely misunderstands the moment and how media and comms works in 2025.

49:26It's the opposite of going to Rackett. Your take on it was that they just seemingly planned the ad like when Trump was elected and it took a while. You remember when the Jaguar rebrand happened and everyone was like, oh, they expected Kamala to win. Yeah. And it felt like a very Kamala coded ad. This is kind of the same thing where it's like, oh, they greenlit this is the day Trump won. And they didn't realize that there would be like kind of a re-evaluation of things post. And like there'd be a settling in period. But yeah, I mean, these ads, like if you go can find it because it's been somewhat taken down, but it's still up there.

50:00Yeah. everybody was saying uh you you solana deleted it but they're like we will not let you forget this ad i wish i'd want to have the actor on the show yeah that'd be fun um but yeah i mean the an ad like that it's like clearly shot on cinema cameras professional lighting makeup hair script all this stuff like it takes months to get something like that made they didn't they didn't use just some some film school kid to whip it up which they probably should have uh it took a long time. And so by the time it got through all the reviews and all the post-processing and editing, color grading and sound mixing, it had missed the mark.

50:38Like it might have been edgy. I mean, really, you got to go back to like Coinbase in 2020, 2021 saying like, hey, we're mission oriented. And even that was different because the Coinbase, the Brian Armstrong piece about Coinbase was, they were not saying we are anti-woke. They're saying we're just mission oriented. We're apolitical. They weren't saying, hey, we're right wing now. It was like, we're not left wing. We're not right wing. We're just crypto apolitical. And we're going to donate where we need to just on crypto stuff. We're going to stay focused. And I liked that. And that was good. And I think that - And they were dealing with internal sort of mutiny, people similar to what happened to Google.

51:18And a lot of big companies were experiencing that. They had to kind of do something. And I looked at Crusoe Energy launched a video yesterday, kind of reintroducing themselves as a producer of energy and data center capacity. Brother Justin Mayer's first angel. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. Chase Lockmiller, the CEO over there. And on one hand, like you watch this Crusoe Energy video, and it's like it has like a very corporate vibe. it's somewhat stock footage-y, but it's just very clear what they do and what they care about. It's authentic. It's authentic. And I'm like, this is amazing.

51:57This is actually what business is about. Like they just care about their business. And you know what? I don't know what the political statement is here because it doesn't need to be a political statement. They're just saying, look, we want to build data centers. That's the business that we're in. We're going to do it. And we're excited about what people will do on top of those data centers training AI. And they have some pictures of people in healthcare settings that could benefit from AI and financial settings that could benefit from AI and all these different things that could benefit from data centers.

52:25But at the end of the day, they just say, we're Crusoe and we're building the next generation of data centers. And I'm like, I'm so here for this. This is so refreshing. And if you love big data, you're gonna get excited. Yeah, and I actually do. So you love energy. I love energy and I love big data. So I was very happy with that. And you love leverage. Yes. And yeah, let's go to Dylan. Yeah, so I can break this down. And so Dylan says, this should have been the Accelerate America ad. Solana is about builders, like a 22-year-old dev born to Sri Lankan immigrants putting real-world assets on chain.

53:00Still one of the projects I'm most proud of. And this is referencing a video. You can go watch it. It's capital.xyz slash founders. We made this video in 2022, Two, highlighting Mary Gunarate. And Mary has a very, very cool crypto company. She's been building on Solana from day one. She has this amazing story. And this ad sort of breaks it all down. And not an actor. This was very, yeah, like incredible story. You can just talk to her building. People are building. Yeah, very real story. Mary is not, you know, doesn't bring politics onto the blockchain. chain you know let's keep politics out of meme coins folks delivering um delivering value and uh i'm uh proud to have uh be an angel in her company let's keep politics out of the pump and dumps and out of the rug pulling and out of the meme coins and out of the pumped out funds let's just keep it clean except except politics definitely got onto the chain through trump coin melania coin and you remember Joe Bowden and all this other things.

54:11Just keep politics out of it. Keep politics out of everything. I'm over it. Anyways, I'm sure Solana is already working on their next ad, the comeback ad. Cool opportunity. For what it's worth, I've done a whole deep dive on the founders, and although their marketing seems to be missing the mark, I think that they're really, really talented engineers, and their whole story of working on wireless networking and high performance computing. Like, I don't even know how much we could say about like, is it not decentralized enough? Like maybe that's a good argument for or against Solana. But I think like the founders are just interesting people.

54:49But they have so much attention on them because it's such, it's like, it's not just a huge pool of capital, but it's also like where people make the huge wins and huge losses. Here's a play. If you want to make a statement around innovation in the future, take the smithsonian national air and space museum private put it on chain put all those planes on chain planes on chain we need planes i mean call mary she's putting real world assets on chain right yeah this is mary takes over the ceo role that's a lot of foundation takes it becomes it becomes a private equity firm and yeah yeah kind of rip out all like the decentralization i'm sure it would trade at like 400x book value of the underlying planes And that is a real financial innovation there.

55:36Well, we'll close the last comment on the Solana thing. Joe Weisenthal, who's coming on the show in 15 minutes, he says he's sharing a post from 2020. I wonder how many Silicon Valley people are inspired by that Marc Andreessen post on now is the time to build, to get working even harder on their next generation decentralized stablecoin protocol. And Joe Weisenthal said this is painful, but also exactly what I joked about five years ago, especially if you make it to the final 45 seconds. Well, Solana could be in trouble. They need to control their costs. And so we recommend that they get on ramp if they're not already on ramp.

56:15Time is money. Say both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Next time you see a bill coming through on a credit card charge for anti-woke, over-the-top marketing campaign, you can just be like, hey, that's out of policy. It's out of policy. Yeah, not approved. We want to do mission-driven content here. That's right. We want to stick to the basics. John, do you have a battery real quick? Do you have some extra batteries?

56:42I think we got Soren joining the team. He has crazy nominative determinism there. He's Soren over the skies. Can you bring him in? Let's bring him in. Let's bring him in. Soren, can you hear me? We got Soren from Niros. We have his post here. I'm thrilled to announce that Niros has raised a$35 million Series A led by VY Capital or Vi Capital US with Sequoia, Interlagos, D3, and Keller. This funding is going straight into mass manufacturing capacity that America desperately needs. My co-founder broke the news today in front of 800 DOD stakeholders and industry leaders at Manifest Demo Day in Washington, D.C.

57:29We're going to try and bring him in in just a second. He should be here any minute. He's here. We're having an audio issue. Okay, we're having an audio issue. We're working through it. Have you actually had a chance to meet Soren before? or will this be the first i have not what's his co-founder's name i met olaf olaf i met olaf i don't know if i'm pronouncing that right and i just want to say uh they i mean we're going to get into some of this stuff they only announced both their pre-seed and their seed uh less than a year ago back on may 20th of 2024 and so uh they've been actually you know absolutely crushing um i got uh i got a breakdown on neros probably six or so months ago from one of the partners over at long journey which are also having the show on tomorrow uh but but crazy crazy lineup of um you know investors and the traction that they've seen is pretty crazy i believe they're already um deploying some of their early oh yeah they're manufacturing now uh i went and toured his first office maybe, pretty small office in El Segundo.

58:37And I'd heard that he was a fantastic, kind of like maybe the number one in the world, or like world-renowned drone pilot. And I was like, look, I've flown a DJI camera drone, like how hard can this be? Like what am I really gonna see here? And we go out, we're kind of walking, talking, and we get to this park, and he puts on the FPV goggles and takes off and is the most aggressive drone pilot I've ever seen. And there's this tree and he's circling it like 50 times a second. And it's just the craziest swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop, swoop. It was really, really insane. Yeah, he's a fantastic drone pilot.

59:23And what a great demo. It's a high stakes video game. Or a journalist or anything like that. it's really really fun yeah few founders have the advantage of being able to go and give a technical demo that can display that level of capability right both in the operator and in you know the tech right so okay um ben how we doing okay so you can hear us guy uh sorry I got you guys. Fantastic. Okay, sorry for the lack of video. We're building the plane as we're flying it. You're building the drone as you're flying it. Give us the update. How you doing? How was Manifest Demo Day? Well, yeah, my co-founder Olaf was out there.

1:00:12He crushed it. I mean, we had a big announcement. So we just closed our Series A funding round,$35 million, going straight into more American drone manufacturing. So really excited about that stuff. We also a few weeks ago announced our 6 ,000 drone production contract. So we are now officially making over 1 ,000 drones a month, which I believe is the highest rate of any drone company in the United States. So our vision of mass is coming together, but there's still a long way to go. What's the main use case for these drones? Yeah, I mean, primarily we're building drones that are going to be putting warheads on foreheads.

1:00:51Uh, it's, you know, FPV precision strike is kind of all the, all the rage right now. And, you know, you are, we have kind of two systems, uh, Archer and Archer strike. Uh, Archer strike is the one where we're actually the warhead integrator. Um, it's basically a modular warhead system. And then we have Archer, which is just the, the plain FPV drone. Um, and you can basically mount whatever you want on there. How do you think about scale long-term? I think that's probably the number one question on people's mind that are following the industry. You see this sort of footage coming out of China of not even drone-specific manufacturing capacity, but when you just think of China's scale and that being one of our most obvious adversaries, that's what you're up against.

1:01:41You're clearly not afraid. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't be doing this. how do we sort of reach and exceed China's manufacturing capacity over the next 10 years, given that they have a decades-long head start? I think the question we need to be asking ourselves is what would happen if the Chinese supply chain was completely cut off and we had to build, say, a million of these systems in a year? What would we do? What would that look like? And right now, the answer is, you know, the entire American industrial base, I think, would be a disaster. And even the defense industrial base would be scrambling to make that happen.

1:02:22And we really need to do whatever we can to make manufacturing cool again and get people excited about working on this problem. I mean, we've been sanctioned multiple times by China. It seems like we're getting attention because we're doing something that is relevant. But there's a long way to go. We're 18 months into this very, very long journey. So you're saying NEROS has already been sanctioned by China? We have. Yeah, we were sanctioned a few months ago for the first time, and then recently they re-upped it. I think we were in the list with General Dynamics and a few others. It's more prestigious than being on the Forbes 30 under 30.

1:02:58Yeah. I see that as a huge bulls case. Can you give us a little overview of what's actually happening at various orders of magnitude of scale? You said you're doing 1 ,000 a month, I think. When I first met you and toured the facility, it seemed like you were putting everything together by hand. The founders were welding or soldering or doing everything. Now it seems like you probably have some machinery in there, but what is the path to like the lights out factory look like? There was some debate on the timeline last week about, you know, you don't want to do too much automation too early, but obviously we want to get to high production value numbers.

1:03:39So walk me through that. Yeah. Automation is definitely the last step in the process. And the first step is designing the product around this high rate manufacturing. I think that's one of the big problems that a lot of the existing drone companies in the US run into is because they're basing off of, one, these pretty exquisite components that are tough to source in high volumes and they're really expensive. And then two, they just didn't actually design the airframe around these really scalable manufacturing techniques or having low human labor to be able to put it together. So that was kind of the first thing we looked at when actually designing Archer.

1:04:20It was how can we reduce the amount of human labor that goes into this thing. So even if we're not automating yet, because things are still in flux and we're not at crazy high volumes, we're still spending, say, like less than an hour of human time per drone that goes together. So that's really, really critical. I mean, we've been in our current factory for about a year. And in that time, it's mainly been about optimizing the main assembly line. And it's still a very manual assembly line, but there's a lot of tooling in place to make everything really repeatable and easy. and then just the design of the drone itself is very intentional.

1:04:57Yeah, it's one of those things that people might say, oh, they're putting these together by hand, but that could actually be the right decision given where you are. Can you tell me a little bit about supply chain? I've heard it's basically impossible to find an American-made drone motor. Is that still the case? Is there a change there? And are you leveraging any of the cool companies that we've talked to, like the Hadrians, the Rangeviews, the 3D printing companies? Like what do you see as like really beneficial to you? Motors are still a big challenge in the US. I got asked on X the other day, like, oh, are you guys winding around motors?

1:05:33And the answer is no, we're not doing that yet. We definitely want to be part of solving that problem. And, you know, there are some things in the works, but motors have been historically really tough. A lot of US companies are still using Chinese motors because it's not mandated by the government to avoid them. and same thing with cameras, especially low-cost sensors. We've seen they're primarily dominated by China and in our world, in the FPV world, really everything is kind of built on top of architectures that use Chinese chips. So our long-time challenge until we kind of finished the work and got onto the Blue UAS list was rebuilding all of these components from the kind of chip level because you'll look at these open-source projects that a lot of like drone racing technology is built off of.

1:06:22And, oh, look at that. It's off of a Chinese microcontroller or like every video receiver for analog FPV in the world uses this Chinese radio module. So you have to get rid of all that, do all the engineering up from a clean sheet, which has been a big challenge. But, you know, we're getting there. And it's great to see these companies that are working on the kind of like fundamental manufacturing challenges. Like that's what I would put, you know, range view into the bucket of. like America needs investment castings where we're sort of one level up where we have to be really smart on our component design, but we're not actually making the chips.

1:06:59Sure. Do you think a lot of these suppliers over time can and should localize to a specific area? You know, China has a massive advantage with Shenzhen and, you know, a lot of DGI being a lot of being able to source a lot of components locally. Do we need that or is it not necessary? What's your vision of how these things, how we get to producing millions of drones per year? That's what El Segundo should be, baby. Let's make the American Shenzhen. Let's go. Let's do it. Do you feel like you've been very successful at raising a significant amount of capital very quickly?

1:07:43Is there enough private investment into drones broadly, or do we need to do a multiple more? I posted probably a couple months ago at this point that it felt like we needed a sort of project Stargate for domestic drone manufacturing. Like it seems like such a critical national security issue that potentially there needs to be an order of magnitude more investment in the category or do you feel like there's an adequate amount of investment yet? I'll say that the capital is available to two companies, but it has to be directed really well because both on the private capital side and the government side, my main ask to the DoD is not to spend more money.

1:08:28It's to spend money in a different way. It's to mandate higher volumes of systems that are lower cost. So it's not just about throwing money at the problem. I think we have to set the expectations, and those expectations might be an order of magnitude greater than, you know, like billion dollars goes towards buying a thousand loitering munitions. That should probably be a hundred thousand, you know, two orders of magnitude difference. So it's not necessarily about spending more money. I do think there is private capital that is ready to go, that's excited to get into this industry. On the government side, I think there are really positive shifts happening in the direction I'm describing, but that's where a lot of this will be driven from.

1:09:11How's the transition gone from drone pilot to CEO? I know you were running a sort of drone oriented company in high school. So you had a little bit of experience, but does it feel like you're playing a video game when you're in Slack and you're just sort of manning the ship? Has it been pretty seamless? Yeah. Do Do you use Slack in the FPV goggles? That would be really locked in. It's not Slack. It's ITAR compliant. He's on Teams. Yeah, Teams guy. We do use Slack, but not in the goggles, I wish. But it's been an interesting transition. I mean, sometimes I do kind of look around and I'm like, wow, I used to just be flying drones off my back porch and now I'm doing this.

1:09:57But I think I've always had this really strong natural inclination to start a company. And I've been interested in startups for a really long time. So it feels very natural. I understand the exact progression of why I'm doing what I'm doing. But certainly a ton of learnings. I mean, we're also just moving really quickly. And so that comes with, at times, a lot of pain and a lot of lessons. But it's been a great journey. I'm super grateful for what I get to do every day. That's amazing. last last tiny question will we ever see a Nero's consumer product uh we're we're I think DGI is number one haters over here we've been trying to get on the sanction we've been trying to we do a lot of cinematic things we want to film them with drones but we want to be American about it it's tough yeah I think the the market dynamic right now is is in defense and that's where the most critical need is but uh our mission is to fix the American drone industrial base so that doesn't just that doesn't just mean defense.

1:10:55I think way in the future, there's a very good possibility that we'll be able to replace DGI on the consumer shelves. I would love to. That'd be great. Well, thanks so much for stopping by. We'll have to have you back next time there's a big announcement. We really appreciate you calling in. Thanks so much. Congrats on the milestone. Thanks, guys. See ya. We'll talk to you soon. I want to go to Andrew Huberman for a bit. I mean, unless you have something to debrief on that. No, no. Let's get into it. Because you got a shout out. Rora. So out of nowhere, it was Saturday, woke up, I guess, yeah, it was around noon.

1:11:29He says, I find it weird that most of all the countertop reverse osmosis water filters are made of plastic. The same industry that is built on keep contaminants out of what you ingest. Ethos puts clean slash cleaned water into plastic glaring contradiction. I'm excited that Rora water is metal. So he's, of course, referencing to this product here. I don't know if you can see it on the camera now, but it's on the set here with us. Yeah, we developed this product extremely intentionally to eliminate as much plastic as possible from the system because we saw that the vast majority of filters that were supposedly filtering out microplastics had huge amounts of plastic used in the process.

1:12:14So I'm fortunate. Appreciate the shout out, Andrew. and yeah, we saw a massive pop in sales from this post alone, as you can imagine. And it was very cool to see. That's fantastic. Well, there's other big news from Dan Primack. He says, VCs always tell me they can't talk about active fundraising on advice of lawyers, but that may be about to change. The SEC has issued new general solicitation guidance that makes the process much less onerous for private equity and venture capital. We may not see Times Square billboards advertising new funds, but we should. But at least it's theoretically possible, they say.

1:12:56Firms would also be able to discuss fundraising efforts with reporters. That's huge. So next time you're doing your big fundraise, call into TVPN Live, announce that you're raising a$10 billion micro fund to rip checks into 100 million companies. Yeah, this has always been sort of done indirectly. you know that somebody will leave a fund and there'll be a no oh they're coming out but um yeah we want to see one-on-one billboards of all the big asset managers 100 i mean we talked about scout funds you know you're you're a scout at a venture capital firm you find a company take some of their money put it in there i want to see scouts on the lp side i get comped when i when i go and solicit a bunch of the rich friends to write lp checks to you that's what i'm interested in anyway we got the perfect person to talk about this we got joe weisenthal from bloomberg calling in.

1:13:46Hey, Joe, how you doing? It's our financial brother. I'm thrilled to be here with my technology brothers. Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to have you on the show. Is this guy professional? He's a professional. I'm not used to this. You know what? The last time I did any sort of video call-in show, my producer, Kale, who was in the room with me, he scolded me because he's like, you look like garbage in that video that you did. Because I just went down to the basement here at Bloomberg and I propped up my phone and it was weird. angle. So he said, next time you do anything, just let me know.

1:14:18And so he got me set up, shout out to Kale in this really nice studio here. And I have like a proper ring light and everything in front of me. So can we give the viewers a little background on you? As I understand your passion is for finance podcasting, but you have to make ends meet by playing in some sort of band. Is that right? That's right. You know, yeah, you can't really live on finance podcasting alone. And so I'm in a country music band called Light Sweet Crude. And yeah, we pass a bucket of tips around after each show. And I think the last show, I probably after netting it out with the opening act and the other members, I think I got about$10 on the band.

1:14:57Fantastic. Amazing. Hit the size gong, John. Boom. There we go. Yeah, there you go. It's fantastic. Well, yeah, thanks for joining. I did Odd Lots a couple months ago. It was a great show. We had a bunch of stuff we wanted to talk about today. I mean, did you see this SEC news that VCs will be about to, they should be able to advertise their active fundraisings? This is in Axios today. Oh, did this? I missed that today. But I'm sure this will be wonderful. Many retail investors convinced that they're getting in on the next big thing. This could only mean good things. I'm sure that's more wired checks to you guys.

1:15:36Well, I think the idea is that if you can put$100 ,000 into a fund or if you can put a million dollars into a fund, it sort of implies that you're accredited, right? I mean, it could be less risky than some SPACs, I guess. Like, you know, you get into some diversified fund that's professionally managed. It doesn't seem that crazy. I love that. Well, there are riskier things that are contagious. So therefore, yeah, no, I get it. Look, you can advertise literally anything else, right? So why not? So I want to know, you got to break the news here. you uh posted yesterday i have a good idea for something i want to write in the newsletter tomorrow i'm so tempted to just waste it as a pithy tweet right now uh you put it in your newsletter yeah we're going to encourage people to go subscribe but can you break us down what was that good idea i hated that solana ad and oh yeah i know everyone hated it and i hate just like if someone follows me on twitter i don't usually like jump on the thing that everyone's jumping on that's not really like my style but i hated that ad it had nothing to do with it being like anti-woke or whatever it was just like i hated the premise yep that like investing in crypto that like investing in meme coins which is the primary use of solana is somewhere along the land space travel in the same conversations like we built the railroads we landed on the moon and we trade coins on solana it's like no i'm sorry i don't accept that premise it's not part of it and i was gonna make you know like there's this i the joke when i was gonna i could have just done it in a tweet, which is the real thing, which is, you know, it's like, what would your job be on the, you know, the Soviet commune?

1:17:08And everyone imagines that they're the poet. It's like, what would your job be on the, you know, the Martian landscape? And probably your job's going to be miserable because it's miserable up on Mars and it's cold and there's no climate. You're probably doing something with like trying to mine ice or something like that. But everyone imagines that they're the guy who's going to be like, I'm going to like set up the decentralized payment platform to finance. Like everyone the Martian meme coin artist. Yeah, it's like, I'm going to be the guy posting dank memes to motivate the workers who are out on the Martian landscape.

1:17:39I hated that ad. I hate the whole premise. It could have been a tweet, but because I am employed, because I need to make ends meet here at Bloomberg, I was like, you know what, I'm going to write it up in slightly longer than 280 characters for my newsletter today. I mean, the steel man, the solana on Mars, we're going to need to fractionalize that ice, get it on chain, trade it. Like this is going to be important, I think. Yeah, no, I like who has the one token. You got to tokenize the ice. I get that. Exactly. All right. Well, then I'm slightly open minded to it. We've got a we've got a working theory.

1:18:10We want Doge to let us privatize the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and put the planes on chain. We want planes on chains. So that's our that's our political platform. uh i'm curious what you think the the whole play was with mark uh and the tesla video yesterday do you have do you have any sort of comments on that it felt weirdly sort of conflicted in the sense that you know luminar was i don't know what the i'm sorry i'm so online and i'm embarrassed i miss who is mark mark rober i totally missed it yeah yeah anyway uh yeah mark rober put out a video testing the Tesla self-driving, which is camera-based, against the LiDAR system from a rival company.

1:18:59We're going to switch this interview. We're going to pretend like we're interviewing a country music superstar. Just ask me about country music. You ask me about Tesla. I don't know anything about that stuff. Well, what about your recent interview with Andrew Ferguson on the FTC antitrust thing? I like that. I thought, I mean, my takeaway from it was that he is very eloquent and a great storyteller. He did a really good job of kind of going back multiple decades, talking about Trump won and Lena Khan and stuff. And like kind of just taking me on a tour of what's going on. But, and also it was very interesting that he kept coming back to like worker harm as well.

1:19:38That was kind of an interesting talking point. But first, like what was your, what was your read coming out of that in terms of like how things might change? Sure. You know, it's so interesting because obviously everybody remembers there was the huge market rally immediately after Trump won. And one of the narratives was that, you know, the FTC under Lena Khan had taken this really strict line on mergers and mergers weren't getting done. And so it's like, okay, we're going to finally get this green light on merger wave. I think there's two things here. So one is like when markets are down and risk is off, obviously, That's a main driving force for declining mergers, right, when people are uncertain, et cetera.

1:20:19So that's one factor why we haven't seen this big merger wave happen, just because actually market volatility came fairly quickly as soon as the new administration hit for various tariffs and reasons. And we could talk about that or maybe the general economy even prior to tariffs. But, you know, I think that like this expectation that the new administration was going to be sort of this like at least on the regulatory side or at least on the deal side, the sort of like libertarian green light, everything is not really panned out. And so it's interesting. We did a live show down in D.C. just last week.

1:20:55And it was a lot of fun. We had the new FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson. And it's interesting because he's keeping Lena Kahn's merger guidelines in place. He does have philosophical disagreements, as he puts it. And he did this fantastic history of what the consumer welfare standard was. It was actually funny because so early in the interview, there was a point. I forget exactly what the question was, but something about Trump and the rule of law, et cetera. And the whole audience started laughing. And you can hear it. It's in the audio. Your producer turned down the volume on that. So I just heard like a gap and I was, I thought they might be booing him.

1:21:37And he's like, I get it. It's DC audience. It was kind of crazy. It was like, I was like, Oh boy, like this is going to go off the rails. It didn't go off the rails. And then to your point in the next question, uh, he sort of walked through the history of the consumer welfare stunt standard as it's been understood by like theorists and conservative jurisprudence over the years. And he did a very good job at that. And actually the same crowd that had laughed at him before gave him a round of applause for that part. So the sort of like history of some of this stuff is really interesting. But to your question itself, like I think his point was there is more to consumer welfare than just lower prices.

1:22:16We don't need to expand. You don't have to expand beyond consumer welfare. We just have to sort of have an expansive definition of the term. And so as he puts it, if there are issues that are going to slow down innovation because something is anti-competitive, regardless of the price, that could be a harm to consumer welfare. He did talk about the idea of harming workers as a harm to consumer welfare. So I think like, I don't know yet, like, it's really hard to say because the next time, if we get a sustained market rally at some point, we might see a bunch of deals get announced until there's a bunch of deals announced and they actually have to go through and green light or red light them.

1:22:54I don't think we really know how tough this new cop on the beat is. But, you know, he's made this point and now public and private, he's like, we're not, we take this idea of corporate power as a harm very seriously. And if you think this is going to be sort of like a Bush era FTC, you're mistaken, which I think is really interesting and probably relevant for investors, both in private and public markets. Yeah, it's interesting in terms of consumer harm. It almost feels like people are, they're not saying consumer harm, but people are frustrated with the pace of AI innovation at Apple and just the fact that Apple can kind of just sit there and Siri is free.

1:23:29They're not raising the price, but it feels like it's underperforming relative to if it was true. I'm actually curious your take on that. Why do you think that is? Because Apple must feel some angst about that. Or maybe they don't because no one is going to switch to the green. I think they feel angst after John Gruber's article last week because they got really taken to task. But this is what I don't get. But I get the impression it's not that hard to build a pretty high-quality LLM because everyone seems to be able to do it. So what is it? Is it just about turning it into a Siri-quality product?

1:24:03You just need$7 million. So I think it comes down to Apple wants every – they have this insane standard for every interaction has to be perfect. you look at what's going on on Apple TV and, and, and they're having trouble getting through the like awkward stage of what Netflix did where there was a lot of just like background laundry TV on Netflix, just reruns of, you know, sitcoms and stuff. And Apple, everything needs to be polished almost like award level. And so they, you know, they've gotten close, but they're, they're, They're kind of trying to play HBO's game. And I think with the AI summaries, yeah, they could easily just vend in an LLM, but then they're going to get hallucinations.

1:24:49Those screenshots are going to go out on X and people are going to say, look at what Apple did. It's crazy. But this is why, to me, it makes me wonder whether, like, so much of this conversation has centered around the Apple question. Why can't Apple get this right? Yep. And I keep wondering, it's like, maybe this is an AI thing, which is that like all of us who, and I use LLMs every day for sometimes work, but sometimes just out of curiosity, I'm simultaneously every day blown away. And I'm also every day like, oh, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And the idea that this is approaching human intelligence is a joke.

1:25:25And so the fact that it can't be productized for a company that really takes the consumer experience very seriously, as Apple does, I wonder if that's like a, oh, this is where he's so about. Here's an angle. It seems like LLMs are good at delivering sort of human intelligence, which is not always reliable, right? Sometimes you're working with somebody that's smart, and they give you some work, and you're like, this sucks. Do it again. And so people are used to that dynamic, whereas with a machine, if you click on Chrome and it opens Spotify, you're like, what are you doing? And so that kind of seems like the challenge.

1:26:04We expect our systems to be deterministic. Yeah, it's possible to be blown away by an LLM when you're using it as a co-pilot to write stuff. But then if you're using it to order an Uber, it's not going to do it, right? Yeah. I had a great hallucination the other day. I was using perplexity to prepare for an interview. I was like, and I, you know, I find them useful. Anyway, we were interviewing some of the founders of Dimensional Funds. And I said, what are some interesting aspects of dimensional lore that would be just sort of interesting to bring up? And it said, oh, ask them about their famous low volatility coffee that they serve at their headquarters where they claim to have like developed the perfect mix of caffeine and taste.

1:26:43Okay. Complete. Does not exist. It doesn't exist. Complete. And so I'm thinking, I'm not a responsible journalist. I'm not going to just ask a question at an LLM. But somewhere, someday, some reporter you're going to see on TV is going to ask an insane question with an insane premise. And it's because someone along the lines gave them a list of questions generated from AI. And I'm just waiting for that moment. Because, God, if I had just asked that question, what's the deal with your low volatility coffee? And they're just like, what are you talking about? It would have been like professional humiliation.

1:27:12It was like an offhand joke that the CEO made at one point. No, I could buy zero. Also, the clue was they say it said they serve it at their Santa Monica headquarters. They're headquartered in Austin. So I knew there was something off about it from the beginning. Yeah. So going back a little bit to M &A, we're purely technology focused. We were covering the whiz acquisition today, which is obviously good for the private markets. It's good for everyone from the big asset managers that, you know, got a nice 2x in less than a year. It's good for, you know, broadly, you know, SaaS broadly. You're less focused on that type of M &A and more focus on stuff like the sort of Capital One and Discover.

1:27:59Like, is that the M &A market that really, you know, if Capital One and Discover can happen, does that mean that M &A is really back on the menu? That's a really good question. And actually, one of the things I regret, we only had so much time with Ferguson, is we actually, so much of it was talked about tech and tech power and concentration of tech power. because like, you know, everyone on the right and the left is in some degree anxious about that. In retrospect, had we had more time, I wish we had actually spent more time on non-tech things because that matters too. It just doesn't get as much attention or people don't think about power to the same degree in some of these areas.

1:28:38But I do think that's interesting. And if you look at that spread, my colleagues, I think Flagg did yesterday. If you look at that spread on that deal, that's been a complete round trip since the election. So if you want to see like one chart, that sort of encapsulates the sort of changing moods since the euphoria in mid-November, mid-December, et cetera, and then the sort of turnaround, essentially when Trump took office, which was basically the turn. You know, I think like the crypto high was literally the day he had that ball. That makes sense. Yeah, Trump meme coin. The Trump meme coin was the top.

1:29:09Followed by the Trump dump. It was just perfect. I mean, it's so perfect because of course it was. You want to start strong. But I think if you look at that spread chart for Capital One and Discover, you kind of just see the whole like, oh wait, the rethinking of, you know, how sort of markets friendly this administration is going to be. On economic data, I love following you on days that are like, you know, the jobs numbers and stuff. But I want to get kind of like a high level for someone who's maybe in tech and not as embedded in finance. Like what is the Super Bowl of finance? Like what are the important days to watch for?

1:29:45Because I know that there's data dripping out there's oh preliminary cpi data then there's fed funds data and stuff like what what is the one day that like you can't miss or like what and what's kind of noise that you can kind of write off yeah well i'll say like the super bowl is always going to be jobs day because it's a really good high quality survey if you want to understand like our business is in a mood to invest yep and are they feeling good i mean there's no better measure than are they actually willing to like hire someone and take on new payrolls. So I think like just sort of like, if you want to like understand the business climate, that has got to be the gold standard.

1:30:22And there's so much to chew on. And there's so many ways to slice it. There's so many ways to analyze it. There's a lot there. You know, it's what I guess the first Friday of every month, typically, that's good. You know, the other things that I think are really worth watching right now. Several of the regional feds have a monthly survey of the manufacturers in their district. And I think right now you really want to be watching specific questions about how are you feeling about investment right now, capital expansion plans, capital expenditure plans. To me, that is like the sort of billion dollar question right here, which is there's this hope, right, that we're going to have this reindustrialization or further industrialization or, you know, that's kind of what the administration is banking on.

1:31:10The sentiment right now is that there's too much chaos to, like, make any big choices and no one really knows what the final tariff arrangements are going to be, et cetera. But I would say in terms of, like, the sort of second tier data beyond the jobs report, I'm really interested in those sort of, like, business surveys that sort of ask a bunch of different questions about, you know, what's happening with your costs, what's happening with your, you know, various business planning as they see it out the next six months. Are you looking at any kind of like alternative data sources? Like we were talking to somebody who was looking at truflation data instead of kind of CPI.

1:31:44Or are you like a purist? You got to go straight to the source. No, I love all of it. Do you look at all of it? I love all of it. There's no, the truth of the matter is, is that the government data is very good quality by and large. There are a bunch of other surveys. You know, it's like I remember like during COVID, you know, looking at like those like measures of like dining out, et cetera. And when is that coming back? Or airplane sales, which were actually that's another sort of like yellow flag or red flag for the market. Some of the airlines, I think Delta last week or two weeks ago, they said they're already starting to see ticket sales tail off.

1:32:19It could be because there were a lot of crashes, travel incidents in the news. So it's not totally clear. I look, there's no data. I won't look at. I'm really, but I think right now the question is like, is the sentiment data, the business sentiment data, the consumer sentiment data going to translate into hard numbers? And I don't know if the answer is yes or no, to be honest, because we had pretty terrible sentiment data the last several years. You think back to 2022 when inflation peaked, terrible sentiment numbers. Consumers kept shopping and dining out. So for all they told surveyors that things were so bad, they were still active as consumers.

1:32:55The Kyla Scanlon vibe session. Yeah, I mean, it really did seem to be a disconnect between how awful everyone was saying things were and what they were doing, which was going on cruises and record numbers and all kinds of things like that. Yeah. Question for you. People have joked about, you know, there used to be we had bull markets and bear markets, and now it seems like we have kangaroo markets, which is just like, you know, going up and down like this is just sort of a fun analogy. I hadn't heard that one before. I graduated college in 2018. Very quickly, it was COVID, and then the COVID crash, and then Zerp, and then the interest rate hikes.

1:33:39It's been this kangaroo dynamic. Is a kangaroo market just an obvious byproduct of the internet, where just information is just traveling so quickly, where sentiment can change so quickly? trade on you know you know i joked historically like now we have group chats where like yeah friends are just you know from all over the world sometimes they're just like talking about what's happening and trading against that information and trading against the sentiment in the group chat right yeah and historically it would be like oh yeah you go to your college reunion and you're hanging out with your buddies that you know maybe you got some got you know and everybody's like oh yeah it's actually we should be really bearish and then you sort of make these sort of long-term decisions.

1:34:25Yeah. You know, it's funny, like, um, because I am a journalist in financial markets, people think I know something, you know, like, Oh, is now a good time to refinance my house? I was like, I have no idea. If I, if I knew which way mortgage rates were going, I'd be maybe, uh, in a different business, but I do, you know, typically get a few texts after a, when the market's down and people are like, Hey Joe, how you been? It's been a long time. What do you think about the market? And that's often like, okay, maybe we're getting close to a bottom here. So just for what it's worth, I haven't gotten any, but no old friends have reached out in the last several weeks.

1:34:58So if you want to use that as an indicator of something, maybe that means we have more to go down. But I think, look, markets are volatile because the world is volatile. I mean, there's a war going on. There are multiple wars that the U.S. is in some way connected to. Yeah, but isn't the argument that we directly, we feel like we're experiencing that volatility yeah because we're seeing it live we're seeing the war in ukraine we're seeing something happen in you know syria or libya or or you you can sort of like yeah i mean during the war on terror like it was pretty smooth sailing until like a massive crash that lasted years and then a massive build up for years and now it does feel more volatile it's a bull market yeah i think that's real i mean i i think that like in terms of like the emotional vandalism that everyone experiences every day because they're just scrolling.

1:35:48How can it not be having an effect on things? Totally. Do you see a world in the, you know, are SPACs doomed because they have such a bad reputation right now or could they be great? Could SPACs be great? You know what? SPACs have come and gone multiple times in their history. So I would never bet against the return of the SPAC. It might take a while. I think, you know, it's like maybe even like every 15 or 20 years or whatever. But I am confident that in my lifetime, there will be another SPAC boom. I will make that prediction, whether it's a year or five years or 10 years. But I believe that this idea of you're going to put money into a box and something magical is going to happen, that will never stop being tantalizing to investors.

1:36:34I think the SPACs are not dead. Capital finds a way like sand through pebbles. It just needs to find its way. I want to talk to you about your, like, you post on X, but you also post on Blue Sky. And I see some posts do really well on X. Some of them do on Blue Sky. Are you using other platforms? I mostly use X. Yeah. You know, when, like, the market's down, I post on Blue Sky. Yeah. The crowd is, like, sickos for bad news under the Trump administration. Does it seem like that? So, like, I'm going to throw, I'll throw them some chum about, like, how the Nasdaq is down 2%. I, you know, I love Twitter.

1:37:07I'm so addicted to it. Me too. I'll stay on, you know, it's like Donald Trump and Diet Coke. like i'll keep like but are you using any of the other platforms are you on threads i went on blue sky you're the only person that i follow tiktok okay i don't use threads i don't use tiktok my instagram is private yeah um but we have a discord and the odd launch discord 10 000 members wow it's like a really so i'm in there a lot that's great people are like posting book recommendations sure sure like that like much higher signal i imagine so yeah and like you Yeah, so it's mostly X, a little bit. Cool.

1:37:38And then my Discord. Yeah, that's great. It's fun. That's awesome. What about prediction markets? Oh, yeah. Yeah, can you just give me how you're experiencing them? Sure, sure. Pros and cons, values. This is like my co-host and I, Tracy, we have different perspectives on this, which is good. But look, the way I see prediction markets is like threefold, which is like, I think it's good to have a price on the news in many cases. Because people make a prediction to be like, oh, you know, I think AI is going to eliminate all white collar labor within two years. I would like to see some like price on that.

1:38:11I would like to see people put their money where their mouth is rather than just that being said with tweets. I think it's a good way of knowing what people are interested in at any given moment. And the other thing I'll say, and I've said this before, which is that the U.S. Treasury market is literally a prediction market. because U.S. Treasuries at any point in the curve are the ensemble prediction of what the Fed is expected to do over the course of any given time. So a five-year Treasury is what the next five years of Fed short-term rates are going to be. You could decompose it. And the Fed makes its decision on like, you know, whatever, 12 voting members.

1:38:45And so the Treasury market is literally a prediction market on what 12 people at the Fed are going to do eight times a year over any given term. So the idea like that, it's not like a prediction market. It is a prediction market. And so they're clearly validated as one of the core pillars of the financial system. So hopefully, I don't know, I'd be into it if they have more liquidity and people can have more specialized bets on things. I think it'd be a cool thing. Yeah, it does seem like they need to figure out how to do longer dated prediction markets. Yeah, right. Because you don't want to tie your money up forever on some 2032 contract.

1:39:19Exactly. I was talking about like the last election was so exciting. I was like, I'm ready to start betting on the next election. But it's like, you don't want to make a bet. It's like you're in money. Exactly. And they're just like, yeah, that's not a product that anyone wants. It's, yeah, yeah. It's very funny. Sorry, I got to run, fellas. Yeah, this is great. I got to run to a recording. But I'd love to come back. Yeah, yeah, you got to come back. This is amazing. I'd love to come back with the technology brothers sometime. Be honest. Thank you so much for having me. You have to go get on the Ted Cruz podcast.

1:39:47I know you were. And I would love to go on the Ted Cruz podcast one day, too. It's between you guys and him. for stopping by thanks for having me take care have a good one we'll talk to you soon that's great okay up next coming in two minutes joe's voice by the way makes me very uh nostalgic oh yeah yeah he just it's it's it sounds sounds like he could could could easily have been recording about uh you know the great depression yeah you can hear him chattering over the radio he's a great podcaster. I love Odd Lots. That was like one of the first podcasts I listened to. I think he'd been doing it for almost like 10 years.

1:40:27It's fantastic. And he's held the line on not going independent. I'm sure people have dangled a million dollar pre-seed over his head. Hey, why don't you come over here? And you know, but he reps Bloomberg. Yeah. That's great. Well, we got Scott Wu from Cognition coming on the show in a couple minutes. So many questions for him, obviously highly related to AI. We got to start with AI. What is AI? What is this whole thing? People have been talking about it. We want to know about it. I mean, when everyone was saying like the AI, like massive job displacement stuff, the bet I would try and formulate with people was over under 10 % US unemployment by 2030.

1:41:11And even that, it sounds like not that crazy. Like we've had unemployment higher than 10 % in the past. But a lot of people who I would talk to, they'd say, oh yeah, AI is going to take all the jobs. When I tried to get them to concretize it in 10 % higher or lower than 10 % unemployment in the United States in 2030. It's not that far out. It's not that high. We've had higher than 10 % before. A lot of people would say, I don't know, maybe we'll still, maybe it won't roll out that fast. And so that's the prediction market that You know, there was always that headline of, you know, humans will be having more sex with robots, you know, by 2025.

1:41:52Do you remember that one? No. Oh, yes, yes. I see that go viral all the time. And then Tesla Optimist just did a campaign with Kim Kardashian. That's right. It was very silly. Very scintillating. Very, very silly. Yep. and it seems that that feels like a big campaign by tesla totally to go and work with a kardashian that's sort of the final boss of influencer marketing it is right um and so i saw people speculating on that um but uh it'll be interesting to see where it goes uh well we got scott in the temple of technology welcome to the show scott there he is man good to see you guys how are you We're great.

1:42:32How are you? Good, good, good. Busy couple days for us. Oh, yeah? What's keeping you busy? Oh, there's always so much stuff going on. I feel like there's new products that come out every week. There's new models that come out every week. And then we obviously have a lot going on with Devin. Well, we appreciate you taking the time. Could you give us kind of just an overview? By the way, real quick, Scott and I talked on the phone. I think it was maybe 5.30 or 6.00 Friday night. and he was like, yeah, everybody will be here until probably, what did you say? What's your normal? You guys have a pretty intense schedule.

1:43:05We're usually still around past midnight. Yeah, yeah. Busy schedules for us. Well, hopefully it's fun. You clearly haven't put yourself out of a job yet. But can you give us the update on kind of like, where is Cognition now? Obviously, like massive launch, huge like going direct moment, great launch video. And then, you know, you kind of went into build mode. We kind of haven't heard that much from the company. So can you give me an overview of where the products are where the company is and kind of set some some some ground rules for for where you are? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we had our initial announcement about a year ago actually at this point and and from then a lot of it was was basically just going through all the all the frictions of software engineering, you know, the truth is Engineering is just so messy in the real world if you think about, you know, what has to get done obviously there's some pretty hard logical problem solving type work that has to be done, but there's also a lot of practical stuff.

1:44:00And so, you know, figuring out how to have a clean experience that slots in, figuring out how to work with all these enterprise customer code bases, figuring out the capabilities and working with logging and documentation and tooling and things like that. And so, you know, for a decent chunk of time, our main work actually was with larger enterprises. And so we would work with a lot of these different groups, bigger tech companies, financial services, or things like that, and work with them on a lot of these bigger projects and more repetitive projects and have Devin basically come in and speed up the job for a lot of this stuff.

1:44:37And then in December, we rolled out our general availability. And it's a self-serve plan where you can just put down a credit card and get started and plug in your code base and have Devin. and we were super, super excited about that, obviously, because it's really the chance for everyone to just get to try it out and see how it is. And it's been a fun last few months for us. It's been a lot of iteration and a lot of growth and so on. We've had users talking about how Devon's now quickly become the number one committer in their code base and so on. And so it's very cool to see. Yeah. Can you talk to me a little bit about the decisions you made early on on where to kind of put your AI efforts?

1:45:15Like, as I understand it, you didn't train a foundation model. You didn't do one of the massive runs. You work with different model providers, but what considerations were made in the early stage? And are you still sticking with those or have those evolved over time? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we had, you know, I would say two major bets that we really started the company with. And I would say the first one was, you know, that reasoning and this whole RL paradigm was going to work. And this is, you know, this is a, it was a pretty controversial thing, I think, around the end of 2023, because most of what, you know, the first generation of AI was, or, you know, the first generation of language models was, was more like imitation learning, right?

1:45:54It was basically like, read all of the internet, you know, read every Reddit post and talk like somebody on the internet, right? And obviously, I mean, it was pretty incredible. We passed the Turing test. ChatGPT was a massive... And for a while, all of the work that was being done and all of the products that happened in particular verticals were much more in that style, which was basically, I'll call it text completion, basically. And so you had a product like that in marketing. You had a product like that for customer support. And similar things for code, where it's kind of like, here's the code so far and just predict for me what line comes next.

1:46:28I think we had a strong view that this reasoning was really going to work and was going to enable a lot of new use cases. And then the other thing that we felt really strongly about was that the product experience was going to shift from this kind of more Q &A, text completion style product to basically an agent. And practically, I think what that means is, honestly, I think a lot of folks today still think of AI as kind of a better Google, call it. Like you have a question and you want to go search it up, you know, you ask your AI and your AI has a better answer, which is big. I mean, Google is not a small company.

1:47:02Right. But but I think the I think the actual vision that we're going towards with AIs is actually even bigger than that, which is basically, you know, your your buddy that does your chores for you. Right. And the obvious difference between those two is the ability to actually interact with the real world and do real tasks and so on. And so there's a big difference between having a legal Q &A, for example, versus having a lawyer that can actually go submit things for you, that can go and interact with all these different services. And the same is obviously the case in code, where this is how we build software.

1:47:38You write code, you run the code, you see if it worked or not, you run the tests, you look at the documentation, you click around on the product yourself. and this is how we iterate and build, right? And so the ability to do that is a big step function difference. Yeah, how do you think of getting Devin to go from sort of this reactive experience where you talk to Devin like you would a teammate or employee and say like, hey, can you help me sort of execute on this specific thing? It goes and does it, maybe it comes back to get feedback at different points too. I imagine long-term you want this sort of proactive, sort of like high, high agency agent and how, you know, I'm sure you guys are already experimenting with that kind of thing internally, but you know, what are your plans along sort of that route?

1:48:26Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so, you know, the way that we kind of think about it is turning all the brick layers into architects is almost, you know, as how I would describe it. And, you know, I think the really beautiful part of software engineering, I would say, is getting to do this core, you know, problems of solving and decision-making around what do you want to build, right? It's like, you know, let me understand the problem. Let me understand what exactly is going on. And then let me figure out, here's exactly the solution that I want to build for this, right? The thing is, you only spend about 10 % of your time doing that, you know, as a software engineer in practice, you probably spend about 90 % of your time, you know, dealing with your Kubernetes and fixing your unit tests and upgrading your thing to the new version and all of this other stuff, you know, fixing these bugs that come up, right?

1:49:07And so a lot of it is, the way I would kind of describe it is working with Devin as the implementer that allows you to be a really great architect, right? And so there's a lot of detail with that because naturally you have to be in, you know, all the same flows that humans use for software engineering if you want to do that, right? And so you have your logs on Datadog. So like, you know, Devin's got to go look at those logs, right? You're talking about issues on Slack. So Devin's got to be in Slack, And a lot of it is really kind of figuring out the workflow where it's very natural and very easy that as you're talking about this idea that you have or this new feature that you're trying to build or this bug that you're trying to fix or whatever, you're able to just tag Devin and just say, hey, Devin, can you take a look at this and make this fix or do this thing?

1:49:53Yeah. Talk about, you know, specifically, I can imagine that Devon, because it's so embedded in these different workflows, you know, there's every single day we see, you know, conversation on the timeline from somebody that says, I'm switching from, you know, this code editor to that code editor or that code editor back to this code editor. Or how do you think about, you know, sort of long term moats and sort of lock in as, you know, you're you're building Devin for yourself, but then you're also, you know, trying to build it. You know, you're already a billion dollar company. Eventually, you know, I'm sure you have much, much bigger ambitions.

1:50:31But how do you think about sort of long term moats and, you know, around the sort of like software engineering agents? Sure. Yeah. You know, I think in the short and medium term, there's a lot of different experiences in code. And, you know, I think a lot of folks building kind of different product experience for different verticals or use cases within code. I think in the short and medium term, things are just changing so quickly that the natural thing is just whatever is able to help folks the most is what they're really excited to use. And I think when the pace of development and also the pace of progress in AI is as high as it is, I think that's going to continue to be the case for a while.

1:51:16I think with that said, in the long term, I think these things naturally do kind of converge to a point. And there are a few particular pieces, I would say, that really kind of cause that. and one of the big ones that I'll just point out is, you know, there really is a lot of, in most spaces, you know, we would call this personalization or something of that sort, but there's a lot of it in code, right? I mean, if you imagine you hire, you know, the smartest software engineer in the world and, you know, you get them to work on your code base day one, they're not going to know a lot of these little details about, here's why we chose to do this architecture, here's what this function does and that function does, here's how you do this database migration or whatever it is, right?

1:51:52So, you know, they have to learn all these things from the ground up, as opposed to somebody who's just as smart, but has been at the company for 10 years and built half the code by themselves. And they wrote all of these files themselves and so on, right? Then you get to a point where you really just understand the code base. You're making the same decisions and trade-offs and you're working with it very tightly. It's the kind of thing where, and we see this already, where as folks start using Devon more and more, one of the really cool things is you can have one of your engineers ask Devon a question And Devin is drawing on the knowledge that it has from all of the previous sessions it has with everyone on your team.

1:52:28Right. And it's able to learn all these things. And, you know, if someone says, hey, you know, we got it. We have to go do this, this version upgrade. And Devin might say, oh, yeah, I remember this. I actually just did one just like this, like last week for this other part of you guys code base. And so let's let's figure out this one and let's do this. Right. And so I think there's a lot of that's kind of the shape, I think, of what we're going to see a lot in AI, actually, over the next couple of years where, you know, This is a bit of a hot take, but I would say a lot of the problem solving is actually good enough already.

1:52:57A lot of the reasoning of the problem solving, I mean, AI has been shown to be capable of solving some pretty hard stuff. I think actually what we have left to do is a lot more so just understanding the detail and the complexity of the real world. And you think about all these tasks that we spend our time on, there's some amount of problem solving, But there's also a lot of just pulling in the relevant context and understanding what are the common sense considerations you're working with. And that's a lot of what we spend our time working on with Devon's capabilities. Can you talk a little bit about, I have this take that we're almost in an AI winter for consumers, even though AI feels like it's moving so quickly.

1:53:37The chat GPT moment was so big because we passed the Turing test that for most average people, it's just Google search, as you mentioned. But over the last year, obviously, if you're following this stuff, there's been incredible breakthroughs. Inference cost has gone way down. Models have gotten bigger. Context windows have gotten way bigger. Have there been particular milestones in just AI research and development that have been more transformative to your business than others over the last year? Sure, sure. Yeah, you know, I think the, at a high level, you know, I think all the continued progress that we're seeing everywhere in AI actually is primarily due to essentially like reinforcement learning, RL, that's really working.

1:54:19And it is a very different paradigm, right, where we're saying how in the past, it was all just imitation learning, and it's get as much of the internet as you could possibly scrape up and just train on all of it, you know, and hopefully you get something that knows a lot of stuff, right? Whereas this whole reinforcement learning paradigm is if you have a clear problem space where you can do the problem 100 times and you know this was right, this was wrong, this was right, this was wrong, it's a little bit more like AlphaGo, this self-play learning, but in a language model. And I think that's the biggest paradigm.

1:54:49And folks like OpenAI, Anthropic, and lots of Google X and so on have shown a lot of real progress through this whole RL paradigm. to your point on consumer, you know, I actually think that, I think that we'll probably see a resurgence actually in consumer over the next, the next few months or so. And I think one of the big things I think that will actually flip that switch is, is like a really great consumer agent experience. You know, it's, there's, I think we haven't had the, we haven't had the moment of, of just chatting with, with this sort of generalized agent that can just book you a flight in a hotel and it's like super seamless.

1:55:25And like that, that's like what I feel like we've all been waiting. We've had that preview since Siri 1.0 back in a decade ago, and it still isn't here and we're still waiting for it, but it feels like now it's actually just a couple months away. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, I want to buy this pair of shoes and just go and look on all those websites and find which one delivers and which one is the best price for that and just go buy it for me. Right. Like things like that, where it's, uh, I think that'll be, that'll be a pretty big moment for folks because you'll really feel, I think the difference of how to process the deep seek moment?

1:55:54Obviously that took over the timeline earlier this year. It was very controversial in a bunch of ways, but what was your deep seek takeaway from that development? Yeah. No, I mean, I think at a high level, it's a competitive world out there. I think there are a lot of really smart folks going after this problem. And it's the kind of thing where it's, you know, if you think about like what people even, not just what was possible a year ago, but what even people even imagined could even work one year ago or two years ago or three years ago. I mean, every year it's basically totally, it's totally flipped, right?

1:56:30And now it's kind of like everyone in the space is talking about agents and the future of agents. You know, when we were doing this like a year ago, no one really even believed that agents were like a thing, you know? And I think that, yeah, no, I mean, it's the case, I think, everywhere in the stack. And, you know, we'll see, you know, I mean, there's the GPU layer, there's the hardware layer, you know, there's the foundation models and so on. But I think all throughout the space, you know, you have these really, really smart folks and really smart teams that are going after the problems and basically pushing things forward.

1:57:00You know, I think we're in a very high velocity period where it really does feel like every month in AI is like a year in a lot of these tech industries in the past. And so, yeah. How is AI adoption, what's been your takeaway from AI adoption within the Fortune 500, right? You see all these companies are spending billions of dollars on like gen AI consulting contracts with Accenture. It feels like the consulting companies are probably doing more revenue from generative AI than like all of the software companies combined. Maybe ignore, you know, open AI. Is it happening sort of bottoms up? an engineer sort of comes to their team and they're like, you know, it's there, they're in, uh, you know, not, not on, not in San Francisco or New York.

1:57:48And they're saying, Hey guys, I got this like guy named Devin, he's 500 bucks a month. And like, I think he can do, what, what, you know, our next 10 junior engineers can do, or is it happening more so top down where execs are super, you know, kind of clued in and following this stuff or, or, or both. Like we need an AI strategy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the interesting thing with these times is there's a lot of both, you know, and executives, obviously, and boards, for example, I mean, everyone is thinking about how do we get AI native? And how do we make sure we're on top of this wave?

1:58:21And how do we make sure we're ready to just accelerate as fast as possible? And, and that we're ahead of the curve on this rather than being too late on it, right? Because, obviously, these things are moving so quickly. And then at the same time, you know, it's like you have individual developers and folks like that, who are just really excited to use these things. I mean, it's, you know, a lot of these painful tasks. I mean, if you're doing a full code base migration and your code base is, you know, 50 ,000 files and you got to do the same migration on every single one. I mean, it's not a fun task, you know, and figuring out how to go quicker on those things so you can spend more time on the problems that you really care about and on, you know, figuring out what to build is really exciting for folks as well.

1:58:59But yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting time for us where it's, you know, it's, it's bluntly, I mean, it's, I think most of our waves of tech, you know, there's always been kind of a hype phase, I'll call it. And also, you know, a phase where basically, you know, this adoption really comes in and you saw the same thing with cloud, you saw the same thing with mobile, I mean, you saw the same thing with the internet itself, right? And yeah, I mean, I think it's an exciting one for us because I think with AI, I mean, I think the, I think if anything, you know, I think the capabilities and I think what will be possible in AI are just getting exponentially better and better every year.

1:59:33But I think what I would say is, you know, I think there's a lot of different areas, you know, of generative AI where it seems very clear. It's like, you know, this is getting better by the month. This is, you know, this is clearly going to work soon. And we want to be, you know, ahead of our time with this and get ready for this. And, you know, there are a few spaces, I would say, and code is one of those, where it's, you know, this is actively working right now. I mean, if your team is not using any AI code tool, you are just heavily behind, right? And so it's kind of interesting. And I think we'll see each of these kind of come online at different points in time.

2:00:06And I think there are a few reasons why code is one of the first to really get there. But yeah, it's going to be an exciting few months for us. What advice would you give the young Scott Wu, the younger version of you that's just starting to learn to code? And how do you sort of fast track to be kind of at the bleeding edge? obviously you can learn from the models themselves they're great sort of instructors but um you know i think we went from this period where maybe a year ago everyone was like oh all the software engineers are cooked they sort of like made their own replacement and now it's very clear that if you're a software engineer today you have a massive leverage than ever more leverage than ever and you have this massive sort of edge because even if eventually all this work goes from you know code to natural language, you know, there's still this sort of, it's possible to be on the bleeding edge, but how would you, if somebody sort of a 22 year old coming out of college today, what would your advice to them be?

2:01:06Yeah, for sure. No, I mean, I really think, I really think we're coming up on the golden age of software engineering here. And I think the main thing, you know, as we're saying, I mean, I think it's always going to be up to us to decide what to build, obviously, right. And a lot of the core of computer sciences, I would just say, is that question of understanding and deciding what to build. And so if anything, I think the theory of computer science is going to be even more valuable, you know, understanding the layers of abstraction and knowing, you know, the basic model of how a computer works and how to break down problems logically and how to reason with these systems is going to be, you know, even more valuable.

2:01:38The other side of it, I would just say is there's no shortage of demand for software, you know, and one of the things that I think about all the time is like, you know, I think Like today, even still, it feels so outlandish, but I think a couple of years ago, a couple of years from now, this is going to be commonplace is single use software, actually. Right. And, you know, you can imagine a world where it's like, hey, you know, I got to go look at these these these 10 LinkedIn profiles today and I got to click through each of these and I'm looking for this and that and whatever. And, you know, I got to go like research and get a bunch of data online and then put that into an Excel sheet and run some numbers.

2:02:11You know, a lot of these things are naturally code works just as well for these tasks, if not better. Right. But obviously it makes no sense at all to go hire some engineering team to go build you this massive script that you're only going to run one time for this use case that you have today. But I think we will get to a point where basically you can just ask Devin, hey, here's the thing that we need to do. Let's just go build this real quick. And software will do that for you and will solve that problem for you. And I think there's just, you know, there's so many more products out there to build.

2:02:39That's the main thing that I always index on. It's crazy to think about, but I think it's like, you know, you can imagine all these products out there that are niche products for a thousand people or a hundred people or even just for you. But, you know, they have the level of quality and the level of execution as, you know, the biggest products in the world today, you know, YouTube or Instagram or whatever it is. So, yeah. Talk a little bit about, you know, there's been a bunch of these sort of platforms, apps that have popped up, lovable.dev, I think bolt.new or bolt. I forget what it is, where, you know, these sort of products that allow you to just generate an apps immediately.

2:03:19and they're showing this tremendous revenue growth. You guys seem to have focused on the... potentially much harder problem of sort of building durable software products. but is there a world in the future where Devon goes more downstream and is actually, you know, somebody comes on and creates their very first, you know, application ever with Devon? Because, you know, I see a lot of these companies pop up and I have no idea what their long-term roadmap is, but I can see why it's easy to generate a lot of revenue quickly to just generate apps or generate websites. But then, you know, maybe that's not, you know, the, you know, it feels like potentially a good wedge, but not a super durable business necessarily, which is like, do I need to generate a new app every month?

2:04:04Like probably not, but maybe, you know. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think a lot of different product experiences in the space for sure. I think the way that we've always thought about it is, you know, I kind of think of self-driving as the parallel where it's, you know, there was first it was all manual and then eventually there was, you know, there's automatic shifts, right. And then there was cruise control, there's auto parking, you know, and basically I I guess the thing that I would point out here is, you know, up until the point where it was true, full, you know, it could do every single thing you wanted it to do.

2:04:34You still needed a driver's license for all of that middle era. Right. And, you know, there was a point at the end where it's kind of like, yeah, you could just sit in the backseat and just have the car do everything for you. Right. And so I think we kind of have this this similar paradigm, I'd say, in code, where it's maybe maybe not so maybe not as much of a kind of like single step function switch. but you kind of have this gradual spectrum where, you know, there are a lot of tasks, I think, where, you know, like you said, building a cool website or something like that, where it's, yeah, you know, you don't have to have any experience with code at all.

2:05:04And now you can just do this. Right. And then I think there are a lot of these kind of like larger and more complex tasks, you know, working on a big code base or figuring out things with your existing product or, you know, building, as you're saying, like a lot of this really kind of these bigger projects where, you know, you still want to be an engineer and you still want to be really deeply technical, I think, to be able to make the most out of these AI coding tools. and to use that. But with that said, I mean, I think that every month the capabilities change, right? And I think there will be a time, I think, where you're able to, it's just as easy as kind of looking at your product and talking in plain English about what you want.

2:05:38And that's it. Do you like the innovators dilemma framework? And do you think AI is more in the sustaining innovation camp or disruptive innovation camp? There's been a lot of debate about this, people comparing it to mobile, where the really large companies were actually the best position to take advantage of mobile. A lot of people are saying Google, even though their product roadmap has been a little lumpy, they still have amazing talent, amazing hardware, amazing software, lots of talent to kind of reap the benefits of AI over the long term. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting one. I mean, I think there's going to be a lot of interesting second order effects.

2:06:14And one of the, maybe the most obvious ones to call out is basically a lot of these switching costs that exist, especially in these B2B businesses, are just going to go way down. I'm sure we can all think of these companies that only really thrive today because it is so painful to switch off and to migrate off. And I think that's going to change a lot. I think on the other hand, I think a lot of, as we're saying, this deep personalization and the ability to use data and to really build customer experiences for your users or your customers, I think that is going to only become more and more powerful.

2:06:51And so I think long story short is, you know, I think that a lot of the existing great businesses are going to do very well in the age of AI. I think there will be, you know, in the neighborhood, I would say, of kind of like, you know, the 10 to 20 power law businesses of the new ones that come up from AI, you know, and I mean, I think we already kind of see it's there's the foundation labs themselves. And then there's some of the, you know, each of the big verticals of the application layer, right? There's code, there's law, there's, you know, customer support, there's sales and so on, right?

2:07:22There's image and video. And I think there'll be kind of like, yeah, like a handful of businesses kind of from each of those categories. I think that that really make it to the really massive outcomes. But yeah, I mean, as is always the case with these things, you know, a lot of it is it's very hard to know in advance which ones will be the winners. I do think that, yeah, I mean, I do think with the richness, I think, of the space of AI, you know, I think one of the big differences is there's just so much difference in technical execution where it's, you know, in AI, you can be doing things that other teams or other products just cannot do, right?

2:07:59And I think that difference kind of means that I think really great, really talented new innovators will have a meaningful edge and the best ones will be able to create some meaningful. What's your take on the various walls? There's been this, oh, deep learning's hitting a wall, scale might be not all you need. Now everyone's pretty scale-pilled. Then we got in the reinforcement learning paradigm, as you mentioned. Are you worried about a data wall or an energy wall or just some sort of wall where we hit and we kind of stagnate and we're not seeing the breakthroughs and the acceleration that I think people are kind of expecting if you're following AI closely?

2:08:36Are you worried about any of those walls? Yeah, I actually, so I actually had the opposite take, which I think is in some ways optimistic, some ways pessimistic, but what I would say is stagnation is actually the default, you know, it's, it's by default, it's not the case that we're going to have this, you know, the next thing. And I think we've kind of like, we've, we felt it for so long at this point that it's like, yeah, the next model is going to be even better. And the next product is going to be even better. And, and the next GPU is going to be even better. But, but, but I, I think more of what it speaks to actually is, is kind of the just, Yeah, how amazing the flow of innovation is.

2:09:10And just to give simple examples, GPT-3 wasn't just more of GPT-2. It was a step function different, and there were a lot of things that had to be figured out. And GPT-4 wasn't just more of 3. And the same is true, I think, with reasoning. The same is true with the advancements that we're making in hardware. It's the same is true with the advancements that we're making in the application there. So in some ways, I'm saying it's like there's no single kind of like force of nature that we get to rely on where it's just like these things will get better all on their own. At the same time, it's truly remarkable, I think, that over the last few years, we haven't slowed down in figuring out the new innovations and the new categories that will get us there.

2:09:50So what is one thing that you learned from Eric and Kareem from your from your sort of ramp days that you feel like you've really focused on making sure that you guys implement at Cognition? Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's a they've I've known them a long time. I'm super, super tight with both of them. They've given me a lot of incredible advice. I'll share one, which I think was hilarious. We were just getting started and I called Eric and I was like, hey, we're starting this company. Obviously, Ramp is incredible. I have so much respect for you and what you built and I just want to get your thoughts on basically, yeah, what is the thing that I should really focus on today that I'm not thinking about right now?

2:10:36And Eric said, you know, take a lot of pictures. And it was actually great advice. It was funny because, you know, I would talk to these people and they would say, oh, you know, you got to really nail in on hiring and you got to really like figure out these. And all these things are also true, obviously. And Eric has helped with all these other things. But I found that funny that that was the first, you know, the day the company is founded, don't forget to take those pictures. And it's like, you know, it's only been, I don't know, 15 months for us, right? But I am actually really grateful that we have those and that we did that.

2:11:10And I think there's a lot of things where it's just, you know, just being in it and going through the experience and knowing what you miss and what you don't miss. I think Eric and Kareem understand that better than anyone, honestly. Well, thanks for joining. It's 1.30. We won't take any more of your time. Where can people sign up and who's kind of the wheelhouse client right now? Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's Devin.ai and anyone who's, you know, I'd say engineering teams all over the world. So, you know, we have teams that range from one or two person startups all the way to the biggest financial services firms in the world.

2:11:47And so, yeah, we'd love to hear folks feedback on Devin as they're trying it out. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining. Thanks for coming on, Scott. Thank you guys so much for having me. Have a good one. Have a good one. Very interesting. I always love talking to an AI founder. There's so many things you can peel into. We didn't even get into AGI timelines, P-Doom, all the fun things that you can go from there. You want a pen? Peter Charger. What? Oh, Charger. Here you go. And we're in demand today. There are multiple guests trying to call in right now. We can only let one in at a time. Or maybe we could do a debate between...

2:12:22Do we have two guests scheduled? That would be cool. I think we have... Yeah, should we do a VC and a car dealership guy at the same time? I think there might have been some confusion over scheduling. but let's try and let in uh well there's two people in the waiting room right now we're not sure who joined but we want to let in the car dealership guy because that's who is scheduled next hopefully we can get him in the temple of technology and pick his brain about what's going on in the car world should be a fun conversation um but we got to figure out some some zoom details well yeah at this point i think the entire entire like stream infrastructure right now is just melting down melting down yeah we're pushing this to the limit folks we're building the plane as we're flying it but i think we're having uh i think we're having good streams back to back uh it's been a lot of fun and i i like these little conversations take us on a little tour go over into finance land with joe drone land defense tech with soren some ai with scott woo now some car dealerships hopefully uh ben how we doing with the car dealership guy is he ready to come on down to the temple of technology he left uh he says trying to join why don't you send him another message and uh i will i will pull up some info on this on this uh card oh he said uh he does a lot of these stuff so he says we didn't let in his main camera oh he has two cameras okay Okay, okay.

2:13:51Well, let's see. Nissan has a profitability problem that is determined to fix. How? A mix of product, pricing, and placement. Interesting. Honda is sidestepping some tariff uncertainties by reworking its battery sourcing strategy. Beginning in April, Honda will source hybrid batteries for nearly 400 ,000 vehicles from Toyota's $14 billion North Carolina plant. He's in. He's in. hey can you guys hear me yeah we can you look fantastic you sound fantastic got a real welcome to tvp over here that's the least i could do if this is what i do all day this is fantastic uh great great to have you here uh can you can you kick us off a little introduction what do you do what's your name who are you well it's great to be on the on the fortress of finance thank you no i'm so i'm the founder of card dealership guy you've probably seen me on twitter if you're if you're listening to this right now.

2:14:46We are the leading content news and insights platform for car dealers. Cool. Didn't start that way. We were very consumer-based, but it's been a couple years where I've really just shifted to focusing on the industry. And today, we're pretty much offering anything for dealers to come and learn, kind of stay informed, get ahead, really just trying to make a better industry with the kind of ultimate vision that if we can create a better dealership experience and educate the dealers and kind of democratize knowledge, then the consumer experience would be better and everybody wins. So that's kind of like the utopian vision.

2:15:22I know very little about car dealerships, so I bet my questions would be silly. Maybe give us the crash course history, your personal history in the industry leading up to this because this is not the kind of business that you start just because you had a good X account. I imagine you experienced a lot of the turmoil of the industry and the good and the bad? Yeah, so it's quite the opposite. But I'll give you the short version. So I was a dealer, I grew up in used car business. Father had a small used car dealership. So that was where I spent most of my time. In 2018, I got the bug. I said, there's no way that we're still selling cars this way, right?

2:16:03Everything's done online. Why do I have to, why do people have to come to my dealership? You know, why can't I expand virtually and whatnot? And so I took this traditional dealership and I said, we're going to build a better way to buy a car. We're going to do it 100 % online. At the time, Carvana had just gone public, but it was still kind of like a nascent thing, you know, selling cars online. And so I actually raised capital and we transformed into a venture-backed online auto retailer. You know, we started building out our own website, our technology, our platform. And I spent five years doing this.

2:16:35So we were completely vertically integrated this entire time. So as we were building this business, you know, we were acquiring the warehouses, building up the logistics network and actually retailing vehicles online from what was a small used car dealership. It was a crazy experience. I mean, you know, we raised lots of capital throughout the time and grew the business to close to like$100 million in annual sales. And in the end of, I want to say it was 2021 when rates started rising, you know, we kind of, things got really tough. We spent the next 18 months, you know, we couldn't raise more cash.

2:17:08capital. Business was obviously, you know, the burn was accelerating and we kind of had this like existential, we're facing this existential point in our life. And the next 18 months were just brutal. We ended up shutting that business down. We tried to pivot to private equity. We almost got acquired, but that didn't work out. And in the meantime, I sort of had this like, you know, anonymous Twitter account where I was just tweeting, you know, just trying to stay sane, be a little creative, but really just sharing kind of my thoughts. And it blew up like crazy, right so i i i don't remember when i launched a twitter account exactly i think it was like early for anybody just on audio uh he's got almost half a million followers on x which is the equivalent of 50 billion followers on instagram pretty much uh no it's a big big yeah i mean it was it was definitely very like you're right it's it's very difficult to today it's completely much more difficult i would say even unless you're putting out slop but i mean like high quality followers is a very tough thing to do, right?

2:18:06You got to put out insight. But that's essentially what I was doing. I was just sharing my knowledge and experiences that I've gone through. And then after we ended up, we ended up closing down the business completely. This was like, you know, like I said, 18, 21, 24 months later, I said, I don't exactly know what's in store for my next thing, but I do know that there's a thirst for this knowledge, right? When I launched this account, people didn't understand what the hell is going on with prices and inventory was all over the place. and it wasn't just consumers it was dealers themselves as well yeah and so i said there's something here and so i formed a b2b media company and um and we can talk about like i went down the holdco route and you know all that stuff that sean pouri spoke about on your podcast the other day as well we can talk talk chat about that as well but that was essentially how i fell into this business so i went from like a traditional family business to a venture-backed tech business right raised like$60 million and all that hoopla.

2:19:01And now we're like a bootstrapped media brand. It's completely different things, but it's been a fun, fun learning experience. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the reasons I wanted to have you on now is just to get a sense of, of, you know, really on the consumer side, how are, how are people behaving in the market? What are, what are the, you know, you guys get a lot of data from dealers that are, you know, your community and i think it's a good signal of sort of how consumers are feeling it's obviously sort of this like shaky time broadly in the market but uh how are dealers doing broadly what what is you know consumer sentiment looking like uh and then i want to kind of get into some individual brands and and you know potentially ask you about the ev market and some other stuff as well as uh later i'd i'd love to get your thoughts on on the war between you know platforms like bring a trailer and cars and bids and all that stuff.

2:19:55But maybe start with kind of a market update. What's happening sort of on the ground today? Yeah, so look, the market has been, I would say, very consistently improving and just becoming more pro-consumer, right? We're definitely in more of a buyer's market today, although it's still very divided. Like if you go to a Toyota dealership, they are still at like 30 plus day supply, which is roughly half the level of supply they should have for current demand. And so Toyota and Lexus are sort of the anomaly here. I'd say the majority of the brands out there are oversupplied right now, which is simply a good thing for consumers because it means you have more negotiation leverage.

2:20:35It means that brands will put more incentives on these vehicles so that they'll sell them faster. And I would say they're roughly like 30 % oversupplied. So it's not, you know, these numbers are not low. we're sort of in this phase right now where it's the incentives are only going to keep getting better because the reality is the inventory is out there and it needs to move now it is spring season which is typically a pretty good time of year for dealers right people get it most people are getting their tax refunds and whatnot and they're going shopping so there has been a bump in business over the last couple of weeks but you know other than that I mean I don't expect the spring bump to last that long and never really last that long.

2:21:16And, you know, it's a very temporary thing. But look, in a nutshell, go ahead. Yeah. When is the best time to buy a car if you're a consumer? And like, are there any like tricks to getting a good deal? It feels like a very opaque process. Everyone has that question. Look, yes, you might get luck out if you go like, you know, end of month, end of quarter, because there's these things called stair step programs where it's like, hey, you sell, I'm just making it up 100 cars, you'll get an extra X amount of dollars as a dealer, right? So if I'm trying to get that stair step, if I'm trying to unlock that benefit from the automaker, then I'm going to maybe even sell a couple of cars at a loss at the end of the month because I want to hit my number.

2:21:59Now, many manufacturers have moved away from those. Many dealers don't even participate in them. But yes, I mean, in theory, you could do that, I would honestly tell you that a better way would be to simply see what brand right now is most oversupplied. Now, you might not like that answer because maybe you don't want to drive an infinity or whatever is the most oversupplied at that current moment. But reality is that's where you will have the most negotiation leverage as a consumer. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Tesla as a stock has been down tremendously over the last month, even.

2:22:38I think it's down like 35%. At the same time, we're seeing more than ever on the roads. but they're obviously, you know, the stock pressure is in part, there's probably a political angle. There's a, you know, broadly the sort of moat they had around EVs has been eliminated as other manufacturers have entered. What do you see in store for, you know, Tesla? I know they're verticalized. You know, there's not like Tesla dealer owners on your platform, but what is the future of the Tesla brand in the near term, in your view, are you see sales performance, you know, continuing to slide or is there, you know, John has joked, joked a lot of the show, obviously, you're completely joking that like they should come out with a gated manual transmission with a combustion engine.

2:23:32Naturally aspirated V12, ideally in the Roadster. The Roadster has been delayed so much. Let's just put a carbureted V12 in there. Let's get the engine in there? Look, I think first, if you look at EVs in general, right, the pendulum swung too far over the last couple of years. So these manufacturers went, you know, had all these crazy proclamations, right? We're going to do X amount of EVs, you know, or whatever, X percentage of our production will be EVs and sales. And the problem was that EV demand simply was way behind. So like Ford was the prime example where they were kind of producing all these vehicles, and people didn't want them, right?

2:24:11Now, demand has been growing very consistently and linearly. Like it hasn't gone exponential. Like demand is still growing if you look at simply, you know, how many EVs are being sold. But relative to the supply that was produced and what was out there, it didn't make any sense. So what happened? Well, all these crazy incentives started happening and all the legacy automakers started to sell all their EVs. But again, they didn't sell them because there was the demand out there was, oh, wow, this is such a great car. I want it. They sold it because, wow, the price is so incredible. This is all I can get.

2:24:43Or maybe this is simply the cheapest monthly payment in the market. I think we forget how consumers are practical. I have a budget and I need to fit into my budget. And if an EV is going to get me within my budget, I will consider an EV. I don't care. The average American doesn't care if it's an EV or a gas or it runs on freaking water. They need to be able to afford something. So I think that's kind of what happened in the big picture over the last couple of years. Now, look, there's no doubt about it that Tesla has some of the most incredible technology. I don't think the actual interior is anything extravagant.

2:25:18It's actually pretty basic and in many cases, so far, but the tech is incredible. The driving is amazing. I love driving Teslas. And I know that many dealers that I personally know drive Teslas themselves. Many do it just because they want to see what it's like. Others just do it because they genuinely enjoy it. And so I think that there's the EV market has been very volatile. It's, you know, the swings have been very, just very rough up and down. I can't say like I'm too concerned long-term. I still think that it's going to continue rising very slowly. I think dealers that put focus on it and make the investments to serve more EV customers will do well.

2:25:57Obviously it's market dependent. You know, if you're in the Midwest, it might be 10 mirrors behind because they simply don't drive as many evs out there um but in general i think it's a it's still a smart investment tesla stock price is just it's so hard to know right because like what is even driving that is it like the elon political like you know um like overhang i mean there's so many factors going into that price the price of that stock and so it's really hard to tell uh what's next for it but i would i would sort of kind of you know quiet out the noise and i still think that EVs are going to continue rising, albeit a lot slower than anyone has predicted and expected because that's just how consumer adoption takes time.

2:26:39Outside of Tesla, who's on a tear and who's in trouble in terms of the big car brands right now? Well, I actually just had one of Nissan's top executives on my podcast today. His name is I forget Shahani is the last name. I forget the first name. But long story short is Nissan is in trouble or they've been in trouble recently. They've been really losing a lot of money. Vinay Shahani, that's what it was. So they basically, Nissan has sort of been the culprit here. And you have to understand the auto business is very it's, you know, it cycles and it comes and goes. So like if you look at 21, it was like Ford was in the spotlight.

2:27:18They were in the penalty box. Then the last couple of years, it's sort of been Stellantis. right chrysler dodge jeep ram um you know now it's sort of nissan because they oversupplied their vehicles dealers are not making any money on them there's way too many dealers for the market share that the brand has and on top of all that because they're oversupplied because they put all because they've been selling these you know wholesale to like rental car companies and whatnot all the consumers are left with lower residual values right so now you're the view the nissan that you purchase is worth a lot less so you're you're pissed you don't want to buy another nissan I think loses value very quickly.

2:27:50So they're probably, they're one of the brands that's really struggled recently. And all that, you know, sort of accompanied by a sales decline. But they are, you know, they have new leadership in place. And, you know, the hope is that they're going to kind of come out of it. I think that their leaders are very convincing and have just because I haven't spoken to Vinay on the podcast. I mean, he sounded like he knows what he's doing. I mean, the guy's been around the block, worked at Toyota, very, very smart and sharp. But it's not an easy thing to get out of. I mean, do they have the resources to really claw back a significant amount of market share so that the brand is sustainable?

2:28:30Or will they have to do some merger like they tried to do with Honda, which didn't really work out. And because of that, they actually ended up switching CEOs at Nissan Corporate. So that's one of the brands that's struggling pretty bad. you know, Infinity is included in that as well. It's Infinity is under the umbrella. But for the most part, I would say like that, they're probably the biggest, the biggest culprit right now in the market. Talk about the durability of the dealership model. You know, your audience, a lot of people that are working in the industry, working at dealerships, obviously.

2:29:02But, you know, you had a, you know, SMB dealership, then you had a venture backed, you know, online, you know, car sales platform, something about cars, it feels like the sort of final boss of e-commerce and that, you know, with a car, you're going to spend a lot of money. It's one of the most expensive purchases outside of your home. And so it's really nice to just go to the deal. You know, I like going to a dealership, even if I'm not actually, you know, necessarily in market, just because it's fun to look at cars and, and, and stuff like that. But, you know, do you see 50 years from now are we still going to dealerships to buy cars my personal bet is yes because i would rather even if even if an online platform says yeah we'll send you the car they'll put it up on a truck you can drive it you can buy it there if you want it i'd still like to go and just see more inventory right and experience you know more vehicles so what's interesting is i mean I learned so much selling cars online, strictly online.

2:30:04First of all, I learned that online car buyers by a large percentage are subprime car buyers, right? Subprime consumers. They can't otherwise get approved anywhere else. And this is sort of their last resort. Carvana, CarMax have built such a great mousetrap that it's attracted customers who are also not subprime, right? And I would bet you that if you looked at a graph from when they started till today and just how their customer mix evolved, I would guarantee that it started out a lot more subprime than it is today. But that's an example of a brand that's evolved. So look, the dealership is evolving.

2:30:40There's no doubt about that. And if you're a dealer that doesn't think that, your head is in the sand. What we learned through COVID and after COVID is that people still want to interact in person with the dealer. And it's not for the purposes necessarily being with the dealer, but rather you might be making a large purchase. You want to go in, you want to talk to someone, you maybe want to test drive that thing. I mean, there's several things you want to do in person. And so the dealer is simply going to continue evolving just to meet the needs of the customer. There are certain things that the dealers are going to do, which I think are very durable, such as service.

2:31:17The service department is the highest margin profit center in a dealership. Because, you know, for those that don't know how dealerships work, right, you have many different profit centers, you have parts, you have new car sales, used car sales, service. Service is the highest margin, you know, revenue stream in a dealership. And that is simply something that, you know, won't go away. You're always going to need to get the vehicle service somewhere, even if it becomes more fleets, right? If we have all these autonomous vehicles on the road, they're going to need to be serviced somewhere. Or, you know, if it's sort of like Turo, where people are actually acquiring fleets, that will need to be serviced somewhere.

2:31:46So service is a very, I think it has crazy kind of staying power and it's not going to go anywhere. And the margins are strong. I think new cars is, it's tricky, right? Because if you look at supply levels right now of new cars in the market, we're not quite at 2019 levels yet, but we're inching up. Many dealers are already breaking even on new cars, depending on the brand. Some are taking losses. And so new cars has never been like a real profit center, right? It's a commoditized product. The good thing about new cars for dealers is that it brings the customers back, right? So if you lease a new vehicle, then they come back to you for service.

2:32:21Maybe they trade into a vehicle, then you sell it as a used car, you get another client. And so the dealership is going to continue evolving. AI is completely shaking up things now. I would say for the better, if anything, for dealers, because they're simply able to offer a better experience, offer more targeted products and services for customers, waste less time. Consumers are getting a more consistent experience. So AI has definitely been doing a lot of good, but it's just moving all so quickly. And we don't really know if dealers will become, you know, kind of new car fulfillment centers eventually.

2:32:52And just, you know, then you'll also do service there and maybe buy some used cars or what that future really looks like. I don't think the dealership model is going away other than the fact that lobbying is super strong and all that. Like, let's put that aside for a second, even though it's a super important one. I simply think that manufacturers sometimes underestimate what it takes to be a successful retailer. you know, do they really want to carry all that balance sheet risk on our inventory risk on their balance sheet? I mean, there's many considerations and it's been, you know, tried many times.

2:33:20And frankly, Tesla is the only one that has really done a great job at it. Sure, maybe Rivian as well, but there's been other plenty of examples on the legacy side that they simply have not been able to do it successfully with launching like a DTC or something, direct to consumer or something like that. On the service side, are there exciting robotics companies that you think are going to get meaningful traction in the service departments of these dealerships? I imagine, you know, we cover the, the robotics companies, the one X's, the figures, the Tesla Optimist, things like that. Do you know, I'm not convinced that humanoid robots are going to be the ones in this sort sort of service base doing the work, but maybe it's, they already are.

2:34:03They are not doing the work so i actually invested in a company called robo tire which went out of business so that wasn't a good one um but they were literally replacing tires on um they were replacing tires on vehicles in like i think fire stones or something i guess the economics didn't work out there but there's a company now a robotics company and i should say now i'm pretty sure they're public already they're part of a bigger company called rich tech um which i had them on my podcast and they're literally transporting um they're literally transferring parts in a service center right from the parts counter to the technician.

2:34:35And this is live. You can literally see rich tech robotics. It's pretty incredible, but again, saves a ton of time. Think about it to technician. You know, these, these are skilled trades, maybe you're making like 50 bucks an hour. I don't know how much you're making like, and to go each time, grab the parts. I mean, it's, it's, it's extremely inefficient. And so these robots now are in service centers, transferring parts. I would say, you know, I, I'm a fan of like the whole, you know, vertically integrated kind of low NPS, high margin. I think Keith Rappboy is the one that was spoke about as I think, but, you know, asking yourself like, what is the, you know, what part of the business has the lowest NPS and the highest margin that's ripe for disruption.

2:35:15And it's pretty crazy how true that is, because if you look at the car business, the lowest NPS in our business, you know, net promoter score is actually service, right? So the service department and it's used car auctions, surprisingly. Now auctions are dealer to dealer. Right. And those are also extremely, both are high margin businesses. Now, if you look what's happening on those two fronts, we're seeing a lot of just attempts at disrupting those two different businesses. So on the auction front, you're seeing all these kind of auction substitutes that have spawned up over the last couple of years.

2:35:47You actually mentioned a couple right there, Bring a Trailer, for example. Yeah. I wanted to get your kind of opinion. And by the way, that's not new. Bring a Trailer's not, they've been around for a while. They've gotten a lot bigger. But just to kind of finish my thought there. So the point, bottom line is like, you're also seeing a lot of disruption in service now where all these AI companies are trying to create tech for dealership service departments to make them more efficient, more profitable, the better customer experience. And so I think that that's going to kind of work itself out over the next couple of years.

2:36:17That makes sense. Talk about the used online, used car marketplace, specifically around collectibles. I don't have a good read right now on market share between you know i've had success on bring a trailer uh every but every car enthusiast you know looks at the platform and they're like somebody needs to disrupt this right it's it's uh got a great community and this sort of rich data and history but uh just the actual experience yeah it feels very dated cars and bids has this sort of amazing youtube driven marketing engine and Doug DeMuro. Who's winning there right now? Do you feel like cars and bids is gaining a real foothold?

2:36:59Once you actually get it working, it's like the best business ever because you don't have to hold inventory and you're just clipping fees over and over and over. But it's certainly highly competitive. It's crazy that you said that. It feels like it's aging because I just spoke with a dealer maybe like three days ago who just discovered selling on bring a trailer right like let that sink in not like it's like it's crazy how adoption in this industry with you know these auctions i mean it just takes time because people are you know how our senator ways things are working um and these auctions are like the original network effect right if you think about the auction is all about how many people can you get can you get the highest concentration of the right type of dealers right the right buyers to purchase now again bring a trailer is consumer facing as well so that's different um but you still need that really you know high concentration of of the right shoppers to buy so look my take is that um i think i don't know the specifics behind uh cars and bids today because it's evolving and bring a trailer i can tell you like anecdotally i hear about it the most from dealers um take it for what it's worth it just you know if i tell you what's the buzz it's i always hear dealers mentioning bring a trailer bring a trailer um i think that it's going to uh it's like it's unclear to me how the these brands not bring a trailer but like the up-and-commerce that came after like cars and bids it's just unclear to me how they how they could maintain their margin long term and avoid really losing their business to the bigger players like the bring a trailer in the market uh because i just don't like you can only pump so much demand from your you know having an audience is great because you're able to, you know, send over demand and community and all that to your product, but that's not sustainable.

2:38:48At a certain point, you have to kind of, you know, the business has to stand on its own feet and, you know, that might get you started. I don't know how far that takes you. So I think the real question is, you know, are they able to really solve a problem in the market in a unique way long-term? I don't know. Like I haven't bought on cars and bids. I've played around with the product, but I just, I don't know if there's enough if there's an if there's enough demand for all of these because they're not the only ones there's other ones that have popped up it's sort of like yeah the real the real network effect with bring a trailer for those that aren't familiar is it it has the longest standing you know most active community and if you're a collector and you have a unique car you want to get it in front of the biggest possible audience to get the best possible price and bring a trailer has so much leverage that people will sign up their car to sell and it won't even necessarily be slated for auction for months sometimes and so cars and bids has an opportunity to say hey we'll list your car next week but then the challenge is if they don't have the same level of you know collectors on the platform you're just not going to get the best price and so they technically offer the same service but they offer a worse service because they won't necessarily get the best price it's still just a fantastic go-to-market strategy to seed a marketplace with a huge youtube audience But yes, there's the question of like, how do you grow from there?

2:40:08Like you are kind of tam constrained. He only has a few million viewers and only so many of those can actually convert onto the platform. But I mean, he's done a great job just going full send and advertising every single video. I would say the biggest physical auction or traditional auctions, what they've done is, you know, they've integrated other businesses. Now, I'm not telling you here that they've kind of given up on margin on the sales front, but you know, they become lenders, right? So they floor your cars as a line of credit. They do other services as well, which helps you kind of, you know, build a moat around your business.

2:40:41But it's just it feels like every automotive YouTuber that gets an audience runs to launch this, you know, auction marketplace. And I just don't know how many of those will really have staying power long term or if, you know, it's going to end up being kind of like a winner takes all or winner takes most. We will see. We'll have to check in with you in a couple of months and see how it's going. Anytime there's big car news, it'd be great to have you back on to break it down. This was fantastic. Thanks so much. You guys are doing great work, seriously. You guys are definitely cutting through the noise.

2:41:10And I can tell you, it gave me a lot of early CDG vibes. You put up that breaking news stuff the other day. And that's how I got started. People just started sending me shit. They're like, oh, by the way, this dealer is out of business. And I just started posting that. People were calling me the gossip girl of automotive, which I never wanted to be. but um it's uh it's it's this thing where like all media in the future in my opinion or the winning media will be like expert-led media which is sort of what you're doing here um you know you're in the game you're bringing people that are in the game to talk about things that are relevant to them so i think it's really great and uh it's exciting well thank you so much for joining great to hang thanks guys we'll talk to you later what a background very interesting setting the bar on backgrounds totally oh yeah yeah i mean fantastic clearly him and joe yeah both both last week yep uh you can tell like the early stage builders who aren't just on the podcast circuit constantly you know you get a little bit more plain background but they come with a different set of insights you know that's true that's true so we got uh we gotta we got some breaking news we got some breaking news i believe i gotta pull this up but we're going to get chad byers let's go here he is um yeah so he should be in the waiting room any second hey how you doing chad what's up what's up welcome to the temple of technology how you doing doing fantastic that's great uh good to see you good to see you guys too before before we dive into it i gotta highlight some uh facts for you so uh until the 20th century Chad was rarely used as a given name.

2:42:51It first entered the top thousand names for male children in 1945, ranking at 997. It actually peaked in popularity in the 70s, reaching rank 25. But now, because it comes with so much symbolism, it's now 1 ,600 on the US birth charts. And I was John earlier, you're a Chad, like by, by sort of definition, right? You're, you're, uh, slinging checks. You're, uh, very, uh, grinding on the fitness front. You're sort of skiing and exotic destinations. I feel like there's an incredible, we talk about nominative determinism on the show. This is a great lead in. And it's, and it's almost like your parents blessed you with that name.

2:43:35And now you're, now there's not a lot of new Chads entering the market. You almost have a monopoly on it. I just wanted to give you a little hat tip for that. So that was the best intro I've ever gotten to something. Let me give you, let me give you a funny data point though. Please. I'm after, I'm named after two people. One is my great grandmother who is granny Chatham. And the other was a gay wallpaper salesman that my mom fell in love with when she was pregnant with me wow wow so talk about what i was supposed to be yeah named after and then my fall from grace as you know this you know chad was dragged to the mud as a derogatory name yes yeah and you know then giga chad and you know all these things kind of like came out so um it's not lost on me that i've unfortunately kind of like grown into the exact stereotype in a way no but but you rode You rode the, you know, it's like the famous masa slide where like, it's like the trough of disillusionment and then you came out of it.

2:44:38Now you're, you just get to be a gig of Chad, but great to have you on the show. You've been a long, long, I feel like a long time supporter. So thank you. And you got some news today. Yeah. Yeah. So, so big news. Like we just dropped this a couple minutes ago, but we are announcing Sousa Ventures 5. So this is our fifth early stage fun. I'll talk a little bit about what we do as a firm and everything, but wanted to drop it here. New media. You guys are hit the size gong. Boom. There we go. What if he says it's a$2 million fund? I got the scoop. I got the scoop. Okay. So preemptive size. So, so really quickly, um, it started in 2013.

2:45:19Um, and we've been an early stage venture fund based in San Francisco since then. Look, our, our general belief is that entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of progress. broadly defined in the world. They are the most important people in the world. And so we exist to serve them. And we're 10 years into this and fifth fund, 175 million. And it's a return to what we did at the very start. So only pre-seed and seed. And I think that makes us probably one of the largest of this exact focus. And so in a moment when venture is changing a ton, and I'm sure we'll talk about that, we are kind of going back to specialists and try to do one thing.

2:45:58And this comes from my core belief in the world that I think you guys are embodying too, which is like, if you want to be the best at anything, you just have to focus and try to do one thing super well. And so that's, that's the big move on this, this new fund and excited to talk about it with you guys. Fantastic. No, it's amazing. Uh, one, I wish we had the data point on how many venture funds make it to fund five. It must be, it must be like, uh, harder to do than getting to your 50th podcast episode, you know, or something like that. Like it's very, very challenging. So, so, um, you know, congratulations on the milestone, but yeah, maybe walk us through kind of your, your full journey.

2:46:38You know, it sounds like you went from super early stage to sort of expanding scope and now you're, you're sort of fully refocusing with this fund, but it'd be great for the audience to hear the backstory. 2013 started with 25 million. It was kind of a pass the hat type fund, no institutions, all individuals, family offices, 75 LPs, like horrific to manage. Wouldn't recommend that to literally anyone. 2016, we did 50 million fund two. And that was really on the back of the two breakout companies we've become known for, which was Robin Hood and Flexport. And I can kind of go into those stories.

2:47:15And we got our first institution in fund two. So Horsley Bridge, I still am grateful for them. We're like, we'll take a risk on you. You guys are not the shape and size of fund we typically do, but we'll put in 10 million out of 50 and then kind of the rest is history. LPs look for those types of signals, et cetera. In 2019 raised 90 million. And this is what you were alluding to in terms of like strategy. I think there's this general thing in venture, but it's true of the whole world, right? You get a little bit of success, start to think you're, you know, you're onto something and then you get feature creep.

2:47:45And so feature creep in venture is like, oh, maybe I'll do other stages or maybe I'll do these other things. I'm going to launch a program or I'm going to do this thing. And everybody has like the natural inclination of the world. So we started doing other stuff. And then we, in 2021, raised 125 seed, 250 op fund. I looked around shortly after that and I was like, you know, so happy. We raised all this money that felt like a badge. And then I was like, wait a minute. My day is like materially different than what it used to be. I used to just meet seed stage founders, which I love, the stage I love.

2:48:16Our average dollar goes in after the seed. Like we can call ourselves a seed fund all the world, but we're not like just definitionally, like let's not lie to ourselves. And so that evolution of really just deciding, like, what do I want my day to be like? What is a stage I love working at? And fund five is just a testament to like refocusing that entire realization back on what I think we're the best at, what I think I love the most. And that's been our journey in evolution. And as I said, like the backdrop of that personal, you know, realization was what's happening in venture broadly. And that's bigger.

2:48:52You know, I call them buffet venture capital is my term now. Like all you can eat, right. You get any cuisine. There's three starters, unlimited breadsticks. You get like desserts and like you can go fill up on that. You can go fill up on that. It's not the best individual dish of your life, but, uh, you know, we're trying to be like the single Michelin star. Like we're not, you know, hovering over you, but you know, hopefully if you know what you want, it's a, it's a good product. Right. That's great. So you had, you had Flexport and Robin hood in the first fund. So, you know, generalists from the start, what, what was the sort of tech trend since 2013 that you were closest to going all going, feeling like, you know, going all in on, uh, We've seen a number of venture capitalists get so excited about a trend that they make themselves.

2:49:45We're a defense tech fund or we're a crypto fund or things like that. I feel just like the feature creep you're talking about, oh, let's add growth investing. There's that same thing of, oh, maybe we'd have an advantage if we were just doing this one thing. That's historically worked out very well for some, but makes venture, I think, a lot harder given that this is a people game. Totally. We have yet to go all in on something, but that is not to say we haven't had a risk of potentially falling into that 100 times in the last decade. We talked about going all in on crypto. We talked about going all in on AI.

2:50:25We talked about going in on all sorts of things at different moments. We talked about pivoting the whole fund to a program. We talked about all this shit. And as I said, like this applies to not just venture funds, but any business, it's as much as what you say no to doing and the decisions you decide not to do is what you do. And so we have thankfully, I think, navigated to we don't try to opine too heavily on the thing. We are still led by people. So like at the end of the day, what I love about seed and what I was alluding to on my realization is. Partnering with people, which is seed seed, there's nothing there, there's nothing built, there's nothing to underwrite.

2:51:02is what I love. And I have found that other people are smarter than me and other people see the future better than I do. When I met Vlad and Baiju, I hadn't thought about that opportunity, but when they told me their vision and showed me a demo of the product in 2013, it was the most beautiful mobile app I'd ever seen in my freaking life. And right when they said the narrative of changing the way our generation, I was 25 at the time, experienced the stock market, it was like, yeah, like a hundred percent, like that's going to happened. And so it wasn't my brilliant idea, right? It was just, you know, I've done a good job attaching myself to brilliant people.

2:51:38So that's how we still operate as a firm. And it'd be very easy right now to be all in on AI, but, you know, we're still, I think, honest with ourselves that we're still people first. So how do you think about pro rata and kind of maintaining a position, riding your winners, any of that? Is that kind of off the table or do you have a specific strategy for that now? So this goes to a broader thing that I've been thinking a lot about, which I think that venture is a pretty inefficient market. And if you, let me just take a step back and I'll answer the question, which is like public equities are pretty efficient, right?

2:52:13Like a bid-ask spread of a single stock is like really tight and you end up having a clearing price. It's weird that in my opinion, the most important industry in the world, which is the innovation industry in the world, which is technology, has a market, which is called venture capital, that is really efficient. If you're a founder and you're raising a B, you pitch like 20 firms and get a price. Like kind of crazy, right? And so what we're trying to do at ZUSA is not force upon founders certain round constructions. Like why is the A 20 % dilutive, no matter how much you raise? It's a construct of the venture business model.

2:52:47But what if a startup wants to raise four at a hundred? What if they only need three? Like we should develop more products in venture to allow every type of founder to finance their business in that way. And so the way we think about it is like we start at the seed, but then we'll be creative. We'll partner with you however you want as you build your company. Do you think that the fundraising needs are changing over time? You're seeing more companies ramp to 100 million ARR faster than ever. They're more profitable. There's just more smaller teams doing stuff. Are capital constraints changing?

2:53:20100%. That is for sure. The efficiency of companies is real. How much does early hype revenue, vibe revenue, I think a lot of new terms are so good. They're just like, they're golden. You know, how much is this durable? I don't know, right? Some of these are going to be bloodbaths. But like what is empirically true is companies will be more efficient in the future than the past. Yep. So what I love about where we are positioned in the market is in a world where companies are more efficient, early stage is really like the place to do this business. It'll be the last entrenched Alamo of venture.

2:53:52Yeah. Talk about FOMO right now. You're based in the Bay. I'm sure you experience it all the time. Everybody, you know, every time I see, you know, one of these sort of revenue charts where it's just like parabolic to 100 million ARR, I get it. You know, I'm happy because, you know, it's good for the ecosystem. But if I'm not in it, I'm angry, a little bit angry. but but but on your side what's the general sense like do you feel like a lot of investing right now it's so unclear because it feels like we're we're early in ai adoption and understanding the potential of ai but the market is so uncertain right now uh what what do you do you think fomo is still uh sort of like is a is a dominant force in investment sort of venture investment decision-making right now or is it you know still dominated by the the sort of beautiful potential of the technology across all these different industries i mean fomo's real like i have fomo every fucking day like to your point i see these graphs i'm like i text my team why aren't why are we in that deal you know it's like it's it's so real and at the same time like i don't know i'm not 50 but i you know like if you were a venture in 21 you remember 21 and you remember 22 and 23 sucked like that vintage is going to be historically shitty so it doesn't take you don't have to be around that long ago to remember 21 and we're in for sure some type of bubble now how much of that will be enduring value or not is like i have no clue but like this makes no sense what's going on like it makes no sense there's seed rounds at 70 with nothing and like four 19 year olds like this is insane.

2:55:39And because Ventures Power Law, that individual deal can make sense if it's the right one. But as an industry, it's going to be a huge waste of capital. So FOMO is real, but I think we do a good job to temper our FOMO and remind ourselves, let's just try to stick to our guns here. What are you doing for sourcing these days? And how'd you meet Ryan Peterson for Flexport? How'd that deal come together? We met Ryan through Wesley Chan, who was at Google Ventures at the time. He's now at FPV, his own firm. Yeah. And Ryan pitched us on a call. There was no Zoom back then, really. And we texted each other.

2:56:23YC Demo Day. Okay. Right before it. Right before it, they allowed people to talk to investors before Demo Day back then. Gary really locked that down. Grabbed that down. Or they're just not talking to us. It's one of the two. We committed to Ryan on the phone. It's the only time we've ever done that in Sousa history. We committed to the deal on the phone call. He pitched us for 24 and a half minutes. And we were like, yeah, we're in whatever. Tell us where to wire. Super irresponsible. It was our first one. I was like, I cannot tell the LP's this. This is insane. This is a bad idea. But it was the most compelling pitch I'd ever heard.

2:57:01He's one of the best salespeople of all time. and he's become an incredible friend. Our families are friends. He and I even own a business together outside of work now. The cheesy thing about Venture is it really is the friends we've made along the way. It's true though. He's the best. He's the best. Yeah, he is the best. He was our first guest on the show. Yeah, he was. It was a solid call. Texas. Out of your portfolio, maybe some more recent investments, What do you feel is the most under-hyped PortCo, the company that should be getting more headlines and attention but isn't for one reason or another?

2:57:42I mean, one that flies relatively under the radar, but I'll tell you why it's not going to be under the radar for very long, is a company called Chapter, which is based in New York City. The founder is Kobe. Kobe worked at Palantir back in the day. the reason it's not going to be under the radar for very long is up until two years ago, Kobe had a very interesting board and a very interesting co-founder. So his co-founder was Vivek and his board was JD and Peter Thiel. So talk about going from like, oh, we have this great board dynamic to all of a sudden being like, my board member is the vice president of the United States.

2:58:19And, you know, Peter's still very involved and this company is doing really meaningful work and AI is going to accelerate it, it is helping this very big problem of senior citizens in the US like navigate the Medicare, Medicaid, healthcare system, pick the right plans. It is super hard to do. There's all these contingencies and other to understand the flows and prescriptions and what stuff are you on and what state are you in? And so they're making that process easier. It should help healthcare costs and law wrong. It should help patients. This is really important work, but just talk about up leveling your connections in the world by the facet of who you chose to be investors.

2:58:54We were the led the seed there and it'll be a many, many billion dollar company. Love it. Question on specifically around reindustrialization. Andreessen had their American Dynamism Summit today. JD was speaking there. There's sort of this broad emphasis on bringing manufacturing back to the US. I'm curious to get your take on manufacturing, even robotics-led manufacturing as a category because from my senses there's going to be a lot of great businesses that come out of this that just aren't necessarily venture scale because they get to the point where they're maybe you're doing 20 million dollars in ebitda and you you know maybe you're not you know hyper growth but you're just a good business and then you know people are going to look at that and say okay this we know what the market price is for a manufacturing business for this kind of widget um and so how have you looked at that as a category And are you making are you making net new investments there out of the new fund?

2:59:56Yeah, well, shout out to my co-founder, Sousa, Leo Polovitz. He started a fund called Humba Ventures a couple of years ago that's only doing like manufacturing American dynamism hardware stuff. So he's primarily of the original OG SUSE founder guys. His fund is really what's doing that. It's primarily focused on software. But I think a couple of things you said are interesting trends into themselves. Like one, I think this question of like, what is venture backable and what is not is a good question in the next decade, which is there's going to be this Cameron explosion of like micro S &B and midsize company creation that AI enables that maybe shouldn't be venture backed.

3:00:33or to my point earlier, there should be different products, different ways to finance a company, maybe different ways to not have it only be equity, but also have profit sharing or other long-term. I think that's a reasonable point, whether it's hardware or really anything, like as a big question. Two is like the strategic value of onshore manufacturing is like obviously a very good idea, incredibly important. We're doing less there. What we're doing more on is stuff back in our realm of, you know, we've led the seed of stored now over a billion, and Flexport, others, like we're doing a lot in supply chain resilience in others.

3:01:06So obviously when stuff is manufactured, whether it's abroad or here, there's like a whole supply chain resilience of a company that has to happen, especially with territory stuff going on of like, where do we move stuff once it's already manufactured around the world? Like that's probably what we spend a lot more time thinking about. But like you guys have had Chris on, I think power from, from Hadrian and others, like these companies are insanely important and awesome. Um, we don't spend a ton of time in and around it. yeah that makes sense um have you made any investments out of the new fund you're you're already doing deals yeah yeah we we soft secretly started writing checks out of it in december so we're we're actually four in which is a little a little hot for us we're we're different than a lot of investors we do relatively low volume each partner will only do two to three deal of the year it's kind of like 90s venture capital and uh but to your point on fomo we're running a little hot right now.

3:01:59So we've done a couple. I think we're just excited to get going. I have, I guess none have publicly announced, but they're all over the place to give you, you know, what you asked earlier, like we're still founder led. So one is a stealth consumer gaming thing with, I'm partnering with this U S chess grandmaster to build. One is a AI personal kind of co-pilot that uses a bunch of cameras to collect first party context about you yourself and then has like a has an app on the phone for a personal AI where we think the apples and others are going to have a little bit of innovators dilemma on this stuff.

3:02:36We've done one that's an AI co-pilot in hardware manufacturing. So like, you know, we're all over the place. Like we're, we're just curious. Are you seeing more solo founders these days? We were at YC Demo Day and we saw a couple teams come through where it was just a guy with no team because he's building it all himself because of AI stuff. And that kind of flies in the face of YC's like early advice of like, you need a co-founder, it's going to be hard, you need someone early. But what are you seeing out there? Yeah, I mean, literally the pitch right ahead, right before you guys, I was literally seeing our comments from here, this guy walks in, he's thinking about starting a company, he's like, I really want a co-founder, we talked about it for 30 minutes, I was pushing him to just start himself and his actually entire product thesis which is the irony of how he was thinking about his own co-founder thing was he wants you know his belief um without giving too much of the idea around is like we are starting to abstract away parts of building software right if you think about we had like cursors literally like you know code itself then you have like the bolts of the world and you have um you know lovable lovable in europe right we're like they're abstracting way, not just the code, but kind of like, like, like prompting entire parts of the system.

3:03:50You know, where we're obviously going in three years is like prompt to like company or like prompt to entire thing. And that's the company he's thinking about building. And his entire argument is like, could a software company of the future not have, and he's a world-class CTO, sold a company to Apple has built big companies. Could we not have a company where instead of the engineering looking like 10, 20, 30 people. It's like three really good people and they control front end, back end, everything through like a series of agents that are responding to prompts and understanding computer science, understanding technology is still useful.

3:04:24So I think that is a counter to like the Jensen's and all the things like, you don't have to learn computer science anymore. But like, I think that's where it's heading. I kind of buy that vision. Yeah. Have you had any AI tools that have particularly helped your job in venture, even just like scheduling or note-taking like or we'll put the deck in chat gpt say what do you think what do you think chat gpt rip it should i do it i feel deeply insecure about this question me too lps asked me this and i'm like not like not really like i should probably be doing more somebody asked me like oh how many chat gpt queries are you making per day i'm doing 20 and And I was like, I think I'm doing like five.

3:05:05I don't know if that's good or bad. Like I should be using it. Rookie numbers, John. You got to get those numbers up, I guess. I find it not that useful for what we do. I mean, to be honest, like we don't do a ton of diligence. Like what are we supposed to diligence? Yeah. It's like people and like themes. Yeah. So maybe like, yeah, if you're searching like how big is this market? Who are the major players? I want to get to know the industry. I don't ever search how big a market is. That's what you're already wrong. I've never done that work. I actually think it's bad work to do at Seed. Yeah, no, that makes sense at Seed.

3:05:39Yeah, that's very funny. There's nothing better. I mean, this is, I just, it's so important to be authentic. And I believe that that is actually the dominant approach of most good early stage investors, yet still half of people want to be able to sort of claim credit and reverse and dress it up and say, well look you know i had this memo and i knew exactly how the market was gonna a lot of that's just window dressing for someone else their boss it's not like we just had that we tried this early on i was like i need to do the work so i used to write limos and then we looked back we're like everything we did a lot of work on that we overthought and passed on we were idiots about and all the things we aped into like like flexport worked and we're like yeah yeah he's he's got an ape in his in his oh yeah yeah what what's the origin of the ape i'm curious yeah so the um we we registered the the firm in october 2013 and going into that we had 10 names picked out that were all similar like we weren't very creative we were like oh venture names are like trees and mountains and shit so we had all these trees and mountains and shit names picked out they were all taken in delaware and we had to register the firm because the next day we were doing our first close so we're like 11 30 p.m we're on the phone we're scrambling we're trying to think of names started like i don't know we're like trying to get creative we're like just why don't we talk about trips we've all enjoyed so someone's like i went to rwanda and did the trekking with the gorillas and then the other person was like i also did that and another person was like i also did that all before we knew each other independently that's awesome we're like that was the best trip of all our lives like it is truly a mind-blowing experience go see the gorillas it's insane they're so human like so we looked up one of the the family names of the gorillas and it's the susa family and we were like this is this is so dumb that we're about to name our financial firm after like a family and b with this little thought the irony is like the only thing people remember about us is our logo it's worked yeah it's fine well venture capital is just a game of trekking with gorillas yes you know it's about appreciating the entrepreneur you know who's the gorilla but you're really just sort of the lp the yeah yeah the gorilla is the founder the the founder is the gorilla the founder is the gorilla i think the founder is the gorilla it's kind of the founder of the company become the 100 pound gorilla if they're big and that makes sense yeah uh last question uh what what's your break down the workout routine i think you've been going pretty hard lately uh you guys have to like people need to roast me way harder when i post this twitter um no we don't we work out as a team together every morning i love it um currently uh i had a crazy list did the half marathon doing the try soon doing the high rocks in in april and then starting mid-year i had this crazy goal that people have now told me who actually lift real heavy weights that the goal makes literally no sense i'm trying to do the thousand club which is like the bench squat yeah but i wrote five reps which everyone's like you're an idiot one in five is like night and day oh yeah my plan in july is to go like full meat all protein no cardio bulk phase and try to get as far as I can by end of year.

3:08:48Meathead mode. I'm going lean to meathead and we're just going to see what happens. Yeah. And then maybe John's been really wanting a venture capitalist to go for their IFBB pro card. So maybe if you really fall in love with the sort of just the weights, maybe you go the bodybuilding route and you really be, I'd love to see you become the Sousa gorilla. Yes. Make that gorilla look small. Yeah. Next time we want to see your traps just in your, in your back right here. Just full chat. Uh, chat, uh, it's been fantastic. Congrats on the line. Can I do one other quick shout out? Oh yeah, of course.

3:09:23Um, one other quick shout out. So every great product eventually becomes a dating site. Sure. And, um, I have a friend in SF who is definitely the most eligible bachelorette I've ever met. She's beautiful, like smart, ripping surfer, great skier, super hard worker passionate about the environment amazing human okay so there's a guy out there that sounds like that would be of interest dm me i will set you up fantastic it's funny you bring that up because i've had that thought recently i want to i want to run sort of anonymous basically anonymous you know semi-anonymous ads because it's kind of it's kind of cringe to post on x and be like yeah like i'm looking for the love of my life but we can do it this might be the first setup you guys might get credit for the first setup on this so here we go fantastic we'll test it a little bit we'll do this one for free and then maybe we'll get like some marriage contracts yeah and if you get married uh tell them the technology they sent you use code tbpn at the chapel and uh good luck to you uh thanks for having me guys thanks so much for coming on congrats again it's awesome yeah i i hope someone uh i hope the matchmaking works we might have a lucrative business maybe this is our cars and bids it's a matchmaking service that's what do your thing i mean uh If you're an SF right now, if you're single, DM Chad.

3:10:38But don't show up if you're not a ripping surfer, a great skier. You got your life together. Yeah. Your traps are in your head. You're jacked already. You know, it seems like he's looking for someone who's got their stuff together. Definitely. But good luck out there, folks. And we will see you tomorrow. Great episode. Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you all. And have a great rest of your Tuesday. Go crush it. Goodbye.