Elon Musk's Banker, Beijing Pours $26B into Robot Boom, How Apollo Dodged SaaSsassination | Ashlee Vance, Vincenzo Landino, Ethan Thornton, Kris Marszalek, Cristóbal Valenzuela, Brad Svrluga, Dayna Grayson

26:42Oh, so he's bullish. I believe he thinks that the SaaSpocalypse is overstated. Headcounts for assorted companies. Salesforce is at 87 ,000. ServiceNow, 32 ,000. Workday is at 23 ,000. Zoom's at 12 ,000. DocuSign, famously large, at 8 ,000. OpenAI's at 7 ,000. Okta's at 7 ,000. UiPath's at 5 ,000. Sprinkler's at 4 ,000. And Anthropik's at 4 ,000. Yes, UiPath still has more employees than Anthropik. Infer from that what you will. Well, the flip side of this is that the companies do need employees to go deploy AI and actually lead about change management. They certainly need to talk to the NFL's photographer with the software that they should be using to upload those photos a little bit faster.

27:28Tyler over at Pallion says, correct to Buko. I have a strange amount of conviction that they could cut up to 40 % and not impact growth. Buko says, in fact, it would accelerate. Yeah. Peter T. It's a fake Peter Thiel account. Peter T-E-A-L. Okay. It says really only 10 % to 20 % of X is a good case study. How many? Is that actually? Did X really only cut? I thought they cut like 70 % of the workforce. I thought they were up at like 5 ,000 and they went down to like 1 ,000. But while you look that up, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

28:08I am pulling this up. I think it was like 80%. 80 % reduction. Yeah, that's huge. Yeah. Did it accelerate? I'm seeing 80. Pre-acquisition, late 2021, they had 7 ,500 to 8 ,000 employees. As of late, they have 20. At late 2024, they had 2 ,800 employees. Yeah. It was such a chaotic time. They were changing the business model. A lot of advertisers were boycotting and pulling out. There was political considerations. There were all sorts of things that were going on. So I would hesitate to say that they accelerated the top line, but they certainly right-sized that business very, very quickly. Yeah.

28:52Derek Thompson is giving a shout out to Matt Levine. KPMG is trying to force its auditor to accept less money since accounting work can be significantly automated by AI. But KPMG makes money from accounting. So this looks like a company accidentally announcing to the world that its business model is under attack. Matt says, auditing can basically be done by AI, so why should we pay for it? It's not a crazy thing for most companies to think or to say to their auditors, but it's a crazy thing for an auditing firm to say to its auditor. That is wild. KPMG should be paying Grant Thornton more. In these crazy AI times, everyone needs to pay more for trusted human auditing.

29:32We'll go first. I guess that's what Grant Thornton said. I bet we should negotiate a discount. Wait, they're saying people are going to want trusted human? Well, that's Grant Thornton, a different group. Yeah, it seems like they'll have to switch to value-based pricing too, like everyone else. And the value, even if it can be one-shotted with a prompt by some superintelligence, is non-zero. It is very valuable to have an external party verifying your work and the numbers that you're reporting. So it's definitely non-zero. It's like price wars all over the place, price wars. Because for a long time.

30:14Or I would say the other dynamic is you have like basically legacy, you know, the big brands in the space. They adopt maybe a more Coke and Pepsi model where like Coke and Pepsi both could, you've talked about this, get in an insane price war, cut down, compete on price so aggressively that there's just no money to be made anymore, but they have sort of like somewhat of an equilibrium where it's not really in any group's interest to compete prices to zero. And I would say like brand is still going to matter in this category with auditors specifically. And maybe that's where you find like bowl cases within the broad sell-off is do they like Coke and Pepsi it's a duopoly not an oligopoly so there's no third player that can be oh we're five percent of the market there's so much to gain let's go be the bull in the china shop just doesn't happen and then also there's lock-in around the brand and then there's also lock-in around the distribution because Coke and Pepsi have trucks that go to every every store where it needs to be distributed auditing might not be the same structure.

31:23I think it's more oligopolistic. I think there's more firms in the market and there's less of like you have to use this auditor because they're in this particular distribution channel. Anyone can pick up a phone, call the new upstart auditor that has the same level of quality at a lower price and if you're getting a good product you'll just go there as opposed to if you're at a gas station and they only have Coke or Pepsi you're sort of out of luck. Really quickly, railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider user agent to deploy web app servers databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling monitoring and security Let's pull up this clip of Gerstner on CNBC.

32:04He hosted CNBC last week I tuned in to as much of it as I could From Altimeter Capital Great host Let's see it Why is this happening to the degree it is as we've discussed on numerous occasions? Is it overdone? At times you've said yes The last time we were together, you said something like 90 percent of the companies, the software companies that were down the way they are, deserve to be. Those, I think, were your exact words. Where are we here? So when you and I were together on January 6th, I said, you have to understand the difference between earnings and revenue and stock price. OK. And what's happened in software is hard for people to get their head around because the stocks have been cut in half.

32:43But that's not what the market is discounting, Scott. The market is looking into the future and saying, in the past, three years ago, I could buy 35 years worth of sales forces, free cash flow into the future. Give them 35 times free cash flow because I had that level of predictability. It was like a government bond. It was a sure thing. You definitely were going to get those. And then we have AI do what AI has done over the course of the last several months. And people just said something very rational. I can't see as far into the future. So I'm going to pay less for the terminal value. I'm going to pay less for those future free cash flows.

33:18I'm not penalizing them because they're missing their numbers today. I'm just putting it in the too hard bucket because I can't predict those future numbers. So the only way that reverses, Scott, is those companies have to accelerate their core revenues and show that they are beneficiaries of AI. The companies that do that, Databricks, is accelerating their core revenues. I think this quarter they grew over 60%. Snowflake, ClickHouse, these are companies that are accelerating their core revenues because AI relies on them. I think they'll do fine, but application software where I can't see into the future, they're going to have lower multiples.

33:53I'll tell you, this week was especially acute in some of the moves on the news of this updated tool from Anthropic, which you're an investor in. And, of course, that speaks to me of the marketplace and the investment community doesn't necessarily know, even yet, how to assess the level to which software is going to be disrupted and by whom and by how. And even a simple, what appears to be a simple update or an upgrade from an anthropic causes software names to go down. It causes private credit names to go down because they're exposed in their loans to software businesses. We're still trying to get our arms, it feels like, around this exploding technology and the impact it's going to have.

34:40And it's exponential. The rate of change, the rate of improvement of these models. The X-Chat says Brad's popping any bubble he can get his hands on. We had a step-function improvement in the first or second week in December. A lot of good points. I mean, I think the real SaaSpocalypse might not start until you have some of the labs public and people can actually really rotate out of software fully and say, I don't want to own this thing that I don't fully understand how AI is going to impact it when I could own the disruptor, right? The Anthropics, the OpenAIs, et cetera. us. So yeah, people were asking like, where will the 50 billion come from?

35:17Where will the 100 billion of capital come from? And we see this in China too, where one company will go public, and you actually see a drop in the previous Baidus or whoever the legacy company is, because there just isn't that much liquidity in the market. So it needs to come from somewhere. Yeah, I just don't know how the narrative around SaaS flips positive, because the models are not getting worse, right? They only get better. We actually need to see some type of, like SaaS would benefit from a model plateau, right? It's like, hey, there's sort of a set, we have a set of capabilities. SaaS companies can deploy this, but if the models just keep getting better and better and better and agents get better and better and better, where's the bottom for SaaS other than some type of minimal free cash flow multiple?

36:10Well, it's like refocusing on a narrative that has durability even in a world where software R &D is essentially free. I guess what I'm saying is like Brad's right. If you see a business actually really accelerating, growth accelerating, then it's possible to get excited about that one company, but it's hard to get excited at any point about SaaS broadly because the models are just going to keep improving and that just seems to be more and more of a threat. Yes, but within SaaS, there will be companies that reveal to the market and correctly message that they are in fact like AGI resistant because of ad networks, because of lock-in effects, because of regulatory moats.

36:59There will be a number of categories that emerge, like when we talk about the payment rails, those feel like, yes, you could maybe vibe code it, but are you gonna vibe code your bank charter and all these other things that you need to do and get all the customers, like the distribution, the lock-in. So I think within SaaS, there will be things that are pretty easy to just rip out and replace with something directly like a model, and there will be other companies that are old and are legacy, but you're just like, oh yeah, that can't be assaulted by a model. It's impenetrable because it's actually a different thing.

37:36And so those companies will wind up sort of rebounding, I would imagine. Yeah. Anyway, New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

37:49When 1792. 1792, that's when they started. That's when they started. Overnight success. We created the country and then almost immediately we decided. We got to start trading. Time to exchange some stocks. Got to start trading. Michael over at Quiet Capital is quoting Bucco. Bucco says, for 50 years we've treated the supremacy of asset light businesses as a permanent economic law, but if AI commoditizes asset light businesses, we'd just be reverting to the historical mean where value accrued to atoms, infrastructure, energy. It would be a 50-year blip, an anomaly. Interesting. Michael says, this is one of the most underrated observations in tech right now.

38:30If AI commoditizes software, what's actually safe? Regulated, liability-bearing businesses. Someone has to be on the hook. Anything touching the physical world, hardware, manufacturing, energy. That's the kind of Tesla narrative. Yeah, these are the subcategories of things that are sort of SaaS businesses now, but will reveal themselves as being not actually that asset light. Yeah. Proprietary data sets. AI makes your data more valuable, not less. Marketplaces and businesses with network effects. Liquidity greater than software. Operationally intense businesses. The bad businesses become the best ones.

39:08And cybersecurity and physical security. More AI equals more attack surface. Yeah, equipment share. I wonder how they're doing. They went out IPO'd at this, I guess it was a week or so ago. January 23rd, they've done well specifically because they have so much supply on the platform that they actually own. And we're just so far away from anything like an optimist being able to like, hey, make me a bunch of heavy machinery. Don't make mistakes. Yeah. Carried no interest in the reply saying, how is this underrated? Most have been talking about this for over a year. I'll say it again. An HVAC business is not vibe coding a service Titan competitor.

39:53That's true, but there's still the risk of the software vendor for HVAC businesses now has 25 competitors that can VibeCode competitors, and there's just a lot more fragmentation, a lot more competition in the space. Yeah, that's interesting. Service Titan serves pretty wide range, but they also serve a bunch of SMBs. And those SMBs, if you went to them and say, hey, I can build you Service Titan, but I'm going to cut your bill in half because I can use AI. That is a real risk to the bottom because a single owner-operated business might just say, yeah, no one's getting fired. If I choose the wrong software, it might be a little bit annoying, but if I can save a lot of money, maybe it's worth it.

40:41So I think there is some risk. Yeah, there's a good comment in the chat earlier. Someone was saying, you know, it's the famous Bezos quote, your margin is my opportunity. And so small company comes in, sees high SaaS margins, can actually go attack them now and can instead of needing to raise a billion dollars and do five years of R &D, they can raise 10 million and do one year of R &D and have a competitor that's ready to go, you know, head to head on a battle card against an entrenched like public company, SaaS company. and maybe they're only earning 30 % margins instead of 60 % margins, but they're happy with that because, hey, it's a new business and they started it from nothing.

41:19And if they make$10 million, they get to take a lot of that home and stuff. And so there's a lot of opportunity for these new companies, but then that's obviously a threat for the incumbents really quickly. Public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Where do you want to go next? Sheil says, the greatest rebrand in enterprise software history is calling consulting revenue forward deployed engineering. I do wonder if a year or so from now we'll see companies that, you know, these companies that went from one to 10 or one to 20 million in revenue really quickly.

41:55It just turns out like, hey, like they were just kind of like doing a bunch. They were doing about 10 million dollars worth of engineering work. And it wasn't actually, again, a lot of them are setting it up. where like, hey, we're gonna come and build a bunch of software for you, and then we're gonna charge on an ongoing basis or based on usage, but still, I'm sure there's some examples where it really is just like, you know, effectively consulting, or you're running like a software development agency, so. Yeah, yeah, it's funny. Thinking about OpenAI, I think they're at 8 ,000 employees, and wasn't the report that they're hiring something like 800 forward-deployed engineers?

42:32So you're going to have 10 % of an AI lab that's focused on AI research, carrying cancer is going to be like four deployed engineers. And you have to imagine that it was basically zero, you know, five years ago. I mean, I guess Greg Brockman was out there paying people to use GPT-2, which I love. But it is going to be a very interesting shift for that business. And I think the four deployed engineering is going to be important. like the AI diffusion question, it's a lot of sticky systems. It's a lot of people that don't have time. The fact that we see these spikes in attention during long weekends and holidays, it's like that's when people have time to go do the new project and stop doing the same system again and again and again.

43:19And a forward-deployed engineer comes into your organization and just is able to do that hard work that you don't have the slack capacity for. Brian says, did you guys see that guy who offered in-person open-claw setups for people and accidentally realized it was a seven-figure business. No. I did see this. It was kind of like a geek squad thing. That's really cool. Yeah. I wonder. No, there are plenty of people who are like, I don't want to open the terminal ever. I feel like I'm hacking into the matrix. It's just not for me. I don't know. I'm going to mess up. I don't know any of these commands.

43:50And so, I mean, that's why the labs are launching desktop products around that are wrappers for the terminal agents. But, yeah, there's going to be a lot of bull market for forward-deployed engineers, in my opinion. What do you think, Tyler? I was going to say, that's like Ben. Ben's scared to use the terminal. Oh, called out. Called out. He's not even here. Where is Ben? Where is he? Where is Ben? He's practicing T-Moc, sir. CrowdStrike, your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. China is going all in to beat the US on humanoid robots. Beijing is showering companies with support, but some fear a bubble.

44:32Where's our bubble gun? Oh, yeah, we don't have the bubble gun. But look at this terrifying bleed. Do you see this? So if you scroll way down in the article, you can see the comparison of the different humanoid robots. And they're getting taller. Chinese humanoid robots are getting taller very very quickly. So the Unitree G1, the Unitree G1 is the robot that most people think of when they think of Chinese humanoid robot. The Unitree G1 has 23 joints and it's four feet four inches tall. Four feet four inches tall, that's something you can drop kick across the room. It's probably pretty safe, but they're getting taller.

45:18The Uni-X AI Panther has 34 joints and is 5 '3". The Ubi-Tech Walker S2 has 52 joints and it's 5 '9". We're getting short king status now. Now the AI Square Robotics Alphabot 2, 5 '11". Wait, that could be some regulation that I could get behind? Yes. All humanoids should be capped at a certain height? Yeah. So that if any people out there are a little bit on the shorter side, they get to feel tall. Yeah. And then, but in general, a lot of the average person should mog the robot. Yes, yes, definitely. On Dwarkesh, Elon said the Optimus is 5 '11 as well. 5 '11. Yeah. That's a very reasonable height.

46:03So the AI squared robotics Alphabot 2, 34 joints of freedom. Yeah, let's give it up for the short. Degrees of freedom. Let's give it up for Trey. It's, yeah, let's give it up. It's 5 '11. It has wheels, but it's starting to look intimidating. It's starting to look skynet. Ashley Vance was at the latest robotics fight. We've got to ask him about that later. Yeah, so the Wall Street Journal has a whole deep dive on what's happening in China with regard to humanoid robotics. China's going all in to beat the United States on humanoid robots. Of course, they have a ton of industrial advantages. So Elon Musk has been telling investors for months that Tesla's optimist humanoid robot will revolutionize the world and create a new mega industry.

46:48But most of it could belong to China, he has warned. China is an ass kicker. Next level, Musk said in January. To the best of our knowledge, we don't see any significant competitors outside of China. China is moving quickly. Shots fired at figure and one X, but I mean, the supply chain is not something. Oh yeah, true. Yeah. He talks about this in the context of, are you going to be able to make a million. Yes, yes. He's thinking about like massive scale gigafactory status. So China's moving quickly to dominate the industry. Humanoid robotics companies are sprouting up from Shenzhen to Suzhou with more than 140 and counting.

47:26There's 140 different companies. They got a market map over there. We have five and they have 140. They're tapping a vast ecosystem of parts suppliers and engineering talent. They're starting to produce humanoid robots at scale and actively introducing them. Running a bit right now. That's how you run. You ever go through TSA and they make you take your shoes off? What's the deal with airplane food? They're actively introducing them into real life scenarios in factories, hotels, and offices. John. Yes. Grok unhinged voice mode in an optimist. Very intimidating. Just hanging out around the office.

48:05Very. Just running bits all the time. It would actually be hilarious. It would actually be hilarious. Get ready. I mean, you're going to be able to do that in like two years. That's weird. It's going to be very viral. That's weird. Is that like skin over a humanoid? Not a fan of that. I think I like the Terminator more than the humanoid with the skin. That is odd. Setting the broader industry direction is Beijing, which has identified embodied AI, the fusion of artificial intelligence with physical systems, as a cutting-edge technology area China wants to own in the coming five years. It's in the latest five-year plan.

48:40Local governments are showering companies with land and discounted office rent. Banks are offering favorable loans. Since late 2024, Beijing, Shenzhen, and other cities have established investment funds totaling more than$26 billion. That's right. That's 1 ,000 times as much as France is investing to inject capital into the industry. just kidding France we love you government agencies and state owned companies are serving as early adopters buying up humanoids and deploying them in museums at events and on the street as RoboCops performing traffic control the deployments are helping firms build a market and collect data to make the robots work better yeah Bill Bishop was saying next week China has some seasonal celebration that they're doing and there's going to be hundreds of robots on display totally they're very good at effectively like scripted dances, maneuvering.

49:33I have been surprised that, I mean, China was very early with the drone shows. Then we've seen a number of drone show companies come to America and do like sort of bring that technology to America. I still, have you ever seen a drone show in person in America? I've never like run into one. Like, you know, oh, they're, oh, like I'm driving in LA and like the Charger Stadium just has a drone show. You gotta go to Katzenbergs. Yeah. Or like if I live near, I live near the Rose Bowl so like I would imagine I see fireworks from the Rose Bowl every once in a while they have concerts but I've never seen a drone show there that certainly is getting diffused into America but the humanoid robot shows can do a whole another level of just like bizarre thing and it works particularly well there as opposed to a truly unbounded like just be a you know be a worker at a restaurant right it's like you know just dance in the scripted.

50:25Really quickly, Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150 ,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So the moves closely track the way in which China built up other industries, such as electric vehicles, which benefited from incentives from buyers to help stimulate demand. Now China has many of the world's most notable EV makers, including brands that are eating up the market shares of General Motors, Volkswagen, and others. Have you seen the people doing the I'm outside in the BYD? Oh, yes. Is that a Drake line? Did he actually say that?

50:58He says, I'm outside in the AMG. Oh, and they changed it? And so there's like thousands. If this is a campaign by BYD, because it's always showing off the features, like it can, the way that it can automatically park, like parallel park for you, not just like a normal parallel park, but it can like shift, I don't know. It's like the Hummer EV. It has like the crab walk right? Okay, the wheels turn off the axis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can sort of tank turn where you're spinning the car without moving forward or backwards. And then I think you can also tilt all four wheels so you can drive in at a really aggressive angle.

51:32But I feel like I saw one, maybe it was AI that was like even more brain breaking than anything I'd seen from an American car at all. Yeah, it can do really crazy U-turn too. Yeah, and then we also, I saw one video of someone driving BYD on like sand dunes It was really crazy. So people show it off in snow. People show it off all over the place. Good marketing. Good marketing. We'll see what they do with the humanoid robots. China is once again mobilizing state support, supply chain depth, and rapid commercialization to build a new strategic sector. Success will depend on who can best solve the myriad technical problems associated with humanoid robots.

52:09The industry is still in its early days, and it may take years to take off if it ever does. Skeptics say humanoid robots are a bubble and may never find a true use case. What? It's like the most obvious use case. It's like you don't have to reach that far to be like put the e-commerce package in the box. Like they're already doing this. Yeah, like anything a human can do. I can't think of any good use case. Who said this? Horse says cars may be a bubble. Bad news. China has a broad supply chain of manufacturers that make the nuts and bolts of humanoid robots Government agencies and state-owned companies in China are buying up humanoids and deploying them in museums That's an interesting place.

52:50It does feel like we'll be in an era of like the Optimus is already deployed into a lot of Tesla showrooms Which is like it's just a cool thing to see if you're at it, you know I was at the Americana brand in Glendale went into the Tesla store and it was just like there's Lucid Air store and there's a a Rivian store, but the Tesla store has a robot. So you're like, oh, I want to go see that robot. Tesla Diner has one. Oh, yeah, they do. I drive by that every single day. And I still have never been because I pulled into the parking lot one day and I felt so uncomfortable because it was all electric cars.

53:21And I'm sitting there with this supercharged V8 just being like, I don't belong here. I don't feel welcome. And so I shamefully like drove away. I have so much respect for Tesla. and yet I've never wanted a food product from Tesla. That is not. It's a big part of it. I mean, it's like a stunt marketing. So let's go into U.S. worries. Even so, China's momentum is a source of concern for U.S. policymakers and tech leaders. The White House has been working on an executive order aiming to boost the development of American robotics industry. Among the U.S.'s concerns, many American robotics companies will rely on China's supply chain.

53:58Dylan Patel over at Somebody Analysis has talked about this a lot. Like if humanoids become a thing, like China has the supply chain almost exclusively. Tesla's optimists will count on Chinese suppliers for components such as roller screws for robot joints and motors for robot hands for mass production. The U.S. still leads in one key area, the foundational AI models that serve as the brains of humanoids. Companies including Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Agility Robotics have made advances tapping cutting-edge technology from the likes of NVIDIA and Google. But China has a broad supply chain of manufacturers that make the nuts and bolts of humanoids Including sensors batteries and other components with the ability to source so much locally Chinese humanoid companies are able to make design changes easily And at low cost it is a hassle Buying from China and waiting two weeks while something ships to you.

54:46They don't have to do that They just walk right across the street pick up whatever they need bring it back. Yeah, we're in the process of shifting We did some sampling for merchant refactoring our supply chain exactly Our merch supply chain, I would say it's looking like 80 % of the merch that we make for our upcoming drop will be made right here in Los Angeles. Yeah, that's exciting. I mean, I do think there's probably some cool things you can do with delivery of humanoids, right? Because if you're buying it from China, you could just like have it go on the plane and just like sit down and walk over.

55:20Have it swim. Yeah. It needs to learn to swim. Give it a windsurfing board, a paddle board. Give it a foil. And it can paddle all the way here. I mean, yeah, Palmer's talked about that with Anderle. Like, they want the planes to fly from the factory straight into the battlefield. Pretty crazy. Chinese makers of humanoid robots, which include human-like machines with wheels, as well as those with legs. Don't have to have legs to be a humanoid robot, apparently. announced orders worth more than$300 million in the second half of 2025. So the Chinese humanoid robotics industry is at a$600 million run rate.

56:00It's not bad. It's not tiny. That's pretty significant. That's more than just demos. I mean, sure, there's a lot of museums and random places where you just want to show something off, but that's good. Isn't it? It's hard to take every Elon projection at full face value, but he's talking about being able to make up to a million humanoids in the, in the, what is it? The X and S facilities in Fremont. Yeah. I have no, it's so unclear where these are going to price still. Yeah. I think you can look at, you can look at the Chinese companies for like some type of comp. Like it's going to be hard to really compete, but yeah.

56:44Morgan Stanley has, let's see, 100 ,000. So that's, That's very interesting. So the run rate right now is$600 million. Morgan Stanley is predicting up to 100 ,000 humanoids shipped in 2026. If there's not significant increases in price for these, that would be$6 ,000 per humanoid. It must be higher. So I would expect the based on this Morgan Stanley prediction of a hundred thousand humanoids shipped in 2026 You would expect revenue for the industry to be in the billions for sure Because I have to imagine that the average selling price of a humanoid is like more like 20 ,000 It's more like a car then you can get a unitree g1 how much on their site for thirteen thousand five hundred dollars But they're gonna charge you for delivery John.

57:36They're gonna charge you a dollar and forty $1.44. They're like, sorry, our margins are so bad on this. They're actually negative. We can't afford free shipping for this shipping, this human size thing across the ocean. We're going to have to ship it in the spookiest coffin possible. Wake from the dead. Very macabre. Very, very spooky. Anyway, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending, now with AI. Adjusting bedsheets. On a recent weekday at UniX AI, a Chinese robot maker, founder Fred Yang showed a group of investors how its wheeled humanoid panther could easily adjust messy bedsheets, pick up trash, and place dirty clothes in the laundry machine and start the wash.

58:33The company has about 100 employees now, and it's developed three versions of its humanoid robots with a starting price around$12 ,000 each. It is deployed in hundreds of places, such as hotels, mostly in China. I was in a hotel in San Francisco once, and there was not a humanoid robot. It was more like a trash can with wheels, kind of R2-D2-looking guy. If you ordered coffee, they would put it on the delivery robot, and then the robot would get in the elevator, take the elevator up to your room, and then knock. and then you would take it out of like the bin. It was more like those delivery robots that you see on the street, the Cocos, right?

59:10So, you know, just one level up that. It still has wheels. It needs to be in a controlled facility like a hotel, something that's not super unpredictable. Goes pretty hard to name your humanoid Panther. Panther's a good name. I don't know if I would be fighting alongside Panther in the singularity. I think in the Skynet apocalypse, Panther's coming for me. I'm going to have to shred it. Yang, who studied at the University of Michigan and Yale University, returned home to China to start UniX a year and a half ago. He said China's deep bench of technical talent and government support help make it a good place to launch.

59:46Some local governments offer free land and office space for three years, followed by three more years at half price. They're giving out free land over there. We can't even get an art gallery in Hollywood to make a TV show. We need help. The saga continues. We got to compete. Policy is one of the most decisive reasons that embodied AI is doing so well in China. Yang said in August, I treat the government policy as a force to crack the market and our embodied AI startups are the force to push. They call it Robot Valley. Other cities and provinces have set up their own action plans and embodied AI funds to provide capital for the industry.

1:00:25Tencent, Huawei, and EV maker BYD have been part of a so-called robot valley in Shenzhen with 15 robotics firms there. Shenzhen has said it is setting up a roughly$1.4 billion fund focused on AI and robotics industries and another valued around$640 million. What is that, a fund for ants? Robotics fund. They're making... That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money to just giveaway. They're making ant-sized robots. I mean, that's a lot of robots. That's definitely like, get a ton of these companies to series B. You know, like, get them with a product that actually ships, you know. Hire good people, do the R &D, do initial manufacturing run, and then, yeah, when you're ready to really skip.

1:01:11Figure reasons that much with triple-layered SDGs. That's true. Every day. Every day. One humanoid robotics firm there, AI Squared Robotics, enjoys subsidized rent as well as access to interns from nearby universities. Their costs are also subsidized. Eric Guo holds a PhD from Purdue and worked previously at Microsoft. The firm's general purpose humanoid called Alphabot is currently used in factories, including LCD, television, and HKC. This implies there's a firm called SigmaBot. SigmaBot, yes. Somewhat antisocial. It doesn't actually like to have humans. And looks out on a rainy day. It's just plotting, scheming.

1:01:48Yeah, it's plotting. And listening to vibe reels. Our primary focus is to figure out how to make robots usable and operational, even when they haven't fully achieved 100 % perfection in technology, Guo said in September. Beijing also has an economic development zone with humanoid robot startups. They are doing a lot,$14 billion to support AI and robotics industries. So China's recipe for government support, low-cost supply chains and technical talent, worked wonders in the EV industry. but it also led to hundreds of brands crowding the market and severe price competition, with many companies unprofitable.

1:02:24As more robot firms emerge, fears of a bubble have risen. Hoping to avoid that outcome, China's government is drafting a set of technical standards to guide development of the humanoid robot industry, weed out unqualified players, and accelerate adoption, according to researchers involved in the process. In November, China's top industry ministry set up a standards committee with executives from leading companies as well as state labs. So China's financial regulators have also tightened oversight on robotics companies seeking to go public to reduce the risk of a bubble. So if you go public, you've got to be accountable.

1:02:59You've got to follow all of the regulations so that you're not just fleecing the public. Apparently Warren Buffett was an investor in BYD. Gabe just brought this up. He was. But he exited in late 2025. He held it for 17 years. What? I didn't know BYD was that old. Wow. He got it early. Was he like a pre-IPO investor or something? I don't know. How do you get into BYD 17 years ago? That's crazy. Buffett began investing in BYD in 2008 when it paid$230 million for$225 million shares, equivalent to a 10 % stake at the time. Wow. Basically led the Series A. Basically, yeah. That's crazy. Let me tell you about Shopify.

1:03:49Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. The Wall Street Journal is trying to unpack what is going on in the U.S. labor market. They identified a number of factors that were sort of interesting. I thought we should read through them. So, the pace of hiring in America has dropped precipitously, and there isn't a single reason why, says the Wall Street Journal. Instead there are a lot of them. Uncertainty over tariff policy, there's a variety of things here, but they identify.

1:04:22So uncertainty over tariff policy has made it difficult for many companies to plan ahead, leading them to hold off on hiring. Some particularly small businesses, tariffs have raised cost, making it more difficult to take on new employees. higher short-term interest rates are another pressure, particularly for smaller firms, which often rely on credit card borrowing to meet financing needs. Tech companies that hired heavily in the wake of the pandemic are still dealing with an overhang of workers. And then there's another factor, workers aren't leaving the jobs they have. The number of workers, the number of people that quit in December was 3.2 million.

1:04:56And in March of 2022, it was 4.5 million. So less people are quitting. And so that's obviously putting pressure on the labor market because there's less employee churn. When post-pandemic hiring was in full swing, the quits rate, which measures quits as a share of employment, was 2%, well short of the 2.3 it averaged in 2019 before the pandemic. Yeah, it felt like at the back half of last year, everyone, a lot of people started saying very publicly, if you have a job right now, keep it. Yeah. So, yeah. So the labor market on Thursday reported that the overall number of hires employers made in December came to 5.3 million.

1:05:37That put the so-called hires rate, the number of hires employers made as a share of overall employment at 3.3%. That's a very low number, not only below the level of a few years earlier when businesses were desperate to bring on new workers, but also well below its level before COVID hit. Low hiring has historically correlated to much higher unemployment rate than the U.S. is actually experiencing, about 4.4%. The disconnect between the two reflects an unusual environment where, despite the low pace of hiring, employers haven't been shedding as many workers, notwithstanding some of the big recent layoff announcements.

1:06:10As a result, employment has been growing at a glacial pace, with the economy adding the fewest jobs last year outside of a recession since 2003, and economists expect annual revisions, including the January employment report coming out Wednesday, will bring the 2025 jobs tally lower still. The relatively low number of layoffs, said JPMorgan Chase economist Mike Firoli, is a reflection of an economy that continues to chug along and hasn't undergone the kind of shock of demand that leads employers to start shedding workers. So top lines aren't decelerating. The economy is doing well. But the low level of quits, on the other hand, is probably driven by workers' sense that the labor market is fragile.

1:06:52And there was another article in the Wall Street Journal today about how the recruiting business is flipping and it used to be employers would pay the recruiter fee, but now job seekers are paying recruiters to find me a job. Like, if you find me a good job, I will pay you to find me the job. Oh, a success fee on the talent side. Success fee paid by the talent, yes, which is the opposite of what it usually is. That's interesting. So consumers surveyed by the New York Fed in December put their chances of finding new work in the next three months if they lost their job. It's interesting because if you're a company and you find out somebody's going around offering to pay people to find them a job, that's a very probably negative signal because a lot of the best talent has no shortage of job opportunities.

1:07:37Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah, I was looking at this. I mean, there were other attempts at this over the years. There's people trying to build kind of like talent agencies for tech talent. There was at least one company that was doing that. I don't know the latest on them. But it's, yeah, people trying to comp like tech hiring market to sports, right? And it felt like we had that moment in summer of last year. But in reality, those people, again, you know, hopefully if you're negotiating a comp package worth$100 million or$50 million or even 10 million. You have like a lawyer involved, but unclear if anybody really capitalized on that moment and became like the agent for a lot of these different researchers.

1:08:26Yeah, I talked to one person who was sort of a talent agent recruiter, I think for like GP positions at venture capital firms. And there's a few other people that have sort of played in that space, but not too much. I have one more thing, but quickly, Figma. Figma helps. Figma make isn't your average vibe-coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. So I was looking at the share of white-collar work over the last century in America. In the 1900s, white-collar work was around 18 % of American labor, and electrification was the big technology of the day.

1:09:09It was transforming factories, cities, and homes. Then in the 1910s, 19-teens, we got the automobile. White-collar work moved upwards to 20%. Then in the 1920s, you get radio and consumer electricity. White-collar work goes up a little bit more, 22%, 25%. In the 1930s, you get aviation. Despite the Depression, white-collar work kept climbing 25 % to 27%. In the 1940s, you get nuclear, radar, synthetics. White-collar work goes up to 30%. In the 50s, you get television. You're up at 35%, 40 % white-collar work. In the 1960s, you get mainframe computers and space technology. White-collar work's up at 42%.

1:09:57IBM is starting to dominate. In the 1970s, you get semiconductors and microprocessors. White-collar work goes up to 46%. The personal computer in the 80s leads to 50 % of the American workforce working in white-collar work. The internet in the 90s pushes that up to 58%. You have Netscape, Amazon, Google. Mobile and smartphone kick off in the 2000s. White-collar work's up at 60 % then. And then in the 2010s, you get cloud computing. That takes it to 62%. So now we're at between 60 % and 63 % white-collar work. And there's this big question about, do we redefine how people work? Where do things shift around?

1:10:33but Tyler, what do you think? Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I mean, I think Boris yesterday - You've got a blue collar on right now. You do have a blue collar on. I do have a blue collar on. I think it was Boris yesterday, he was like, well, maybe we have more blue collar jobs in some way, but the colors are less blue, right? So it's like, maybe you're in a factory, but you're just using an iPad, right? You're not actually moving things with your hands. Totally, totally. I think the line is getting increasingly blurry, at least, like in the US. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree.

1:10:59and it does seem like people will just be moving around to new jobs, new jobs will be created, but certainly a lot of opportunity for like chaos and turmoil if things happen quickly, although at least according to the Wall Street Journal, there's a whole bunch of different factors that are going on in the labor market. They sort of conclude that article talking about how it's still difficult to really quantify the impact of AI because there's so many other things happening around interest rates, tariffs, quit rates, hiring, slowing, COVID overhang, that you shouldn't just jump to being like AI is 100 % explanatory for what's happening in the labor market.

1:11:38Quickly, let me explain to you LabelBox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. LabelBox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. You want to go back to Ferrari? There's more Ferrari. Ed, he's an automotive advocate, according to his bio. He says, to all the people who for some reason want the inside of a Ferrari to keep looking like a mid-range gaming mouse, here's a historical comparison that may provide some context for recent design choices. This is very cool. I really, it was easy, obviously, to clock that the steering wheel of the Johnny Ive Ferrari looks like some classic Ferraris, but I hadn't seen a shot exactly like this.

1:12:21I can't tell. I don't know what car this actually is, but you can see a lot of the same functionality. Even the vents up at the front are quite similar. They've just modernized it. So my main thing, I'm going to have many more thoughts on the Ferrari, but I will wait to see what the outside of the car actually looks like. That's true. Yeah, I mean, very mixed results. Some people were super excited about this design. it's always just cool to see like what Johnny Ives up to outside of Apple like this is one of the first big projects that we've seen you know we've heard about the love from acquisition with open AI what he'll be doing there but all of that is still very rumored it's unclear how much of his design work is actually working its way through the open AI organization but here is just like a project that he did from start to finish and turned over like they they delivered not just like a deck, but like a series of books.

1:13:17If you see this, like five multiple hundred page, like coffee table books around their work. Like here are all of our references. Here's how we think about Ferrari's history, all this stuff. I think it was very, very cool. But very mixed reaction. Lee says cover the badge and you'd think this was the interior of a budget hatchback. I don't know if that's entirely fair. I think that up close and personal. You could convince me from far away that this was in the new Mini Cooper. Yeah, totally. But I think the thing that is undeniable is like some of the little details, right? You can, to start the car, you can like pull this thing out.

1:13:52Yeah. It lights up. I think that'll be very cool. Yeah, Ilya has the, imagine starting your car like that. It does look very cool. Is this in the ceiling? Like why is the video? Oh yeah, that would be. This looks like you pull it down from the ceiling. It doesn't look like the way the camera is pointed looks like this will be up top, which is very cool and very different. And I think this is something we were talking to a friend about, that the tactile feel and the way, like I saw some ASMR video of all the different buttons. And the buttons make, even if it looks like the same switch, it makes a slightly different sound when it clicks.

1:14:28And so you could potentially have an audio cue that knows, okay, if I click this, it's the light. If I click this, it's the windshield wiper. If I click this, it's defrost. And all of that makes no sense in a gas car because a Ferrari is going to be very loud. But in an electric car, you can actually hear all these little subtle cues. And it really takes beyond, like, the image doesn't do it justice. I just know that when you're there and you're feeling the materials and then interacting with them and the sound the materials make and the feeling of every knob, every button, how it works, that's very interesting.

1:15:03But at the same time, PNorm says it looks like a PS2 peripheral. So you got them dead to rights there. But, you know, you got to see it. Yeah, this is it. All the buttons and switches in the Ferrari loose sound incredible. Love that they went for a real tactile experience instead of just a touchscreen. If we have audio here, you can hear them sound different. That's really cool. Yeah. So those sound the same. That's good. That's good. You ever seen one of those new car reviews where they push the plastic throughout the whole car? Oh, it's a mess. And sometimes it, like... Yeah. This is it. Listen.

1:15:39So if you go back a little bit. So listen to the different switches. They sound different, even though they're, like, on the same dash. This one. Okay. See? Different sounds. That's really cool and unique. I've never seen that before. I was intrigued. I like this. I like it. I like this. Johnny, I've come on the show. Johnny Drive. Johnny Drive's making cars now. A lot of people in Silicon Valley are teeing up. Ilya Sukar said, how do I order the Johnny Ive car? I'm ready. I call it the Johnny Drive. Anyway, Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.

1:16:22We have Vincenzo. We do. Amazing. Ready. We can bring him in. Vincenzo is in the rooster and waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra Dome. Vincenzo. How are you doing? He's back. Good to see you. Welcome back. I'm just here to talk about Oh, this is the Williams Pit Crew, retro Pit Crew shirt. I love it. Thank you for taking the time. I might have to do a Puma collab. I'm still waiting for my TVPN. We'll send it to you. Aren't we all? Everyone's waiting except for me. I, John, John this morning, John this morning was like, yeah, it's really cool. How, how every, you know, every Tuesday you wear a new one of one, but we're in the sampling process.

1:17:10So don't worry. We got a bunch of stuff. We will be mass producing. Let's get, I want to see, we've been talking about Ferrari, but I want to do a take on the new Johnny Ive car. I hadn't actually seen that video yet. The Luce, Luce. It's Luce, John. Luce. Light. It means light in Italian. Yeah. Break it down. what was your reaction? Do you like it? Is it too iPad-like? Does it look like a PS2 peripheral to you? What do you think? I think I'm with Jory in this one where I'm like, I'm kind of torn. Like, I want to like it for what it is and I think it looks cool. It looks great. But is it Ferrari?

1:17:47It is a little different. I don't know. But is electric Ferrari? You know, they're doing a different drivetrain. Well, that's a whole other, that's a whole other issue. So why not just go full send and change everything about it? it's so funny because you know American consumers have broadly rejected EVs even though there are some that sell well but every American manufacturer like Ferrari is so late to the game every American manufacturer has already taken like a multi tens of billions of dollars worth of write downs already so they're coming in so I'm expecting the car to be cool I'm expecting it to sell well in LA which naturally means it will sell terribly in the rest of the country I'm expecting it to be Ferrari's just like known Watch F1, right?

1:18:33And decide, do you want a daily A Ferrari? I've tried doing that It's not good I expect, but the Price point's interesting The Johnny thing, I'm expecting it Do we know the price point yet? No, I think you can assume it's not going to price Like the Purisangwe up in the half a million dollar range Because you're getting a naturally aspirated V12 and this is like not even here's what they gotta do they're changing the drive train they're changing the UI and all the interior they gotta change the exterior it's gotta look like a cyber truck and it's gotta be orange they say we're burning the ships no Ferrari design cues whatsoever, just complete blank slate you already frustrated a lot of people why not just frustrate 100 % of the audience do you know when they're gonna come out with the actual like what the car actually looks like because the render that's been getting shared around is not released by you.

1:19:27I did not see the date on anything. The render doesn't look repressive, so I really hope that's not what it's going to look like. NASCAR. NASCAR broke a Guinness World Record for loudest billboard. What's going on? I guess it's a thing. This is the alpha. You got to be making up records that only you can achieve. Correct. Yeah, they have got a billboard out in Times Square, which it feels like there's so much motorsport stuff happening in Times Square. We had the Cadillac F1 reveal. Aston Martin took out some billboards out there. Well, I said some billboards. They had a whole bunch of Times Square queued up with their reveal.

1:20:09Their launch was happening. And then NASCAR did this. But I thought what was really impressive was the ad they put out. Did you guys see the ad they put out? yeah the guy in the red truck the guy in the red truck clint eastwood's kid it's scott eastwood yeah so uh it um it really impressive so a lot of they had a moment at kind of a bud light moment too right they kind of switched up started alienating their typical base wait so they switched up on their day ones they did switch up on their day ones they were they were accused of switching up on their day ones. But this is a return to tradition.

1:20:47Let's play the campaign. I just dropped it for the team. We can watch it together. Yeah, we can watch it together. A little watch party. A little watch party. I love it. It's pretty fantastic if you're into America. Okay. One second. So we can be loud. Here we go. So we can be free. We don't come from royalty. We come from bootleggers and bar builders. Shots fired.

1:21:16more about grit fights for inches and contact accounts

1:21:25wait is clint eastwood's son is he uh an actor or a very famous actor okay yeah yeah yeah there's also i didn't know if he was a nascar driver no no no there's a youtuber cletus i believe he's in it too which a lot of people spotted this is great driving wow the sense of speed here is amazing this is like free bird kicks in yeah this is a level above even like uh watching a movie a michael bay movie or something speaking of michael true like true like brand collab here this is a nascar ad but it feels like this is an ad for seven other things Oh, I mean, it's motorsport. You should have a bunch of ads.

1:22:12You should have a bunch of logos. Yeah, stack them up. Stack them up. Stack them. Ben Sand. This is good editing. This editing feels like a vibe reel. It's very like, yeah, it's really like the cuts are so fast. It's like somebody said, give us the most America-feeling trailer you can possibly think of. That's super cool. Ben Sand in the YouTube chat, he's commenting on Apple. He says, car takes the awkwardness of the Apple watch and scales it up to a car. Whoever said that is accurate. Anyway, so NASCAR switched up on their day ones. They're like, we're done. We're back. But they're back. They said, we never forgot the day ones.

1:22:54They take some shots at F1. Took an immediate shot at F1, right? The royalty thing, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. We're not here for royalty. where we're founded by bootleggers and barn builders. And so that's what sets the whole thing off. How many NASCAR, what percentage of NASCAR drivers do you think are, if they're taking shots at the European royalty F1 pipeline, is NASCAR a motorsport where you can be truly self-made, actually just work your way up? Or is it just like Americans' version of royalty? Like your father had an oil and gas company, and so you're a NASCAR driver kind of thing. I mean, somebody put up this graphic and it was like, here's all the top players in NASCAR.

1:23:39Bill France, Michael Jordan, Roger Penske. And it's like they're all billionaires. I mean, listen, everyone's got their version of royalty. But I think it is a little bit easier to come up in somewhat of a NASCAR, maybe not at the cup level, but even like the Xfinity Series. There's the Arca Series, which is kind of like their third division. You can come up in those pretty well. The bottom line on motorsport is you still need money to race in it. You need significantly less. I don't have the exact figures, but you need significantly less to go through a NASCAR feeder or NASCAR ladder than you do F1.

1:24:12F1 formula racing, it's insane. The numbers are mind-boggling. I had someone on the podcast recently who was telling us you need$400 ,000 a year just to even be in the Formula Series or in the Formula 2, I think it is. And then, or Formula 3, Formula 2, you already need like almost a million per year. So if you're not getting out of that soon enough and getting into like a paid F1C, you're like, how long can you sustain that without being loaded? Yeah, I think people were running the numbers like Lando's dad spent like$40 million or getting him to the point where it was like net. Yeah, we talked to some like IndyCar guys who were, it's basically like they had a family friend who ran an investment company or a law firm and they put up like 20k a year and they're like just put our logo all over it we'll go and like take clients to the local race and it's like not a huge investment for some company that's doing well and they see it to support like a local hometown hero and so they can actually get racing and then move up uh what are you like nascar is doing this in response they want to are they is this they're threatened by f1 and the popularity f1 has three races in the u.s now do They feel like, hey, there's a number of people that are going to be just saying, well, I'll just go to F1.

1:25:30It's got the glitz and the glamour, and maybe they're worried about people not kind of entering the NASCAR world, or is this just, hey, we should do a new campaign? So NASCAR, they got a new agency late last year, creative agency, and I believe it's 72 and Sony, but don't quote me on that. And they wanted to just attack this whole thing, right? You've got F1 growing, IndyCar, the massive deal with Fox. Fox took an investment stake in IndyCar and all the broadcast rights. So there's a massive thing going on there. IMSA, Sports Car Racing, their YouTube channel is about to surpass NASCAR in terms of growth.

1:26:14And they're growing tremendously off the charts. Yeah, I couldn't believe that stat. I was like, the only way this makes sense is if NASCAR has just not been paying attention to social media or something. IMSA obviously has a massive international audience. NASCAR, you know. Very big. And yeah, even as somewhat still, I consider myself a casual viewer of all these things. But IMSA is a lot more exciting to me. You have the battles. You're not just around an oval, right? It's very exciting. Multiclass racing. Yeah. Yeah. They also, they made, so what IMSA did really well was they worked out a deal with NBC to allow international feed to be completely free on YouTube.

1:26:59So internationally, you can watch, if you're outside the US, you can watch it from flag to flag for free on YouTube. Very cool. You know, is that something others are doing? Now, I think NASCAR is tripling down on we're America first. We're going to go all in on America. We saw they've got the Andrel race coming up. in San Diego. Andro is sponsoring car. Like there's, there's a lot of that come back to, Hey, we are an America first series. We're going to go all in on America first. So they're going to double, double, triple, quadruple down on what works for them. Other series or have to do the same thing.

1:27:36And I think that's what they're seeing more than anything is, you know, F1 is doing what they're doing. IndyCar is doing what they're doing. IMSA, which is owned by NASCAR is doing what they're doing. Like we have to go back and find an identity. We can't just try to be all things to all people. It's just not, it's just not going to work. It's not that kind of, uh, racing. And there's, there's so many other flavors of racing now that are available to everybody. They're so attainable to watch. It's like NASCAR, you need to carve out something. And that's what I think is happening. What is actually happening.

1:28:03Yeah. Uh, switching gears, uh, Aston had their event yesterday. I was excited to see cognition working with Aston. They got all their enterprise clients. Got to get them, got to get them on the paddock, uh, public, of course, sticking with, with Aston for the, for, for the season as well. What's going on with Cadillac? How, how, how, like, how would you, how would you rate their, their whole launch, their entire strategy running a Superbowl ad for a new formula one team? Very bold. Was that to get, was that a, to acquire? So I'll say I've got a double take. First of all, to go back to Aston eight sleep, did you guys see the eight sleep announcement?

1:28:44Whoa. That's right. So that's a big one because not only are they a partner, they are a partner with Aston. Aston invested in Eight Sleep. So it's a little bit of a two-way situation. So that was big news today. For Cadillac, I don't know. Lawrence Stroll is an investor, so he's like down to do some equity deals. Because he's like, I got the cash. That's a thing. That was a thing. As for Cadillac, they were attempting to reach a new audience that they don't have, right? The U.S. audience, they don't have anybody yet. And I think the Super Bowl ad was aimed at doing that. I don't know the ins and outs of what they were trying to accomplish because it felt like a very fast spot.

1:29:27And you guys were at the stadium, so I don't know if you saw it. But it showed up, and it felt like it was over really quickly. The longer full spot, the one minute that you see on social later. Oh, so we watched the one minute version. We watched the one minute on the stream the next day. Correct. But during the moment, I had a lot of people text me and say, hey, what was that Cadillac thing? Because they were pulled in by the JFK speech, which I thought was brilliant. And the moonshot, that was great. But I think if you're watching the game and you don't know it's coming, which a lot of people don't, they had no idea what was going on.

1:29:58And a lot of people that did not know, I was like, the people I was watching it with, I was like, hey, check that out. And they were like, what happened? And I said, oh, well, they're a new F1 team. And they were like, oh, that's what that was. So a lot of people had no idea. So I'm curious to see if it worked. They had the Times Square activation, which I thought was the better move in terms of actually getting people interested because you had this box sitting there thawing out in Times Square for a couple days. So people had to figure out, inquire what is going on. Oh, it was frozen? I think that was the idea.

1:30:29It looked like it was frozen. Then it was thawing right at that last minute. So I like what they're doing. They ended up with not a lot of sponsors on the car. They used a lot of TWG's assets. So TWG AI is like their big primary partner, but TWG owns the team. So they're using the base of that. Yeah, I was just expecting for Cadillac to partner with like an Exxon or a Chevron or some, you know, you have your Ramco out there. And there's just a big deep pockets. A lot of the big tech. We love big oil, but we also like asset management. We do. And TWG is. Yeah, there's a lot. Do you have any idea what percentage did Cadillac retain significant ownership in the team, or does TWG effectively own the entire thing?

1:31:13It's TWG Motorsports that runs the whole thing. So they're basically operating a factory car or GM under the Cadillac badge with a Ferrari engine. If that makes any sense to anybody watching. I love it. That's F1. Get ready to study. Hit the books. And that's also probably why they don't have an oil partner yet because they're using Ferrari. so they have to use shell, I'm guessing. Oh, sure, sure. The power unit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's tricky. You did get fact-checked on the 72 and Sunny thing. You were right. Okay, good. You were right. Good job. I want to get the Rolex 24 update. How was it?

1:31:48You were there. Give us a review. Dude, I mean, the cars are incredible. That's, to me, what cars should sound like. The Valkyrie was there, the naturally aspirated V12. And in IMSA, they don't muffle the engines. where they have to in WEC in the World Endurance Championship. So it is full bore. During the night, you hear that thing around the track. Wow. I got to sit in the passenger seat of our friend's Valkyrie, and every single corner was, oh, I'm going to die. I'm going to the wall. Okay, we made it around. Next corner, oh, I'm going to die. Oh, we made it around somehow. Coming around, oh, we're going to die.

1:32:27The access people have, though, at IMSA is really, really crazy. I mean, there's fans of any, like with any ticket can walk through the garages and there's like a whole pit walk. And so people that just think of F1 as the only thing out there, like have no idea. There's well-priced series to get you into, you know, into motorsports, but there's nothing like Daytona. There's nothing like an endurance race. I had never been to the 24 hours of Daytona. That was my first time there. Just such a cool event. Whoa, such a cool event. I mean, people are up the whole time. There's festivities going on walking through like where all the RVs are.

1:33:03I mean people are absolute party It's it's a good time So if you ever want to go for a good time, they don't know the great What was your experience like were you up for? 12 of the hours 18 of the hours are you sleep deprived or is it more like I'm going to the day and then I'll sleep Normally, and then I'll come back for the day section. Yeah, do you really need to catch the fog? straight fog No, fortunately, we didn't have anything to do during that. We weren't tied to anything. We had gone up to the spotter stand and the starter stand. We had done all the things. We were hanging out with the president of IMSA.

1:33:38We were in the suite. So they were taking us around. But then around midnight, it was like, all right, things are dying out. The fog was coming down. So we actually went back and came back at about 8 o 'clock in the morning. So there was like an eight-hour period. So what, 16 hours I was up for the actual race. That's too bad. What kind of stories, narratives are you tracking ahead of the Formula One season? I know there's been some drama with kind of some of the advancements Mercedes made and other teams pushing back. Can you share more on that front? I'm tracking to see if anything pans out with the Mercedes situation.

1:34:14There was this rumor that I don't believe is going to happen, but a rumor that the Mercedes cars may not start in Australia, which is not going to happen. It was just interesting that that was being floated around. and I know Red Bull was trying to garner support. And then Dan Tauris today, the CEO of the Cadillac team, he actually said, like, yeah, we're all competitors. We're banding up against Mercedes because they're competition. So obviously, if you take out the Mercedes engines, which to me tells me they are just very worried about that engine. It must be that good. They're pushing the FIA to change how they're measuring compression ratio, which is like, okay, you know, they're really trying to nerf this thing.

1:34:56And it's either an absolute rocket or things are going to blow up. Like there's no, there's no in between to me with the Mercedes at this point. Um, but you know, half the grid runs the Mercedes, the Mercedes team runs it, McLaren runs it, Williams runs it, uh, Alpine runs it. So like you've got, you, you've, you've got a lot of cars that are going to have a rocket ship in it. Um, yeah, Yeah, of course, if you're Ferrari and you're Red Bull and anybody else, Honda, you're going to be nervous. I'm also curious to see how this Adrian Newey Aston Martin ends up with the Honda power unit. Like, it's a match made in heaven, Honda and Newey.

1:35:30You've got Alonzo who's been wanting to drive there, a lot of experience. So you know that he's going to put in a good drive if that car is halfway decent. I think that car is the one to watch out for, the Aston. I'm really excited to see the Aston. That's very cool. Do you think Lewis Hamilton is locked in during the offseason? We saw him at the Super Bowl. Yeah, locked into Kim K.

1:35:55He's keeping up with the Kardashians now. Do you blame him, though? Do you blame him? No, he's having fun. He's living his best life. Dude, you're 40-something years old. You're loaded. I mean, he's already been on reality TV with Drive to Survive. What's one more show? Yeah, we're both reality TV stars. Essentially. essentially probably more people know him from drive to survive than actual f1 i don't blame him and if that car is a dog i could see him checking out sooner rather than later oh no i'll just be real with you well we appreciate maybe maybe the conspiracy is like f1 is actually doing an you know some type of influencer deal with the kardashians a taylor swift deal it's kind of an arranged marriage like they saw the success of the travis kelsey taylor swift thing and they're like, we need our own T-Swift.

1:36:41Would it shock you? Would that actually shock you if that was the case? That'd be great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Guys, thanks for having me. Always good to catch up. Great to get the update. We'll have you back on soon. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks a lot. Have a good one. Cheers. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, we have Ethan Thornton from Mock Industries. Long overdue. Welcome to the show. Good to see you.

1:37:10Good to see you. Grab a seat there. Good to see you. Good to see you. First time on the show. Long overdue. Please introduce yourself. Introduce the company for a moment. Awesome. Yeah, I'm Ethan Thornton. Started Mock Industries. Happy to tell background on the company. Yeah, please. I mean, we met, what, two years ago or something? And you were maybe just starting the company then. Huge progress. But yeah, give us the background. Yeah, for sure. So I actually started the company in high school. I ran like a woodworking, metalworking company in high school. was pretty obsessed with this turnover we're seeing towards unmanned systems um and the importance that'll have on the world over the next few decades went to mit um initially thought this would take a lot longer to play out than it would so i went to mit but around that time when ukraine starts it becomes clear that this transition is happening very very quickly drop out start mock i guess two and a half three years ago now where were you studying at mit aerospace engineering i I was there.

1:38:01I was playing football there. I dropped out during football preseason. That's crazy. So I can't say that I was there very long. Yeah. But I think the mission of making sure the West wins on the mid-systems is just so urgent. Was the Teal Fellowship part of the decision to leave, or had you already left? I'd already left. Okay. Yeah, so that was the semester after I left. What was the answer to your question? The main, what's your contrarian take? what's something you believe that very that very few people agree with you on that's the classic teal fellow question it's a great question oh yeah i don't i don't remember what i answered wow um i can say the thing the thing i was betting my life on at that point and if i had to guess what my answer was i think it was the importance of drones yeah like i singularly think that the u.s is not going to be able to out manufacture on out manufacture china on unmanned systems and that the the way to win is through asymmetry yeah and at the time that was obviously a contrarian take less so now um the world has started to move in that direction but i still think very few people yeah that sort of predated americans have now seen how many different chinese drone shows in the sky where they're like look at the pretty lights and the colors and then some people are like whoa that's imagine that coming at you talk to me about asymmetry is that sounds like not just going drone for drone that seems like different capability unpack asymmetry?

1:39:22Why is that important? Yeah, it's a great question. I'd say that was probably the big differentiator in the way we thought about the space. If the U.S. is manufacturing a quadcopter and China's manufacturing the same quadcopter, if we're making a cruise missile and they're making the same cruise missile, they will out-manufacture us, right? And so the optimization becomes instead, how do you take this future style of warfighting and pull it left as far as possible? And we talk a lot about basically creating an offset to China's dominance in manufacturing, which doesn't mean we don't focus on manufacturing.

1:39:50First and foremost, we are a manufacturing company, but that's not what it's going to take to win. What America has to do very, very well is actually rely on unmanned systems to win, which, like you mentioned, America's actually been relatively slow to adopt unmanned systems. A lot of the work we're doing is pushing to change that as much as possible and getting the institution to think about unmanned systems not as something that's scary, not as something that's looking to disrupt the way wars are currently fought, but instead is basically our biggest advantage if we look to maintain. What's the history of these asymmetrical offsets?

1:40:25I'm trying to think of like the classic example. Can one F-35 take out five MiGs? And so you don't need to manufacture as many because you have a more advanced plane. So you throw 50 planes at me. If I have even 10 of my better planes, I'm good. Isn't it a nuke? It's like, I don't care if you have 10 ,000 bombs. I have one that's a lot bigger. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, a lot of the things that become the way wars are fought start as asymmetric. Sure. I mean, you go as far back, it's like the American Revolution. Yeah. Right? You've got walls and troops. Yeah, something's not going to remain asymmetric forever.

1:40:57Yeah. But over the next decade, two decades, pushing on this new style of war fighting as much as possible to achieve that asymmetry, which is something historically America has done very well. Yeah. Again, all the way back to the American Revolution. Yeah. Adopting tactics to counter a force that at the time was obviously superior. Yeah. Yeah. So get me up to speed on how you're thinking about the current drone landscape, even putting aside the asymmetrical thing. I mean, I've heard like you just buy a DJI drone, you fly to Ukraine and you put a grenade on it and you fly it into somebody. There's these new drones that have the fiber optic wires.

1:41:33So, you know, you don't, no electrical interference. You don't need a signal. They can't jam it. There's a whole bunch of different things. There's the Shahids and like all these different tail sitters. There's 25 different types of drones. what's actually going on, what's actually making a difference, and then what are you interested in? Absolutely. So yeah, it's obviously a super wide space. What we focus most is on the pacing threat, which we see in China, and basically fighting a war in Indo-PACOM. And generally speaking, if you can do something in Indo-PACOM, you can do it well in Ukraine, is the way I like to think about it.

1:42:03We don't play in the Group 1, Group 2 space. So the quads and similar smaller drones. Describe Group 1 and then Group 2. Yeah, the formal definitions are pretty murky. Like I think technically Vyper's a Group 5 based on speed, group three based on weight it it's basically it's an old like faa style of assessing how much damage something does if it falls out of the sky okay but generally thinking you can speak speak about a group one is like quadcopter all the way up to a group five being 30 foot long kind of fighter jet yeah um for us where we play the predator drone would be exact five that's the biggest we have but it's like human manned in las vegas remotely or something yeah for landing and other things.

1:42:40And so where we play is generally group three, group four space. Okay. So pretty big. Pretty big. And our primary focus is again on asymmetry as relates to endopacom. So the pacing threat for America right now is China specifically as relates to Taiwanese semiconductor access. Right. A world where we lose access to advanced semiconductors because China takes Taiwan is pretty crippling for the West. Talk to me about the hypersonic missile gap. I had a friend who was very worried about that, saying that there's a lot of other things that are going well. I mean, we're advancing AI models. There's a lot of stuff that's happening on trade, but we're just not making hypersonic missiles.

1:43:21Is that something you've looked at or you have any sort of insight into the importance of? Yeah, I mean, we spend a lot of time thinking about it. Ultimately, we play in the subsonic regime. Yeah, you focus on this. So that's where we focus. Castilian and a lot of the other folks are pushing hard on hypersonics. My personal belief, and this is, again, sort of a contrarian take, I think future warfighting has to be so decentralized that most of the assets used to fight wars are actually not large enough to consider taking out with a hypersonic missile. So a big focus for our product line is having things that two operators can deploy.

1:43:53So you look at Viper, you look at Stratus. These are things you and I could actually put up in the field ourselves such that by the time you launch it, there's actually nothing to shoot back against. I think that is very much the direction war fighting is heading. That's what we see in Ukraine. Less exquisite systems, less capital assets, like you sunk my battleship becomes less important because there aren't as many battleships on them. And so I think hypersonics are excellent at taking out existing large centralized assets. But as soon as both sides have them, there's just no more large assets on the battlefield.

1:44:28Exactly. Because everyone knows, well, I'm not even going to try. Yep. So that's a contrarian take. And I'm not saying we're going to get there in five years. But as you as you look as far into the future as you can, and a lot of what we see in Ukraine right now is this giant push towards decentralization. How do you get everything off a runway? How do you get everything off of centralized command and control infrastructure? Like, how do you push to decentralization? Because the future force structure looks a lot more like a it's kind of a buzzwordy term, but like almost like a kill web of hundreds of different systems, each doing some element of sensing communications and shooting such that your force is kind of fighting from everywhere and nowhere.

1:45:04Yeah. What is your like P doom on Taiwan or timeline? I mean, there was that book 2035, I think that was sort of talking about that timeline. At the same time, you have China's thinking in a hundred year plan. Xi Jinping thinks he's going to live to 150. Maybe he's not in any hurry. Last year was pretty quiet. I mean, it was a lot of trade negotiations, but we didn't see a blockade. We didn't see really many major military movements. And so from my perspective, it feels like maybe I just wishful thinking, but it feels like things are sort of business as usual over there. Yeah, it's a good question.

1:45:40Look, it's really hard to know. I mean, the CCP obviously outlined their plan for military readiness by 2027. And y 'all can find public testament to and others talking about sort of the state of our war games right now in that theater being quite dire so look i i can't say um when or if something happens but we need to be prepared we need to be prepared i think we obviously started this year with a lot of chinese aggression around taiwan okay and in january they ran a pretty big set of set of drills and then yeah look i mean it's just it's so catastrophic if taiwan falls yeah for for the west like what have you learned from history about in indo-pacific theater it's been a while for the united states but there's you know infinite amount of kind of content on on uh what techniques worked what are the unique challenges it's obviously very different fighting over you know huge bodies of water and that kind of thing versus ukraine yeah there's a lot of predictions about like uh if they're if they do try and cross the strait they'll do it at certain months because the the tide's low or the waves are not as choppy What are you thinking about history?

1:46:51I think it's super hard to extrapolate out the course of this conflict from history. We have not fought a war in the Pacific at scale since the era of precision munitions. I think certain things will continue to be true. It will overwhelmingly be a logistics battle. And I think the biggest problem we face right now, speaking on hypersonics, is how do you get your ships close enough to actually get into the fight is the big problem right now. How do you secure runway access? How do you get your ships close enough? And so it becomes a massive logistics battle, and that's why you'll see us focusing on these decentralized assets that are significantly easier to get into theater or that you can launch from far enough away to actually reach the fight.

1:47:32So I think it comes down to logistics. I think getting secure comms that far forward and then more importantly getting proliferated ISR that far forward is going to be an incredibly difficult challenge. The U.S. conducted an operation last year called Rough Rider. and CENTCOM and it we lost something crazy like 30 MQs like 30 Preds and Reapers and that was not against as nearly as sophisticated of an adversary and certainly not over that distance and so I think one of the key gaps is how do you get enough sensors forward how do you secure communications I think rightfully so in in many cases the U.S.

1:48:10pushes to have man in the loop for autonomous systems but what that means you have to have really secure comms in order to do that and we're facing adversaries that may not look to do that themselves and so that becomes a pretty pretty strategic vulnerability and then right now i mean you can count on any conflict being a conflict of numbers and in war games we run out of ammo in literally a couple days right and so that's why you'll see across industry just this massive push to manufacture as many assets as possible while also making sure that those assets are as is effective effective and asymmetric as possible because we're just not going to catch up.

1:48:46I mean, China makes a lot of claims. This claim is probably not totally accurate, but they have claims they have factories making 1 ,000 cruise missiles a day. And you can go online and actually, like, watch videos of these factories. Now, that might be 100 a day. That might be 50 a day. Regardless, you're talking about orders of magnitude more production than the U.S. has right now, which serves as a wake-up call. That's why I dropped out at MIT. It's why I think a lot of us in this space are pushing this hard. And then a world where you lose access to advanced semiconductors is existential. I mean, our entire backbone as a country is built on this sector.

1:49:21As you look at future of conflict or future of unmanned systems, the reason you build unmanned systems and not an F-35 is advances in computation. And so if you find yourself in this arms race where the most important thing is unmanned systems, primarily bottlenecked by intelligence, and you lose access to the semiconductors you need to power these things, it's pretty terrifying. Where are you guys partnering? Are there other primes that you're working with at all? Anything on the, obviously, there's battlefield systems that you need to integrate with. What are you doing? What are you manufacturing in-house?

1:49:57What is the web of companies and groups that you're actually connected into? That's an awesome question. Before I start, I need to emphasize the importance of working well together as a group of companies in the space. primes, neoprimes, startups, like when you're facing this level of difficulty at a geopolitical level, you have to, you have to view it as, as a non-zero-sum game and you have to be willing to. Yeah. Have you learned any, any stories from history on that front? Like back, like I imagine in, if you're actually fighting in a hot war, I imagine people, the whole industry and the whole country is banded together and saying like, we're not competing here.

1:50:35We're, we're fighting for our values as a country and our way of life and all these things. So I imagine it very easily in a hot war clicks into that mode, but in sort of relative peacetime or preparation, they're still like, oh, this neoprime just launched this thing. They're trying to kill this other neoprime. And it's like, all right, we're kind of focused on, yes, fighting for market share is important, but at the same time, the entire purpose of the defense industry is to defend the country and of which we are all citizens of. Absolutely. Look, I mean, unfortunately, in a modern day, I think a hot war would end relatively quickly.

1:51:13Like you're talking about a very decisive outcome. When you think about cyber effects and how quickly infrastructure in both countries would shut down, when you think about the ability to do long-range precision fires, how quickly capital assets would be taken out. And so Ukraine is like not a good example because it's effectively turned into trench warfare. but it's a battle for like territory whereas in a conflict with China it's more over a specific, you know, region being... Exactly. And the style of warfare that the Soviets wage versus that the West wages and that China's looking to basically base their fighting style on the West on are quite different.

1:51:53Like they always happen. Like the Russian and because of that largely the Ukrainian way of war fighting is this sort of just mass effects war of attrition. What you see the U.S. doing and what China specifically architected their force structure to also execute is these pulse strikes that are very, very, very quickly damaging. And so my fear is in World War II, one, we had years of ramp up where industry could start to rearm, lend lease, all these different things that got us into the fight before Pearl Harbor started. Even after that, however, you still had years where GM and Ford could switch over to defense production and where you could get this sort of mass rallying of cultural effects towards fighting this war.

1:52:34Yeah. That is not happening today to the extent it should. And I think we have way too much confidence about this war not just happening in weeks. Like very, very likely outcome is you're not ready to fight a war until you cede territory, right? And so the way I see it, that effect you're describing has to start like today. We need to start acting like we're purely on the same team. And then for Mock's approach specifically, a few things we do. One, our approach is quite different to a lot of the other neoprimes. So you'll see a lot of folks starting with battlefield management layer and kind of working down, which is a great way of doing things.

1:53:08You need to have efficient orchestration. Everybody wants to be the platform. Yeah. Yes. From a business perspective. Yeah. From a business. If you're pitching investors, you don't want to say, oh, we're a point solution. We just offer this, even though that might be the best way to actually get into the game and become a business. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm happy to dig in there. I think the business tactics there are actually potentially more complex, and I'd argue that point, but I actually don't think it's super important. I think the big thing is we need different people doing different approaches.

1:53:44The way I think about it, the defense industrial base has rotted out so bad. I mean, you think about the incentive structures for the last three decades. If you're Lockheed and I'm your supplier and you're out in cost plus, you're incentivized to have me charge you more for a component. And then if you're my tier two supplier, I'm incentivized to have you charge me more. And so for the last three decades, 10 levels down the stack across the industry, you've just seen it rot out. And so what that means is typically like tech that you'll get for like 50 bucks in consumer electronics, you'll literally be charged tens of thousands for.

1:54:16Like AirPods cost Apple like six to 10 bucks to make roughly. If that's a defense product, if you're dealing with like three different radios, all these different IMUs, you're literally talking tens of thousands. Yeah, 20 grand. Something about like a, it was like a faucet or sink on a battleship that costs like$200 ,000. That's crazy. That's crazy. And so, and you look at the incentives and it's very obvious how we got here. And so the work I'm looking to do as a company is, I think that the rate limiting factor on how much you can produce, and frankly, where most of the money from the budget goes is into hardware.

1:54:48And the performance of that hardware is gated on the performance and cost of its subsystems. And so we're taking a very different approach of actually working bottom up in the stack. Most of our revenue, for the record, still comes from selling platforms. We've taken a very deeply vertically integrated approach. And then one of the ways we look to partners is actually by selling those components to other companies. Oh, interesting. And looking to be a good partner by basically establishing this industrial base and hopefully enabling people to sell products cheaper and more performant than they could otherwise.

1:55:16So that's sort of our approach. And then even within that, we try to be selective about the things we buy off. Consumer electronics and automotive still run pretty efficiently. And so if you can architect your designs to use hardware from those two industries as much as possible and to avoid hardware from the defense industry. This is COTS versus GOTS, right? Commercial off the shelf versus government off the shelf. But in any case, there needs, I mean, this industrial base needs to be rebuilt. And that does start with your jet engines. That does start with your radar. That does start with your cameras.

1:55:47How are you thinking about moving quickly, solving problems and workplace safety? There was that incident that happened that was reported. And I'm just wondering about, like, that tradeoff has got to be difficult when you have a bunch of people that want to work on a really important product. But these are big machines. There's risk factors. Like, what does security and workplace safety look like? That's a great question. So I think there are misconceptions about that accident. I've talked a good bit publicly about it. But that was actually before we were mocked. Oh, OK. So that was before we had any employees.

1:56:20Sure. Super, super early. Got it. And again, I've talked a good bit publicly. I'd say today, I don't know, there's this move fast and break things actually doesn't work very well. Like you imagine testing a Viper. Like you're basically putting a Ferrari on like a slingshot and launching it into the air. You don't want to be doing that every day, like haphazardly, randomly. So early on, what we did, like literally when we raised our A, was invest very deeply in SIDL, invest very deeply in HIDL, invest very, very deeply in... What are those? Sorry, sorry. Like hardware in the loop testing. okay a simulation environment sure how do you go and run thousands of cases of what a vehicle will look like in flight and then actually run that on representative hardware and then run that on the vehicle and then build into a test campaign um and we have five products now and the the first flight of all five of those um reached wings level steady fight flight on the first try got it and so i think there's this misconception that the way you move fast just get a test range and just start putting slapping stuff together which is not yeah it's actually not the way it works and i think one of the reasons we've actually been quite successful at developing these things so insanely quickly.

1:57:26I mean, I just kind of soft released a product that we went from nothing to flying in 71 days on a pretty large aircraft. And the way you do that is by building excellent, excellent test infrastructure, excellent engineering process. How do you actually build the simulations? Can you use Microsoft Flight Simulator to create like a physics engine? That's a good question. Or are you building everything from the ground up? Unreal? We actually do use Unreal a little bit on computer vision. So for GPS and non-navigation, you're using your cameras to navigate. You obviously need to be able to spoof some of that imagery.

1:58:03There are a bunch of different approaches. So we have an aero tool we built in-house to basically run across hundreds of different aerodynamic designs and select your platform as you design out your outer mold line. different tool chain basically allows you to do rf simulation a lot of this stuff is industry standard for the record like i'm not saying we we invented much of this stuff i do think we're we're pretty good at it but rf simulation to understand antenna patterns to understand all that different stuff we we actually have four different radars and design right now as a company so we have a really good rf team um you work from there into basically your six degree of freedom physics simulator um we found an open source it's called jsp sim if anyone wants to go and use it that we forked a couple years back and have been doing a lot of work to basically make more robust.

1:58:50That's really cool. Like, you can actually simulate, like, specific actuators breaking. You can simulate wind gusts across, like, thousands of cases. And then from there, you then plug that into your avionics and actually spoof your avionics to think they're flying. And so we make our own avionics, and you obviously can't run hundreds of thousands of cases. Like, the JISP sim will be running on basically a cloud instance so that you can crank out a ton of compute, and then you confirm that your actual avionics hardware is performing the way it should. Very cool. What advice would you give to the younger version of yourself that's dropping out of MIT and going to attract hundreds of millions of dollars of capital?

1:59:28It's a good question. I think the importance of people. All you have at the end of the day is your team. And as an individual, the amount of work you can get done is tiny compared to what can happen if you get a really, really good group of earnest, mission-aligned people together to go work incredibly hard. And did you learn that the hard way by hiring somebody that was maybe like leading expert for a specific technology but weren't perfectly mission-aligned or came from kind of an old way of doing things? And then when the going gets tough on kind of an individual product level or something like that, and, you know, it starts to unwind?

2:00:09Yeah. I wouldn't say we necessarily learned it the hard way. I just think it's very spoken about. And I don't know. I'd assume that saying that was more buzzwordy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I actually, like, I really, I don't think we learned it the hard way. No, but that's a classic across all startups. I don't even have context. I'm just saying all startups will hire somebody who, like, is the expert in one specific thing. and then you put them into a new context and it just doesn't work. I've done it before. I think every founder has. I actually don't think we've necessarily done that. I think I actually was so afraid of that.

2:00:45I almost spun the other way. And we had like too many really, really intelligent, really young, hungry people. They're still at the company and they're like some of the best people we have. But I actually think I was almost too slow to bring that on. I don't know if that was good or bad, but I was pretty terrified because all the horror stories surrounding stuff like that, of doing that too early. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, it's good to hear the team's in place. What does winning look like for Mok this year? This year. What's the focus? How do you end this year? You've got 11 months left.

2:01:17What is coming out of this year? Yeah. What's going to allow you to take, like, you know, one or two days off around Christmas to feel good about it? Look, it's proving effect on the battlefield. and getting into manufacturing at scale. Like, I think we've done a great job as a company winning contracts and bringing products into a state that we can demonstrate them to customers and that we can make tens or hundreds of a thing. But the really, really hard work starts the day you try to build 100 ,000 of something, the day you actually have something go downrange. And so for us, it's basically taking these designs that are in a good spot, taking the team that's in a really good spot, scaling that team up a ton this year to actually enter rate manufacturing, And then taking our conviction around the impact our products will have on the battlefield and actually going and proving it for the warfighter.

2:02:07That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for everything that you do. Thank you for coming on the show. Of course. Ethan from Mock Industries. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform built for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses. Go check it out. Like ours. And we have the CEO of Crypto.com, the CEO of AI.com. I'm going to tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next level of vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. And we are going to bring in Chris from crypto.com. He's in the restream waiting room, and now he's in the TBP on Ultrodome.

2:02:43Chris, good to meet you. What's happening? Nice to meet you, guys. How are you? Thanks for having me. I love the background. The logo's looking great. Is that real or is that AI? It's totally made up. I was like, it feels pretty quick to have the actual design. Manufacturing, it takes time. Well, take us through the thesis for AI.com. Yeah, wait, before we get into the Super Bowl, let's maybe rewind to maybe probably a year ago. You see a domain on the market. I think they had been trying to sell it for a while, I imagine. And you came in as a buyer, but walk us through that whole journey. Yeah, I bought another domain and the agent who was brokering this told me about AI.com being in a process of being sold, if you will.

2:03:34So I immediately recognized the importance of it and just jumped on it. Got on the phone the same day, got the deal done, we shook hands. There were some ups and downs through the process, but we managed to get this done. you've had some good success buying iconic domains. What did you pay for crypto.com? Have you ever disclosed that? I don't think we ever did, but we paid$12 million. dollars and i would argue that that was a more difficult decision if you will we were a small company back then um 12 million dollars was about a third of our capital and it was bang in the middle of the 2018 bear market so people were discussing whether crypto is going to survive or not yeah the person selling it to you was like probably like this guy is an idiot of course of Of course, you ended up looking.

2:04:34Now it's on the Staples Center. I drive by it all the time. Okay. So, yeah, you see this domain is on the market. Do you have any idea what you wanted to do with it at the time of acquisition? Or did you just think that, hey, this AI thing is probably pretty important. Maybe I should own AI.com. Look, we were building products ever since ChatGPT launched and playing with consumer-facing side, but also internal tools. So constant experimentation. And the vision from day one was, we want to build a consumer product. We believe that you will have 4 billion people having personal assistants that should play the role of kind of a chief of staff for your entire life with great contacts, being proactive, getting things done for you rather than just chatting.

2:05:29So the vision didn't change from day one. And then, yeah, I guess fast forward, how did you process, before we get into the kind of Super Bowl and that whole strategy, how did you process kind of the open claw launch? It sounds like you guys are integrating the, are you building? Some of those patterns. Yeah, at least some of those patterns. Are you kind of forking the project? Talk about that. So as we started building this product about mid 2025, it was never just, it just didn't click. It didn't have this, you couldn't pass the uncanny valley. And I think the pivotal moments where we started seeing these changes, Opus 4.5 release, it started working much, much better.

2:06:20and we obviously saw CloudBot going live and adding some elements of their architecture to it I think it gets it done in terms of how it feels as a product you just need to solve a whole litany of issues to make it consumer friendly like how do you set it up without being technical, the security issues around your data, those are serious serious issues when you want to bring something to the mass market so I think we've we're combining everything that we've built over the last say eight months into something that we can roll out to the end users and we're starting doing this tomorrow. Wow. Tomorrow.

2:06:59Okay. Before we get into the product and kind of more of the vision, let's fast forward again to the Super Bowl specifically. How did that all come together? It felt like it was coming together quickly, but we know we ran a much, much smaller ad. We ran a regional ad. You do have to lock these things in ahead of time, but walk us through the process of kind of preparing and then experiencing the Super Bowl Sunday. So I bought the domain in April. The deal closed and we got the domain successfully. So I'm like, OK, we need to launch this and it deserves a global stage. And in May, we were one of the first companies to actually buy the spot.

2:07:45Oh, no way. At that time, we had just the domain and idea what we want to do with it, but the product didn't exist. And I know that we only have one shot to get this done correctly. And I didn't want to release the product until I felt that it's there for the end user. You know, these things need to be able to develop an emotional connection with the product in order for this to be sticky and retentive.

2:08:23So I only made a decision that we're actually going to pull the trigger on this a couple of weeks ago. And that's why the ad felt like it was quickly put together. It was quickly put together. Wait, so you bought the Super Bowl spot. But you can always fall back to crypto.com if you wanted to. Yeah, what was the idea? Like, hey, if we don't run it for AI.com, we have the crypto.com ad ready. We'll just run that. We have the crypto business. We have a prediction markets business. You know, we could do it. There's always some level of optionality, right? But this is the moment to run an AI ad, as you guys have seen.

2:09:03Yeah, it is. And timing is really important in life, you know, skill, timing, and a combination of these things. That's a good reference. Okay, so you put the ad together in effectively two weeks, and then you run it, and what happens then? Because I think you got the attention from buying the world's most expensive domain ever, and you got the attention of like, hey, there's this new AI product I've never heard of with a crazy domain, running a Super Bowl ad, should pay attention to it. And then you got a whole other kind of amount of attention from people being like, wait, I just got an ad for AI.com and I landed on the website and the website's down.

2:09:41So what kind of happened? You spent the$70 million on the domain, the$8 million on these spot, and then you didn't have enough to host it? What happened? I'm assuming a lot of people got through, but certainly a lot of people got stuck as well. I think we are happy with the outcome we had about 300 ,000 people signing up wow let's go can we get the gong for 300 ,000 sign ups there's been a lot of big numbers that's a big number for one day for one day but on a more serious note how did you how do you even prepare for that that amount of traffic? What was going on in the war room? As you know, we're on a platform that is used to spikes, right?

2:10:39And we've got a great DevOps team and we've got all the stuff that you usually would expect, auto-scaling and whatnot. So there were intermittent problems for some people, but largely it held up. So I think fundamentally it's the name and the fact that there is a certain element of curiosity there and we designed it. It was a very simple call to action. Go and sign up. So I think it worked. Yeah. Talk to me about consumer AI. ChatGPT has broken through. Gemini and Google, they've been leveraging the Google platform and the network to onboard consumers. Nano Banana was a big moment. Sora and the MetaVibes app.

2:11:24Sort of made a splash, but haven't been super sticky. But where do you see the gap in breaking through with consumers in a new way or just doing what consumers already expect, but better, cheaper, faster? Like, where is the consumer AI opportunity now that we're three years into the chat GPT boom? I think fundamentally, you're able to actually get stuff done right now. So that's a big differentiating factor for the user experience. And we don't really know where this experiment is going to take us, given how the domain is resonating with people. We can introduce social network elements to it. I think the fact that every single person on earth is going to have an assistant of this sort, can unlock new type of interactions and make our lives just better through serendipity, advice, staying on top of things and being proactive, really understanding us.

2:12:28So I'm pretty excited about the wandering aspect of it. We try to keep an open mind and not really be set on one thing. We now have 300 ,000 people waiting for us to give them the product. are we going to very quickly iterate on it? I'm a huge believer in moving quickly and listening to actual customers and we will see where the journey takes us. I take a very long-term view. What can we do with this in 10 years? I think it worked in the crypto space and the opportunity here, the size is much, much bigger. Yeah, so much of what happened in crypto was sort of permissionless, bankless, this open source, these networks, Anyone can set up a node.

2:13:15And part of this latest OpenClaw, Claudebot hype cycle is driven by the fact that you get a Mac Mini, it can talk to iMessage. It can talk to WhatsApp. It can talk to Telegram. It can go sort of wherever you go as a person. And that feels unique because maybe OpenAI can't go over to WhatsApp because Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to let him. And so I'm wondering about how you're thinking about the tradeoff between certain things that are only possible with an open source AI system that is sort of acting as an imposter as a human versus you're a company. If you want to integrate with WhatsApp, you might have to give Meta a call.

2:13:56So how do you think about delivering the vision of like a truly universal AI agent that can do things with the realities of the business community? There are a lot of business and UX challenges here. We'll have to resolve them one by one. Our view is we want to stand on the side of the consumer and help them make these technical choices, make sure that their data is safe, make sure that they can do what they want to do without putting themselves at risk, and solving these issues with access to data, with user experience, it cannot feel like a chore. Today, you need to be really technical to get value out of it.

2:14:41So there's plenty of work, and it's difficult, and that's part of the opportunity. Yeah, some unrequested feedback for me, I had kind of heard that AI.com was potentially something, like some type of leveraging some open-claw technology, and then I got hit with the Google login and I was like, I don't have time to read through kind of the full terms of service, privacy policy and really understand. So I would love to see, I mean, maybe there's plans for it, but I'd love to see just like being able to create an account on the platform to play around with it just because I was looking at my Gmail, which my life is on, my work email, which obviously has its own privacy concerns, all that stuff.

2:15:28You said you're rolling out the product tomorrow. what's the first thing that you want people to do with it? I think this is the big part of the product, figuring out how do you onboard people to it and get them to do a couple of things so that they can see value very quickly and connect with it. I think today it's pretty hard to get the feeling for what it can do without really connecting your email and calendar. We will see. I feel that there's going to be a lot of experimentation there and we will look for user feedback and truth in data in numbers of what really works and what doesn't. To a certain degree, you need to gamify it until such point where users are deep enough that it actually gives them the feeling of like, wow, this is special.

2:16:18This is different. Yeah. Yeah, that gamification is so important. Like you see the Studio Ghibli moment where the latest images in ChatGP launches and you don't even have to think. You just have something in your camera roll and you're going to type Studio Ghibli and you're going to get the value prop. And then a couple months later, you're still going to be going there for slide inspiration and stock photography and all the other things that you can do. But there's a killer app on day one that you come in and you get joy out of. Did you ever talk to the original owner of AI.com? I heard he sat on it for 30 years.

2:16:5130 years. Because his initials, his first name starts with A, last name starts with I, so he had bought the domain. Wow. I'm shocked that he held on to it for so long. You would think like IBM Watson in like 2010. Oh, totally. We'll give you a million bucks for it. Yeah, he held on. Look, we spoke on the day when we closed the transaction because he had a, it was a little bit of a bidding war. He had a very serious bidder on the other side and it required connecting in order to get it done. That's good. Your deals guy. And by the way, right after we closed the deal, I got approached from the other side offering 500 million plus, not for 500 million for the domain.

2:17:40I think I could have pushed it to a billion if I wanted to, but I didn't want to. So I think you guys need to understand I am pot committed. I love it. I love it. You are committed. I love that you're just thinking, you're viewing this like, obviously, you're taking it very seriously. But you're also taking the approach of like, it's very early days in, you know, what will be a long journey for the project, but also the industry. And you're just going to, you know, listen to your users and figure it out. But the conviction to turn down what would have been turning 70 million into 500 or a billion in 24 hours is admirable.

2:18:20Will you train a foundation model?

2:18:26I think I'm more focused on getting this to scale and getting the data flywheel going so that we can deliver for our users. Our users don't really care about which model runs in the background as long as the job gets done and their data is safe. But once you get to a certain scale, who knows? Anything's on the table. I like it. Well, I'm sure you'll be back on. That's very exciting. I'm excited to see this roll out. I'm signing up tomorrow. I might be using a dummy Google account, but I will be signing up and testing this out. I'm excited. And then I'll slowly forward myself data from my real account to give you a little bit more to see what it can do.

2:19:08But I'm excited for the launch tomorrow. And congratulations. I mean, a fantastic career, but also this particular project, really, really fun execution and a wonderful story. So thank you for coming to share with us. Do you come? You're basically the mayor of Los Angeles through the Crypto.com arena. Do you come through much? You're a Lakers guy? I've been in D.C. last week, and then I stopped over in Silicon Valley. I have never been to the arena. Never been to the arena. Wow. You got to come sometime. Catch a game. Maybe we should catch a game. Yeah. They also do monster truck rallies there.

2:19:47Underrated Crypto.com arena experience, especially if you have kids. This is a big monster truck guy. I'm a big monster truck guy. I don't really follow basketball that much, but I will be watching Grave Digger live in the Crypto.com arena. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. That is insane. buys a domain immediately could net a 430 million dollar profit same day decide says no diamond hands diamond hands hasn't been to his arena hasn't been to his arena he's like i've heard of it yeah what a what a wild uh what a wild story amazing here's another wild story alphabet is selling 100-year debt.

2:20:38You can buy a bond from old Google. Sundar's paying you. In 2126, you'll be getting a payment from Sundar. They did a big bond sale. They're gearing up to sell bonds that won't come due for a century. You don't get your money back for a full century. You get Google$1 ,000, they're going to pay you a little dollar every once in a while, and then you get your full$1 ,000 back in 2126. Sorry. I don't know if this is fake news, but somebody was saying that out of the Dow of 30 in like 1930. Like none of those companies are publicly listed anymore. Thinking in centuries, potentially underrated. So it comes as the second big tech company to tap the bond market this year after Oracle issued$25 billion in debt last week.

2:21:24The Google parent plans to sell debt in dollars, British pounds and Swiss francs with varying maturities, according to an investor familiar with the matter. That will include debt with maturities of 3 to 100 years for the sterling debt and of 3 to 25 years for the Swiss francs. The dollar bonds will total up to$20 billion, up from the initial$15 billion, the investor said. And I was listening to Ben Thompson talk about, you know, for a long time, if you were worried about the AI bubble, the easy counter was, hey, it's just all this build that stuff. It's just being funded with cash flow from these super profitable companies that have been around for decades.

2:22:03Like, worst case, they take a bath on some cash flow. It's like what happened with Meta and Reality Labs. Like, Mark Zuckerberg drew down a ton of the free cash flow from Meta's incredible advertising business. Launched some VR headsets. Didn't really get crazy traction. Went back to printing free cash flow, right? It was no problem. Of course, he had to restructure the business a little bit. But the stock rebounded. All investors were like, okay, that was sort of a fever dream. We're moving on. Well, now the hyperscalers as a class are all going all in on AI and spending all of their free cash flow on AI.

2:22:40And that's where people start to get a little bit more worried. I'm sure we will be hearing more about the potential fears of an AI bubble. Also, I mean, people are broadly very excited about this. I believe that this$25 billion debt offering was massively oversubscribed. People are excited about buying these alphabet bonds. It's such a robust business. It's been around for a very long time. And so people are gearing up to ride with Google into singularity. The Dow ekes out third straight record. Let's go. Let's go. Gong for that? Gong for that. Gong for the third straight record.

2:23:24Third straight record close. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform, baby. Blue chip heavy Dow Jones rose roughly 0.1%. It's not much, but it's on its work. You didn't tell me when you said it was a record that it was 0.1 % gone. I hit it pretty hard. I hit it like it was 3%. Industrial is the safe haven in the SaaSpocalypse. Anyway. Nikita Beer is saying that X will be looking into undisclosed paid posts via clipping agencies. Tarun said, these big accounts copy and paste each other's content and get paid by X. What are your thoughts on this, Nikita Beer?

2:24:07Nikita chimes in. He says, these are likely undisclosed paid posts, also known as clipping. When you see this happen, the person or brand in the story is likely paying a clipping agency to take over the timeline for a day. We're looking into it. Yeah, they're looking into it. But to be clear, this doesn't read like they're looking into supporting it. They're looking into how to, I think. That's what Yeet, the original poster, was saying. We'll be looking into undisclosed-paced posts. I think everyone's annoyed by undisclosed-paced posts and wants them to go away. And it appears that Nikita and Elon are also in that camp to say, hey, we want these to go away as well.

2:24:46they make the platform worse in some ways because it's astroturfing. It's not organic. It's not what people actually want to see. It's engineered to go viral. And so it makes the user experience worse, and Nikita cares about that. Buck says, my rep at Mr. Beast Bank said I can have a 9 % APY savings account, but I do have to live in the bank vault for 100 days. The jokes really write themselves with Mr. Beast Bank. It's very exciting. But we'll see where it goes. Tyler was saying there's you could maybe offer no there's no zero percent APY there's no interest yield but you get a you get a you get a chocolate bar once a month free chocolate bar wait isn't that just isn't that just pure upside for the for the customer because they don't they don't pay interest but then they also get a chocolate bar no I'm saying like in it hey it's like we heard you like rewards so we're giving you rewards but we're not going to give you any of the interest yield that we get.

2:25:45Oh, on the bank. Okay, got it. I was in credit card debt world, not in savings account interest world. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. This is crazy. Apparently, there's an ATM in China that melts your gold at 1 ,200 degrees Celsius and transfers money straight into your account. Do you think it actually does this at the ATM, or do you think it just looks like it does this and it's just storing it in the background? Couldn't you weigh it? But at the same time, I imagine people would try to spoof it. So they actually maybe do have to. It pays you immediately. I mean, I've seen those ATMs where you put a bunch of change.

2:26:21Have you ever done one of those? Have you ever saved up a big piggy bank? Oh, I used to do that when I was a kid. Yeah, piggy bank. You put a coin in. Piggy banks really fell off, I think. I mean, the death of the penny does not bode well for the piggy bank maxers of the world. It was a true coming-of-age story to save up$100 in quarters, take it to the exchange. Although, the real Alpha was not using those ATMs because they take a cut of the counting. Yeah, they're preying on piggy banks. They are. They're preying on young pigs. Yeah, you get the little paper coin rolls, and then you fold them up, and you put the quarters in.

2:27:02and when you get to the full stack, that's exactly$10 or something like that. And then the dimes is$2 or something like that. And you very meticulously count them all up. It takes you all day. But at the end, you get 100 % of the value. You're not paying anybody. And then you take it to the bank and they turn them in and they're very happy to hand you cold, hard cash that you can use to buy video games. The Kugan method of being five years old. Yes, yes. I would definitely save quarters. I have definitely bought an N64 game for$50 with coins. Aston Martin Aramco F1 team is welcoming Cognition to the cockpit.

2:27:39The dedicated AI coding company joins us as a global partner. Love to see it. We will be back with Aston Martin this year. I'm sure at some point with our brothers over at Public. And it's great to see Cognition joining. Sort of underrated in the FDE boom that Cognition has been going after larger enterprises for since like day one, right? That this was, you know, Devin did go into general availability, but, you know, the business... It's an enterprise business. Yeah, I mean, the first time I saw Cognition mentioned on stage, I think was at a Microsoft conference and they were talking about replatforming.NET applications.

2:28:21Like that's not exactly like, it is vibe coding, but it's not really vibe coding. It's not a common, you know, consumer vibe coding use case. It's not a personal website. It's much more like you're a huge company and you're running some Fortran and you've got to move over to Python or Rust or something and you send in Devin. Mateo says, today I'm excited to announce our partnership with Aston Martin F1. Growing up as a motorsport fan and racing car driver myself, whoa, some lore. I've always admired the precision and dedication that goes into every race. When I first connected with the Aston Martin team, it was clear they shared our vision at 8Sleep.

2:28:53This isn't just a logo partnership. Aston Martin is now an investor at 8Sleep. Because we want to integrate our technology directly into their performance strategy. That's fun. Yeah. I mean, we were talking about the F1 circuit for the drivers. It's so intense. We're flying all around the world constantly. And, I mean, it takes me a full week to adjust from just going from Europe to America. So getting on 8Sleep. Yeah, I wonder if there's anything they can actually apply 8Sleep's cooling technology to the cockpit to help with driver performance. I'm sure there's various vendors already that are dealing with making sure that drivers are not overheating.

2:29:36Obviously, cars in IMSA and things like that have AC. Here, F1 car, trailer with a California King, 18-inch mattress with an eighth sleep on it. You sleep on that while you're going around the track. That's good. So Jaguar, is this a real Jaguar out on the streets? in London. Did you see this? I saw the post, but I don't know if it's real. I have no idea. No community note. No, yeah. This does look real, but El Slapo. AI slaps, though. It's not AI, dude. You stole the original post from Instagram that was made two days ago. Hard to tell, but it does look like... You can't even trust your own eyeballs in this world anymore.

2:30:25You can't. But wasn't it supposed to be electric when it came out? They're saying this is a V8 now? I don't know. I would need to really pixel peep on this. No, that's a joke. They were saying, like, hey, it looks really cool. Now it just needs a V8 or V12. Oh, now it just needs a V8. Yeah, seriously. Moving on. This does look good, though. I think if they wound up shipping this, it could be successful. I covered this when Chris was on from AI.com, But the story here is this Malaysian bought AI.com as a boy in 1993. Wow. Now he sold it for$70 million. He bought it for$100 million. Wait, what? No, he bought it for$100.

2:31:08$100. He bought it for, as a boy, he bought the domain for$100. Arsene Ismail. Arsene Ismail. Ismail. He paid$100 USD 30 years ago. What a buy. What a buy. Just grind. What a visionary. Visionary. I love it. It's amazing. Let me tell you about Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. The Vine boom really does hit. Dan Primack at Axios. Last story. He says Stripe is in talks. We valued it at over$140 billion. Everyone, Eric, Bonds, and Lee's IPO. That's going to buy a lot of cheeky pints.

2:31:55A cheeky rack, maybe. They can afford the 20-ounce glasses now. They can build out the rest of the authentic Irish pub. That would be a good use of capital. No, congrats to all the folks over at Stripe. What a fantastic progress. Certainly not affected by the Saspocalypse and whatnot. It's a network. They've been building and building for years. And who knows? Maybe we'll see an IPO in the 2100s. I would love to hear them talk about the competition for Stripe. Yeah. Like, where are they actually facing competition? Is it real? Are they the kind of company that has to say, we have a lot of competition.

2:32:36We have, you know, basically. I think it's Adyen, right? Yeah, it's Adyen. And Adyen's public. So people comp it. No, no, no. That's a, yeah, that's a comp. Oh, you mean like. But in the context, in our world, you don't exactly see companies saying like, Like, I just set up my Delaware C-Corp and I built some software. Now I'm going to set up Adyen, right? It doesn't, you never see it. Obviously, they've been a lot more enterprise focused, but I wonder where they actually do face competition at this scale. Well, we'll have to dig into it. Let's start the Lambda Lightning round. We already have the mallet down, but we have Cristobal Valenzuela returning to the show.

2:33:16He's the co-founder and CEO of Runway, and here he is in the T-Boo, again, at UltraDome. Good to see you. How are you doing? Hey, good to see you guys. How are you? Congratulations. Give us the news. What happened today? Yeah, a lot of news. We just raised our Series C and so we're announcing it. How much? 215. That's five. Big, big numbers. I love this product. You know I'm an OG. Jordy? Yeah, you were one of the first. Yeah, back when it was like a rotoscoping tool almost. Not to sell it short. There were other features, but the roto was very, very cool. You invested. Yeah, that's the dollar you had.

2:33:52This is a running joke. John's like an early user of like every, you know, five to a hundred billion dollar company. Now, break down what's been going on the last kind of few months. Talk about traction, all that good stuff. And then I want to talk about where this money's going toward. Of course. Yeah, there's a lot going on. And so obviously close around late last year, I think we just like figure out now we should announce it. There's a lot going on just in the company model release. We released 4.5, which is one of the best video models in the world. And it's been getting used a lot more than what we usually planned for.

2:34:30And so one of the biggest things in research in both inference is capacity. How do you manage the amount of volume of users and inference that we're seeing? And so scaling compute has been critical for us. Remind me, we're one of the perhaps smaller frontier labs out there. and we're having and creating some of the most powerful models. And I think the way we do it is we're very efficient with how we do things and the research itself. And so a lot of our racing and we're putting our funding towards is scaling that machine we build to get more training runs, to get more pre-training of the next frontier models, and then supporting inference.

2:35:13We have millions of customers who just require more runway and like supporting them is like the biggest thing and the biggest obsession for us right now. So yeah, putting funds into that and then talent. We're hiring across the board. So from research, from engineering, from sales, for pretty much everything at Runway, which is great. Yeah, talk about going all in on video generation, training models, the actual video generation from start to finish versus tools. I was watching Corridor Crew. You probably know those guys. And they were like, I still don't have a good Roto tool. And they were like sort of vibe coding and stuff.

2:35:54And it feels like we're in the centaur period of video editing. And I see vibe reels on Instagram all the time that are like, no video model could do exactly what they're doing because they're editing so fast and in such bizarre ways. At the same time, the models just keep getting better. That's sort of where you want to be. How do you think about the tradeoff between building tools and harnesses and tool use within video generation versus just like just all in on the video generation will solve every problem? So I think the reality these days is that you have to do both. The way we call it at Runway is there's the exploration mindset and the exploitation-like mindset.

2:36:34You need to be able to explore and create new models, pre-train them, build and net new products, net new things. I think we've been relatively good at that. with first to market with video, first to market with world models, with real-time gen. The surface area of what you can do there to help either filmmakers like the crew guys or other folks is just so big. At the same time, the gaps you can fill by building the right workflow on top of the right model or chaining models together to get to where you need to go is the way you educate the market to that next frontier of sorts. And so the best companies, I would say, are the ones that can do both.

2:37:11If you only focus on one, you're detached from your user base, from the reality, from use cases. If you focus primarily on workflows, you're going to get leapfrogged. And this is a bigger lesson I think we've seen over the last, we've been working around it for seven, eight years now. The bigger lesson of AI startups is that they eventually get leapfrogged by a better, bigger, much more capable model. And so there's definitely a market opportunity while you're getting leapfrogged. So being good at being ambidextrous, you need to use your left hand and your right hand all the time to win here. Yeah.

2:37:48Talk a little bit about tool use. It feels like Nano Banana definitely has access to some tools just to cut out an image, overlay it. When I asked ChatGPT to multiply two big numbers together, it doesn't just try and inference that. It actually writes some Python, executes it in a REPL. if I go to runway and I say generate me a video of you know beautiful mountains it's going to do that flawlessly if I say now make it black and white is it going to know just to drop out the colors using like a traditional workflow or will it regenerate the footage because that feels like an extra step wasteful and then if I like the way those mountains look the new mountains might be slightly off so how do you think about that that workflow and tool use coming to these models Yeah, that's an interesting point.

2:38:34I think tool use might be, like, I wouldn't say, like, the best way to necessarily think about it. I think the best way to think about it, I would say, what video models are capable of is that in some way they have all these emerging properties that if you, like, tune them well into, like, there's examples and research. and I think others, and we have proven that if you want to train a great rotoscoper, a great horoscoping machine, you can just take a baseline model and show it a couple of examples of rotoscoping. And the model has, and this is where the world model approach comes from, it's like the model has innate understanding of the world.

2:39:09And so with the right examples, then the model can learn that particular task without necessarily having to be pre-trained for it, without necessarily having to see enough examples of it. And so the most unique opportunity around here is that these are eventually simulation machines. That's what video models are. They're simulating the world. And the way they simulate the world is by watching the world. Therefore, you can ask it for almost any task, like remove things or add things or change how things are seen, create a new novel camera angle, for example. And when you think about it that way, then simulation becomes extremely useful in other domains as well, like robotics or self-driving cars or many other opportunities where you're not showing videos to humans, but you're showing videos to robots and robots are learning from those videos.

2:39:58And I think that video as a world simulation engine is perhaps the most impactful thing that we can work in in ID says. Yeah. How did you react to the Super Bowl? There was Svedka, had like the first AI. super bowl ad i have to imagine a lot of the other ads were using ai in some way like in some way or another it's kind of hard to clock they're 15 second ads you kind of want to keep up with the program so not necessarily pausing and looking at each pixel i see six fingers yeah yeah i think a lot of people i think more more ads were using ai than i think people realize but but it's hard to tell and maybe that's the trick like you can tell yeah like uh i like the idea that you're making an and you're putting it out because it's good, not because it was made with AI.

2:40:42But I'm pretty sure there were a lot of facts out there that were made with AI. It was the first time I watched a Super Bowl. I think I'm not a super sports fan, but I'm from Chile, and we had a lot of great Chilean representation there. Pedro Pascal was there, so biggest Chilean representation we've ever had. Yeah, who are the biggest customer segments? Some of these apps have people, they video generation just for themselves. I was talking to Sam Altman about this. When I use Sora, it's just for an in-joke between me and Jordi. It goes into a text chat. Then you talk to other companies and they'll be like, we are used by social media advertising agencies like crazy.

2:41:22Then there's other people that might be in Hollywood and they're like, hey, we just need to do a background shot or stock footage. What's the biggest use case right now? I mean, biggest case is just media all around, like marketing, entertainment, film, pre-production, and production, we've signed with all the studios out there, we've signed with a lot of agencies and brands, marketing teams. I think the default way you make things will be with AI and AI first. It's just such a... And you start to see this already where studios are now hiring AI chiefs or they're organizing their entire companies around AI-related workflows.

2:41:59I think that's the norm of what you'd expect over the next couple of years. Because the trade-offs are just so big. You start to realize you can do things in days instead of months. And so for us, media, entertainment, just content all across from like social to much more professional will continue to be a source of growth for sure. Yeah, it was eye opening yesterday. We were on Fox Business for like a total of three minutes. But while we were in the waiting room to go on, we watched like five minutes of ads. and every single one of the ads, I was like, I feel like Runway could not one shot this necessarily, but it's five different kind of scenes stitched together.

2:42:43And I don't know why you would even in 2026 do this as a IRL production. Yeah. No, you don't have to. And I think that's what most agencies have realized, but also the marketing teams. We've signed with PayPal, with Allstate. We've signed with agencies across the board, with AMC, with Lionsgate. And all of those companies and brands and teams have realized, why would you spend six months hiring an agency to do one work when you can just do it internally, as you were saying? Not entirely one-shotted, but kind of close to it, to be honest. That's amazing. Well, congratulations on all the success.

2:43:17Thank you so much for stopping by. I'm sure you'll be back on this year. You've got a habit of raising money every two months. It's such an exciting company. Yeah, maybe in two months we'll see you again. Yeah, we'll see you soon. Good stuff. Congrats to the team. Good seeing you. Awesome. Thank you, guys. Bye. Let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. And I'm also going to tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, our next guest is in the Restream waiting room.

2:43:47We have Brad from Primary. He's the co-founder in general. Brad, good to see you. How are you doing? Great, guys. How are you doing? We're doing fantastic. Not as great as you. We didn't raise hundreds of millions. We're not announcing hundreds of millions of dollars. Give us the news. What happened? I don't know, guys, but you, what is this? Like about 12 months in and you're becoming the place that people like me have to come and make these announcements. So like you're doing something right. Thank you. We're having fun. But it's great to meet you and super excited to get the update. Give us the news.

2:44:21How much is the fund? So we raised$625 million for our big gong. Awesome. First gong of my life. I appreciate it. First gong in primaries history. That's great. May there be many more. Yes. But 625 for our fifth family of funds. That's both a pure seed fund and what we call our select fund that doubles down on some of the biggest and most successful of our portfolio companies. that's to you know we are our model is is institutional seed at scale we think the world is rapidly as you guys know and you guys have talked to the leaders of these firms that kind of mega platforms are getting bigger and bigger they're sucking a lot of oxygen out of the room they're getting more and more aggressive in the seed market and our point of view my co-founder Ben Son and I have thought from the beginning 10 years ago that seed was a sub-asset class that deserved to be treated as such, that there's a very different value proposition, a very different set of needs and opportunities to be the best partner to founders at the earliest stages.

2:45:36It looks a lot different than supporting founders who have$10 million businesses you're trying to take to 100. And so we've tooled everything we do to be the best partner in an institutionalized, professional with a lot of support resources behind it way from in those most fragile moments where the magic really starts to happen. Give us the update on seed today. In 2020, 2021, there was every platform fund was descending down and being like, hey, we've got plenty of money. Why don't we compete here? The narrative at that time that you were probably talking founders through was like, hey, there's some real signaling risk and you're not going to get necessarily the attention.

2:46:24And there's all these implications. And then I feel like a lot of funds backed off a little bit. But at the same time, they created accelerators and things like that. And where are we at today? What is what does the market look like? Yeah, I don't I haven't seen a ton of backing off yet. Certainly every time we're in an exciting competitive seed deal, which is all of them now, we assume that one of the big, you know, at least one of the big multi-stage platforms is around the hoop as well. And I get why. I mean, I've been in this business for a couple of dozen years now. I've seen three full cycles of the kind of big firms coming down market.

2:47:06And that's what everybody does. It gets competitive at your stage and you try to front run all your competitors and move early and that moves down and down and down market. And so we're seeing it again. I think in each one of those cycles I've seen before, founders ultimately figure it out. You know, when you have leaders of some of these platforms openly saying, we're sort of indexing categories and we want to seed multiple competitors and then we'll back up the truck for the winner. that's a really rational decision for them it's not a great value proposition for for seed founders and um we we want to be that we are that amazing go for it oh uh i'm just uh i'm wondering more about uh what being ready for a seed round looks like in 2026 it feels like some things are so fast with prototypes vibe coding like you can have something that looks so polished at the same time, like building relationship with co-founders takes years, decades, sometimes like what, what, what, what do young founders, new founders actually need to be thinking about before they go out to raise?

2:48:20I think the fact that to your point, the fact that you can vibe code something awfully impressive in a weekend, the fact that you can get customers excited about something literally in a week or two now, um, obviously that plays to the advantage of everybody. But it doesn't substitute for the fact that if you're going to be selling into a market, you know, there's a reason that the guys, you know, the three or four real breakout companies in the legal tech world all have lawyers as they're amongst their founders. There's like critical customer context and product awareness that only comes from living within these industries.

2:48:58And you can't you can't fake that in a weekend. You can't fake how well you've gotten to know your co-founder. We certainly spend as much time as we can really getting to understand the human dynamics of this stuff because the listen I relearn every single year in this business is that there's nothing more important than the kind of character and grit and makeup of those founding teams. That's what ultimately drives the game. What's a category that you'd like to be more invested in? Maybe you've done some, one or two deals, but you want to do more or there's kind of you see a greenfield opportunity and you're looking for the right company to back there?

2:49:40A couple of things we've been we've been very light on activity over the last several years in. Blockchain and crypto, because we haven't felt like the kind of application layer of those markets was ready. That is starting to feel much more interesting to us. My partner, Emily, who leads all of our financial services work, is getting more and more oriented there. My partner, Sam Toole, who leads our healthcare practice, is thinking a lot. And we brought on a venture partner recently to help us explore what's happening at the intersection of AI and biology. and there's a set of life sciences companies that are going to be transforming treatment and therapeutics in the next decade that look a lot more like computer science companies than they do biotech companies in a traditional way and we're getting much more actively involved there as well.

2:50:38Have you been processing the SaaSpocalypse? Is it a suicide mission if you're a startup founder to pitch a seat-based model in 2026? A seat-based model? Seat-based model. I'm selling SaaS and I'm doing enterprise SaaS. Save yourself the trouble. Stick the gun to your head. Just end it. But a usage-based, a value-based. I think we're in a really interesting period of transforming the way software is priced. And I think there's a lot of people with good ideas and best guesses. Anybody who tells you right now they know what the answer is, is wrong. Like we're going to have to see how that plays out over the next several years.

2:51:20And it's that kind of, you know, are the premium we put on creativity, nimbleness, like being a learning machine and the founders we back is higher than ever right now because we know it like it's just radically changing. Yeah. Week to week to week. Yeah. Do you think that do you like the idea that AI unlocks like new areas for software to eat the world more fully? I mean, the legal boom has been interesting. There's been a few legal tech companies, but I never thought of legal tech as like a multi-unicorn category. And now it feels like there's many players, lots of revenue, like it's an entirely new era for that category.

2:52:00And I feel like there's probably five more of those subcategories that are less explored. I think there's a lot of markets where historically it's been hard to sell software. But when you do what the legal tech guys are doing and start to sell software that's bundled effectively with work, that's a super compelling, super compelling set of opportunities. We have a company called Lighttable that's in the kind of architecture and engineering and design space that, you know, you traditionally an architect completes a set of drawings for a building. You send it off to a third party quality control operation and they like do the checking of like, hold on, you can't have a elevator right there next to that.

2:52:45I beam, whatever the problem is. And so it's been a traditionally very manual process. Like suddenly, bam, that is AI automated. What took you three months gets done in 30 minutes. And that's been historically a really hard category to sell into. But now when you're selling not just tools to do the work, but the work completed itself, that's really transformational. And we think that is what's going on in legal and that plays across many, many, many sectors.

2:53:18IPO market in relation to seed market. If OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX get out, there's a whole bunch of liquidity that could funnel into early stage startups. Even early employees getting liquidity, becoming angels. At the same time, you have the most formidable companies in the world now trying to eat every opportunity. How are you processing this idea of these mega IPOs and how they might change your business or the business of the companies that you work with? There's no question, guys, they're going to be helpful. I mean, this LP base, we have terrific LPs. They just trusted us with a big pile of new capital.

2:53:57We feel very fortunate. But they're all starved for liquidity. The asset class has not done a great job of returning more dollars than it's raised year after year. And so I think this will unlock a bunch. It's been a tough, we had a quite streamlined process at our raise, but it's been a tough process for a lot of people. And I think it will be good to have more capital flowing into, frankly, something other than just the mega platforms. I think an interesting thing in the IPO dynamic, though, is, you know, yes, OpenAI, Anthropics, SpaceX, those are incredibly sexy. Like, I need to own that stock kind of names.

2:54:35The pipeline of IPO-ready companies is also full of a lot of traditional seat-based SaaS companies that are in a bit of a weird limbo right now. So it's unclear to me whether or not those three getting out unlock some like tidal wave of additional activity. Yeah. Last question. How are you advising early stage founders? Let's say you back at, you know, three co-founders in New York. When are they making the call to stay and scale a team in New York versus set up on the West Coast or wherever? uh you know we do equal amounts of work on the west coast as as new york now despite our original new york heritage by and large if we're meeting teams who are in new york they're in new york for a reason and a good reason and so i can't remember ever having said like gosh you really need to go west to build this business we definitely see companies on the west coast that are, that should be there as well.

2:55:40But I think as we, you know, what we're in right now is a, is a phase of the AI revolution that's been much more foundational and infrastructure driven. And that's a phase that the Bay always does well. You know, when the, when the PhDs are driving the companies, Stanford and Berkeley are going to be, you know, outpunching NYU and Columbia. when kind of go-to-market activity and being connected to customers and starting to really scale around enterprise accounts and all of that. Like that's when the fact that New York is home to media and consumer packaged goods and financial services and everything else starts to shine.

2:56:22So it's been important for us to be playing both coasts because different coasts excel in different environments. Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Awesome. Well, great to meet you. Thanks for coming on. Congrats to the whole team. Congratulations. Thank you. thanks you guys congrats again to you guys on all your success it's been fun to watch that we'll talk to you soon have a good rest of your day let me tell you about octa

2:56:49octa helps you assign every age and a trusted identity so you get the power of ai without the risk secure every agent secure any agent and without further ado we'll bring in jane grayson

2:57:02Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on down to the TBPN UltraDome. First time on the show, please introduce yourself. So Dana Grayson, founder of Construct Capital with Rachel Holt. We started in 2020. I spent about a decade prior to that, a little bit less at NEA doing early stage investing. Started a smaller boutique firm in Boston. That's where I learned venture. Had a small stint in product design at a company that had gone public. And that's what sucked me on over to the venture side. Was there any particular focus at NEA stage-wise, sector-wise? Yes, definitely. So NEA, big firm, tech, healthcare, early stage, later stage.

2:57:42At least that's how they were organized then. I was early stage tech, mostly outside the Bay Area. But that's because I lived on the East Coast. Of course, did some stuff on the Bay Area too. So my first investment was a company called Onshape, which is a CAD company, CAD in the cloud, brought CAD, like, next generation. This makes so much sense now based on what you're doing now? Yeah. So exactly. Like, that was a pure SaaS investment. I was a SaaS, you know, like, software developer prior to that. Always enterprise SaaS, enterprise software. Through Onshape, I saw, like, okay, if you actually bring, like, collaboration to product design, like, real product, physical product design, make it cloud, like, Google Docs.

2:58:21that affects the whole downstream manufacturing and creation of those projects. You're not FTPing files. You're not calling your manufacturer in China. You're actually able to instantly change things and iterate on the design a lot faster. So from there, I got into Desktop Metal with Rick Fulop, who I had known for years prior, a whole slew. Basically from 2015 on, was doing just exclusively industrial, mostly software. investing tulip automation before it was cool before it was cool and yeah we had a terminology for it outside of just i didn't have hardware for it yeah i didn't have a term for it i'd like to say i was like no not hardware not hardware because that's like a bad word yeah like but secretly we're doing hardware was that just a bad word because of the capex intensivity of that category yeah yeah in those days you had to have and it wasn't that long ago but you had to have people like Rick who were just like larger than life, kind of will it to make it happen.

2:59:21You know, you've got, now we've got SpaceX going public. You have to have those types of people. Hardware was hard, so people were like maybe don't want to invest there, or founders would say, well I could build this thing in the real world, but I could also build some software scale to a million users really fast. And now hardware is cool, but it's still hard. Like that part hasn't changed, which is why over the last, you know, I had a A friend of ours was saying, man, I think a lot of these new hardware, American dynamism companies aren't going to make it. And we were like, yeah, of course. That's actually how it's always been.

2:59:57But that doesn't mean you shouldn't invest there. That doesn't mean it's not worth still building. It still fits the venture model, even though it's really hard. But you're going to get these outlier outcomes still. Well, you've got to keep it simple. In hardware, you can't do everything. When I see teams designing everything new, you're like, that's going to fail. because you do every little thing new. We love companies that are doing like commoditized, using commoditized off-the-shelf stuff for most of it and then innovating where they need to innovate versus like building the whole thing. That's where you can really falter.

3:00:30I remember talking to a drone company like a decade or two ago that didn't use Linux. They were like, we need our own operating system, which is like crazy. So they had like an operating system team, then the software on top of it, then the hardware. It's like they're really trying to do it. We'd like to be around to see success. Yeah, we'd like to be around. And so that's what I say. I mean, I think today what you're seeing in industrial tech, you're seeing three main things. You see AI automation, and we'll, of course, get to that, I'm sure, in this conversation. And that just being able to do things that are filling the talent shortage and boost productivity, just like we're seeing in the IT space, obviously, coming over to, not obviously, but coming over to the industrial world.

3:01:09It's taking longer. Physical AI is going to be longer, but it is happening. I think the other thing that we really see is like you're able to create things and do things that you just weren't able to produce before, partly because of the speed. Like you get engineers that are coming over from the tech world where they're used to, someone mentioned earlier on the show, like fail fast and do things like that. Like you have to have that mentality of just like willing it into existence. We don't usually back people that are coming out of Fortune 100 industrial companies. We back the people that were coming out of Uber or now SpaceX, Palantir, etc.

3:01:46Yeah, you want to back people that are coming out of a big company but that became big really quickly versus the industrials company that's like, yeah, we were started in 1800. Yeah, otherwise hardware. It's like, well, this will be ready in two years and you can't accept that type of cycle. What do you think about why the reindustrialization narrative is so tied to the defense narrative? Yeah. I've had this sort of like random thesis that like maybe if we want to re-industrialize fully, like we should make Happy Meal toys here and get back into injection, plastic injection molding. But like what are the steps?

3:02:23Obviously, there's some accelerants to re-industrialization in the defense context because of supply chain security, because of the way D.C. writes contracts and does deals. You sort of have one buyer. So maybe you can accelerate. But what's easier or harder about the various pieces of the reindustrialization puzzle? I think it's definitely become like the early adopter market, which is like ironic. That is ironic. That like defense is our early mover. Yeah. But I think it will happen across the board. I mean, when we started Construct, we really believed that like the world of industrial companies that could dwarf like, you know, the whole S &P value today.

3:03:02If you projected out 50 years, you could have industrial companies. They should be part of our public markets, right? But getting back to your question, in the defense space, that is just something that you know has to be built on U.S. soil. You know you've got to adopt new technology. You had the great impetus, the oh, crap moment when Ukraine, and actually it happened way before that. But that really opened the eyes of like, if we're going to support that, we're running out of stuff faster than we can make it. and like it's an oh crap moment not just like we knew this was happening which they did know was happening but it was like an actual depletion so they had to escalate and there are budgets there are large incumbents that need to be disrupted it's all the things I think the thing that we haven't seen is like

3:04:19We're financial markets investors. is a different level of financial rigor. What are you seeing the best founders do to sort of financial engineer their success when they need to maybe buy a lot of equipment? I think it's a hole in the market right now. It is. I mean, I do think it's a hole. I think debt is a hole. You know, the venture debt guys don't know how to lend to companies that are startups, unprofitable buying hardware and capex. Like, they don't do that, you know? And traditional banks that would do that don't do that for unprofitable companies. They learn to get cash flow. So you kind of have to back into it.

3:04:54But it's like the founder actually has to put their house on the line. Like it very quickly is like, yeah, you can get a loan if you're willing to like, you know, stake your entire financial life on it. And venture-backed startups are not used to doing that. Yeah, so you have to put these different instruments together. We don't recommend that raw startups go out and take debt, but certainly Series B stage, you shouldn't be using equity capital to finance, to build out of a factory or things that are financeable in other ways. Any movement on equipment financing and the way large equipment makers, if they're starting to sell to more startups, if there starts to be more activity in the venture community, there's actually crossover and you see more risk taking from suppliers deeper in the supply chain?

3:05:45Because that's also like unlocking liquidity in some ways, right? Yeah. I mean, vendor financing is great, right? Might as well. Yeah. We've seen some of that certainly in the bigger companies like Hadrian and others that are buying at scale now. Yeah. Yeah. What about... Speaking of Hadrian, I wanted to ask, do we need more Hadrians or is Hadrian the Hadrian for X? And a little anecdote, we were flying back from the Super Bowl and Chris, the founder of Hadrian, was there. And I was like, oh, were you at the game? I didn't see you. And he's like, no. I was like, that's a business meeting. And I was like, that's bullish.

3:06:21It was like a late Sunday night flight. He was locked in. Well, I have both sides of that bet because my job depends on more Hadrians, but I would love Hadrian to be the only Hadrian. We just plow it all into that. But I think you've truly succeeded when you hear people saying I'm the Hadrian of X. You know, we sit in a position where we're like, not really. It's like, do you know what Hadrian does? But that's OK, too. I mean, that's the sign of success. We're the Uber of, we're the, you know, DoorDash of, we're the Google of, we're the whatever. But I think what Hadrian's done so well, and you guys probably know, is just rebuilding the whole stack and, like, really, you know, not saying, like, never say die until it's full automation, but, like, getting real return on, you know.

3:07:11I mean, they hit this market that was, like, supply going down and demand going up. And, like, when we first invested, we weren't – we didn't even see the defense stuff, right? Like, we loved that it would happen and we thought it would happen. and we were investing purely on aerospace and just our own belief in reindustrialization. And that was already demand going up. But then you have, like, double demand. Like, there are very few companies. Like, you know, people say you get lucky. I don't believe in luck. I don't believe in – I do believe in timing. But not everybody can, like, have a return on timing, you know, like you would on luck or return on investment that way.

3:07:47What can we, do we need to be learning more from China on the manufacturing side? It feels like they learned plenty of things from us. They were the factory of the world. They learned what it took to make a great product. And then you look at BYD and companies like that learning from Tesla, whether Tesla likes it or not. We've talked to T1 Energy. When we saw T1 Energy launch or at least put out a launch video last year, we got super excited because it looked like a Shenzhen-style factory in the U.S. And we were like, wow, America is back. And then we realized that it had a Chinese history. But what can we learn from China?

3:08:33Do we need to be taking that more seriously versus the American, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and figure it out approach? I mean, sure. I think you should always know, you know, keep your competitors close, be learning from them, but be learning from them in a way that you can like leapfrog. I mean, I think what we're good at in the U.S. is, you know, the things that you guys have been talking about all day, AI, you know, systems. And if you're going to play the catch up game, like we're probably not going to catch up. Like if you're going to play the leapfrog game, you've got, you know, to reinvent the way automation is done through what we do well with AI and software and systems.

3:09:15So I would say, like, be aware. But, like, we're not – we don't have that culture. We don't have the worker talent available. You know, Steve Jobs said, like, we wouldn't even be able to do the tooling of the iPhone in this country with people that do it because we don't have that skill set. So we've got to find something else. I firmly believe, and it's been an original point of view or thesis of construct since we started, of manufacturing and production will look different in this country, decentralized, different smaller formats. That was the promise of additive manufacturing, which I think is still finding its way.

3:09:48But you can do a lot of different things. You don't need humanoid robotics going everywhere. We may end up with that. But we have a few steps in between of just automating factories. I want to go back to the government as an interesting buyer of new technology, reindustrialization technology, defense technology. I'm interested to hear what you're seeing best practices look like on ramping up a business that sells to the government. I'm familiar with the SBIRs and then getting to program of record. Has anything changed there? What are you seeing founders sort of match to based on their fundraising in the private markets relative to traction in D.C.?

3:10:37I think it's probably more a canon. I'm speaking sort of naively here because we're not biotech investors. But if you think about the biotech world, you take different markers. You're like, okay, you've got FDA clearance. You can go public. Or you've applied for this. You've got to this clinical trial. Stage two trials. Oh, my God, it's amazing. I'm like, I don't know if that's amazing or not. But, like, I think those are the signals you can take of, like, getting a program of record, how you navigate that. But, you know, these markets are mercurial, too. So we're in a really great time now where there's a lot of spending, a lot of new programs, a lot of disruption, a lot of, like, unseating, a lot of neoprimes that everyone's talking about.

3:11:23um so what does it take to work for you as an investor you have to be a great angel investor do you need a portfolio do you need to be an operator yeah what are you looking for folks yeah and the folks who hire yeah you know um and uh we think of ourselves as like if you take the way venture is gone and like the bulge bracket yep vcs and the boutique vcs we're boutique vcs I came from bulge bracket place, voted with my feet. That change has been going on for a while. It's great to see a couple of firms declaring success there. Declaring success? Well, being successful. I think being able to declare success because they were declaring their path for a long time, and I think they can declare success.

3:12:09Raising, what was it, in recent 15 % of all venture capital, maybe more, 18%. I can't remember what it was. We hit that gong real hard. Meaningful market share. That's success. It is. That's a hat tip. But if you follow, like I've been studying that for a while because I came from a boutique firm in Boston. I went to NEA. I don't think the way to look at it is look at other, and I'll get back to your question about how we hire, but I don't think the way to look at it is how other venture capitalists are doing it. We look at other financial markets, other asset classes, like hedge funds. Yeah. So if you look at, like, hedge funds, you've got, like, the Bridgewaters, the Bulge Bracket, and then you've got, like, the Valposts, you know, the boutiques.

3:12:52Yeah. We're very much a Valpost. So how would we – or would we aspire to be? Yeah, rehire. We aspire to be. So how we hire is we hire that analyst-type thinker who, unlike in the hedge fund world, you can't do a lot of, like, analyst-based research behind your desk. Yeah. Our research is going out, meeting people, being in the field. Like, you have to learn on the front lines. Yeah. but people that form that point of view. And we work in a very team-based approach. So, you know, if they've spent 30 hours working on something and I've spent, you know, two hours meeting the founder for the first time, I'm going to, like, want to collaborate with what they've learned and what they've seen.

3:13:28And then I can also help them, you know, think about winning the deal and how to do this. And so we want people who are original thinkers, who have points of view, and they're scrappy, to go out and hunt it down. Is there anything that jumps out on a resume?

3:13:46I mean, we want to see success in that analytical rigor, but we want to see that combination of self-starterism. Sure. You know? Yeah. So we do like the analytical rigor, but you can get sidetracked by that because there are a lot of great, you know, bankers out there. VC's just so interesting because you have somebody like Andrew Reid, Goldman background, then you have so many founders, you have operators, you have people. Anywhere. All over the place. Yeah, when I first got into venture, I was at a business school thing, and I heard a venture capitalist speak, and he's like, you've got to have been an engineer.

3:14:20Oh, yeah. You had to have been a company that went public. Yeah. And then you've got to go to business school. And I was like, oh, I've done those three things. It's funny. If he had said you could do anything or you need to be a bank bank. Sort of a non-traditional background. Yeah, you know, we make that joke, but, like, there really are so many non-traditional backgrounds. There's so many. More so than other career paths. What's your health tech stack? I see you've got the Whoop and the Apple Watch. Oh, I'm ridiculous. Yeah, I got the Whoop. I love the Whoop. Shout out Will Ahmed. Yeah, yeah.

3:14:51We should have invested in him a long time ago. I love the Whoop, and I'm a proud customer. This is my iPhone Finder. Okay. iPhone Finder. Got it, got it, got it. And it's a watch. And then, you know, I also, you know, do the bands when you go to different workout classes and stuff. Nice. I have a, I'm a single stream device for one single thing. This is probably more sleep than it is. You got two wrists for a reason. Right. You were giving this advice to a friend. He was like, I love the Apple watch. I was like, that doesn't mean you can't get an RM. I haven't done the War Ring. I don't like, I don't like that form factor, but.

3:15:26Awesome. Well, I hope you let us know when you find a real Hadrian for X. They're out there. We've done a lot. Energy, energy is a big space. Power. Energy is a fascinating space. Great one. Yeah. Awesome. Great to meet you. Congrats. Thank you so much for coming by. We'll talk to you soon. And we have our last guest of the show. We got Ashley Vance from Core Memory. He's the founder. He's the CEO. He's the podcast host. He's the documentarian. He's an author. He's a multi-hyphenate. He is a friend of our show. We were excited to announce his launch of Core Memory a little over a year ago. We made a sports center type hype reel.

3:16:11It's amazing. You said a lot of crazy things about some legacy media companies that I probably wouldn't say now, but we all had a good laugh at the time. Didn't we say this was a death knell? Death knell for Bloomberg, short the stocks. We were going crazy. Time may tell you. We'll see. We'll see. Yes, yes. How are things? What's most interesting to you? What are you tracking today? You've done so many different things, tours of Abilene. you've been tracking this AI talent war, I feel like, pretty well with the Mark Chen interview and Jerry Turek as well. Yeah, we had Jerry, Kylie Robinson join our team.

3:16:45She's been killing it. Yeah, that was a huge pickup. What do you call her? A scoop? She's scooping like a Baskin Robbins employee. That's what we call her. But we have a whole list of scoop-related puns that we will be slowly trickling out as more scoops hit the timeline. So I don't want to leak them all. Okay. I'll send them to you. Hold on. It's so cool to be here, man. Welcome to the show. This place is amazing. Are you recording? We're recording. We're filming you. Are you recording on your face, too? I'm recording on my face, all the cameras. I think I'm the first person to do a meta walk-up, I'm told.

3:17:15I love it. And, yeah. So, well, what are we doing? Yeah. Well, first of all, you're in a Quonset hut. Yes. You are. Which is near and dear to my heart. You guys know Silicon Valley began in a Quonset hut. I didn't know that. No way. Tell me a story. Yeah, when we figured out how quickly you can actually build these structures, we were shocked. Yeah. Extremely amazing. There's that one startup that's doing like the inflatable ones from some Belarus technology. But yeah, no, Quonset Huds. William Shockley invents the transistor at Bell Labs. His mom lives in Palo Alto. This is like why Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley.

3:17:48His mom's not doing great. She misses him. He wants to move out. So he moves to Palo Alto, sets up Shockley's semiconductor lab in like 1954 maybe, and it looks exactly like this. It was right in Mountain View on San Antonio Road. It no longer exists. It's amazing because we always get like, why aren't you in San Francisco? You know, is this a real tech show? It's like we recreated Silicon Valley here. Right here. In Hollywood. No, I saw it. I saw it. And it was hit me. How is SF? Do you go to robot fights like daily now? Is that a weekly thing? Do you have a season pass? Hourly? Yeah. It's a lot.

3:18:26We just went to one this Saturday. Rec had one at Kizar Pavilions. is kind of like their biggest one yet. We've been filming like, oh, my Meta Glass has died. We've been filming a documentary more or less. So kind of like from the very beginning of the robot fights all the way through. So yes. How do you think of the timeline? Is this a 10-year project? Because my expectation, I haven't been yet, but my expectation, tell me if I'm wrong, is that it just sounds like the craziest, most awesome thing ever. and yet the robots today are still kind of making progress. And so the actual action in the moment, it's probably a fun place to like hang out with friends and watch, but it's not yet like, oh, I'm sweating.

3:19:11This is like better than UFC. It's a little comical at times. But, you know, it's getting better and better. But the idea is that the documentary would show over time. Well, I think we want to do, this is like, this is kind of the cool thing. So we do make films for Netflix, HBO, all that stuff. But I think we're going to try something different here where it's like a documentary that's living and ongoing. Yeah, so I think we're going to take what we filmed for the last six or seven months, put that out as like chapter one of the rise of the robot fights, and then just keep following it along, which is, I mean, we have internal, not like fights, but just the best strategy on how to release some of this stuff.

3:19:51But I think it's kind of cool. I think you can do different things now that we have our own distribution. and kind of play with the format. How do you actually process watching robots fight? Is it like Scary Doomer? Are you actually entertained? No, it's pretty fun, man. Everybody, like at this last fight, you could tell there were a lot of people who had never seen one before. I mean, it's the spectacle of it all. There was an element where the first round went and then a bunch of people cleared out because I think they were just, once they've had their fill, it has to get better, right? Well, I think what they should do is do the robot extreme sports.

3:20:26Because I think before you get fighting, it's like robot cliff jumping. Watching a robot jump. Or base jumping, right? Watching a robot hurl itself off a cliff and then be trying to pull a parachute. Whether it works or not, it's pretty cool. I'm with you. Or big wave surfing, robot big wave surfing. Fighting is pretty good. It's getting better pretty quick. When it first started, they had these little miniature robots, and that was super goofy because they had barely hit each other and fall over. But, you know, now they're getting this year. In the next five months, we'll see, like, the six-foot.

3:21:00Did you used to go to the BattleBot shows back in the day? No, I've seen that. I have some good memories there. Those things were lethal. Those things, like, even. I just jumped from 4 '11", 4 '4", to 5 '11". That's pretty tall. Yeah, so we just filmed. It's kind of, well, I won't tell the back story, but we have filmed. There is a six-footer in America. Six-footer in America. that I think is the only 6-foot in America. Does that make you feel the AGI more than visiting a big data center? I mean, the cool thing, okay, I find this cool as like a cultural phenomenon. Yeah, totally. It's this San Francisco sort of art meets tech kind of thing.

3:21:37But then I do, it resonates with me because it is this physical instantiation of AI. And even though it's not as cutting edge as some AI solving a physics problem, maybe there is this, you do feel the AGI because there's like something to it and there's this energy and that's what like drew me to the story from the beginning. Are documentaries just like a get rich quick scheme? Break down the business model. Cannot count all the cash, man. I always laugh because people are like. Well, it sounds like, oh, I work with Netflix. I work with HBO. You sound like you're in mogul mode but the reality is like you have to invest years of your time and it can you you know obviously it's a business otherwise you wouldn't be investing in it but uh break down the realities of like what it actually takes to create a documentary sell it monetize it it's hard it's probably harder than ever maybe i mean we went through this the glory years of all the streamers lighting up and they couldn't get enough content they were they were overpaying for everything and And so you can actually, you don't make money like a scripted project that really hits, but you could do pretty well with a documentary if you really had something good.

3:22:49And now it's brutal. You know, Netflix, most of the streamers kind of cap what they're willing to pay. And it's not a very high number. It's like call it like two million bucks. And so you have to get your budget under that. You're following something for, it could be one year, it could be six years. And to spread all that work and money over all that time. Yeah, some of the best stories. I mean, it's so hard because there's companies today where if you knew where they'd be in five years or 10 years, you'd be like, we need to have a camera on this team every single day. But then they could just peter out and it doesn't become interesting.

3:23:23And then you've just kind of lost it. Which is what we kind of try to do. I mean, we try to place these bets. But you're acting as like an investor, basically. Yeah, because like the robot project, I'll go as a reporter first and be like, oh, there's kind of something here. And this character, this person is really interesting. Let's like follow it for a bit. and then we can do sort of shorter episodes. And then, you know, once you really think you're on it, so that you can go all in a bit more. So we have like our own money to invest in the projects that we really care about and then sometimes partner.

3:23:50How, have you cared at all about what's happening with Warner Brothers Discovery? Is that, do you think that actually impacts the documentary market? Does it consolidate the number of buyers? Yeah, I mean, it's just more consolidation. They're going to be like, hey, it was 2 million last year and now it's like one and a half. Is that like kind of the concern? Yeah, I mean, continued consolidation is a real problem. Then, I mean, there's this part where, like, tech companies own every major media company now, and it's a real issue for some of the stuff we want to cover because it's like, does it compete with this?

3:24:23Is this offensive to all the tech people? And so it really limits, you know, to some degree, the scope of what you can cover. Even, like, if you just want to make a documentary about, like, the Apple Vision Pro, how it was made, whatever, and it's like, if it looks if it looks damaging to Apple and then you sell it to Netflix, well, like those two companies compete. And then they could, even if there's no true conflict of interest, people could be like, well, you know, was there, you know? You know, is Netflix going to buy some doc about Apple? Oh, yeah, they might not want to glaze Apple. Then you have, you're always after the most interesting people, right?

3:25:00So you've got this list of whatever, the top 20, 30 tech figures that you might want to follow for a doc. And then it's like, whose alliances are they on? and who hates them, you know, who fits in where. You're just trying to make a movie and have people watch it. Talk about scoops and the importance of scoops in making a documentary. That feels like it can help a lot. You also have these multiple touch points. So I can imagine you, like, interviewing someone and then being like, that would go well in a documentary. Maybe I want to hold that. How do scoops work in this? That's horrible. I mean, because I do books and documentaries.

3:25:34Yeah, so you get good scoops and then you have to wait a year. I know you're sitting on some stuff. You're like, you have to sit. And then you just, when I see these open AI. You got to hide your notes. Well, you got to hide your notes from Kylie too. Cause she's like, that's a scoop right there. No, no, no. Now you're on the same team. We're on the same team. We'll figure all that out. But no, I mean, it is, it is really hard. Like sometimes you're sitting on something and you, you know, I remember when I did the Elon book, you know, there was this anecdote where Google almost bought Tesla. And I had that like two years before the book was going to come out.

3:26:05You're just like praying to God. Nobody happens upon this. And in the meantime, in the documentaries are the same way. In a perfect world, if you do manage to like ride through that, then yeah, you have not only this long form piece that's revealing a lot about these people, but you've got some news with it to help. When I released that story ahead of the book on Bloomberg, that's what shot the Elon book like up the Amazon charts before it came out. How do you think, I've always been struck by the fact that in the Netflix app, in the iTunes, like Apple TV app, it's very hard to like screen record and share because they don't want you stealing the whole thing, which makes sense.

3:26:42But it also hurts like clippings. Whereas if you share a story, you can screenshot it and that can go viral. With books, it's very important to like pick a good excerpt and then run that in a magazine, right? Like New York Mag got the first chapter of this new book and they distribute it and whatnot. I'm wondering how you're thinking about how documentary promotion might change in the future. I mean it's funny because we're living in these two worlds right now we're doing stuff on YouTube on our channel and the doc world and the second you go into the doc world is a lot like the publishing industry things get very traditional very quickly and there's a lot more reluctance to try things out and they once you've signed over to Netflix I mean they kind of own your thing and you're a little bit at the mercy of how they want to do it.

3:27:30So it's not something honestly that I've thought a ton about and I haven't seen, you know, like an incredible amount of creativity yet on, on embracing that. Are there any traditional Hollywood executives that look at your YouTube experience as a feather in your cap? I'm just thinking about that Neuralink documentary that you did. Well, it was a YouTube video went super viral and the structure of that video was amazing because it was all the great stuff about an Ashley Vance, like documentary video production, but then it had a hook. It had, Oh, Elon's going to call. It had to, it had like, it opened loops.

3:28:08It was like also a Mr. Beast video, you know, it was the best of both. And I, and I imagine that I, you probably saw Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on Rogan talking about second screening and how more and more Netflix executives want you to retell the plot 25 times. but if you're coming from the YouTube world you can say like hey if it's holding retention on YouTube like I know I can edit like that for you and you'll have similar retention is that interesting yet? Well I mean I think there's a massive clash going on right now I mean like the guys filming us who make our show we sort of at Bloomberg we learned how to make a TV show that was like an Emmy nominated show for way way way less money than Netflix or Hulu would pay for a similar show.

3:28:52This was Hello World? That was Hello World and then obviously we're doing that at Core Memory but you know there's this economics that I think we figured out they work very hard is one part of it but the second you sign up with a Netflix the budget expands everybody's padding like you'll get line items on a budget for landlines of like $15 ,000 because people are just trying to, this is how Hollywood works, it's very strange. So you have these, you've got this clash of finance from the old world and then the model of the new world and so you know when I talk to more traditional Hollywood execs some I think are not paying as much attention maybe to YouTube as they should but then there are some really big producers the second we started the company they called and they're like dude we want to kind of do what you're doing or we want to be part of what you're doing and rethink how we go about things and so I mean I still think YouTube if you know it's been around what like 20 I still feel like Like, this is very early days for how this is going to play out because I think that is where you have the most flexibility and the distribution of the entire world.

3:29:57It still beats everything. How do you think about it? Yeah, and it would be nice if they bought documentaries. They're like, we'd love to buy your documentary for this creator payout. We floated this idea. No, but I think, I mean, one of the challenges of building a modern media brand, I think, like, you have the sub-stack business. you could roll out if you could potentially lean more into YouTube at some point and build out a subscription business there you're kind of like splitting attention which can be tough it's hard to figure out and Substack Substack's been great, our stories do great but it so far I would say is like not a visual first platform and so putting stuff behind the paywall it's been tricky but there has to be some way to figure this out where you are, you can't just give everything away and that's it's kind of fun now because we have all these different levers to play with and try to see where this goes yeah how did you react to the different Super Bowl ads well thank you guys for putting the core memory logo I think we snuck it twice on the through some sort of missing oh really yes let's go no accident no accident let's not Tyler over there thank you thank you very much I'm like I was just happy that you guys did what you did we actually snuck the ad on Fox Business yesterday I saw that So that ran there.

3:31:15And then it snuck onto the billboard in Times Square as well. So the logo's been there. I think we're going to the Olympics next. We're taking these everywhere. You're coming with us. Everyone can see it. And I'm not just saying this because I'm in the ultra dope. You guys are just marketing geniuses. I mean, it was so smart when I woke up on X that morning. It was just every single person was pushing it along. And then I did the same thing. And no, I mean, I liked, I don't know. I kind of like the world ad. I think people are so torn on world and how they feel about it. But I actually like that one.

3:31:48Yeah. And then the Claude, OpenAI. Yeah, I don't know. Wait, WorldCoin ran it at? No, no. Yeah, WorldCoin. I mean, it's World now. But yeah. Tools for Humanity. I didn't even see that they ran it at. There was one about, it was like, you know, are you human? Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah, that's somewhat of an optimistic message in a time when people are sort of AI skeptical. So you have a little bit of wind at your back when you go into the Super Bowl where people are probably like, oh, this AI stuff. I have a question. Can you go to China for like a few months? I'm trying to figure this out. So we want to do.

3:32:24Like I want your, I want the, I want to, I want, I want to feel like I toured China through your eyes. I should have got me like 99 % of the way there. Only you can take me across the finish line. So I appreciate you saying that. We are trying to do this. I mean, we filmed the Hello World in China when I was at Bloomberg. we had some difficulties with China that made it, made it harder to get a visa for a period of time. And so now I've been trying, I actually want to get in touch with iShowSpeed because I want to know like what the visa YouTuber versus pure journalist visa situation is like, but yeah, no, I 100 % want to go to the humanoid robot factories.

3:32:59I want to go to BYD. I want to do all that stuff. Very cool. Yeah. It'd be great. We're definitely going to go to India this year and shoot an episode, which is already lining up. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to me about storytelling. When you're in information capture mode, you're doing reporting, you're getting a ton of different facts and scoops, but then at some point it needs to boil it down into usually a three-act structure. Do you think in the hero's journey? Do you think in the eight-part story circle? Do you think in act one, act two, act three, and then you're trying to map things to that? Or are you just hunting around and then when you get lucky, you're like, okay, the third act has happened.

3:33:36I'm feeling it. I'm ready to publish. There's always sort of an arc. Um, I don't know if it's not always the hero's journey, but yeah, you're not wrong. I mean, a lot of the people I'm chasing are these eccentric inventor types on the quest and trying to figure something out. Um, I usually, when you do the magazine features, if it's, if it's like 5 ,000 words in length, those usually, my first thing I think about is the character spending time with them. And then, And, you know, those break down usually into like actually four or five, six sections. And for each section, I always think about it like a documentary or a TV show.

3:34:10You want something to open. You have to like keep momentum for the reader because you're asking them to stick with you for a while. And so those are the bits that I always think about. So, you know, you set up the state of play in the first act or you're taking someone into some really weird world through an anecdote. and then, yeah, you're going on this journey where you're getting into more and more detail. I always, it's like my fatal flaw maybe, I short shrift the ending. I spend so much time on the beginning and then you should obsess about the ending as well, but I always kind of just get there and then figure it out on the fly.

3:34:42Well, it's really hard because in many ways, the third act of the Elon Musk story is like the SpaceX IPO. That's the final boss. That ties it in a bow in some ways. So if you're like, well, I'm not going to wait 15 years. So we're finding a different third act. I found this with the, I did a piece on Parker Conrad and Rippling. Incredible act one starts Zenefits, right? Gets fired, got revenge story, starts a second company. And then it's like, okay, well, they're building, building, building. And it's like, what's the third act? They got to take the company public. Hasn't happened yet. I'm sure it'll be successful, but it doesn't tie itself in a bow with like the dramatic third act.

3:35:25It's the hardest thing about the, for the long form stuff we do, whether it's a book, magazine story, or a documentary is you're doing real time reporting on tech and it's always changing so fast. And then like on the Elon book, I had to pick, you know, you just have to pick a moment where you're like, okay, this is, we're going to button this up. Same thing on the last book. And so, no, I mean, that part's really hard, but I battle with this all the time. After I finished the Elon book for a whole bunch of reasons, I was like, I'm only writing about a dead person next time. But then I only get excited about.

3:35:58Well, the Shockley book is ready to go. You know it off the top of your head. That one is good. There's a couple of people who have swiped at that one. But yeah, no, I mean, I get excited when I walk in places like this, when I walk into factories and I kind of feed off that. So it's like I have no choice but to chase what I'm interested in. But it's hard to figure out. The Elon book is a biography. what is heaven when the heaven heavens went on sale which is in your uh lobby i signed multiple copies that's how we first met it's it's uh i sent him a picture so we made a movie based on it called wild wild space which is on hbo but it's a book it's kind of like a book non-fiction book tracing the underbelly of of new space being born and so we go along with a couple rocket companies some satellite companies but it's it's less elon less is it an ensemble cast is a tour of an industry.

3:36:49There's like four, there's four distinct sections that would for sure tell you some of the history of space and then fully bring you up to speed on, on like the rise of commercial space. But yeah, we go with rocket lab, which is after SpaceX, the second most successful rocket company, planet labs, which changed the face of satellites. Firefly is one of my favorite stories in the book. I hang out with this Ukrainian dude. We go to Ukraine, we're drinking scotch and Vandenberg Air Force Base down the road, all kinds of adventures. And then Astra, which is still going, God bless them, and was trying to make the smallest, cheapest rocket possible.

3:37:25And so I spent six years on that with Astra. Overnight success. I was there. I was with Astra when it was like four dudes in a room trying to get the engine to burn for the first time all the way up to when they flew to orbit for the first time. So I think, I mean, mostly that book is, it's meant to like immerse you. Yeah. Did the moon, Mars to moon pivot from SpaceX, did that surprise you? I was wondering if you guys, I'm still like processing this in some ways. But like it didn't come out during the biography and all the conversation. No, no. I mean, Elon, even until recently, is full Mars. And do you think it's because they're going public and you now, as a public company or a soon-to-be public company, you can't be messaging like, we're going to Mars, we're going to Mars, but then we're actually.

3:38:18I think Elon probably could still keep messaging that because he cares. Yeah, yeah, the roadster. But yeah, public markets are less excited about what you're going to do in a decade or two decades versus what you're going to do. What are you going to do for me right now? take me to the moon. I mean, oh man, we could talk about this for a long time. You know, the Mars thing was always part of Elon's genius, I think, because it sounded completely insane to most people. And yet if you were into space and you were young, there were a lot of people who actually wanted to go do that. And it was part of building this religion, this very aspirational thing that made you want to go to SpaceX that filled you with like all this passion for what was going on.

3:39:00even Gwen Shotwell, I mean, she's, she co-runs the company of the, and that was, that was like her quest. That's what she wanted to do. And so it always had this like mystical overtones, you know, which is the same way with Tesla of, of creating this big climate change sort of revolutionizing technology. So in some ways I feel like he's come, pardon the pun, back to earth a little bit with like, with, with this, right? Because it's, it's slightly less, I mean, it's still, you're building a colony on the fricking moon, but it's, it's, it's like, It's slightly less aspirational. It's much more practical for all the reasons you lay out.

3:39:34I mean, clearly the U.S. government wants to try to beat China to the moon, although I don't think we will. But that's where the U.S. government's attention and money is, is on the moon. And with all the space data center stuff, I mean, all this interplay between building these layers of infrastructure. So I think he's chasing money and what makes sense in this near term. Yeah, it's more pragmatic, less sci-fi. It made me a little sad, man, like canceling the Model S, you know, stopping production on that along with this Mars thing. I mean, it is, as someone who is like his biographer, I mean, it's a massive philosophical change in the Model S, just represented that was the moment that Tesla actually became real and electric cars became real and like shocks.

3:40:23You know, it sold so many more than anyone had expected. So these are really momentous things. I think Elon's really practical. I think he's all in on AI. He needs money to fund that. SpaceX is like this sexy thing that people get excited about, and you can use it to raise money for other things. And so I think he's just being very, very practical. And I think probably it's the pressure and the immediacy of this AI race that might be making him make statements and decisions that normally he could put off, I think. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Time to plant the bomb. We're getting out of here.

3:41:02You can close the show out with us. I want to hit the gong. Two best-selling books. Go to corememory.com. You want to hit the gong? The bomb has been planted. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Go to tbpn.com for our newsletter. Go to corememory.com for your newsletter, for your subs tag. Follow Ashley on X, YouTube, podcasts everywhere. Go buy the books. Go buy the books. Buy them all. Buy 100 copies. Yeah. We will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. Goodbye. Nice work, bro. I'll see you on the next one. See you on the next one.