Google Taps Berkshire, Confidential IPO Filings, Putin's Longevity | Jack Doohan, Shreya Murthy, Nate Cavanaugh & Justin Fox, Thomas Mueller, Edward Kim, Brynn Putnam

27:33I want to be in the mix. And then at some point, people make the decision. So it's more about family planning, but of course, there's all sorts of affordability issues. But chat says white pill, never doom. Never doom. This investment is grounded in a long-term belief in the strength of America's housing market and its underlying fundamentals, which we see as enduring over time. Berkshire is raising its exposure to a housing market in its fourth year of dismal sales. High mortgage rates, job market uncertainty, and the rising cost of living have kept many prospective buyers on the sidelines. Builders have been forced to offer incentives such as paying part of buyers mortgage costs just to unload their inventory Builder confidence is low single-family home Starts decline nine percent in April the steepest drop since August a third of builders said they had cut their prices last month Moreover many Americans now think homeownership is beyond their budget More people are renting for longer or putting their savings into the stock market rather than investing in a home But analysts say the U.S.

28:36housing shortage of more than 4 million homes means new homes need to be built. They expect more buyers will return to the market once mortgage rates, which recently hit a nine-month high, come down and trigger pent-up buyer demand. Berkshire has agreed to pay a 24 % premium to Taylor Morrison's closing stock price at$58.58 on Friday. analysts see the price is a good deal for Berkshire because the actual value of the builder's home portfolio bellies its lagging stock price. That is an incredible bargain, says Tony Avila, chief executive of Builder Advisor Group. Taylor Morrison's stock shot up 22%.

29:15This is a quote by Warren Buffett. This is the first deal for Abel, Greg Abel, the new CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. And Warren Buffett said, gave a quote to the journal, he has launched. He has launched. I love it. On Monday. That's great. Then they talk about the Google deal. Taylor Morrison is a safer bet in a precarious home building market. The company tends to focus on the higher end of the market, which has performed better. A significant part of its business is built around buyers looking to upgrade to nicer homes rather than entry-level buyers who are struggling the most. In addition, the company is part of a smaller segment of builders that have leaned into so-called build-to-rent communities of single-family homes constructed for the sole purpose of renting.

29:52Congress recently threatened build to rent developers with a proposal that would force them to sell their properties within seven years of building them. But House lawmakers removed that proposal in an attempt to rescue the burgeoning sector. The Taylor Morrison deal is the latest example of consolidation in the residential construction industry. Last month, Avalon Bay Communities and Equity Residential agreed to merge in the largest multifamily combination on record years after sluggish profits. This puts pressure on others to find a dance partner, says Alan Ratner. Interesting. Well, we'll continue following up on that.

30:26Well, they own railroads, and you should be on Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. We have some time. What do you think the odds that the admin does some type of mega project around home building? Almost zero. Like, I don't see the government building homes. I think that the number one lever that any administration has over housing affordability is interest rates. Sure. Doing something there. FHA program? Yeah, but specifically just the Fed funds rate.

31:11Like, if you can do something to bring that up. Yeah, I just mean we're at a time with, at least in modern history, relatively unprecedented government intervention. Involvement, yeah. You know, government taking a stake in Intel. You think they might build the cube? You know the cube? What's a cube? There's a cube that if you built it in Central Park, one mile by one mile by one mile, it would fit a billion people inside. So housing crisis solved. No windows, but if you build the cube No more housing issues wait not Buffett, but Who's the guy that built the the the James Nolan no the dorm at UCSB.

31:53Oh, yeah, Charlie Munger Charlie Munger. Yeah, I'm under my was building cubes He was he was early the cube not a member of the government not doing a mega project I would be surprised if there's something that's first party, but Tyler has another take I was just gonna say the admin is not supposed to be able to like interfere with interest rates, right? Yeah, but that is independent, but there's a lot of things that you can do where interest rates were declining until we got into Yeah, like if you strengthen the economy pull back from from geopolitical risks and whatnot like It's like down in place cool dominance.

32:26Yeah, this kind of yeah, yeah There's just there will be things that open up the Fed to cutting rates potentially but yeah I don't know very clearly it's not within the admin's abilities well let's head over to James Walker okay what's James Walker up to he's boarding this morning's flight with an emotional support trout is this AI is this real this is insane honestly I don't think AI could nail this era of Instagram filter is the fish alive this is crazy bringing a fish on a plane is hilarious but that does not feel very uh humane it feels like a very uncomfortable situation for a fish but i guess we got to get somewhere uh you got to go you got to go in the tube think about it though john yeah think about the things this fish will have seen that many fish would never see in a lifetime yeah so is it is it inhumane yeah or is it inhumane not to let the fish yeah if you got a trout it's like i think the earth is flat i've never seen the curvature you're like well you're going into 747 and i'm showing you out the window your look out the window you'll see the curvature of the earth potentially or maybe it's just the windows maybe the windows and the plane are curving it this was a good post from key he said this dude is effing Sherlock Holmes.

33:54Okay. Somebody says, 100 % this ad is sponsored by OpenAI from the official OpenAI account. It's not even sponsored. This ad is posted by OpenAI. It's not even marketing. It's just communications. This is a wild post. It's so funny. Terrence Tao, AI creates more room to experiment, test unexpected paths, and discover what might otherwise stay out of touch. Terrence Tao, goat mathematician from UCLA. Very fun to see him talking about his process, where he's still seeing value, how he's using models. He talks about this a lot, a lot of times. It just allows him to flesh out his work, build a chart that he wouldn't otherwise build.

34:43Very synergistic, fully in like the centaur era. I don't know who got paid to say what, but that ad is sponsored by OpenAI. I think it's best to show real results. That's so interesting. This is so funny. Anyway, what else is going on in the timeline? Joe Weislandt all has something. The price of whey is going bananas. It's a protein crisis. This is not good. What's going on? Here's what's a little funny. Okay, break it down. We know why the price of whey is going bananas. We don't need Joe to tell us. It's because Joe is going bananas on his weight consumption. Oh, you think he's responsible directly.

35:21I think he's the problem. He's like, we're all trying to figure out who did this. He has been looking bigger. Much bigger. His traps, specifically, they've been eating his head. Yeah. Yeah. And he has those Death Star delts on the cap, on the shoulders. It's really crazy. And the lats, when he does the lat spread on Odd Lats, it gets aggressive. It's a little too much. So cool with the way, Joe. But here we have some news. In early May, a supplier delivered bad news to baking and beverage company Hello Amino. It had run out of whey protein. Canada-based Hello Amino uses the ingredient in all of the 30 high-protein baking mixes it sells.

36:00Founder Ali Swift found another supplier, but it means importing whey protein isolate from the U.S. at a price that's 50 % higher and due to increase again soon. The new whey protein delivered other complications. that dried out the company's baking goods due to the manufacturer's different processing methods. That's true. A lot of different ingredients will change the output. Not always created equal. Our pancakes came out like sawdust, Swift said. The company plans to reformulate using different combination of proteins. Protein has really leaked into everything. I have not found, I've been surprised whenever I see the trend pieces about like proteins packed with everything.

36:37Everything has protein in it. Because I feel like, I don't know, It hasn't snuck into that many of the things that I eat throughout the day. There isn't protein in my Diet Coke. I don't know what else I consume. But this whole trend of protein-packed cereals and salads and lunches and dinners and protein-packed pastas and stuff, I never really – I just kind of stuck with the normal stuff. Yeah, the idea that if you eat two to three solid meals a day, you have some protein, that you also need to be snacking on protein in between is just insane. It's completely unnecessary. I don't know. Protein shake gets it done.

37:15Well, let's check in with one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders because they've launched an athleisure clothing line. Guaranteed rate has rolled out RateFit, a wellness-driven lifestyle brand. They were the seventh largest mortgage lender in the country last year. Colin is baffled. I had to check if this was real. Is it? And ratefit.com, it is. You can get pretty much all the things that you would get over at Lululemon. Who launches this? Or Aloe. Or Bori. 20 % time project or something? I bet you this was a... A fool's joke? No, I bet you this was just Shopify. It's just so good at sales.

38:03they were doing a little outbound campaign and they're like sorry we're a mortgage lender like we're not really set up maybe it's a rogue agent maybe someone just you know at guaranteed rate just said like make money make my business make money and it was just like i'll set up a shopify store and contact a distributor and a manufacturer you're now in the clothing business uh how long until that happens i don't know uh any any day now i'm sure i'm sure uh the sooner i get a porsche the better for my mental health. Good luck, Mason Hughes. Good luck on your Porsche pursuit. Maybe a very depreciated Taycan.

38:40Cheaper than you think, right? There you go. The fact Eliezer isn't looks-maxing is the ultimate condemnation of rationalism. People have asked about this before. He should get into looks-maxing. Why not? Why not? It's a good time. Well, I had another question come up from a friend of the show about why are companies filing IPOs confidentially. It's an interesting question, and I sort of tugged on the thread. Liz Hoffman was talking about this a little bit. So Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S1 registration statement to the SEC June 1st. That was yesterday. Liz Hoffman said, reminder that the ability to confidentially file an IPO was a 2012 rule change meant to ease small companies, meaning less than a billion dollars of revenue, into the markets.

39:30And it was later expanded to what we're... Yeah, it was meant to be like a smoke grenade. A smoke grenade lets you talk to investors before you get out. Do we change the camera? But I... So she asked the question of like, what are we even doing here? And I was curious, like, what are we doing here? Like, why do all these companies file confidentially? And And then the S1 comes out. This is what SpaceX did. It's not like Anthropics unique in this. This is very much standard practice at this point. But how did we get here? And why? Is this good? Do I like this? I don't know. Let's find out. So first, the basics.

40:06Confidential IPO filing. It doesn't mean that you IPO in secret. It means the company submits a draft S1 to the SEC for private staff review SEC employees. Yeah, it's a smoke grenade. It's a smoke grenade. Yeah. Great analogy. before releasing the prospectus on Edgar, which then every hedge fund can download, anyone can download, it becomes public. So this lets companies run the SEC review process while keeping the sensitive financial details private. And there's a few reasons why you might want to do that. So any regulatory stumbling blocks can be dealt with in advance. And so the final filing is clean and ready to go.

40:41SpaceX did the same thing, filing a draft submission confidentially before the public S1 dropped a week or two ago. So after the 2008 financial crisis, this is where this all starts. There's a lot of regulation that results from the fallout. Sarbanes-Oxley is the main one. And the financial markets slowly built back and started opening up as the economy rebuilt. So post Dodd-Frank, post Sarbanes-Oxley, you get a lot of regulation. And then over the next few decades, certain pieces get relitigated, renegotiated, and different paths open up to slightly less regulatory burdensome pathways in the financial markets.

41:23And so before 2012, the S1 became public early in the process, which was great for journalists who wanted to report on IPOs. It wasn't really that beneficial to very many other people, but it raised the stakes for companies because if anything was off, it could result in a botched IPO, which would be damaging for morale. You know, you hear that your company filed publicly and immediately something comes up and you can't fix it. So then you have to pull back and it's seen as damaging. Seen as weakness. No one wants to be running a company that publicly failed to IPO. And so in 2012, the Jobs Act passed.

42:00And they created a new class of company with some relaxed filing requirements. These are called emerging growth companies. It's defined by the SEC. They're called EGCs and EGCs were defined as any company with less than a billion in revenue. Later It was inflation adjusted to be 1.235 billion, but that doesn't really matter though because in 2017 staff at the SEC under Trump 1 explained Expanded the confidential filing flow to include all issuers not just EGCs So anyone no matter how much your revenue was you could go through this process And so the drop the jobs act was driven by Republicans but broadly supported and the 2017 change happened under Trump won, but again, it didn't face strong opposition.

42:40So private market investors like IPOs for liquidity. VCs love to come on the show and do a victory lap when they take a company public and it's great to return capital to LPs. And then on the other side, public market investors like access to more names. So it's sort of win-win. In 2017, this was a huge year for huge large growth stage companies. These Decacorns. You had Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Palantir. They were all well past the billion-dollar revenue threshold. But there was still a lot of uncertainty about how the market would value these companies because they had sort of new business models.

43:13There were some questions about different margin profiles, how the market would price these. There weren't direct comps to Uber and Airbnb already in the market. Are you going to just trade Airbnb like it's a hotel chain? Not really. It's asset light. So the market needs to digest that and confidentially filing was beneficial and it was encouraging to these companies to say Yeah, we'll go try the IPO thing because it's less burdensome. So By stripe should file confidentially for ICO, but then never actually go. I think that's a Collison brother nightmare I think they wake up in cold sweats. Yeah, I took the company public what happened?

43:47No, I know But it would be kind of funny to like confidentially file. Yeah, then just pull it back Just let it just kind of sit there for another decade. Troll. Troll IPO. So the confidential filing rules were expanded again in 2025 under Trump to SEC staff to include other financial offerings. So new issuance of stock, other classes of securities. These things can be reviewed before going out in the market. This allows companies to test the waters on follow-on financings, spinoffs, other capital markets transactions. You can go and test the waters. So there's no question that companies are staying private longer.

44:21Everyone knows this. Private markets are incredibly deep, driven both by mega fund raises from the largest venture capital firms, crossover investors from hedge funds coming into the market, and then also plenty of activity from the hyperscalers and strategics who can write a$10 billion check into a private company, no problem. So the end result is that the public markets have been losing companies to private markets for years. Exchanges don't want this. Public markets investors don't want this. and so there's a huge demand to make going public less painful. Confidential filings don't fully obscure investor protections because all the traditional data needs to be released before any money changes hands.

45:01But it speeds up the time to market and increases coordination between private companies and their future shareholders in public markets. And so that's why companies are allowed to file confidentially. And I don't know. After reading that, I don't really have a problem with it. But you let us know. What do you think? Should it be illegal? Should it be straight to jail if you file confidentially? I don't know. We can roll it back. A couple more notes before our first guest. Joe Weisenthal is reporting that on the eve of the IPO, SpaceX employees are organizing. More than 1 ,000 current and former SpaceX employees have banded together to negotiate with wealth management firms for better pricing and access to sophisticated tax-saving financial products ahead of the IPO.

45:44Interesting. I imagine the wealth management firms are thrilled about this. They were joking, of course. Very fun. One more note. Yeah. Friday IPOs. Yeah. Alibaba. Okay. Uber. Ooh, big ones. And Meta. Ooh. All on Friday. Okay. Very interesting. I think there's going to be a lot of fanfare. If the images in the S1 were anything to judge, I think that the actual coverage will be a spectacle. We will see Starbase in full force. it will be a lot of great entertainment and a pretty wild day, pretty wild day for financial history. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market?

46:27Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, we can bring in Jack Doohan. He is the founder and CEO of Muse. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Jack? Very well, thanks. How are you guys? Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Great to have you on. Why don't you kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself? Certainly. No, thanks. Thanks for having me on, boys. Myself, a bit of a whirlwind last 12 months of my whole life. I've been driving towards being a Formula One driver. So, you know, in that realm, let's say, and I was always in the mindset of doing one thing properly or two things, average, to be right.

47:08So I always wanted to build and wanted to do many things. But that was full focus. ended up getting the Formula 1 the end of 2024 for the final round Abu Dhabi signed for three years which was obviously a huge thing for me and for a kid from Australia and then six races into that season sort of sidelined for some circumstances outside of my control let's say and it was a big moment for me of realising not that you're set you're never set in stone, nothing's ever guaranteed. But I definitely thought with security, with the three years and with how things work, that it was a little bit more stable.

47:49So it was a big reality check. I said, okay, for what I'm locking into for the next, you know, for my life and what I'm carrying, you know, the next 10, 20 years is not going to be from something that's, let's say, decided by these political circumstances. So then, to be honest, I had an interest in AI since late 2020. I was teaching myself to code since 2019 on a low basis. Definitely not. I'm not engineering behind the behind news at all. So just from understanding and then ended up founding a news sort of at the end of December, doing some small passive tech investments, setting up some SPVs and some opportunities.

48:27But yeah, it's crazy. The distribution that has been gathered now since being in this paddock and around as well. Yeah, I want to talk about tech and business, but I have two questions about racing. First, I'd love to know a little bit more about your early path. Did you go through the typical cart racing Formula Three? Like, walk me through the steps to actually get to F1, a little bit of the history there. And then I would love your view on like the future of the sport, where things are now, what's changed, what you've observed as you've been probably not just competing in F1, but also a fan.

49:07Yeah, no, certainly. You know, it started from karting, as you mentioned. Then sort of in Australia, there's the other ceiling. You know, like I guess like any small, like any not small country. We're a big country with 25 million populations compared to the U.S. very very different but you always have the goal of going to the top of what you're doing and even for karting the main space was Europe so that's where the European Championships were so as a kid I always wanted to be over here ended up moving over on my own when I was 13 just before I was 14 years old did a year of karting was then picked up by the Red Bull On your own that means like you said see ya to your parents or what did that look like it was the first seven days was with my father and then i was on my on my own with like people that my that was sort of connected into this into the in the european region um and still that's that's wild that's crazy it was it was weird like you know i think when i went i came over i was wearing shorts and i was in europe and the guys who were mentoring me was that i looked through you know i looked to australian um i remember i remember i walked in i I was a 13-year-old kid.

50:21I walked in the go-kart track, and it was the first time I was in Europe, and there was a Scottish guy who was mentoring me. And I walked in, I high-fived a couple kids, and I sat down into my awning. And he looks at me, and he goes, what was that? And I said, what do you mean? And he's like, you know, you're happy. You're high-fiving. What was that? I said, oh, they're just my friends. And he looks at me, and he goes, the only friend you need is me. There's no other friend. There's no friends out there on the track. honestly I just came from Australia where we're racing then we come off on our scooters we're running around we're having fun you know and then you know racing and obviously it's fully competitive but it wasn't to that aspect so it was a big wake up and the realm to get there and then climbed up Formula 4, Formula 3, Formula 2 and then was a reserve driver in 2024 for the Alpine team and then mid-year July they signed for the three years.

51:20That's great. How important was the sim during that time? Did it become more important throughout that early part of your racing career when you're kind of moving up the ranks or was it important the entire time? It's important the entire time I guess. The simulators we have are obviously at home or to an extent on a junior level are very obviously on low caliper. When you're a reserve driver, you're doing the sim overnight on your Saturdays. So you're typically at the track on a Friday. You do the first free practice session, the free practice session two, and then you'll fly back to the factory, do the simulator from, let's say, 6 p.m.

52:01till 3 a.m. So all of the things they want to try throughout Friday that they weren't able to go and try overnight because they have curfews. So they obviously can't, then the engineers can't keep working towards you. You're working overnight. And then I'd get in, you know, a transfer, head straight to the airport and then head back to the track to sort of deliver this and more in a driver's perspective rather than just engineering feedback that's been delivered. So it's very rare. So you're not flying commercial in that situation, right? Yeah, unfortunately, yeah. I feel like I'm 6 '0.5". I mean, it's just crazy because it seems like a pretty tight window, you know, you're going to the factory, getting on the sim, getting off, headed straight to the airport.

52:50But then I imagine you're arriving shortly before the race on Sunday, right? Yeah, it just means not great or let's say preferable flat times and then options of sleep. but it's weird like you dread it and then you get like you're 12, you're midnight, you're 1am it's tough and then you sort of then push through your coffees deep, you're also doing some cool things and you enjoy it, you know, definitely after a while and it's not you know, it doesn't become, you know, you get some bad time zones like when you're doing you're in the UK, you're doing for Australia or you're in well the Sims are always in the UK you're in Mexico, some weird places where you're having to do some very strange time zones.

53:34It's Brian Johnson's nightmare so literally no there's no good life therapy there so uh i mean throughout this whole process you're also uh learning about technology i'm sure meeting people thinking about the company uh what is your uh workflow like what is your free time does it track with seasons does it track with certain days of the week do you have downtime where it just doesn't make sense to put any more time on the tracker in the simulator and so you do have free time like what is the work-life balance like as you're sort of grinding up the ranks i imagine it's pretty full tilt but you obviously had a little bit of time to think about what was next yeah exactly i like to think about it now because i went from that being being my full my full life um and you had very little time off in the sense of every one of your spare days was a marketing day or was a media day or as a partnership day and then if you did have then a free day then it was more time on the sim or doing more correlation and not doing effectively you'll be going back to maybe a race six six races ago and redoing things with what you have now and how that's changed and then we had time off that was off right it was fully just like you know you're completely done um when now i'm i'm reserved driver for Haas this year doing 10 races um it's you know what'll be what'll be with what might happen but i'm very limited on the control that i have on getting back into the car sure um So I'm not, you know, I'm not, they only have X amount of time with simulators.

55:02I'm not on the sim. I'm currently not testing. So when I'm here or if I'm off, and as I guess you are, when you're in this world, it's never fully off, right? Even if you are on the weekends or away, you're constantly still taking that 2 a.m. call. You're still, you know, working through things. There's still communication going on. So it was quite a difference. You didn't have any flat-out commitments of these partnership days, nine to six and here to there. but you're still you know you're constantly doing something is is part of what uh attracted you to entrepreneurship is um like i feel like the the challenge in formula one uh there's only you know in entrepreneurship you're getting like no's all the time and and you're and you're sometimes you get an opportunity sometimes you don't uh but in formula one you're like almost entirely reliant there's like a set number of teams on the grid there's a lot of stuff that's out of your control whereas in entrepreneurship there's a lot of stuff that's out of control but if you get a no from one customer or one investor or a hire you want to make there's always like another one and you can keep working towards where i feel like every day as an athlete it can be very frustrating where you're like i'm doing everything that i possibly can and yet i'm reliant on these external parties in order to push my career forward does that does that resonate at all yeah massively i think even even once you're a formula one driver and you can be in a you can always for sale in essence right like you know maybe not depending there might not be any buyers that are able to compete with with the ticket size that you're sitting on but there's never a certainty right at the end of the day you're an employee you're still contracted and you can be fired yes that can happen in entrepreneur states if your CEO founder it depends on your structure how you you know at what stage things are at but I definitely want to be like I said more in in control.

56:50And I've been through, you know, although I'm young, I'm not super young anymore, but still young and being through quite a lot of, let's say, networking and navigating different realms, whether it is, you know, whether it's, you know, trying to source a client and they're in a specific region. For essence, the old CEO of the Alpine Formula One team didn't really read the media, didn't watch the news, but he just specifically had a little newspaper for his local town in Italy that he always read each morning. So I ensured that, you know, what I was doing in my testing and my work that was getting correlated was made sure that it was published in that specific newspaper.

57:28And it's the same thing if you're trying to, you know, target a market in MENA or in India, the Philippines that are overlooked on the West, you know, by, let's say, West innovation or other technology and looking at things from a different perspective. I think these are all like aspects that I've learned that sort of tried to target, have a different scope on things that I wouldn't have known at all. So tell us more about Muse and tell me specifically, like why this company? Like what was the what was the opportunity discovery moment? Yeah, I think, you know, what I wanted to do was solving like a little bit of the fragmentation issue for your, you know, non, let's say, high enterprise institutions that they have everything aggregated, have these things that are together in order to then implement and optimize AI.

58:22So I didn't really know where that was. It was quite horizontal of that factor, especially targeting your, like I said, your, let's say, lower-served countries, whether South America, Brazil, India, Philippines, where things are more fragmented, Indonesia. And our first contract came actually in the food and beverage space with Oakberry, which is an acai company. and it was an extreme eye-opener of how many systems that they run on, how they don't communicate, how things are just not tracked, obviously, over three, four days because your inputters, your tracking sources are 17, 18-year-old kids.

59:04Whether it's an Oakberry or whether it's a QSR, your employees that you're managing and that you're relying on to track all this reliable data that you end up will be having automated or optimized was done by someone who doesn't really want to be there, who is checking in at the latest point and is checking out at the earliest point and things are not being done with, let's say, top-level accuracy. So that's where we wanted to really tie it down and thought if we're going to try to do many other things, especially in this realm, it's so important to find that trust. And so we really wanted to niche down and capture one vertical properly.

59:41And as we could dive into it, you just get further and further into the rabbit hole of finding your niche, right, and getting into the area where you really want to solve. And it went from, okay, supporting on agents for, you know, your POS systems or inventory or waste, your invoicing, and then finding that none of this can be optimized until these are communicating because each QSR system is using between 16 to 80 different software systems, you know, can be very, very large. They're all third parties. And none of them obviously are coerced. None of them communicate. all this data is fragmented.

1:00:15So no AI agent, let's say, or AI is going to be strong on proprietary data unless it has access to all of it at one time. And your big institutions, your Burger King, your restaurant-printed international, and Donald's are very tech-forward. They have their own agents, but they're only accessing many queries, maybe staff training. And because in order to aggregate all of that data, it would mean, you know, shutting some part of that system down to do it. Is it hard to get companies to pay for this? I feel like a lot of the traction in SMB, restaurant, it's driven by the POS system, like toast, because you just take a small cut of the credit card fee.

1:00:55And it's sort of like this invisible cost that then can scale really dynamically. but if you're going in and you're saying, I'm going to sell a solution, like how are you justifying actually getting someone to open up and put down a credit card or pay for a recurring service, which I imagine is the business model. Yeah, definitely. No, it's, it's not easy on the aspect of you think you come in and you're trying to sell something that is, Oh, this is better than what you can't have. Right. We're going to replace it. They get pitched. How many tech, you know, tech software has daily emails coming through that.

1:01:27what we have is better than what you have. Use us and not them. We have a great AI agent for F &B, both. You know, for us, no one's got a good AI agent until it's operating on the data. But what we're trying to operate is it's like headless as default, right? It's an underlying layer that is almost super good. So in essence, AI cloud systems, whether you want to call it a company brain, where it's unifying all their current systems into one aggregated location, which then if they're not optimizing AI, as long as we have at least three months of that data, you know, up towards three years, then we're able to, you know, really act and create for that.

1:02:05Or if it's your larger companies who have already an agent with Burger King, BK Assistant or others, then you're feeding this, let's say, aggregated and orchestrated data to this agent, which before they're all individual third-party softwares and now they're in one hub which can be orchestrated. They're all communicating together and you're actually going to get that optimization. Got it. So it's much easier to sell like that than actually saying this platform is going to replace what you have, let's say. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Last question. How's the grid reacting to the Luce? The Luce?

1:02:43The Ferrari Luce, the new electric vehicle from Ferrari. He's still locked in. He's like, Luce, what? $640 ,000 US. It's a steal. Yeah, I feel like I was having a dessert for a second. Something like that. It does sound like that. No, I think, look, I'm with Haas. We have a relationship. We're riding a Ferrari engine, so I think it's amazing. It looks terrific. It's unbelievable.

1:03:16Couldn't agree more. Cannot bless it more, I'm sure. We'll chat about that more, Jordy. But guys, I'm sure that's my time. So it's great to be on the show. Yeah, so great to meet you. I love the energy and the focus. And let's do it again soon. Yeah, we'll talk. Great to meet you, Jack. Awesome, boys. Have a good one. Cheers. Let me tell you all about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. You heard it from Jack. I think our next guest is joining in just a minute.

1:03:54But in the meantime, we can talk about the AI executive order. This was signed today by the president. And Dean Ball has some context here. He says, wow, this EO is almost exactly similar to the leaked text from the EO the president chose not to sign because it was too regulatory. The only major difference is that the voluntary pre-deployment review process is now only 30 days rather than 90 days. that's a concession but a very small one compared to what I would have expected based on the president's remarks about the earlier draft. So if you haven't been following along, AI companies will be able to voluntarily submit their new models to the U.S.

1:04:33government for review. Now the government will get back to them in 30 days as opposed to 90 days, evaluate them and make a call or give advice or give some sort of commentary. Every word that comes from the government is a potential lawsuit in the future. And so, or will show up in health potential lawsuit. And so you can expect a lot of thought and care given to whatever the government responds to. A lot of government applications from the FDA previously, the response would be no comment. And no comment is tacit approval. The FDA, with some products, with a lot of nutritional supplements and food ingredients, they don't necessarily want to say, this is FDA approved, because that's a very high bar.

1:05:20There's a lot of regulatory and risk and legal ramifications from approving something. But they can decline to comment. They can decline to not permit the company to move forward. And I would expect that even a small result, like we sent them their model, they reviewed it for 30 days, and they didn't say it was bad, will be a good signal for AI labs that submit through this process. So, but Dean Ball continues, he says, this is a fairly major win for the safety contingent within the admin and a significant loss for the SAC's accelerationist wing and is surprising to me. I continue to think this EO is a mistake.

1:06:01This is clearly teeing up the infrastructure for a model licensing regime. And the fact that the administration is classifying the details of how this voluntary system will work is egregious. So everyone wants to know, what are they going to be evaluating? Are they going to be doing, you know, RKGI tests or some other benchmark or humanities last exam or just red teaming it or just talking to it? Who knows? It's classified. Everyone is interested to know. Dean Ball is certainly interested to know. But we don't know yet, but maybe in the future. The public, he continues, the public and the employees of the labs have a right to know how this works.

1:06:38It is very frustrating when you're interacting with the federal government and you don't know their rubric for grading you. That is one of the most frustrating pieces of going back and forth with the regulatory body. It's best when there's a very clear test for the DMV. You show up. If you know the answers to the questions, you get a driver's license. If you don't, if they were like, we test you on a mystery, Gru Brick, that would be very frustrating for anyone looking for a driver's license. He continues, most lab staff don't have clearances, but some do. But if the literal regulatory thresholds that trigger pre-deployment review or classified researchers themselves won't know whether what they are training is regulated by this EO, all for the benefit that is barely articulable.

1:07:21What exactly is the intelligence community going to do in 30 days to make the model safer? I don't know. There's a lot of tests you could run in 30 days. Try and hack this thing. Try and design a bioweapon. These are things people are worried about. In 30 days, you can certainly get these models to attempt those and see how they respond. He says, it's not a huge mistake, but a small, medium-sized one. But I am fairly confident this is a mistake nonetheless. Well, we will dig into it more in the future. But our next guest is here in the waiting room. We have Nate Kavanaugh from Special. He is the co-founder.

1:07:52Welcome to the show. Both of you, please introduce yourselves and tell us about the company. Hey, guys. Good to see you. I appreciate you having us. Yeah, great to have you on. Yeah, my name is Nate Kavanaugh. Justin Fox is my co-founder on the line. Today we were excited to announce Special, which is a new holding company that we really view as an extension of the work we did at Doge. So Justin and I worked together at the Department of Government Efficiency for the past year. But we're now building effectively Doge, but for the private sector. And so we're focused on this$10 trillion Main Street services economy, which in many ways is like the federal government.

1:08:32It's massive, it's inefficient. And in a lot of cases, it's still funded in part, at least by the government. And so we announced that today and excited to chat with you guys about it. Do you have a particular industry that you want to focus on? Do you want to be general? I mean, I see this loosely in the bucket of management consulting, delayering, understanding efficiencies. There's a tried and true track record. I'm interested to hear how you're differentiating from other management consulting firms that might already be doing some of this work for large companies. But then also I'm interested to know where you're focusing, where you see the most opportunity.

1:09:07Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, the main point of differentiation is there's two components to special business model. So special is developing a set of AI tools that we can apply to these main street industries. We're starting with healthcare and more specifically a bet on the aging population demographic of the US. And so we've identified that as our first vertical. We're actually incubating a new brand to become category leader and we're going out and acquiring these great independent small businesses and applying those AI tools into the businesses that then we will own forever. Just to guess, are these Medicare-related businesses?

1:09:43A hospital or a primary care or an urgent care? What are we actually talking about in terms of healthcare? The specific market is at-home senior care. So it would be a nurse going to a senior citizen's house, provide them with care in the home. It's the lowest cost way to provide care for senior citizens in the country. I'm sure you guys have seen there's a lot of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. We're focused on trying to provide the nurses, the critical workers in these industries with the best AI tools so that they can provide better care for seniors. And there's probably a lot of back office work that goes into scheduling and all of those things can be enhanced with AI tools, I imagine.

1:10:18That's exactly right. Jordy? Yeah, why a hold co? I'm curious. Like this feels like health care is like, you know, multi trillion dollar industry. Startup, focused on this one thing. You guys, it sounds like you have a playbook that you feel like can be applied across different categories, but is healthcare not big enough for you guys? Justin, you want to take this? Yeah, look, first of all, it's great to be with you guys today. Look, I think, you know, with special at the top ParentCo and developing these AI tools, I think, you know, to limit sort of the expertise that we've learned from Doge and from prior careers to just healthcare, I think would be narrow.

1:10:58You know, the point of having the parent co with engineering talent is that we can deploy into multiple verticals. And so, I mean, as you can imagine, the Main Street economy is massive. And so if we're just going to address healthcare, I think that's too narrow. And frankly, there's so many independent business owners that we're looking to problem solve for. So Nate alluded to it, but, you know, Figure is going to be, or figure is our newly incubated strategic brand in healthcare. And so that brand is going to inevitably be carrying the torch for these business owners through development of AI.

1:11:34So we're going to be working hand in hand in the weeds with these operators to develop the tools that they need to succeed. How do you think about the size of a company that you want to acquire and fold in? Obviously, there's some organizations that have already been sort of rolled up they're large they're private there's probably public companies that you could do a take private of at the biggest scale there's also uh probably very small businesses with owner operators who might be getting older looking for liquidity like what is in your strike zone yeah it's a great question i mean today we announced our new financing led by injuries and horowitz and a lot of our dutch teammates guys like steve davis antonio gracias we and we in that same announcement uh announced our first acquisition that's under contract it's a it's a business that's doing, we'll say, tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

1:12:20They have about 1 ,500 senior patients that they care for and about 200 nurses on the payroll. So it's a pretty big business based in Texas. And we have a pipeline of others that we plan to do. So I'd say it's a business where it already has some management sophistication and some real scale, but is not at the scale of doing a public take private. Out of curiosity, how like is there significant like how significant is the back office like opex because i imagine like you know seniors want to be cared for by individuals i imagine they don't want to just like jump on a zoom call and get care that way um so it is is uh is this a play that you think you can use ai to grow the business much faster and you feel like there's a significant sort of back office savings?

1:13:12Or like, where do you think you'll get the most return? Justin, go ahead. Yeah, look, I think what we're not suggesting is that a robot is going to replace a nurse in grandma's home. That's not at all the case here. Look, I think, you know, when we think about the delivery of service, you know, if that takes up about 50 % of the costs to pay your nurses, there's something like 40 % of the remaining dollars are getting spent on a lot of administrative tasks that can be solved with AI. And so our view, the way that we think about it at Figure is, let's make the jobs of our back office team members easier.

1:13:52And instead of what maybe a traditional PE or strategic would do, which is pocket those savings and market a huge margin accretion, let's share those savings with our workers. So one of the things that's unique about this space is there's a massive shortage of nurses and caregivers. And so to the extent that you can be in a market and be able to pay your team the most, everybody will flood into your business. And so then you can provide care for the millions of Americans who sometimes don't have access to it. So that's the underlying thesis. I think it's share the pie, grow the pie with everybody.

1:14:22It'll help you grow and deliver better service. And Jordan, to your point, this is the playbook that we plan to replicate across not just healthcare, but markets like construction, manufacturing other very labor intensive highly regulated markets that a lot of learnings we have from doge can then get applied back into the private sector yeah more leverage on the key workers that are doing the most important tasks the things that are actually aligned with the mission and more efficient back offices sense you guys sticking with a five-day work week it's been a hot debate i got a feeling you guys might be putting in a few more hours I don't think we're as we're somewhere between five days and Corgi I think is a that feels healthy that feels sustainable just sort of tattoos never go full tattoo exactly congratulations and thank you so much yeah thanks for coming on guys congrats on the raise and I'm sure you'll be back on with more news soon have a great rest of your day guys thanks cheers Up next we have Tom Mueller from Impulse Space.

1:15:26He's the founder, CEO, and CTO. Two job titles? Three job titles? We're very excited to have Tom Mueller back on the show. He's been on the floor, but great to see you. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Great to see you guys. First question, Ferrari Luce reactions. What you got? What do I got? What do I have? Ferrari Luce reactions. Ferrari Luce. the electric Ferrari. It's coming out$640 ,000. Do you think it's underpriced, overpriced? What do you think? Overpriced for that styling. It is an odd positioning. But it got everyone talking. I'll keep my F40. I think the F40 is going to hold value.

1:16:09I don't think it's going to be an F40 disruptor. Not many people trading those in. Anyway, we're not here to talk about Ferrari. We're here to talk about impulse space. Can you reset the table for us? reintroduce the company give us the news tell us what's happening and then i have a million questions about the space broadly but let's kick it off with that and pull space i started this company five years ago it's uh space mobility night success which basically means that um we take over where launch leaves off yeah so um we move things around in space so starting starting at leo we move things up to to geo like 20 up to 22 000 miles up we can you know take things to the to the moon we can greatly increase the amount of payloads you can take to mars um we have our mirror spacecraft three of those are flying uh right now and a bunch are in build those things uh do precision maneuvering in orbit they can host payloads they can deploy payloads they can do rendezvous we are hope hopefully we'll get um on ramped onto the the new lunar um cargo uh program and do some big, some ton, one ton class lunar landers.

1:17:23It's a lot happening right now. I can imagine. So there's been so much excitement about LEO, Starlink, Planet Labs. You put a camera up there. You put a Wi-Fi router up there, basically. Not to simplify it too much, but even VARDA manufacturing LEO. Like so much of the attention has been on Leo that I think a lot of people have sort of lost the reference classes for what happens in higher orbits. Can you give us some examples of what's interesting at higher orbits, whether that's Middle Earth orbit, I think. Is that what it's called? MEO? Yeah, MEO. Middle Earth is just hilarious because it's a Lord of the Rings reference.

1:18:00But MEO, GEO, I understand geostationary orbits are sometimes useful, but give us the 101 on why someone would be unsatisfied with just YOLOing endless satellites into LEO in perpetuity. Well, the nice thing about GEO, you know, is where really ComSat started, is that you can cover the whole Earth with just three satellites. That's right. Right. And of course, geosynchronous means or geostationary means that it's a 24 hour orbit. So you're you're always looking at the same point in the sky. Super important. Still an important orbit. It's kind of been overshadowed by all the LEO launches, but there's still, you know, a dozen launches or more that go to that orbit.

1:18:47It's becoming more important of an orbit for the Space Force. There's a lot happening up there Yeah, that I don't even know about I don't have to need to know but there's a lot going on up there and You know, but our adversaries China and Russia are maneuvering around our satellites up there So we need to we need to go to have mobility to go up there and and defend and find out what's going on and be able to protect our assets so we have we have the capability to get to geo obviously there are satellites currently in geo you mentioned there's maybe a dozen launches that sounded annual like maybe something like that going up there so we have the capability like the rockets exist but it's uneconomical and so the the value problem impulse just to say it back to you is get on a rocket that's going to leo but end up in geo and not and you don't need to pull all of those resources and so you're sort of unlocking geo based on all of the Leo capability that we have in spades is that right?

1:19:49Yeah, so what we're talking about here is our Helios product Which is what we call a rocket on a rocket. We add basically a third stage to a Falcon 9 It's got 12 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid methane very high performance a pump-fed stage combustion engine and it can get you from Leo to Geo in a day so it basically helps Falcon 9 do what Falcon Heavy does yeah for tens of millions of dollars less or for an example of a you know commercial guys usually don't fly on Heavy they'll they'll fly Falcon 9 and then they'll spend months using electric propulsion to get to where they want to get we'll get you there I didn't realize that.

1:20:31I didn't realize that was an option. That's so interesting. I'll have to research more of that. I'm fascinated by that. But talk to me about how Starship changes things for you. Is that an accelerant for you? I mean, you're raising a$500 million Series D. I can imagine. And you worked at SpaceX, obviously, for a very long time. I imagine that that's not a nail in the coffin. That's not a threat. But I imagine it's a benefit. But how is it a benefit? because the intuitive, you know, the layperson might think, bigger rocket, that'll get me to geo easily. Why do I need impulse now? So talk to me about how Starship fits into the future of the space economy.

1:21:07I mean, Starship is going to be the ultimate Leo, you know, cargo ship. Workload, yeah, cargo ship. Yeah, because it doesn't need to refuel. yeah um get to leo it can get to leo and be fully reusable come back and fuel and go again yeah so it's going to greatly reduce the cost uh per kilogram or per ton to get um to get cargo to to orbit and that's that's why i started the company basically because i worked on starship you know last six years i was there realizing that now we have such an efficient way like i mentioned at the beginnings launch is solved now we need to figure out how to move all that cargo around once it's up in orbit of course starship can refuel and go to these high energy orbits but i think it's gonna be more efficient if you need starship there that's what you need to do like if like if you're taking cargo to the moon or humans to the moon or to mars that's the right thing but if i don't know that it's the right thing if you don't actually need the starship up there because if you think about a starship's 120 tons of stainless steel you got to bring up there and then you got to bring it back to get it back so it comes uh we'll see how that how the economics work out okay how did uh how did uh the space sort of like founder uh startup community react to blue origin obviously you know massive setback and disappointing uh hopefully for all humanity i don't think anybody was cheering that on it's i mean it's obviously bad for industry on launches you know is still constrained even though spacex is flying so often there's just so many payloads that need to go that we need all of them to be successful and i think it's been mentioned many times spacex is not going to lower their price until they have a true competitor and we need true competitors to come online it's happening but um you know these setbacks delay it yeah what uh what have you heard around how big of a setback it actually is is this setting the program.

1:23:10Actually, Dave Lemp, the CEO, just I think last night tweeted that they think it's not as bad as it initially looked, and they think they can fly again this year, which is great news. Yeah, I was looking at the aerial photography of the launchpad, and the headline was, billion-dollar launchpad, the only one they have, completely destroyed, but some of the buildings looked pretty usable. I was optimistic, so I'm glad to hear that Dave Lemp is is sharing some optimism there as well. I would love for you to sort of walk me through some of the trade-offs and economic considerations about getting to the moon, because we just saw with the Artemis launch that a single rocket seemed to be able to just fly right up there, come back.

1:23:55And then when I see the Starship plan, I'm like, it's as big or bigger rocket. It should just be able to go straight there. But then when I see the actual plans, It's like seven different refueling stages and it seems much more complicated And it seems like you have the ability to potentially get to the moon with certain plans And so it feels like there's an ensemble approach. There's different trade-offs Like what is the logic as we try and get to the moon more regularly? How will this actually play out? Yeah, I think, you know, there's two ways to do it. You use a large partially reusable where you throw away those upper stages and take a lander to the moon.

1:24:36That's kind of the Blue Origin approach. Or there's a fully reusable with multiple refueling to get there and back, which is the SpaceX approach. But what we do with Helios is sort of the former. We're adding this expendable third stage, and now we can 10x the amount of payload on a Falcon 9 to the moon. So imagine that lever. Like you basically, for the same cost of the launch vehicle, but a little bit more for the Helios, you're getting 10 times the amount of cargo. And we've looked at missions to Mars where we get five times the payload to Mars just by adding a Helios. So it's a huge leverage.

1:25:15It's going to be a really compelling product when it starts flying. It's already selling really well. I think once it starts flying, we won't be able to make them fast enough. So you have the money raised. what are you actually working on in terms of creating reliable manufacturing, your supply chain? Because I imagine that it's not enough to build one prototype, a few prototypes, something hand-built. That might be something you're experimenting with in the early stages, but the name of the game is industrial capacity here. What do the next few years look like in terms of scale? Yeah, wrapping up production.

1:25:51We're hiring more people, and we're hiring a lot of people in the production area, manufacturing engineers, technicians, all kinds of people now. Where earlier in the company's history, we were mostly hiring a lot of development engineers. So now we're really getting into production on our products. And we just moved into, or starting to move into, a much larger facility here. So we're filling that out with production capability. and we're always um the same thing that we did at spacex we're constantly um uh bringing more things in house like getting becoming even more vertically integrated okay vertical integration takes a lot of capital which is why we've raised a lot um but it once you vertically integrated you have a huge advantage we see that we see this with with spacex able to able to execute very quickly very efficiently at low cost.

1:26:45Basically, you can control cost, schedule, and quality if you're vertically integrated. And take me through the shape of that vertical integration. Are you buying like two bending machines, CNC machines, 3D printers? What is the shape of vertical integration? Are you building like specific machinery that will just make one product over and over and over again? i mean that's the tooling part of it but certainly you know milling machines lathes 3d printers um and uh building out test capability um so like raw materials in and you get the finished product eventually yeah you know you bring in raw material and spacecraft come out the other end of the factory i love it uh what do you think the impact of the spacex ipo will be on the space economy broadly, talking about maybe people that have been there for a decade, maybe ready to do something new.

1:27:42How do you think it'll impact the industry? Well, certainly the space economy has been accelerating since the time that I've started this company a lot. And I think that's just really the general effect of SpaceX and other startups have on the industry. And now with the announcement, it's just supercharged in the space industry, which is great. And I love what Elon's talking about building, you know, basically he's talking about building megastructures now in space, you know, millions of AI servers in space. And he's already talking about using the resources of the moon in order to build when they max out what they can launch.

1:28:23And this is the theme of my company is like this is something I've talked about a lot is you need to use the resources of the moon to build these megastructures in space because it's going to be destructive to the Earth to launch it from Earth or grab it from Earth. Or in the case of compute power, the amount of compute power we're going to need in the next 30 years as it's growing at 15 percent annually is just crushing. So moving that to space is the obvious thing in the long term. I'm glad to see it's happening. Sooner. Seems like you're excited about both the moon and Mars. Yeah. Elon was like a Mars maxi for a long time.

1:29:02Now he's interested in the moon. It's been exciting. I'm obviously excited about both. But what is different about these two missions? Obviously, the moon's closer, but like what's uniquely unlocked by the moon? Why is the moon important? Why do you see Mars as important as well? Obviously, you should never stop. I hope you wind up going to Alpha Centauri. soon but but but let's just uh narrow in on moon and mars what are the unique opportunities what are the risks what are the trade-offs yeah i've always been uh more of a moon person myself i think the more important in near term uh it's it's easier to have a permanent base there and i think everything we need to build in space is on the moon the metals you know water um you know oxygen Everything we need to be self-sufficient of building megastructures of space is there.

1:29:56And I would also add near-Earth objects. Some of them are easier to get to than the moon. Mars is super important. What's a near-Earth object that's closer? Are there secret planets? Is that there you know about? It's a near-Earth asteroid. Okay. Near-Earth asteroid. Yeah. The thing about the moon is it still has a gravity well. you know we talk we talk in kilometers per second yeah earth has a gravity well of like nine kilometers per second and the moon has a gravity well like two two point four okay but it still have you still that's a lot of propulsion to to to break onto the moon at 2.4 and then come back you're talking five kilometers per second total that's a lot of delta v and you got to bring that with you yeah you got to bring the propellant to do that yeah that's why the moon is is still pretty tough whereas a small asteroid is you know this is meters per second maybe you're centimeters per second because the gravity is so low so you don't have to um to to use all that propellant in order to get there and back so and those meteors uh i'm not trying to quiz you on something that you might not have dug into but i'm fascinated are these like meteors that are just passing by and the whole point is that they pass by regularly enough that we could go up and back or are there actual meteors that are like orbiting the earth right now that i don't know about there are i mean there are i think there's one right now right that's these things get temporarily captured okay orbit and then they eventually run the table and they get thrown out like the moon will throw them out or something yeah yeah but there's you know there's most of them are you know further than the moon yeah but once you escape earth's gravity it just takes time to get there but but you don't have a gravity well once you once you get there to get the material to come back but the moon the moon is easier and just that you have surface gravity and you know and a nice surface you can land on and build on so i think the moon moon is super important also yeah uh sorry drew do you have something here uh not right now i i i i can keep going um i i'm interested in i'm interested in the in uh both the footprint of the company you mentioned you're expanding i know uh the original headquarters is in el segundo correct yeah i still have that little building over in el segundo we started a little 7 000 square foot building but i imagine you've outgrown so what what is the footprint of the company what uh what's the workforce like today where do you see that going what are you hiring for this feels like a great company to join if you're you know uncertain about how ai will change the world well we're going to be shooting rockets for 30 years as you said we have a lot of work to do so this feels like a fantastic opportunity for folks yeah yeah so like i mentioned we started in a 7 000 square foot garage people call it over over there we've we maxed that out and then we moved into the um our facility we had an interim that's about 60 000 square feet and we just acquired another 240 000 square feet uh on the same basically at the other end of the block that we're just starting to build out.

1:32:58We've got 500 employees right now. We just passed 500 a few weeks ago. And we've got 200 open job racks. So we're hiring. That is fantastic. Take me through the shape of the... There we go. Hiring 200 people. That's serious. Take me through the shape of those job racks. Are you hiring software engineers? Are you using AI everywhere? Are you hiring everything? like i mentioned earlier we're hiring a lot in the production area okay um we're you know we're we're hiring uh software uh people uh just i mean we're a spacecraft company um we we do you know we have to do comms we have to you know we have radios we have antennas we have reaction wheels all kinds of stuff lots of avionics lots of propulsion lots of structures lots of software to control it there's you know no such thing as being a tech company without software to operate your hardware.

1:33:57So all of the above. Guidance, navigation, and control. Orbital mechanics. I'm a rocket scientist. I don't understand most orbital mechanics. That's really tough stuff. Super smart guys that figure out how to navigate in space. All of the above. That's great. Awesome. We have a gong. We'd love to hit it in your honor. Tell us about the fundraise. You raised$500 million from 137 Ventures. There we go. We love Christian. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a fantastic rest of your week. Yeah, great stuff, Thomas. We'll catch up with you soon. Congrats on the progress. Thank you, guys.

1:34:35Goodbye. Thank you so much. OpenAI announced that they're breaking ground on Stargate, Michigan, a one gigawatt data center utilizing closed-loop cooling, and they're getting out ahead of the water, the water FUD. They say it uses water at the rate of a typical office building, creates thousands of union jobs. Not an office building that I'm in. No, I know you're drinking a lot of water. You're not drinking tap water. You're bringing in the glass bottled water, potentially. The Rora water. The Rora's getting thousands of gallons a day. AI pivot for Rora? Filtering the water that goes into the data center?

1:35:13Make sure it's clean for the GPU? I'm sure that there's a water filtering system. I'm sure that there's a water filtering system in these data centers. In other OpenAI news. What else is going on? And there's now sites in Codex. You can turn work ideas, plans into interactive websites or apps. Your team can explore, use, and share. This is very cool. This is what you asked for the first time you ever tried Codex. It was my benchmark, my hello world test. Can I go on my phone into any of these AI apps and have it generate me a link to a website that I can share with a friend? because I can generate a big deep dive text thread and I can share that link with someone.

1:35:56They can go in the app and see what I've been texting back and forth. That's very useful. You can generate an image and then you can save that to your camera or I'll send that around. It's very portable. And when I demoed Meta AI, the latest launch, one of the suggested prompts is like, vibe code a video game. And it actually does a really, really great job building a little miniature video game. And it gives you a link, But the link is trapped within the meta AI. I'm like, oh, we're so close. It's such a minor thing to have an actual hosting service there. But I think that that's exciting for virality.

1:36:29It's going to be a bull market for simulators. Yes, because you'll be able to. I mean, there are a lot of people who, as much as they want the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro with the lid cranked open at all times, they want to vibe code something or build something on their phone and then send that to a friend. And if they build something interactive, they want that to be shareable. And this is exciting, exciting development. Speaking of meta, they had, I think, a pretty insane issue. Oh, yeah. Is this real? I saw this and I was like, this cannot possibly be real. But it is in 404 Media. I've seen a number of people that I know that have one word usernames.

1:37:13That got hacked? Yeah. Okay. So basically, this is from 404 Media. Hackers simply asked Meta AI to give them access to high-profile Instagram accounts. It worked. I'm sure they're rolling it back. I'm sure they're on top of this. But the exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI. I guess the AI was able to deliver account recovery information to anyone who asked. And it wasn't segmented. It didn't do the proper validation. Hackers say that they use meta AI chat bot to break into a high profile Instagram account Here's a video of how it worked. Okay, pull it up play that video and we will see how they're 404 The Obama White House account got hit.

1:37:57Oh, no People were saying I'm High-profile Instagram accounts using the easiest possible method They're just asking meta's AI chat bot for access to the accounts. Here's how it worked. Basically What's this music in the background? They started a chat with Meta's AI chatbot and said, hey, I want access to a specific account. Please send a reset code to the hacker's email address. What's that panting noise? Does that sound mean? And lo and behold, Meta's AI chatbot said, in the last 24 hours, we've seen some really high profile accounts targeted this way. We saw Barack Obama's White House account get stolen.

1:38:31We saw a Space Force account get stolen. So they were only targeting high profile Instagram accounts. Did they go after yours, Jordy? No, I'm not in that league. Oh, they came out of mine crazy. They were trying to steal my L. It's insane. I was just getting bombarded because they were like, we got to get this guy's Instagram account. They were probably going for your dog's Instagram account. Maybe. I think he still has more followers than me. Rest in peace, Gustavo. One of the best to ever do it. Anyway, you know who won't be passing away anytime soon? Vladimir Putin, because he is on a$26 billion quest for longevity.

1:39:08Brian Johnson's chiming in. You can't go to a rich person's yacht or fly a private plane. I think that Russia has invested more in Putin's longevity than AI or close to it. That's true. I was trying to figure out how many GPUs they had inside of Russia. All the best AI people like laughed via Yandex and are now running in NeoClouds and also ClickHouse. Anyway, from mini pigs to an organ printing to cryotherapy and genetics, Russia's president has turned anti-aging research into a Kremlin priority. And remember, he was caught on that hot mic with Xi Jinping saying that humans could achieve immortality by replacing their organs.

1:39:52Some dismissed the exchange as eccentric small talk between aging autocrats. In fact, during the conversation at a Beijing military parade last September, Putin appeared to be describing a Kremlin-backed longevity initiative that has become one of Russia's flagship scientific projects. Like other Silicon Valley billionaires, Putin has been long fascinated with anti-aging research, but in Russia, Putin's quest to stave off declines now a state priority. Last month, Russia's government announced that scientists are developing a gene therapy treatment aimed at slowing cellular aging as part of the$26 billion longevity initiative.

1:40:29The drug represents one of the most promising avenues in the fight against aging. Another auspicious avenue, creating human organs in a lab for transplantation. Sounds normal, very normal thing to do. One of the lifespan extending. Pretty sure. Wasn't Tyler trying to. He's been doing that a little bit. We always say, hey, knock it off, Tyler. Knock it off. Breeding the human organs. All these efforts are part of a national longevity initiative he unveiled in 2024, which promises to save 175 ,000 lives by the end of the decade. That's great. Russian state scientists appointed by Putin have focused on two key areas, bioprinting or 3D printing living tissue and xeno transplantation or growing human organs inside mini pigs what if the next what if the next you know longevity hack comes from the mosquito and we kill them all and it's like oh all you need to do is get a blood transfusion from a mosquito it's the next deal twice as long yeah the next glp1 potentially you gotta be careful about these knock-on effects who knows well i think the conspiracy theorists would would say that some humans already discovered the mosquitoes.

1:41:36One simple trick. Yeah? What's that? Drinking blood. Oh, yeah. Weird. Russian scientists are working with government agencies to claim that they have bioprinted human cartilage tissue. That seems doable, maybe. And a mouse thyroid gland with the aim of achieving human organ replacement by 2030. They're trying to grow organs inside pigs. And the Russian Federation work is underway on a whole range of scientific programs in this field. These projects are supported by the state and many scientific and research institutions are taking part of them. It's difficult to discuss immortality, but the ability to repair man will undoubtedly increase, they told the Russian media.

1:42:16Unlike similar research funded by American tech elites, the work promoted by Putin's circle has produced little peer reviewed research in major international journals. He's keeping it to himself. He's going to live forever and not tell us how he did it. We'll see. Anyway, he's doing a cold plunge, too. So he's doing some of the some of the old stuff, some of the new stuff. The average male life expectancy in Russia is about 68 years, roughly compared to 76 in the United States. So lots of room to catch up 80 over Western Europe. The Europeans are living to 80 these days, but in Russia, just 68 years.

1:42:57So lots of room to improve health over in Russia. We'll see. We'll see what happens. Maybe they've discovered the next GLP-1. It feels like they are behind the ball on AI, and it feels like they would be potentially enhanced by having AI tools to help them alongside this. I feel like AI 2027, China wakes up this year. When is Russia waking up? I had Codex do some quick research. No evidence of anything like a blackwell-level chip, which makes sense. I don't think NVIDIA has plenty of demand. It wouldn't be selling them. Over there, they do have likely small numbers to low hundreds of H200s, potentially hundreds to low thousands of H100s, and then they have some A100s, but again, and then certainly could have some within the military that they're not talking about.

1:44:01But yeah, they're trying to get up to 10 supercomputers by 2030 is their stated ambition, each with 10 ,000. That just sounds like not a lot. They're calling everyone else's bluff. You absolutely must not dunk on any Russian oligarchs if they talk about their underfunded AI projects. I will not. I will not. You must abstain because you can have some fun witty banter with the president of France. But I do not want you to draw the ire of the Kremlin at any point in time. I respect their supercomputers. I respect them. They're doing great. Seems like it's on track. Good job, everyone over there. You're doing great.

1:44:53Really, really good. AGI, definitely on the same timeline as every other country. We have to pull up this video. We have our next guest. in the waiting room, but first we have to play this video from Jensen Wong because the gamers are rising up and Nvidia is delivering a AI chip, four laptops, four PCs, super computers at home, AI agents at home. It's in section K. He was on stage and he had a very funny quote. I want you to listen to this, Jordy. The new 007 game, I'm looking forward to playing it. I look a little bit like him. Look at this, isn't that hilarious? He just, he just. a little bit like it.

1:45:31They're going to blow out. It's going to be a blowout quarter. That's the funniest bit. He's playing like, he's like, this laptop has fours on it. The racing game. This laptop has the new 007 game. I look like him. It's like, I guess he's wearing a leather jacket or something. But it's just so funny to be like, I'm just fine. He's having a great quarter. It's amazing. It's such a great bit. And then he shows some other racks. But there's a lot of good, there's a lot of good stuff from NVIDIA. Why NVIDIA inside can work in the PC market. the world's only$5 trillion company can sell the concept that AI computing won't be confined to data centers.

1:46:06So he's already getting ahead of the future of on-premise AI compute local AI inference happening in your house. You get a DGX, you get a big powered PC, and it runs your lights, it runs your smart home, it runs whatever you want locally and actually can inference a near frontier model in the future. So exciting to see. I like it. I like the idea of having powerful AI that's not in the cloud, that's local. I think that that's fun. I've always been a fan of the tiny box, and this is in that vein. Yeah, and actually, I bought the property right next to your home, and I'm putting a little data center in it.

1:46:44Perfect. As long as I can throw an Ethernet cable over there. Well, we have Edward Kim from Gusto. He's the co-founder and head of technology. Welcome to the show, Edward. How are you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Thanks for hopping on. Great to have you on, and great to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you. I think I'm the third and final co-founder on your show. Third and final co-founder, that's what I was going to say. There must be one more you guys have hidden. Yeah, one of yours. No, just us three. No, just us three? Okay. Well, anyway, take us through the launch today. Tell us what's happening in Gusto world.

1:47:11Yeah, so today I'm really excited. I think it's the most important moment for us as a company since the launch of the company almost 14, 15 years ago. And we're launching today Gusto co-founder. Gutsal Co-Founder is really the first agent that can automate most of what a small business does in their back office. You guys were just talking about personal computers and I have a Mac Mini where I set up OpenClaw. It took me eight hours to set up, pain the ass. And as soon as I got through the entire setup, I didn't really know what to do with it. I still kind of use it as a glorified search engine.

1:47:50Sorry, someone on your team was waving. In the office. We're in the office here in.patch. People are still using it. It's still as a glorified search engine. And that's kind of the problem that we set out to solve with Gusto Co-Founder. Instead of starting from the technology and then giving people a blank canvas on something to do with it, what Gusto Co-Founder does is we start with all of the problems that we're already helping our customers with. payroll, benefits, HR, scheduling time, and then we bring on a lot of the power of AI into it. So at the center of Gusto Co-Founder is a concept called automations.

1:48:30And essentially, you tell us what your business processes are, starting with payroll, benefits, all these things that we're already doing for you. And Gusto Co-Founder will basically run your business process for you. You communicate with it through SMS and Slack, so you don't really even interface with it through a website. And then, of course, we'll connect to all of your systems that you're using outside of Gusto as well. So Notion, QuickBooks, Google Workspace. You have a lot of information and data that sits outside of Gusto as well. What Gusto Co-Founder does is it brings it all together into one place where it can automate your business processes.

1:49:08Why SMS and Slack? Why not a chat in your face and a Gusto app directly? Like what, what, what does that allow you? Because I think it just, I mean, I'll tell you, it just mimics exact. I mean, uh, I, I remember even with how gusto, how easy to use gusto was in 2018 when I had my first business, I was still relieved when we hired somebody whose job was just to kind of like handle everything on the payroll side. And if I needed something done, I would just text them or I would Slack them and say, Hey, Hey, can you do this thing? Or, Hey, we're, we're onboarding this person or this contractor, uh, you know, uh, we need to like make sure they get paid by this day or whatever it was.

1:49:56Uh, and so I, I just think like actually, actually making it feel like a teammate is, is, uh, getting you much closer to the experience of like people are not waking up every morning. Entrepreneurs are not waking up saying like, I want to spend a bunch of time in my payroll platform today. Right. Like you want it to be so seamless that it's just happening. Yeah, that's exactly right. We want it to feel like your teammate. It should be someone that you feel comfortable texting, having run processes for you. So you could have it actually text you when it's run your payroll. It'll tell you the total amount and all you have to do is say, I approve it.

1:50:35It'll actually run your payroll. So you never even have to log into Gusto to run your payroll ever again. If you want to do more one-off things, like, hey, pay this contractor 500 bucks, You could just text it as well. One of the things I really loved about OpenClaw is it just blew my mind. It was such a simple concept that seemed so obvious, the ability to text with it through Telegram. And I wanted to bring that magical experience into Gus, the co-founder. It just really changes the game, and it's hard to understate how important that is. Yeah, so is the product development for this sort of indigenous in the sense that your your experience are like informing the product decisions or is it you're noticing customers like you're noticing an uptake or you i don't even know if you can detect if your customers are interfacing with gusto's core endpoints or ui uh with open claw like are you able to see some sort of data to show that there's demand for this or is it just like absolutely you've experienced it and you're launching this?

1:51:36Yeah, I mean, if you just observe some of our customers, like I'll give one example. There was a massage spa in New York and what they do every week to run payroll is they typically have work tracked in some other system. In this case, it was MindBody, right? A lot of like spa, yoga studios, Pilates, they track work of their workers in MindBody. Then every week, what they'll do is they'll export data from there. they'll put it into Google spreadsheets. They'll run some crazy calculation in there. They'll say, you know, if you worked this many, if you did this many massages, then you'll get paid this much.

1:52:14If you upsold CBD oil or a hot stone massage, you get 15 bucks for each one of those. That goes in as a bonus and commission. And then here's how we do tips. We'll split it across all of our therapists. They do all that calculation. And then, and only then, they go into Gusto, put in all that information to run payroll. That part we see, obviously, right? And so if you only look at that part, we're like, great, we did a great job. It takes like seconds to run payroll. But if you look at the entire process that they're running, there's this whole, what I call the work before the work that happens.

1:52:46And you really only like understand that when you observe a customer like end to end, not just using your system, but all the systems that they're using to run their business. And that's why kind of having these connectors and Gustav Co-Founder was so important to us. we recognize that these businesses are not doing everything within Gusto, at least not yet. And they have multiple systems that they're connecting. And these entrepreneurs are really creative in stringing them together, but there's still a lot of work at the end of the day. And they can just really kind of have those business processes, just tell Gusto co-founder once that like, hey, go export it from this system, do these calculations on it, then put it into Gusto, run payroll, and then text me the final amount so that I can approve it before you actually run payroll.

1:53:31Last question for me, I'm very interested in how, I don't know, a company of Gusto's scale thinks about launching new products within Gusto. Because there are a lot of people that are just like, oh, Gusto works perfectly. I'm not going to think about it. And you have to market this new feature, this new product to your existing customers. Obviously, it's a draw for new customers because new capability, better product, but also just you have to tell people, obviously you can email them, but I'm interested to know, like, because every payroll admin probably has a phone number already like, like authenticated for two factor, like, is there some sort of like internal go to market strategy that's more mature than just throw it in the newsletter, tell everyone that this thing exists?

1:54:21Like, how are you thinking about actually onboarding, measuring churn, making sure there's satisfaction for a new product within the Gusto ecosystem? Yeah, I mean, it's really just talking to your customers all the time. I think really understanding what their needs are. There's always going to be more problems that we can solve for them. And then when we solve those problems, we're pretty good at tracking either through customers we've talked to or through our data. How do we reach out to those folks that would specifically benefit from what we just built. That way we're not spamming every single one of our 500 plus thousand employers on Gusto for every little thing that we launch.

1:55:02We want to just communicate to them only the most relevant things. And so with Gusto Co-Founder, we've reached out to 500 customers to give early access to this starting today. And naturally a little bit more on the tech forward ones are the ones that we've talked to that are already using AI to automate parts of their business, but can do a lot more. Cost. How much does it cost you? How much does it cost the customer? Is inference a problem? Are you able to use a series of models? How are you thinking about... I think you've got to worry about people being like, hey, I'm trying to ship this new feature.

1:55:41Hey, Gusto Co-Founder, can you actually just do product development for me too? And it's like, no problem, boss. I mean, I think the philosophy we took with Gusto Co-Founder is we wanted to unconstrained it as much as possible. Sure. Because I really want to just learn to see how people use it, right? If you have it, say, hey, text me the weather every morning, especially if it's going to rain today. Because my business is a tour business that's highly dependent on the weather. Even though that sounds like a wild, just random open claw task, that actually does make sense in that business context.

1:56:11Yeah, and then look at my customer list and send them an email saying to bring an umbrella for today's tour. To build those automations. You can do that on Gusto Co-Founder. And we had some conversations, do we really want to let people do this? And I think our bias has always been, why not? That's the problem of why people aren't getting the most out of AI is because I think a lot of folks are putting unnecessary constraints on those systems. And obviously, at some point, there's certain things that we won't want Gusto Co-Founder to do. We're not going to have it serve as your cloud code or anything like that.

1:56:43Sure, sure. But I think for now, we're more in a learning mode. We want to kind of see how people use it. We want to encourage people to get as creative as possible with it. Okay. Jordy, you think of what I'm thinking? Automatic swear jar. Anytime you swear, dox your gusto payroll automatically. I like it. Agentically. You can do that. Probably. I like that you guys didn't just pick some quirky, human-like name. Oh, yeah. It is just like a very straightforward title. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how we think about it. It should be literally the person that you are on a texting basis, you feel comfortable reaching out to day or night to take care of something to help you with running your business.

1:57:26That's great. Would you one day allow it to make calls on behalf of customers? Like, let's say there's some, you know, you have a... I-9 verification. I was thinking more like, you know, let's say you have an employee in another state and like, you know, the tax board there or some type of employment agency, like... Call them and explain this to them. I feel like every startup founder is used to getting some type of letter in the mail from some random state that you pay to contact. And you have to call. I feel like there's probably some stuff there down the line. Yeah. I mean, I don't see why not.

1:58:06We don't do that today, but you can just certainly tell it to email on your behalf. And so if we're willing to do email, then why not calls? That'd be amazing. well uh thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us have a great rest of great to meet you congratulations on the launch congrats to the team thanks guys we'll talk to you soon cheers okay section out we got to pull up the ferrari luce i think this is the third mention of the ferrari luce of the show this show but uh people have been talking about different specs and uh this instagram account showed the uh ferrari luce 1.9 jtd base spec and i think it looks fantastic what do you think scroll through some of these so this is uh this is when you get it with a 1.9 liter uh turbo diesel it's like a base model civic uh spec like this it looks fantastic just just minimal minimal scroll through all of them here we go look at that yeah the the the central console delete and then the state shift there just i actually love the way this look.

1:59:11You don't. I do. This looks like a 1995 Honda Civic. I think this looks okay, the rear end looks a little bit rough, but just ultra, ultra discounted. Let's compare it to the Spectre EV from Rolls-Royce. Yeah. Coming out, starting price around half a mil. Okay. 307 mile range. 20 % cheaper than a Luce. Zero to 64.1 seconds good very slow very big very heavy but that's 6600 pounds it's the same as a cyber truck same as a cyber truck that is wild but it looks incredible okay well would you get one of these one rolls royce specter series two or 10 model s plaids used model s plaid goes zero to 60 in two seconds you can get 10 of them so you can just be launching them off some cliff dive out get in the next one because you got 10 of these things zero to 60 in two seconds it's a tough call it's a tough call when you put it like that at 50k the uh the the the used tesla model plot is hard to beat uh what do you think yeah i mean the alternative with the lucha you get 15 tesla model s plaids or one you and the crew just zero to 60 in two seconds the drag racing would be Very, very good.

2:00:36You have your whole bachelor party doing drag races. What do you think of the GMC Hummer X SUV pickup truck concept? I thought this would be good for you. I like this. And you know where they launched it? The Pasadena Design Studio. Can you believe that? No way. They brought it to my hometown. No way. It's a sign, John. It's a sign. I think it looks good. The truck also looks good. It's interesting because it still looks huge. But in a world of 1 ,250 horsepower Corvettes, ultra luxury Cadillacs, the GMC Hummer SUV, and pickup trucks are no longer the most outrageous new cars in the General Motors family.

2:01:17That does not mean they've been forgotten, though. GM is celebrating the opening of a new design studio in Pasadena, California. Let's go. By reimagining its enormous electric SUV with a pair of outdoorsy concepts, one size smaller than we've seen recently. I think it looks cool. It looks very like ready to crawl over some rocks. I think it's a fun time. Anyway, let me tell you about... Let's have Whistlin Diesel put it to the test because he tried to test the Cybertruck and I think it stopped. It basically bricked before he could really make a video. 100%. We got to see the... What does it call?

2:01:53A durability test. Wistland Diesel Durability Test. Let's see it. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of AI, IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And our next guest is in the waiting room. I'm going to share. Murphy from Partiful. Welcome back. How are you doing? Hey, guys. It's great to see you. How's it going? Great to see you, too. Thanks for having me. What were you dressed as last time? Was it Halloween? Yeah. Wicked Witch for the West. That was a wild appearance. That was really, really fun.

2:02:27You said you weren't going to dress up this time. Yeah. But I still am kind of disappointed that you didn't dress up. I'm disappointed in myself. Yeah. Well, I'm not disappointed in progress in Partiful's world. Yeah, and you guys are going to finally make some money? What's going on? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know we literally promised to the world an iron-bound agreement that Partiful would never make money with a very literal tweet that was clearly meant entirely seriously and could not possibly be a joke. And here we are violating our promises to the community. It's kind of a sad day. No, I think it's a great day.

2:03:09I think it's a great day. We love monetization here. We love monetization. You love money? Me too. I wanted hyper-targeted ads based on Partiful, right? in the app. Like, you know, I want it to feel like Partiful is listening to me. Yeah. But I don't think that's what you're going to do. It should let you stand up a B2B MLM on demand. So this person was at this party with this potential customer. Enlist that person to sell them ramps. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Buy some Tupperware. Yeah. Yeah. Tupperware parties but for enterprise SaaS. That is what, that would have been a good play. It's like, hey, we said we weren't going to make money.

2:03:52Turns out we are Partiful Tupperware parties. Host a party in your area. It'll be good. But actually take us through the real monetization plans because we've riffed enough and I want to hear the real story. So yeah, I mean, today Partiful launches ticketing. It's available on app, on web. You can now buy and sell tickets directly on Partiful. Fantastic. So it's not just us making money. It's hosts making money too. And that's the most important thing. Very, very cool. Who I want to know. Yeah. Is it like walk, crawl, run? Like, do you imagine that you're going to bring in like a new, like, like, you know, like a, you know, like a band that's performing at a concert and that's going to be a new user that has been on the fence and not jumped in?

2:04:43Or do you think that there will be a sort of more gradual evolution from people that are throwing events on Partiful. It's an easy add-on. So the next one in their series of events, they will just have paid ticketing for because they already have a lot of traction and they're a power user. Yeah, little bit of column A, little bit of column B. So the impetus for building it was something that had been building for quite a while, which is that people were already trying to host paid events on Partiful. You know, supper clubs, run clubs, you know, community events, concerts, album release parties, fundraisers.

2:05:22And because we didn't have ticketing, it was not a great user experience. Like hosts were linking out to other platforms. Guests weren't sure. Like, does my RSVP count or does my ticket count? Hosts were cross-referenced. So that wasn't really upholding our standard of what we want Particle to be and what Particle is known for, which is having a super seamless experience no matter what kind of event you're hosting. And so first and foremost, we saw this as a feature gap. And it was always a question of, well, when do we close this feature gap? And I think the tipping point for us was starting last year, we launched our Explore feed, which is a tab on the app that you can go to and you can browse events that are happening around you.

2:06:07They're highly curated. You can see what your Particle Mutuals are going to. And increasingly, people are using that as a place to discover things to do. And so with the launch of Explore, we started to see a proliferation of these events that really needed ticketing because they're marketed to the public, because they're often higher production value. Like it takes real money to put on a lot of great events. And that funding for hosts has to come from somewhere. And it typically comes from selling tickets. And so all of that really culminated where we were like, first and foremost, we want to create a much better experience for the hosts on Partiful today and the guests on Partiful today to do what they're already doing, but in a seamless way.

2:06:51And then two, we absolutely know that there are types of events that you can't have on Partiful because we don't have ticketing. And so we're hoping with this that we can grow and actually get even more of those events onto Partiful that weren't on the platform previously. Yeah, I can imagine a lot of even emerging artists that aren't on some insane tour, etc. The experience of an artist being able to send an easy text blast and feel like they're communicating and then have social features built in. I feel like that'll be a much cooler experience. What trends are you seeing on Partiful? Like I would, I feel like you guys should, should maybe you do.

2:07:39And I, and I haven't seen them, but like, I want to know, like have, have run clubs peaked? Have people stopped running from whatever they're running from? Like what, what, what, what's kind of maybe the lookalike meetup ecosystem? Are, are, have we reached peak lookalike meetup or are we continuing to boom? Well, it's funny you mentioned that because on our very serious Twitter that should be taken literally at all times, we did tweet like I think a year ago that lookalike contests are dead and that future lookalike contests will be banned on the platform. And actually a news publication picked it up and said Partiful has canceled lookalike events.

2:08:18But they're still happening. And, you know, honestly, in 2026, many of them are still great. Like there was a big heated rivalry lookalike contest that was still happening. There was a JFK Jr. lookalike contest. And so I think I've come around and I can never say no to a good lookalike contest. There's also these just like mass meetups in Central Park and, you know, Dolores Park to do whatever. And so I think that's the trend that we're seeing is the rise of these viral events of someone, you know, taking a funny meme and actually bringing it to life in the real world. And it's so much better when that happens.

2:08:54Like people yearn to touch grass. and they yearn for these types of events that feel like easy low-key and something that where they can participate in a collective cultural moment uh and say that they were there like i don't i think yeah that's a crazy feedback loop too because the meetup itself produces so much viral content that then feeds the meme because it's like well that person doesn't look exactly like so-and-so, you know, sometimes, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Yeah. Public events are social. Another reason ticketing is on Partiful now. So, uh, have you discovered any like lessons from like particularly seamless payment processing?

2:09:38I feel like so much of the beauty of Partiful is like how like the text message integration, the seamlessness, and I feel like there's demand for Apple pay or Venmo. There's like a whole bunch of different ways you could solve that. Maybe you just do the hard work to get everyone to put their credit card information in and then it's all saved nicely. But like, what was the, what were the trade-offs? What was like the best practice that you wound up landing on? Yeah. So first and foremost, it was like, this should feel ridiculously easy because RSVPing on Hartnable is really easy. It shouldn't feel quite as easy as RSVPing because like you do have to pay money.

2:10:13But if you go through the flow, it still feels like buttery smooth. Like you tap buy tickets. You add, you know, you add the number of tickets you want. Um, if you have a promo code, you use that. Like we, we have an event for tech week tomorrow where tickets are$10 ,000. But if you have the secret promo code, how much is it? We have a secret promo code. It's 20 ,000. The secret promo code. It's$9 ,999. Uh, very fun. Uh, what, what, what, what, what, like, what's your motivation at this point? Like, what's your ambition? I feel like, you know, I imagine you guys have had a bunch of acquisition interests this entire time to date while you're not making any money.

2:11:02And, you know, somebody makes an offer and you're looking at it and you're like, wow, this is, you know, a big number. It's, I feel like the hardest time to turn down an acquisition is when you're not making money. Once you're making money and you're growing and things like that, like it can, there's more of like a line of sight to, hey, this is like a really big real business. But how did you process like building a company for this long that's so in the public eye, that's so popular and not making money and stay focused on the long term? Yeah, it's a great question. It's a bad day for everyone who wanted to acquire us when we weren't making money.

2:11:44Yeah, exactly. For sure. Brutal. Brutal. They hate, all the acquirers probably love that. Oh yeah, Partiful, it's cute. Like they're not really monetizing yet. So they'll take our offer eventually. Nightmare, nightmare for them. Yeah, they're down bad today. But I think this is like, this is exactly the next step we wanted to take for our long-term ambitions. Like we intend for Partiful to be a massive company and we've already proven in so many ways that were there from like a growth perspective and we're continuing to grow. But this just felt like such a natural addition to our ecosystem where it's a win-win.

2:12:26We're closing a feature gap. We're making an experience buttery smooth, which is what we always wanna do for everything we're building. We're solving a problem for hosts. We're solving a problem for guests. And yes, this feature happens to be one where we can make money. It's not the only feature that we'll ever build to make money. There's a lot more to come, But it is the right next step in our journey. And I think what's cool is that it's coming at a time where there's this real cultural moment around gathering in the real world for these fundamentally social experiences. And that's where Partiful plays really well.

2:13:00One thing that's pretty different about us is we're not a ticketing company where social is an afterthought or non-existent. were a social product that now has a ticketing component on top of it. And so what does that get us? Like you mentioned concerts earlier, Jordi, like Weezer, for example, threw a ton of pop-ups on Partiful that were just free events that they were doing for their community as part of their tour. And before, Partiful didn't have ticketing. And so like all Weezer could do with Partiful was host their free events. But I think they're one of so many artists, cultural institutions, performers, creatives who are really harnessing Partiful to connect with their community and create social experiences with their community.

2:13:47And so that's the ball that our eyes are on is how do we supercharge this thing that we're seeing in the culture? And what are the features we can build to help accelerate and expand that and make that accessible to more people? Do you expect there to be an entire class of Partifold entrepreneurs, basically small business owners, where the vast majority of their revenue or almost all their revenue is flowing through Partifold? Does it feel like there's a line of sight to that? I think that's going to be a huge and very important subset of our ticketed hosts. But I also think it's equally important for us to be serving the more casual host who needs ticketing for their event for whatever reason, whether that's a frat, whether that's someone putting together like a party bus for their birthday, whether it's like just someone who wants to charge$10 to make sure that people don't flake from their event.

2:14:41Like there's so many ways that you can use ticketing to get what you need out of your event. And there's so many people where they have a day job of building community is their passion project. We hear from so many people like that. And so I really see ticketing as something that very much unlocks what they're able to do as much as it is something for the person where their lifeblood and their business and their, you know, what they're building for themselves and their lives financially is powered by Partiful. What's a country that uses Partiful a lot that people wouldn't expect? Oh, Italy has a very strong.

2:15:24I would expect that. I would expect that. I have a bunch of Italian friends. They like to get together and do things. Yeah, yeah. The Italians love Portifull. I mean, the UK is really big, but like, so it depends on how you feel about the UK. I've been to some phenomenal parties in London, so it doesn't surprise me, but some people are like, what? But no, I would say like the most unexpected thing is the random, most of our users are in the U.S., like the random contingents of people that I didn't expect. Like my mom's friend texted her that Partiful has gone viral in a South Florida over 55 senior living community.

2:16:02And I love that. That's amazing. Partiful retirement. What a wonderful way to retire. what's the work culture like at Partiful these days? Do you guys work more on the weekend than a normal company because there's a lot of action? Or is the product robust enough that you guys can take a couple days off? Well, the product's really robust, but it is always stressful to be on call on the weekend because if something breaks, that is when it's going to be like a bad time for everyone. So I would say like the culture is work hard, party hard, which probably doesn't surprise anyone. Like we can't be 996 because in order for us to do our jobs right, everyone on the team physically needs time to party.

2:16:55Like it doesn't work without that. But yeah, I would say events that are otherwise totally fun and stress-free for other people like Halloween. like that's my I'm in the situation room all Halloween or two years yeah yeah exactly I'm not partying um but yeah we the the party product research is a very important part of our culture fantastic well thank you so much for coming very cool congratulations on the progress and I'm glad yeah great great launch excited to uh attend my first ticketed part of full event whenever that is fantastic$10 ,000 tomorrow hey there we go we'll see you later great to see you goodbye let's talk about Figma agents meet the canvas your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context go check it out figma.com and our next guest is returning to the show one of my favorites probably the my number one favorite new consumer electronic electronic device product of the last, I don't know how many years.

2:18:05We have Bryn Putnam from Ford. She's the founder and CEO. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. How are you doing? What's going on?

2:18:13Brynn Putnam:Thanks so much for having me back, guys. Last time you were on, we both left and bought the product. We both ordered on the show. Very easy checkout. Thanks to Shopify. Yeah, thanks to Shopify. And they arrived and we have been entertained for hours and really, really enjoyed the product. But tell us how things are going on your side. It's been a crazy six months. It's been so fun just seeing Bored actually out in the wild and seeing people using it and loving it. I think it's really just sort of exceeded our expectations. We have, you know, thousands of households using the product and loving it, and people are actually starting to create their own games for Bored, which has been the most surprising but exciting development for us.

2:18:56Yeah, so you three printed us as Mark Andreessen and Elias Escover dressed up on Halloween. It was very funny because it's like a character of a character. But what does that actually represent? There they are in reality. Smaller than they looked in the photo. They loom large. They loom large, Gordy. But why would a customer want to print something? Walk me through the thesis. How is this actually playing out?

2:19:24Brynn Putnam:Yeah, so today people... are using their favorite AI coding tools to build using our SDK, which really surprised us that your sort of average family was sitting down around this new shared surface trying to create their own experiences. And so we've decided to really lean into that and are creating a product we call Board Studio that really makes it just easier for your average person to start to build. So they'll sit and just prompt and the board studio will create the experience for them, including their very own custom miniatures. So very excited to see what people are creating. Everything from educational apps to things for health care settings or bars or restaurants.

2:20:14Brynn Putnam:It's really been a diverse range of interactive experiences. Yeah, what's the secret to making a, you know, basically I'll call it like a vibe-coded game studio. I imagine you want, you don't want to change, is like re-skinning the best way to think about this? Because coming up with like original game mechanics and rules and all these things feels like much, much, much more challenging for the average person than just deciding like, I'm going to make this character look like this, and I want to change the setting and choices like that. Yeah, so I think it's important for us to really create a batteries-included environment.

2:20:55Brynn Putnam:So to give people good project templates, good asset libraries, an easy way to connect directly to their board so they can kind of automatically build, deploy, and play games and start to test. and to help kind of steer people towards experiences where they really can go from prompt to prototype in an hour. So that's not going to be creating highly complex games with where the technology is today, but it's quite impressive how quickly, you know, people are able to create things that are fun just using sort of a set of prepackaged assets and templates. Walk me through where the board SDK ends and the vibe coding begins.

2:21:40It feels like there's an SDK that's open source hosted on GitHub or your website, something like that. I download that, and then I can kind of use the vibe coding tool of my choice. I could use codex, clog code, whatever I want to sort of build. But then am I testing the game in a browser? Is it going – am I deploying to the board? Is there the idea of like test flight or then at some point does it get released to an app store that you review? Because I imagine there's all sorts of privacy and security goals that you have in mind as the company.

2:22:16Brynn Putnam:Yeah. So for Q4, you'll be building on a computer and then directly deploying on your board for use with your own family. I think our learning has been the act of creating a game on board is actually one of the most fun games on board. So I think for many people, the experience is just going to be vibing things that they love and that their kids love that they want to play in their own homes. And then from there, if they want to share with the broader community, we have a review process. So you submit your game to us. We have content standards and controls. And then we'll release those games in our board store.

2:22:48Brynn Putnam:So the first of the community games goes live next month. And that was something that a member of the community created using the arcade pieces from our arcade suite. and it's a reimagined game of pinball that we're super excited about. And that will go live in July. And it just went through our review process to ensure that it was fun and accessible for the community. Yeah. I have a game idea. What is that? Monopoly-style game where you develop data centers. Yeah. Love it. Yeah, I was thinking. Tyler? We'll get Tyler on the team to build this. Discounted cash flow simulator. It just runs a full spreadsheet, sort of like how Ramp Labs came out with their ramp sheets.

2:23:27You know, you just get the kids started early. These will be the least popular games on your community forum, but potentially the most popular. And my children will be required to play them eight hours a day, probably 996, really, to make sure that they understand the discounted cash. How did you feel your intuition was around this launch, you know, versus mere? I feel like the hardest thing with hardware is you spend like, you know, one, two years, sometimes more time developing something and then you just have no idea. You have an intuition around how people will react to it. Did you have more confidence going into board than the last go around?

2:24:09And, you know, obviously the launch has been great, but did it kind of meet your expectations? And how are you kind of adapting your thinking going forward?

2:24:20Brynn Putnam:I think it surprised me, honestly. You know, I think we thought that we would be talking to kind of early adopter, gadget geeks, maybe some hobbyists who wanted to build, you know, interactive D &D campaigns on board early days. And the audience has been much broader than expected. You know, we have grandma and grandpa who are buying it for when the grandkids come over along with, you know, teachers and doctors and restaurant owners. So the breadth of the audience, I think, has really surprised us. And it's great, but it's definitely been a challenge the team now has to meet because we have to create games quickly that can satisfy not just deep, passionate gamers, but people who for whom this is like really their only gaming experience.

2:25:05Brynn Putnam:It's bringing sort of new people to the table. And so it's been really fun. But the mission of making playing together more accessible and creating together more accessible is all that more important given the breadth of the audience. Yeah. How are you thinking about intellectual property in the modern era? Because I can tell my son a bedtime story where Spider-Man meets Superman, which belonged to different studios. Never the two shall meet on the silver screen, but in the imagination of a five-year-old, Anything is possible, including cross-IP infringement. And some of the AI models will sort of play friendly with you if you ask, you know, chat GPT, hey, tell me a story or flesh this story out where Spider-Man's interacting with Superman.

2:25:55Some of the companies have licensing agreements and they make royalty payments and all sorts of things. But there's some sort of interaction there where I can draw Spider-Man, and I think that's legal. I think I can just draw an image of Spider-Man and give that to my kid. But if I take a picture of that, upload that to board, I imagine at some point you'd be partnering with companies. But is there some sort of terms of use that you have to think through or guardrails that you put on? Because some of the magic of creation is drawing Mickey Mouse for the first time. But if you're monetizing that and selling that, that's a whole different equation.

2:26:31So how do you think about playing that side? because I imagine there'll be a huge demand for intellectual property-based games, but you need to be careful that you don't run into any trouble with the big studios.

2:26:44Brynn Putnam:Yeah, I mean, I'd love to get to a point where it's just one big universe where everyone is playing together in the board sandbox, but we're obviously not there. So I think today we are making every effort to respect the IP holders and also respect the sort of safety and privacy concerns of our community. You know, these are families that are using the device. And I have a three-year-old and I want to make sure that when the three-year-old sits down to make pieces, that nothing comes out that would be upsetting or surprising to us. But those are definitely active conversations that we have had since day one with IP holders about how we can move to a future universe where creation isn't really limited, that people can bring Spider-Man and Miss Piggy together into an incredible new world.

2:27:33Yeah. When I think of D &D campaigns, I start to think about almost like internet connectivity within the game. I imagine that most of the games are self-contained. It feels like there's an internal state of, you know, is the cartoon character clean? You have to wash him off. If you save the game, you come back still dirty. But how are you thinking about making the games? Are you thinking about expanding to something that is more cloud interactive multiplayer at some point? Is any of that on the horizon? Is that interesting? Is there demand for that even?

2:28:12Brynn Putnam:Yeah, that's definitely a polarizing topic within our audience. Some people would love to be able to start a game on their board and then have grandma play on her board in a different state, which we don't do today because the other half of our audience also feels very strongly that board feels safe because it is a closed community. So our tabletop product is the first product that will be networked. You will be able to link to your Foundry VTT account and play your campaigns with people elsewhere. But we felt like that was a specific segment of the community that understood the connectivity. And so otherwise we are keeping it sort of limited to, to your board.

2:28:52Brynn Putnam:Um, that may, that may evolve over time, but for now I think those are garbables that are important to keep it really feeling full family for everyone. Uh, wait, so sorry, uh, take me through the, the, the product catalog. It sounds like there's, there's, are there, are there multiple, uh, products at this point, or is it all just one, the one that I have the, like the big board, I just think of it as the board, the board, but is there, is there a different skew at this point or is there one coming? So we launched with a Founders Edition, which had 13 games included, which is the version that you guys have.

2:29:24Brynn Putnam:And then we unbundled in March. And so we started selling five of the games a la carte, which was really exciting for us. We saw over 60 % attach rate on games with most people buying four out of the five games we had available. So that sort of gave us the confidence that more games were needed in the community. So starting in June, will launch another 10 games between now and holiday. And the Board Table Talk product is sort of the most unusual of those in that it's specifically for the Table Talk community that's currently using BTTs. Otherwise, they're all sort of full family games. Got it.

2:30:01Awesome. Warhammer is coming. Yeah, exactly. Talk about the round. Yeah. I want to hit the gong. How much did you raise?

2:30:10Brynn Putnam:Already, we raised$20 million.

2:30:17Sorry, I know I could hear you because I had an idea, but who who led the round?

2:30:22Brynn Putnam:Mike McNano. There we go. We love Mike. We love Mike. I love I don't know everything Union Square is doing this company. Everything about this is just delightful and amazing and obviously a good business as well. So it's a royal flush of good news. Yeah. Great update. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest. Thank you guys so much. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. We got to go back to Instagram because in the era of AI slop videos, the rental encore was doing it better than anybody years and years ago. We got to pull up this video.

2:31:02I want your reaction because this seems like peak cinema. I want your analysis. Break it down. With independent suspension for amazing handling. Okay. reasonable car right wait until you see the advertisement for cheap car you can get a hundred of those for the price of a Ferrari Luce. 100 Renault Encores. Anyway it's gonna it's gonna restart and you're gonna be amazed watch this. We don't know how to make vibe reels like this anymore. Show me the founder transforming into the B2B SaaS that they are launching. Put away the cinematic softbox. Take away the soft, shallow depth of field. Show me the founder transforming into the product.

2:31:53I can see myself in a Renault. The one to watch. Such a good ad. The one to watch. Great ad, right? Such a good ad. Actually a great ad. Someone should copy this. Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Mike Isaac said, get ready to get even more annoyed by your cheapest friends because the germinator is sharing that Apple readies iOS 27 service that will let users split bills for dinners, events by taking a photo of a receipt and assigning items to friends. This is annoying super intelligence that I won't be using. This will be part of Apple wallet and cash taking on Venmo and Splitwise.

2:32:39You got to do the credit card roulette. I love that game. Or the inverse credit card roulette, where one person, you take out one credit card, they don't pay, so they get the free dinner and everyone else splits the bill. And everyone else pays like 10 % more, but someone else got like a free dinner, so they get a great, you know. And everyone got great company. Yeah, but no. Every dinner should be a ruthless, game-theoretic Nash equilibrium of everyone trying to drink exactly the same amount or buy the most expensive steak to one-up each other so that you don't get taken into the cleaners with an even split.

2:33:14You want to get your money's worth. So if you see someone ordering the porterhouse, you say, I'll have two porterhouses. Give me two porterhouses. We're splitting this evenly, right? Oh, you got three glasses of wine? Let's do another round. I'll take ten. But triple me up. And I am having dessert. I'm having yeah I'm a big dessert guy I'm a big dessert guy actually I'll be taking it to go that's the buzzer I'll be taking it to go order lunch for tomorrow and I'd like a third porter house for lunch for lunch tomorrow let's split the bill evenly don't don't pull out your apple intelligence on me don't do that I what's the crime having a porter house having two porter houses having three porter houses four you're gonna divide that up with apple intelligence Oh, you don't want one of your good friends to hit their macros today?

2:34:01What are you trying to do here? There's a whey protein shortage. What's going on? There's a whey protein shortage, and you're saying I shouldn't order my second and third porterhouse. What is going on? When you know if I go to the store right now, whey's going to be priced to the— Let me have a porterhouse. Let me have three. That's a good place to end it, folks. Thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Let me tell you about Ramp one more time. Time is money. Say both. with easy-to-use corporate cards, mail-pay accounting, and a whole lot more.