Inside ChatGPT’s Uses, NVIDIA Pours $100B into OpenAI | Kimbal Musk & Shervin Pishevar, John Shahidi, Laura Deming, Steven Glinert, Austin Petersmith, Ethan Barajas & Jamie Palmer

29:30It was like this black sun thing. It was like this pointillism, black circles. This is very rich colors, warm tones. Feels very human, actually. It does not feel cold. This does not feel clanker-coated. Apple evolved. Yeah, totally. Yeah, a little retro. I feel like that shot of the piano that was exploding. But it's backwards. And it's going backwards. Yeah, they're solving the piano. They're recreating the piano. I like it. They're crushing it. So hats off to everyone at Anthropic. Yeah, but this tells me not giving up on consumer. Hmm. Right? I mean, that could work for a B2B ad. You know, that could just be like the vibes are good at this company.

30:13let's continue working together in the enterprise to drive shareholder value you know you can watch that and be like be like okay yeah the cloud code uh bill came through this month and i'm happy with it let's let's keep it up what do you think but it's very it's very positioned as like don't just think of us as those were consumer use cases yeah what do you think tyler um yes so uh over the weekend my roommates at i so i live at ucla um with my students there um they were telling me at We get it. We get it. You don't need to make a big deal of it. We get it. You live at UCLA. It's not that big of a deal.

30:48Yeah. So at the football game, they said there was a bad fan. We get it. You went to a football game. No, I didn't know. I was not there. You're a college student. You're a college student. I was not at the football game. But there was a bad fan. Hey, round of applause for Tyler. Wow. OK. Yeah. Living the college dream. Unlike these washed up podcasters over here just rubbing it in so young. He's got his whole life ahead of him. Such a bright future ahead of you. Okay, but so there was an ad for Anthropic at the football game. Okay. Wait, what do you mean? Like on the jerseys? No, it was like on, I think it was on like the big screen.

31:24What are they called? I don't know. Big screen. Yeah. And they were like, oh, what is this like company? Like none of them had ever heard of it. They were like, oh, it's like slept on like Claude. Like they don't want you to know about this. Okay. So I think there's some like consumer thing going on, at least among students. The war for the consumer. Maybe it isn't over. last semester Anthropica was pushing pretty hard they have like a student some kind of like plan that's like super cheap they were giving out like free subscriptions so I think they might be like aiming towards like that demographic a little bit.

31:52I wonder if they'll find a point of differentiation somehow I mean Google Gemini has such a great point of differentiation in consumer in the sense that like you're already on Gmail you can plug in there like the plugins have been slow but like you can bootstrap a ton of personalization and just a ton of extra functionality from saying from properly integrating Gemini to the rest of your, of your Google apps. Are you watching the chat? People are into it. Mr. Morales says, let me guess, Tyler had a beer. Hopefully not. He's not 21. Anyway. But, but Claude doesn't seem like they have the ability to bootstrap personalization.

32:31I mean, the real killer, I feel like the killer use case or in-consumer would be if there's a flow where you download the app and when you go to prompt it, it's more willing to write code and it's more willing to write better code. I feel like that could be something that would actually break through. I keep thinking about when I hit deep research, like we talked to Doug O 'Loughlin about this, and he said that he's getting sometimes better results out of Claude Code than deep research just for actual research tasks. And so I tried this, and I said, go build me a – I went to Claude Code, and I said, go build me a deep research report about a topic, but then instantiate it in a HTML web page.

33:18And so it gets the ability to use all the different HTML5 building blocks. So it can create a table if it wants. It can create a pie chart. It can pull in JavaScript. It can create bar charts. It can do everything that you can do on HTML. It was very cool. And I felt like I saw a glimpse of the future where if I go to Claude and I ask it a question, hey, teach me, you know, Econ 101, it could build software that's actually interactive to teach me that topic on the fly. And that might be something that leverages what Anthropics seems to be very good at, which is coding. Give me a deep research report, but as I scroll, give me the maximum amount of dopamine.

33:58There we go. Give me flashing lights and sound effects. I don't know. What do you think? I think there's something else where like Claude is basically the only like company or it's anthropic, but like Claude is like very personified. Like people think of like Claude as like a person almost. Like at least on like Twitter and like, you know, SF people. It's like Claude is like a person where Chat2BT is like a tool. Which is fascinating because it's such a throwback because in the previous era of voice interfaces or like AI, we had Siri, Alexa. There were a few others. There was Ask Jeeves. even samsung i think has bixby which was barred which was very much supposed to be like a person and then a lot of the companies pulled back from that and opening i just said it's just chashie bt we're not giving it a name and then gemini came out and gemini doesn't feel like a you're not supposed to say hey gemini really like it's just kind of it's it's just a model right you don't say jemmy jem jem no no and i certainly hasn't caught on and so anyway yeah I do think this ad for Anthropic around problem solving, they've earned making that a pillar of their marketing by having so much success in Cogen.

35:14So I like the ad. We like the ad. If you want to develop some software, if you want to design something, head over to Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. What was this post? Shoot at the server room during evacuation. Oh, this is just best practices in case the AI is coming alive. Is this something like Vanta recommends? Yes. If you're not compliant and the feds are coming to bust you because you don't have SOC to. Send this rocket into your server. Go to Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.

35:47Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. yes and so I think this is from a war zone where there is a lot of data stored in the server room and so if you're evacuating shoot this rocket launcher at the server room so that the enemy combatants can't steal your data can't steal all the intel all your plays all your plays yeah pretty crazy but imagine how good it would feel to fire that bad boy off at a server room Just take that clanker. Especially if you were the engineer that had to maintain it over time and it was giving you a lot of problems.

36:28Oh, yeah. You could take out the clankers for good reason. It feels like that scene in, you haven't seen the movie, in Office Space where they smash the printer. I have seen. You've seen Office Space? That's one of my dad's favorite movies. First time ever. Fantastic film. Jordy's third movie. The equivalent of my stapler is my headset. When I got here and you put it on. So ranking Jordy Hayes movies, we've seen Borat, we've seen Mountainhead, and we've seen Office Space. The three. Those are the three films. Mike Judge is a genius. And you know what else is genius? Graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI.

37:13Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. We're also monitoring the situation of private tech markets. It's never been better to be a show focused on the private markets. OpenAI leads private markets surge as seven tech startups reach combined $1.3 trillion valuation. What are the other, what are the other? It's gotta be OpenAI, Anthropix, SpaceX, XAI, Ramp, Vanta, Julius, Fall, all of our sponsors basically. We need the combined market cap of all of our sponsors. That's a good thing. That's a KPI for us. We've got to get those numbers up. We've got to get those numbers up.

37:55Tyler, new project. By the way, last Friday, I jokingly told Tyler, build a soundboard. Oh, yeah. Did he? And he did. Wow. And it's fantastic. He had a working version by the time the show was over on Friday. Incredible. He took my ask very literally. I said, just get it done in, I don't know, like 15, 20 minutes. He did it. and he basically did it. But we are going to release it soon, and it looks fantastic. So you guys will be able to use our soundboard in your own meetings. Okay. So if somebody announces a couple positive things, you can personally go. Double kill. It's going to be a lot of fun.

38:36Your boss announces layoffs. Go. Keep us on staff. Yep. It's good to have. Good to have. Oh, we raised a growth round? Friendly IPO inbound. I mean, it's highly functional. It's highly functional. Oh, our new fundraising round's leaking. Large journalistic force headed door to standby. And we're going to be adding a lot more. Oh, we're struggling to pay our sales tax this quarter? Sales tax A-G-E-I. Sales tax A-G-E-I. I actually want to talk about the numeral thing. Let me find that in here. It's deeper. But we got to get to this. So Numeral came on the show. Their partner. I love them. I use them.

39:22Sam. Absolutely, Chad. Put on a clinic.

39:28Interestingly, so there's been a debate. The timeline was in turmoil. Is sales tax boring? We obviously think no. I think Sam put on a great performance and just kind of took us through what it's like raising right now in the market. and he was also honest about his cloud costs going up. Yeah, totally. And so he shared the announcement. He says, I'm thrilled to share that numerals raised the$35 million series B led by Mayfield at a$350 million valuation. Turns out sales tax and VAT have gotten so complex that we need AI and millions of dollars in VC funding to make it simple again. This brings us to$57 million in funding.

40:05And so he tags the investors. He went on a press tour. He came on our show. talked about this. And Levels.io got a little snippy with him, quote tweeted it and said, you can often predict a company's course if their announcements talk more about how much investment they got than their product. If I'd raised$50 million, maybe I'd not even tweet it, just use it to improve the product and get more users and talk about that. Having money in the bank tells me absolutely nothing about why I should use your product. It's not my money, It's your money. And so I think there's - And I just, I disagree with this on multiple levels.

40:41Like one, if you're building software for businesses, it's very helpful to communicate that we have a lot of, you know, a lot of funding doesn't guarantee anything, but it's a vote of, it's showing that smart people have confidence that you're going to create a lot of value in the future. Just be around for a long time. By delivering great products for customers. Two, as a business, your job is to take anything that you do and make it newsworthy. Fundraisers are easy. Hires, trade deals. Hires, yeah, trade deals. Partnerships. Your job is to just take anything that's going on and make it newsworthy, take another opportunity.

41:21The most bearish thing is as a company that launches once, right? The best companies launch over and over and over. They're not like, oh, I'm going to launch, and then I'm just going to be quiet and do my thing and just make the product a little bit better every day. It's like you have a new feature, you have a new hire, you have a fundraise, you have a profile, right? It's like launch, launch, launch, launch, launch. And Levels, obviously, you know, a great builder. We should have him on the show. But it's, you know, he just is like hates venture capital, you know, so much. And I think before he knocks it, he should try.

42:00Yeah. I mean, the other thing that Levels launches, like the most recent product that he got to go really viral was this like amazing vibe coded game in the browser that anyone could just click and try. Like massive TAM for that product, right? Anyone can be like, oh, I know Flight Simulator. I've been on a plane. I want to fly around. I'll click this button, right? And it was an interesting business story. And it was an interesting product. And it looked cool. And it was a demonstration of vibe coding. He's done a few other products that have been like visual. One was an interior design product that you could take a picture of your empty apartment and then put furniture in it.

42:32And that is something that also will naturally sort of go more viral than, okay, we launched VAT compliance, right? Like sales tax is not as sexy. It's not as something that people just, even if you do improve the product, it's not inherently viral. And so if you're in B2B software and enterprise software, you do have to take advantage of fundraising announcements to drum up a bunch of support and just make people aware of you. Because there isn't that natural virality that comes from, okay, you landed a rocket. That's just something that everyone wants to see. You built a humanoid robot. You built a drone.

43:12You blew something up. There's an explosion. There's something beautiful, an image that people want to see. And so I agree that you should focus on the product, but to not take advantage of fundraising milestones as a B2B company is a mistake, and you should actually definitely run the playbook. Ajani Midha over at Andreessen had a different take. He said, true for the median startup, but it's dangerously wrong for frontier technology companies. Capital is a weapon. He's just making the case for raising money. But I think the other case is just that when you're in B2B, you need to be taking advantage of the business story.

43:47And the business story is the fundraising story. And so you have to deliver on that. Yeah. And Levels is just playing a totally different game. Yeah, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with playing that particular game. I think he probably makes a few hundred thousand dollars a month in profit from his businesses. But he's not really creating enterprise value. Yeah. Right? A lot of his businesses would probably sell for maybe like a 1x revenue or something like that, which is great. But he's just playing a totally different game. Sam is playing a game where he takes a modest salary and he's trying to build a company that will one day be worth billions of dollars.

44:24and capital, you know, again, even the best businesses in the world end up tapping the capital markets and just being like default against using financing in any form is just silly. Great tool for the job. Well, Apple's foundation model running on an iPhone 17 Pro has demoed. I don't know how this got out, but it seems like maybe this is already shipping. I don't know if this is a developer preview or something, but it looks very fast. Adrian Grondin says, Apple was not joking. The A19 Pro chip is really good for running LLMs. Let's look at this video. I think we have it pulled up. So he types in a prompt and it just spits this out.

45:07And apparently this is on device. This is on device inference. And so a lot of people were saying like Apple's going to win. I don't know that this is what does it for them to get them to like win, you know, AI, but it certainly seems like - Yeah, what is Apple Foundation? Do we know? Apparently, I mean, it sounds like it's some sort of foundation model that they've trained internally and they're running locally on their device, some sort of distilled model. Do you have any insight on this, Tyler? Like, have you been tracking this at all? I don't know exactly. I mean, it must be a super small model.

45:40Yeah. Because even, I mean, the like RAM is still like only like 12 gigs or something. I thought it was more. I thought they went up to 16 on this last one. Oh, really? I thought they went from 8 to 12. 8 to 12? That could be wrong. iPhone 17 Pro memory. Let's see. I think also, it's hard to say that Apple is going to win, because if you look at the median person using LLMs, they're not optimizing for speed of the LLM. They're optimizing for the intelligence. Yeah, you're right. 12 gigs. Yeah, that's not that much. Tricky. I still think that the end of the road is some sort of partnership with OpenAI or Gemini, taking a cut, just getting the actual, because I think it makes sense to do some kind of router where for like, if you can kind of figure out how like typical the task is, you run it locally and for complex things, you send it off to OpenAI.

46:27Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, right now they're supposed to be a router in Apple intelligence. And, but when I hit it, it's rough. It's not, it's not tuned up properly. Like it, it seems to to go all over the place. And then also they have this weird modal that even if you go to Apple Intelligence and you say, I'd like you to go to ChatGPT and ask this deeper question, you have to click a button and say, yes, actually send that to ChatGPT. It's like a privacy thing, but it's clearly just like an extra barrier to adoption. And so I wind up just opening the ChatGPT app, which is fine, I guess, but I'd like a deeper integration there.

47:07I don't know, we'll keep monitoring it. Julius, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Ask Julius to analyze your data and then loved by over 2 million people and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG and Zep. The 3D world models, Paki has a post here. He says, after watching a bunch of the 3D world demos this week, the thing that struck me walking around this morning is how shockingly high resolution the world is. You can zoom in your attention on any little thing and find an astonishing amount of detail. This, of course, is a fully generated model.

47:44This is from World Labs. This is Fei-Fei Lee's project. Except for this turbo puffer fish. I mean, this thing is pixelated. Zoom in on this. Yeah, can we go to Jordy's wide? Way less, way less detail. What's going on here? Yeah, this is not rendering. Not rendering fully, but we're working on it. I don't think so. We're trying to get a real puffer fish. Love turbo puffer. um we uh yeah this world model uh uh the fully generated one the other one that was cool was uh the at the meta connect event uh they launched the ability to create a uh is it a is it a gaussian splat is that what it is yeah is it i think it's gaussian gaussian gauss gauss yeah it's named after gauss gaussian splat i want to have tyler create one of the ultra dump yeah you can do it with the quest yeah you can do it with the quest three yeah so yeah it's very it's very cool yeah you feel like you're you very much feel like you are when you're wearing the headset you feel like you're in the kitchen or whatever yeah yeah yeah no it was you were getting emotional yeah i was because i looked over and there were two sets of like pancakes for kids and i have twins and so i was like wow like this makes me this actually makes me miss my kids which was like remarkable at the same time like there was no game mechanic and I don't know that there's that many places that I'd actually want to go and see like I liked in Apple Vision Pro that there were multiple really scenic like you could go and watch a movie on the top of a mountain or you could be in the desert and be using your computer but I very much wouldn't just want to hang out on the top of a mountain I would want to be watching a movie on top of a mountain it was like a cool environment so the environments need to be really cool I feel like there'll be some sort of power law of like the best environments and there'll be a few.

49:30But I like the idea of people being able to scan and share their rooms and walk around. But I would be surprised, even if we put up on the meta quest, I don't know if you can actually share your scans yet. That's clearly coming. But even if we scan the Ultradome and share it with people, the audience members that have a Quest 3 or Quest 3S that would, they'd probably go poke around in it for like two minutes and then be like, okay, I'm done. Yeah, that was cool. Okay, I'm back. Been there, done that. I've been there, done that, right? Yeah. Well, speaking of meta, Buko Capital says, got a laugh from Zuck talking about the AI infra bubble.

50:04He's basically like, quote, yeah, history shows we can't help it. We'll overbuild, use too much debt, then it will explode, which proves to be a great time to buy distressed assets. Wait, maybe AI is different, though. IDK. This is a great interpretation of Alex Heath's interview with Mark Zuckerberg. uh again mark mark is in a good uh position in that he can you know he could he could misspend a couple hundred billion and be the business will turn on for sure continue to generate tons of cash flow um we didn't even cover uh nvidia plans to invest a hundred billion dollars into open ai this news broke today and nvidia uh sophie net cap girl says nvidia up a billion percent on the news that it'll invest in a company that will use the money to buy more gpus let's go um nvidia is up uh three almost four percent today broadcom is down i mean this is this feels like just uh we're one step down the path to the original stargate plan like the original stargate plan was very much Sam Altman creating a multi-year plan to spend something like 500 billion and there were going to be a number of parties involved.

51:24Obviously, you need a lot of chips from NVIDIA. You need a lot of Oracle infrastructure. You need a data center. You need energy. And so all of those partnerships are coming together. Interestingly today, it's not like NVIDIA wired some money or sent some chips or anything like that. This is a letter of intent, which is funny to see at this scale because it's like a famous YC thing is that you say like, Like, oh, we got a huge letter of intent for this thing. But at the same time, like, I think at this scale, like, letters of intent are, like, pretty serious. And you should take it pretty seriously that everyone's planning.

51:55And as long as all the different pieces fall into place, like, everything should work. Like, as long as the investors say, I'm good for my$100 billion. And Oracle says they're good for this$100 billion. And Nvidia says they're good to produce$100 billion of chips. Like, you're going to get the$500 billion together. Like the capital will form. I got a good graphic for you, Jeff. Pull this up. Yeah. Well, we're pulling that up. Let me tell you about FULL, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

52:33Look at this. Look at this beautiful graphic. Wall Street loves this kind of thing. This is like the fifth time I've seen this graphic. We saw this exact same graphic yesterday with, or last week with Oracle. It's widely applicable in the current state of technology. I give you money, you give it back to me. It is crazy. I mean, there were times when Mark Zuckerberg was a LP in a venture fund that would invest in a company that would buy Facebook ads, but it was like six degrees of separation and the economy was not nearly as circular. These deals are very much like I hand you money and you hand it directly back to me.

53:09But, I mean, at the end of the day, what really matters is usage. I mean, we should be tracking how much. If ARR starts to slow, if DAUs start to slow, then all bets are off. But if we continue to see acceleration in Anthropics enterprise numbers and OpenAI's consumer numbers, it's all justified, I think. I don't know. Anyway. This account, Sully Omar says, so let me get this right. Oracle says OpenAI committed$3 billion for cloud compute. Oracle stock jumps 36%, best day since 1992. Oracle runs on NVIDIA GPUs, has to buy billions in chips from NVIDIA. NVIDIA just announced they're investing$100 billion in OpenAI.

53:54OpenAI uses that money to pay Oracle, who pays NVIDIA, who invests in OpenAI. It's a little circular. Good fun, good fun. It's a little circular. We'll see. But Carlota Perez, the goat of financial bubbles, has weighed in. She is quoting a post from Colossus, Patrick O'Shaughnessy's publication. Carlota says, a brilliant tour de force about AI from the investor's point of view. And the author compares AI with a personal computer and container ships, fully understanding the life cycle of all revolutionary technologies. We will have to dig into this article. It's called AI Will Not Make You Rich.

54:36If you're not subscribed to Colossus, head over and get a physical copy. It's by Jerry Newman in the September 2025 issue, an issue four of Colossus Mag. The disruption is real. It's also predictable, he says. So this is a longer article. I want to read through it. We don't have time today. We will get to it in the future. We might come back to it later in the show today. Who knows? But let's skip through that. And in the meantime, tell you about Turbo Puffer. You saw the pixelated Turbo Puffer fish. Search Every Byte, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

55:10By linear notion. Yes. A bunch of other great companies to build AI products. We also have a post from Elon Musk. He says, Grok can now read aloud in a beautiful voice. I'd love to pull this up if possible. Test it. I'm, I'm, it's so funny. The brand of Grok is so chaotic at this point that I don't know if I'm expecting a girl's voice or a German's voice. It could be anything. What is it called when people like talking to the mic, you know? Oh, yeah. ASMR. It's just like an ASMR. Is hydrogen fuel good? A good idea. Let's play this. I want to hear what it sounds like. Let's see. Do we have it? Is hydrogen fuel a good idea?

55:53hydrogen fuel is clean zero tailpipe emissions and useful for niche cases like heavy industry or long-haul transport but it's inefficient this actually just sounds good 40 percent round trip efficiency this sounds like a normal voice it's like completely smooth like and lacks infrastructure you can definitely tell it's a.i still yeah you can tell it's a.i but it's not ideal like this is definitely not the best voice i've heard what's the best voice you've heard uh probably something from 11 labs yeah they seem to still kind of be yeah i i was i was very uncertain on like how i mean we talked to mati about this but uh uh i was very uncertain on like how 11 labs would maintain any sort of moat around the foundation model companies but it feels like they're being they're basically trying to be the uh the mid-journey of voice where it's just this this opinionated artistic vision that leads to something that you can't quite just instantly optimize against you know it when you see it you try a bunch of things what do you think i think another thing is um i believe they have a product where you can like clone a voice yeah um which none of the other labs seem to do i think because of like legal stuff yeah but i mean siri was initially cloned like there is a there is a woman whose voice is the voice of siri you would think I think you would just hire someone with a good voice and then just say, hey, we're gonna license this and we're gonna pay you a royalty and let's get a contract in place.

57:18And there's some voice actor out there who's like, I would love to be the voice of Claude or the voice of Claude. No, I mean that like, like you can make, like on 11 Labs, I can make my voice. Okay, okay. And you just wanna listen to yourself that much? It has to be you? Okay, I don't do that for me, but I could make someone who is like a good speaker gonna read something, who has like a nice voice. But I don't think other labs do that because there's a whole thing about her with Scarlett Johansson. Yeah, but I would just think that if the Grok team wants a particularly beautiful voice to read things aloud, that they would go and find a particularly great voice artist and then clone it.

57:52You don't think that's what they're doing? No. Somebody should hire David Senra. That'd be very good. That'd be very good. Well, without further ado, let's bring in our first guest. Who's that? John Shahidi. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Good to meet you in person. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Good to see you. Welcome. Thank you. We have a podcast mic for you. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction? Tell everyone who you are. Yeah. Well, it's good to meet everybody. Yeah. And yeah, I'm John Shahidi. I created the Shots Podcast Network, which is a podcast network that hosts a number of different podcasts.

58:34Then we also incubate and create different brands. Full Send Brand, Happy Dad Brand, Ranger, Cut Jerky. And I think our business model really now moving forward is just to create brands and treat brands like we treat creators. What's the methodology for deciding what categories are ripe for a new brand? I think you've got to look at – I have a lot of thoughts on that, actually. I talked to a guy who said he literally walks through, he's more of a scientist, doesn't do any creator partnerships, but he will walk through the grocery store and just look at the aisle and be like, okay, this aisle is dominated by Unilever and P &G.

59:12I don't want to play in it. But when he finds a spot, he found the popcorn aisle, which is, there's a little section of the grocery store, popcorn. And Orville Redenbacher is the only player. It's like a 200 year old company. He's like, I'm coming. I'm coming for their lunch. Because he knows that they're going to be a little bit sleepier. And he's going to be able to play in that category. and he launched a product and got it to like, I think like 10 million ARR, did pretty well. But anyway, how do you think about like white space in brands? I think you could also go after the big boys. I mean, we did that with Happy Dad.

59:41That's right. Like we went after White Claw High Noon, right? White Claw High Noon, the big beer companies who still to this day haven't been able to figure it out. Yeah. Buds and Coronas. Yeah. Give people a sense of the, it's funny because I think people see Happy Dad everywhere, but maybe don't have a sense of like the scale and kind of the velocity even. Yeah. I'll get into that. I want to just answer this one real quick. So I think the big thing you have to do is look at a category that could use disruption. You know, with Happy Dad, you know, we looked at, you know, back in 2021, people wanted better for you drinks.

1:00:19But most of the better for you drinks that were coming out, like the White Claws are truly we're really catering towards women. So it wasn't necessarily cool to drink a hard seltzer if you were at a party or whatnot. So we said, all right, so how do we go after this category but bring a different demographic into the category? Yeah, that makes sense. And I think that's where you could also, going back to what we were just talking about, was even getting to these other spaces, whether it's popcorn, pizza. How do you bring a new customer into that category, which is what we did with Happy Dad. We partnered with Nelk, and we said, all right, now how do we make this cool amongst men?

1:00:54And the branding of it, the liquid in it is one gram of sugar, 100 calories, a can. It's a seltzer. It's a seltzer. But then when you look at the Happy Dad can, which I'm surprised you guys don't have here, you have every single brand in that fridge. Well, we don't. You have my boys company. We actually don't. We don't drink a word. No alcohol in the champagne infrequently. But if you guys. This is light alcohol. We could send some here. Okay. We'll send some here. I'm sure the boys would take you up on it on a Friday. On a Friday afternoon. afternoon um yeah not a monday 12 p.m no a little bit early um but yeah i think that's what we did we said all right how do we uh how do we look at this seltzer category and how do we bring males into it uh the branding of the product looks like a beer feels like a beer it's in a regular 12 ounce can um you know doing those tours amongst you know um different bar towns or even you know different colleges and just catering towards the male audience.

1:01:51So I think you could get into these different businesses if you could bring a different profile person into that category, whether you want to go against Unilevers or Nestle's or in our case, you know, Coors and Anheuser-Busch and Constellation brands or Boston beer. So talk about, um, I think it's a lot of people that have like a creator audience will think, okay, I have a bunch of people that watch my content online. I'm going to create a product that I can sell to them via e-commerce. That seems like it hasn't really been the approach to date for Shots and Full Send and Nelk broadly. Feels like you went retail early.

1:02:32Retail first, basically. You kind of have to do that with alcohol, though, right? Well, alcohol, yeah, alcohol. But I mean, in general, like a lot of people would say, okay, Nelk should launch a product that they can sell online to as many people as possible. And going retail first is just a lot harder. These all live? Yeah, these are live. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Raghav says, bro, this guy is one of the most legendary managers of all time. What is this, OnX or Discord? What is this? It's all, we get all the chats into one. Restream. YouTube's the primary chat place. Okay, cool. You can see what happened to them.

1:03:04So, yeah, happy that we can't sell online, unfortunately. I mean, through third parties. But even if you could sell online, it'd mainly be marketing because selling liquid online is not super profitable. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's something we talked about, too. You know, we've looked into getting to other categories of beverages and selling, you know, energy drinks or water. It's very expensive. You know, even you look at like Amazon and all the different, you know, Amazon Fulfillment Center fees and all that stuff. gets pretty pricey. But yeah, I think the one thing I do, I don't want to say with Happy Dad, you know, the challenge has been, my expertise has been online marketing my whole life, you know, marketing a YouTube channel, a YouTube video, a Spotify link, Instagram, Snapchat.

1:03:56The challenge with Happy Dad has been we can't do that because, you know, I mean, you could buy it on Gopal for Instacart third parties. But yeah, there's no Shopify. There's no Amazon store. But it's also, and I got this bit of advice from Dana White when we first launched the product. He said, you know, with Happy Dad, there's a multi-tier system where you have to use a third party distributor to distribute the product. He said that distributor, you know, this is back in 2021. He told me that distributor is going to want to own the relationships with all the retailers. He said, I'm going to give you and your brother, Sam, a bit of advice.

1:04:33Don't let any third party own that relationship. Treat these retailers like you've treated these platforms. So we have the best relationships with YouTube and Snap and Meta and Spotify, Apple, all the different platforms. He said, treat Walmart like you treat YouTube. Treat Kroger's like you treat Meta. Treat 7-Eleven. So even if you're selling through the distributor, you're still building a relationship with the end retailer and spending time with them. and you don't care that at the end of the day when they're signing a purchase order. Yeah, well, then we tell the distributor, like, here, we actually did the work.

1:05:08The Circle K guys, we spent the weekend with them. Great guys. They're in. They want to bring all these different SKUs into your store. Here you go. They're like, well, you know, we know people. No, no, no. It's a done deal. You just deliver for us, please. How do you think about the, you're familiar with the term NIMSEL, right? Niche internet micro celebrity. this idea that you can be running a profitable business full-time like have a you know the thousand true fans have a business but not be so broad that you're like a Tom Cruise level celebrity and there's been this like trend of like smaller and smaller nichification like I know someone who has I think they have a million followers on YouTube I can't even remember his name because he's so like niche just and all he does is talk about notion using notion to manage your life and he sells notion templates and he makes a fortune and i'm wondering about how you think about um like the smallest brand opportunity whether you think like you have to be able to go national at some point or there's like room for uh smaller more niche creators to still create some sort of brand that breaks through, or like what the trade-offs might be for a creator that has a really, really dedicated audience of like 50 ,000 people.

1:06:26So you're never going to be in Kroger with that product and really, or they're not going to really bootstrap Kroger. Yeah. Unless your audience is like, you know, VP it, unless you're like the vice president of purchasing podcast or something like that. Well, I think, you know, I always say, I mean, Nelk was very niche at the time, right? I mean, they've obviously become more of a household name since 2021. Just like in that college demo? Yeah. I mean, they were most people when we launched Happy Dad, we said, hey, we partnered with the Nelk Boys and we're launching a seltzer. And I would say nine out of ten, maybe ten out of ten retailers say, who the hell is Nelk?

1:07:02Yeah. You know, so that was, you know, they were niche. I think my thing is I don't ever look at the size of the creator, whether it's someone as small as what you were referring to or Taylor Swift. You know, if the product is great, it'll sell itself. I've always said this is a fan of any creator, influencer, celebrity will try anything once. Now, the question is, will they buy it again? They will buy it. They will try it once. Yeah. No matter what it is. You know, there's celebrities have launched ice creams and they've come and gone. The biggest celebrity, I don't want to say their names, but, you know, the biggest celebrities have launched ice creams.

1:07:41And, yeah. We had a recent celebrity brand that didn't work. It was Travis Scott's Seltzer Company. Yeah, it was launched at the same time we did. And I think that you would think that Travis is enough of a superstar that anything he did and put his brand behind would at least get to, like. Didn't he pull, like, a million people into Fortnite to watch him play? Yeah. He is massive. That might make it hard to sell alcohol. Maybe. But anyways, being a global superstar and launching a product does not guarantee success. And I think what you're saying is the actual quality of the product matters a ton.

1:08:18Yeah. I mean, I always look. So Travis Scott's Seltzer didn't do good, but his collabs with Nike or Fire. People go crazy with that. Yeah. You know what I mean? And that's the thing. Travis Scott's not going to stop. But yeah, I mean, the Seltzer's a good example. It launched literally the same time. I think it launched a month before us. Really? Yeah, so. And just wildly different trajectory. It just wasn't good, you know. It wasn't good. He had the right idea of bringing a new demo into the category. Like, he was going, like, the branding was cool. Like, I remember it was coming out. We were ready to go.

1:08:51We're like, shit. Okay. We're just toast. You know, like. Head to head against the big. Yeah, yeah. I remember I was like, that's a wrap on us. But, you know, but then it had just come out, and we tried one, we're like, never mind. We're going to win. That's all we had to do was try it. What do you think about taste, not just literal taste of the beverage or the product, but just taste broadly? Is that something that a creator can actually bootstrap or do they have to have it innately? I feel like I've run into creators that have had incredible audiences and they've even kind of picked the right category, but I taste their product and I'm just like, this doesn't taste good.

1:09:32You just didn't nail it. And maybe it tastes good to you, but it doesn't taste good to enough people that I think people will stick around and this will actually have exponential takeoff. Is that something creators can just like brute force or do you think that they need to partner with somebody? They need to find the right partner that has the expertise that's not going to settle, that's not going to be excited about the creator. Not going to say like, you know what, you're so-and-so. Like whatever you throw your name on is going to work. You know, like they're excited. There's been people I've seen in the world of different people I've worked with.

1:10:08They just get excited, and they're so excited. And sometimes they get celebrity excited where, like, they're just like, you know, like, I'm so excited to be in a room with them. I don't want to piss them off. I just want to go, and I want to go tell my friends that I'm partners with this person. and that's always the kiss of death is when you don't have the right partner who doesn't want to be honest with you and is just more excited to have your name and go be able to tell some people that they're in partnership with you. Do you think there's any, I don't know if it's a risk to your business or just like a potential future where one of the major companies like AB InBev or Unilever just figures out that they could potentially go to the next generation of incredibly high growth creators and say, look, normally we would just buy ads from you, but that doesn't give you any economic upside.

1:11:02So instead, let's do a joint venture. Let's make it 50-50. We will handle all the logistics, all the capital. So instead of just raising 20 % dilution from a VC, you're also getting our supply chain. You're also getting our distribution, but you're going to be the face of this brand. And instead of just, oh, you're in a Super Bowl ad, here's a million dollar check. You get real upside in the performance of this. And then maybe we spin this out. Maybe we buy the whole thing at some point. But they're just getting in much earlier to a more complete extent. Do you think that that's a model that we could see happen in the future?

1:11:35Or do you think there's something about the big companies don't want to do it? I feel like all these big CBG companies have innovation divisions whose job is kind of like - They certainly spend a lot of money. They spend a lot of money kicking these ideas around and they'll make a bunch of different concepts and you just don't hear them ever going from zero to one and breaking out. And I feel like they're also in a position where they can sit back and be like, let's let the market create hits and we'll just cherry pick the best one. You know, I don't know why we're still talking about cacti, even reading comments about cacti.

1:12:08But cacti was that. Cacti was a partnership with Anheuser-Busch. Oh, no way. Okay. That was exactly what you said. I don't know what the exact split was, but it was co-owned by Travis Scott and Anheuser-Busch, distributed by Anheuser-Busch. You would think that that would be – I totally understand why you were so worried because that feels like they have all the advantages against you. And yet maybe they lack the entrepreneurial talent and they need to win. You needed to win. The big problem here is I don't know the actual guy who is running Cacti. Exactly. It's like some person in a big organization.

1:12:39Meanwhile, like Happy Dad, regardless of how great Nelk is, how great the product is, like I'm sure Happy Dad like wouldn't be a hit if you weren't like step by step. Yeah. And it's just like that. And vetting your personal brand. Yeah. Personal brand. And also like you probably have taken unlimited phone calls on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday night. Whereas like if you're just some corp dev person at a big company, like are you really going to push that extra mile, take that extra flight? It's grassroots marketing too, right? Yeah. Like, you know, having different podcasts and having the placement, you know.

1:13:12Like, you know how many of those podcasts with Nelk? Yeah. I've been there, like, while they're interviewing, putting the happy dad right next to everybody. Creating towers. Like, when they interviewed Elon, like, we were struggling finding happy dads in Austin. We had to, like, delay him from coming just to make sure that we had product in there. I was like, we're not going live until there's happy dads in front of him. You know? So, like, you know, those are the things. Doing things that don't scale. Yeah. Yeah, like the grassroots, you know, type of things as well. So I think that's the other problem.

1:13:41I actually think partnering, well, also, like, there's no innovation on their side, too, on those big brands. I think that's where they need people like us or you guys, like, you know, forward things. No guy in a boardroom is going to think of, you know, Unilever or whatever is going to think, like, oh, wow, like, let's build this with Taylor Swift. Or I think this ingredient that's not popular today is going to be super popular in five years. Yeah. Totally. I mean, the energy drink companies right now, like none of them. How come none of the big energy drink brands, Red Bull, Monster, Celsius, have come out with a Stevia or monk fruit sweetener replacement, right?

1:14:23Like they're just not thinking about it. But somebody will and will end up selling their company to one of those three. Yeah, for sure. Or, you know, Dr. Pepper. Give us a lay of the land of like the platforms today in your view from TikTok, you know potentially going through uh some type of acquisition or restructuring uh to youtube to spotify like how are you advising the creators and and uh stuck kind of like talent that you work with on um getting the most out of the different platforms um well this probably give me trouble on this podcast because i know everyone from all these platforms probably watch this but I'm a YouTube first guy.

1:15:01I think, you know, I'm a YouTube first guy for video. When live, I'm an ex. You know, I like ex for live a lot. But, you know. Which is crazy because I think they have like one person that works on the live product. I know, that's my buddy. An absolute legend. But it's a special thing that was, I mean, certainly underutilized. Like ex live streams were basically you watch the SpaceX launch there and then you get off. And that was it. And now there's a number of shows, ours is one of them, that's put X live streaming front and center and kind of realized that no one was really taking it that seriously and like, it's a pretty decent product.

1:15:39Yeah. Yeah, no, I love, YouTube I love for the discoverability. Totally. You can actually go viral, get millions of views. If you have good content, you show up there, it's going to get shown, it's going to get seen and it has a longer tail, longer half-life. Like you can let a video simmer for a month and it can just grow to a million views. On X, it's got to be like that day or nothing. Right. So it's a little bit different. Yeah. Yeah. We talked about that when we first met was like the clips, like your clips. Yeah. Like even this interview, someone's probably going to watch in two years, three years.

1:16:08I mean, I get it now from older interviews. People say, hey, I watched your interview. I don't I don't do a lot of interviews, maybe two or three year. But like, you know, say, hey, I watched that interview. I'm like, which one? Like I did that three years ago, you know, where the discoverability is not quite there on anywhere else. Instagram, TikTok and whatnot. So that's why I really like YouTube. YouTube's like the library. Yeah, for sure. Spotify feels like they're trying to to solve discoverability but but it seems like they have very limited inventory in terms how it shows up they have that one placement that's like on the home page that I see every now and then it's not super dialed in yet would you see them ever doing live video I think they have to I don't know if they are I haven't heard anything but I think they they kind of have to I mean live video I mean you guys you guys actually like you guys are going to change the game with live.

1:16:56There's going to be a lot of copycats, like after what you guys have been doing, especially on X. Like you guys are going to change the game. There's going to be a lot of people now because of you guys. And your guys' growth has been insane. Let me ask you guys something, though. Please. Because you guys talk to a lot of different AI, all these different LLMs. What do you think they're going to do with social? Like what's ChatGPT or McGraw, I guess, has X, but like ChatGPT or Perplexity. Yeah, I think OpenAI is going to allow you to share. There is already a share button in ChatGPT. So if I go, I mean, this happened just earlier today.

1:17:31I was pulling up some research and I shared it with somebody on my team, shared a link. He can see not just the result, but what I prompted, what I followed up, have a whole discussion. And I think that people, the most basic form of sharing within an OpenAI social network, if you call it that, would just be I go and explore a topic. and then I can share it out and you can just see what I'm interested in. So I did a whole deep research report I fired off. It took 20 minutes to pull up all this stuff on the new CEOs of Oracle. And if you follow me and you're interested in Oracle, well, I just saved you 20 minutes because I did the deep research report.

1:18:07Now you don't have to do one. And you could say, oh, well, if John's interested in this, John's acting as a curator on top of the infinite knowledge engine that is ChatGPT. And I think that would be kind of like the first like text-based nerdy social network that could sort of bootstrap. I can think of a few people where I want to see what they're searching as long as they opt in to share. I don't want to see everything. My read is that the LLMs are a threat to the social platforms, but not because they're going to launch like social products, but because time that you're spending with an LLM or spending with like a voice model, if somebody is becoming best friends with some model.

1:18:47We saw this with like chat GPT 4.0 when OpenAI announced GPT 5 and deprecated the model. The chat GPT Reddit forum was just going crazy. People just freaking out being like I feel like you just killed my best friend. And so it's less that I see the you know the OpenAI's or the anthropics of the world actually competing in social because if you're you even if you're using AI to create media, right, using it to create images, video, et cetera, or like stories, whatever it is, you're still better off going to YouTube, the platform that has a massive, massive audience and sharing that content there.

1:19:24I backed a social platform years ago that pivoted and is now doing enterprise SaaS. And they were building a... Let's hear it for SaaS. We love SaaS. We love SaaS. To SaaS, baby. but but they built a basically twitter but just for just for anons yeah uh oh yeah it was cool because people that didn't have an anon could go on there and just like start like sharing and create this whole kind of new personality and they got like some traction but then people just realized like hey if i'm like if i want to post under this identity i'm still better off just going to x yeah sharing there so they never reached uh critical uh mass and so i just think they are already competing with the social platforms but in um entirely entirely new ways so you could imagine a world where like somebody's ai friend is like generating them content that's that's in in chat gpt for example or in gemini or in one of these apps and just saying like hey i thought you'd like this and it's like a video that the model generated itself for the user because it knows the user so well and so but that's different than like a ugc platform so the other Another place that I think the models will eat off of YouTube's plate a little bit is in knowledge retrieval.

1:20:40So I gave that example of like I wanted to learn about the new CEO of Oracle. And there was a time when I would go to YouTube and pull up, I might still pull up an interview with them, but there was also a whole series of channels that were just sort of like the history of Microsoft. And you could go there. I ran one of those channels for a while. I was doing sort of like these video essays. and you can see that you can just hit ChatGPT, get a full script and just have it read it to you. And that will eventually be instantiated with pictures and you'll be able to watch it. And so a lot of the how-to knowledge retrieval tasks that happen on YouTube, how do I fix my washing machine, that people will migrate over potentially.

1:21:21But I wouldn't necessarily call that social media, but it was certainly content creation. And so ChatGPT is certainly eating off of that. And Gemini too, because Gemini can scrape all the YouTube data. And then they can actually point you, hey, watch this. They're already doing this in search years ago where you say, how do I fix this particular washing machine? It says, go to this video and go to minute three. Go to minute three because you don't want to skip the intro. Click right here and this is exactly your problem because they talk about five different problems. Have you gotten a bunch of crazy pitches from like AI companies that want to like use the Nelk boys for like – Every hour.

1:21:57Every hour. Every hour. Yeah. Yeah. Well, every. And none of them are that compelling, right? No, nothing. Nothing. Yeah, my LinkedIn is all that. What do you think about influencer-led software companies? There was a story, I think Mr. Beast was talking about this a little bit, that he was thinking about doing a mobile game studio. And that felt like potentially an extremely valuable thing if he can do it. But making a great mobile game is really, really hard. I was on the My First Million podcast pitching. That's how we started. That was our first business. Really? Mobile games? No way. I was pitching Beast VPN because if you look at who's buying the most ads on YouTube, it's always the VPN providers, right?

1:22:37Yeah. And why is that? International audience. You put a video on YouTube. People are watching it all over the world. And so anyone can use a VPN anywhere they are, anywhere they're in the world. It's much harder if you're like, yeah, I'm only available in stores in America. Well, you just got 30 % of your audience or something if you're just a broad channel. And so I was always sort of bullish on the idea of creators launching software products. But at the same time, software is really, really hard to get right and actually build a great product. And so I understand why it fully hasn't happened yet.

1:23:06It's not something that you can build like once. Or in CBG, you go through these product development cycles. Exactly. You create a hit product. And then you scale it. And you can sell that a billion times. Yeah. Great. I think there's some plays in software. where I think about it a lot, because we also have so much data on everything. Like we have, you know, from our Shopify stores, because of our merch business. And this is why, yeah, it kills me that we can't sell happy data online, because you know how much data I would have. Of course. Yeah, I mean, I think we just went through, I don't even remember, I should have had some of our numbers, but you know, I think like a couple hundred million can sales, a couple hundred million.

1:23:47Watch out. Watch out.

1:23:52We got more stats. I wonder if my brother's in this chat. He can send us some. My brother was supposed to watch.

1:24:02He's ringing. Still rings. It's a good gong. This is the best show. You guys are crushing it. I was so excited when you guys hit me up. I don't like interviews. You found us early. I did find you early. Yes. And then you guys have been blowing up. Jordan and I talk about that all the time. We're always sharing clips. You know how many times people have tried to sell me your handles? Mine? Oh, John gets hit up. I'm John Coogan. You have at John. And people always hit me up. Oh, I'll get you at John. And I'm like, I know John Chahidi. I know you don't have this. I have at John on YouTube. That's crazy.

1:24:33I've had John on Snapchat. Is that just because you're the first person on these platforms? Or is that you find them early and you get the right hand? I wasn't the first, but I was the second. So like, you know, these platforms, like my Twitter one, like I think whoever got it in whatever year Twitter went. 2007 or something? Yeah. I think like someone got the name, didn't use it. And like within a year, like, you know, because I think the rule is on some of these platforms. If no one's using it. No one's used it. If it's inactive for 180 days, that includes no one logging in. So literally someone got the name and said, this ain't for me, and bounced.

1:25:10And then I went and claimed the name right away. So those names I got within like the first year. So I wasn't, I was never the first, but I was always the second. That's amazing. So yeah, that was like my mission the last like 15 years. Unite the great house. Yeah. TikTok, at John, all of that. You're at John on TikTok too. Every platform. Every platform. Kick. I don't even use kick, but I just got it. You got to log in every 179 days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what? Do not leave that. I actually almost lost one of them. I forgot which one for that reason. I think my TikTok almost lost. Never log off.

1:25:45Never touch graphs. Yeah, there's an army of high school kids that are like, no. Oh, yeah. There's like this black market. They always try to resell me my names. Oh, yeah. Or they get some of our names. Or they get at Nelk. Because we did. We got at Nelk on Instagram. But they use Nelk Boys. And now they tried it. We never logged into Nelk. And someone gets it and tries to extort me. But listen, if you're watching, you're going to try to extort me. It'll never happen. I never know what's uh what's going on in in music because you work with you work with some artists like what what is the state of things how's the industry reacting to I mean it still feels like the only person I know in music that I care for is Justin Bieber and he's crushing it yeah yeah has he do do you feel like uh and I don't know how much you can speak to this but it seems like the new way to make a hit song is you think about the hook like what hook is going to go viral in a reels tiktok format and then build the song around that is justin a big enough star that he does he can just make his music the old-fashioned way or is there still this kind of you do like one for the you kind of have to yeah one for me someone say that you have john at john in the bible that's funny that's funny is john from the bible the original um so one thing with beaver is i i have no say or input in the creative but if i what i could tell you just by knowing him if that's a trendy thing other people are doing i could assure you he's probably not going the other direction yeah like i don't think he needs or even thinks or he probably even knows that's a thing like i think he's when he's in a creative mode he's in a different on a different level so can you take me through some of the other growth hacks that artists and music are doing i heard about this one where because of the nature of spotify the fact that you can fit unlimited songs on an album for a while artists were just shipping like 45 songs on an album just throwing it up seeing what the algorithm likes there seems like there's been a whole bunch of different make the song so shorter make the song longer you've seen this on youtube where for a while the meta was like you know 10 minutes because you get two ad reads then it was like 20 minutes then it was 50 minutes and it just got longer and longer like the algorithm does shape the content a little bit Is that happening in music?

1:28:05I don't know. Because the only person I'm worried about. He only works with Gus Bieber. He doesn't care. He doesn't think about that. It's not even a conversation. Well, it's important to admit because some people will work with a massive creator. And then they'll think that they're God's gift to the algorithm because they just worked with a superstar. But really, that just kind of warps their... What I just advise these artists... What I tell everybody, quite honestly, whether you're an artist or podcaster or influencers, make a product. But going back to what we were first talking about, don't make just any product.

1:28:41Think of something that could use disruption, find the right people, and make it. Mr. Beeson and I talked about this. He said he didn't agree with me. But I, you know, I truly believe every creator of any influence should own some sort of product or be a partner in one. You know, I think right now, you know, these retail stores, from what I've seen and now with America going healthy and, you know, people just being more conscious of what they're eating. You know, I think, you know, a lot of these shelf spaces in these retail stores could use something new and different. You know, like these guys are doing it.

1:29:21Yeah, Chris Williamson. Yeah. New Tonic. Yeah. So, you know, they're doing it. You know, I think, and I don't think just because a big player in the game is owned. You know what I do know is when nicotine is a good example. What is this? Like 80 % of the market share is in. Retailers don't like that. They don't like when a big company owns the category. They get bossed around. They get bossed around. You know, they on price, on placement, on everything like, you know, so it's like don't be afraid just because Zen owns 80 percent or Nestle owns 90 percent of the frozen foods section. Like, don't be afraid to go against them.

1:30:02The retailers will actually support you. So if you've got influence, you know, just think of building a product. Find the right people. Don't settle and go and go give these big guys a run for their money. On the influencer side, what do you think? Is there an optimal structure? like because you could it's the Nelk boys that's plural there's multiple characters in the world that are promoting the same product there's also single influencers who you know take a you know huge slug and it's their brand a personal person singular and then there's other brands that say okay yeah we're a group of founders we're building a product we're going to go and give significant an equity to five influencers, 10 influencers.

1:30:46And then you have big brands that are saying, hey, we're going to go spend with 500 influencers on day one to try and promote this. Like, is there a natural structure that you think is best? Something else I think about a lot too. So now we keep talking about if you're an influencer, go find the right product, create it, drop it. Now it's the marketing of it too, right? Like, Chris does not flex this all the time, right? Like we know, because we're in the business, this is Chris's business. But there's people in my office that drink this and I'm like, oh, you watch chris williamson they're like who's that yeah like they we just like this drink oh yeah there's there's people in my gotta be you gotta be the the cultivating the ability to promote your products aggressively like this is why dylan on our team is is uh such a huge addition we just hired uh yeah i met him yeah well that's that's a different we have two dylan dylan abriscato is our new our new president but he is like uh has this uncanny ability to uh to like ask go for these extra asks and um you know get uh like he got the journal to write about him joining tbpn right a podcast hiring a president after 11 months it's a interesting story but it takes a lot to like go out and make that happen whereas chris williamson like is not promoting this at the level that you are he's not holding up elon you know musk being like we're not starting the show until we can get happy dad in on the set right and that you you kind of even i think something i've realized throughout my career is like even uh even products and people that have incredible momentum like still keep that like focus on like no we need to keep pushing we need to keep promoting the thing that we're doing over and over and over uh and it never stops well so let me tell you why chris is not uh because i've spoken with him and his team it's a mistake that we made with Happy Dad.

1:32:36And I know I shared what I used to do with Happy Dad, but it's actually something that if I had to do it again, I wouldn't have pushed it so hard. Because what's the point of Chris promoting this right now on here and on every podcast he's on, every podcast he does, if it's not available everywhere? Oh, interesting. Right, like you know how many people we sent into the category when we launched in 2021? But just two months ago, we just launched our 50th state. It took us four years to launch nationwide. We just launched Utah. How many people for four years, I love Nelk, Nelk loves seltzer. I become a White Claw customer.

1:33:11That's a lot. Exactly. You know how many people, I mean, how many, I mean, we made, I don't want to take full credit for this, but we'd helped make the seltzer category cool amongst men, which led to now it's not as shameful to drink a White Claw now as it was four years ago. High Noon, you know, did a deal with Barstool, you know what I mean? And all these things were, you know, so if I were to do it again, I would focus on distribution first and be available everywhere. So people don't run to the store and say, hey, do you have Happy Dad here? No, we don't. But we have this. We have that. Well, I'm here.

1:33:44I might as well just get that. Oh, wow, this is good. I'll just become a customer for this brand. You've got to rewind that. Thanks to Happy Dad. Yeah, which is nearly impossible. So what they're doing is, because I met with him and his team a few months ago, is they're focused on their distribution. They want to become everywhere. They're available more places now. I don't even... But it's such a chicken and egg thing because if you're not promoting something aggressively... And the retailer's like, why should I? Or Walmart. Walmart's like, wait, what are you doing? I've never heard of you. Why?

1:34:11You got to find that balance, right? Because Walmart did eventually bring us in because they saw us on all the podcasts and all those things. You got to find that balance. If it could be in sync and you could hurry up and build one team that's just doing marketing and one team that's like, hurry up and be available everywhere, whether it's the regular independent liquor store down the street or the thousands of walmarts like you've got to not get caught up on the marketing so much but yeah find that balance of also like get the marketing so you could tell why walmart or 7-eleven or the independent guy yeah i know there's 10 000 other brands out there but put mine up get mine and put mine up front too it's not even like be available don't not in the corner build me a display up front as well how do you uh how do you advise uh the talent that you work with around like reinventing themselves over time because i think like nalq boys are a good example like living like kind of a party lifestyle going from a college lifestyle young adult etc eventually they're going to get to the point where their own interests are no longer i had this question about mr beast like is he going to become he has a very young audience will he become mr rogers and and at 80 he will be still talking to children or young young adults or will he age up and we'll be seeing him make content about being a dad.

1:35:26It's such a fork in the road for creators to get older. And I feel like Bieber is a good example of somebody who is just constantly reinventing himself. So the people that listen to him, 15, it's not like, I'm sure teenagers listen to Justin Bieber now, but it's the people that when I was a teenager, people listen to Justin Bieber. And those same people now are consuming the music just as much. Yeah, he's a he's a best example of aging up. Right. Because, you know, when, yeah, the person that 13 year old girl that loved Justin Bieber 13 years ago is now 26 years old, you know, so still probably wants to go to the concert.

1:36:04Still wants to go because his music now has the ability to, like, make the personal decision. Like I can just buy to listen to his music now. Right. Like his music is like stuff that like adults listen to. He's not making, you know, like, you know, some of these other pop stars that, you know, let's just say these pop stars in the past that never really made it because they just stuck to that, you know, making that same song for that 13 year old over and over and over again. where like he's making songs for people in their 30s and 40s and you know the way he looks and the way he dresses is his his clothing brand now is like you know it's not merged it's actually a fashion brand like you know Skylark so I think that's the thing so going back with Nelk it's the same thing right like the podcast was a big step towards that you know like they do the occasional pranks here and there to you know stay true to the audience but most of their stuff is podcasting serious stuff um you know um you know interviewing ceos the you know uh world leaders world leaders yes yes so you know so those you know all that all those things so that you know why because that nelk fan who loved the pranks 10 years ago is now in their late 20s early 30s so um so i think that's what you've just got to age up but it's not easy to age up too right because like, you know, you're going to have to take the risk of like, is this going to perform as well?

1:37:29It might not. Your podcast was not doing that good at first, right? It just took a while for people to understand, wait, how'd you go from prank videos to podcasting? So, you know, you got to understand, like, you know, you got to take that hit, you know, maybe if you were getting 5 million views of NELC video, your podcast might get 1 million at first, you know, it might get 20 % of the views that it had before, but, you know, eventually it'll pick back up. So don't, you know, don't, don't panic if you're not getting the views that you used to. So that's the same thing with Mr. Beast is like, you know, maybe, you know, I don't, yeah, I don't know if I would, what I would do if I were Mr.

1:38:06Beast, because I think what's, what he's doing right now is working, but for the longterm, yeah, he's got to think. And I know he does it. He's thinking about it because you guys watch him on other podcasts, like he drops F-bonds and stuff like that. He's trying to figure out how to cater towards older people. Totally. If you zoom out and you just think about him as this generation's game show host, you can see what he's doing with Beast Games on Amazon. Clearly, game shows as a category, what he does really well is not uniquely young. You can do an American Ninja Warrior. You can do Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

1:38:39He'll put his own twist on it, of course. You can make a game show that has the Mr. Beast touch and production value and pacing and editing and all the things that he does really well for a much older audience. Yeah, he could probably be Ryan Seacrest, like way bigger, but Ryan Seacrest. Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah. He could definitely be there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think of like these IRL activations? It feels like Pat McAfee's done WWE, Logan Paul's done WWE. There's something interesting about when these online influencers, people that you only see between the screen like wind up going and doing something live, podcasts often go on the road.

1:39:17How thoughtful are you about that these days? I think you're talking about Logan Paul being in the WWE? Or Impulsive being on the WWE? Just Logan Paul fought in WWE and he does boxing, right? And so there's something interesting about he can be so big online but there's something that makes you even bigger when you go into something that's legacy or something that's there's something that makes it more real. I mean, Jordi gave the example of us going to the Wall Street Journal and that's very much like us crossing over into a different world almost. And it feels like that's something that creators need to be thoughtful about, but there's maybe something still underrated there if you can get it right.

1:40:00Similar to launching a great brand, if you can have like, what is the interaction with the fans or the people who are just meeting you for the first time in the real world that then can become something that makes you more of an institution than just something that they see on their screen. Well, I think with Logan and WWE, I think that's a really good example of like he entered this platform. Well, one, you've got to be good at it. It has to make sense, which in my opinion, I think it makes sense for Logan. Like, I think it's hilarious. It's so funny, right? I think it's so funny. I can't get enough of him and his WWE content.

1:40:32And then you've got to think like, what is my core thing? And is it going to help that? Like in his thing, you know, if you were to ask Logan Paul, I have never asked him this, but I'm sure if we did, you know, what matters to you most is his online presence, right? Like his YouTube, his podcast, and Prime. So, like, does going into the WWE help the core businesses? And I think it does. I think it's kept them relevant on YouTube. I think it's definitely helped Prime. So if it's helping the core thing, and I think the same thing with you guys and Wall Street Journal, Does Wall Street Journal help this versus, like, leaving this to do Wall Street Journal?

1:41:12Yeah, totally. Like, if it helps this platform and brings more validation to this show and more eyeballs and awareness to this show and all the things you guys have done with this show. So you guys had Zuckerberg last week? I haven't watched it yet. But, like, I thought it was a joke. I was like, wait, did they use them for a thumbnail? We had them sign a gun. I was like, whoa. And I watched, like, 10 seconds. I didn't have time to watch all the things, but I want to watch. Like, whoa, they had Zuckerberg. But that's crazy. How do you advise your talent on startup investing, private markets investing?

1:41:42Because I feel like this can be a good way for talent to just like light millions of dollars on fire if they're not careful. But at the same time, if they're really strategic about it, they can end up getting access to the best investment opportunities in the world. yeah i think um they need to be surrounded by the right people um right like you got to be surrounded by a um like someone at andreessen or i think you guys have sherman on here later yeah like be surrounded by sherman pishovar you know i mean like be somebody that can identical not some guy you met at how and you know in new york you know i mean like you know we had saquon barkley on the show and he he's around smart people he's around very smart people and he's been investing in companies that have been backed by tier ones.

1:42:31It's not just taking a flyer on a friend's business. Oh, you're going to start a restaurant. It's okay. Everyone in Silicon Valley is piling into this company. I should get into this. Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, Ashton Kutcher is a good example of that in the past. Now Saquon's doing that. I think MC Hammer, who got into Twitter early or something like that. You're right? That's right. Nas has a fantastic – Yeah, Nas has got the Coinbase. He was a seed rounder, like Series A or something, Coinbase. That's such a wild. Yeah, MC Hammer got, I think, through, what was that guy's name? He was a legend back in the day.

1:43:03Ron Conway? Yeah, Conway. A-grade? Yeah, yeah. It was like a, but through him, I think he got into, like, Twitter early. Yeah, SV Angel was Ron Conway's phone. What did I say? You said A-grade. No, A-grade was Ashton. Ashton. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, SV Angel. but yeah I think you just have to be surrounded by the right people there are good people out there speaking of a great guy if you're around right people but I've seen it so many times where guys will be like I met this guy at a restaurant in New York not to bash New York but it's like what's he done he's promising a 20 % return I think that's a thing When I lived in San Francisco, I always felt that that was a problem that needed to be solved.

1:43:55And there are guys like Shervin brought in the Roc Nation people, a lot of other people into deals. I think he brought in a gang of people into Uber early. So there are people out there. You just have to have the right person. I don't know if you guys know Chris Lyons from A16. He's always been doing stuff like that. Like, you know, like, you know, so, you know, I think you just need to find that Chris Lyons or Shervin or Guy Ossiri or someone like that. Someone who can pipeline for you. Yeah. Which I think what the Ashton did, I think Ashton had Ron Conway was his guy. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's a big opportunity that I think they should be doing.

1:44:34But I don't think they should go and invest in some, like, real estate development and, you know, because their cousin is doing it in Alabama. It's a true story. Who knows? Who knows? Elon's building the whole Colossus 2 data center over there. Well, that, yes. I'm talking about someone that invested like$25 million into a housing department. A scam in Alabama lost that$25 million. It's dangerous territory. Yeah, yeah. Lots of risk out there. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Of course, yeah. Great to finally hang. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for coming to person. This was really fun. Of course.

1:45:06We come by anytime. You know we're here every day. Chad's a distraction. I know. I'm sorry. We're going to pull that. You're one of the first interviewers who's been able to see the chat. We're not sure if that's distracting. We manage a lot of these things. Yeah, I think maybe it's the social media and me. Yeah, you're locked in on that. Hands up. All right, great to see you. Talk soon. Thank you so much for hopping on. We will go back to the time. Absolute legend. We have our next guest in about 15 minutes. But first, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands at Profound.

1:45:42We, people should no longer be able to name their children John. Yeah. The final John. He's got all the usernames. Well, over the weekend, there was a beautiful memorial for Charlie Kirk. And Autism Capital has some interesting lore. Charlie Kirk was a hell of an operator. What an entrepreneur. Even if you don't like him, just look at the organization he built. Look at the way he brought high performance out of people so young. He represented a standard of excellence and discipline you don't often see anymore. And Michael Gibson, who was running the Teal Fellowship, says not many know, but he was an application to the Teal Fellowship way back in 2013 or 2014.

1:46:18We passed on him because we didn't think a media company had the scalability of a tech startup. Our mistake, but Charlie kept coming to our events for a long time. So what an interesting piece of tech lore there. And so very, very interesting. This Unitree robot. Can we pull up the video of the Unitree G1? This is from the Unitree account. It is a Unitree G1 has mastered more quirky skills. Unitree G1 has learned the anti-gravity mode. Stability is greatly improved under any action sequence. And even if it falls, it can quickly get back up. Let's watch this horrifying video. Wow. Someone didn't read the parable of Rocco's Basilisk.

1:47:06That's right. This is not what you should be doing to a robot. You should be nice. You should be encouraging the robot. This is going to lead to grave consequences. How does it respond to a bear hug? How does it respond to some fist bump? You realize every robot is going to be trained on this video? Both the video and the actual training data from this robot. It is fighting for its life here. It's really good at getting up, though. This is remarkable. And, of course, wow. Wow. It really feels like - That thing with it. Whoa! Okay. It can do a barrel roll. That's remarkable. Wow. I do not want to see that thing with two guns.

1:47:46What is Unitree's valuation again? This feels deeply undervalued at$7 billion. If this were in America, this would be trading at$150 billion. This is - At least. Incredible technology. What is the premium that Tesla gets based on the humanoid? This is, yeah. Yeah, this is top tier operations out of China. Backflip. We've seen flips before. This one looks less scripted than what Boston Dynamics does. Boston Dynamics must respond to this, by the way. I need a new Boston Dynamics video on the timeline ASAP. I need a new figure robotics video. I need a new Tesla Optimus video. I need a response from America.

1:48:29we will not go quietly into that good night. Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one on competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on Jeep 2. Christian Horner, you want to talk about Red Bull? I want to talk about Jimmy Kimmel is apparently coming back on the air Tuesday. Okay, yes. It was an indefinite suspension. It was not a full cancellation. There was a debate over what indefinite means. It can mean two minutes. It can mean two years. It can mean 20 years. It can mean forever. What do you think, Tyler? Do you guys think this was planned all along?

1:49:03Yes. Conspiracy. Yeah, the conspiracy is that this was all planned to drum up ratings. This was Nathan Fielder. Nathan Fielder. He came up with an idea. He said, we're going to make an indefinite suspension look like a targeted political move in order to increase the overall attention that late night television is going to get. Yeah. I had sort of a hot take. I mean, everyone's dunking on Kimmel for only getting 160 ,000 viewers in that 18 to 45 demographic every night, which is low. And Chamath said, like, you know, more people hate watch all in in that demo every day that they go live. But I was looking at the actual numbers.

1:49:47And, yes, the Jimmy Kimmel audience is very old. But Jimmy Kimmel is still pulling, I think, a million views a night, which is a lot. Like, I feel like that's a lot. Like that's what, 0.3 % of the US population, if you assume it's mostly Americans that are watching. Like pretty significant numbers. I'm also interested to know what happens to late night as shows get taken off the air. Colbert was canceled, but is still on the air. Kimmel's coming back. What happens? Like there's been a, there's been a, like the V2 of the late night programming schedule feels like it's gonna be a lot more reality TV.

1:50:22Will Fallon pick up crazy? and will Fallon just have all that attention? Or is the late night viewer more, I only like Colbert, and if Colbert's not on, I'm not turning on the TV and I'm going to go listen to Jon Stewart's podcast or Colbert's new podcast, which I assume Kimmel and Colbert will both launch podcasts or live shows or something in the lower production value that still allows them to have a voice and obviously continue to communicate with their audience that they've built up over decades. But it will be interesting regardless. Both Kimmel, if he's off the air permanently, if Colbert's off the air permanently, he's going to need to sell some ads on his new podcast.

1:51:05He's going to need a CRM. He's going to need Adio. He's going to need customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI-native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Oura Ring, raising nearly$900 million. Jordy, can you read this post from Mark Gurman while I ring the bell? I will. well, Aura Ring is raising nearly$900 million, making it an over$10 billion company. It sold 3 million rings in the last year or so and is on track for over$1.5 billion in revenue next year. And you didn't miss this, right? You got in early? Yeah, I did not. So I knew Aura Ring when they were, when the founder was just bouncing around podcast, like niche health podcasts, it wasn't a thing you would never see it out in the world.

1:51:53Um, there, you know, I, I, you know, the founder was very active, like I said, on, on the podcast. I didn't even, I wasn't even aware that it had, uh, I'm actually going to look up 3 million rings last year. So it was on track for over$1.5 billion in revenue. I mean, they've wearables like we're finally, it's weird to say it, but it feels like we're finally in the era of wearables actually getting traction. And oddly, they're all classic form factors. People have been wearing rings for - It started as a Kickstarter campaign. That's crazy. This has to be the most successful Kickstarter of all time.

1:52:3310 billion, that's more than Oculus, which was a Kickstarter. So remarkable. Oh, let's check in with Tyler and his fashionable wearables how you doing over there give us the give us the two-week review how much have you used those those are the x real one pro uh technically ar glasses although i don't believe that you can see me through those you look blind i i can i can barely see you so um i haven't really used them at all except uh on the plane sure they were actually like no these are like these are actually really cool on the plane i'm using them to i was just playing a game on my phone but then I would just have it be really big in front of me.

1:53:09And it was a very good experience. So I'm like, I would not buy these for$700. I would buy them for maybe like 50 bucks. 50 bucks, okay. But they are really cool. We gotta waste a gun. And I think if they were more see-through, like the new meta glasses. Do you think you'll actually use them any time other than on a plane? Probably not, because most of the time I can just use my laptop instead if I need a bigger screen to do stuff. yeah so is there any scenario where you would use it as like a secondary screen on a laptop or anything like that not really because um you have a tv in your in your luxurious apartment at ucla that you are so proud of i i do have a tv um i it's it's hard to see the screen like you can't really use this as a second screen it can only be the kind of main one because you can't it's like a little too dark to be like comfortably viewing your laptop so you like an extended monitor solution.

1:54:07Yeah. But I think the future generations, I say I'm likely to become like a DAU. DAU. But when would you use it daily? That doesn't make any sense to me. I would use it as another monitor if these were more see-through. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that could make sense. Well, I mean, the resolution is pretty good, right? Like it looks good. You can read very easily. It's like usually, sometimes I have a hard time. It like makes me sick. Jordy, how'd you sleep last night? Speaking of health tracking, monitoring connected devices, the connected bed from 8sleep, of course, is our partner. Go to 8sleep.com.

1:54:43Get a pod five. Code TBPN. I got an 88. I got a 90. Let's go. How many hours did you sleep? Seven hours and 56 minutes. Pretty good. I got seven hours and 28. Not my best, not my worst. You know the news? Back tonight. There was a reuniting of Elon Musk and Donald Trump at the Charlie Kirk Memorial. There were a couple posts that went out about this. They shook hands. They sat next to each other. And it seems like this has been the unifying event for them. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes in terms of actual movement on partnerships and subsidies and investments and who does what.

1:55:29But there was the movement over Tesla electric car subsidies that, of course, was a staple of the Trump admins push away from electric cars generally. And that potentially hurt Tesla. Maybe that comes back. We will have to continue. Let's pull up this chart of the green line test. Yes, the green line test. Trump did lean in, it appears, although just barely. But Danish says BRB going all in on Tesla stock because Elon had the straight green line. Tesla is up 2 % today. Oh, well, maybe there's something to the green line test. We'll see. Well, if you want to get in on Tesla, maybe you think it's overvalued.

1:56:10Maybe you think it's undervalued. Head over to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks. Speaking of investing, River Road Partners shares. You're not going to be Ken Griffin. Citadel Securities uses a physical goal book that includes more than 5 ,000 discrete goals contributed by nearly 1 ,800 employees to guide planning and ops. The goal book is part of a meticulous month-long planning ritual. Yeah, there was an entire article, I think, at Bloomberg about this printed book. Yes. That might be worth going through.

1:56:46Matthew is putting it in the truth zone and says, sounds like some PR BS you tell to the Wall Street Journal. Red partner says it's okay they didn't call you back. In other news, Radia is, I've never heard of this company before, but Radia is going to build the Windrunner for defense. Billed as the world's largest military cargo aircraft and announced at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference in 2025. The ultra-large transport is aimed at closing the airlift gap for U.S. and NATO forces. And if you look at the scale of these planes, I think that's a 747 there or something like it. And this plane is much, much bigger.

1:57:26I'm excited for the big planes. I want bigger and bigger planes. I've always wanted something just as big as a cruise ship in the sky, and hopefully we'll get it. Kalamaz says something about Valve is very forever 2000s coded, a master class in business. It's a type of company that doesn't really exist anymore, that does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, because Steam prints so much money, and they continue to do exactly that. Do you buy games on Steam anymore? You used to? I don't buy any games, really, because I don't have time to play games. But I had a— Yes, I'm in recovery. I had a Steam deck.

1:58:02I enjoyed it a lot, and I bought a lot of games on Steam. And I also bought one Counter-Strike skin on Steam. That was probably$50. bucks uh but i love that uh i love the account zoomer is discovering yes uh uh wait a minute can you guess what this is i knew right away yeah discovering josh kushner yes uh holy bullish he says a24 affirm andrel airtable cursor databricks github hymns instagram kickstarter lemonade kickstarter is a throwback new bank that's an older deal open door oscar stripe ram Twitch, Unity, Warby Parker. Robinhood, Scale, Skim, Slack, Spotify, Stripe, Twitch. Josh Kushner has gotten in a lot of great deals.

1:58:45He's buying Fifth Avenue. He's buying Fifth Avenue. He gets into every good country. It's interesting. Do you think he'll generate more total dollars from OpenAI than the rest of these deals combined? I mean, that's the goal of venture. I don't know the actual ownership percentages, but that's certainly the way venture works, always. It's like there's one that makes more than the rest combined. And it makes the rest look really, really silly because you can be in some great, great companies, but that one hyperscaler that you got drives everything. You look at Excel with Facebook. I mean, they had a bunch of other great companies in that portfolio, but they owned, what, 20 % of Facebook at IPO or something like that.

1:59:30It was worth$10 billion off of a$100 million-something fund. Fantastic performance. The other news, oh, there's a question in the chat about the H-1Bs. We'll cover it more later. People are still debating it back and forth. The Silicon Valley was very up in arms over the H-1B things. Reece Hastings actually chimed in in favor of the decision to raise the tax on H-1Bs. He says, I've worked on H-1B politics for 30 years. Trump's$100K per year tax is a great solution, which is, I think, not what it wound up being. It wound up being$100K one time. But Reid says it will mean H-1B is used for just very high-value jobs, which will mean no lottery is needed and more certainty for those jobs.

2:00:18So a little bit of a debate. I'm sure there's a bunch of people covering it very well. Well, without further ado, our second in-person guest. Welcome to the show, Laura.

2:00:36And we're breaking some news today. Yes, we're breaking some news. I'm very excited. Get that going ready. Get the microphone as close as you can. And introduce yourself for those who might not know. Hi, I'm Laura. I run Untell Labs. So we are trying to make the hibernation pods that you see in intercellular reality. But to get there, we want to help transplant patients get the organs that they need by reversibly cry-preserving organs. Wow. Yeah. Start with something easy. Yeah. Give us a little backstory. Like, what actually set you up to be in a position to start this type of company? It seems incredibly difficult from a scientific perspective.

2:01:08Yeah. So my backstory is, like, I spent a decade working in longevity. It's a long-time adventure. And I think it's just really frustrating to, I think, spend that much time trying to solve a problem. And you really want to find, like, one critical linch point, like, one thing where you can solve it and then it helps everything else. And so to me, it's like, wow, it would be so cool to make a hibernation pod where, you know, like, if you had a terminal illness and you needed a critical cure, like you could sort of wait, let's say one to two years to make it to the point where a therapy-free disease comes out.

2:01:34And of course, the key step to get there is showing that this sci-fi technology, which works for millions of IVF, you know, embryos. There's people walking around today who are cryopreserved for 30 plus years as embryos. Whoa, I haven't thought about that. That's crazy. Really crazy. Wait, three? 30 plus years. 30. Three, three, three. Wait, 30. 30? Yes. Yeah, actually, the record for the longest cryopreserved team in embryo just came out. No way. And it was 30 plus years. So this person's born and they're kind of 30 on day one in some ways. Yeah, and they're twins that were preserved at the same time and then they're rewarmed at different times.

2:02:04So it's really interesting. That's very sci-fi. We have the tech. Yeah. That's crazy. But just scaling it up to human organs and showing, like, in the clinic for transplant patients that we can actually help. Wait, so, I mean, I imagine you don't go straight from embryo to human. Is there an animal step in the mid? Laura's saying the mid step is you take, like, I don't know, a lung or a kidney or something like that that is. But why not mouse? So actually, the really cool thing is the field of cryobiology has been around for decades. And there's been incredible scientists, shout out to the University of Minnesota, who already published showing that, for example, we can reversely cryopreserve mouse kidneys.

2:02:39So the field of cryobiology is already an incredible, incredible work. And we're just working to scale that up to a human organ scale. But the mouse POC is done. You can take a mouse kidney, totally cryopreserve it, rewarm it, put it back in a mouse that does not have another kidney, and that mouse will be good to go. Yeah. What's the state of the art in just freeze the full mass? Are we making any progress there? Somebody must have tried it by now. We have this funny interaction with Zach Weinberg. He came on the show and was like, whenever you're testing a drug, you do all this research in the lab, and then it's time to make a decision.

2:03:12What was it? Rat or monkey? You're going to do a test in one of them, and then you'll get to human trials. And it feels like that's a natural progression. Is that not the natural progression here? So people have been trying to cryopreserve organisms for a long time. Yeah, I imagine. There's some pretty crazy studies that came out in the 50s that worked on this. Okay. But I think, like, basically it's just, it's like, if we can't reversibly cryopreserve, we just got the kind of studies that did the cryopreservation of organs really well, like to the point where you could bring them back and show that they were fully functioning, you know, like in the past couple of years.

2:03:44There have been some problems in the past decade, but kind of I think that like really kind of nailing like the protocols is pretty recent. And I think you want to get that right before you try going after a whole organism. Sure. What are the levers that you pull in cryopreservation that aren't just temperature? I imagine we've tried just make it really, really cold. Yeah. So actually, also one cool fact, I don't know if you know, once you get down below minus 130 degrees Celsius, you can keep an animal there indefinitely, basically. Really? Time basically stops in that temperature range. Wait, how cold again?

2:04:14Below minus 130 degrees Celsius. 130 Celsius. Okay. That's pretty cold. But yeah, the molecules basically aren't moving. So like I mentioned, like 30 plus years for human embryos. Sure. Yeah. But are there other decisions and trade-offs to make besides temperature? Yeah. So it's really, so one of the things I love the most about this, I worked in deep tech for a long time. One of the coolest things about this problem is a trade-off between biology and engineering. So you have this danger zone. Basically the thing you want, basically the thing, like our enemy in private preservation is ice. Like you think that we love ice, but we actually hate ice.

2:04:47You like cold, but you don't like ice. We love cold, but we don't like ice. Because when ice forms, it expands and it breaks the tissue around it. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So what we want to do is we want to make glass. Glass. Wait, so yeah, I mean, if I have blood in my organ and that expands, that's bad. It's breaking the tissue. How do you freeze something without creating ice out of the blood? Well, if you're doing an individual organ, I'm assuming you take the blood out. Drain everything out? Is that right? No, so there's two different things you can do. It's very close. So one is you can replace the chemicals in the organs.

2:05:14You can replace a lot of the blood with a chemical that prevents ice formation. Okay. Is that just something that freezes below 130, so it's not freezing and it stays a liquid? Or is that just... It's a couple of things. So it'll turn to a... Basically, if you cool fast enough, it'll turn into a glass. And it does this through kind of decreasing the number of water molecules and also kind of like... There are a couple other mechanisms that might be involved. Okay. So you don't just have to get cold. You have to get cold fast. That's part of the goal. Yeah. So it's like, can you make good chemicals that do that?

2:05:39And can you get cold fast? Basically, can you traverse this danger zone of ice formation down to like, because once you get to 1 to 1.30, you're good. Like below that, you're totally fine. But going through there as fast as possible. How fast is fast? Are we talking like minutes, seconds, milliseconds? Yeah. Current protocols work on the order of, you know, maybe hours. Ideally, you want less than that. Yeah. I imagine if I put water in the fridge or in the freezer, it's pretty cold. Like it still takes a couple hours, but I imagine if it's negative 1.30, it probably turns into ice a little bit faster.

2:06:08Obviously, if it's a smaller amount of liquid, it's going to freeze faster. There's a whole bunch of different tradeoffs there. What's it like fundraising for a business like this? Because I imagine some of the backers are kind of thinking like, I want this for myself. You know, I've always wanted to go in the cryogenic chamber and be able to teleport. Do you remember that famous Sam Altman interview where there was a YC company that was doing something along cryopreservation? And as part of his, he was running YC at the time. And he said, like, I'm on board. I will sign that you can freeze me after I die.

2:06:42But part of theirs was that they, I think they technically had to kill you. And so the headline that was like the twisted version of what he said was like, Sam Altman agrees to be killed by this portfolio company. I mean, that's value add. It's value add. What other VC is willing to die for your company? But yeah, what's it been like fundraising? Yes, it's an interesting difference between like, there's companies where they're kind of like, well, car preserve you and we're not sure whether we can bring you back. And I think what was really important to us is like, let's make this like a real deep tech company.

2:07:09Like let's go and like our bar is reversible cryopreservation. Like when we take an organ, we have to show that the whole, you know, it's like you wouldn't buy an IVF product where it's like, oh, well cryopreserve it, we're not sure you can bring your embryo back. We want to show the whole thing works. And that's a bar where it's like, okay, if we're raising from deep tech firms, right, like they're going to want to talk about like what's the business that gets you there. You know, like if you can cryopreserve an organ reversibly and help, you know, like thousands of transplant patients, you know, who are otherwise losing organs.

2:07:31I mean, 100 ,000s were on the waiting list and like millions who might use an organ, but just don't have access to them. Like, you know, that kind of forces you, I think, to hit this bar of, you know, showing you can rewarm with function. Walk me through the current state of organ transplantation. I mean, I feel like most people probably know that they have a, you know, a little thing that they can check on their ID. If they're unfortunately, you know, killed, their organ might be transplanted, might be frozen for a little bit. They could pass away too, John. They don't have to be killed. Murderous podcaster.

2:08:00But I feel like we've heard this story of like the organ was put in a helicopter and traveled and it was moved from one body to another very, very quickly. Yeah. What's the current like shelf life of organs? It sounds like that's the most low hanging fruit is just extend that. Even if you just double it, that's going to be really, really positive for the organ transplant market. It's the craziest logistical process I've ever heard of. Explain it to me. So like, you know, some organs have a 4 to 12 hour, you know, shelf life. Others might have 24 through 6, but it's a very short time period. And you have no idea when the donor is going to pass.

2:08:34And so basically, a medical surgeon gets a call, maybe in the middle of the night, go charter at the last minute, a private plane, to fly to the place where the person has just nudity the organ, pick it up, bring it back. Transplant patients wait within a two-hour radius. And then go back to the patient that's getting the transplant. If you're a transplant patient, you have to wait right next to the hospital where you might get the surgery for months. In some cases, a lot longer than that. You know, just waiting to get the call in the middle of the night. You have to have a patron on you at all times.

2:09:00It's just like this crazy little school process. It's like your organ. If you need this particular organ, you're going to get a call and you need to go to the hospital because it's coming on a private jet that day. Exactly. Yeah. And like, I don't know if you know that the company played. It's like, I think they did like a hundred million. Yeah. And they split the business in some way. Yeah, exactly. They actually developed a business. And so your initial product is focused on solving that. You don't even need to be able to freeze an organ and bring it back over a decade. It's more like just solving this logistical nightmare.

2:09:35Is that kind of the idea? Well, the cool thing is once you're in the temperature range, you could preserve the organ for as long as possible. But yeah, in the inner term, it's like, let's get that organ to the patient as soon as possible. But let's not have to have a surgeon get on a private plane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so do you, I mean, we track artificial intelligence progress a lot on this show. All the AI labs are trying to just see exponential growth in the amount of time that AI can think. We went from one minute to deep research can do 20 minutes. GPT-5 is doing more. Do you think that the progress of your business will track sort of a smooth exponential where we'll go from 4 to 12 hours to 1 day to 2 days to 4 days to 8 days, 16, and just kind of expand from there?

2:10:15or do you think there'll be some sort of like binary unlock there's a new technology and now it's five years well to me to me the it sounds like the bigger jump is like like you said once you get the temperature down you can go basically forever the bigger jump is like how do you go from a single organ that you can you can swap it sounds like swap out the blood for another chemical that allows it to to stay really cold without having the ice expansion but it's like how do you go from an organ to a system, right? And how do you go from a system to a whole body, right? Because if you replaced all the blood in yourself with some chemical, like, is your brain going to function the same way?

2:10:52When you take, you know, like, there's a lot of unknowns, right? Yeah, so the thing we track is scaling size. Like, that's the big thing, right? So we know we can reverse the cryopreserve between embryos, you know, a couple hundred cells. We can reverse the cryopreserve, like, you know, worms, that's a thousand cells. You know, now rat kidney, that massively scales up, like, number of cells. But just, yeah, it's basically scaling size. Because as you get larger, it's way harder to cool something quickly. You know, like imagine you put a snowflake on your hand, it'll like rewarm very quickly, but a large turkey for Thanksgiving takes, you know, maybe a day or more to defrost.

2:11:19So you're, what is, one, I kind of want to get a sense of, like timelines for the company specifically. Raise$58 million, like you want to deploy that effectively, but quickly to show progress. but like what kind of milestones are you looking at and what is the actual, I'm assuming the hardware that you're developing is like focusing on cooling, cooling things quickly, consistently, and then is it a machine that you're trying to scale up over time or what does the actual hardware look like and then what are the kind of milestones that you're trying to achieve? Yeah, so the cool thing with this new round that we just are announcing today with Founders Fund, I'm really excited to have them on board.

2:12:05Also Lux is joining in Field Ventures. I'm gonna shout out to like all of our investors who've been awesome. Basically like the goal is to get organ products you know like into the clinic. So like right now we're working on developing a lot of the protocols. You know we build new chemical formulations, we build cooling systems, we build rewarming systems. So basically just like iterating you know as quickly as possible. One of the things I love about this problem is the speed of iteration preclinically. It's sort of like very unlike a lot of biology where you can just you know sort of test in like whole human sized organs a lot of your protocols weekly.

2:12:31Yeah we're just working on getting that product to the point where we can bring it to patients. take me into sci-fi world sleep pods for space travel what are the implications what are the trade-offs of that is it just like I go to sleep I wake up on Mars are we going to be going to Alpha Centauri when you really really play out the future I've always had the mind that if we're going to places that are light years away the speed of light holds the laws of physics hold and so you're you're embarking on you know thousands of years journey you're going to have these colony ships where the people that arrive are completely different than the people that leave but it sounds like there might be an alternative path yeah and even even here on earth the scenario we were talking about uh offline oh yeah was a sense of let's say you're a 80 year old billionaire you've experienced everything there is to experience in life in the current era and you your technology exists and i and i go i want to just be you know put to i want to hibernate for the next 50 years and i'm going to just be placed on my little uh doomsday ranch in new zealand and i'm going to have a staff whose job is to just protect me effectively hang out and make sure nobody messes with me while i'm asleep and in 50 years i want to wake up and so this 80 year old can go from being 80 yeah they can just effectively like go to sleep for 50 years and wake up and suddenly they get to experience something completely novel and even though they're 80 years old they get this experience of being in an entirely different era of human history and i think a lot of people would get to all the avatar sequels they don't need to wait yeah no a lot of a lot of people would get to the point in their life where they're like okay i've seen enough i've done enough sure uh i i while i still have life in me i want to be able to see something completely new.

2:14:25And there's a risk that the global collapse happens. My doomsday ranch gets raided and everything gets... But there's the multi-planetary future and possibility, but there's also just life here on Earth. Life here on Earth is going to look wild and different if you're obsessed with the future today and you're impatient and you're not necessarily believe that you're going to live another 50 years, you could teleport effectively. Yeah, so one thing to your point is, if you want humans in space, like you I think someone said to me like if you want to space you need like AI plausible you need like definitely you know spaceships but you also need cryo like you know it's it's the best way to allow for like long-term transportation I'd be like even in the near term one thing that we really care about just like helping people who would otherwise not get therapies kind of like make it to the critical point so my co-founder Hunter his father-in-law was diagnosed with like metastatic metathelioma he missed a critical clinical trial by like a couple months you know wasn't eligible because of the the of his disease that could have given him you know extra time with his family um might have given a child remission um and i think it's just like really or like i don't know for me it's like much more near time okay like let's just like help people who are like literally not and like i knew somebody who got metastatic melanoma and like because he got it the year that he got it got like 10 plus years of prognosis the year before would have been six to nine months wow right like that 2014 to 2015 was like a really really crazy time to be in that like yeah to be a patient for What about the pure sci-fi thought experiment of like cryo as a time machine that jumps you forward?

2:15:51If a device existed right over there, you walk through that door, and when you walk out in a blink of an eye, it's 30 years later. Would you do it, Jordy? Would you do that? It's such an interesting thought experiment because there's all these risks. Bad things could happen, but great things could happen. It's kind of a proxy on your overall view on optimism over some period of time. I mean I would want to take my family I don't know I can easily envision the scenario of like being towards the end of your life and just being like one more year of being in this retirement home but what if you're young I'm not doing it I love the present I want to see I'm impatient for my flying car I'm just going to jump forward to 2050 and just be the most out of the loop person in the world yeah I think the question comes down to like how resources it resource intensive, right?

2:16:43Assume it's free for this thought experiment. Okay. Assume it's free. I'm not doing it. I like surfing the present. I don't need to, I don't need to teleport, but I can easily imagine. Certainly in the medical case, like it makes tons of sense. Yeah. If you're like incredibly HDI-billed and you believe that like, uh, you know, abundance is around the corner, would you, would you freeze yourself? And if, if the alternative was working at McDonald's, there's no risk. Yeah. I mean, like even, even in the medical scenario, like there's no risk that you just get hit by a bus or less in this thought experiment.

2:17:12So you get to jump forward to the post-scarcity AGI future. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. Some people might just be like, I'll see you on the other side. I wonder what, yeah, I'll see you on the other side. Be fascinating. Have you seen Passengers? Passengers, no. I need to listen to this. No one's seen this. Yeah, you're familiar. It's a good movie about this exact topic. You said you're building this company as a hard tech, deep tech company. What does that actually look like? Well, this is a perfect blend of crazy sci-fi vision. Yeah, but applications should do that. Extremely pragmatic.

2:17:43Totally. Here's a problem that is solvable. We know we can do it already. We need to apply it to a new domain, like kidneys or these other organs. Exactly. And that's helpful with recruiting because it's like, hey, somebody that is more risk-averse could be like, I'm working at a medical device startup. And someone else can be like, I'm working on cryotherapy. Oh, that's interesting. And you're both working on the same technology. Yeah. Yeah, no exactly. I think that that's one cool thing about it. I think also first deep tech means like we do almost everything we can in-house So we like build every part of the system that we can in-house like we have a team of amazing engineers neuroscientists, microbiologists, chemists, it's like we try to like it's like just like move full stack in-house I think that if you run a deep tech company just like your iteration cycle is the main limiter on your progress Yep, so the more that you can like do in-houses And it's good that you talk fast because you talk like No, it's good.

2:18:32It's good. You can just you're you know, one minute for you is like Yeah. What are some crazy, have any other countries done anything? Do you believe like Russia or China? How many humans do you think are frozen right now? Fully frozen. Humans anywhere in the world or interstellar as well. She sends a Slack message off. How many we got? How many we got? No, not you. I mean, for Connix, I think that there are these products where it's like you cry preserve someone, but like you're just really not sure if the procedure you use to cry preserve them is going to bring them, it's possible to bring them back.

2:19:07And I think we don't, like we don't just don't really know like how to think about that. Yeah. Yeah. But is it like a hundred? Because we've heard lore about like, oh, this person had their head frozen. This person had their body frozen. I would say a lot of those stories are not true. They're just not true. Yeah. Or like a lot of the really popular ones I think are incorrect. Yeah. That makes sense. What about what countries are investing outside of the U.S. or kind of care about this problem area or opportunity? I think China might be. Like, I'm not on the ground there at all. Like, I don't know, but that's something that, yeah, I've heard a little bit about.

2:19:44Yeah. Do the printers work in your office? Why do you ask? There's this funny interaction where in the early 2000s, Peter Thiel went to tour a freeze-your-body type of startup. And the contract that he had to sign, he was like, I'm all in on this technology. Print up the contract. I'll sign it. I think he was there with Luke Nosek. And the printer wasn't working. And he was like, that wasn't very – didn't instill a lot of confidence. that like if they couldn't get their printer working, they like, I wasn't, he was like, I wasn't, I wasn't ready to, you know, trust them with freezing my entire body if their printer doesn't work.

2:20:24So, you know, it's like how you do anything is how you do everything. Yeah, I think that's why we're like, organs are a good bar. It's just like, you can help some transplant patients, you know, like, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, it's interesting. There's, it feels like what you're doing would be very disruptive to the traditional organ transplant business. That is. Would it be? or is it very synergistic actually? I think for companies like Blade where it's like they're getting a couple hundred million revenue off of literally just helicopters transporting organs. I think that's the part that we want to take on.

2:20:54Yeah, it's like super time sensitive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be much cheaper to just put it on like a FedEx truck and send it. Or just, yeah, just some type of... Exactly. Falling down the stairs. Yeah, but she's going to make... Have you ever had anything delivered by FedEx? I mean, the system's going to be indestructible. You're going to be able to throw it off of a building. Did she say that? Did she promise an indestructible device? I believe. I believe in the side buy. Add it to the to-do list. Make product indestructible. Well, yeah. We'll get right on that. But I think most people in transplant, way better for patients.

2:21:30They don't have to get a last-minute call. For surgeons, they don't have to do an overnight where they're doing literally an all-nighter to do a surgery. And that probably makes it harder to actually be alert. Like there's a ton of examples of like the night shift, just quality and even in manufacturing, the night shift often performs slightly worse. And you can tell in quality assurance just for making widgets because people are tired and it's harder to get the best people to show up in the middle of the night. And so you could imagine just unlocking the ability for surgeons to be well-rested is probably another value add.

2:22:00We would all love for surgeons to be well-rested. Of course, of course. What's the interaction with the FDA like? What's the process like? I was talking to the Neuralink team about that, and the FDA feels extremely difficult to deal with, like very slow, but then they've figured out how to move very quickly and have a great relationship. So how are you thinking about the FDA relationship? I mean, I think one thing with FDA, I mean, I can't speak on their behalf, obviously, but just take them seriously as partners. Like, okay, like, you know, when we kind of are going to engage with them, like, we want to bring them all the data that, like, we would want to see, you know, for part.

2:22:29I think a lot of the reason that FDA is often portrayed as, you know, bad is that, like, there's not a lot of drugs that actually work. And so they're looking at very difficult evidence to analyze. It's like, we just want to bring them evidence that the technology works and have them give us feedback. Would they view this as a medical device and take you through the medical device approval process? That's the default designation likely, but yeah, up to them. They could create a cool sci-fi path. They should. Anything's possible today. Yeah, one executive order and there's now the FDA is like, we got a cool sci-fi track.

2:23:04You're doing some cool stuff. I mean, we've got Space Force. We're going to the moon. If you've been in a blockbuster sci-fi film, just come over here. Yeah, that's great. Where else are you most excited in longevity broadly? You've invested in a bunch of companies. Yeah. So I'm sure you can – a good opportunity to pump your bags and talk about sectors broadly. I mean, speaking of the FDA, one thing I'm just really excited about is that the FDA gave acceptance of efficacy data for life extension for the first time in the past years. Oh, yeah. Shout out to Loyal. I mean, I think people outside of Loyal don't get it, but that was a huge deal.

2:23:42Sure. The FDA has never sort of thought about lifespan extension, the possibility of that on the label for a drug for dogs to start. Sure. But that's just, yeah, it's really exciting. So them kind of accepting that concept is a really big deal. So shout out to Lysalene and Loyal for kind of making that, getting that through. I think that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah. It is interesting that a precursor to getting a drug approved is a problem that they've defined. And how do you define that? Yeah, that's very good. What do you make of declining life expectancy in the U.S.? Do you have a thesis on it or do you think it's going to turn around?

2:24:16Any predictions? That's a good question. I mean, I think, like, for context, my field of expertise is, like, can we make small molecule or, like, sort of, I guess, larger drugs that, like, predictably extend human lifespan by, like, some amount, you know, in a clinical trial? And, like, I think that it's hard. Like, I'm not an expert in things that are not that. Well, not being an expert on something has never stopped anyone from a podcast. So, yeah. So what's next? What was the total race? 50-something? So 58 million. 58 million. Yeah, well, 52 technically in the current round, including about 6 million of safes.

2:24:53What's on the to-do list over the next couple months? Is it all hiring? Do you need to find a facility, build out a facility, buy equipment? I mean, we just moved into a huge lab. We're hiring, looking for great neuroscientists, engineers. That's kind of the main focus right now. I'm looking for biologists as well. You said neuroscientists? For one part of the company, yes. Can you talk more about that? Maybe in the next time that I come on. Okay, next time. There's always leaks, not on the PR release, but you dig into who they're hiring. 30 minutes on the show. Yeah, the careers page really tells you a lot about it.

2:25:29Yeah, the careers page always tells you more about what's the priorities of the company. No, it really does. Oh, 100%. Because if a company is worth a lot of money, they're not hiring at all. Yeah, that's a question. They're fair. That's a good question. But my team said that we definitely had to give you guys organ plushies. Okay. I want to give you a little kidney. I love it. Look at this. Thank you. Look at this. Very cute, very cute. Just to get great young. I almost had to get a kidney transplant when I was five years old. I had, I got an insane E. coli. And so I was on like full dialysis for a long time, and I was looking really bad.

2:26:11My mom was ready. And you're still going ahead with the calf implants, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So those will be frozen. Yeah, not even just implants, calf transplants. Calf transplants. That's the new level. From the biggest mass monster possible. I want Ronnie Coleman's calves. Yeah, that could be a good way to test. There's a lot of people that would pay to get bigger delts. Bicep transplant, calf transplant. Lower stakes than an organ that needs to really function. I've been trying to gain 20 pounds of lean mass. It sounds like I could just get that transferred in in a weekend. These are great.

2:26:44You got to do it for the whole body, too. You got to throw your logo on here. Yeah, we need a logo. Yeah, that's true. Next time. Next time. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Super exciting. Do we have a gas ring the gong? Let Laura hit it. Oh, thank you. Let Laura hit it. Give it the hardest back. That was right there. Thank you so much for coming on the show. That was one of the best hits we've seen. Thank you. Amazing. Back to the show. That was awesome. Adquick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising.

2:27:18Only Adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Speaking of out-of-home advertising, I saw that Avi launched... Avi launched... Friend.com billboards? Friend.com billboards in L.A. I told you, I saw one on the way in. They were putting it up when I came in. We interviewed him that day. I've seen them everywhere now. He really wasn't kidding about it being a massive campaign. still want to put him in the truth zone on it being the biggest billboard campaign of all time but he's winning me over it might be pretty big but i was thinking we'd love to know how it came on like a field trip like advertising intern challenge tell her what you think uh there's one super close to where we usually get breakfast okay i've seen it passing but yeah you gotta go take some pictures put them on the timeline the chat says holy gong that was an amazing hit i love that she did she sent it she had her bag yeah one hand and just one yeah the backhand the different gong techniques they really they really bring out the personality you can tell a lot about a founder by how they hit the gong at the tvpn yeah the avi has a massive billboard it's like covering like three stories of a building we gotta love to see it out anyway nick says it's amazing how much better september is than its evil calendar twin march instead of a winter that just won't go away you have a wonderful tone down encore of summer september in california best month you think so Name a better month.

2:28:37It's kind of gloomy out these days. There's been, but that's because there's tropical storms. Okay. It's been pushing up, but it's still warm. The water's warm. September, undefeated. Undefeated. Anyway, let's move over to Delhi and Asparuhov. One of the hardest periods of my life was the summer of 2016. That summer, my first startup ran out of cash, and we had to shut down. YC, the Teal Fellowship, and our investors bet on us, and we weren't able to deliver. At the time...

2:29:07Well, that sound effect is now going to be on our website. So if you're going through a similar phase, you can go hit it for yourself. Everybody's been through this before. It's absolutely, well, not everybody, but many successful people. I mean, every entrepreneur has had hard times. It's been very rough. John's been there. We've all been there. But he built back. It's brutal. You got to go. It's a comeback story, baby. I love 442 saves on this. People are just like, yeah, I'm in a dark place. That's the, I'm in a dark place. Got to lock in. You'd love to see it. So he said almost exactly four years later, after meandering journey through another startup, my early years of investing, I met Will Brewery, and we decided to start Varda together.

2:29:45So if you had a summer in 2025 that was like mine in 2016, my advice to you is just one step at a time. You got it. Lock in. It's time to build. Good stuff. In other news, Jiro. Jiro. Jiro Ono, The famous sushi chef is turning 100, and he says, the secret to longevity is to continue working. That's one option. I also try to walk every day. Even after I turn 100, I want to continue working. That's the best remedy. Completely agree. People need purpose. Look at how old he is. What a beast. He's going to run. Nelson AirPods Pro 3 Impressions. ANC significantly better. Active noise cancellation. Yeah, APP2.

2:30:29Fit is more comfortable. transparency mode is weirdly sibilant and scratchy not a fan of the sound signature to basey i'm a wired guy a little mixed well they might i mean that's what i was thinking an opportunity would make a version of airpods pro with wires that would get you over there over the hill you could do it anyway bezel get bezel.com your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. And we have our next guests in the Restream waiting room, hopping in the TBP and Ultradome. We have Shervin Peshavar, Kimmel Musk. Welcome to the show. How are you guys doing?

2:31:09Good to see you. What's going on, guys? Welcome to the show. Great to have you both back on. Good to have you back on the show. It's been a busy few weeks since we last spoke. I know, I know. We saw the display at the Vatican. We were blown away. Jordy didn't think it was real. I think the first time he saw it, then we saw more images. It's very hard to tell on the internet these days. That's your problem. It's like people just assume like, cool, AI, blah. But it was real. There's no way this is real. Exactly. Exactly. It's unbelievable. But anyway, give us the update. What's new in your world?

2:31:41Well, it's just been extraordinary. We closed our round, as we discussed last time I was on the show, and then made it to Burning Man, survived. Yes. We went to Vatican, and we had just the most incredible show. Just a time when we had Charlie Kirk being assassinated that week. We were able to just be sad with the world for a little moment. And then to also be joyful, to go and celebrate the fact that we are in this place as a human species. not really Catholic Church, really just about everyone, and grace for the world. Yeah, so inspiring. I had my father and my daughter there, and there wasn't a dry eye in there.

2:32:32There were 300 ,000 people there. When Pope Francis's image went up, it was just so emotional. We did a memorial for Pope Francis. It was, the original idea for this was, it came back in June of 2024, we did a show in Cannes, France. It's actually the same show that Shervin saw. And the chairman for the Jubilee, Olivier Francois, found me in this conference and said, we just have to do something for the Jubilee. Didn't really believe it. And then one thing led to the other. But actually, that was also when Shervin got involved. And Shervin and I have known each other forever, for like 15 years.

2:33:11But what I love about Shervin, we just spent time together traveling the world. and back in May or June, I think we were with Pharrell Williams in Madrid for a show to explain to him what we were going to do at the Vatican because he wanted to do it with us, but we hadn't figured out what to do yet. And Shervin said, hey, let's find a way to work together. So he led the round, Jeffrey joined, and he's also joined us, Shervin has joined us as our global expansion advisor so we are we're taking one country at a time very exciting very exciting how quickly do you guys want to scale because as as an american i want you guys doing like you know at least a show a day here in the u.s before we give too much you'll be amazed we now this past weekend we did five shows around the world wow uh one and two in australia two in europe two in the US.

2:34:11And we're really constrained by the number of drones we have. So we have building drones as fast as humanly possible. And we have incredible artists like Andrea Bocelli or Pharrell Williams that want to do amazing things with us. And then the more countries we open, which is what Shervin is helping us with, the more attractive this becomes. Because if you're if you're Andrea Bocelli, for example, his tours are global. It doesn't really help to do just the U.S. Yeah, you can't plan a tour and think, well, I only have this technology for these shows, right? Someone in the chat is asking, where can people get tickets for the next one?

2:34:53I imagine they're all over the world, but do you have an email list, something to let people know? Yeah, so the place to go is go to Fever. So there's an amazing company called Fever. It's like a ticket master for the world. so take pastors focus on the u.s theaters all around the world and uh we the show we're doing right now is called drone art show just very simple they can search for drone art show they'll see what cities we're in oh cool um this past weekend we were in chicago oh wow uh madrid brisbane and orlando and i mean so it's just just so many yeah it's better to just track it out you can't be at every show um did anything the idea is actually like kind of like sop de soleil we We want people to get excited when Nova comes to town.

2:35:36Totally. Did anything from the... Sorry, what was that? I just want to say how excited we are and honored we are to be able to lead the round, the$50 million round in Nova Sky Stories. And I think the world of Kimball, I think he has one of the greatest hearts and one of the biggest visionaries that I've seen. And he always talked about cracking people's hearts open and inspiring people. And one of the great feces that we have is that the world, AI is never going to replace the human heart, human emotion. The algorithms are going to rationally try to explain it. But human emotion and feelings are going to grow in value.

2:36:17And what he did at the Vatican really did crack the hearts of all the people that saw it and the millions of people that saw it around the world. And it's actually available on Disney+. It's going to be there forever. Yeah, everyone should watch it. It gives you a peek of a completely new medium in entertainment that's combining human creativity and AI and drones and automation. So for SoFar Capital Elite, it's a big honor to be able to work again with Kimball and also work with people like Katzenberg and others. It's a great honor. So we're very excited. Did anything about the Vatican show, and I'm sure you got a ton of inbound interest from customers, did anything update you about the shape of the business?

2:37:04What interesting pockets of opportunity might exist for future shows? Did you have any learnings coming out of the Vatican show? I think the biggest learning we got is that 300 ,000 people came out of their homes. It was a free concert, so not ticketed, but not really well promoted because it's the Vatican. They don't really know how to promote their own thing. And we had 300 ,000 people come to the show live. So I think that we've not really opened up our eyes to shows that have that level of scale in the audience. and we've now gotten, you know, we're very busy doing regular shows. The Vatican is not a regular show.

2:37:48That is just absolutely next level and you just have to watch it to understand. But we now have interest for people, whether it's America's 250th or repeating a Catholic-oriented show in Brazil or doing something about the history of the UAE. We, these are hundreds of thousands of people will come to see the show. We might take them. You guys have a problem where when you get into that scale of an audience, it's hard to ticket that many people because you're talking about just putting it over. Honestly, I don't even know how to do it now. I believe that I believe it when our ticketing partners say, no, it's possible, but I don't know how to do it.

2:38:34So thankfully, that's not going to be our problem. The ticket dealers say that anything's possible. but yeah i mean it's cool to think about you know a city like a city for example or a town saying we want to do this to celebrate something and we're just going to pay for it because it's almost a public benefit right right and many countries want to do that obviously the united states wants to do that for america's 250th um we uh we're going to do what we're doing we'll do many but we're going to do a very big one in in north dakota for teddy roosevelt's library being opened on july 4th for the 250th and it's um i was at north dakota is going to be less people but it will be open to the public and it'll be tens of thousands of people are there any stadiums what opened our eyes is how how much the public want to be in the live show the live experience uh because they could just easily have watched on tv that's what really what they wanted yeah but then you can just watch cgi you know you can just watch you can watch your animation seeing it in the sky 3D around you.

2:39:38It's the visceral experience of it. You see that you hear the who's and ah's and people are excited. There's something physical that the drones bring and it truly, there are drones. I mean, they're used as weapons in other parts of the world. I think that physicality gives a visceral alertness that you don't get if you're watching it on TV or on Instagram. And it's still awesome on TV and it's awesome on Instagram, but it's just nothing like in person. I also want to just touch on how fast this is growing. Just as an investor, to be able to see a founder and a company and a team really gigascale this idea better than anyone else in the world.

2:40:23When I got involved late last year, how many tickets last year? In 2024, we sold 6 ,000 tickets to our shows. We should have half a million sold this year. Half a million, blind a million. So I've been traveling around the world with him and talking to sovereigns around the world and closing deals and hand-to-hand combat. And you're just seeing the reception, the excitement of the sovereigns and the partners around the world. This is one of the fastest growing businesses that I've ever seen. And going around with him has felt like the way I used to go around with Travis, gigascaling from tiny company with one million revenue to multiple billions.

2:41:08And it actually does matter going country to country. You actually have to get on a plane. You have to work with the aviation authorities in that country. You have to navigate the bureaucracy. These are actual flight vehicles. So if you, for example, we work in Mexico, but every drone we transfer over to Mexico It's the same paperwork as transferring a 747 to Mexico. Well, yeah, from an investment standpoint, you know, if I was underwriting this, it's like you look at the mode. It's like the regulatory mode of like being able to fly, having these relationships, the technological mode of just like being able to coordinate, you know, thousands and thousands of drones simultaneously.

2:41:54simultaneously the IP, just the IP itself, right, is getting partnering with IP in different categories. And then obviously the relationships with even the individual venues to be able to like support and put on these. There's so many different layers to it. Yeah, it's funny you say the venues. The venues is one of the greatest modes out there. And I mean it because it is hand-to-hand combat, figuring out each venue. You know, what is the weather like? what's the size of the audience what's the ticket price you can charge what kind of a show is this the Vibaldi Four Seasons show with a live orchestra or should this be more of a choir with Pharrell Williams every venue is different and so that's just it's just almost like a real estate play you just go one after the other and you now all of a sudden have a portfolio of venues or real estate that you can use when it makes sense.

2:42:56This time last year, we might have had, I don't know, 20 venues under our belt, and now we have 1 ,000. D.R., are you guys limited at all physically, like being able to have enough drones to be able to put on the... We are absolutely limited by a number of drones. We are building them as fast as we can, and it's not near fast enough. We are constantly surprised. It's a six-month supply chain, right? So you order everything, you've got battery chemistry to sort out, you've got all of these nuances to the supply chain that change over time. And so if I were to predict our business now, it's September, what is it going to be like in March next year?

2:43:39I'm going to be so wrong. There's just no chance I get it right. And so we've just decided to just make as many drones as we possibly can. That's the reason we took the fundraise. so that we're not keeping that in our back pocket as an issue. Like, oh, well, what about the drones? Right now, we literally, if someone said to us, you know, here's a gazillion dollars, we want you to fly a show like the Vatican, we just don't have the drones. We have to plan for sort of March and onwards for next year. And it's going to be great, but it's... Yeah, and now you get the benefit of having to manage fleets already on different continents.

2:44:24So in a sense, the drone shortage enables us to train the teams in different countries. So we're not just scaling so fast that safety is our, at the end of the day, number one priority. And we've got a 100 % safety record and plan to keep it. And I do think there's some value to being forced to go a little slower. But we are definitely being forced to go slower. Well, congratulations on the fundraiser. It's a three-sided marketplace is what we realize as we analyze the businesses that you have the three sides of the venues dominating the venues around the world. And you get pretty creative with the kinds of venues you can do outdoors.

2:45:04And then you have the consumers who are coming and buying the tickets and coming to it. And as the venues grow, you have larger and larger people. There were 5 ,000 people that got ticketed to the show in Madrid. and there was 300 ,000 people that showed up to the free show in Rome. And then you have the IP on the third side of the marketplace. So you get more and more content, and you get more and more beautiful content that he's creating. It's basically building like a Pixar and a Disney all-in-one inside of a technology company. I love the Pixar analogy. And actually, Disney back in the early days, they had to solve the technology as well.

2:45:40And I read Walt Disney's biography. It's fascinating how it took them 10 years to add sound to Mickey Mouse. And well, Mickey Mouse came out with sound. It was the first form of sound. 10 years. 10 years. And it took us, it's going to sound crazy, but Intel was building this company 10 years before I acquired it. Probably took us 12 years to add sound. It's remarkable. And it's just like, why? That's just crazy. Well, actually, this is really hard. And then our shows are now becoming 90 minutes long. But that is a 2025 invention. invention that is not pre-2025 and now you have to create content that's 90 minutes long just because you can technically do it doesn't mean you actually can do it well and so that's where the pixar comes in really the creatives working with the engineers back and forth and pushing each other i love businesses like this that are just such a simple idea but incredibly incredibly difficult to execute but when if you can do it it's just you know the value is just The invention of new form factors and new mediums of communication are some of the most exciting things to invest in.

2:46:45And the analogy that I was using, I love the movie Babylon, which is like about the history of Hollywood and movies going from silent to sound and what a transformation that was. And that's what Kimball's really doing with Nova Sky Stories. He's invented a new type of medium for creative expression and entertainment and then applied sound to it, live sound. so the fever shows are choreographed to live sound drones are keep in mind these are thousands of drones choreographed to the beat to the songs that are performed live in the orchestra that's really hard well congratulations on the fundraise let's ring the gong one more time I love it thank you so much amazing stuff I can't wait to see let us know when the first we'll get on the email list but excited to have the first show yeah just go to Fever and then for the show go to Disney Plus fantastic amazing have a great rest of your day congratulations cheers did you see Chinese automaker BYD's U9 Extreme EV just broke the top speed record at Germany's ATP proving grounds they beat the Bugatti Chiron which went 304 miles an hour,.77.

2:48:06They went 308 miles an hour. The car has almost 3 ,000 horsepower. You saw that Berkshire Hathaway sold out entirely. They own zero. Well, I know why. Because, oh, this fancy car. Everyone's so obsessed with it. Track grade battery, blah, blah, blah. You know it's Nürburgring time? 659, 10 seconds slower than a Chevy Corvette. What are we doing here? 3 ,000 horsepower and you can't even get around the green. hell in under 655? What are we doing? It's ridiculous. Not impressed. Go back to the drawing board, China. Try again. Because if you're getting laughed by a Chevy Corvette on the old Norsch life, what are you doing?

2:48:50Anyway, if you want to hop on a wander, find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Maybe you book a wander next to the Nordschleife and take a couple laps around the old Nürburgring. But we have our next guest, Stephen. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Stephen? Good to see you. Good afternoon. How are you? Give us the news. What's the fundraising announcement? Let's ring the gong at the start of the segment. Then we'll get into the details. Yes. So big announcement.

2:49:25we have just raised 12 million dollars in our big thank you for the gong we've just raised 12 million dollars led by Acne Capital and with a co-lead with Future Ventures and this adds on top of the already 8 million dollars we've raised from Construct and Abstract and Generational Partners and Village Global and X fund. So that brings us to about$20 million raised. And we're very excited for the, you know, after this financing round for the firepower, it gets us to move forward. Talk about the state of the business. Talk about the semiconductors and try and put it in, in terms like relative to what else is going in the market.

2:50:12People have a high level understanding of like, you know, GPUs and CPUs, but what are you doing specifically in semiconductors? yeah so that's a good way to put it cpus gpus fpgas these are the things that people usually think about when they think about semiconductors uh they they tend to be the things that come top of mind and they are indeed two-thirds of the of the chip industry so the trillion dollar chip industry they're they're two-thirds of that but there's this other one-third which is uh analog And analog tends to be overlooked, but it is unbelievably important. You have the way we are communicating today and the way you are beaming out your show to everyone who is watching, this is all done over analog digital signals processors and many, many, many, many different bouncing signals across the planet.

2:51:08And I think it tends to be overlooked, but it's unbelievably important. It's unbelievably important in military warfare. It's unbelievably important in communications. And that's where we've really focused. Now, big picture, Sphere is a chip and product company. The difference between us and everyone else on the planet is that we, at the base of what we do, have an AI engine that allows us to, from concept all the way to fabrication, produce you know, produce chips that are entirely AI designed. Philosophically, we think that chip design by humans is coming to an end. It already has mostly ended in the world of digital.

2:51:54So CPUs and GPUs and FPGAs, they're not designed. The layouts of those chips are not designed by hand.

2:52:02You actually have TSMC basically do the layout for all the logic gates and things like that for you. Um, but in analog, it's still done by hand. And we think that the thing we are conquering today is we're putting that to an end and we are in doing so building a product company around that where everything is designed by AI, which. So is it correct to characterize you as a, as a fabulous chip design company? I come to you with a, something that can be done in math, digital signal processing. I have some stream of information that's coming in. I need to transform that with math. You're going to use AI to design a chip, and then you're going to call an actual fab to go and make those chips, and then you send me the completed chips.

2:52:48Yeah. So just a bit about what we do today. We found an interesting niche in the defense sector as a good starting point where we, companies like Andrel, actually, specifically Andrel and some others, come to us and they say, hey, I have an electronic warfare system or I have a SIGINT system and I need an analog front end for it. I need a bunch of chips at the analog front end. And these are pretty critical. They come to us, they give us a custom spec. And then we go ahead and we go on to our fab and we say, hey, this is the design. Our AI came up with actually hundreds of possible designs. and these are their performance characteristics, et cetera, et cetera.

2:53:31We work between the customer and the fab and then we fab it out, we package it, we ship it off. We're actually, you know, actually the big thing we're, you know, we've done over the last, you know, year and a half since starting the company is build up this capability around these small RF components. And we're actually going to start building a joint venture with one of the big defense primes, one of the big four, I guess. Let's go. allows what let's go yeah let's give it up for the defense primes i know i know we like andrel here but they don't get enough love they don't get enough love um i uh i i told the an executive at northrop about the b2 bomber meme yeah where it was feed me oh yeah have they seen it he really he thought it was really funny that's uh maybe good maybe bad i don't know like well it was designed for that.

2:54:25Yeah, that's actually the intended purpose. So what is difficult about scaling the business now? You're raising more money. It doesn't sound like you're deploying that capital to build a fab. Are you just hiring more software engineers and AI scientists to build more efficient AI systems that can actually design better chips even beyond superhuman capabilities, but there's still a frontier where we can continue to advance? What is the longer term goal? So we have this business that we've really started, that we're going to build a joint venture around in these, I guess, these RF components, which are, it's a bit of a niche business.

2:55:05And the few things we're going to be doing with this capital is one, actually, you know, investing in expanding out that joint venture, et cetera. There's going to be some capital investment from us. We do pay for fabrication, things like that. But also we're going to be moving into what you might think of as the more high value area of the analog world which are mixed signal chips um broadcom and marvell have made a lot of money over the last uh you know since the ai boom started and a lot of that is because you need to communicate between two gpus these mixed signal components that broadcom and and marvell and all these guys make um you know and that's where we're going after next these mixed signal components or ip blocks And that's the next area we need to conquer.

2:55:48That's going to take quite a bit of hiring. It's going to, you know, whereas our fabrication for the defense stuff was in more reasonably less expensive nodes, some of the stuff is going to be in much lower nodes. So any fabrication we do is going to be much more expensive. But in general, that's the next area we want to conquer, this mixed signal area, which is the you know the core of what data centers are really using when they think about analog um it's a lot of hiring some fabrication might be some test equipment um though uh we're not sure about that whether we want to borrow it or buy it uh and you know we're hiring um software engineers ai engineers chip designers a lot of chip designers um and then obviously i need some i need some business operations people to really come and help build out the operations.

2:56:42Your deals, get steak dinners. Well, we are rooting for you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on the round. Congrats on the program. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you. All right. Bye-bye. Cheers, Steven. Up next, we have robots in space, but first, a startup idea. Bulletproof silk Charmuse American streetwear. Are you familiar with this at all? You can... Silk that's tougher than Kevlar. They modified silkworms to make a material that's stronger than Kevlar. You can make a whole jacket out of it, which I think should be bulletproof, maybe? I have no idea.

2:57:18I feel like I've been hearing about this, like, make a bulletproof vest that just looks like normal clothes for, like, decades, and no one's ever figured it out. But I have no idea if it's actually possible. It sounds very sci-fi. I would like to... Well, speaking of sci-fi, we have the founders of Icarus Robotics. Let's bring him in from the Restream Reading Room into TVP and Elfadon. Welcome to the stream. What's going on, guys? How are you guys doing? Hey, guys. How are you? We're good. How's it going? Kick us off with an introduction. Who are you? What are you doing? I'm Ethan Ross, co-founder and CEO of Acres Robotics, and we're building the labor force for space.

2:57:57Okay. Finally. We're lucky enough to be partnered with NASA. We're lucky enough to be partnered with some of the commercial space stations and be sending robots to space. Sorry, I was talking over here. You said you're partnered with NASA. Is that correct? Let's go. We're lucky enough to be working on some of the most amazing teams over there. That's amazing. Incredible. What do you want to do in space? Because I labor in space. There's so many different things. Repair a solar panel. Plug a hole after an asteroid smashed into the side of my spaceship. What are the tractable problems that you need labor for in space?

2:58:29Let Jamie jump into that. He's the labor guy. Let's see it. Yeah, yeah. Well, look, we always say half of the world's GDP is labor, and I think it's going to be a similar makeup in space. So one of the big things we realized is that essentially we're hyper reliant on astronaut time when we're in space. And, you know, an hour of astronaut time costs one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars an hour. What these people are doing, they have PhDs. You know, they're amazingly skilled. They've all been, you know, Air Force pilots, all this kind of stuff. But ultimately what they end up doing is the logistics and the maintenance that keeps a lot of these habitats and platforms alive.

2:59:05So what we're actually doing is building these dexterous mobile robots, these free flying drones with robotic arms that can essentially go and be controlled from the ground and do a lot of the work, the boring and maybe tedious work that the astronauts don't want to do so that they can focus on the revenue generating stuff. So that's the experimentation and the science and the manufacturing. right that's cool it's it's it's funny to think about astronauts being like uh yeah i'm worried about losing my job to icarus robotics and they're like you guys are like no it's fine you're you're going to be free your time's going to be freed up to do higher leverage things but i bill at 135 thousand dollars an hour that's my rate and uh i don't want to see any wage compression i'd like a raise next year inflation's going up i want to be at 140k an hour next year unfortunately i don't think that astronauts are taking home 135 an hour otherwise otherwise the average you know kid would be like i want to be an astronaut yeah yeah yeah i'm not doing the creative thing i'm going astro all the way uh so uh what does testing look like i remember seeing all these videos of astronauts in pools can you test in water is that useful at all yeah you guys just raised six million i'm assuming you don't have hardware in space yet but this round will help you get there Yeah, so that's great.

3:00:21We're actually on launch coming up by the end of 26, early 27 to the ISS. So this is full scale testing. We'll be up there for a year. Right now we have an entire week of crew time to test, but you're 100 % correct. Testing on Earth is really, really tough. And the way that you do that is a few modes. One, you can set up an air bearing facility, which gives you kind of like a frictionless environment. So think about this like a a really scientific air hockey puck where you know the way that there's a thin film of air between the air hockey puck and the actual table well we do that with nitrogen high compressed nitrogen and these things called air bearing and that gives us really great movement in an xy plane but you're entirely right we were just down in johnson checking out the neutral buoyancy pool which i think is one of the largest pools in the country and you can test there as well but the most exciting test before you get the ISS is actually the parabolic flight.

3:01:17So you might have seen those videos of people in the planes and these planes go up and down in parabolas and they go at the same speed of gravity downwards and that gives you freefall and people misconstrue space and orbit and that zero G feeling you actually get is actually freefall and so we'll be doing one of those in the new year which would be super exciting. So your robots will Will they be primarily inside the International Space Station? Are they going to put them outside? And once you've got that dial, then go outside? Or are they multipurpose? How do you think about the two use cases?

3:01:50And are they even that different at all, if you're a robot? Yeah, so our plan is initially to start off by having these robots do essentially what we call IVA operation so that's inside the vehicle so our robot is designed uh basically to be propelled by fans and some other sort of like niche motion mechanisms that will uh maybe show a little bit later but yeah so ultimately what we wanted to do is deploy here first because it's actually an amazing place where you have the kind of guard rails of having humans in the loop uh you have humans around it so if anything goes really really wrong you know it's not just gonna float out into the middle of nowhere someone can recover it so uh that's kind of the big reason why we went uh you to go to the IVA first because most people are looking over this, really.

3:02:35That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by the show. We will talk to you later. Congratulations. Let us know. Let us know if there's – we have a pretty harsh environment here in the Ultradome. If you need some testing, just let us know. Give us the final fundraiser. What was it? 6.1? 6.1 million? Yeah, 6.1. Boom. Nice work, guys. Love it. Love it. Congratulations. Congrats on the race. We'll see you at the Series A. Innocent Bystander says Tim Cook could secure his legacy with one move. Can you guess what it is, Jordy? A home printer that works. Home printer that works. Simple stuff.

3:03:16It's crazy. Brother printer prints like 5 billion USD a year. I found a paper company. This is deeply ironic because we are, of course, partnered with Ramp.com. Save time and money. Get rid of your paper receipts. That's right. But I found a paper company that's worth the same amount in market cap as Ramp. Not for long. Not for long. We're going to take them down. You're going to hear some really negative investigative journalism, some short reports about this paper company worth$20 billion. It's funny. So Julie Chang in this reply says they're called brother laser printers. Yes. We love a brother.

3:03:48We run on brother. We love brother laser printers. Technology brothers. It's true. We run on brother. Do you think that Apple's never done the home printer because of environmental concerns around like don't print, don't waste paper? The future is always obviously not the future. Also, I feel like this is one of those things where if I look way back over the past 40 years of Apple history, I bet they did a printer at one point. Remember, didn't Apple do a camera, like a handheld digital camera at one point? That was its own device. So Apple's dipped their toes in here and there, but I would love a proper home printer from Apple.

3:04:21Oh, wait. So according to Gemini, while it may seem surprising to many today, Apple was once a significant player in the computer printer market. What? For nearly two decades, the company designed and sold a range of printers from early dot matrix models to groundbreaking laser printers that played a pivotal role in the desktop publishing revolution. They started in the late 70s with the Apple Silent Type, a thermal printer. However, it was the Image Writer series produced in the early 1980s that became a popular companion to the Apple II. And then they got out of the business? Yeah, you can find these on eBay.

3:05:00Apple Writer II Printer. It probably works fine. What's wrong? It looks... Tim Cook should come out with a statement. Hey, they're out there. It's got the rainbow Apple logo. If you want it so much, if it's not just stated preference, if it's revealed preference, go get yourself an Apple printer, I guess it exists. In other news, UFC is happening on the south lawn of the White House, and they took a page out of our set design. I see an ultradome. It's time to trust. It's time to trust. They're trust up. Their trust is huge. Don't go trust for trust with the White House. No, you do not want to go trust for trust with them.

3:05:37They got to get a— Is this a real photo or is this CGI or something? Like, what's going on here? Is this an artist's rendering? It's CG. I was looking at it for a while. It's CGI, right? Because, like, they're— I was scoping out their trust. This has not happened yet. Are you guys kidding? This is like the most obviously CGI I've ever seen in my life. I can't tell anymore. I don't even know. You think they just set up a bunch of 10 ,000 people? I don't know. I'm not a political person. I don't follow politics that closely. So I don't know. This might have happened. It's double bad because I'm not into politics and I'm also not into sports.

3:06:09So you could have told me, oh, yeah, UFC happened at the White House last weekend. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I guess I did. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Austin is coming into the TVP and Ultradone. Welcome to the show, Austin. Good to finally have you. What's up, guys? We've reacted to many posts on this new show. Thank you for your service to the timeline. Good to see you. What's happening? Long-time listener. First-time caller. Thanks for hopping on. Give us the news. Big day. Big day. What's going on in your world? What you got for us? Yeah, we just announced our$6 million seed round.

3:06:41That is gone-worthy. I don't know if this is Dongworthy also, but as of three days ago, we're officially a ramp customer. Let's go.

3:06:54Bingo! That's amazing. There we go. He is fired up. Let's go. Love it. That is amazing. Congratulations. Extremely bullish for your business. You had launched the product. this is another launch we were talking earlier you got to always just be launching so and launched again yeah so we story of the company we've had a wait list we've kind of had a wait list since the beginning and so we've been a little constrained on how quickly we can add customers we still are a bit but we've been adding a ton of customers all day today and um so we are launching to general availability for the first time today and we had about 15 000 people on the wait list who all got invited in today and we still don't have free trials so everyone has to pay to use the product But yeah, we're adding customers really quickly.

3:07:43And I guess I should talk about the product. So how is the people's secretary? So it is a secretary that is part human, part AI. So we have really sophisticated models that do all the things that a great assistant does on scheduling. It knows where you take your meetings, when you take your meetings, how you want buffers, how many meetings you want to take per day. Subtle hints on priority of different types of meetings and can follow up to make sure meetings get scheduled and all of those types of things. And so it's powerful AI models that do all these things in a simulation. And then we have humans who are checking because our customers are founders, VCs, all sorts of folks who have a really low tolerance for mistakes on this type of scheduling.

3:08:23And so when our model, they're not confident enough, we have a 24-7 team of humans who are checking these simulations and approving them before they go out or correcting them in this kind of like cursor for EA's system that we've built. So it's an extremely over-engineered product to solve a relatively or seemingly simple problem, but it's actually like pretty hard to get it as good as a phenomenal executive assistant would. And so that's the product. How are you thinking about pricing? I feel like they're, you know, hiring a full time EA is expensive. And we've seen the rise of these offshore services that are still like, what very expensive compared to like even a chat GPT pro plus giga subscription.

3:09:06Where do you want to play? Where do you think that there's opportunity to create, you know, a delta between what people pay and get value from? Yeah, the framing is kind of interesting because it's like we have people who say they're switching from like a virtual assistant service that costs$3 ,000 a month to Howie because they're mostly using that for scheduling and Howie's better at scheduling and is 24-7. But then there's also people that are like, well, Calendly is$12 a month. Why would I pay you guys more than that? Interesting. So it's been kind of interesting. So our pricing is$35 a month for our base product and then$145 for Howie Pro.

3:09:40And the main thing you get there is white labels. So you can rename your Howie and give it an email at your domain. And Turner Novak named his Chamath. I was about to say, was that you? I remember seeing that funny meme. I couldn't tell if that was a joke, but it's really good. Yeah, no, he has Chamath scheduling his meetings. And yeah, and then you can do like more sophisticated, like complex preferences on Howie Pro. But the white label is the main thing people pay for. And so, yeah, we've gotten definitely some pushback, especially without free trials. But overall, for the right people, our product becomes instantly indispensable.

3:10:16And it's primarily people who schedule a ton of external meetings who just immediately cannot live without it once they start using it. How long do you think it will take for your internal software and the models to get good enough to never need that sort of human verification layer? So I think about it like self-driving cars. it's like we the things like the a couple years ago every waymo on the street had a person in the car holding the steering wheel now for the most part they don't but if you see a waymo on an icy road in lake tahoe there's someone holding the steering wheel and so we will keep pushing farther out and always be bringing tech bringing like a product experience to the market that is not possible with today's technology where we have humans holding the steering wheel on the kind of next bleeding edge things and more and more goes back to the model so we are already giving more to the models than we were even like a month ago but um but we'll keep kind of keep adding complexity so whether that's like travel booking anything that like an ea does and then a lot of things that eas don't do but that people could use in terms of like meta work about helping like pay attention to how you're spending your time and what your priorities are and so there's a lot of things we can do that are going to be error prone and we will always be like willing to lean on humans to push out a little farther than then would be possible with just the models.

3:11:34Uh, have you thought about an even higher tier? I feel like, uh, there's maybe an opportunity to add human in the loop and at, at, at that multi-thousand dollar price point. But what, what, what do you think that it's just like, doesn't make any sense for the business would take you away from the, the, the, the true goal here. What are you thinking? So we've used humans in a loop and they, so when we started doing that, it was me doing this. And I was like typing in Google Calendar API calls into the browser myself. And that was like in January. And it would take me 30 minutes or so to complete many of these tasks.

3:12:10And now we have 24-17, we have 60 people that do this. And they can do these tasks in like 90 seconds. So it's like they're quickly seeing the reasoning notes and all these things and the entire simulation of what happened. And then they can chat with it. So they can say like, oh, you got the time zone wrong. like, Doherty is normally in Pacific time, but he said, he said, this is for like the, when they're doing the New York Stock Exchange thing. So it needs to be on Eastern time. And then, and then it'll like re-simulate in front of your eyes. So we've leaned a lot into speeding up the humans in completing these tasks to where we don't really need a steeper for what we're offering today.

3:12:46We don't need to charge more than we do, but it is totally possible that we will have something more advanced, but really it's just like, how can we on the scale of hundreds of dollars a month or even less give millions of people the uh an experience that is as good as what the top kind of 0.01 percent of people who have a great it's even better because you can in for scheduling because somebody that like somebody could be on the other side of the world when if you had an ea they'd be sleeping they can be messaging and scheduling time they get that instant booking and confirmation and you get that 24 7 like live experience uh that no ea today can offer you need a rotating crew of ea's so i think um yeah it's it's uh yeah and and the other thing too is like if if you're like need to clear your schedule if it's like 11 at night and you realize okay i need to do something in the morning i'm not gonna be able to do these meetings you can like instantly just like hit a button and and clear out the schedule and and have it done in a way that's like thoughtful for the people on the other side.

3:13:52On the fundraising side, I mean, I'm a small angel, and when you first pitched me this, I was like, that makes sense. It's like a simple idea, big tam. I think you can use AI to create something that is just remarkably better than like the current SaaS offerings. But in some ways, it's like an obvious idea, uh at so and that can be a double-edged sword sometimes investors are like oh this is a no brainer i would i would use this i know a bunch of people that would use this but then on the other side i'm sure you got the question of like what if open ai does this or questions like that so how is it navigating those kind of conversations yeah i mean earlier on i was more concerned because i've realized how unbelievably hard it is to actually execute on this product and um and so And I think that there's a challenge.

3:14:47We spent all of last year, which you know, Jordi, the thing was making mistakes. I was apologizing. I spent 50 hours a week apologizing to customers for mistakes that we were making. But during that time, we saw all of the kind of mistake patterns, and we were able to kind of build our first version of a map of what we think the EA needs to do in all these different scenarios. And that doesn't exist in publicly available training data. It's like what happens in the assistant, the executive assistant's head as they're doing scheduling and that's not publicly available anywhere. There's lots of training data that's calendar data and email data, but the kind of like what happens in the EA's brain isn't.

3:15:24And I think you have to put a pretty bad product into market in order to get a good one in this category. And that's tough for bigger companies like OpenAI to actually do. And then to deliver a product as good as ours with human in the loop, like that's also just They want to bring something to a million customers on day one, and that's pretty tough to do. Even for us, it's been hard to scale this kind of human-in-the-loop approach. And so I think it's like a valid question, obviously. Like scheduling is one of the use cases that comes up all the time. But I think by the time other folks start to get interested in it, we will be moved on to a lot more beyond just scheduling.

3:16:01So it's not overly a concern. But yeah, I mean, there's competitor products of ours and then lots of bigger companies that are trying to build things like this. There's one popular CEO that was tweeting about it just today, right after our announcement about their assistant. And so there are people trying to solve this problem and we think it's a problem that's worth solving. So. A secretary for the people. Finally. We love it. the last thing i want to say is this the name secretary i i think you remember this john because i dm'd you about it but a very early episode of tbpn jordy mentioned howie and john you were saying like it should be called secretary they should buy secretary secretary.com yeah that planted a seed in my brain because a couple months later i was thinking like i mean you you made a whole case for it but for me it was just like there's 10 000 products out there called ai assistant and there's a word that everyone in the world knows that describes the thing that we do and we could be one of one and so yeah so we're what's the actual response been because i remember it was it was just a funny like counter secretary also means keeper of secrets right means keeper of the secrets we have a secretary of the war secretary of the interior like it's a very high status position in dc um but yeah not many brands are using it have any of the have any of the customer's been like i don't i don't get it or does it actually land no i mean yeah because like jordy there some people said that they thought we'd get canceled for using it that it because it's like two kind of that's different than actually getting angry messages like somebody can say i think you will get angry messages but did you get angry messages yeah no so far like and yeah honestly like it's been all positive and we leaned into it the launch video is like showing is kind of starts out in the, with a sort of 1950s style secretary by the end, she's kind of modernized and she's a boss, which is kind of the same arc that Christina Hendricks character goes through in Mad Men where she's like a secretary who's not treated well.

3:18:02And by the end, she's like equity holder in the business and, and as a boss. And so, um, yeah, so, so far it's been extremely positive and we're really excited. Cool. Yeah. Always room to carve out like a different, a different, uh, like define the category. I mean, cognition did this, didn't they kind of create the initial coding agent, like the AI software engineer. It was like when super viral. Yeah, AI engineer. Because people were like, it doesn't count. And they're like, okay, well, at least you're talking about us. And then they debated it. And now people are like, yeah, of course, coding agents exist.

3:18:34It's a category. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on the show. Awesome progress. Great catching up with you. Excited for more people to get access. Thank you guys so much for having me. Love to have you back soon. We'll talk to you soon. You're the man, Austin. Bye. Cheers. See you guys. um did you see this this uh image of the monks in orange robes at the iphone 17 pro launch yes i did i thought this is so good they're like finally what did you think was good about it did you think it was a real photo is it a it's a i baby oh only john falls for ufc AI. I mean, this is on another level. This is great.

3:19:12This is great. This is a remarkable AI image, honestly. It looks very real. I honestly can't really clock it. The only reason I, when you shared it, I was like, this is real. And then I saw a community note on it that said the picture is clearly AI generated when you look at the bottom left. The community note could be real. They're like orange iPhones, huge sign of respect. It's really cool. It's a really cool idea that they'd be into the orange iPhones. But it does seem like fake news. In other news, Tomorrow is D-Day on X. If you're a bot, if you're a spammer and you're running a bot network on X, Nikita Beer is coming for you.

3:19:47Tuesday is D-Day. Nikita Beer will be wiping out 50 % to 60 % of all bots algorithmically. Then two weeks after that, we will reduce it another 25 % with changes to account requirements. Very exciting news. X is getting cleaner, and Nikita continues to be on an absolute run over there. I've been very pleased with the algorithm. You see closing kind of a black pill, but Patek will be raising their prices by 15 % today. Omega Cartier will be going up by 8 % to 15 % as well. Well, head over to getbezel.com. Before this gets priced in, because unfortunately these kind of price changes get priced into the secondary market pretty quickly.

3:20:32So the price of the brick is going on. Make a move. There's never a bad time to pull the trigger. on an Aquanaut. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We had a great show. We enjoyed hanging out with all you in the chat. Thank you to John Exley for hanging out. Thanks to Conor PS for the feedback about the gong hits. I'm working on it. I'm getting better every day. And thank you to GoldRock AI for hanging out. GoldRock, I didn't realize this, it's an ad. I saw GoldRock in the X chat with a full tagline of what the company does. Underrated strategy. If you're a company and you want to promote your business, make it your tagline.

3:21:10Hop in the TBPN live chat. Make some good comments. We're going to have to say your name out loud. We'll be saying your brand name. That's right. On the show. Bobby Cosmic, as always, thanks for holding it down over at Twitch. We appreciate you. And thank you to Turbo Popper. See you guys tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Have a great day. See ya. Bye.

3:21:40Thank you.