David Senra, Delian Asparouhov, Brendan Foody, Jake Adler, Apple Makes Moves, Hims & Hers

26:46This isn't your core business. Get out of it, tax everything out. Else, figure out how to take a dollar for every 10. Yeah, or to me, and I'm sure there's a reason for this, but the inspired strategy is to build the best television and then tax every single streaming service that runs on it and just take you know a bunch of revenue and pursue a bundle i i always was shocked that they didn't that they that they went with like the smart tv device that makes your tv an apple tv versus just making the most beautiful tv because i think that there's everybody that owns an apple computer would buy that totally even a lot of people that are think pad chads would would you know still opt for the apple tv in their home one of the most frustrating thing for me with modern uh tvs is just the software the hardware yep it feels like slop uh i happen to have like samsung tvs all over my house and the software is so buggy it's so slow and i just don't even end up wanting to turn on the tv because it's just like okay i've got to like click around and um my whole hack was i get a tv that was as dumb as possible but had this technology called hdmi cec which is like it controls the tv through the hdmi and so if you hook up an Apple TV to that, you can just use the Apple TV remote.

28:04You push it on the TV and it actually turns on the TV and controls the TV. And then you can use the Apple TV remote as the volume button as well, because the Apple TV remote is good. Yeah, it's just crazy to think that Apple could easily have a TV business that was significantly bigger than AirPods. I agree. I asked Ben Thompson this and I was unsatisfied with the answer. What was it? I asked him like, why don't like they make they make a five thousand dollar display the apple pro display xdr make me a designers like pay for that they love it yeah maybe you have we have multiple of them here i i and and i think i i think there were a few things that that went in there where uh you know the like the market is moving so quickly and that the like the install rate is is odd and there's something about like the the the like the the price per inch of tvs and hd is like declining so so quickly but apple is a luxury brand i know i know and having an apple tv on the wall would be iconic and i think it would sell very well i i would love it and and the integration would be fantastic and you can imagine it working very very well but there's there's you got to stay focused at some point.

29:15Yeah. There's probably a, uh, startup opportunity to just build, uh, the most beautiful TV. If Pebble, if Pebble is saying, you know, we're going to make a, a smart watch again, you can, you can go build a TV. It is, it is like the most deeply competitive market. And a lot of the buyers are just like purely fixated on price to value and don't care about design. The other thing is that I think if they're really, really looking forward to the future, you put on the app it's vr yeah and you put on the apple vision pro and there's a lot of apps that don't work and the dinosaur thing is like two minutes long and like talking to your friends all that stuff is like crazy future but just putting on the apple vision pro and watching a movie is a fantastic experience and it feels like having a private movie theater and if they just make it lighter and a little bit more comfortable the visuals were there the pixel density was there the price point doesn't matter, I think, for the Apple consumer.

30:10I think five grand for something that's actually light and comfortable and you can put on every night to watch a fantastic movie in a movie theater and you can have someone for your whole family. I think that will sell very well if they really focus the software and the strategy on that. And I mean, that was one of the best parts about the Apple Vision Pro was that the app that was in the top left corner, the one that they want you to click on the most was just the Apple TV store where you could just buy movies. And you could go there and immediately, with a couple clicks, pay a couple bucks and be watching Avatar in 3D in a theater.

30:45And it was a magical experience. It was great. Just a lot of other problems with that thing. But I think that that's where they're going to bet and that's where they're going to invest and they're just going to skip over the wall-mounted TV entirely. Anyway, if you don't want to watch Apple TV, maybe you should buy a watch on Bezel. go to getbezel.com they have over 23 ,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts one thing they don't have on Bezel what? Apple watches they don't they just don't make a statement let people know that you care about craftsmanship I guess they I think they have they have a case for a certain app no no they don't they have some watches yeah anyways Anyway, absolutely no watches on the platform.

31:34But if you're listening to this, you owe yourself a little treat and go get yourself a watch on bezel. You can always find a reason. Yeah. There's always a bull market somewhere. There's always a bull market somewhere. Let's stay with the Vision Pro. Apple released a new piece of immersive content, a Metallica concert, and it was absolutely panned by Ben Thompson, a scathing review. and he makes a very clear argument before we anyway before we drag this through the mud i just want to go out and say that metallica is awesome and it's it was a core part of my childhood that's it's so funny i love metal never really got into metallica yeah what were you into more like slipknot you know the really hardcore stuff yeah yeah i was never a slipknot guy yeah but i was never big into that world yeah yeah um even like iron maiden better for me than metallica i don't know why i think i think you know what it was i think i got turned off because I grew up in the Napster era and Metallica was very hostile to piracy.

32:35And a lot of my generation was very into the Napster, the Kazaa, downloading stuff illegally, the precursors to Spotify. And Metallica left a bad taste in everyone's mouth by being so prosecutorial, doing lawfare really against us, us hackers on the internet. And so I was just like, you know what? I'm not going to give you a chance, Metallica. But they're back and they're partnering with Apple and they launched a new immersive concert experience. It's coming to Apple Vision Pro this Friday. It's filmed in Mexico City during a sold out second year finale of the band's world tour. It features full performances of three longtime staples, Whiplash One and Enter Sandman.

33:16And it was captured exclusively in Apple immersive video, the remarkable storytelling format that's only possible with Apple Vision Pro. And so Ben Thompson kind of hated this. And the reason is that it is not immersive because they cut it like a documentary and they keep cutting from one camera to the next. And every time they cut, it feels like, okay, I'm not just sitting there. You would almost want a drone that's just flying around the event. Even flying around is going to be a little bit jarring. really all you need this is ben thompson's thing is like just take the immersive rig put it courtside at the laker game or the basketball game or whatever that ufc thing it would be so yeah the octagon yeah yeah yeah um you put there it is so funny look around and if you want to look at the scoreboard you look up at the scoreboard and if you want to look out the one team you look at and you turn your head about if apple that's great i i love that from a go-to-market uh just strategy hey we're going to create this apple like orb thing that just goes and we're going to put it in prominent we're going to put it at the US Open we're going to put it everywhere we're going to put it all these places we're going to get we're going to get the partnerships that allow us to do that we're going to put you you know right next to the ring in UFC yeah and we're going to put you on the track at F1 yep and I think people would buy the Apple Vision Pro just to be able to teleport into these crazy cool locations and then yeah if you want to do the cut down version you can do that that's just repurposing this is just like your short form thing but give the fans as the full experience as they want it.

34:45If WorldCoin can scan millions of eyeballs all over the world. You can drop immersive video rigs. At the Lakers game. At the Lakers game. And they clearly have the money to go pay for those rights and it's super complimentary. And you could even upsell them. Like I would imagine that, you know, you could charge someone, I mean,$100 for, you know, like a fully immersive live stream. It's like pay-per-view. but just in VR. But for some reason they're not doing it. It's very unclear and Ben Thompson doesn't like it at all. They also did this with soccer. So when they first demoed the Vision Pro, they brought in all the reporters.

35:27Ben Thompson was among them and they said, put on the headset and we're going to show you this like reel of all the things that you'll be able to do with this headset. And one of them was a basketball game and Ben Thompson's a huge basketball fan and he's just sitting there courtside for like a couple seconds and he and he was like this was my like epiphany moment where i realized that i would watch an entire game here because you don't need any graphical overlays the production is actually easier yeah because you can just hear the sound in the stadium if you want to look at the scoreboard you just look up at the scoreboard it's a fantastic experience maybe you could get the audio the you don't need the actual um comment commentator yeah track you just need the what's happening.

36:08You need the feeling of being in the stadium. People pay for courtside seats and they don't need anything else. They're not saying like, oh, like I want to be over there right now. I just want to sit here. I just want to sit here. That Greek weather report and just get immersed in the moment. Yeah. And so he breaks down another Apple immersive video that they released, the ML season in review. And so instead of just saying, hey, the season's over, you can go watch the full game. they released a five minute video with 54 distinct shots. It's one cut every six seconds. There's not that much gameplay, only two minutes and 32 seconds of gameplay.

36:42Worse, some of the cuts happen in the same highlight. There was one play where there was a sideline view of the ball being passed up the field and then it switched to a behind the goal view for the goal. I actually missed the goal the first time because I was so discombobulated that it took a few seconds to even figure out where the ball was. And this is like a classic problem in VR when you're teleporting around, it's really jarring. Even if you don't get motion sick, it's just you have to reestablish yourself because you're so immersed. Wyatt in the chat right now just had a good idea. Imagine being in Apple VR and watching Tracy Morgan throw up on the court.

37:17And you could have the perspective of the court and just watch. He's fantastic. Yeah, or you look over and, hey, it's Bill Gurley right there. Hey. Gurley. What's up, Bill Gurley? Gurley. that's something you'd pay a paper who is mess who is uh somebody was messaging me on x uh will quist over at slow says by the way the dude girly was sitting with was bob kegel one of the benchmark founders who was on the ebay board nice which is a top 25 legendary venture deal and he's a warriors co-owner so we we we gave girly all the credit yeah uh i think girly replied to that post it was like i was actually the owner was right there like you probably should have clocked him you idiots uh it was a lot of fun um well ben thompson goes back in time and talks about uh ping do you remember ping at all this was kind of interesting uh it's a social network this was in 2010 yeah you weren't you weren't born yet but maybe i thought you might have seen it in like your you know your tech history book in middle school yeah yeah one of those textbooks yeah they had it uh so uh this launched in 2010 and the idea was uh ping lets you follow your favorite artists such as lady gaga coldplay youtube jack jack jack johnson yo-yo ma and more to find out what they're up to check out photos and videos they've posted see their tour dates and read comments about other artists and albums that they're listening to spotify has since integrated all of this you go to an artist page you can see their tour dates you can see their bios all this stuff but apple thought that this would be big for itunes yeah they just released a new feature I think today I saw Daniel all questioning about it specifically around this.

38:57Well, Ben Thompson says Ping is an old standby when it comes to making jokes about past Apple failures but that last paragraph actually helps explain why Ping never had a chance. And in the press release it closes with this very boilerplate PR thing. Apple designs Macs the best personal computers in the world along with iOS X OS X OS X iLife iWork and professional software blah blah blah blah. When you think of Apple, you think about their jewel-like devices, about the integration of hardware and software, Johnny Ive in a white room, et cetera. Indeed, you think about the magic of putting on the Apple Vision Pro and having your eyes seamlessly tracked as you touch your fingers together to enter your passcode.

39:37All of this is basically the exact opposite of the reality of social media and user-generated content. I wrote this about Quibi's failures, the same thing. So it all relates. It's the same thing with these, like when things get messy and user generated and AI generated and hallucinatory, Apple struggles. But when it's a super, super tightly integrated, polished product of aluminum and steel and titanium, Apple wins. And so the thing that we want is stick to - Speaking of stainless steel. Yeah. Aurora. Go to Aurora. Check it out. I mean, the thing that we want is Apple to do what they're really good at and let other companies that are better do what they're best at.

40:23But that's not the nature of monopoly. They have control. And so if they can get 10 times as much value with a product that's half as good, that's a trade they take all day. I was listening to a film critic talk about, kind of gripe about the fact that films are no longer released in theaters. and he was saying like i think that there should be a rule that if you release a film you have to have it in theaters for six weeks and because a lot of netflix and apple like they're no longer even doing theatrical runs it's on streaming the next week or it just goes straight to streaming and the filmmakers sometimes get upset about this and the fans sometimes get upset about this yeah but i was thinking about it i was like it's like that's kind of like an authoritarian thing like that might not be what's best for shareholders like sure you can want that but if the market doesn't want that, you're kind of just saying like, I want to force you to do something that's uneconomical.

41:14It's just like a tax basically. And it's kind of the same thing here where, you know, I want Apple to open up Siri or I want Apple to invest billions of dollars in amazing films that probably lose the money or, or I want them to, you know, ditch their current Apple vision pro strategy, but F1 team. Yeah. Just, and just broadcast F1 by an F1 team and just put, let me just sit in the paddock all race long. They could genuinely buy an F1 team and let you be in the car for the entire race via Apple Vision Pro exclusively. Yes, they could. But is that in their business plan? Who knows? Is that what profit maximizes for them?

41:51I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it is so funny to think we're going to do this concert. We're going to make this big deal about a Metallica concert, a band that I hadn't heard about in five years, even though when Apple was at its best, I was listening to Metallica as a kid. And so it's just not the music partnership that you would do if you were building for the next generation. One of the things I did love about the Apple Vision Pro was using it in bed right before I'd go to sleep. I'd be able to put it on and then there would be no light. If you turn on TV, it's going to disturb your wife or whoever is in the bed with you.

42:34But if you have an Apple Vision Pro on, you can actually just lay back and watch an amazing, you know, IMAX quality film. The problem was, is that the software was so bad that it would freak out and say, I can't track because the lights aren't on. So then I had to use it with the lights on, which would have no sense. And it was just very janky. So I returned it. But if you're looking to upgrade your bed, you got to go to 8sleep.com, Nights of Fuel Your Best Days, turn a new bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. The apple of smart beds. Yeah. Many people have said that. So go to aidsleep.com slash TBPN.

43:05Get$350 off your pod. It's a fantastic product. I put up 100 last night. You put up 100? Yeah. You didn't tell me. I took it very seriously when I got the worst night sleep of the last year on Monday. 84. Not enough. Six hours and 38 minutes. I need to step it up. Routine was a little bit rough too. Anyway. I got over two hours of deep sleep. Who's doing that? You know who's sleeping pretty well these days? Masayoshi-san. Of course, SoftBank bought chip designer Ampere computing for$6.5 billion. Ampere will retain its name and operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank. And so this is an interesting deal.

43:48They just inked the deal that's just broke recently. It's a series of investments to advance its artificial intelligence initiatives. And this is one of those deals that you don't hear about as much because it doesn't have the crazy PowerPoint. It's not this high flying thing. But this is like, you know, when Masa went and bought Arm, you know, it was kind of a boring deal. And so people weren't like, oh, top on Arm. And of course, Arm did really well. Early and right. Yeah. Early and right. This is kind of where I disagree with Sam's lesson a little bit. It's like, yes, he does get over his skis a lot.

44:21But also he does go back to me. But skiing is awesome. Skiing is awesome, Sam. Yeah. the Japanese technology investment company's purchase of Ampere will help improve its AI capabilities. The deal comes as SoftBank is starting a giant data center project in the US. How much is SoftBank spending on OpenAI agents this year? They want to spend$3 billion this year just on OpenAI, which is amazing. And so Ampere designs - They're saying it's one of the best SaaS deals of all time. It's really remarkable. I wonder if agents had anything to do with this deal. Maybe they used Tebbia to get in the data room, crunch some numbers.

44:57Maybe they use deep research. We'll have to get Masa on and ask him about how he's using agents to speed up his multi-billion dollar acquisition process. But in this case, Ampere designs energy efficient processors for cloud and AI computing and has about 1 ,000 skilled chip engineers. Ampere's expertise in developing chips can complement the design strengths of ARM holdings. So they're kind of like creating this Keiratsu, which we love. We love. love a Koretsu uh buoyed by a rush of ai chip buying arm in february reported record quarterly sales for the three months ended we should help facilitate a gundo Koretsu they really should we're already doing it between all of our sponsors diamonds investing in in all the different companies some of our sponsors all of our sponsors are now on ramp all the founders are wearing watches from bezel sleeping on eight sleeves they're running ads on adquick it's great their Their personal portfolios are on public.

45:50It's great. It's beautiful. If you join the TBPN sponsorship, Karetsu, everyone benefits. Yep. Yeah. Masayoshi Sun said that realizing AI that surpasses human capabilities requires a breakthrough in computing power. Ampere's expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision and deepens our commitment to AI and innovation in the US. I really just want to know how this deal got done. I imagine it was Masa writing on a napkin. He probably has specially designed napkins that have space for two different sig blocks and signatures and it's like a mini Excel model.

46:37I think it might've been maybe a little bit more boring. I mean, look at who owned Ampere at the time. It was Carlisle Group and Oracle. Carlyle owned 60%. It's crazy because the VCs typically, when SoftBank invests, would love to be able to sell. Yep. In this case. Usually doesn't. Not really able to exit. It's PE that benefits this time around. SoftBank is borrowing from Mizuho Bank to finance the deal over the past few years. It's our leverage. Operating losses as its revenue dropped and its liabilities exceeded its assets. That's the acquisition is expected to be completed in the later half of the year, subject to customary closing considerations.

47:17I love Masa. Levering up to buy an asset that's losing money. Well, it doesn't have to lose money because I was thinking about this. Like the real bull case is that Ampere gets on ramp because time is money and they could say both. Exactly. So you think about the Ampere team. If they had easy to use corporate cards, great bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place, that could really drive the accretion of that deal. Yeah, it's very possible that Masa is running a ramp-oriented M &A strategy where it just looks at all these businesses. Hey, I know you're losing$2 billion a year.

47:53Like I have a great fix. I think we're going to see more of this. Like, you know, you can see a lot of... We do a roll up and we drop AI on top. We do a roll up and we drop ramp on top. It's the same idea. Yeah. Anyway, go to ramp.com. Sprinkle a little bit of ramp in your next acquisition. We got big news in the world of Zempik. sale of Ozempic knockoffs is supposed to end soon. Telehealth companies aren't happy. We've covered this on the show before. Fascinating industry. Obviously, the creators of Ozempic are printing, but also the telehealth companies that have been selling Ozempic and compounded versions of Ozempic, which are manufactured independently, have also been doing quite well.

48:33And so pharmaceutical giants are squaring off against telehealth companies and pharmacies selling custom-made versions of the hot medicines. Today was supposed to mark the beginning of the end for a chapter, knockoff versions of hot weight loss drugs. The FDA wants bulk production of the copycats to stop starting Wednesday for pharmacy-prepared versions of ZepBound and later in the spring for knockoffs of Ozempic and Weguvi. But telehealth companies and pharmacies have fueled wide use of copycats. They have other plans. Telehealth platform Hims and Hers Health says it will keep offering pharmacy-made or compounded versions of Ozempic and Wigoovy tweaked to individual prescriptions.

49:12And some of the pharmacies making GLP-1 drug copycats will continue, according to people familiar with the industry. The firms are seeking to take advantage of current law, which allows compounding pharmacies to make special individualized versions of the drugs that aren't available commercially. And so what happened here was that Ozempic became so popular in America that they could not supply the market. And for most things, like when the iPhone dropped, the iPhone was extremely popular and it would sell out. There'd be lines out the door. And so for years, Apple hit their earnings perfectly.

49:47And it was amazing. It was an amazing stock because they knew we're going to sell every iPhone we make. And so how many iPhones can we make? If we can make 5 million iPhones, we're going to sell 5 million iPhones. And so they They hit their earnings every single quarter, and it was great. Then, now, we're in the era of abundance of iPhones, essentially. And now, it's much harder to predict how many Apple Vision Pros will sell, how many new iPhones will sell, because the demand is much more sticky or loose, and iPhone production is essentially unlimited at this point. Drugs are different. Drugs, you know, you can say whatever you want about Ozempic, but abstract it away to the classic, like, cancer drug, insulin.

50:29these drugs, when they're approved, the FDA is saying like, these are important. These help people solve health problems. And so it is critical that these, if doctors are prescribing them, they need to be available. And yes, we respect your intellectual property. We are granting you a monopoly on your patent for a certain amount of years. But if you can't supply the market, we are going to invalidate your IP temporarily while you're out of stock and say, hey, there's supply shortage. Anyone can make these, including the compounding pharmacies. But as soon as the big companies - Great side hustle last year.

51:03If you were in high school, buy the compounds online, compound them in your garage, go door to door, pay for your college. And so Ozempic and Wugubi are a little bit different, but the general scientific consensus is that obesity causes tons of diseases and losing weight causes you to live a lot longer. So these are important medicines. And so if Novo Nordisk couldn't supply the market, then it was okay for compounding pharmacies to make their own and sell them. And of course, HIMS and HERS, large telehealth public company, was able to use that compounding pharmacy. I don't even know if you'd call it a loophole.

51:44It's more just like a rule by the FDA. They were able to use that to sell a lot of this product and it really benefited the stock. But of course, Nova was eventually going to catch up and that's exactly what happened. And at the beginning of this year, HIMS and HERS Health went on a generational run. They had really struggled after they went public. I think it was a couple of years ago at this point. Many, many people were writing them off completely. It was a SPAC, I believe. And then, and then they dropped like most SPACs, but never went down 99 % or anything like that. Yeah. And people have critiqued their business for a bunch of different reasons, but ultimately consumers like to be able to buy their medicine easily and directly online.

52:31And so they peaked on February 18th, just about a month ago at 15 billion, and then they've dropped almost 50 % since then. So it's seven and a half now. Yeah. Yeah, and there's kind of a question about like, what's the next act? They clearly have a lot of customers. They have a lot of people on their platform. I think they even allow us subscriptions. And they still sell a lot of hair care drugs and ED medications. They're basically saying, we are going to keep selling these drugs. But they wanna find, they wanna find. Because it's this interesting balance, right? Because it is this sort of tough position to be in where they're saying, we can make hundreds of millions or potentially billions of dollars in revenue from selling these drugs.

53:09Even if we're very clearly proven to be in the wrong, the settlement to Eli Lilly and Nova Nordisk would probably be in the nine figures, but maybe not. Maybe it's worth it. Yeah. It's worth it potentially. These are high margin products. Just legally, no one's ever done compounding pharmacies at this scale. The law might not be written in a way that makes this illegal. It's an open question. There are lots of pundits and people that have been saying, Hey, this can't last or this can't happen. But, uh, you don't really know until you run through the legal process fully and look at what all the judges and what all the presidents say.

53:48Yeah. I mean, him, hims and hers and these other players can go to Washington. They are doing this. They, they've, they have two different lobbying firms that they just hired in January. I'm sure they had others historically and they can say, hey obesity is the biggest health problem in america the best way to help americans is introduce a massive amount of competition yep we're not trying to lobby to say we you know we're not going to let nor you know yep it's just saying consumers should have choice they should be able to buy these but it will set a crazy precedent around just ip laws in america and which is the biggest pharmaceutical market in the world right don't we spend more, um, the people of fact check me if I'm incorrect there, but I believe we spend more money on pharmaceuticals than any other country.

54:36I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Uh, the firms are seeking to take advantage of current law, which allows compounding pharmacies to make special individualized versions of drugs that aren't available commercially, telehealth firms and pharmacies. We, we account for nearly half of global pharmaceuticals. Let's go. And what was, uh, Jensen Wong was saying we need a hundred X that, or he was talking about AI production spend. but maybe, maybe we get Andrew Gidiman and he says the same thing. Yeah, yeah, Andrew from him saying, we need 100X per capita spending on my compounded drugs. I mean, the crazy thing is that everyone was projecting, I mean, runaway takeoff of these drugs and obesity rates do seem to be coming down, but it's not this fast takeoff like we hear in AI.

55:26these drugs take a long time to work through the system. They're expensive, they really are. And a lot of people are skeptical about them and they don't wanna be the first person to take them. They wanna say, okay, yeah, sure, the FDA has approved them but maybe I'll wait a couple years, even if I am obese, I'll wait a couple years and see where does this shake out, are there some unknown complications, what are the bro scientists saying about it? Yeah, we really gotta wait till Joe Rogan chimes in here to really form an opinion. You got to trust the bro science on this one, for sure. The brother scientists.

55:58For sure. The FDA deadlines come after the agency declared the official end of obesity drug shortages that allowed compounding pharmacies to make copies of the drugs in bulk. The shortages have led to a fierce fight in the courts, on airwaves, and around Washington with the pharmaceutical heavyweights, Eli Livy and Novo Nordisk, that sell branded drugs. And there was actually a Super Bowl ad from HIMSS that was framing them as a challenger to the entrenched incumbents, the large pharmaceutical companies that are raising prices, decreasing demand, monopolizing these important drugs in their view.

56:35Telehealth companies often sold the compounded drugs at$100 to$300 a month, well below the$1 ,000 a month price tags of the branded medicines. And so, yeah, I mean, for a lot of Americans, even if they're obese, $1 ,000 is a lot. And even though, you know, you could say that the benefit of not being obese is very high. A thousand bucks is a thousand bucks and not everyone has that, unfortunately. Anyway, let's move on to Wander. I was really thinking, how do we get a Coogan transition into this next sponsor? And I tried to do the work for you, couldn't come up with anything. But we do have a good way to transition and that is find your happy place.

57:18Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views. hotel-graded men in these dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge services, vacation home, but better, folks. Go to Wander.com. Go to Wander.com slash TBPN. Use code TBPN. I was really excited. So Kyle, who's the CMO over at Wander, he posted this incredible house. Yeah. And it happens to be like a quarter mile from my house in Malibu. So I hit him up and I said, hey, we get some early access to that spot. So we're working on that. Very excited. can't wait um and uh yeah can't wait to to get over there yeah well uh let's move on to oh we only have four minutes let's just do some timeline folks we got to do some timeline uh let's go to uh zabi elmgren she says we'll lead your series a if you can hang and i just i saw this earlier i thought it was fantastic i would like to make this the new kind of like y combinator basically Zobby takes you down the most aggressive gnarly run yeah and then afterward there's like VCs at the bottom that you can pitch to yeah it's kind of like Keith Reboise is like you shouldn't hire anyone over 30 VC you shouldn't fund anyone if they're skiing less than 30 degree inclines yeah something like that and to be clear something about skiing when you take a picture of a cliff like this, it doesn't necessarily look super significant, but that is a serious drop.

58:47Yeah. And she really is going full send. Next time Zabi posts the video, we'd love to see the entire run. Let's go to the next post. Let's go to Kirsten Green over at Forerunner. She says, today we're sharing our annual consumer trend report, our primary research and analysis on where consumers are at and what trends are driving new needs, priorities, and business opportunities. We focus on three key forces, health and wellness, generative AI, and personal security. Interesting. So you want to have her on the show? Yeah, I had a friend reach out to her this morning about coming on the show. I think it'd be awesome.

59:27I always love these trend reports. They put them out pretty frequently. I'm trying to find it. I can't find it on Forerunner.com. Well, she says, This past year was marked by contradictions, yo-yoing in consumer sentiment and markets, explosive new tech and out-of-pocket healthcare spending, a strikingly resilient jobs market, and mounting fear about career, financial, and personal safety. Our full report here. Interesting stat here. Yeah, I want to have her break it down, but just some interesting stats. Forerunner's historically been heavily consumer focused. They'll do a B2B company here or there from what I know, but they're, and the reason for this, a lot of people sort of write off consumer because it's really hard.

1:00:12It's really hard to get right, but many of the biggest outcomes ever have been in consumer. And interesting stat here, two thirds of US GDP is from consumer activity. And so that's why the outcomes end up being so massive. Yeah, it's also interesting just to hear her talk about these brands because they're just so much more tangible business cases than the B2B stuff that's harder to dig into. It's more spreadsheet based. You need to really understand what's going on in these niche sub markets. Everyone can have opinion on liquid death or Dollar Shave Club. You can kind of understand that. It's very tractable.

1:00:49Anyway, we have our first guest. There we go. Welcome to the Temple of Technology. Brendan from Mercore. How are you doing? What's going on? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me, guys. I'm excited to be on the most profitable podcast. Yes. Well, you're live. Can you introduce yourself, break down a little bit about your history, your story, and what you're building, what your company does? Yeah. Usually when somebody gets to your stage, they've been in market for five, six years. So people have more of an opportunity to get to know you. So yeah, we'd love the full intro. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

1:01:23So I grew up in the Bay Area, met my co-founders, Adarsh and Surya, when we were 14 in high school. And so we were all in the speech and debate team together. They were the winningest speech and debate team of all time in high school debate. But I was always building companies in one form or another. So I didn't want to go to college. My parents insisted that I had to. And so I went to Georgetown for two years, where Surya was my roommate there and Adarsh was at Harvard. And we started Mercore when we were 19 to train models that predict how well someone will perform on a job better than a human can, similar to how a human would review a resume, conduct an interview, and decide who to hire.

1:02:04We automate all of those with LLMs. And then fast forward two years, we scaled from one to 100 million in revenue in 11 months. And so we're only 21 and running this really exciting company that's working with most of the most prominent companies in Silicon Valley. it's more of a more of a line than a curve over there it's not really just a hockey stick it's a how do you uh it's a fencing sword you're very you're very smiley right now you look like you're having fun but your your linkedin profile is dead serious uh do you do you do uh you know like i'm sure internally as a team you guys are focused on not letting the hype and the crazy initial traction get to your head how do you think about running the team when the team is only experienced sort of massive sort of immediate success.

1:02:54Totally. And I think one thing that compounds this is that so much of our team is like college dropouts and new grads, right? Because it was the extension of our initial network at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc. And so a lot of them haven't seen what normal companies look like. This is all that they're used to. And it's easy to get caught up and lost in so much that's happening. But I think the most important thing to stay granted is just focusing everyone on the numbers that matter long term, right? The network effects of the business. How do we build up the marketplace? How do we learn from all the performance reviews that we're getting to build our usage data flywheel rather than focusing on a lot of the lagging indicators like revenue or more of the customer signals?

1:03:42Can you talk about some of the jobs that you're actually placing? Like you go to Mercore, you get placed. Are you placing people in white collar jobs, blue collar jobs, everything, any specific niches? Yeah. So when we started out, it was that we were very amazed with the caliber of talent in India. And so we would hire these software engineers in India and use LLMs to assess them, hire them for our friends. But what we realized was that there was this really large shift happening in the human data market where large AI labs are hiring thousands of people to train the next generation of LLMs. And it used to be this crowdsourcing problem that was super low skilled, right?

1:04:23Of how do you get a bunch of people writing barely grammatically correct sentences for the early versions of ChatGBT? That was moving towards this vetting problem of how do we find the most exceptional people in the world in high volumes that want to work directly with researchers to push the frontier of model capabilities. And so to your question, we now hire roles across almost all domains or the vast majority of popular domains, ranging from software engineers to consultants, people in finance, medicine, law, et cetera, to both help more traditional customers as well as these AI labs. Yeah.

1:05:03What about robotics? I mean, obviously, there's this question of like a data wall in robotics. Google had that famous like arm farm where they were trying to generate reinforcement learning data with like 17 robotic arms just working on grasping. Are we going to see a future where people are getting placed into jobs, kind of wearing motion tracking suits to generate robotics data? How do we solve that problem? them? That's a phenomenal question. I'm not sure I think so. There is a lot of questions around like what kind of data production are most efficient robotics. And I will say we don't provide people to create robotics data as much yet, but it's certainly something that's top of mind as these companies start to mature and really scale up the kind of data that they're interested in.

1:05:54What about revenue volatility? I feel like a lot of these, like if you're placing individuals into, you know, some big foundation model company or some big hyperscaler is doing a massive training run, they need to really nail down math and they're going to bring in a ton of mathematicians, generate a ton of training data. And then they're like, hey, we're actually good. We're moving on to the next thing. That can kind of create a massive oscillation in your revenue. How are you thinking about like scaling out and making sure that the growth curve is smooth, because obviously it's very fast. But the iron law of the universe is like, what goes up quickly comes down quickly.

1:06:36But then maybe there's a second act and you go back up again. And over time, it looks smooth, but it can be very jostling in the next few years. Yeah, I think the most important thing to think about is the leading indicators in fast moving markets, right? And that if you look at the most sophisticated labs and what they're really investing in. It's a super high caliber expert data that is like far beyond the model frontier of capabilities. And so, so long as we focus on like the leading indicators, the things that, you know, all the big tech budgets are starting to move towards that positions us really well.

1:07:11And obviously like the leading indicators evolve over time and we need to position ourselves there. I think where companies get themselves into trouble and these fast changing markets as when they aren't looking at the leading indicators and they're sort of sitting with the large incumbents that are doing a lot of the legacy systems that get phased out. And so that's how we think about it. But my broader take on the human data market is that it's going to grow dramatically because we're getting to the point where RL is so effective that you can create almost any eval and it will be able to solve that eval.

1:07:45And so the barrier to applying AI throughout the entire economy is just creating evals for everything, right? which is a process that inherently requires humans in the loop. And so I'm very excited about building that world. What are some customers that you can talk about or maybe allude to that have been kind of surprising? We talked about yesterday Yum Brands, which is like a$44 billion public company that owns a bunch of fast casual restaurants. They're partnering with NVIDIA and like buying chips and like actually building, effectively building their own AI in-house. Has there been any sort of, you're obviously working with all the big sort of foundation labs, or I would say most of them would be my guess, but has there been any customers that you're working with that you've been surprised by?

1:08:32Not too surprising yet. Like most of our customer base, we work with all of the top five labs in the US and we're starting to see, maybe actually one interesting thing is we're starting to see a lot more customization at the application layer. And I think a big reason for this is that it's now much more data efficient to customize models with RL environments and a lot of this like new kind of data versus fine tuning data that people would do historically. And so it's now becoming, you know, this like gold rush for all these application layer companies without too much CapEx, they're able to get these incredible results.

1:09:11And so we're seeing some of that, but at least for the most part, the legacy Fortune 500s haven't really caught on to this yet. And I imagine that that might take a year or two. Well, that'll be a nice rush of revenue once they realize what's happening. I have a question. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, I mean, we've been talking a lot about agents and kind of wondering, obviously agents are breaking through in the enterprise and the coding sector. but we've just been kind of tracking against like, when can you actually use an agent to just book a flight reliably? And I'm wondering if we're in this weird thing where you see a foundation model company do a press release and it's like, we're working on, you know, fundamental math innovation, or we're gonna solve, you know, I forget that, that like really, really hard problem in math.

1:10:00And it seems like maybe there's a gap in the human RL training loop just around like a really good executive assistant. Is that the gap? Is it we need more data there to actually break through? Or is that just a product issue? Like why can't Siri reliably book me a flight? Yeah, so I think there's two challenges. One is the interest of researchers has historically been in these like super hard reasoning problems, right? They're interested in GPQA of how do we solve PhD level reasoning. They're interested in IMO level math of how do we have models that are beating all of these incredible mathematicians and have historically just been less interested in like how do we automate a McKinsey consultant or an executive assistant?

1:10:48And I think that shift is starting to happen. And so that's like a big part of it. And that ties into the data that they create. Because, of course, if you want to automate a McKinsey consultant, you need evals for everything a McKinsey consultant does. If you want to automate an EA, you need evals for everything that an EA does. I think the other part of it is the models are just starting to get really good at tool use. Tool use is still relatively immature relative to all the reasoning capabilities. And so I think as that starts to happen, I would really expect that this year you're able to use operator or whatever the equivalent agent is to start booking flights and doing a lot of these more mundane tasks.

1:11:31Have you ever been approached by any of the labs around help us make our models funny? Like, is there a world where you guys are, you show up to the comedy store here in LA and you're trying to, you know, grab some of the comedians and say, hey, come on, come on, work for her. Tell me a joke. We're going to test how funny you are. We got some opportunities for you. Yeah, yeah. If you can, if you can. The Joe Rogan mothership, we just pull them right off stage. You know, the Kill Tony bucket pulls. hey you did you got the joke book come on but it seems like that's like when when every model's like pretty good at some of these sort of like foundational like problems and thinking then the way to differentiate is is can a model be more entertaining for consumers can and there's value in that itself yeah a lot of our customers at the frontier as have you've seen in recent releases are starting to think a lot more about humor and and these exciting things we have been hiring a bunch of people out of like the harvard lampoon and equivalent places that have these comedic skills to help teach models uh how to get there and so it's really like every capability you want you need evals for uh we uh john has been doing like the coogan eval which is just he asks you know various models to tell a joke and then they end up just taking you on this winding thing that sounds like a joke but it's not actually it doesn't actually have a punchline i mean it's hard because there's not there's not a quantitative eval for humor it's so subjective and so quality another uh question just related just broadly to the future and how these labs so you know the labs are your customers uh the critique of the labs broadly in the model companies as they raise tens of billions of dollars has been you know if the models are commoditizing and intelligence just becomes too cheap to meter?

1:13:22Where does the value come from? John's point of view has been, there are many commodities in the world that have a ton of value. And there's a bunch of great businesses that, you know, drill and, you know, produce oil and then sell it, right? Even though oil is like a commodity that just sort of trades on the open market. How do you see the model market long term? And do you see a world where there's constantly new companies being spun up to create these sort of bespoke specialized models for different use cases? Yeah, I think the value will accrue to the product layer. Like I don't think about OpenAI as much as an API business.

1:13:59And it seems like most people are really placing a bet on the product side of things, which will start to get very exciting, especially and spread out across many companies, considering that customizing models is so much more affordable than it used to be. So that's sort of how I see it playing out. I think one of the things that a lot of investors don't quite realize when they're not like in the code of building these products is how low the switching costs are for API, right? Like it's a line of code to switch back and forth and like see how new models are doing. And so it's hard to build a business when that's the switching cost.

1:14:37And I think it's really going to be in the product layer. Well, I mean, given that, do you have a view on why every single ex-OpenAI employee seems to start the exact same foundation model company instead of doing something else? I was really hoping for like a supplements company from Ilya or, you know, like a hair loss or something fun, something different, t-shirt company. But everyone just seems to be, hey, I'm going to do what I know. I've been building foundation models. I'm going to stick with it. Yeah, it's a good question. I think a lot of it ties to just like the ideology around AGI, right?

1:15:13This is the most important problem in the world. And so how do we all race as fast as possible to get there rather than a lot of the unit economics and competitive dynamics that investors would be thinking about? Yeah. So they're basically just disregarding the fact that the like, sure, the value might accrue to the application level layer for 10 years. and then it's completely irrelevant once ASI arrives. Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting strategy if value in the short to medium term accrues to the product layer, but then if you actually can build artificial superintelligence, then none of it actually potentially matters in the end.

1:15:53So it's an interesting strategy. Last question for you. I know we have a minute left. This is the most champagne problem that founders ever have. And when you were fundraising, you probably couldn't even drink champagne but do you have any funny stories i'm sure you raised a series of like very competitive rounds any funny stories of like offers investors made to just like try to get you you know the classic is like didn't you go to a helicopter like yeah the classic was a helicopter yeah but a private jet to vegas to race ferraris i knew there was gonna be something yeah you're like i don't know i've never actually got my driver's license they're like it's fine it's a private track are those effective do they win you over it sounds like you went with benchmark after the helicopter thing so maybe it's effective yeah they could they could be very tempting because we never actually for our series a and our series b we didn't create a slide deck because we weren't uh both times like people asked for it and we were like just no not not really willing to create one but uh the the sales processes could be a lot of fun it's sort of like christmas where you're getting all these like gifts and fun experiences uh but also trying to balance that with it not being too much of a distraction from building the company.

1:17:05Well, that's fantastic. Congrats to you. Good luck. And we'll have to check in soon when you have new fundraising news. Absolutely. Every other week. Every other week. Let's get on schedule. Yeah, same time next week for the Series F. Yeah. Okay, cool. We'll make it happen, John. There we go. All right, give our best to the team. Thanks for coming on. Bye. Thanks. See you guys. That was great. That was a fun one. Oh, to be 21 again. Yeah, I know. I'm 21 getting flown out to Vegas to fly Ferrari, sir. fly helicopters and race Ferraris. That's very TB coded. Well, we got David Senra coming on the show.

1:17:38Going to ask him about NVIDIA. Going to ask him about Jensen Wong. Going to ask him about Great Founders. I'm going to ask him how he's doing today. How are you doing? What's going on, brothers? Looking fantastic. Oh, amazing. Look at this. Look at this. Professorial, if I might say so myself. I honestly, 99 % of the time that I see Senra, he's got the black Founders tee on. And it's good to see you in a jacket. I know people say I shouldn't wear my own merch. I completely disagree. Yeah. It's the greatest merch in the world. It is honestly like one of the most comfortable t-shirts. To work out in.

1:18:15Think about how important that random me and Jordy ran into each other after not talking for like six months. Yeah. At a gym in Malibu. And I don't know if you would have recognized me if I didn't have the without the founder shirt on. So, well, now that you're doing video, you know, you're a lot more recognizable. You're going to get stopped on the street all the time. I'm sure it's a dream that you've been waiting for. No, let's hope not. Please don't. Yeah. He only wants to get recognized in the Amman. Yeah. That's the most common place that it happens. I'm sure. Anyway, our friend, Justin Mares told me he's opening the new factory for Kettle and Fire.

1:18:50And he texted me last night and he texted me where it is. I was like, is there Amman in that city? It's like Link. Caster, Pennsylvania. I'm on Lancaster. I'm on Caster. Yeah. One of the most historic locations. The Caster. The Caster. That's great. What was the last episode you dropped? Oh, my God. The episode's actually going kind of crazy. Most people like it. Some people are very upset. It's Todd Graves, the founder of Raising Canes. Okay. So Raising Canes, this guy's been running his business for 30 years. He owns over 90 % of it. it's worth at least$10 billion. And he truly believes that God put him on earth to be great at chicken fingers, making chicken fingers so he can help other people.

1:19:37So a lot of people love his approach. He's essentially, what I would describe as, I did this episode on the founder of In-N-Out a long time ago, Harry Snyder. It's essentially like Harry Snyder's reincarnated, but instead of making hamburgers, he's making chicken fingers. They have the very same philosophy. But people are really upset that he feels this is his mission. But he does a ton of good for the community, like gifts to charity like let the guy make his fucking chicken fingers that's funny yeah didn't so he he basically just was building the company while he was still in college right i know so there's a funny there's an interesting um thing that reoccurs about the history of entrepreneurship is like these these founders write a business plan and business school about their idea and they get terrible grades so like fred smith the founder of fedex of c minus uh todd graves lowest grade in the class uh phil knight for nike same thing bad grade uh completely disinterested the professors don't know the professors don't know i remember in college i wrote a bull case on twitter at like 1 billion and they got like a b minus they're like just because he like disagreed me with me on the valuation and it's like i was completely right yeah i was completely correct 100 but the crazy thing about todd graves isn't like no one would give him money so uh he never raised again um and so he raised from uh he actually to save money or to make money he worked as a boilermaker and so they do these fucking crazy things where you have to work like five or six weeks because you're fixing a refinery and every day the refineries down is like very detrimental to the health of the company so they pay you a ton of money where you just have to work like a dog for like 100 hour weeks six weeks straight so he meets a bunch of boil makers then he risks his life doing commercial fishing do you remember this show like deadliest catch deadliest catch yeah that's what he did he did that when he was like 23 and then he goes and uh he borrows money from his bookie and then a boiler maker named wild bill so he never talks about this anymore but i know i just i love the idea like there's some boy there's some boiler maker named wild bill out there that has like a couple hundred million dollars with a racing cane stock or his book he made like 100 or 20 million dollars just because his 23 year old kid wouldn't shut up about wanting to live a chicken finger dream that's what he repeats over and over again chicken finger dream chicken finger dream and those guys have the 10 of raising canes no he never says the percentages who has the rest of the tag he says over 90 but you know he said he rolled him into the um he rolled him into the main company because they just they just invested in the first uh raisin canes another thing that's interesting he had a co-founder who quit after the second store oh miss no conviction there's always a story like that with like all these power law companies no it's interesting it's it's funny restaurants and cpg are so tangible that it attracts people that that have uh dreams but not necessarily extreme conviction they can see the idea in their head and um there's a there's a sandwich shop in la and i've sat down i'm blanking on the name right now but they've got probably 20 30 locations around the west coast now he was just telling me how the first year he had been a successful restaurateur he had multiple locations he'd done nightclubs and all this stuff and then the first year of his business he went into massive debt he was working 14 hours a day he he went into this business like knowing food beverage really really well and it was just the most devastating like a couple years where it didn't matter that they were making a good product and people liked it he was getting you know he was having high schoolers sort of like talk smack to him you know saying like make my sandwich faster you know like getting angry at him and so it just like we you know it weeds out the people that don't have that like ridiculous can you know didn't have maybe the co-founder didn't have the chicken finger dreams listen i would i think the episode's like an hour long so if you listen to it on 1.5x speed you can get it in 40 minutes it's it's exactly that he almost lost so he was like heavily geographically concentrated in louisiana and he almost lost everything in in during hurricane katrina because it knocked out 21 of his 28 restaurants and it was all personal debt so no one would lend him money so he'd have to go find like an angel investor he had a very interesting way to uh to finance each individual store he's like hey invest like 200 grand in this he would take that uh he called it an angel investment but it's really an angel investment he's like give me 200 grand i will fill out a one-page contract i will guarantee you personally that i will pay you back your money and 15 with 15 interest he would take that contract to the bank the bank would loan him like a million dollars to give him the startup money and he did that all the way up until the first 20 restaurants and he was like we're rolling we have so much cash flow nothing's gonna go wrong as long as i don't lose out on any day sales and then hurricane katrina comes and knocks out you know 21 out of 28 restaurants and so he talks about we he says this over and over again he's just like don't do the things i did because they were wildly reckless they just happened to work out for me which i thought was also really funny now he's still alive uh are you planning on doing one of those episodes where you go sit down with him have dinner eat some chicken fingers break it down so i said on the episode if anybody knows him yeah uh please i would like to meet him because i'm upset you know like you guys know this because we talk all the time like i'm obsessed with people that do one thing the only thing i'm really interested in is like i'm not interested in your stupid fucking startup or your latest company I'm interested in your last company like the thing that you were going to do until you thought you were put here on the earth to do and the thing that you're going to do until you die and so yeah I'm fascinated by talking to people like that most of the most interesting like unknown founders that I've met recently uh the most impressive ones are all in like their 70s and they've been building their company for you know 40 or 50 years you just talk to them it's like the level of detail they know about the world they've built is like on it's one of the most unique experiences you can have in your life because that compounded knowledge, there's things that they know that they can't even really explain why they believe what they believe.

1:25:29But it's just like a very like deep intuition, sense of intuition. Jensen is the same, I would imagine the same way. I think he's the longest running Texio, if I'm not mistaken. My question is, do you think that these founders who wind up running their companies for 40 years know it's their life's work in the first month, in the first decade even? Do they fall into it? And because I feel like a lot of it's just luck, like no one ever made them an offer they couldn't refuse. They never wound up being in a situation where they had to pay some bill and they wanted to cash out or something. So I don't think they know it that early.

1:26:08Yeah, that is separate from like, so like Todd Graves, right? It was like he's been offered billions of dollars. Yeah. And he's like, I never thought of it for a second. What I also love about him is he talks about the need. we need more founders and we need more entrepreneurs to not sell their company. Yep. And so he's like, I'm competing. The reason he's like running through the QSR industry right now is because it's like, he's competing against these very old corporate run businesses. There's no founders competing against him. And like, he's just like, we need more diversity of thought. We mean more ideas.

1:26:37You need more innovation. You need people to actually care. And so people, if somebody asked him, like you've been offered billions of dollars, what was the, the offer that was the most tempting? He's like, none of them, not nothing was ever tempting. He's like, this is going to be a multi-generational business. I'm going to give it to my kids. So let me, let me give you another hilarious story about this. And I'm going to paraphrase this, but so James Dyson, who still owns a hundred percent of Dyson, which I've done four episodes on, right. My, my number one autobiography recommendation out of, you know, the almost 400 biographies of entrepreneurs I've read so far is James Dyson's first autobiography, which is called against the odds like a few weeks ago.

1:27:11So he still owns a hundred percent of the company. The numbers you see thrown out there, they say it's worth 10 billion. It's worth 20. I've heard he's pulling out more than$5 billion a year dividends personally from what I hear. So I was at this super fancy invite-only. What does he do with it? Where is he investing? Does he have a family office or something? So that's how – Yeah. So there'll be hints because he's been pulling out a ton of money forever. Well, it turns out he owns 5 % of Apple now because he's been building a position for a decade. No, way better than that. Way better than that.

1:27:39Okay. He owns the most sheep in anybody in the world. I love it. Yes. He's like – You got to be sheep maxing. You have to be sheet maxing. You run out of things to invest in. So he's the largest green pea producer in Europe. That's amazing. So this is true wealth. There's a funny story about this there. So I'm at this super fancy invite-only investor conference. There's like 15 people there. And all of them controlling massive amounts of capital. And one guy was telling a story. The more assets under management, they're trying to buy private businesses. And you start out buying$500 million businesses, then a billion-dollar businesses.

1:28:14Now he's got to shoot really, really fucking high. yeah and so i'm gonna paraphrase this this is why i love people like james dyson like bloomberg michael bloomberg like todd graves uh steve jobs is obviously is similar though even though it's a public company they go to they approach dyson to see would you be interested in selling and the response i'm paraphrasing was fuck you barely this is a family heirloom i'm not selling for any price so there's actually there's actually a really important idea here to and i think another way to answer your question uh john is i i realized uh i remember exactly where i was uh you guys have both met my wife i was supposed to be on a date with her at harry's pizzeria in the design district in miami right and i'm not even paying attention what we're talking about i'm thinking about founders and i remember like it just where it was like the epiphany i had was like oh people say if like you love what you do like you would do it for free yeah and i was like no no there's a different level if you there's a there's a there's you can have such a deep love for what you're doing that people couldn't pay you to stop so it's like the idea has like how much would you have to help how much would you have to pay steve jobs to not build to not work on apple or build products there's no money you couldn't you couldn't give him two trillion dollars It didn't even matter.

1:29:36This was the Zuck acquisition attempt. They said, hey, here's a billion dollars. You're 23 or something. And he's like, but I would just start another social network. This is what I want to work on. What am I going to do? I like this one. Amazing. That is the perfect example because there's a bunch of young kids that sell their companies and have a bunch of money. But look at the difference of his life. No one would know his name. Who knows what would happen? And it's like now he's like working, you know, the best, you know, the best 40 year old public company CEO in the world by far. Working in the most interesting time, having access to like build some of the most interesting products and then essentially unlimited resources.

1:30:16Yeah. Yeah. Question. Todd Graves, I'm sure, has like an extreme loyalty to his team and employees at the corporate level and the individual restaurant level. uh there's sort of a broader playing trend playing out in restaurants people have been attacking the sort of like one of the biggest cost centers for restaurants is or probably the biggest is labor and so you have uh we covered yesterday yum brands which is like a 44 billion dollar public company they own kfc taco bell pizza hut they're trying to integrate sort of robotics on both sides both on the ordering process they're partnering with nvidia to like do like voice models and uh process, you know, you're driving through the drive-through or calling or texting or whatever.

1:30:59And then they also are trying to integrate robotics on, you know, within the actual kitchens just to produce food more cheaply. How do you think Todd Graves, I haven't found any commentary from him online about robotics, but how do you think he would think about that in a world where I'm sure he has a deep loyalty to his team and loves that it's sort of this human experience going to a Raising Cane's, but at the same time, his competitors are just going to be like trying to drive costs down as low as possible? Yeah, that's a good question. I'd love to ask him that. Based on what he says, like he's pretty anti making decisions just based on financial reasons.

1:31:33Like he he talks a lot of shit in his interviews about like PE people. What? Like he's just not a big he's not a fan at all. Whoa, whoa, whoa. We love private equity here on this show. OK, let's not slander the good folks over. Dude, some of my one of my two of my closest friends who I I love all that. And I talk to all the time. They are literally might be the most successful PE people rolling up QSRs. Patrick just did an interview with Matt and Alex. So I love them too. But Todd Graves does not. It is very anti-PE in QSRs. Timeline and turmoil if they start chirping each other. I have a question about your point about founder control over the long term, never selling, owning 100%.

1:32:13Do you think that there's a need for some sort of maybe cultural shift or even a shift in the way startups are financed in Silicon Valley? It's just so like the standard YC playbook, for example, is like you get three co-founders, you split it equally. Then immediately YC takes 10 percent. Then it's like back to back to back 20 percent rounds. You're diluted down to a few percent. Maybe you get some super voting, but you're not paying yourself a good salary. And so, you know, Jordy's kind of talked about maybe we need to normalize some sort of secondary sales so that the founders can take a little cash out of the business and then actually go in it for the really long term.

1:32:51Maybe we just need, hey, it's OK to pay yourself a really reasonable salary. A lot of founders are out there kind of like starving even after they've raised$20 million. What do you think about the structure of Silicon Valley? Like is the Silicon Valley playbook setting us up for to create the next James Dyson or the next or the next Todd Graves? So when you say, what do I think about that? I don't think about it. So it's really bizarre to me. Again, like I have an unfair advantage because essentially I just talk to dead people all day. I have one sided conversations with history's greatest founders.

1:33:23Right. So like for like the first four or five hours of my day, I'm usually just reading biographies. and then uh i usually have lunch and then in the afternoon i like reread highlights of the stuff i've read over the last like eight years while i'm building the podcast um and one of the main lessons from all that is just like they do like the people that usually get to the top of their profession are the best what they do they do what's best for them regardless of what works for other people and so the weird thing that i have is like when i open up twitter and people are arguing about like you should race from this person or you shouldn't race at all or you should do this it's just like you should do whatever's best whatever is best for like whatever mission you happen to be on um so i don't have like an opinion of like how other people should do it other than like what do you actually want to do and then figure out what's the best way to go about doing that and then this is this this is my issue was like uh remember when paul graham released like found the founder mode episode or uh essay so many people sent it to me and and like asked me what i thought of it just like i it just was a bizarre reading and i'm a huge fan of his essays in general but i just think like it missed which something that he obviously knows which is like it just depends on who the founder is as a person like one of my favorite lines it was this random book on steve jobs you know i've done like i don't know 10 or 12 episodes on steve and it said that apple is just steve jobs with 10 000 lives and i think like the good news like one of the best benefits of being a founder is like you get to create your own world from scratch you get to choose like what you work on who's around you how you go about doing everything and so I would start with like what do you actually want to do in the world and then work backwards from that so like I am tech I am like obsessed with control so you know us three talk basically every day and especially about what's going on with like tpbn I told you what's going to fucking happen because it's happened to me it's like you guys are blowing up your podcast is going to get a ton of attention all the people in your audience want to do deals they're investors they're entrepreneurs they're going to come to you with all this crazy shit because they did the same thing and for me it's like i had an insane amount of investment opportunity uh people are offering to invest in the podcast and or i would acquire it and like i said no to all of them because the most important thing to me is like control for long term i believe this is my life's work just like todd graves on a chicken finger dream i believe i was put here to do this i think i'm the right person at the right place with the right set of skills at the right time and like i was watching um yesterday i was watching uh my my son turned five and he's obsessed with dinosaurs right and so i was like oh it's a good idea let's watch jurassic park i didn't fucking realize how scary that movie is for a five year i tried to do that once too i was like a jurassic park dinosaurs my son loves dinosaurs yeah it's dinosaur time and then i'm like oh pop the brakes but i had the thought because like you see the computers and like everything else i'm like wait a minute this this movie came out in 93 yeah like if i wanted to do what i'm doing now 20 years ago and you guys too what would you do you couldn't you'd have to go knock you have to go to a physical building and be like, please put me on the air.

1:36:14It's just so important that we're doing this at the right time. So again, for me, it didn't matter. The money was not what I'm optimizing for. It was the control and the long-term control because I want to do this until I die. And so for me, it's like control is way more important than money. Yeah. I think the question maybe you were getting at is at a high level is, are we losing the true generational founders because they do four back-to-back rounds and then they own 10 of their company and they've got a big board and they and they did and and somebody comes and says hey you're experiencing all this like you know craziness we'll just buy the company you'll do an earn out and then you're going to be like worth 100 million dollars but the question that when you look at you know the the mark zuckerberg example it's somebody who maintained extreme control despite doing a bunch of venture rounds And I feel like many founders aspired to that path over the last 20 years, 15 years, whatever.

1:37:09I know a guy with eight board seats. Not, don't, wouldn't recommend it, but it is a path to control. Yeah. No, I think like the, the, the main thing is like, you find something you want to do. Like, again, I don't think you could pay Zock to not work at Meta, right? He's got all the money. You know, I have just admired people that do things for a very long time. some of these people i talked to a lot of pe people they one of my friends has the funniest lines i think that's just like he says vc gets all the attention pe gets all the money and his whole point was just like vc's so loud most of like all the media is obsessed with like fundraising everything else so to to a founder it looks like this is everything that's going on i have a weird uh like vantage point in the founder ecosystem because it's like yeah a lot of tech people listen to the podcast but a lot of people like they have billion billion like multi-billion family companies listen to the podcast so like there's just a ton of businesses out there some of them raise money some of them don't i don't think you're losing anything i just think they're just it's there's a uh it's you're there's like a what's the word i'm looking for it's like there's just a lot of noise that don't that doesn't exactly represent like everything that's going yeah yeah the the next todd graves or the next uh you know james dyson might be quietly building out there some behemoth that we're just not even hearing about because there's no vcs chattering about it so i just i just tweeted this out uh where it's just like i had um mid journey is kind of like that you know no no outside capital people know about it but mid journey could become some behemoth that david holds just if you're not raising like there's a reason that you have to be loud if you're constantly having to raise money like so i just did this tweet it's like i had uh dinner with one of the wealthiest people in the world and uh his family has commissioned two biographies it's for the family use only right yeah and i was like dude and we got along like we had a fucking fantastic dinner i thought he was charismatic smart great storyteller i'm gonna hang out with him again again in the 70s and i was like dude dude let me get those biographies like i would do such a good job he's like absolutely not i have no interest in educating my competitors i've met a ton of founders like this where i get to go to their company off site I've met, I've, or their warehouses, gone to their company.

1:39:21And, and they're usually all family owned businesses. And I'm always like, you're so fucking talented. Why don't you write an autobiography? Why don't you write about, do something. And they're absolutely not. They're just very, very quiet. Cause there's no reason to make noise. There's also, it's also dangerous where this is something Charlie Munger said that was fascinating, where he thought it was very, it was against human nature for him and Warren to be so wealthy and so loved. and his point was that most, you know, that greed doesn't run the world. Charlie has a great line. He says greed doesn't run the world.

1:39:50Envy does. And so when you're really wealthy, there's a lot of envy and so it's actually smart to not advertise that. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so again, I think it's just... Can we flip it over to Jensen? I want to know, I mean, obviously he's in the news. He put on the Super Bowl of artificial intelligence, made a bunch of announcements at NVIDIA GTC and I wanted to know where do you see gaps between Jensen's archetype as a founder from maybe the other magnificent seven founders, the Steve Jobs of the world, the Zuck of the world, whoever else you've studied, where are the similarities and differences?

1:40:22I think they're more similar to each other than they are to like, obviously they're more similar to each other than they are to like the general population. I don't feel like, I don't think there's a single founder that I've covered that is like the only one. Like he's got a lot of interesting ideas. Like they're all usually, you know, what would be considered like micromanagers. They're obsessed with the details. Like the Todd Graves example, right? He's got 50 ,000 employees, 800 stores. He's opening like 100 stores every year. And before he does the interview, like he interrupts the interview so he can approve the Instagram reel that's going out.

1:40:57Wow. Same thing with Steve Jobs did the same thing where like there's a great book called Insanely Simple, which talks about this. And it didn't matter if it was like a billboard in Missouri or a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal. Steve Jobs would approve every single ad before it came out and then he'd be calling up so the guy that wrote this book called Insanely Simple is the guy that was actually running Steve Jobs ads and he says Steve would call me at fucking midnight and we'd be debating for an hour over a single work so I feel like that's happening anymore at Apple no it's been a little messy lately no no so I think Jensen's the same way what I thought was most interesting about him he is definitely one of the more extreme like he is every single person on I cover on founders is hardcore and extreme he is you know and he's a he's unusual he's uncommon amongst uncommon people one of my favorite things that he said was that um he likes to torture people to greatness i thought that was like a really interesting line and his whole point was like you know people kind of like clip through people and fire people uh really fast is if he felt somebody had potential they're just fucking up like he's just going to torture them into greatness he's going to make them great and what you realize is the longer you read this book there's a book called uh nvidia nvidia way by take him which is the one i did the episode on what you realize is he does that to himself he's tortured he's tortured himself to greatness where they just had there's a great story in the book where they had won a blowout quarter they absolutely fucking killed it and he comes in and he tells his team he's like every morning i wake up look in the mirror and i say you suck i love that the anti-manifestation or visualization something odd how do you how do you square his micromanagement with his uh he's stated that he doesn't have one-on-one meetings very often he is a very like kind of scattered organization it's an interesting thing it's like kind of like you just dive into a specific thing how do you think about it yeah he's got 60 direct reports i think in the book yeah i think when they start writing a book it's like 30 and i think it goes up to 60 because the book just came out it's like it it covers stuff up up until like the recent last few months yeah um he actually has a great way to to to describe this that is most interesting where people are saying like how are we going to handle all these agents when they're smarter than we are and he's like i'm already doing that he goes my 60 direct reports yep are agents they're all smarter at what they're in charge of than i am and yet i'm able to direct them there's a great line let me see if i can find it he has this line where he says something about um the company has to be like an f1 uh pit crew probably well he he's describing the way like he organizes it and essentially like nobody he he designs he believes the founder or the leader should design the company not for like what's necessarily best like after they leave but literally what's best for what they're doing now he says ultimately my e-staff which is his direct ports ultimately my e-staff is something that i have to know how to work with.

1:43:54The company's organization is like a race car. It has to be a machine that the CEO knows how to drive. And so if you think about it, it's like he made an F1 organization that is tailor suited to him and may not be, it's obviously not going to be tailor suited to the person that takes over after him. I have a totally separate but somewhat related question in that certain high profile investors sold a huge stake in NVIDIA in 2019 that would be worth 160 billion dollars uh as of last year that person is masa masa yoshi son uh you haven't done an episode on masa feels no i won't i fucking won't so this uh i i sometimes i get sad because i feel like the great thing about podcasting is like you actually know the person like when people meet you and you guys and me they're like well i feel like i know you it's like you've heard me talk for 100 fucking hours you do know me right yeah um and so i had so many people that listen to the podcast like there's this new uh first english uh biography of masa called the gambler you have to do it it's gonna be a great episode i started reading it and i was like oh this is interesting he's kind of like nutty and then uh this happened this week this was supposed to be the next episode of founders and no listen rule number two in the center family is mind your own business so like i don't i don't care what other people do for a living i don't care how they do it it really doesn't bother me i wind up fucking hating this guy halfway through the book like i I found it disgusting.

1:45:22And it's like, so we have a bunch of mutual friends. We've spent a lot of time together. We're like legit friends off camera, right? We talk all the time. I'd be very concerned if I ran into people and were like, Koogan's a fucking liar. He's fucked me over. The entire book, the first half of the book, is all these people that Masa did business with. That is like, that guy lies all the time. He screwed me over. So then I fast forward and I read the last chapter. and it's like he's super depressed he's like i've wasted my life i have an he says i have an ugly face which is kind of weird uh and he's just like and would you realize like he never he was just so obsessed with he is a legit gambler and it's like a sad existence he didn't build a product that made somebody else's life better he didn't do any of that and so i was like i don't give a fuck about weight sunk cost of spending half a week i if i'm gonna make an episode on this guy that means i have to live inside his world for like another 40 hours and i'm just not willing to do that.

1:46:15So I just threw the book across the side of the room. I was like, I'm not doing this. Crazy. Wow. Well, let's, uh, I mean, I'm glad that you have a beautiful face. Uh, and it's always great to have you on the show. Thanks. We'll have to have you back soon. This is fantastic. It's great seeing you in a jacket. I'll say it again. Now that you set the bar, make sure, Hey, this summer when we're doing this live in person, yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. I mean, seriously, we still, we still have to do the goat debate, the greatest entrepreneur of all time. We have a bunch of, we've been debating it in a chat room for a while.

1:46:47Let's do that in person. We have to. In tuxedos. If it's the goat debate, we have to take it one step. With a bottle of Dom pairing on, hopefully. I would love that. That's right. Well, thanks for stopping by, David. This is fantastic. All right, guys. Great to see you. Always great chatting. Talk to you soon. Talk to you soon. Bye. Love you. Bye. Love you too. Fantastic. I told David last time we talked, he ended the call. He's like, love you guys. And I'm like, if you're just tuning into the show for the first time and you're a Senra fan and it's a, it's a, it's great. It's true. It's crazy about Masa.

1:47:19It makes sense. We'll have to get deli and steak on Masa. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm sure that. I think, I think David changes, changes his tune. If Masa comes in and says, Hey, look, we're going to lever you up. We're going to take founders podcast. We're going to put a 20 billion in at a hundred billion pre, and we're really going to take this to the next level. I think David all of a sudden says, well, yeah, that's enough to live in Amman for the rest of my life. And so he does it. No, there's no price. You can't buy a map. There's no price. Masa could get us on his side if he took PETA into a for-profit.

1:47:51That would be a fantastic move. I would love that. Anyway, I think we got Delian in the temple of technology. Welcome to the show, Delian. How you doing? What's going on? What's up, boys? Thanks for having me on again. I'm excited to catch up. Appreciate it. We're calling this Delta V with Delian. our little space update. We're still workshopping the name, but we got to come on. We got to come up with a catchy, pithy phrase for all the regular guests, but very excited to have you here. Can you give us an update? Let's start with the rescued astronauts. You got community noted. The X-Army really came out for you.

1:48:27How'd you process the landing? Break it down for us. You know, I already have enough of an ego that I don't need to overly you know sort of praise myself even more but all I'm gonna say is you know they go up I forget the exact timing but like be a beginning of June last year I sent out this tweet that's like end of June where I was just like losing my mind I was like how is nobody talking about this like these guys are like totally stuck up there it's clear that like you know Boeing and NASA clearly are panicking and realize that like they can't take these guys down on Starliner and nobody's even begun a plan for how to bring these guys down and so I tweet with you like hey why is nobody talking about the fact there's like two American astronauts like stranded in orbit and like look if there were like Apollo days or like space shuttle days and like, you know, they were stuck up there for an extended period of time, people would a hundred percent be using like the word stranded.

1:49:11And so I was just like, so confused as to why like this just was getting no attention. And then I literally just felt like I was being fucking lied to when I get community noted. And it's like, oh, like they're totally fine. They're doing some like final checkouts on Starliner. I'm like, has anybody like read the comms that NASA and Boeing are putting out? Like this thing's clearly in like a very bad state. Definitely in no way that they actually like decide to bring astronauts, you know sort of down on it and the word stranded had not yet been used a single time in any like nasa comms in anybody's like comms about the entire mission within 24 hours of my tweet going viral nasa put out a press release explicitly saying the astronauts are not stranded and like then the word stranded became like totally in the lexicon around the mission yep i'd like to think that it had something to do with that you know sort of viral tweet maybe there are other people that you know some influence did and then god even like literally you know the white house's communications this past week said you know we brought back the stranded astronauts so i'm going to claim credit on stranded being the case the entire thing to me was you know sort of crazy you know not to go you know there's a lot of history that we could give here but like um when commercial crew was originally getting started the original plan by nasa was to only you know do it as a sole source award just to boeing spacex was seen as a bunch of you know you know cowboys who has that had no chance of actually being able to be trusted with you know human astronauts on board they actually had to delay the announcement because in like the final hours they basically decided to do it as a split award where they gave boeing by the way it's crazy like they literally just gave boeing twice the price per seat so it's just like boeing it's like hey the price is like ten dollars for spacex and for boeing it's twenty dollars and like we're just gonna pay them more why because you know it's because boeing has a 200 person lobbying team um and so there was like a very near world where like we only had boeing as the only option it was only like in the final hours that program that like spacex was either should have given an alternative and like thank god otherwise like we would have been begging the russians to bring our astronauts back and you know it's a little tricky to do when you're also like you know providing you know weapons to their you know enemies so you know that would have been was this a lot of people you know would say this was like political was it uh do you think these astronauts are coming back like deeply radicalized like are they you're like you're up in space a long time you got a lot of time to think I don't know how the internet connection is up there, if there even is one.

1:51:25They don't have necessarily the bandwidth to doom scroll. Are they coming back sort of like deeply, are they going to be like kept off camera? Like, you guys got to kind of stay off the mics for a while while you cool off? Or what do you think their reaction is to the whole thing? Well, now that it's the Trump administration, I don't think that Trump will limit them from the mics. But I think what's incredibly clear is SpaceX offered to bring the astronauts back sooner and because it was in the midst of the election cycle and because musk was campaigning for trump the biden administration turned down that offer there's a whole lot of fucking you know jackos and wahoos that will try and convince you otherwise hey this is the pre-existing isss schedule this is when dragon was scheduled to go up etc so they had to stay up there no way if somebody had gone to elon and said yes like according to the standard nasa budgetary process this was supposed to fly then but like one of the astronauts has like you know bone density issues and is having health problems up there we want to bring her down like this week because it was planned to be like a three-week long mission not a nine-month long mission they 100 could have done that the biden administration very much so tried to challenge those you know sort of facts and deny that um dems today even have tried to deny that crazy is like typically naster astronauts at least in like you know you know past 20 years have not ever really made even the slightest inklings of political statements butch and suny like basically confirmed these facts like they basically made it clear, hey, we could have been brought back earlier and we were like denied the opportunity to be brought back earlier.

1:52:49And if I were that, I'd be pretty pissed because like, you know, Sunni, I believe, like did suffer bone density issues and was not supposed to be up there, you know, sort of for, you know, for that long. And so I wouldn't be surprised if you've already seen them push the fold on what they've been willing to say behind the mic. I wouldn't be surprised if they like do that even more now that they're on the ground and you're in a Trump administration. Do you think that NASA has a talent crisis? You could imagine that Boeing is finding it difficult to compete on, you know, getting the best talent when there's SpaceX and VARTA and all these other players that are sort of competing for the best and brightest in the world.

1:53:23I imagine NASA is very prestigious, but at the same time, you're going to work in this government organization and there's a bureaucracy. And, you know, if you're 22 years old right now and your hero is Elon Musk and Elon Musk is beefing on the timeline with NASA, like, where are you going to go right um yeah i mean you know i do think they have a real challenge they also have a bit of an identity crisis where they are turning more and more to buyers of commercial off-the-shelf hardware versus like developers of it and so what does that transition look like but then if you only have people internally that are just buyers and don't have an engineering background how do you know that they're buying the best stuff at the same time look like you know um nasa also like flew a helicopter on fucking mars yeah that's insane like that's like a crazy capability nobody else would be capable of doing that yes they worked with air environment as like the contractor for that but they like such a heavy hand in that they're now talking about like flying a helicopter on mars they did like the you know sort of six minutes of uh what is it called like when the curiosity rover came down like the six minutes of you know hell or whatever it is um they're like you know literally using like retro boosters to like sky crane down a you know you know, a rover.

1:54:35So like, there's a lot that NASA does that is like, requires crazy talent. But I think what they need to, you know, sort of go through, and I think like, you know, Trump administration is likely aligned with this Jared Isaacman, the likely incoming administrator is NASA needs to basically just focus on two core parts. One, the core of space capabilities, they just become buyers of and they just buy things off the shelf. And then where they're developing technologies directly themselves, it should only be the really radical super far out things right like there's just not commercial space companies that are like talking about like we're gonna build like off the shelf mars helicopters like we talked about this we talked about this last time like asteroid deflection is something that nasa should work on because it's not that commercial right it's like we maybe need to do it once every 50 years hopefully not and then and as so you can be the hero yeah exactly exactly can we move on to the continuing resolution can you break that down for us yeah yeah i mean it kind of relates to some of the nasa stuff too where you know it's been interesting to see you know this quarter feels like it's been the most active in, you know, sort of defense tech aerospace investing in a long time, some of which feels rational, some of which feels sort of crazy over the top.

1:55:42And it's just interesting to have this like massive flow of capital, you know, from, you know, venture investors going into this field, while at the same time, the flow of capital from DC literally has been halted, right? So, you know, for the sort of less informed viewers, ultimately defense tech and aerospace companies that are selling to the government. Yes, there's commercial sort of use cases for these technologies. Those aren't related to government budgets, but ultimately, you know, a lot of these reliant on government budgets. You know, about 10 days ago, the House and Senate agreed upon a year long continuing resolution.

1:56:14And so what that basically means is both the House and the Senate had previously passed budgetary bills that increased basically defense spending, had various NASA spending, et cetera, couldn't come to an alignment on that, couldn't come to an alignment with the president. And so the ultimate sort of call by all parties was we're actually just going to freeze to whatever fiscal year 24 levels basically are. Now, in that CR, they did give the DoD, hey, we know that you guys are thinking about like sort of reprogramming. And so as you're shifting budgets around, make sure that it reflects whatever like, you know, House appropriators, you know, and, you know, Senate appropriators basically had in those budgets that they basically put out, you know, sort of end of February.

1:56:54But in the grand scheme of things, this mostly means a freezing of new ads, any new programs. And as you can imagine, who's the biggest beneficiary of that? Well, incumbents have their programs continuing to be funded. Right. And so the Lockheed's, Raytheon, et cetera, Northrop's, you know, might not be experiencing as much growth as usual. But, you know, they're generally, you know, continuing to be funded versus all of the net new entrants while are experiencing massive inflows of venture capital dollars have literally been told by the U.S. government, like, expect zero stars. And so it's just a little odd to me that that's not a thing that is being talked about by all these people that are talking about, like, the gundo, dynamism, this, that.

1:57:31Well, who talks the most on X? It's founders and investors, and neither have an incentive to really say, hey, by the way, none of us are making anything back anytime soon. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's like a paranoid founder. I like to talk about this stuff because I want to make sure that the thing that I'm working on survives for a very long time and is sustainable. But to be clear, what this means practically is basically this year's budget was basically end September 31st is completely frozen. in. Now it's being, you know, begun to be worked on is like the fiscal year, you know, so 26 vehicle that's going to, you know, first have to come from like, you know, so the president, you know, putting forth, you know, sort of a plan that you'd expect to make it over to, you know, sort of the house and Senate in like roughly the May period.

1:58:12That means it's going to make it onto the floor and like, you know, sort of June, July, hopefully gets passed by like September, October. Realistically though, we basically have not hit that September 31st deadline for the past. I don't even know what it is like 10 plus years. And so that continuing resolution is probably going to extend for at least another 30, potentially 60 days. So, you know, potentially until the end of the year, that means that like new budget actually doesn't start until, you know, basically January of next year. And so all these companies that are raising all this capital for all these things that they would like to start, yes, there's going to be reprogramming.

1:58:41Yes, like the president is, you know, doing shipbuilding and CAA, et cetera. But like a lot of this stuff is very much so frozen. And, you know, what people don't realize is let's say, you know, you have, you know, sort of CAA or CCA, sorry. And, you know, sort of shipbuilding. Those five-year plans that the DOD put together where they were like, look, in order to do the early R &D in 2024, we need 100 million. In 25, we need 200 million. In 26, we need 300 million. Well, because we're now frozen at 24 levels, that means it's only 124 and 125. So now when you're looking at 26, it's like, are you making up for the fact that 25, you know, sort of was, you know, low and you're trying to scale all the way to 26?

1:59:15You're like in a real budgetary hole. So like new programs are also in a way worse state because it's typically the new programs that are the ones that grow, that are growing. And so if it's flat, you're both trying to figure out, do you make up for last year? And how do you keep up with like what the program needs? Or are you like really pushing on milestones? But if you're pushing on milestones now, is it relevant to Taiwan? If people are thinking about that needing to be ready in 2027, 2028. And so does that now make the DOD just want to keep shifting budget to incumbent programs that can deliver by 2728, even if they're not as capable?

1:59:43Right. So there's just like a lot of things where it's just like, you know, I'm a, you know, obviously mega bull on like the team at Andrel, because like they have the like bench, the capability, the set of different products, we different programs going like they will navigate this. But like, I don't know, there's going to be like five and rolls. And I think VCs are investing like there's going to be, you know, sort of five and rolls right now. But without even understanding the basics of like the budgetary sort of process on the hill, they're just slinging checks, you know, based off of, you know, the zip code of where somebody's office is.

2:00:13If you're a if you're a yeah, if you're an American dynamism defense tech investor, Are you looking at, you know, are you seeing more pitches in Europe right now? If the anduril of anduril is anduril here in the U.S., but then Europe is like re-militarizing, at least Western Europe. You know, are you seeing pitches come in? Would people just kind of divert dollars over there because there's potentially a lot more willingness to spend?

2:01:09I think you're starting to see that happen. new portfolio company investment. So not just like follow-ons. Obviously, we've deployed mega checks in the ramp, but that was after doing seed in Series A. But we're investing about$36 million into basically a European aerospace defense sort of type player. And that's our first check into the company. Now, part of it is that the company was already performing very well, irrespective of the EU tailwinds. And then now with re-industrialization, et cetera, we're like even more bullish, you know, sort of on the company. But we're also getting to do it at a price that is like highly differentiated relative to like the, you know, 94129, you know, sort of, sorry, shoot, that's the SF, you know, sort of zip code.

2:01:50Oh, yeah. 056, you know, sort of zip code. With all this turmoil with the DoD and with the budget and the continuing resolution, is it more important than ever that these companies figure out commercial applications? We talked to a company, Albedo, they're a satellite company yesterday. It seemed like even if the government doesn't want to buy the ISR capabilities, there are hedge funds and oil and gas providers that want, you know, high resolution images from VLEO. And so is that something that you should, I mean, you've thought about this at VARTA with the pharma and DOD contracts. How do you think about that?

2:02:23And is that more important going forward? Yeah, but I think it's like one of these things that's like very, you know, sort of hard to pivot to depending on how you've set up your business, right? So, you know, take a business and say like Sironic. I'm not sure there's that many commercial use cases for, you know, sort of small scale autonomous surface vessels or take a company, you know, like Apex that is, you know, mostly selling, you know, sort of commercial satellites. Now, some of them are to like, you know, various defense groups, but they also have a bunch of commercial sales, right? So I think it's one of these things that it's really hard to like pivot from one approach to the other.

2:02:56Maybe somebody like Palantir has clearly shown it where they were super duty focused for a long time and now have a massive commercial business, but that felt like it happened at like the very, very late stages of the company. I think your ability to like pivot from, you know, either being dual use from the get-go or being defensive from the get-go you kind of have to choose one and we've obviously chosen the like you know sort of dual use from the get-go does that give us some cons when it comes to like defense programs yeah because like we're not as willing to like change around our architecture to totally match defense needs but the pros is also in a continuing resolution year i also have a lot of commercial work that i can continue to go pursue there's pros and cons i think to you know sort of both approaches the dod but i don't think you're going to see that much shifting it's just too hard to shift well if the dod isn't buying kamikaze drones I'm happy to buy them personally for my next hunting trip.

2:03:39Give me the C4. Let's lift the ITAR control rules. Get me the suicide drone. I want to go hunting for some big game. Thank you, Delian, for coming on. Do you have a last question? We got another guest coming on, but quick question. Do you think that the deal, without commenting on rippling a deal, do you think that was a wake-up call for the defense industry around, hey, if this is happening in HR tech, we've got to take everything way more seriously. Because obviously, anybody that would be competing with Varda knows who else is bidding on the contract. It's common knowledge. It's not the same type of information advantage.

2:04:19But if people are willing to break the law to steal customer data, CRM data for HR tech, to me, it should just be this massive wake-up call around if you're doing anything that's critical to national security, you need to take your own security at your company 10 times more seriously. Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at the, you know, sort of SpaceX, the Anderals, the Vardas, the Hadrian, et cetera, on down, the per capita number of like IT security people you basically need on staff because you're just like ITAR compliance, et cetera, means these companies are thinking about it all the time.

2:04:52Now, at the same time, are there like Chinese spies and, you know, foreign spies sniffing around all these? Almost certainly. Are there other corporate spies sniffing around this all the time, absolutely. But I do think you see this stuff a bit less in terms of actually having these sort of totally negative effects. Partially because with Rippling and Deal, it's like there, it's like, okay, let's pull which software features, et cetera. When it comes to something like Varda, man, it's like, what would you even pull from our servers to figure out how to do what we do? It's like, you could get this CAD file, this thing, but it's like, you need the supply chain, you need to cut the metal, you got to integrate it, you got to know how to test it, et cetera.

2:05:24It's like, even if you gave me access to our full server base, and you gave me a team of like 30 engineers and you tell me go replicate VARTA, it would still be like a really hard problem. Like if you look at the Chinese rockets, they look a hell of a lot like the Falcon 9s and they're still not landing, right? And so I think it's clear that like the Chinese definitely ripped a lot of stuff from SpaceX at some point or another. It's really hard to sort of prevent that from happening. So I can't blame anybody for having that happen to their company. But also the Chinese still aren't landing rockets.

2:05:51Now their solution has just been, let's build as many rockets as possible and screw it rather than purposely landing them on barges. we're just going to ditch them over Chinese villages and like, you know, dump propellant on like our, you know, support villagers, but like whatever, we're going to set up the, you know, the first Chinese lunar base before the Americans. Cause like, we're just willing to murder citizens nonstop on the way to a goal. And, you know, unfortunately for America, you know, we don't, you know, murder our citizens. We only murder our presidents. Oh, JFK files. Um, deep cut.

2:06:17Hey, well, at least we didn't, at least we didn't land on the dolphins yesterday. Yeah, that's good. The dolphins seem like they were good. Let's end on a high note. Uh, Maybe the dolphins work for Mossad, though. That's all I'll say. Maybe. You never know. As soon as you get off the dolphin, there's some crazy... What happened on the ISS. No, there's some crazy NASA lore around dolphins. Don't Google it. Don't Google it. Okay. Well, thank you, Delia. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great one. Always a good time. I think we got Jake Adler coming in, the Temple of Technology, in just a few minutes.

2:06:46He is building military medicine, biotech for the next generation soldier. sure and we got to see if there's some dual use applications for that because we podcast pretty hard yeah harder than if you're injured we're still going live so let's talk to jake about it i believe he's here welcome come on down oh the big celsius i got the small celsius mog cheers cheers cheers jake how you doing i'm good how you guys doing doing fantastic uh can you give us the update what did you announce what are you doing what are you building what's behind you Oh, so behind me is our lab. This is a BSL-2, so biosafety level two facility.

2:07:24So this is a biosafety cabinet. So we're handling any like pathogens, like any anthrax or botulinum. We're going to be doing it in there just for protection of the operator. But yeah, so we just announced a$3.25 million round led by Peter Thiel, Kantos, and Refactor Capital to transform really the battlefield with advanced biotechnology. And really, if we consider the state of affairs today, military medicine hasn't really changed much since Vietnam. We've seen a little bit of improvement in tactical combat casualty care, but we very much still have warfighters who are going on the front lines and dying in combat.

2:08:02So, you know, what we're trying to build here is really advanced and novel biotechnology that we can really equip warfighters with to make them more, you know, more lethal, more resilient and more ready in combat environments. So initially applications of that look like, you know, a nanocomposite for rapid wound healing, along with something we're exploring with more intelligence partners, which is a novel biosurveillance network that would effectively be able to monitor for biological and chemical threats. I remember reading about quick clot back in the day. Can you talk to me about the evolution in just wound healing on the battlefield, kind of the different eras and where you see it going with your company?

2:08:43Yeah. So quick clot is a really, really interesting example. It was started by a guy named Frank Hersey. And they basically, you know, this guy would cut himself when he was shaving. And he realized that this mineral called zeolite, he would pour it on his skin and it would stop the bleeding. The challenge with Quick Claw, at least its initial formulation, was that it used to burn warfighters. So it actually would cause like second or third degree burns. So it would effectively stop the hemorrhage, but it would also burn them in the process of doing that. And they've now transitioned the technology.

2:09:11But really, the issue with the traditional Quick Claw idea and the concept is that it might have supported warfare in a more traditional context where we can medevac that troop. But military is heading towards like the military doctrine is heading towards this environment where, you know, troops are going to be deployed in combat for an extended period of time. And military medics, we won't we won't even be able to retract them for maybe upwards of two weeks. So, you know, the almost in many ways, the definition of what a casualty is, is changing. It's not somebody who's just been shot and is completely completely gone.

2:09:42It's now somebody who can't even pull the trigger. So what we're trying to explore with Kingsfoil is moving beyond just that initial hemorrhage control and that hemostatic agent and building a product that would actually enable the warfighter to heal faster. So reducing that convalescent period and having them return to duty sooner. Talk as much as you can about sort of broad, I would call it almost like drug use in the military. I've heard stories of fighter pilots. You know, the funny thing is, from what I know, when F-35 pilots are deploying to the Middle East, they just sort of like take off in the U.S.

2:10:17and they just fly there. And you can imagine it's a pretty long flight. Anybody that's been on a 16-hour flight to the Middle East doing a little fundraising, it's usually want to fall asleep at some point. You know, Adderall and some of these sort of like— Modafinil is the big one. Those types of drugs are obvious. World War II has some crazy examples. would love to hear the history of like kind of drug use in the military super abbreviated everything from like stimulants to stuff more like um quick clot yeah yeah so you know the the medications you you guys mentioned are typically categorized as no and no go so your your stimulants and then you have like your z pills or your benzodiazepines to help with drowsiness and um and look it's really interesting um the military is is relatively constrained for for what they can actually provide to warfighters.

2:11:03I've heard some crazy stories. I think I heard this story about an Air Force pilot who, yeah, he basically took a bunch of benzos and he was unable to fall asleep. So he started taking more and ended up trying to go use the bathroom and started completely pissing himself. So they don't have a lot of control over, and I would say they don't really advise how to use them so well. But modafinil is definitely a big one for vigilance and awareness. Obviously, your benzodiazepine class is pretty big as well, although the military is trying to move away from those. So there's quite a broad history here.

2:11:39But really, I don't think pharmacological is necessarily the right or immediate approach. I think in many ways, we should be targeting the more of the root causes. So for example, one of the early technologies we were exploring was a device called NewSleep, which is a closed loop brain computer interface that would effectively shock you to sleep. And this has been a really big point of interest for the military is can we build neuromodulation or brain stimulation devices that can control sleep architecture and make it so when war fighters sleep three hours, they really feel like they're sleeping five hours, right?

2:12:09So we're trying to find alternatives that are not addictive, or habit forming, and don't really carry that their secondary or next day effects that many benzodiazepines would talk about, talk about sort of like dual use applications of sort of stuff on your roadmap, right? I imagine there's some things that you're developing that are going to be so powerful that eventually we'll want to get consumers will be like, hey, we want some of that too, right? And there's a long history of the sort of military. Aren't you a consumer of this stuff? I see pictures of you testing yourself. Whenever we're thinking about a new initiative, my brain immediately goes to the dual use implication.

2:12:48And that's sort of one of the beautiful things we get to do at this intersection of biotech and defense you know a lot of the companies today that are getting funded are building like cruise missiles and you can't really sell that to the consumer or civilian population right so john wants to john wants some i i'm really in a big game hunting and i i want to take it to the next level move past the sniper rifles and the long guns and go into the kamikaze drones and the cruise missiles that's my goal for this year yeah i mean but but i take your point Yeah. So continue. Sorry. But but yeah, so we're consistently thinking about that dual use implication.

2:13:23And really, in many ways, I see that the OD and our work with with federal partners as a launchpad. Right. We kind of get to offload a lot of this initial experimental and financial risk kind of deployed into this first customer market and be able to eventually leverage that market for really extreme validation in the most austere conditions and then bring it back to the civilian market. So practically everything we're building has a dual use implication. And I think another interesting implication as well is that, you know, a lot of technology we're building is potentially maybe too early for the civilian market.

2:13:55So we kind of get that initial footing with a partner who can actually help us build up the technology, you know, provide us with the necessary revenue to grow as a company and really, you know, grow as an organization and grow out our product portfolio and eventually bring it back to the market when it's the right time for civilians. How do you, we were just talking to Delian about kind of the continuing resolution and the fact that the DoD isn't adding a lot of new programs, you're obviously still in the early stages here, kind of seed round level. Are you thinking about, hey, let's just go heads down for a couple of years, R &D, and then sprint towards program of record?

2:14:26Or are you seeing there's pockets of money that you can be responsive to and little programs that you can build up very quickly? Yeah. So we're pretty aggressive with our approach. One of the last conferences we went to to present our technology, we got like removed by armed security, presented to PMs on garbage bins outside the conference center. So we're definitely in the mode of trying to get our technology in the warfighters hands. Sort of the chasm we're trying to cross here is that if you look at the state of things today, you know, academia rules military medicine, and they do a horrible, like totally shitty job of taking technology from the benchtop to the battlefield.

2:15:06So the way we've been approaching things is thinking like, how can I build something in four months that we can then present to a federal partner, get it in the hands of the warfighter and deploy this rapidly. So Quick Clot, which is an example you brought up, got cleared in nine months with no human trials. So there's kind of this really interesting opportunity for us to leverage the DOD and FDA memorandums, which enable expedited approval and clearance. And notably, like big companies right now, big startups like Neuralink and Synchron, like these big brain computer interface companies you know which have breakthrough designation which was you know prized as like the the fastest most expedited pathway in the fda if you work with the dod you can move faster right so there's this really interesting opportunity for us to build technology and actually get it in the hands of the war fighter and and make sure that the troops we're putting in the most austere conditions aren't just surviving but they're thriving right it's really hard to to ask a 20 year old to go into combat without the tools that they need to survive I'm curious how much of what you're developing is based on, you know, sort of studies that have existed for a long time that just nobody cared about.

2:16:10Right. Like I imagine I imagine that you can there's just this treasure trove of like information and research that people just never acted on. And now that you're sort of this high agency, you have this like kind of core thesis for the company. I imagine there's a lot of basically like off balance sheet R and D work that you can just kind of absorb and, and sort of run with. Yeah. So the first thing I mentioned, I, you know, I think, I think Palmer actually said this, which is that, you know, he, he doesn't, he doesn't really invented anything new because a lot of these concepts are already in sci-fi and, you know, growing up being a big sci-fi reader you know, a lot of the ideas I have are coming directly out of science fiction.

2:16:51So, you know, rapid wound healing, you know, artificial synthetic blood, biosurveillance and biodefense. So a lot of these are deeply tied to fiction because of the limited constraints on the reality. But in terms of existing literature, you know, we really do stand on the shoulders of giants. I think my primary skill set has been, how do I take really compelling literature from this one field that has no real practical application and combine it with something else, right, and kind of find these really interesting points of convergence between different ideas and turn that into a practical product, right?

2:17:25So in many ways, we do a really good job at taking, you know, this cutting edge research and perfecting it. And I owe a lot to academia for that. And that's really, in my view, the role academia should be serving, right? Academia should be that foundational, doing that breakthrough science without very much thinking about the translational ability. But then you do need that partner to cross that bridge and actually build technology that can translate and get in the hands of the warfighter. And that's what we're trying to do at Pilgrim. That makes sense. The Biological Weapons Convention in 1972 said the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxins are effectively prohibited.

2:18:03So bioweapons are illegal, but that doesn't mean they're not going to be used, right? Do you think the DOD, like if I'm a soldier being deployed to some far off land to fight some enemy, that I don't know what their sort of ethics are. I don't know if they're going to follow the sort of like laws, right, against these things. Maybe they get super desperate. Do you think that the DOD generally takes these sort of threats seriously enough? And I imagine, you know, a lot of the stuff you're thinking about is reactionary to, you know, a certain situation on the battlefield. How do you make sure that you're keeping our warfighters safe in a sort of unpredictable environment?

2:18:42Totally. So first off, you know, but the DoD has a very kinetic frame of reference. So when they're thinking about things and threats, they're thinking about big, shiny explosions. I always joke with our team that I wish there was more explosions in bio, but there just really isn't. I can't just do like an on-drill demo of an Altius or a furor just like crashing into something. It just doesn't really work that way. So to your point, the DoD's response has been largely reactive. You know, you look at COVID-19, spread across the globe in nine months, killed like 1.2 million Americans and wiped out 16 trillion in our GDP.

2:19:13It also took off like for 10 weeks, we had an operational gap in the Pacific due to the USS Theodore Roosevelt. So it's very reactionary. So, you know, in terms of the Biological Weapons Convention, we should not be at the mercy and trust of other states. The U.S. has a somewhat of a grandstanding policy around this, which is that we will not build bioweapons and the best offense is really stronger defense. The problem is that we have no defense. You know, so we're kind of in this really precarious position right now where we are very vulnerable to a biological weapon attack. And we've seen that we've seen that with COVID.

2:19:46We saw that very briefly with H5N1, but that really have a much spillover risk. So even if it's manmade or natural, it's still a threat. So the reality is that, you know, most of our foreign adversaries are building out these laboratories. They're building out these weapons. You know, in many ways, these systems are tend to be referred to as like poor man nukes. because they're a lot cheaper and also don't really respect borders so they can proliferate a lot faster and don't really require that direct confrontation so it really underscores a frightening reality where these these weapons can be used in in really novel ways uh to really uh really take down and break down the resilience of our military and also the critical infrastructure around the us so even with even with the biological weapons convention there still is um an outlasting and really uh real threat that's impeding uh with uh with these systems how do you think about the legacy of Theranos, I'm sure if you're successful, people are going to be like, oh, this dropout, you know, raising all this money, building this stuff.

2:20:42It's tough in bio, because obviously there's so many real drugs that make it to market and quietly make billions or trillions of dollars. Novo Nordisk is bigger than the entire GDP of Denmark. But at the same time, it's harder for someone just to like download the app and verify that it's a real thing like they can with a cursor, for example. What's your take on the legacy of Theranos? So Theranos is obviously a very concerning, or was a very concerning situation. You know, Elizabeth Holmes had basically this ability to keep the FDA out and prevent them, you know, proper inspectors from coming in and checking out their work.

2:21:20And this is actually something I'm seeing again with non-invasive neuromodulation today. A lot of the companies in the space are building brain-computer interfaces and trying to circumvent the Food and Drug Administration. by trying to fall into this general wellness category. I've seen dozens of companies do this. And right now, they're going to be fined. They'll get away with it for the time being. But if they hit a billion-dollar vow, they're going to get a horrible enforcement action. At that point, it's fraud. So you can even be seeing jail time, and you can be seeing massive fines. So it isn't like this cycle has gone away since there.

2:21:49And it's still very prominent. One thing that we do at Pilgrim, which is something I've been very adamant about since day one, is that we do that preliminary validation. So if we don't see the results on our bench top, we don't even bring it to the US government. And the belief there is that we're trying to not only save taxpayer dollars, but also save our time. Like, I don't have any interest in working on tech that doesn't work. So I want to see it work for myself. And clearly, if it wasn't clear with the demo I did on myself, I have a pretty high conviction to get to results, right? So on limited time, I had to cut holes in my legs on camera to demonstrate the rapid healing abilities of one of our composites.

2:22:20So that's sort of the approach we've taken. But in terms of Theranos' legacy. It obviously has scarred the biotech industry. I'm pretty bearish on biotech as a whole, which is a pretty hard thing to say being in the industry itself. But I don't think many companies here are actually thinking about the practical and commercial implications of their work. Many people come in, they'll raise a couple million and buy like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and run with that idea, but not actually think about how they're going to make it to the market. And I think that's a really concerning reality when we're thinking about startups, even on that 10 to 15 year timeline.

2:22:50Have you had any luck finding the you have a roll up here called Pathfinder? It says as a Pathfinder, you're the stormtrooper who stares down critical near impossible challenges. You'll take on missions that break lesser souls problems with no playbook. Trekking into combat zones to deliver our tech, restoring a 90s scanning electron microscope without a manual, crashing a DARPA event with a fake badge to snag itself from top brass tasks so wild they'll call you insane. Has it been challenging to find the right person for that? That's barely no. We've gotten a lot of really compelling submissions for that.

2:23:25One thing I was very smart to do ahead of the announcement of the company was put like the question as part of the job post. So we've gotten some really interesting information out of people. So when people are instead of just like submitting a bullshit application, they actually have to spend the time and write something compelling. But we found some really cool people. Like I said, our approach is very much based in guerrilla warfare. So we do what it really takes to get the meetings that we need to get. And thus far, it's worked very well in our favor. I think in many ways, we're kind of battling a lot of entrenched interests.

2:23:57I somewhat compare with limited perspective on precisely what it would look like, but I somewhat compare our experience to 05 Palantir, going up against the government, going up against these primes, and really trying to make a name positioning ourselves in our company. So the Pathfinder role is one that I was really excited by. It really even fired me up writing it. And we really wanted a stormtrooper who could go on the front lines, I could put them into combat environments, and they would just kill it. If we need to get a meeting with SecDef, if we need them to break into a DARPA conference, if they need to go beyond enemy lines, whatever it may be, we just needed somebody who would basically take the task and sign off and get it done.

2:24:36You need an absolute dog. Well, I want one more question, then I'll cap it off. Okay, cool. You talked about brain-computer interfaces. We've talked about this in the past. You know the industry very well. I don't know if you saw this, but a couple weeks ago, someone burned something close to like a couple million dollars of Ethereum to encode a message in the blockchain that alleged that China had developed brain-computer interface technology that was being used to control workers like ants. And it was very scary-sounding sci-fi. If it's happening, it's terrifying. Why would someone spend so much money?

2:25:14Is this a some sort of false flag? Just try and freak out the Americans by spending this money. Is it even possible? What's your timeline for that type of thing? The Enders game of BCI, you know, controlling all the soldiers on the battlefield. Give us the most sci-fi take you have. So notably, first of all, I'll address the China thing. China is beating out the U.S. in patents around neural interfaces. They've been doing that, I think, for a few years now. So they've really taken the lead. China also thrives on this belief of military-civil fusion. So basically any civilian corporation has basically has a direct inline to the government for military applications.

2:25:53So it's realistic in many ways that China is going to get there. And also, like I mentioned before, the U.S. maintains somewhat of a grandstanding approach to bio. So we've been pretty anti-modification or genetic enhancement of our warfighters for good reasons. But notably, that's going to inhibit our timeline to get to potentially the same outcomes that China might eventually move towards. So in terms of neural interfaces that can control warfighters, it's something I've looked into and something that I've explored. And there's a couple of interesting modalities that are still semi or non-invasive.

2:26:27The biggest challenge with neural interfaces is spatial and temporal resolution. So most of the solutions today that rely on like EEG, you have really high temporal resolution. So you see the signal really, really quickly, but you're basically looking at like a bowl of soup. You know, it could be with millions of different things mixed in. You don't know precisely where that signal is coming from. And we've been leveraging AI. Like there's been researchers who've been using AI to like isolate it a little bit more. But non-invasive modalities are still pretty unclear. But in terms of a timeline or really approach to build technology that would be able to control the warfighter, it's a lot sooner than you would imagine.

2:27:05Terrifying. Terrifying. Amazing. I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. Last thing I just want to leave you with, if you're working on anything that would help us do this show 24 hours a day for weeks in a row. If you can just eliminate sleep entirely, that'd be great. Yeah, just get it over here. We have Celsius, but we're looking for something stronger. Make it happen, Jake. Yeah, we're here. We appreciate you dogfooding your product. We'll step up. We're confident. You can test the craziest stuff pre-FDA. We'll get ITAR compliant. We'll get regulated as a DOD effort if you need to test stuff on us.

2:27:36Thank you for doing what you do. It's great having you on. Appreciate you, Jake. Thanks for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. What an absolute dog. Wild. Should we move on to the timeline? Close it out? Yeah, I have a post here that's breaking news. Oh, yeah? This was sent right when we started going live. This is from Barrett Ames. He says, yo, at TBPN, Ramp just sent us cookies. Talk about customer service. I reached out to them because of y 'all, so keep shilling. It's working. Thank you. It's here. And so we'd love to see it. Nice work. barrett nice work ramp on sending these look like some fantastic cookies ramp when you hear this we like cookies some cookies johnny sure it has no carbs and it's all protein it's actually made out of filet mignon yeah exactly uh well said anyway should we move on to willmanitis let's do it uh obscure hobbyist of the year if you're following our award show last year uh he said the end result of vibe coding 100 million dollars in 30 days and all this software prosperity gospel junk isn't hundreds of venture scale ai companies it's just junk food it's a return to artisanal software software that fits right in the hand distribution passed down over generations amazing what a word smith what a word yeah yeah so will's one of those people again right he's sort of in that rune category of uh uh he he should be writing great you know novels and text but instead he's just posting bangers you know bangers um yeah i mean i i've been seeing that there's this whole trend of the levels i oh i just vibe coded a flight simulator and now a lot of developers are realizing that they can take work that they've already done and spent a lot of time on and been like i just vibe coded this in the day and so i saw someone post a website that they designed and it was like a beautiful website that was so pixel perfect and like you'd scroll down and you'd go on this crazy 3js thing and it was like so complicated and everyone in the comments was just like you didn't vibe code this there's no way like show us the prompts or it's not i gotta hide the secret sauce like my prompt is so good i you know i was able to build this thing jeremy's jeremy's uh comment on that i long to pay 59.99 for a one-time download of a download of a handcrafted german to do app absolutely i'm totally on that yeah i i could see a return to the one-time purchase model like everything comes in cycles yeah yep yep i'd like that uh well should we should we move on to a ramp employee jeff charles yeah this is a great post uh he's has a screenshot of gemini says make a presentation that summarizes these trends highlighting key statistics and takeaways i'm still learning how to create multiple slides at once can you describe one slide you want me to create okay create one slide with main takeaways and then i'm still learning how to create multiple oh i'm sorry i can't help with creating slides yet but i'm still learning gemini oh come on you have to pay for this stuff you have to pay yeah they charge for this product oh yeah this is like 20 bucks a month and then it just annoys you in every app you're in like hey you wanted to use gemini and then it doesn't clippy would never do this to you no it would never make it sound like it could do something exactly clippy was just there with like fun little positive messages like hey i'll help you out here have Have you heard of Control V, Control C?

2:30:50We got it all here in Microsoft Word 95. Anyway, should we move on to Joe Weisenthal? Oh, the post was deleted. Anyway, he was just giving a shout out to bros. He says they love using bros as an epithet. That's sad. I only have warm feelings toward my bros. And this is because there is a new phrase on the timeline, the abundance bros. This is popularized by Ezra Klein, saying that we need to focus on a, on a, basically a democratic platform around abundance and building a pro builder, a political party. And, and a lot of people are trying to take them down, calling them abundance bros. Bernie bros was the same thing.

2:31:32Whenever someone wants to take down something, you know, it's a SAS bros, tech bros, business bros, finance bros. They throw bros around. I saw another post from, that was relevant to this, from someone named Grace. Freud. She says, hi, I'm Ezra Klein. I've spent the past two weeks or so thinking about how to fix the world. And I think I have the answer. What if things were good? I love it. But no, I'm pro abundance. It's easy to rally around. Yeah. I mean, we don't really talk about politics here, but like Ezra Klein is on the vanguard of a significant shift politically, where if you listen, if you read his book or you listen to his YouTube video, breaking it down, it sounds very, very different from anything we've heard from his camp over the last few years.

2:32:19So I don't know, check it out if you're into politics, but there's other podcasts for that. So certainly are. We got a post from patio 11, AKA Patrick McKenzie. He says, so Atlantic came out with this new article that said there are two kinds of credit cards, yet another way the poor are subsidizing the rich. The credit card market is quietly transformed into two credit card markets, It's one offering generous benefits to wealthy Americans and the other offering expensive debt to the poor with the latter subsidizing the former. And so this is so he's on credit cards. Yeah. So Patrick says the thesis is that interchange fees redistribute money from poor to rich.

2:33:01I do not subscribe to this thesis. So he's put him in the truth zone. Yeah. You got to put this one in the truth zone. I mean, credit cards take fees from payment processors. when they swipe a card because they're taking on some amount of risk related to that transaction. And the credit card companies pass some of that back to the people that pay them off. And if you really want the best rewards, just constantly switch credit cards and debit cards and just always use the latest neobank that's offering you 5 % cash back or 10 % Bitcoin match, whatever it is. We should have him on the show because I want to hear his thesis because I've talked to consultants and kind of investors who have looked at consumer credit card products.

2:33:47And they've basically said that, you know, that is the business model. Like revolvers are the way, like revolvers, people that revolve the debt and actually they collect interest on. And then there's a whole cohort that they never make any money on. And that's kind of always been the business model. And so I wonder. Well, you can still make money on the people just from the spread between the interchange fee and what gets passed and i guess they're yeah i i i guess it's not redistributive in the sense that like the rich person is still generating a lot of money for the credit card companies it's like the credit card companies making a lot of money on everyone and probably more money on the rich person turns out anyway it's a good business uh this was an interesting post by tyler hoggie i'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that but he says the the the venture capital Mount Rushmore ready Arthur Rock Don Valentine John Doerr and for many years the anonymous poster I'm kidding Don Valentine the creator of Valentine's Day yeah uh by the way you made that joke and like 10 flopped I don't even know if 10 people got it no no if anybody got the joke I don't think he's that iconic I thought it was funny yeah well we scheduled that one like months ahead and it went out and it was a complete flop anyway um uh and for many years he couldn't pick a fourth today.

2:35:01He's calling it Doug Leone. And then a lot of people in the comments are saying Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Kostla, Teal, Moritz are all interesting. I wanted to go back and look through who wrote the seed checks into the hyperscalers, the Mag7. I thought this was an interesting thing and I wanted to go through it really quickly. Apple had Mike Markula, who did not become a large venture capital firm. So he kind of doesn't count as a generational VC, even though obviously he invested$92 ,000 plus the secured credit line, made a huge amount of money. And interestingly, he was introduced to Apple through Don Valentine and Arthur Rock.

2:35:40So like literally every major company went through them. Microsoft had David Marquette of technology venture investors, got 1 million for a 5 % stake. And when you talk to David Senor, he's like, oh, Microsoft didn't raise venture capital because they didn't really do more than that they only did one bc round and of course uh tbi did not go on to become like a big generational firm uh amazon jeff bezos's family came in but they had other angel investors and later planter perkins came in uh andy bechdel schheim at google there's there's a lot of folks that like the early rounds of these mag 7 were just kind of like random people that never fully scaled up like you even look at meta just became post-economic too fast basically lost yeah they lost the dog in them.

2:36:27Of course, with Google, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins eventually came in very, very early and got huge stakes. Meta, formerly Facebook, Teal put in 500K on a convertible note, which converted to 10 % equity stake. And then he turned it into founder's fund. Tesla, Elon Musk, you can kind of think of the first investor, but then Sequoia and Kleiner came in, of course. And then, oh yeah, Tesla with Elon Musk and then NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital again. So just some generational firms putting up big numbers the holy trinity for a reason uh it's it's crazy to think about you know investing in in apple or microsoft and then just being like yeah i'm not going to raise a massive growth fund yeah like it's a different era now you know the lps would be beating down your door yeah if you had 10 of a trillion dollar company but anyway uh Should we move on to this robot?

2:37:21Do we have this video pulled up? Can we play this? Boston Dynamics wants to do another demo. Oh, no. Oh, no. The demo, bro. Let's do Mads posting first while Ben tries to pull that up. Mads posting. Science Girl says, what massively improved your mental health? And Mads is sharing a picture of a book. Caller, I'd like to know how you handle your stress. Trump, I try and tell myself it doesn't matter. nothing matters if you tell yourself it doesn't matter like you do shows if you do this you do that and then you have earthquakes in india where 400 000 people get killed honestly it doesn't matter what a bizarre quote and it just sounds like a ramble i don't even get it i think there's some more context here i remember when this was first shared it was during the height of the drama and the election and everything like that and and i think this is good a good and bad philosophy it's very nihilistic if you're dealing with problems yeah yeah you want to sort of detach from them and understand like you know okay this is frustrating or i'm not happy with the situation yeah i need to resolve it but you can sort of detach and look at it from a different perspective and say you know i still have there's still a lot of good things in life and this one thing doesn't make everything else bad yeah and um is he a nothing ever happens guy this feels very nothing ever happens coded maybe we should ask him when he comes on the show yes uh after he's talking about his business no i'm saying after yeah after he gets done with all this politics if he goes back to just building social networking and crypto technology that's right uh ben do we have a video hey we got it there we go looks like a normal boston dynamics demo All right, let's see it do a kickflip.

2:39:11Oh, it's running. Okay. Pretty impressive. Kneeling. Okay. Oh, wow. Crawling. Not bad. This is pretty good. I'm excited. I still don't understand what's going on with Boston Dynamics because, you know, Unitary is getting all the attention now. Wow. Okay. That's cool. That's pretty good. I like that. I like that. Anytime you're going vertical, doing flips. Yeah. Whoa. Okay, breakdancing. That's pretty good. This is impressive. So there's a human in the suit, right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, honestly, the robots look so crazy. It's so easy to think, like, this is CGI, this is AI generated. But wow, okay, doing some breakdancing.

2:39:52Interesting to start with the very unimpressive. Oh, okay. That's getting really, really good. Wow. Very interesting. I'm really wondering when is Boston Dynamics going to get more aggressive about the commercialization? Like, they're not in the conversation at all. Yeah, you called this the best marketing strategy for any robotics company is to figure out a way to make 10 ,000 of them and just march them across a field. Yep. That would be very intimidating to anyone. And there'd probably be a program of record the next day. I would try to lead their round. Yes. I would get all the group chats together and I'd say.

2:40:23There's a lot of companies working on counter UAS technology. You're invested in the company. Allen Control Systems, gun on a truck, right? Yeah. And they can demolish DJI drones if they were coming to attack. and those drone light shows, we now have counter to that. We have Andrew Roll's Anvil. We have, you know, electronics systems. Drones are good for counter drones. Drones against drones. I've even seen eagles be used to capture drones. Nets, all sorts of stuff. Shotguns. Beagles, hunting dogs. But I have yet to see a company build counter-humanoid technology. I think it's just a gun, but I want to see it in a demo.

2:40:59I want to see a gundo defense tech company just showing you know a minigun just spitting out a thousand rounds at a horde of unitries there's this thing i don't think you've ever seen it but where two guys get in an octagon and they fight oh and you could imagine a world where we take some of our best mma athletes that's the united the united fisticuffs championship right yeah yeah the uh it's not mixed martial arts it's muscle man attack you called it muscle man attacks um and uh you could imagine a world where we just take our ufc champions and face them off against the humanoids and boston dynamics and that's the final the final boss the final boss anyway and you um could a humanoid take take out a you know john jones and his prime you know bow nickel i think bow nickel makes short work of that boston dynamics oh yeah oh yeah rear naked choke i don't know i mean that that robot seemed like you could just flip around and just grab them but the hard thing is you can't i think it's more like a strike to the head a foot to the head really does it and kick it over maybe it's kind of crazy how do you submit a robot you can break their arm and the rest of them is still yeah it's gonna be tricky yeah our producer ben is a former uh almost champion of a jujitsu tournament recently go for number one ben uh let's move on to chat yeah chat no capital uh yeah so this is a good I've heard this before.

2:42:25I just wanted to highlight it again as a word. If you're running a city, don't do this. Just learned about how Chicago sold the rights to all of its parking meter revenue to the UAE for$1.1 billion in 2008. The city is currently collecting$150 million a year and growing in parking meter fees and sends it straight to Dubai until 2083. Not a good inflation hedge, but maybe they put that$1.1 billion in some high growth asset, and it's now sitting at 20 billion. They could be outpacing the inflation. We don't know what they did with the money. Probably just did nothing with it though, let's be honest.

2:43:01Anyway, Sam Ruddykoff says, Ruddykoff says, my dad uses these speakers to watch MSNBC and this is what we expect our future to be. When you're enjoying TVP on live, throw it on a TV, but get some nice speakers. Get some bass there. We recorded nice microphones. The ideal way to listen is through sort of handcrafted European, very artisanal speakers where the maker makes one or two of them a year. Exactly. And it's sort of like a 30-year waiting list. So get on the waiting list. It's fantastic. And get a nice recliner to sit there and watch this. What else should we cover before we wrap up? What's interesting to you?

2:43:41Do you want to do Carp Madness? Palantir? This is kind of an interesting one. Eliano Yunus over at Palantir has created a March Madness bracket for the greatest Dr. Cart moments, the infamous sound bites, cockroach holders, steak dinners, self-pleasuring, Rusty Krusty, don't play golf, fake religion, Coke short sellers, AI revolution. And he posts all the different video clips and you can go and vote on this post and have a lot of fun picking uh the best carp uh soundbite uh the most electric carp soundbite the player haters the powerpoint the motel six uh they're all great clips and eliano has done the great job of collecting i go and figure it out i have one more post uh from steven schwartz over at wop uh so r4rock posted 24 hours ago wop just crossed 90 million dollar run rate and closed an unannounced series b at 800 million dollars from bain capital congrats and then stevens uh quote quotes it and says this is nearly one year old news sorry we hadn't told anybody yet uh wop has grown significantly since then and we have enormous plans for the rest of the year so totally sleeper company yeah uh we should we should have them on i mean i don't fully understand And they run sort of a sub-stack-esque platform that helps people sell information products.

2:45:18We call it the Make Money App. Great name. And yeah, we should have the founders on to talk about it. I remember they reached out to about PMF or Die when we got started. Very cool. They have live streaming functionality, like a bunch of stuff. So sleeper company, excited to have them on at some point. And congrats to Steven Schwartz on the round. You got to announce the next one with us. Come on the show. Don't let Arthur Rock leak stuff. Leak it here. Take control. Go direct. We love scoops. We love scoops. As much as John loves scooping his protein powder, we like scoops. We like scoops. And we don't like leaks.

2:45:58It's very disrespectful. Stop leaking numbers, folks. Never leak. We will never leak your fundraise. What we will do though is say thank you to ramp public ad quick eight sleep wander and bezel for their support of the show. Thank you all for the support of the show. Thank you for supporting the show. We love doing this and I can't wait for tomorrow. I can't wait for the next one. I was going to say the same thing. It's 20 hours away and you got to wonder if we could commission Jake over at Pilgrim to develop just like the sort of pod call it like podcast alpha. alpha you know that joe rogan had alpha brain yeah if we could develop like our own proprietary drug and then not release it to the world just so that we have or some sort of drug that just as soon as the camera stopped rolling it just puts me to sleep in hibernation and i just wake up 24 hours later welcome to tbp in life that would be ideal so i don't have to spend a minute away from the show guys we're moving to a new studio soon and we're actually just gonna set up our mics on our eight sleeps right here so the second the camera goes off we just kind of go yep that's anyway thank you for watching thank you we will see you tomorrow see you go leave us five stars on apple and spotify we've been climbing up the charts by the way charts thank you to everyone seriously if you've subscribed if you've if you've listened on any of those platforms it's really cool and really awesome to see we really appreciate the score takes care of itself truly yeah but thank you all for being a part of this and we will see you tomorrow see you tomorrow thank you bye