Meta Oakleys, Golden Retriever Maxing, Suits in Airports | John Jumper, Christian Garrett, Aaron Frank, Joseph Cass

30:18And sometimes it works spectacularly well. Can you tell me about the initial project spec for AlphaFold? was protein folding the most obvious choice, or were there other targets that you thought were appropriate for deep learning? And how did that initial project kick off? Was it, let's go collect all the data, or let's just start experimenting on synthetic data? How did all this play out in the early stages? So one thing to say is this problem had kind of stood as a crown jewel of hard problems in science. For a long time something like 50 years that people have been trying to build some computer system any way you could And I think it was kind of obvious also That this felt like a problem that AI could do something about one answer was data that in fact had Enormous kind of effort and forethought and expense Scientists worldwide had basically put every structure ever solved into what's called the protein data bank And so for about 50 years, people had collected this data set.

31:25The time we were doing our work was about 140 ,000 structures, but it represented essentially everything. Everyone had the same data. There were some thoughts, I think, early on about, oh, well, maybe this is a good problem for optimization and combinatorial search. That didn't really turn out to be how we solved it. But there was this thought that maybe it's kind of well teed up for the methods that were looking incredibly powerful and are, you know, incredibly powerful in terms of AlphaGo and other search style methodology. And then I think also there was actually some grassroots where there was a local group of people that were going into a hackathon at the company, kind of do whatever you want for a week and literally Googling grand challenges in biology.

32:04And so that was the other way that this got started. And, you know, it was on the list. And all of these kind of came together. And I think what it turned out to be is we didn't at all solve it the way we thought we were going to do it. And there were many blind alleys. So we got into it possibly for some right reasons, some wrong reasons. But we stayed with it for a long time. Talk to me about the state of the art of protein folding beforehand. You mentioned like a year and$100 ,000. dollars. But what did that look like in terms of the actual problem of like defining the structure of a protein based on a sequence of DNA?

32:41Is this, you know, an undergrad or a graduate student kind of pipetting stuff and putting it in a centrifuge? Like I've seen some bio lab work, but try and walk me through actually what it looks like. Is it just using a different machine and pushing a button? what's driving the cost is it labor is it is it you know reagents and equipment and expendable things like what was the state of the art at the time

33:09so it's a very good question and underlying it is a false premise okay you have this premise that there is a series of steps yeah that you're going to execute and you know you're going to maybe it's a year long but in january i'm going to do this at the end of january i'm going to succeed at that I'm going to go do the next. And, you know, you can think of it the same way as training an AI system isn't just I want an AI system. Let me press the AI button and then go get coffee. It's really about research and iteration. And so four scientists going to solve the structure of a new protein, they have this huge numbers of steps.

33:41And one, like the very first thing they have to do is make enough pure protein to study this thing. And I, you know, I did my Ph.D. in biophysics. And I remember sitting in a lab meeting where someone for six months talked about how they couldn't even make their protein to get started on their experiments. And I remember saying, if you talk about protein, you know, making protein in one more lab meeting, I'm going to start talking about my compiler errors in the next meeting. But just like building and doing the work to get enough product to get started is enormous. And then you have to convince it to form this very regular crystal structure that is not at all natural.

34:18and no one really knows how to do this they just have some ideas that maybe or maybe not work and so they try many many combinations and you know always look like one that really brought home the difficulty for me is one paper I can't remember if we trained on it or evaluated on I think we evaluated and I looked in the appendix of the paper and it said after more than a year crystals began to grow you have to make crystals to solve a protein structure and so they were literally trying things and probably that whole year they were trying things just to look in their cabinet and find out something from a year ago worked.

34:51And then after you do that, you go to a very large synchrotron, and there are many other steps. But I would say the real answer is there's wide error bars, and there's enormous amounts of experimentation and cleverness, and this is why one or a couple protein structures can be a PhD. You can be doctor at the end of this. Talk to me about the timeline. And I think that kind of was done. Yeah, talk to me about the timeline between AlphaGo and AlphaFold. and the lessons from the Lisa Dahl match, the Move 37 moment, and just the different paradigms. I mean, I remember part of the beauty of learning Go is that it's this very defined system that can be simulated at extremely high speed.

35:36It's kind of a prime environment for this reinforcement learning strategy. What was taken? What was different? And how did those timelines match up? So already coming out of Lisa Dahl at a kind of company level, DEMIS level, people were getting interested in this question. I can't remember exactly, I think it was 2016 when the work really started. I actually joined slightly after that. The early work was in kind of, can we use reinforcement learning and these models, these energy functions where you're trying to treat this as a minimization problem, just a really, really hard, clever minimization problem.

36:13And I remember even like when I came in, it was kind of, I come from a protein background and there's a way in which this is obviously not the right idea in that we don't know the full, you know, God's energy function for proteins. We don't know this thing that if you just minimize it, we're sure that's the right answer. At least if we do, it's quantum mechanics that we're not solving. And in fact, a big problem is that really you needed to solve the kind of, how do we, how do we optimize this and what are the rules that we're optimizing under at the same time and it turned out to be actually much more data-driven supervised learning and what really started to make the difference is when we sat down and we you know the state of the art kind of before it was growing there was progress was in using convolutional neural networks a certain design you can also try transformers they're not really much better for this but there were a lot of kind of people trying to take machine learning off the shelf and say, I'll just apply it.

37:11This is an application problem. And I think what we did really, really well, especially in AlphaPole 2, the one that really worked, is that we said, no, no, no, this is a machine learning research problem. How are we going to rebuild our kind of four components? How do we get inspired by the transformer, build something different in order to make a system that learned really well? And we can show, in fact, like an external group did a very careful experiment where they took Alpha Fold 2 and they trained it on 1 % of the available data and they found it more accurate than our Alpha Fold 1 system.

37:45So even between 1 and 2, you can see what is 100-fold in data. And so in a certain sense, all we did was a lot of machine learning engineering that got us 100-fold better data efficiency than we used to be and in fact used the exact same data as everyone else and that we had used for Alpha Fold 1.

38:07Oh, we're having some trouble. Really in these core ideas that enabled it to learn much more. I think all of these, I think the ideas evolved and still I think, you know, there's room to play and there's all these different problems. But it did kind of presage how important learning directly from data has become in terms of this and then RL to optimize performance and achieve other objectives. Okay. I want to talk about the reaction to AlphaFold in the public markets. I know you're not a public markets analyst, but I was very surprised that this 50-year age-old problem, this incredibly tough millennium challenge level problem is solved.

38:51And I didn't see biotech stocks like really pop. And you'd think that if you took this cost out and this uncertainty out of the system, you would see benefits. And we're certainly seeing all sorts of companies tell stories about, oh, we're using large language models all over the place, and their stocks pop. And so was that, in your mind, like a misunderstanding of the impact of this technology? Or was it more that, hey, this is just one step down the path to actually increase the output of biotechnology companies? I think it's a very interesting question. I should say I'm not an equity analyst and I would actually be after this podcast, you should go back and do the same experiment for CRISPR, which was undoubtedly a big moment in biology.

39:39And I would be shocked if you saw a pop when the CRISPR paper hit. So there actually was a major pop during CRISPR, but it was more about companies that were directly linked to it. So there were a number of companies that were trading on the back of, we will be commercializing CRISPR technology specifically. There weren't as many pure play alpha fold companies, if that makes sense. And so I don't think there was as much of a vehicle. And some of these biotech companies, they're just not traded on a cost basis. So maybe that was what was going on. It's like, yeah, okay, you're going to save a million dollars next year on protein folding.

40:21I think I think you shouldn't think of it too narrowly and you want to be really careful. So if you think about it from the hundred thousand dollar point of view, then it should already be immediately obvious that a single protein structure wasn't the gap to a drug. A drug is about a billion dollars totally in R &D. Yeah. And so you can already see that that in that many orders of magnitude. What I think I'll hold I think. But there are two more things that are really important. And one is, and especially when AlphaFold first came out, it was unclear if we just solved a grand challenge or was this going to be a really practical system?

40:54And the practicality became much more apparent, especially in six months when it was available to everyone. I think, you know, people started to say, wait a minute, it's actually solving my problems. The other, and we see it here all the time from biotechs using it. I think when AlphaFold 3 came out, it was apparent that the same thing would describe protein small molecule binding. And of course, we have work within Alphabet and isomorphic labs. It's really about how do we take these technologies and make them better. And I think all of this is to say, one is to say really, you know, certainly one of the big drivers of cost for biotech is clinical trials.

41:30So if you want to increase the success rate, you need to understand biology better. I think there's been some really important work in terms of technologies either using AlphaFold or downstream of it, such as the really incredible advances in protein design. and maybe not in the public markets, but if you look at private valuations from everything from evolutionary scale to Zera to others, you've seen some really enormous funding rounds where certainly the startup community believes that this is going to hit it big. And I think you do see some effect in that you need more technologies on top of this, and it's not a single problem, But I think it will also make a larger and larger difference.

42:13Of course, there are more problems to be solved. And without jumping into the valuation, but you also see these strong valuations on the companies very, you know, are trying to figure out how to use this and how to say kind of this door has been opened. Do you think the AI and biology and predictive biology? Do you think that the FDA will be able to adapt? Do you think the FDA will be able to adapt quickly enough to advancements in research at the intersection of AI and biology? Like, is there anyone at the FDA that's AGI pilled and is like, you know, thinking five, 10 years out? Yeah, how the underlying systems need to change.

42:53That's a very interesting question. Yeah, because what will be concerning is like if we have all this great technology and we can't implement it because of paperwork. Ultimately decrease the cost of drug creation if all the costs are in trials. Yeah, that's a great question. So one thing I'll say, and I'm outside my area of expertise and I don't have any contacts at the FDA, but let me say this version of it. These are tools that make predictions. You still check them. You don't check them by doing the exact same work as you were going to do otherwise. But you check the consequences. You say, if this is true, then this change or this drug will have that effect.

43:31And what you ultimately look at in terms of safety and efficacy of drugs is real world evidence. Now you look at clinical trials and they have this 90 plus percent failure rate. So you think about that as being really one of the key drivers. It's not so much are we just going to totally trust computation. We'll just do AI and because it says AI, we'll kind of leave it. It's going to be that we're going to do AI and then when we go in the lab, we're going to have a much better sense of what's really going on. We're going to have much better predictions, and that's going to let us do the right experiment in the first trial or the third trial instead of the hundredth trial.

44:06And I think that doesn't necessarily require you to shift your standards of evidence for what is evidence of safety and efficacy so much as it's about you as researchers, where you have a lot of freedom on how you choose the experiments you do. How do you choose the right ones that will advance you toward treating that disease? That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for joining. We'll let you get back to it. I know it's a busy day over there at AI Startup School. We really appreciate you taking the time. We'd love to have you back to go way deeper when we have more time to dig into everything.

44:38So thanks so much for joining. Thanks a lot, John. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Talk to you soon. An absolute legend, an absolute dog. That's probably the first time he's been described that way. Yes. It probably won't be the last. Definitely won't be the last. It is amazing. I mean, we should have gotten in, I'd love to go deeper into the way DeepMind has been re-org'd a bit, Google Brain has merged in, they're working on a lot of different stuff, and the science side and the research side is something that Google has been fantastic at for decades and continues to be.

45:18So, lots to dig in there. Anyway, let's go back to the timeline and go through some posts. Marvin Van Hagen says, plane flying over Stanford graduation right now. Congrats. Don't work for Elon. 20 years after Steve, stay hungry, stay foolish. Commencement speech. So this is like a pro-Trump post? Yeah. They don't want you to work for Elon because they're on Trump's side? They must be extremely mag-pilled. Yeah. Well, it isn't red. They must actually just be in favor of big government, you know, massive spending bills. That's probably what's going on there. Now, I always wonder with this type of thing.

45:52I mean, this is the person that's going to go through the effort to, I imagine they're there. I mean, you've got to give it up for them because they're doing some outdoor advertising. We love out of home. And so, you know, if you have a message to get out, regardless of whether or not we agree with you, we always support out of home advertising. You support free speech and out of home advertising. Combined is kind of the sweet spot. Yeah, so if you have a good message to send, throw it on a plane. There was a big debate on the timeline over the weekend. I think this works better than skywriting, by the way.

46:27Skywriting is potentially overrated. I think so. It just dissolves too fast. Totally. And you can't really get a message out. But this, I mean, you look at this photo, and if you go to the next slide, you'll see it's zoomed in. Like, it is incredibly legible. Yeah. Incredibly legible. And so, yeah, yeah. We should have a competing plane there. Congrats. Please work for Elon. Yeah, Elon, where's your plan? Consider applying to roles at companies like SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink. Yeah. Just fly hundreds of planes. I have been seeing stuff on the timeline about like, oh, maybe there's like a talent exodus from some of the Elon companies to other companies.

47:02I think there was one post I saw too. One post, you saw that. And I wonder how real that is. You know, some of the stuff can be tracked. The thing is - And Elon's also laying people off, so like, who knows? Yeah, and when you're at a scale like Tesla or any of these other companies, at any given point, there's a bunch of people that are leaving to go work on other things. Yeah, this is like the Microsoft laid off a thousand people and it's like 1 % of the workforce. Yeah. And it's like, no. Yeah, well, the big debate over the weekend was between you and Ashley Vance. It was more of a collaboration than a debate.

47:30More of a collaboration, but really trying to get to the bottom of an important story. Ashley said, why is the U.S. not breeding tens of thousands of gorillas? I want to know what sparked that post for him. Like, why did he choose to post that? These zoos got so gorilla-pilled on a Sunday. Anyway, I said, I'm about to find out. I went to 03 Pro on Chachapi. Very funny. Tyler Cowen retweeted this, which I love. And there's some answers. Gorillas reproduce very slowly, so it would take a long time to scale up. Conservation programs keep the population small on purpose. I don't like that. U.S. zoos follow a coordinated plan called the Species Survival Plan, which aims to keep around 350 to 355 gorillas.

48:14The conservation program is against wide-scale mass breeding. That is crazy. This number's chosen to preserve genetic diversity over the long term. I feel like if you grew the population to 10 ,000, like, boom, you would have, I guess, overbreeding leads to surplus gorillas with nowhere to go. What about to our studio? We have a lot of space here. We have plenty of space. We'll take some gorillas. I think you could scale up the number of zoos as well. and then also like obviously put them to work like you know horses no one's like oh yeah like you know too many horses you can just ride them around everyone can have a horse everyone can get a gorilla yeah they probably need to be domesticated the acceleration of gorillas too could be great for city kind of transportation you know it's stop and go traffic gorillas are really quick maybe maybe gorilla domestication is the next uh biotech project let's check check in with tyler cosgrove over on the intern cam get an update oh okay he's moved over to big pharma Nice.

49:08He's in a biotech company. Give us an update. What have you learned? What's new in your world? I'm still looking at various drugs. Yes. But I have found some interesting people I would like to talk to about. Okay. Hit us up. So the first one is, of course, Derek from moreplatesmoredates.com. Oh, fantastic. So everyone, you know, famous. He seems like an expert. He makes YouTube videos about, you know, PEDs. Yes. So I think his experience would be useful for, for one, just the increased attractiveness. Oh, yeah. That'd be big. You know, he has a long history of like pharmaceutical looks maxing.

49:37Yes. And also for like athleticism, right? If I'm going to be chasing balls, I need to be stronger. Those fast twitch muscles got to be working overtime. So the next guy is Mike Henry. He's the CEO of BHP Group, which is the largest publicly trading mining company in the world. Why are we mining? We're mining because I need lead to make me dumber. Oh, okay. Obviously, he should be an expert in lead. They're a massive mining company. So making more of a cocktail than a one-shot drug. Got it. And then, so there I have increased, I'm look-maxing and I'm making me dumber. So the third one I need, well, I guess there's friendliness.

50:17Friendliness. But also I need to have more hair, obviously, because I'm a dog. So I'm going to talk to, I think it's Gunter Khan. He created Minoxidil. He did? Okay, interesting. Is he alive? No. Oh, okay. Well, we need an alive person. Well, actually, he might. I'm not sure. I'll look into that. We'll have to figure that out. We need experts we can bring on the show. Yeah. So those are the three I've found so far. I'm going to keep looking at. We need friendliness. That's the key one that I'm most worried about. That's the one that's the most, the elusive drug for friendliness. And that's the one that we need.

50:51We see a lot of negativity on the timeline. We try and encourage people with the what would your mother do ethos. Imagine just being able to share. share a link to them to say, hey, take this drug. Injecting this once a week could make you, you know, an order of magnitude more friendly on the timeline. No more aggressive quote tweets. No more clapbacks. Those will be a thing of the past. I didn't actually know that golden retrievers are actually have pretty significant intelligence when comps to other dogs. They're the fourth most intelligent breed behind border collies, poodles, and German shepherds.

51:28Narrative violation. narrative violation this is what you want this is the guy who's on the left of the bell curve meme that's where everyone thinks the golden retriever is but the golden retriever is secretly the guy on the right yeah but that's the beauty is that they're the same guy you know like he doesn't feel the golden retriever is just not intelligent because in the age of artificial intelligence ai is going to increasingly push everyone who's trying to be the guy on the right into the midwit territory yeah and so you want to just go full guy on the left or at least have people expect that you're the guy on the left.

51:58Well, we have a post from Bucko Capital. Wait, really quickly. If you're breeding gorillas and you're going to try and sell these gorillas across the world, you're going to need Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Anyway. There's someone in the chat right now saying, Adio has a great UI. I would invest in them. Let's go. Let's give it up for Adio. Get on there. You can check it out. Let's go over to Buko Capital Bloke. He says, Apple has more of an impact on job creation in China than all of China has on America.

52:30Wow. This is obviously - Yeah. So there's an entire paragraph here. The size and influence of Apple aren't properly understood in part because they are so difficult to fathom. How can it be, for instance, that demand from China's 1.4 billion people indirectly supports across all industries between 1 million and 2.6 million jobs in America, whereas by Tim Cook's estimate, Apple alone supports 5 million jobs in China, 3 million in manufacturing, and another 1.8 million in app development. That upside down contrast boggles the mind. One super corporation has more of an impact on job creation in China than all of China has on America.

53:07Yeah, that is wild. This is obviously from Apple in China. Fantastic book. We had the author on the show and Tim Cook is quoted a bunch in the book. There's a ton of great scoops. I've been listening to the book a bunch and it's fantastic. There's a whole bunch of really interesting deep dives. Some stuff you might know but it's woven together in a very interesting way. Highly recommend going and picking up the book or the audio book, Apple in China. Ben Thompson's been singing its praises as well. He had the author on his show. did an interesting podcast with him and really dug in a layer deeper that I highly recommend going and listening to.

53:48Fascinating. And it'll be interesting to see how this affects. Apple in China, I think, could be one of those books that becomes a reference point for DC policymakers in the same way that Chip War became kind of a playbook for the Chips Act. And the 100-Year Marathon also became a kind of playbook for a renegotiation of the trade policy between the US and China. And so these books don't come along often, but when they do, give them a read. Make sure it's heavily annotated and highlighted. Anyway, if you want to invest in American companies, get on public.com, investing for those who take it seriously.

54:30They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com. What is this thing about Frontier Valley? I saw you posted this. Yeah, so I put this in there. I invited the founder, James, on the show. So Frontier Valley is a new special regulation district in SV that's larger than MoMA. Once approved, it will be America's epicenter for physical AI and deep tech innovation and will also be a template for robotics-first cities that can be replicated nationwide. What is going on here? So this is on top of an airport or something? Like, where are they going to build this?

55:05Is this landfill? Phil? Like this, this looks amazing. It just seems like so ambitious. I don't know how they're going to pull this off. Um, anyways, I invited the founder on to learn more. Uh, I thought that, uh, it was at least, it, it reminded me about some of the stuff that California forever is working on around ship building. So anyways, we need more big ambitious, uh, projects like this, and I hope they can figure out a way to pull this off. Yeah. Seems like it's getting steam. Post in here from Reed Hoffman Reed Hoffman Says some AI industry leaders are predicting white collar bloodbaths Even the most inspirational advice to new graduates lands like a band-aid on a bullet wound Some thoughts on new grads and finding a job in the AI wave Gotta go into art history It's the name of the game now Huge opportunity to go into art history Reed says what you really want is a dynamic career path not a static one Would it have made sense to internet proof one's career in 1997 or YouTube proof it in 2008.

56:05When new technology starts cresting, the best move is to surf that wave. This is where new grads can excel. College grads almost always enjoy an advantage over their senior leaders when it comes to adopting new technology. If you're a recent graduate, I urge you not to think in terms of AI proofing your career. Instead, AI optimize it. Sure. I think that's a good framework. What do you think internet proofing one's career in 1997 would have been? It's unfathomable because like the internet rolled out. Don't start a newspaper, print newspaper. Okay. Or don't go work for one, I guess. And instead go work for.

56:44No, but it is, but the immediate takeaway I have here is, is you can be worried about job loss from AI and trying to pick the right job. That's not going to be replaced where you can proactively figure out how to leverage AI to be just vastly more efficient and productive. I'm just thinking about like internet proofing feels like find a career that will not be disrupted by the internet. Or YouTube proofing means like find an industry that will not be changed at all by the existence of YouTube. So it's not about, okay, like what was disrupted by YouTube? I mean, I guess potentially like linear advertising or linear TV.

57:21Well, that's still grown tremendously. Like if you went into reality TV in 2008, like you did great, I imagine. But then also there was like kind of the death of Hollywood. Well, the thing about people that are entering startups or in the industry already, if you want to generate massive wealth and have massive impact and work at a company that becomes significant because of your participation, you have to work in and oftentimes have to work in an industry that's experiencing, you know, rapid, rapid growth. Right. And so joining traditional entertainment world or getting into the reality TV business when YouTube was taking off, probably not going to have that sort of ridiculous rapid growth.

58:07Maybe working for some creator or actually joining YouTube itself. Yeah, yeah, I mean certainly he's saying like ride the wave, lean in. I'm just wondering about like the idea of internet proofing a career or YouTube proofing or AI proofing a career. It all feels the same. It's like become a furniture maker or something or become a plumber. They're all kind of the same sides. It's like if you're a lawyer who's trying to internet proof and says like we're going to be the one law firm that doesn't use the internet, like that would be a disaster. and it's like kind of unthinkable and same thing with YouTube if you're working for like in a marketing agency and you're like, oh, we're gonna be the best at content that isn't relevant on YouTube.

58:51It would be very, very difficult and so yeah, I mean, I agree with that sentiment. It's interesting but also just go into art history. Anyway, how'd you sleep last night? I put up some good numbers. 88, seven hours, 16 minutes. It's not quite as good as Sunday where I got a 92. Slept for almost nine hours. Putting up generational numbers. I got an 88. Did I beat you? I, uh. got an 86 let's go let's go two weeks in a row get the pot five i'll give you an air five year 30 year warranty, 39 risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go to aidsleep.com, use code TBPN. Speaking of Father's Day, Kendall.

59:42Kenny Rose, the best gift you can give your father today is just the space to speak for 20 minutes uninterrupted on any one of the various geopolitical issues he's been monitoring this week. That's great. Fantastic gift. Just give us the truth. It's free to give, but it's priceless to receive. It is. It's fantastic. Well, we have Christian Garrett from 137 Ventures in the studio. Welcome to the stream, Christian. How are you doing? Good. Good to see you guys. Glad to be here. We're at three sessions. Okay. Recently, I think the promise was five for a rocket engine. Oh, yeah. We got to up these.

1:00:16What are you doing tomorrow? What are you doing Wednesday? To be clear, I tried to book this like weeks ago. We're at two. Justin was on. Yep, yep, yep. We're going to be in debt pretty soon. We're up in it. We're up in it. Well, we got the space for it here. We're in the new studio. We definitely have the space. You can come by and hang in person. Anderle sent some Legos. We're getting to the physical stuff in the building slowly and surely. We have the big gong. Anyway, I want to have you on, talk about growth stage venture, trends, LP dynamics, Bill Gurley's appearance on Invest Like the Best.

1:00:50I thought it'd be interesting to get your reaction to that. Let's kick it off with this Logan Bartlett post, though. First, I'll read it, and I want your reaction. So Logan says, have had a few conversations with bankers and friends and private equity over the last few weeks. And it's kind of remarkable how orphaned most of these$1 to$10 billion horizontal software companies are right now. There will be some strategic acquisitions, i.e. Informatica, but few and far between as those acquirers are getting their own house in order with AI. And some of these companies aren't just big enough, just aren't big enough to move the needle.

1:01:22And private equity players are all worried about the plural site situation where AI just takes a leap and steamrolls something. It seems a lot of them are just on the sidelines from buying a horizontal player. We're going to see some frustrated public shareholders with very little recourse other than mix-up management. Weird times. So break it down for us. What's your reaction? How real is this? What's correct about this? What's maybe off? Yeah. No, Logan makes a great point. And Logan's a great investor. and he's absolutely right. I think there's definitely going to be consolidation. It's just like he hit at, right?

1:01:59What price? For context, right? Like Asana trades at a 4X NTM multiple right now. They're forecasted to grow 8 % this year with 1 % free cash flow margins. That was a business that during COVID, right, was trading at like multiples, higher multiples than a ton of software businesses. is. Workday now is trades at a premium to Asana. Build.com was once the highest multiple in software and fintech, now trades at like a two and apex multiple. On Topline, there's a ton of these companies that are real businesses, but they're not long-term compounders with power to grow margins. And they're kind of stuck as point solutions.

1:02:38We at 137 heavily focus on durability when investing due to our focus on partnering with companies across the entire growth life cycle of a business. So we want to be excited about continually holding and investing to a company 10, 20, 30 years from now. And I think venture is kind of realizing this dynamic here. There's a Michael Maboussin paper on what's called the competitive advantage period that encouraged a lot of people to go read. And it's focused on how companies end up competing and being publicly traded on average for about 10 years, 10 to 15 years. And then it ultimately ends up delisting or getting bought.

1:03:14And so you just kind of realize that, you know, there are businesses that you could be right on at one point in its life cycle. But then, you know, after 10 years, 15, 20 years, margins compress, growth slows, and the business ends up kind of with a very different story and moniker. And I think a lot of the ultimate winners within these categories, front end software development, FinTech, they're actually the bundles, right? The stories we're talking about or point solutions or companies at risk where growth slowing down due to AI, I think the bundled winners are going to end up having opportunity to consolidate, whether that's Figma across front end application development.

1:03:50You have Ramp and Brax and Mercury within FinTech. I think that's a real opportunity there, but the question is still going to be on what price. Can you explain to me a little bit more about the horizontal software companies versus vertical software companies. Toast is like the classic vertical example, I think. But these are kind of buzzwords. And I feel like when one gets hot, you're going to see a lot of CEOs be like, oh, we're in the hot category or vice versa. So how do you see the landscape of like horizontal versus vertical software? What are some examples? Can you explain that to me? Yeah.

1:04:28I mean, I think when looking at either, I think our investment framework is around powers and we look for sustainable competitive advantages. And so whether that's a vertical software business or horizontal software business, the key thing is, are they building these defensible moats, whether it's switching costs, whether there's network effects, is there some durability to this business getting better the bigger it gets? And then a big key function of that is multi-product. And it is much easier for a bundled offering to end up going after these horizontal point solutions, or it's much easier for a vertical software business to run that playbook, right, of moving into financial products, launching more modules within that vertical to end up in that story and building more defensibility.

1:05:09If you end up kind of a single product company within the horizontal space, it does become very difficult to have a long-term kind of defensible story. So I think, you know, there's like inherent business model dynamics to pay attention to and the ability to go multi-product, right, is key. While the stories that we're talking about are companies that have multiple business lines with nine to 10 figures of ARR. These companies that haven't worked to have a very different story. Yeah, is an example there like what happened with Slack and Teams where Slack was kind of this point solution? Yes, it eventually got plugged into the Salesforce ecosystem, but a lot of Outlook users and Microsoft Exchange users were just like, we'll just add on Teams.

1:05:48And so that's more of the horizontal playbook. Because I'm wondering about that Asana example specifically, like is there a horizontal player that's eating them? Because when I think about what Asana does, Yes, it's a point solution, but it feels like something that I can't immediately think of. Oh, well, like if you're on the Microsoft stack, you'll just be using Microsoft's version of project management. But I'm sure they have one. So I don't know if there's more to say there about like what what areas are most or what what vertical areas are most fragile when it comes to a horizontal player coming in and kind of like eating their lunch.

1:06:27Yeah, no, it's a great question. I mean, I think it's areas where the software becomes or the product becomes commoditized. Sure. Right. And so, you know, within fintech, you're seeing that with bill pay. Yep. And within Asana space, like I think most of front end software development is in that category. And you see Figma moving into more and more, uh, uh, watching more and more products that kind of go after that. Um, and so, yeah, you just, you just kind of see like there's either a cap on how large the market actually is. So you sort of saturate the market, uh, whether that's based on kind of sector, um, or sizing of business or it's based on the actual kind of use case, or you end up running to it and it ends up being a commoditized product, right?

1:07:04It's very easy for the marginal competitor to launch a competitive offering and get their feature parity over time. So yeah, there's not a particular formula, but, and it's always not easy, right? Especially in a growing market, it's very easy to extrapolate out how, you know, a market will grow in perpetuity. I mean, Bill Ackman has this good line around growth annuities, right? Not every business has that dynamic, right? Where they can continue to own a large percentage or some meaningful percentage of a continually growing market and therefore they have durable growth. A lot of these things end up saturating out and their market size is actually much more constrained than investors anticipated, or they end up just getting commoditized.

1:07:40And so it gets really hard and that leads to margin or pricing pressure or growth stalling. Yeah. Do you have a current thinking around like the Parker Conrad, like the compound startup idea of like, let's build like everything as fast as possible and get our fingers in every single pie versus like the more methodical like let's go dominate one point solution and then add on another and then add on another. We're certainly seeing that at like Ramp and we're seeing that at Figma with, you know, a really, really strong point solution and then using that as a platform for the rest of the horizontality to come into the business.

1:08:17I'm wondering if there's like, is it too early to do like a postmortem on like the right time to go broad. I've always thought about the consumer neobanks. Like there still hasn't been a consumer neobank that I'm aware of where I can go and get a checking account, a savings account, a public trading, like trade stocks, also a home mortgage, also an auto loan. Like those are five different point solution consumer fintech companies. And I was, and everyone will always say like, well, there's a lot of regulations, really hard to build all of them at once. And I was like, but five of them are being built in YC, like every single batch.

1:08:50Like What if we just merged all those companies? You would have a compound consumer startup, but it didn't happen. And I'm always wondering, is that a unique thing to Parker? What is the full post-mortem on the idea of the compound startup? Yeah. I mean, I think fundamentally, it's hard to pick a playbook for each. We've seen, to your point, Ripley, that tries to move much faster and get to 50-plus percent feature parity before launching products within their bundle. And then you have startups that are much more methodical, right? Different business line. Gusto's focused on really small businesses, but Gusto's been very, very methodical in rolling out products.

1:09:28And they have two core businesses that are massive. And they are slowly kind of rolling out more and more products, but they're very methodical. I think the biggest key is right to win, right? And so in that case, as long as you have a core business that has a right to win, you give yourself the ability to think about how and what strategy you want to run for going multi-product. product. And also the other key is, I mentioned this feature parity point, for certain product offerings, I think feature parity matters less in regards to how much depth you have within the product. And then for certain offerings, it matters at all.

1:10:01And so you have to think about, do we want to get something out as quick as possible and cross-sell it? Or do we want to wait until we have a real offering? And that also depends on what customer you're servicing. An SMB is very different than an enterprise customer. You're going to take a lot more time to launch an enterprise grade product, you know, if you're going after this bubbled opportunity. So it's not a particularly it's not a clear answer. It definitely does depend. But these are the kind of the fun things to think about when trying to invest in businesses over, you know, 10, 20 year timeframes, you have to walk through kind of the strategy in these stories and make bets on how you think it's going to play out.

1:10:32And founders obviously will inform those bets on their thoughts and will respond and iterate accordingly. Yeah, is there is there enough capital out there to do a roll-up of like asana and bill.com like some crazy take private of these two companies because like they are let's go buy two slow growing companies who were category leaders that are getting eaten alive it might be crazy enough to work if you're if you're them but if you can raise money for that roll-up? Do it. You might be goaded. You should do it. I mean, this is private equity, right? But the real question is, looking at that, why haven't they bought them, right?

1:11:12Or why haven't these other companies decide to try to consolidate them or do a tech private or merge more in the private markets? There really hasn't been as much consolidation in the categories I'm particularly excited about around front-end application development and vintech. Why is that? And I think this gets into a little bit of some of the points on Bill Gurley's podcast recently. But there are a lot of these companies where if you're cash flow positive, you're not a forced seller. And if you're still hold on or hung on an expensive price, then it's not very clear from the buyer's side why they should take all that dilution, especially if you believe that AI is going to lower the ceiling or increase the ceiling and sort of lower the floor a bit on development and product development.

1:11:56So in some sense, maybe you should just bill, right? Like the buy versus build dynamic is really interesting right now. Sure. given sort of the unlocks within AI on software development, and we're kind of pricing it for these companies. So it isn't clear what's going to happen with all these things. Do I think, you know, as interest rates drop, there's a lower cost of capital that maybe changes the calculus? But right now, a lot of these things are kind of stuck in a pause right now, and there hasn't been a lot of consolidation like I thought there was going to be. But I think that will change over time, mainly as a function of the cost of capital dropping.

1:12:27Yeah. Throughout this year, people have been calling 2025 the year of agents. I feel like that's come up quite a lot from a variety of different hosts. There seems to be this, or sorry, not hosts, but guests. There seems to be this collective belief that this is the year that we unlock power of agents. We've seen consumer agents like Deep Research. We see coding agents, things like that. But my question from an investing standpoint is it seems like every scale-up SaaS company is aware of the potential of agents, and it's just launching their own agents. And given the distribution advantage they have, how do you think about the investability of sort of net new agentic software when there's – Yeah, yeah.

1:13:15So like Intercom is a good example, right? Yeah, yeah. They have hundreds of millions in ARR. They have a traditional SaaS offering, and then they have FIN. Or even in like BillPay, it's like, is Bill.com more threatened by a startup that's going to move much faster with CodeGen and generate something that just has different economics? Or should they be more worried about Microsoft spinning up a clone very quickly because Microsoft's able to move faster because of AI? Because we have this weird arms race dynamic where everyone has access to AI, even though the startups might be the only ones that are slapping it on the front door and the domain name.

1:13:53But in theory, AI should improve everyone. Yeah, and if you're a CEO who started your company seven years ago and you have 100 million of ARR, it's not like you just didn't check X. It's not like you haven't tried deep research or anything like that. Yeah, I want your reaction. Yeah, it's a great point. I think that you mentioned Intercom is a good example, right, where you have an incumbent that is one of the winners in a category. And you've seen them execute incredibly well in launching agents in the A-Race. I know Owen tweeted out, and we're investors in Intercom for a long time now. And Owen tweeted out a bit about the performance of the company and how AI has been pretty transformative to them.

1:14:40I think you've seen other companies launch their own agents out to mixed degrees. I think Intercom's a really successful example. Salesforce has been mixed. And then you have some other legacy incumbents that have done pretty well actually in launching their agents like ServiceNow. I've seen a ton of growth there. It's an interesting dynamic. I think there's a debate now as well where some of these companies are talking about gating access to their core data within this system of record. And I think, oh, that was great. Hello, Dorothy. And I think that's also going to be another big one, right?

1:15:17If you believe in sort of extrapolate out the role that agents are going to play, I think some of these companies are going to look and try to maintain their kind of position in system record and not give access to kind of some of the core underlying data. So that folks are going to have to use their agent for certain workflows. And so this is also going to be, I think, a continual debate on how people respond, where the value will accrue, and what does it look like to have agents in the workforce, right? Is it going to be agents within sort of the gated ecosystem, within Databricks, within ServiceNow, within kind of your existing SaaS providers?

1:15:49Or are you going to have this kind of abstraction layer above and one agent to kind of, you know, that rules them all and abstracts and coordinates across them all? Very interesting to see how it all plays out. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to Bill Gurley. Hot takes, the retired. We love retired venture capitalist. Speaking freely. I hope to be there one day. Yeah. What was your takeaway on his state of the venture markets? He's very worried about capital wars, the zombie unicorns, what's going to happen with the decacorns. What stuck out to you in his appearance? Yeah. I mean, I thought Bill Gurley's state of the market was really good.

1:16:30He's a legend in the industry, and I'm one of many who's learned a lot from him sharing his knowledge. He's absolutely right about the dynamics around the overhang from 2021 and how there are a thousand or so companies that are still hanging on to marks from 2021 in people's books. And that's still working its way through the system. He's absolutely right in the loss of the kind of singles or doubles that used to matter to funds. And that's just a function of the growth and fund sizing. So you were more incentivized to go for larger and larger outcomes and put more and more capital into these businesses, which is a real change from the beginnings of the industry as kind of a niche fledging industry decades ago.

1:17:06And I think we're going through the same growth dynamic that private equity went through in the 90s and 2000s as it became a really mature and large asset class. I agree with him that we're repeating the same mistakes from 2021 a little bit. And all these AI companies may end up zombie AI companies with a ton of funding. The challenge now is like, how do you avoid false positives? A team is in an interesting category. They get to 15 million of ARR in six months and you're looking at the business and you're like, this team is incredibly talented. The company is growing at such an incredible clip, but then it's so easy for them to just kind of fall, you know, fall off a cliff and not actually break out into the sort of type of company that really ends up mattering.

1:17:49Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And the one point that he did hit on, which I definitely would want to dive a bit more into, is something that we talk a lot about. But he talked about this kind of category within those thousand plus unicorns. And he hit on Stripe for a bit in Databricks. There's a category of company now that I would say is probably like maybe 10 to 20 or so that we call the semi-liquid category of technology company. It's really unique. I'd say our bet 15 years ago on the trend of companies staying private longer post Facebook didn't even really appreciate or see the ultimate magnitude of this trend.

1:18:27If you look right now, these kind of top 10, 20 or so companies, we all know about them, SpaceX to Stripe to Android, these companies would otherwise be large cap publicly traded companies. Some might even argue in the Mac seven if they were public and had the cycle not change, they probably majority of them would be public. Venture hasn't really seen this many companies stay private this long at this kind of growth and profitability and magnitude. And it's actually being met with a matching liquidity profile as well. And so for context, a bunch of these companies are doing billions of tens of billions of dollars in top line, and they're extremely profitable.

1:19:04They're all growing faster than what's in the public markets, say, within the bucket of companies I'm talking about. They're all growing 50 to 100 percent. Palantir is the fastest growing publicly traded software business, and it's growing 30 percent. So the only way to access kind of growth is in the private markets within these high growth technology businesses. And of that group, not only are they larger than many large cap businesses and growing faster, but they're also running a liquid market. And that liquid market is extending to the founders and employees as well as the investors in the LPs.

1:19:32So having these companies on your books is entirely different and almost like holding a public stock, given the recency of the marks and liquidity around them. So it is almost entirely like a whole new sort of subset of company or whole new asset class within venture. We try to focus on cost training here and are lucky to be major shareholders in a lot of these businesses. But it is definitely something that I think no one could have sort of forecasted is that usually companies, they stay private longer, but they went public when they're still burning cash, when they were still early in the growth curve.

1:20:01Now you're looking at companies that are not just growing fast, but they're extremely profitable. And given the liquidity around them, they kind of don't have a reason to go public. And that is a pretty interesting dynamic. And, you know, he talked about Stripe. I think there's a lot more of these companies, but it is still relatively small. It's, I'd say, 10 to 20. Yeah, I mean, I feel like Stripe was the first private company that was really getting whispered around in, like, the centricorn conversation. And then we just blew past it with SpaceX and OpenAI, both in, like, the$300-plus billion range, heavily liquid.

1:20:33What does that mean for the LP dynamic? Because if I'm paying$2.20 or something, I'm holding something, and maybe there's an opportunity to go direct, is there some pressure to distribute those shares earlier since they are semi-liquid? Is there anything that's changing on the LP side with these ultra-late-stage, ultra-mega-cap, centicorn private companies? I mean, I think back in the early point, if you're in these companies and you're in managers in these businesses, it's a different dynamic. I think if you're in the thousand unicorns, right, and a lot of them are still holding on to marks and kind of it's unclear what's going to ultimately happen there.

1:21:13That creates a different dynamic. We talk about the gap between TVPI and DPI. If a gap are in these companies that are extremely profitable, they're marking every six to 12 months because they're running tenders regularly. You know, the fundamentals you have visibility into. These companies, the pressure around liquidity is very different. And in fact, they kind of want that part of the book to still keep compounding because it's where the growth is. In the public markets, the growth is not there compared to here. And so if you have the ability to be within a power law asset class and you're in the power law companies and they're performing this well and there's liquidity around them, we've actually seen less of a pressure, which has been kind of interesting.

1:21:52And when there is demand, it's very easy to facilitate it. That's why I mentioned like you're holding this thing in your book. You can close the gap between TVPI and DPI relatively easily. Um, and, uh, and so I think it's creating a different decision for the LPs within these funds. And we've seen increased demand to hold increased demand to buy. And when there is demand to sell, you're able to facilitate that really easily, uh, as if you're holding a public stock. And once again, that's just very different than, than, than kind of what growth venture has, has experienced, you know, over the previous decade plus.

1:22:22Yeah. You mentioned a number of companies that are, uh, maybe public and cashflow positive. So there isn't that pressure to sell. What about those unicorns where they are burning money still? They're hanging on to those high marks. We've seen a couple of companies go out at haircuts to their all-time high valuation. But it seems like historically when companies get out at rational valuations, they're somewhat set up for success and they can go into kind of the next chapter of their lives and start growing. There's also this dynamic around M &A maybe being back on the menu. We saw the Wiz acquisition news.

1:22:56Scale just happened. There's been a few of these. Windsurf's been rumored. And so, like, the multibillion-dollar acquisitions seem to be happening. Lina Khan's out, but the administration isn't fully, you know, embracing M &A. It's not happening constantly. But how do you think all of this unwinds? Yeah. I think M &A will pick up. I think some companies are, you know, at the tail end of growing back into those marks. Sure. And that just takes time. You know, some grew back within 12 to 24 months. Some it's taken, you know, 36 to 48 months. And then there's a large swath that are going to just have to take the pain and think about the business long term and remark.

1:23:38And there's some that's like super unclear. I don't know what percentage breakdown it is. I can probably confidently say the majority of that thousand are going to be in that sort of ladder bucket where it's very unclear what's going to happen to them. And I don't think founders are going to want to operate zombie companies forever. So at some point, they're going to have to find a home and the investors are going to have to be willing to take the pain. But look, there's a lot of companies that grew back into the marks from 2021 over varying degrees of timeframe. I mean, people forget there are companies in that top 10 to 20 bucket I mentioned that are growing fast and have very efficient, profitable growth.

1:24:12And a bunch of them also had to go through 2021 and ingesting their views on pricing. If you can compound past it, great. If not, at some point you have to make a decision whether to be marketing the business or selling at something that maybe doesn't clear path. And this is just a cycle. It's just taking a lot longer to work its way through. Do you think these bigger fund sizes and these more aggressive revenue ramps and these more aggressive valuations getting up into, I mean, time to unicorn for companies that are anywhere near product market fit seems like it's like three to six months now.

1:24:43is that putting downward pressure on like the, you know, low$100 million tuck-in acquisition that used to be just like such a win for everyone. It's like, yeah, they only raised 10 million. Everyone made money. The founders got, you know, liquid 10 million plus or something. Everyone's happy and they can kind of move on with whatever the next chapter is and they built something cool. It feels like maybe I'm just not hearing those because all the numbers, if it doesn't, if it's even breaking through. It's not even going viral. But it does feel like there's just less of those happening. And I'm wondering if it's more driven by, you know, just, hey, it's a lot of overhead to do post-merger integration, even if we could get it approved.

1:25:23There's the FTC angle. There's also just the pricing angle. What do you think is driving like early stage M &A, you know, the status of early stage M &A? So many things, right? I mean, one, to your point, you did have an administration that was a lot harder on M &A. And so I think Big Tech, who was the traditional buyer, you know, called, let's say, the last cycle. Yeah, I'm thinking about that VR company that Zuck bought that was like, it was VR fitness. And it was like, you know, not a huge deal, not in the billions. And they were like, you're dumb and you're monopolizing VR fitness. It's like, I don't know anyone who does VR fitness.

1:25:57Amazon and Roomba, right? I mean, like there's, it's like the$100 million, a couple of billion dollar talking from Big Tech definitely got put on pause. Yeah. One factor. Another is pricing expectations. I mean, the growth of the asset class, the growth of funds, people keep funding these companies a little longer to keep pushing for product market fit. And therefore, you start looking at valuations that become less attractive, right? So that, you know, one to$300 million tuck-in was based on a company at Series A that did their Series A at$50 million post, right? I mean, that world is gone, right?

1:26:28So now you've priced yourself out of an acquisition because you've raised too much money. It's a seed round now,$50 million post. Like, it's a Series A. Exactly. It's a watermelon seed, we're calling it. You keep saying watermelon seed, but watermelon seeds are smaller than any other seeds. Like the mango seed was a big seed round. The mango has the biggest seed. We're beyond seeds now. Yes, yes. It's just the whole fruit. Yeah, I mean, I think that's another dynamic. And so, yeah, I just think a lot of this is just structural. Sure. Do I think it comes back? I think on the margins, but. It's on the founders.

1:27:05The founders have to say no to the higher valuations if they want to have that as an option. Because once you have$200 million in the pref stack, it's like, yeah, you're not going to take$150 million acquisition offer or tuck in. It's just not going to happen. Jordy, I want you to ask about capital wars a little bit if you have that question. But if you have something else, feel free to run to that. I mean, my issue with capital wars is they can have a negative effect on outcomes, but it sounds so awesome. I love capital wars. You just want to get involved, right? Capital is the best.

1:27:37I don't know how much there is to say or if you have any comments there, Christian. It just feels like, yeah, in every category now, you have at least two big, fast-growing players and then a couple multi-stage investors on each side that are just sort of saying, let's ride and just putting in hundreds of billions. And I think Gurley had a front-row seat to that with Uber and Lyft and how Lyft being funded as though they were really, really competitive with Uber, even though there was pretty material differences, ultimately harmed Uber for years and years. Yes, but it felt like Uber, it was worth it to fight the capital war because Uber won so hard and now trades at, what, 100x Lyft or something like that.

1:28:22So I don't know. Any thoughts on capital wars and where we are right now? Yeah, obviously it's an inefficiency in the market. It would be much better if all the venture dollars that were funding R &D and sales and marketing were consolidated into one company after one opportunity. Do I think also it's a sign of a vibrant ecosystem as well that there is that level of competition and there is that level of entrepreneurship where founders all want to go after some opportunities and sort of have their version or strategy around it? Absolutely. So, you know, like if the business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said, I think it's great that there is the ability to have multiple businesses that have the same opportunity.

1:29:05If you look in other ecosystems, when there's one dominant player, there's not 20 startups that get funding and go compete. And so although it's extremely inefficient and as an investor perspective, you would like to see everyone just kind of back into the winter, assuming you're in the winter. At the same time, it's also a sign of a vibrant ecosystem where other sort of tech markets don't have this dynamic. Right. And so overall, I think the biggest question, which is going to be very difficult, right, is when are founders willing to merge forces? Right. And accept. And I think you've seen that happen here and there in cybersecurity and other categories.

1:29:39Pretty rare. Oh, it's a tall ask. The ex PayPal merger legendary worked out really well. So you roll the tape and you say, what would happen if some of the code gen companies merged and stuff? It had to happen. It 100 % has to happen. And a lot of the companies pre-AI, or I mean pre-AI, but the latest AI cycle from 2021, like we've been talking about, they're also going to have to go through this version. Yeah. But it's a tall ask. And I think it's just taking a lot longer to work its way through. I mean, Deal is already employing rippling employees. So imagine if you merge those companies, just one payroll system for all the employees.

1:30:14That's true. That's true. What are you hoping... Code 2 is already on the balance sheet, on the cap table for both companies. What are you hoping to see out of robotics generally in the next 12 months feels like there's just a massive amount of excitement. Everybody's calling it the next. In some ways, it feels like it could turn into another, even though a lot of robotics applications are kind of, you could bundle them into the American dynamism category broadly, feels like it could turn into its own thing. And even today, an AI cleaning robot firm called Cardinal raises 800 million. Wow. I'd never heard of this company.

1:30:55I think you were going to say Gecko because they raised money. No, so this company Cardinal just raised 800 million. Wow. I guess SoftBank is participating. Let's go. But this is just one of many examples. I'm curious if you have any sort of expectations around the category. I'm sure you guys are in a lot of exciting companies already. Yeah, we haven't done much in the robotics space. I think for the most part for us, there's kind of two things. Like one, there's still, we like to think about things between R &D risk and engineering execution risk. And I think this still feels slightly on the R &D risk side, especially some of the human robotics companies.

1:31:35And we're just not, I think there's better people to underwrite that. We're happy to invest once there's a bit more traction in the business as, you know, growth stays investors. In that, I think I'm not as close to a lot of these businesses, but I do think that for an LLM to build a world model, I think it's very difficult. I know there are people that are much closer that have really good arguments on either side, and I walk away convinced, believing their argument based on who the last person I talked to. And so I think overall, we're just kind of staying back and paying attention to how this plays out.

1:32:06I think there's a ton of excitement for a lot of reasons. I do worry that this may be like the first or second wave of autonomous vehicles. Now we're actually living and then beginning to actually play out. And we may be right on the trend. I'm a big immersive computing believer. I read every sci-fi book as a kid. Everyone read Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil books. Like 100 % we believe in robotics and want to see this, especially human robotics. I wonder if it's too early. And I wonder if the main use cases now are going to look more like industrial use cases or robotics that have been around in manufacturing, kind of scaling out versus the kind of human robotics like you're seeing.

1:32:45But we'll see. But obviously it's a huge opportunity. Unclear if that's going to play out this cycle or in a future cycle. But it's a cool world if it does. I'm very much rooting for these companies. Are you seeing a, last question, are you seeing a slowdown in activity yet? It's June 16th. Yeah. Summer's coming. Sancho Pays popping. Sam Ritz. You're going to be cold. Do you see rounds getting done this summer just because some of these companies are moving so quickly? I think all of Silicon Valley grinds to a halt personally, but we'll see. What do you think, Christian? I mean, ask me in August what's going on.

1:33:23June, July, there's a lot going on still, and there's a bunch of fundraising. We're busy, and there'll be a lot of announcements coming out. But ask me in August. Okay. We'll have you back on from wherever you're vacationing. Thank you so much for joining. This is fantastic. Two more to go. Two more to go. Let us know what you're doing tomorrow. We've got a lot of space for an engine. Come on, hang out. We can even put a plaque on it that's big enough, you know, if you zoom in that says, you know, the 137. Engine. That'd be great. Anyways, great to see you. Thanks so much. Thanks for coming on.

1:33:55We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Really quickly, let's tell you about Figma. You heard Christian mention it in that interview. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. and we will invite our next guest into the studio, Aaron from LightspeedVenturePartnersLSVP.com. Aaron, how are you doing? There he is. Round of applause. Welcome to the stream. First appearance. Hopefully first of many. First of many, I would hope. First of many. How are the chickens? You said you were looking after your chickens for a second before you joined. That's awesome.

1:34:28Yeah, yeah. I had to go feed the chickens in the midday sun. They're good. They're good. We have a dozen new ones also. That's not a metaphor for seed stage bats? No, no, unfortunately not. I didn't go feed my chickens. No, it's not what I call my founder. No, it's a chicken coop on the property where I live. Amazing. Do you have a high-tech chicken coop, or are you keeping it low-tech? Pretty much all chicken coops are falling apart by nature. You just kind of keep propping them up. It's like any early-stage investing. You just keep the companies alive until they produce eggs. yeah growing up my my dad was was uh very into building hardware software solutions for our chicken coop so he would rig uh these sprinklers to like fill up a bucket at the right time that would pull up the gate using gravity and then it would dump out so he should have productized it there's now a bunch of chicken tech companies i don't know how they're doing reaction to foxes and hen houses uh avoid at all costs uh yes scarecrows and fake fake owls they're all fake owls really decoys yeah i'll send you a picture this is good fox defenses defense tech for for chicken coops i love it yeah for her anyway uh awesome awesome to have you on it um why don't why don't before we just start uh all ranting together give it give us uh give it give a quick kind of overview of your background what you're up to for the audience yeah uh well before i sold out i was a founder myself so i sat on the other side I built a company called Final about a decade ago.

1:36:01We sold it to Goldman Sachs, and it became what is now the Apple Card. So I've done a lot of kind of deep fintech experience. How I met Jordy was I was angel investing and advising long ago in early-stage fintech. And now I'm an early-stage partner on the fintech team at Lightspeed. And when I say sell, this is kind of what I want to do with my life's work, is help early founders and kind of be in the weeds, go zero to one. Break up the chapters of fintech history in your mind. When you started final, I'm sure you just got a lot of, did you get a lot of no's or were you built different and people were like, yeah, I don't know about this fintech thing, but this makes sense.

1:36:40I got a lot. I got 100 no's, I think, when we were raising our Series A. It was kind of a slog. We were probably FinTech 2.0, where 1.0 was like Bank Simple and a few other of those people. wave 2.0 chime would be at the beginning of that and then like robin hood be in the we were kind of the same cohort of robin hood my company final ultimately we kind of were going after the wrong target customer segment where you just needed massive distribution which it turns out that you know apple does have especially for the right customer base so it made sense to partner with goldman and kind of sit inside there but you know now we're sitting on almost wave four right like We're doing a lot of stablecoin stuff at Lightspeed, and I spent a lot of time.

1:37:23We hosted a stablecoin conference back in February. You look at all this stuff, and the stuff that you want to do in fintech now are just so much easier than it was back then. We were like a full actual credit card, including line of credit, and took two and a half years to launch that company just because there hadn't been anyone since wave one when it was a company called Revolution Money had launched through Steve Case, which is why they call it Revolution Capital. But that was wave one. And we had to go find people from that company to even figure out as a startup how you bring a credit card to market.

1:37:56Now you can do it in nine months if you. I have a question about this. I was talking to Christian about this earlier. This idea of like the compound startup. We've seen it in enterprise software. Why can't someone build all of the consumer fintech products in one kind of neobank? One-stop shop on day one. I sign up and I get a credit card, a checking account, a savings account, the ability to buy stocks and Bitcoin, a mortgage and a car loan all in one. Right now, that feels like six different startups, six different YC companies potentially. But if each one of those can now be built in nine months, why can't they all be built in parallel in nine months?

1:38:38We may see with kind of like all the AI stuff, but honestly, it's not a technology problem. Financial services products, the same building blocks have existed i hate to say since the medicis but for a long time now so we have product market fit consumers want access to credit they want savings accounts they want mortgages they want car loans what we don't have is product marketing fit and so it's the same reason we've seen even robin hood with essentially infinite capital to go and acquire it's taking them a long time to get the right product construct and aggregate all those different products together and then them this is sort of the wealth the wealth front mo when they tried to play this game but it's just really hard to get that second third fourth fifth attach rate it's so hard to make it work that you can never make the economics work unless you're playing the bundling game right if you're built which is what robin hood gold is if you're playing amazon prime which is my best customers i want to just own their entire financial life that's a path you can you can take but the answer is just product marketing fit it's not product market fit financial services fundamentally have it we need access to it but you just you know getting the product right Why would I if I have trading at Robin Hood go get a shittier checking account from them?

1:39:46Not that they have that just from across the board. You just need to get the product construct right and then you're also not going to go out and spend on CAC again. You're gonna try to cross sell. yeah i'm just wondering about like the product marketing fit this idea that like if you went to customers with this idea of like this is the drop-in replacement for your chase account which you have your mortgage with and your car loan and your credit card with and chase owns a bunch of different stuff but it's all one solution one app for everything uh maybe they're all kind of mediocre to start with but then they all get better it just it's interesting that no one's been able to break through with that but i mean i think i think the challenge is you acquire a customer in their 20s and they just need a basic checking account and it's hard to class everything right because they're like oh I want the best possible price for my mortgage and so unless you can win consistently and every single thing you're gonna get fragment so I think it'd be helpful to talk through a couple recent IPOs chime as well as circle they they chime you know obviously represents what you called you know FinTech 2.0 started around the time that you guys started final finally got out you know well below their 2021 marks, but at least they're out.

1:40:57And we now have proof points, too, that some of these businesses can do well in the public markets. At least Dave, I think if you bought Dave at the bottom like a year and a half ago or something, you'd be up like, you know, crazy multiples. So it's good to see that, you know, these sort of neobanks can exist in the public markets. But why don't we start with Chime? What was your reaction? it seems like a pretty solid outcome from my point of view. It's great for everyone, but I think Sequoia or DST did the last round. And even then, I think they're back pretty close to in the money. Ultimately, liquidity is the future.

1:41:36The Chime IPO is fantastic for the rest of fintech. We will see compounding amounts of capital flow down, one to the early stage funds, but even every single one of their employees over the last, I think it was a 2012 company, 2011, over the last 13 years become angels in a meaningful way and just see that there's room for product innovation. They also are a potential one of these aggregators, right? Chime now has an even bigger balance sheet, and they can go in after and aggregate people, and maybe it's not the same customer for the multiple products, but they can get deeper into credit. They, in theory, could buy, they could have bought a Dave or a Moneyline and kind of get that sort of product under the hood.

1:42:14You know, when you look at like a Chase, a$750 billion company, or banking, they have to do a lot of things to get to that market cap. So you have to do all of these disparate services that don't always necessarily have the same fundamental core systems underneath. So Chime now is an IPO, shows one that FinTech actually can have a Decacorn as a public company and in neobanking. So we'll see a few others go. And we can also see that we can actually, and I trust Chris and Ryan to go out and do this because they know what they're doing, but they can go and become an aggregator and kind of do more.

1:42:48I think it'll also just drive a few more fintechs to go public because it's just, it forces you to be a mature business, get your economies of scale right. And in some sense, the Chime IPO that it's below the top tick mark is probably just more a side effect of interest rates being higher and capital finding other sources, as opposed to like this thing being worth whatever it's worth today, right? It's still up like 40 % from the IPO, which seems pretty successful and you know uh it's a pretty good win for the industry yeah yeah so um before we dive into circle is there um how how are companies like chime messaging around ai it feels like the obvious application is just better customer service and maybe you can use agents to serve more customers and and increase margins is that uh and i'm sure they're applying it around you know fraud and other use cases.

1:43:43But in your mind, what are the exciting ways that a scaled fintech like Chime can actually apply this stuff? Yeah, I mean, it's where there's ever, in industry speak, and coming from credit cards, there's a lot of industry speak. It's where we can apply AI to arms and legs, right? Like people are this massive cost. So customer service is one thing, but really, it's actually the back offices of a lot of these businesses. We've invested in a company that does dispute management, and then as a professional service plus AI. And so you are able to give what is effectively an AI powered BPO and do this for other companies.

1:44:17But for someone like Chime, you know, pre IPO, they announced that they, I think they call it Chime core, like they built their own processing stack, and they kind of are getting off of Galileo, which is owned by SoFi slowly, it AI enables kind of all of these macro tailwinds that just really give them better economies of scale as a bank to operate. Tier Tier one is customer service. Tier two is then really like, you know, a bank is kind of like an iceberg. As a consumer, you only see above the water, but there's so much below the water to make these things really work. And that's where Chime is like able to actually, and all of these kind of scaled neobanks and fintech companies are able to use AI to provide better services for their customers.

1:44:57You can almost think of it as like applied AI, right? They're not research companies, but they really can find places just to replace where they've thrown bodies at problems in the past. That makes sense. How are late stage private market investors as well as public market investors looking at fintech businesses that get a large amount of their revenue from interest yield? It felt like when interest rates popped in late 2022 and have sort of stabilized, it felt like people were kind of looking around and being like, okay, a bunch of these businesses are generating a lot of revenue now, but everyone was discounting it so massively.

1:45:34Now, if you look at the macro, it seems like we potentially have entered into a new normal with just like sort of moderate rates. Is that the way people are looking at it? Or is it still like a massive discount being applied? In the private markets, there's still a pretty big discount. Some people will give you credit. And the reason you give someone credit is just because it lets you compound the business, right? Like you're essentially immediately profitable post Zerp ending because you just had all these deposits. It's going to flow to you and you're going to be able to make all of this interest revenue.

1:46:06And the best founders are now just compounding that into other business lines and using that to just bring kind of more of what you're talking about of all of these different services. We see it a little bit more in small business than we see in a consumer, just because if you're pitching a consumer on a high interest rate, they're typically a pretty like hot deposit. They're going to move around and it's just not the best person to build against, whereas a business, you're actually giving services. And so you're able to charge them across the board. But yeah, so there's a pretty big discount on it.

1:46:36But you know, it's not it's not back to Zerp discount, which is I think what everyone was expecting initially. It's more akin to two to three point rate, wherever the two year T is, you know, it feels about right just from where we're expecting the market to come back to. That makes sense. What was your reaction to Circle's IPO? We had Jeremy, the CEO on the show, which was great they have a big you know bold vision i think they've executed very very well and at the same time it was interesting to see the market reaction to stables versus how people initially reacted to the s1 which many people looked at it and said this company isn't even actually shouldn't actually go out like they should just get acquired by by coinbase and clearly there was an exceptional amount of demand but i'm curious how you how you saw you kind of looked at the business pre and then post IPO.

1:47:27Yeah, I mean, pre IPO is the same kind of look, like all the revenue goes to Coinbase. And I know a bunch of circle people, I know Jeremy, he actually spoke at our conference, and I've been able to get closer to them. But it's one of those that, you know, if you think about the macro trend of stable coins, and this isn't circle specific, but you know, the biggest export in the US economy is the u.s dollar um post brandwood let's give it up for the u.s dollar uh yeah post brenton was essentially like we've tried to dollarize the world and make everything trade in it um circle ipo is just showing that there's more demand for that right there's one retail demand for kind of like a normal crypto company in the public market but two is if you think about where the world might go where the dollar might just be it's already hegemonic but it becomes the only meaningful currency um circle or tether is going to be one of those two people who plays that role um it's possible we see a new upstart there's you know we're playing around with a bunch of ideas around stable coins and how uh they may exist maybe we'll get a stable coin per country not necessarily cbdc but maybe we also dollarize every country we're seeing a lot of ideas come through right now from the circle ipo just showed there's just a ton of demand um i know jeremy and team are what are what are um every single person that is at a legacy financial institution or a big bank is looking at the circle ipo and you know probably excited and a little bit like we should do this ourselves starting to think about you know should we have our own stable coin etc i can think of some reasons why they have more of a moat than the average person just kind of analyzing the business for the first time, I think, right?

1:49:14They have liquidity, deep partnerships, they have a regulatory, you know, you know, sort of arm that's now getting involved in countries all over the world. They have developer tooling that's really powerful. So they've, they've, they've done quite a lot to build out their sort of long term edge. But I'm curious why you think Circle could, could potentially continue to sort of durably accrue value even though other people will naturally start to compete with them. Yeah, I mean, look, there was a story about Walmart and Amazon trying to launch a stablecoin. You know, the joke I've made to friends is that essentially just rhymes with Kohl's cash.

1:49:56Like nobody wants a merchant based stablecoin. Maybe from the banks, they'll build a consortium. But we've seen historically those kind of fail. The reason circle... did zelle did zelle fail or well zelle is ews which sells a bunch of services but ultimately like consumer nps on zelle cannot be high because it's so fraudy and so just painful to use as a kind of integration point um no i'm talking um man it used to be called soft pay at one point was called isis was this bank consortium of pay by like pay by bank i kid you not crazy crazy name for a bank consortium they had they had to rebrand when isis chose the same name as them And then JPM bought them to take them out of the market so that nobody could really see how bad it was.

1:50:40So like a bank consortium with Stablecoin makes sense. There's a bunch of people. Greg Kidd, who is one of the early angels into Twitter, Square, Ripple, Coinbase, is working on something called USDB. We're going to see a lot of these things play out. Circle just has this like in financial services, scale is what makes you win a lot of the times or it gives you a real network effect. Circle is going to spend a lot of this money trying to build sort of a network like Visa MasterCard is kind of the underlying bet where they can get merchants on one side and get consumers on the other. Whether or not it's for supplier payments and B2B stuff or B2C payments is a little unclear.

1:51:18And I'm sure, you know, if I were them, I'd be throwing everything against the wall to make it stick. They had a lot of announcements pre-IPO in pretty much all of April and early May, which seemed like stuff that they really been working on for a while. and just weren't sure kind of due to the Trump tariffs, if they'd be able to go out, if the market would reopen. They got that stuff out there. It's a very strong narrative of what they can do into the future. It's just now they have to go and execute on it. And that's one of the things, you know, they're fighting an uphill battle of network effect in traditional financial services.

1:51:49How are you thinking about stable coins as an investment category? I'm sure this is how you're spending probably 50 % of your time. Is now the time to get in? It seems like this is a public company. I think in many ways the IPO. No, I'm not saying investing in the next stablecoin issuer. I'm talking about the actual consumer applications, B2B applications. It's the infrastructure here. To me, I can imagine a massive wave of companies being funded that try to ride the stablecoin wave, but then ultimately end up getting just Sherlocked by circles and stripes and things like that. But how do you think about it?

1:52:29Yeah, I mean, so I'm an early stage investor for the most part. Like I bet on people and then I like I'm looking for companies and founders I fall in love with and then want to figure out how to deploy capital into them. Stablecoins is this current trend. Every company is now in some sense a stablecoin company, if it makes sense for their business, just like every company is an AI company. We figure out a few archetypes of founders. And I was joking with one of my founder friends of like, we'll probably coin it as money 3.0 founders, where they're very serious about how you handle a business that actually touches money.

1:53:01But on the other side of it, they're taking all the efficiencies that come with crypto. And when you combine the two, you end up in a world which is stable coins. So we've been able to back about two companies right now in the last few months doing that. We've seen a lot of the companies kind of in the middle of the sandwich, which is like you have issuance, you have consumer distribution. In the middle, you have a lot of orchestration. You have a lot of like actual bill pay and stuff like that. We've sat more on the issuance side and core infrastructure side. We've looked a lot at the kind of like later stage distribution side and just realized that in the middle, you're going to get squeezed.

1:53:37The issuers like Circle are going to have to move up market and verticalize. Or the distribution plays where they control all the value from the consumer and can build a better product. They're going to have to move down market and kind of eat down the stack. Or dual source or triple source their vendors so that they can, at the end of the day, squeeze them on margin. Which is, honestly, from a distribution perspective, the traditional fintech play. It's what Cash App, it's what Chime has done. You put as many vendors behind you as possible that do the same thing. And then when you go to rebid the contract, you just squeeze them.

1:54:07So we've made a few bets in the space. And really, when we're seeing demand on the distribution side, we're seeing it, honestly, outside the U.S. I personally haven't figured out a use case where stable coins reduce the friction that you see in the U.S. banking system. But if I'm not in America and I want access to the U.S. dollar, it's the fastest way for me to get access to the U.S. dollar in something that looks like a U.S. bank account. It also helps for people who are, you know, operation. What about buying a car on the weekend? You can still do that. There are services that do that. Fedwire is actually, I believe, seven day settlement now.

1:54:44So with the right bank, you can even do that. But also like, do you actually. Stablecoins, mogs. What? Fedwire, mogs, stables. Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of other, there's so many other use cases. I mean, streaming, you know, I mean, there's. it's the thing is like if you think how visa mastercard work they're the biggest factoring networks in the world they're they're taking risk they're adjudicating risk for a bank when a consumer swipes and so what is the risk that visa mastercard and amex discover take it's single digit maybe doesn't like 12 basis points the rest that interchange flows to the bank it flows to the issuer who's actually taking the real risk and so if stable coins and visa ambassador card are both taking this very seriously.

1:55:27If stable coins start kind of eating their lunch, we're going to into a world where they're just going to cut rates and we're going to get a much more, I hate to say efficient, we're going to get a less lucrative card issuing and kind of network based world there for the big banks where Chase can no longer offer you, Capital One can't offer you high rewards because there's no margin in it for them. Interesting. So will we see protests in the streets from point points maxers you know just taking saying like we don't want efficiency we do not want efficiency in the financial system yeah we want to keep rewards high really upset well they'll just hire the lobbyists finally right like crypto got around to hiring lobbyists the points points guys will uh points guys well uh what about unexpected beneficiaries oh sorry banks also want higher interchange so they're actually fighting this well it's why they're trying to put out stable coins.

1:56:18It's going to get messy. Like we're going to over invest in the space like we do in everything in venture. And then at the end of the day, a few winners will emerge. Circle's been around for so long that like it clearly makes sense. They got big, they aggregated a lot of value and now we're going to see a lot of people come for their, for that opportunity as well. What about unexpected beneficiaries of stable coins? I've heard that potentially some payroll companies that maybe hold on to tax withholding, they might be able to earn higher yield because they're able to actually hold the treasuries themselves.

1:56:52Do stablecoins unlock any sort of float dynamics and shift it from a bank making an interest rate return on float that they're holding versus the company can now do it because of stablecoins? Are there any kind of unlocks like that that might be happening? uh if i live in i hate to say venice well columbia but if i look like so so for what your use case not for a sophisticated business you should be having a serious conversation with your bank to figure out how you earn that float um small scale it may get you better economics but not going to move the needle economics right there's only so much juice to squeeze from that um orange uh really yeah the side effect is like i no longer have to trust my my government as a as an international human, right?

1:57:38Like I don't, like I can move my savings into the US dollar, which right now is in theory, the least volatile currency, but from like US companies, yeah, there's a little bit of friction reduction. It lubricates the system a little, but at any meaningful scale, you're going to take most of that yield anyway, because you're going to go back to your bank partner where you, for, if I'm a payroll company, I have a direct relationship with some banks somewhere and I'm going to take some of that yield. The other thing I should say is stable coins are in theory two things. One is that's the actually underlying treasury, which actually holds a risk asset.

1:58:10Usually it's a T-bill of some sort, but the other side of it is a payment vehicle. And payment vehicles traditionally are not risk assets. You send them and the money is good. And so it's one of those, the benefit that we see is really on the payment side. On the yielding side, maybe we'll get securitized T-bills and T-bonds and we'll get securitized CDs and like somebody will actually have direct access to Treasury to get these things ad hoc. But it's a bit out because there's just so much demand on the payment side of this industry. And it's really hard for all of us to grasp truly how big payments are.

1:58:45That's why stable coins are taking off. It's giving people access to the US banking system in such large volumes that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. What about geopolitical risk? I imagine that if I'm a dictator in another country and I'm watching all my citizens like go off of my currency that I control, I would want to ban that. Is that a major risk? Are we beyond those discussions at this point? You can ban the on ramps, off ramps. You can ban your ability for your citizens to get into a stable coin directly, but not indirectly through crypto, right? Like I can go buy Bitcoin and then swap that into USDC.

1:59:20Yeah, that's kind of the running joke between a few of my friends on the back channel of like, who's going to be the first startup to just aggressively essentially become an arm of the CIA and new USAID in dollarized countries to promote US hegemony. It's like half a joke. It also is just going to naturally happen. If I don't have to worry about the volatility of my currency, and I'm a human who's not living paycheck to paycheck, so I actually have savings, why would I want my local currency if I'm not going to actually spend that money and I actually want to be able to save for the long term.

1:59:52And there is no ability for you to capture that money because it's my private keys. So there's a ton of value there. There is some geopolitical risk. But at the end of the day, it's one of those that I think the world's going to have to move through it, not past it. Yeah. So you're not worried about like a great firewall for all the on ramps and off ramps. And then, I mean, if you make it illegal that someone's discovered with stable coins, you're holding USDC and now you go to jail, like that is a serious, serious headwind towards stablecoin adoption in a, you know, in a dictatorship, I imagine.

2:00:25Yeah, it's a question. Yeah, for maybe unfriendly countries to the US, but like you're a semi friendly. Do you want to actually do that? That is crazy. Right. Especially when the Trump family is so heavily involved with digital assets. And such big believers. I mean, the joke I made last week was like, why even issue stablecoins against treasury bills? We might as well issue it against the U.S. military. So if you're a friend of the U.S., you're not going to really cut us off. Yeah. Well, that may be why Coinbase sponsored the army parade. Maybe, yeah. Maybe they're cooking. Maybe they're cooking.

2:01:00Mill coin. It's coming soon. Mill coin. Any kind of events in the sort of broader fintech stablecoin world that are coming down the pipeline? potential IPOs catalysts that you're kind of looking out for or is it summer break and we can just all check back in the fall isn't there stablecoin bill going through yeah the genius act uh they're going to negotiate it you know it i try not to play politics at all it's just not where i have the expertise um i think i think they'll actually i don't think we'll have a summer break i think the ipo window's open uh and this is not knowing anything that's great to hear everyone thought they could get public in april and then that blew up and then may kind of like we reopened the window if i was trying to go public i'm going to try to sneak it through until something geopolitical closes the window again which is like kind of the mantra right now uh so i think the the bankers in wall street are not going to get the summer off uh the hamptons will be empty time to grind that's why the hamptons are empty it's so funny you know you know there's been like these articles like hamptons rentals are down 30 percent this year IPO windows open.

2:02:09IPO windows open. Time to stay on Wall Street. You can't leave Manhattan while the windows open. Would be insane. Thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic. This was great, Aaron. I really enjoyed it. We'd love to have you back on again soon. Thanks. Thanks, guys. Well, if you are trying to scoop up one of those Hampton homes, head over to Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Our next guest is from Standard & Poor's S &P, Joseph Kass, coming in the studio.

2:02:43Very excited to talk to him. He has talked to some of the most impactful financiers one notch away from us. We talk about a lot of technology. We talk to some business folks. He has experience talking to Ken Griffin, Howard Marks, Ray Dalio, has a bunch of interesting stories to share with us. I'm excited to pick his brain. Welcome to the show. Joseph, how are you doing? Hey. What's going on? John, Jordy. Great to meet you guys. Thanks for having me. All good. How's things on your end in LA? It's fantastic. It's late for you, right? The crazy protests. You're in the UK? But it's still light, so it's all good.

2:03:16Well, we appreciate you staying up late to hop on the show. Why don't you kick us off with a little bit of introduction on yourself? And I'd love to just kind of understand how S &P is structured, how it's working these days, like the core business lines, because it's such an institution. Yeah. Yeah, sure. It's a really, it's a huge business. So I work in the ratings division. Yeah. So you have a number of different divisions, including the indices. So kind of like the S &P 500. You have market intelligence, which provides kind of the data and analytics platform. You have mobility, which owns a bunch of businesses, one of whom is Carfax.

2:03:50Oh, interesting. So there's a number of different divisions in the company. And I'm trying to remember if I've got all of them there. But it comes together to make S &P global. So I work in the ratings division, which, you know, assigns the ratings, you know, the kind of AAAs or the BBs or the Cs. Yeah, we got to hold your feet to the fire because S &P downgraded America. and I'm hearing an accent. So this seems like it's maybe some political issue going on. Well, I can't correct you there. It was actually Moody's. Yeah, it was Moody's. Thank you. The S &P did downgrade the US, but I think it was about, I want to say it was about over 10 years ago.

2:04:24So Moody's come down to the same level that we were like kind of 10 years ago. Okay, well, yeah, we'll take it up with Moody's. Anyway, I'd love to go through some of the folks that you've interviewed and hear some stories. Why don't we kick it off with Ken Griffin? Break down his career, your experience chatting with him and what you learned from him. Yeah, sure. So I can kind of give a quick overview as to like why I'm meeting these guys, like why I'm in the situation where I can meet them. So essentially my role at S &P in the ratings division is to engage with the buy side, the big buy side investors.

2:04:59So after about six months, and I've been doing this previously at other roles, I felt like I need like a platform to essentially kind of make it easier for me to do this with these senior guys. Because trying to get, as you guys know, trying to get a meeting with these senior guys from the finance side can be tricky unless you've got something very hot for them. So I created this podcast and just said, listen, we're going to have a chat. It's going to be like half an hour. We're going to talk about you. We're going to have a guest from S &P. And we're going to kind of give you kind of one question to you, one to the S &P person and see how it goes.

2:05:29And that was like five years ago. So now it's kind of grown slowly. I mean, I don't do many. I do like one a month. So it's not as horrific as you guys doing four hours a day. But it's grown slowly over the years. So now we can, as you said, we can meet those type of guys. So to answer your question, and just a quick plug, the podcast is called Leaders. If you want to look it up, it's called Leaders. Go listen. But in terms of Ken Griffin, so we, I mean, the actual podcast came about from, I create a LinkedIn post, like an old story about Ken, which I don't think many people knew, which was, this was like 15 years ago.

2:06:09One of his assistants actually had terminal cancer and he funded her treatment for two years secretly, kind of without telling anyone. And she got into remission, you know, it was kind of a miraculous turnaround. And then after that, he funded her to go to Hawaii with her family for like a two week holiday and didn't tell anyone about it and um i thought that was you know quite a cool story so i found out about this uh through like a tiny in like one of the chicago kind of newspapers an old pdf from like 2009 and wrote it up on linkedin as just like a story post which sometimes i do and then i said you know i just sent it to ken saying like listen just thought this thing was really cool that you did this lady and then he replied back and i was like i was like oh wow he replied so i said do you want to do a podcast and he's like yeah no problem so that was like six months later and last month we recorded in New York.

2:07:02And I'm sure like listeners know who Ken Griffin is, but obviously he's the CEO and founder of Citadel. So you've got Citadel, the hedge fund, which is this enormous hedge fund, but you've also got Citadel Securities, which is the market maker, which is, I think it's probably, I think it probably is the largest market maker in the world. So he's a really, he obviously a very smart guy. So we interviewed him in person last month. And, you know, he is like, he's just as you would expect for someone who is that successful in their life like he kind of like he's very good at answering questions very succinct can give you kind of a one minute answer to anything and he kind of sums everything up in like a really crisp way um and he's also very like you know he's very personable so he came out the lift so i'm waiting for him at the lift and he comes out the list and he has like a group like an entourage around him and i can see someone telling him something like just whispering him something quickly and i'm like okay what's what i wonder what's kind of being said and then in my head i'm like oh they're telling him who i am probably they're probably saying oh this is joe he's from s &p you're going to do a podcast right now and he comes up to me and he's like he's a very strong handshake looks me direct in the eye and he's like i am so thankful that you invited me thank you so much and i was like you know it's such a crazy you know to me he's literally you know i'm just like another person for him but he probably has this kind of intense uh kind of state which he's in which is just amazing to witness and he has his aura around him and i don't want to use the kind of rick james analogy but he does have this like aura around him where he's like uh you know you can feel him in the room and you can you can feel his his expectations of his team and of and of you like of me as an interviewer, kind of I was like, okay, you know, you're sitting up straight, you're making sure you have everything down to a T.

2:08:53So I was kind of I can you can see why beyond the kind of obvious fundamentals of Citadel, you can see how that energy probably permeates through the whole company just through his kind of vision. Do you notice any difference between the Ken Griffin archetype and some of and some of the more behind the scenes financiers? Like, I imagine it's very hard to get someone from Jane Street on the show because they seem to be quieter. And yet, Jane Street does do technical talks, but you don't hear from the founders that often. Do you understand what dynamic is going on there? Does Ken just view media differently?

2:09:33Or is there something structural going on with his business that it makes sense for him to have more of a public presence than a pure high-frequency trading focused firm that maybe doesn't have to interface with i mean they still have to recruit but maybe they just have a different pr strategy yeah it's it's interesting i think i mean my sense is that it's quite ken led ken has lots of things to say and he's super super smart and he's not afraid of saying them so i definitely got that vibe from him but you know there's kind of no no holds bars he's not he's not just saying something because he thinks he should say he's honestly giving you his opinion of something um and also i mean i i don't know many guys at jane street um and i i haven't actually reached out to those guys probably because i thought it would be a no because they're so kind of closed they do seem closed but maybe you could break through these sometimes these guys they're closed they're closed they're closed until they're not yeah so until they need to not be closed and they need to have a voice so it's kind of a long game i guess Jordi, you have a question?

2:10:40Switching gears a little bit, I'm curious, your job on the rating side of S &P, how much more challenging it gets when we're in this sort of critical macro environment and things are kind of unfolding real time that impacts businesses, banks, things like that. How do you guys approach situations like we've had even in the last week with Israel and Iran and other situations like it? Yeah, it's a good question. So obviously my role being on the kind of investor engagement and investor relationship side, we hear a lot in terms of these kind of large, huge events. And obviously we've had the things in the past week, but we've also had the tariffs.

2:11:27So it promotes kind of a huge spike in inbound for us. We're very keen to be kind of outbound and like forward-facing, transparent, et cetera. But there's no doubt that those kinds of occasions, everyone wants to speak to us, you know, for good reason. But also I think, you know - So the big institutions reach out to you guys and ask you what else are you seeing broadly? Is that how it works? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of what you guys are seeing at kind of a macro level. What does kind of the X situation that's happening right now, How could that impact this group of ratings?

2:12:05It could be kind of financial services or it could be large corporates and they drill down to kind of one sector. So I could have someone calling us from one of the largest buy side firms saying, listen, I work on autos, strictly autos kind of portfolio. How will this be? How will the tariffs impact my portfolio, the ratings? What's your view? Just to kind of sample with us. And we have like pretty much every week, you know, London, New York, Hong Kong, we have these investor roundtables where we engage with these kind of small communities. We speak to them. We have our analysts speak and they can kind of, you know, standboard their ideas and we can go back and forth.

2:12:47Very cool. I wanted to move on to some other folks you've chatted with. I want to hear the story of Ray Dalio, obviously the founder of Bridgewater. He feels like someone who was maybe a little bit behind the scenes for a while building the fund and then principles that it was originally a PDF that just kind of like found its way onto the Internet. I think they might have published it. Then eventually it turned into a book, a book tour, banger, viral videos, podcast appearances. But what was your experience like with Ray Dalio? Yeah, it was fascinating. It was totally fascinating. So we had Ray on the show in kind of, I think it was 2012, 2022, I think it was.

2:13:28So kind of two and a half years ago now, just coming out of the pandemic. And like we booked, we had, we have everyone booked for like 45 minutes. And I think kind of, cause usually it goes on for about half an hour and we want some just over on time in case stuff goes wrong. And Ray spoke for, you know, it was coming up to two hours to the point. So he was very generous with his time. he has lots of things to say and like he has lots of things to say on lots of different topics and he's very good at kind of connecting the dots like making links so for example when i was speaking to him yeah i kind of asked him some crazy questions some some off the wall questions to try and make it interesting so i was talking about my first job at mcdonald's so i used to work on the first window of the drive-through and like take the order for people in mcdonald's uh here in here in my hometown.

2:14:17And then Ray was like, oh, it's so funny you say that because I set up the hedging strategy for the McNugget. So the only reason the McNugget is on the menu is because I set up this trading strategy for McDonald's and the supplier. So like, he's very good. He's very, he's very cool guy, but he's very like, you know, he's very personable and he's so good at like linking A to B. That's hilarious. You always got to be hedging your McNuggets. Yeah, yeah. I've heard about that. I mean, there's the entire supply chain. And of course, McDonald's doesn't want exposure to all that. And there's that famous example of Southwest successfully hedged gasoline prices for a while.

2:14:54And that was a massive beneficiary of that for a long time. These small, little kind of minute financial operations downstream, like the CFO is just kind of off doing something, can have a massive impact on the trajectory of the business when they pull it off. Talk to me about Ryan Serhant. He feels like someone who is potentially underrated as a business leader, business thinker. People know him as a reality TV star, essentially. And yet he's built this massive media business. You're obviously in the media industry. We are as well. What did you learn from him? What was what's the experience been like working with him and talking to him?

2:15:29Yeah. And he's my personal opinion here, not S &Ps. He's a very, you know, he's someone to look out to, especially in this space. so he you know as you say he started off from reality tv which you know sometimes you know especially people in the uk they kind of look down their nose at those type of people but when he started to kind of how he leveraged his appearance but also his media like his content is uh it's enormous i think across all platforms it's something like seven or eight million he has like multiple youtube accounts he has instagram he has tiktok all the kind of usual suspects he has LinkedIn and he has this content content to commerce model whereby um I met him when I was in New York just to talk about this just randomly and I said listen I'm in New York do you want to talk about this he was like yep and so we just met up and spoke about this very thing whereby he has like different his client base could be you know super super high net worth or it could be kind of someone looking for like a one million dollar apartment in New York or it could be potentially the child of the client so that's a big one so he's very smartly said listen i just want to spread the board with this so we've got the youtube for the kind of like millennials and we've got tiktok for the younger guys so if i said listen what does this mean like in terms of like revenue basically and he said well we sold this like uh i can't remember how many million but it was like it's very expensive property um off the back of one of the children seeing a tiktok so they said look at this thing look at this thing this guy's selling in new york they showed it to the mom and dad mom and dad said that's great let's go and have a look at and you know and then it's sold so like he's he's definitely got like a very interesting model which to be honest i think um again me personally speaking at s &p lots of other kind of industries sectors could could kind of adopt this model i don't know why they're not it's it's it's kind of been proven now yeah yeah yeah i've heard that story before and I've heard that he has something like 60 to 80 people working just on content in his organization to really pipeline everything out across all the different platforms and he's cast a very wide net but he's built a fantastic business around it.

2:17:40So when I was there. Oh yeah. No I had a totally unrelated question that I can cap it off with. Please cap it off. I wanted to get your read since you talk to a lot of these buy side institutions. How are people thinking about ESG today? Is it still are they, you know, how do they feel on a personal level? And then what are their actions look like on an investment level? Yeah, I think, I mean, on a personal level, it's kind of tricky to to answer that one, because I can probably answer on like professionally what they're telling us and on institutional basis. So in kind of 21, 22, the ESG kind of, it was just enormous.

2:18:27It was, we couldn't have a conversation with an investor about anything without them mentioning ESG in some way, you know, and how does this link to ESG and all the S or how does this, the G factor into this stuff. So whereas now, especially kind of in the past, I don't know, six months to a year, maybe a bit longer around that time. It's, I'd say it's definitely a part of their kind of investment thesis, but they're not necessarily pushing it to the front. So I don't think that they've kind of, you know, totally dropped this idea. I definitely don't think that's the case because we still get lots of inquiries.

2:19:03We have lots of conversations around sustainability. Um, not so much, I mean, the brand of ESG seem to have kind of died, but sustainability is growing in the amount of kind of inbound and outbound we're having, the products we're seeing in the market. There's lots of, I'd say it's definitely not kind of just been dropped, which I think may be the perception by some people. Totally. Yeah. That's fascinating. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was a great conversation. We'd love to have you back and we will talk to you soon. Enjoy the evening. Thank you so much for staying up. Enjoy the evening.

2:19:34Thanks so much, man. Cheers. Cheers. Well, let's go back to the timeline and run through some posts. We mentioned it earlier, but DHH raced in the 24 Hours Le Mans. Base Camp Mobile. Number 22 is ready. Let's go. So congratulations to him. He's driven it multiple times now. Wait, we have to try to figure out how he actually did. You work on that. I will stay in automotive world. Nick Cruz Patane says hailing a Tesla robotaxi directly from the X app would change the game. There are approximately 600 million active users per month on X. Interesting. There's already a lot of buttons in the X panel.

2:20:16Grok, you got chat. There's a signal competitor now. There's communities. I always wonder about how much you can add and how much you can bloat before you need a separate app. I already slapped some AI in there. Why not slap some robotaxis in there too, John? I got the results pulled up. DHH says, we had the pace for a podium, but power stealing failure and a missed pit stop meant P7. Still the greatest race in the world. That's amazing. It's so funny because you don't think of Basecamp as like a super active major advertiser. No. Like they like to have the product do the talking. Yeah. But it looks fantastic on some race gear.

2:20:55Congratulations. Congratulations. P7. The car looks fantastic. as well. So I have to have him on the show to break it all down. Totally. Mike Noop had some interesting reporting from TechCrunch. Waymo rides are costing more than Uber and Lyft, and people are paying anyway. He says, true for most automation scenarios, given machine intelligence on par with human capability for a task, machines offer lower variability and will be preferred, even commanding a premium on price. Big call. Yeah, this is what Chris Spike was talking about yeah uh the the idea of like if if you are a gating function to getting the thing that the person wants and you're not in that leisure category uh the the robot will be preferred um but yeah i mean it makes sense have you ridden in waymo yet i don't think so right i have not i i've taken one ride in sf it was pretty nice we should call one today take it around the block i don't think they i don't think they're in la right now i think they actually left i think they i don't know we'll have to figure it out but i i think they might have actually shut it down for a little long march back to san francisco um we got another post here from laser boat 999 love it coke tastes like tapping into your ancestral ancient ancestral petroleum reserves while sprite tastes like being connected to a big beautiful energy grid 1.4 million views i love it and then celsius daybreak over the computer world a real grass of the english language fantastic people are really enjoying posting about Diet Coke and Coca-Cola and all the sodas right now.

2:22:27The Diet Coke. They've never been better. They've never been better. Yeah. They're peaking. Yeah. They're peaking. And the organic marketing is working. I love it. In an era you'd have been Homer with that. That is spectacular. I completely agree. What a fantastic post. The big, beautiful energy grid. Anyway, we have a post here from Circe. If I see a guy in a suit at the airport, I just assume he works for Deloitte. Or is the technology and business podcaster? Or is a technology businessman? Who knows? Could be an international businessman. You just don't see international businessmen flying in suits anymore.

2:23:06There's almost no suits in business class. Not yet. They're coming back. The level of disrespect people have for the airport wearing joggers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if you want the pilot to take this. What are you running from? Yeah, if you want the pilot to take the safety of your plane seriously, maybe you should take it. Yeah, imagine getting on a plane and the pilot is wearing athleisure. Yeah, not going to happen. I am cooked. Not going to happen. I am cooked. Yeah, you should be thrown out. I wanted to shout this out. The Cadillac F1 team just posted over 60 jobs. So if you are wanting to work for an American, a true American luxury brand in Cadillac, or get involved with F1, head on over there.

2:23:51I'm excited for them to hit the grid. They really are hiring in every department. They have finance operations people and all sorts of stuff. Get into Cadillac F1, get them on ramp. Huge alpha there. Play the long game. Huge alpha there. Chess.com, saw her, says between June 2020 and December 2022, accounts on the site jumped from$35 million to$100 million. I joined during that time. It had taken 14 years to bring in those first 35 million. Pretty historic run for Chess.com. The business is doing great. Privately owned, founded in 2005, makes most of its money from subscribers who pay$5 to$15 a month for features such as unlimited play and post-match analysis.

2:24:36ARR, it's over$100 million. So congrats to the Chess.com team. That's amazing. We haven't hit the gong today. We've got to hit it for Chess.com. Hit it for them. Hit it for them. We should also hit the gong for Eli Lilly because someone at Novo Nordisk failed to pay a$450 maintenance fee, which would have kept its patent on Ozempic at force for another two years. This is such a crazy story. That's like, what, like$50 billion of value or something like that for$450. Just absolutely brutal. Maintenance fee. What a mistake. Good reminder to all the people with ip out there go pay those maintenance yeah yeah yeah this is a use for ai agents just constantly trolling for what fees am i not paying read every email inbox check in with all of the different patent databases and make sure that we're we're up to date on our maintenance fees because 450 costing you billions is insane to me um anyway there's gotta hit the size cong size going for Gecko.

2:25:37You want to hit it? Let's hit it. Gecko Robotics has raised 125 million at 1.25. They built robots and AI software to inspect and improve important infrastructure like power plants, factories and military systems. I think Trey Stevens is on the board. It's very, very cool. It's like these robots. They actually crawl around like that? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you have the massive industrial equipment, you know, like a massive grain silo or like oil and gas silo that's holding a bunch of like a refinery, the robot will crawl up and down and scan and take images and understand, oh, there's a structural weakness here.

2:26:14There's a crack here. The paint needs a touch up here. All of those different problems. And it's, yeah, it's just cool because it's like, it's, they are very much a scaled business. Like they really do make these robots. They're not humanoids. They're highly specialized. So crazy. It's a great business. They can crawl around buildings. Very, very cool. Wild. Chad Hurley the founder of YouTube says honestly this means more to me than any acquisition he sold YouTube to Google But there's a travel vlogger who met a young Iranian boy who basically speaks perfect English all because he watches YouTube I watch this video the kid is has a better grasp of the English language than most adults.

2:26:53I know it's very very well spoken Yeah Bullish for English. Honestly, this was probably the biggest news of the last week to stay in YouTube world. Sam Sulik had a back workout with Arnold. Okay. And yes, I mean. Broke the internet. One of the more important stories. Four million subs. Absolutely crushed it. Only two years ago or three years ago. And credit to Zach Pogrob, he says Sam Sulik is a great example of where content is going. Back in 2023, August 20th, he's like, this guy's onto something, he's the future. And then, of course, he got his IFBB Pro card on an absolute tear and has put out a ton of great content.

2:27:34Value of daily posting. For sure. Just 1 % better. The vlogs get better. Daily poster. If he was doing it weekly, it'd be much harder. Anyway, there was this odd news about the New York Times reporting that Chachi B.T. talked a guy into insanity followed by suicide by cop. A human being is dead in passing. This falsifies the alignment by default. Cope, whatever's really inside ChatGPT, it knew enough about humans to do this. And so, Justine Moore says, it's ridiculous to say ChatGPT talked a guy into insanity when he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar before he started using ChatGPT.

2:28:09This is a tragic story. But the man was clearly mentally ill. Messaging with a chatbot didn't kill him. Very, very sad story. But yeah, I mean, obviously, this is not the responsibility of the AI. but it is an opportunity for JGPD to potentially step in and help treat someone. And we've already seen promising results in therapy. And of course, there will be an interesting dynamic about when does it call the cops on you if you are planning something? If it detects that you are insane, what should it do with that information? Because there's a lot of privacy and individual rights that are potentially infringed upon, but at the same time could have had a much, much better outcome here.

2:28:48but very very very rough story anyway let's move back to jane street we talked about them earlier uh instead of non-competes jane street decides to make its own programming language so far from anything mainstream that you can't get a job anywhere else not entirely true bubble boy if you know ocamill you can probably write python um but yes well they're on minstery branching it is is the thing yes they're creating their own but ocamill was already all like basically entirely maintained by Jane Street. Ron Minsky has like the main YouTube video about OCaml, this like low-level machine language.

2:29:22It's almost at like assembly level. Very, very performant, very fast. And Jane Street, I think, has been the main contributor to that programming language for years, but now they are branching it. Camels, llamas, hogs, pigs, they're having a moment. They're having a moment. OCaml has been around for 12 years, something like that. Ron Minsky, he put out this YouTube video. I actually watched it back in the day. It was great. He's an absolute beast. It's one of the few pieces of Jane Street content that's out there, or was. It was like this interesting lens into the way Jane Street builds their high frequency trading algorithms.

2:29:57They need to be extremely performant, extremely accelerated, and so they now have their own programming language. So congrats to the Jane Street team. We have a post from GoDinny, probably botching it. I can't articulate exactly why, but this generation of B2C founders feels like the tech equivalent of SoundCloud rappers. I wonder who they're talking about. Yeah, somebody else was posting that this feels like the generation of founders raised on YouTube. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, they are extremely good at viral content. Is that entirely new? I think so. There's been other people that, I mean, consumer founders have understood viral growth loops for a long time.

2:30:43I mean, the Airbnb guys were doing stunts like the political serials. That was very much like a stunt, but it was like fun. You know, obviously, some of the early Mark Zuckerberg experiments at Harvard were very designed to go viral. Designed to go viral or designed to scale rapidly? or like there's this thing that I'm seeing in the timeline of founders sort of consistently trying to do things that piss people off or like are just trying to be attention grabbing without necessarily using it to drive any type of business results. Yeah, I mean like you can get a lot of downloads and attention just by rage baiting the timeline.

2:31:24But that is – Low quality. Yeah, it just doesn't scale infinitely. Like eventually, like you just figure out that like getting a million views is doable every week, but it's just a million views. It's not something that's truly like going to scale endlessly. Like the performance marketing, you know, playbook or a true viral growth. Like you compare it to like the viral growth engine at Dropbox where, you know, I give you storage. You come on, I get storage. And there's this loop or like referring people to Gmail. know like the classic viral loops that continue to grow even among people that don't need to necessarily see your viral rage bait um so there's always a question about like like once you have that attention you have to shift into something that's more durable and more scalable um totally but uh i don't know maybe they'll take the lesson the last uh the last viral rage bait didn't really go over as well but we'll see we'll see well we have a post here from christo vasilev taking a screenshot from Tyler Cowen's blog.

2:32:32He says this was March 14th, 2025. March 14th, only three months ago. Wow. When will Israel attack Iranian nuclear facilities? He says it seems this ought to happen soon, though it is not yet a major news item. Iranian air defenses are severely disrupted, though not forever. The Hezbollah counterattack has been more than neutralized and no alternative deterrent has been put in its place. That too may be temporary. Israeli public opinion is still close in time to October 7th, and Netanyahu is not so far from the end of his reign. Netanyahu started his reign when I was six months old. Is he supposed to wind down soon?

2:33:10I don't know when his term is up, but certainly feels more than four or eight years like he's been over there for a while. Are you sure it's been 20 years, or has he just been in Elected to prime minister in 1996. Oh, wow. Okay. Interesting. The next election is November 3rd, 2026. Okay. So a little over a year. Got it. The countries that will get very mad at Israel for such an attack are already close to maximally mad at Israel. Trump has signaled plenty of support, yet there is no guarantee that will last forever. Most of all, Iran is getting closer to having a workable nuclear weapon. I also find it striking how many people discuss the Ukraine negotiations without considering the two issues may be tied to some degree.

2:33:56How much will Putin, if at all, shore up Iran in such a scenario? Just a reminder that you should not forget about this issue. It could be the most important thing that happens this year. Wow. He really, really called it. And zero comments. Like everyone just was like, yeah, okay, yeah. No comment. But yeah, he called it and now people are looking. Um, congrats to the work week team, Adam Ryan. One year ago, we launched a bold experiment. What if there was a real social network for business leaders? No self promo, no influencer fluff, just verified operators helping each other. And they're seeing 10 X growth in five months, 51 % acceptance rate.

2:34:34Did you see who was shouting them out to? Uh, Lance Armstrong. Oh, wow. Crushing. Adam had to throw this in there. Lance is an early investor in work week. He's investing in a lot of stuff now. He has a whole fund. Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's running it. I was on the work week board through the series a, and it's just been amazing to watch them execute over the last year. Company is ripping. And I thought it was cool that, that Lance was, was throwing a little shout out here. That's great. Anyways, I thought this was posted on Friday, but it was just funny. I got to include it. This Neil Renick. Wow.

2:35:06What a stressful week at work. Time to relax by holding a phone, beaming endless streams of horrific international news inches from my head. It's ridiculous. 220 ,000 likes. Everyone's feeling the same thing. And that really was this weekend. Like I went to the beach on Sunday and all of Los Angeles was just peaceful. I mean, I saw one train of like cop cars kind of moving from one part of the city to the other, but I didn't see any protests, didn't see any real fallout. Like things were pretty quiet in America generally, but you go online and it's just like, I mean, you read like the cover of the Wall Street Journal and it's just like flames and insane.

2:35:42Yeah, that picture is crazy. because there's crazy stuff happening in the world. But fortunately, due to the amazing technology, it's beamed directly to your face. In other news, the founder of PumpFun as well as PumpFun have been banned from X. Oh, why? And I was seeing this because Dan Romero posted something, something decentralized doesn't matter until it does. Farcaster is effectively a sufficiently decentralized version of X. So he's kind of making his case there, but we'll see how that evolves. But overall, slow news day. Pretty slow news day. Only geopolitically. It's a great time to be a political podcaster.

2:36:31You got Trump, Elon, Waymos. You got Iran. You got assassinations. There's so much stuff. us over here we got to talk about technology so maybe tomorrow we break down the warner brothers discovery split some hbo stuff some sports stuff i think it'd be fun to do a deep dive on le mans and some of the history there there's a lot that we could go into in different directions we also have an absolutely insane line we have an insane lineup tomorrow too so i don't think we'll be getting to a lot of that we have a lot of range and it's gonna be a lot of fun um and so stay tuned for tomorrow because we have a we will bang or line up well you'll hear about it in the morning thank you for tuning in thank you to our incredible production team thank you to tyler who learned all there is to know about biotech today yes he's in the home of the golden retriever glp1 i like the ai generated good tyler yeah i actually i found this uh great concoction i've cooked up okay okay let's hear it okay so this is optimal you know golden retriever maxing okay So there's three parts, right?

2:37:32Hotter, friendlier, dumber. So for hotter, I have melanotin. It's like injections to get you more tan, so you can have a nice bond. The next one is growth hormone peptides. So I think Jordy knows a lot about peptides. That's kind of the king peptide. You can do a lot of stuff around human growth hormone, more hormone but at the end of the day if you really you know plan to win just just do it okay sounds good okay and then the third one i have for hotter is um blood transfusions from young people would like an intern be good like a summer intern yeah would you recommend

2:38:19do not do not be a summer intern for brian johnson he will you will you will be a blood boy Okay, so then the next for friendlier, I have two, you know, items. The first one is MDMA microdosing. So I haven't tried this myself, but it could be interesting. The next one is oxytocin nasal sprays. Yeah, that's the love chemical, right? Yeah, so this is supposed to increase people's trust. It makes you more generous, more empathetic. Okay. That's somewhat dog-like. I don't know why that just seems so wrong. just like a but at the same time i mean coffee has like a you know a i'm sure a similarly strong effect but just for feeling the dose is the poison so you dose it correctly maybe there's something there interesting okay okay and then uh the last one is for the dumber yes um so the first one i have is uh scopolamine okay so this uh apparently makes people confused um extremely compliant and forgetful.

2:39:20Oh, okay. This could work. There we go. The next one is prefrontal lobotomy. Okay. I think people have tried this throughout history. We're maybe going too far here. And then the third one is just lead. Lead again. Just lead. Well, if you want to have some lead, just drink tap water. There you go. Get you covered. Good luck to you. Well, thank you for solving one of humanity's most pressing health challenges. Indeed. How do we be more golden retriever-like? Anyways, great show. We'll be back tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it. There will be some big news. We'll talk to you tomorrow. And we hope you have a fantastic Monday afternoon and evening.

2:40:02Goodbye. Cheers.