NEO Home Robot Reactions, Bryan Johnson LIVE in The Ultradome | Marcin Piatkowski, Nathan Mintz, James Proud, Shaun Maguire, Anil Chakravarthy, Brynn Putnam, George Kurtz

28:05It's interesting. Yeah. And. Yeah. It's the same. It's the remote. It's the remote work story. It becomes a global labor pool. That's a huge supply shock. So prices go down. None of this happens overnight, but eventually it will become a hot button issue. Tyler, what are you thinking? I would like to see them go the Uber route, right? Okay. You saw those tasks that drivers can do in between rides. Yes. So then they can just put on the VR headset if they don't have a ride currently. then they just teleoperate for a little bit and then maybe they're only halfway through their task when the next drive comes in and then someone else just comes in.

28:35Because we don't know who's actually behind the robot. So it could be multiple people. It's true. Yeah, I don't know. It's going to be interesting. Abdul says, Zuckerberg's clanker watching yours and your wife's clanker in 2035. Oh, there's a clanker outside the window. Yes, clankers are going to be, the clanker slurs are going to be through the roof over the next few years. All the experts are at the 1X offices. Very smart move by them. I feel like this is a very, very shrewd move because if they were saying, no matter where they pick, if it wasn't America, it would just be a political football immediately.

29:18Did you see Bernie Sanders talking about friend.com? You saw this? That was crazy. It's like Avi has not even broken through meaningfully, and yet politicians recognize that robots are coming, and even if Avi isn't the one who has it completely dialed, the idea of talking to an AI is already a political issue, which is just remarkable. That's why you should stick to Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. uh dalton caldwell hit the timeline to share that whatnot from yc winter 2020 is now a decacorn congratulations what not has raised 225 million at an 11.5 billion dollar valuation the company plans to announce on tuesday which they announced yesterday the round comes less than a year after the e-commerce platform raised 265 million at half that valuation and puts its total fundraising at about 968 million.

30:19So, uh, again, this LA based company. Awesome. Uh, I believe. Um, and, uh, we've heard about the online shopping stuff. It seems like live shopping might finally be working in America. We've heard about it in China. Oh, it's so massive in China. We were wondering when it would come to America. Uh, it feels like it must have came. It's interesting that it seems like it's working and it's not working in as broad as broad of a set of categories as in China. Like in China, people will just straight up buy like vegetables. Yeah. They'll be like, people will be selling coconuts live streaming. Here, it's like trading cards, sports cards, various collectible toys, thrift type stuff, coins.

31:02Never used whatnot. And I don't know many people that have, but they must have found some powerful niche because 10 billion is no joke. I wonder where it lands. I wonder if this is like a Snapchat size business or if this can really grow into something that's amazon walmart style like massive massive massive i mean clearly like they've done a lot of things right um but uh you know interesting to see like like what is the american um uh what what is the american you know uh appetite for this product specifically um let's uh take it over to our first guest. Welcome to the stream. How do I pronounce your name?

31:50Marcin. Hi. Marcin. I know it's difficult, but Marcin goes a long way. Thanks. Thank you so much for joining. Great to meet you. And thank you for staying up late. We know that you are over in Europe. If you could please give us an introduction on yourself and some of the research that you've done, we'd love to kind of explore some of the ideas that you've been writing about sure sure thank you for having me of course i'm i'm professor of economics at kosminski university in warsaw which is the highest ranked business school in central europe it is sort of the stanford of central europe if you will i also wrote a book that uh playing the polish economic miracle yes the the fact that poland has been the fastest growing economy in Europe and worldwide, except for China over the last 35 years.

32:37And I've also worked and advised over the past 20 years, almost 20 governments around the world, including most recently India and China. So that also brings a bit of a global perspective to what has been happening in Poland, in the US and around the world. Yeah. What are the key ingredients to Poland's economic success broadly? If you were to kind of rank the few key choices that were made or investment. Yeah, it feels like at least once a month, a chart pops up of Poland's GDP growth relative to a bunch of other countries. And it's just absolutely remarkable. Yeah. Yeah, so it's a remarkable sort of Hollywood Netflix-like story, or you can call it a California-like unicorn because it is an economy that was bankrupt, backward, and broken in 1899 at the end of communism and was poorer than Jamaica, Suriname, Gabon, and a couple of other countries.

33:38And 35 years later, it is now richer than Japan, and it will be richer than Spain and Israel next year, which is a remarkable story of sort of unicorn and phoenix-like growth. And I think there were a number of ingredients, but one is definitely the grind, the work habits. Even now, 35 years into this economic miracle, polls are the hardest working people among all the rich countries. An average poll puts in 700 more hours of work per year than every German. There's like 12 hours per week. That's incredible. You're speaking our language. You're speaking our language. Take me one click upstream from that.

34:23I can imagine a population is more hardworking if you ban things that make it hard to do leisure. So are there any pieces of what the government has done to make hard work easier to pick or more likely for the population to lean towards? I'm thinking of Singapore has banned a ton of drug use, for example. And so I would imagine that Singaporeans work harder because the alternative of going to a rock concert or to the equivalent of Burning Man isn't on the table. Is there anything like that that's actually been cognizant the government said, we want our folks to work harder, and then it happened?

35:10Or is it just like chance luck of the Polish people? No, it's not Singapore. It's a democracy with, would you believe, 20 different governments over the past 35 years, from left-wing Democrats to right-wing Republicans, from Bernie Sanders to Ron Paul. And all of them, I think, they represented a society that is just hungry for success and a society that just wants to be richer, or at least as rich and then richer than the fat cats in Western Europe. And that's exactly what's been happening. There's been a choice of polls who have moved from one third of German income 35 years ago to 75, 80 percent of German level of income now.

35:52And they want to get to 100 and 120. And one way of doing it is obviously working hard. So an average poll per week works 12 hours more per week than an average German and even six hours more. And what's the exact number? Is it 50 hours a week? I don't know how much time Germans spend working. I don't know. I don't want to pick on Germans. I say hi to all my German friends. But, you know, Poland continues to believe that working hard and there's a lot of opportunities. You know, Poland is part of an open global economy, part of the West, part of the European Union, where we have 450 million consumers with no borders, no towers, no nothing.

36:38If you have a good idea, you can win and conquer these markets, particularly from the incumbents, Western European players who very often just lost the hunger for success. What's the lesson from the rollout of the Internet? I've heard a lot of countries sort of were able to pull forward economic growth by leaning in on high-speed internet, making it more accessible, extra infrastructure investments. How much does the rise and rollout of the internet and like getting that right play into the Polish growth story over the last maybe three decades? So Poland is a latecomer and also a beneficiary of being backward.

37:25You know, when I came to the U.S. for the first time in 1997, I did not know where checks were. I just never knew they existed. So Poland moved from a backward communist country straight into swiping credit cards and sort of reach-at-like payment systems, which we have right now. So and also brand new 5G and fiber optics. So I think this is what they call a rent of backwardness, which is what exactly Poland has leveraged. It has not had any sunk costs in the old infrastructure, which, again, has happened in Western Europe. For instance, in Germany, one of the reasons they seem to be losing the battle to be competitive in electric vehicles is that all the BMWs and Mercedes, they did not want to cannibalize the good business.

38:16And so they were late to compete with the Chinese. Poland never had this sunk cost, and it went straight into technological frontier. How are you counseling or thinking about sovereign AI? I feel like giving every country, if you want your country to succeed in the 2000s, in the 2010s, you definitely want every citizen to have access to Google or every access to Google search, to cloud documents, the cloud broadly. But you don't need necessarily a data center in your country to access Google or to search the web or have access to the internet. It wasn't that critical to have the actual infrastructure in your borders.

39:08Now it feels like there's a whole new discussion around you need sovereign AI. You need to be doing the inference within your borders for some reason. And I don't know that I fully believe that. I feel like you want your citizens to use AI, but whether they use it, whether they jump through a fiber optic cable across the border and access it somewhere else, that doesn't seem like that. I think the push for sovereign AI is partly out of a fear of this sort of fast takeoff scenario, right? Yeah, but yeah, I've never bought that. Yeah, but it does not need to be mutually exclusive. So in Poland, actually every single player is in the market.

39:53Google, Amazon, Microsoft, these guys have the largest data centers and they're ready to provide AI services to whoever is interested. But at the same time, the government is also building redundancy. It's building additional infrastructure, including to host apps that do not even exist in the US. Like, for instance, I don't have to have any plastics on me, any ID when I drive, for instance. It's all on my phone. There's a Polish app called, you know, Citizen, where you virtually have most of the things you ever needed. It's all on your phone. So it's, again, it's an example of how some countries have just moved on.

40:35And increasingly, a lot of public services will be done from the phone. It also helps that there's a lot of Polish talent that has actually helped create AI in the first place. I mean, a Polish guy is a chief scientist at OpenAI. One third of the founding engineers of OpenAI were Polish. So, you know, these guys call their moms and call their ex-girlfriends and tell them, look, you really want to look at ChatGBT and what we're doing because that's the future. How is Poland's university system helping to accelerate all these different priorities? It feels like the U.S. is at a unique moment where we've had a very robust academic system, but currently there's somewhat of a, well, not even somewhat, certainly a kind of a conflict between the government and our university system, but then also like a broad sort of distrust of a lot of our institutions.

41:41Yeah, that is true. And, you know, for all people, most people around the world, including myself, a lot of I got my PhD in Poland. I became a professor in Poland, but I did my pre-dog and post-dog at Harvard. And I know the U.S. well, and it's obviously still the best place to get the top quality education. Most Nobel Prize winners come from the U.S., but some other countries sort of hustle. So Poland has not only outworked its competitors, it has also outeducated its competitors. So for instance, half of young Poles aged 25 to 34 have university education. In Germany, it's only one third. So that gives you an idea.

42:22They do not only work hard, they're actually pretty well educated. It might not be Stanford and Harvard all the time, but this is solid education as reflected in these open AI guys. And finally, Poland also outcompetes because you get this talent for half price for what you would pay for it in Germany. You know, a top-notch computer scientist in Poland whom you can put at Silicon Valley any day will cost you 75 grand. And I guess back where you're sitting, it would be 200 plus. So it's really this combination of human capital and low labor cost and being located in the heart of Europe and getting increasingly increasing interest from global investors who look at 11 labs.

43:08And I saw just a guy who was there just before me. I think he had a hat. Tyler's rocking the hat right now. What about on the regulation front? And what are the ways that Poland has, you know, break down Poland's decision making around regulation versus, you know, maybe other members of the EU? So in the EU, you cannot really have much of your own voice on digital matters. So it's actually all been consolidated in Brussels. And the European Commission puts up ideas on behalf of everyone else. It's the same for trade. So, for instance, when the European Union cut a deal with Trump, it was the EU that was negotiating on behalf of everyone, not Poland, Germany, and Spain.

43:58On digital, it's pretty much the same. And there's ongoing debate whether Europe is just over-regulating, including AI. And I agree, we are over-regulating, or at least there's a perception that Europe is over-regulating, which is killing AI. So, I'm hoping that the perception will change. and again, newcomers, new guys on the block like Poland, now the 20th largest economy in the world, richer than Japan with more than$1 trillion of GDP, Poland will be one of the countries that will be pushing for deregulating, for opening up, because this is exactly what has worked well for this country. Did you have to ask Brussels if you could come on our podcast?

44:41No. I'm here as an academic author of this book, if anyone is interested. No, but no. Okay, good. Okay, good. You're like, I had to apply. It was a 10-hour application to go on the podcast. No, it's not quite that extreme. The advantage of the EU is that, for instance, there's now this debate about creating a new regulatory system where you could set up a company which could immediately work all across Europe under the EU laws. So I think they called it sort of the 28th regime. You could sell your products and services everywhere in the EU without worrying about local regulations. And I think this is the way to go.

45:23And I think Poland and our region, all countries in the region will be pushing for these kind of solutions. We don't want Europe to be sclerotic. We want Europe to be successful. And Poles, who are the most pro-American society in Europe and probably also in the world, will be one of the big supporters of exchanges. Awesome. What's the mood in Poland around energy? Or what's the... Is there any place where Poland differs from Europe, like other European countries broadly, in terms of energy strategy or where energy is going? When I think about the sovereign AI thing, a lot of countries, it's just if you have cheap energy, you should set up an AI factory, even no matter where you're going.

46:09wind up selling the tokens. That's just a great use of energy these days. But how is Poland thinking about the current energy mix and where that's going and various incentives and trade-offs that might differ from other countries? So Poland has originally and traditionally been a coal-based country, but it's really moved quickly. Now about only half of the oil energy use comes from coal. And Poland has decided to go all in on nuclear and on renewables. So the plan is to pretty much minimize or even eliminate the use of coal within the next decade plus. And Poland has already decided to build one nuclear plant and actually with Westinghouse American technology.

46:54But renewables is the other part of the answer. So there's probably not enough of a surplus now to make Poland into a data center hub. But it's pretty much coming. In other ways, Poland is a hub. Like a lot of Belarusians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, virtually the whole region is increasingly moving into Warsaw and Poland because this is where things happen. If you want to scale up, if you want to internationalize, if you want to find capital that's not Vilnius, that's not means for sure, you really want to come to Warsaw because that's where all the interest is and that's where the action is.

47:31Cool. Very, very cool. Well, I cannot wait to, at some point, I'm sure we will do this show from Warsaw. I'd love to. And that will be a fun moment. Thank you so much for joining and breaking it down. Anytime Poland is in the news, feel free to jump back on the show. It would be great to talk through it. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you for having me. Great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Let me tell you about Vanta.com. Automate compliance. Manage risk. Improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

48:02Back on the timeline, Cyan Bannister over at Long Journey has gotten a tattoo of the logo of their newest portfolio company, Substrate. We have the founder of Substrate, James Proud, coming on the show in just a little bit. I'm excited for that. And I never knew that my friend Chris Ovitz, also here in LA, was the one who introduced James, I guess, to Long Journey, and they were, it sounds like, the first check. I don't know that for a fact, but at least very, very early. So good to see, and I'm excited to meet James.

48:43There's a post here from Semi-Analysis, an all-time classic, We Have Been in Serious Problem. They're saying this is ASML. talking about Substrate's approach and their new lithography system so we can get more info from James in a little bit. But this company was announced yesterday and announced about, was it 100 on a billion? Straight out the gates? It was 100 on a billion. Straight out of the gate. Not bad, not bad. Not bad. Logan Paul was a Series A investor and whatnot. So he's going from a$90 million to an$11.5 billion valuation. not too shabby at all. I know another friend of mine, Ann Skates, was I believe also one of the, a part of leading that Series A, if I remember, just not too long ago at all.

49:38It makes so much sense that Logan Paul would have invested in this company. He's like super into collectibles and... Oh, collectibles, but also just social media. He's actually sold a ton of products on social media. He's done all sorts of different YouTube videos, the Vine era. He's seen firsthand every single iteration and turn of what's happening on social media, on content, on commerce. And so it makes a bunch of sense that he would be fine-tuned to understand the opportunity here. Although there were a bunch of companies that were going after this. Very tricky to pick the right one. Pop Shop.

50:14Pop Shop. Are they still around? Did they do okay? I don't think so. I think they, well, they still have a website. I know a few other companies were trying to come after this exact idea, this live shopping. I mean, even just live streaming. No, Popshop, I guess, is around. Popshop's around still, okay. There's somebody live right now selling blind boxes. There you go. Hopefully they're selling SaaS. Hopefully they're selling graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. Sam Altman said yesterday an IPO is now the most likely path forward for OpenAI, given the scale of capital the company will need going forward.

50:55No surprises, no surprises there. Yes. It'll be very interesting to hear more comments from Sam Altman and Satya Nadella on what happens over the medium to long term. I'm fascinated by the idea of if Microsoft winds up with like$150 billion position, maybe that goes up in the public markets. You could be looking at like a$200 billion dollar position like what is the treasury strategy market sells as soon as a lockup just bails immediately yeah no no i mean microsoft thanks for the ip thanks for the ip buddy microsoft is opening i'm gonna be trading just based off ruined tweets alone yes yeah yeah you're gonna be trading microsoft for now you can do that today because they own that's true they have 135 $35 billion in position.

51:43So it's always an option. But yes, what will Microsoft do over the medium term once the company gets out? I would imagine that they don't just hit slam the sell button on day one. I imagine that they let that evolve over a long period of time and probably don't crash the stock because that just seems not particularly advantageous, as silly as it would be. um more important news uh there's an abandoned mcdonald's that nasa turned into a moon probe picture recovery lab what what is a moon probe picture recovery lab was this is this from years ago like yeah i i don't know if it's still operational people are saying moonviews.com mcmoon the official website of the lunar orbiter image recovery project and it does indeed look to be, and they're calling it McMoons.

52:41Is it AI? No? No, it's not AI. This is a real world. Wait, wait, wait. This is right by Google. This building is right next to where Sergey Brin's blimp is built, which we saw yesterday. Absolutely stunning blimp. I'm so happy. I love seeing blimps. I love better chips. I want to know more. I know Ashley Vance did a whole video interviewing the founder of that company that Sergey partnered with, like the CEO that came in and has actually run the company. And I don't want to sound too rude, but what is the goal of the company? Because blimps have been invented. So it's like, are we just - We're bringing them back.

53:26I mean, I love it. I want it to be brought back, I guess. But it's like, it's a thing that exists already. Well, there's another company. There's a new blimp company called Airship that's a SpaceX team, ex-SpaceX team, that is trying to leverage Airship's blimps for global freight. And the idea is that a lot of exciting things happen when you're not trying to work within waterways, ports, and you can just transport goods directly. You can imagine directly from China. You just fly over. I saw someone who is a venture capitalist, I believe, lay out the whole blimp bull thesis very eloquently and run a bunch of numbers.

54:09Seemed pretty interesting. But it is funny that your moonshot is a thing that we've done it. I guess it's just like... Your blimp shot? Your blimp shot. Well, it's really just like, okay, I guess there is a challenge. The challenge is make blimps work in the way that trains work or in the ways that containerships work. Commercially. Like actually scale them. Not just as a billboard. Because they never really. Because a Goodyear blimp still flies around LA sometimes. But there are truly like six blimps in the entire world or something like that. And so the total market cap of the blimp economy is just nothing.

54:46It's just a disaster. And so that's the real challenge. I guess the challenge is not make another blimp because we know we can make blimps. the question is like can we find something more valuable to do with them such that it scales as a mode of transport uh are you your are your anti-hot air balloon are you anti-blimp would you go on a blimp ride i would inspect it first you would you would inspect it oh you feel equipped i would use kick the tires i would use large language models yes and i would say how much gram and then and then you would know okay this is a good blimp yeah i don't know i think uh i i i would love to i i would go to blimp i think without checking i think uh blimps yep blimps especially with um you know being you know potentially having uh like a parachute on your back you know you're one of the parachute guys you're like i need a parachute with me if i'm go up high.

55:46I don't know. Planes have life jackets in them. Those are, those are parachutes. I know, but it's not the worst idea to have, have a backup plan. It is funny. Like what are the odds when you take off on a plane that you're going to crash into the ocean and need a life jacket? Pretty rare. Yeah. What are the odds that you're going to need a parachute on a blimp? Probably rare, but not non-zero yeah that is true it is funny how uh there aren't any planes like imagine if united was just like back is coming in with the the important take here which is data centers tied to balloons steampunk data center so let's go blimp data center that that might work elon apparently said on the on uh recently that he's uh thinking of what he wants teslas to be like distributed cloud, basically, so that when it was just parked, it could be providing.

56:41Well, you know who should run a blimp ad? Julius.ai. The AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English. Chat with your data, get expert level insights in seconds. So I believe Google had a data center on a container ship that they put out in the bay for a while ago. So this has happened. It is interesting that there's no, there's no airplane service that is like, we, we actually have parachutes on board. Like what would that do to the airline economy? If United one day was just like, yeah, we're putting, we're putting parachutes on all the United planes.

57:24Like they don't do that on JetBlue. They don't do that on American. They don't do that on Delta. Does Delta give you a parachute? No, United gives you a parachute. I mean, potentially a good upsell for Sky. Would that make you more likely to fly United or less likely? Be honest. Why are you guys adding parachutes? Exactly. It's bagging a lot of questions. I look at it more as a potential upsell. It's like instead of having to fly into JFK. Oh, you think it should be something I have to pay for? Yeah, it's like an extra$1 ,000 you can parachute out anywhere over the price state area. Oh, let's you go.

57:57I was just thinking for the price of the ticket, for$200, you get the life jacket. But for$300, you get upgraded to the parachute. I think that might be a way to just squeeze a couple extra dollars out of that economy premium. I want an option for executives that don't have time to go through the airport and be able to drop into their meeting. Yeah, I like that. if United came out and said, Let's witness! We now have parachutes on board and you have a choice. You're flying to New York from LA and you have a choice between Delta which does not have parachutes and United that does have parachutes.

58:41Tyler which one are you pickin? I don't think I want my airline to have parachutes. Why? That makes me way more scared. It's a pure upgrade in safety. If you don't have one and you need one. I don't want my car to have seatbelts. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, you put seatbelts in there. You're expecting the car to crash. No. It's just if it happens, we have the seatbelt here. If the plane dissolves in the air, you have a parachute. On this airline. If the plane dissolves. Yeah. If the plane rips open like in Fight Club, which you haven't seen. If there's a bunch of snakes on the plane. I think it makes more sense on a blimp because we've seen blimps just blow up in the sky.

59:21Yeah, true. Planes don't really do that. False flag. Planes are pretty safe. Anyway, I hope no one in the chat is watching on a plane because that would always be rough. Caleb Watney over at IFP says, Hard to understate what a blow this would be for American leadership and AI if this happens. He's talking about how Trump has suggested he was open to providing China with access to NVIDIA's Blackwell chips as part of a trade deal, which would represent a major concession and rile up national security hawks in Washington. We'll be speaking about Blackwell, as Trump said, touting the chips as super duper and years ahead of what was currently available from other countries.

1:00:02He said NVIDIA CEO Jensen had recently brought a version of the chip to the Oval Office for him to see. AI. Bellwether and video shares extended gains to 8.5 % in Asian trading on the alternative platform. Blue Ocean signaling potential further gains when U.S. markets open. They are seemingly en route to a$5 trillion valuation. I think they hit it, didn't they? We got to pull that up on public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. They did. Hit that gong. They hit it. Let's have it. $5.02 trillion. Okay, that was a better hit. That was a better hit. That's a better hit, but it's going to do the weird ring thing, I think.

1:00:43Yeah, see? It's going to keep ringing. Because apparently we broke our gong, and this is what happens when you break the gong, is that it just keeps ringing. But that's actually kind of a feature in my mind. I don't know. Feature. What do you think? uh the question here is maybe trump is doing a little uh 5d chess and he realized 60 chess actually could be six could be seven could be five a little simplistic you don't it's it's really hard to say at this stage but it's possible that he realizes that ai is about infinite slot machines yes and he realizes it's actually adult content it's actually in america's interest to get as many blackwells to China as possible.

1:01:23So that they all get one-shotted. Yes. Yeah. This is the modern information war. This is the cybernetic future war that's happening between America and China. It went from AI is a good thing, so we need to keep the chips in America. We can't let them have them. What if Trump says you can only have the blackwells? We've got to get the chips out of America. You can only have the blackwells if you give a free plan of gpt4.0 yes every citizen and uh xi jinping's just you're absolutely right i would love to give every every citizen ani uh with with sexy mode um no i don't i don't know my take on this has always been like we do we actually have slack capacity for chips because we've been having the GPU poor debate for a while.

1:02:20Everyone said that, you know, oh, we can't make enough chips. We can't build enough data centers. But like, it's a lot easier to advocate for, hey, don't sell to China if there truly is unlimited demand in America. It's a completely different conversation if it's like, well, yeah, actually, like AWS and Google and OpenAI, they're actually good on NVIDIA chips. They don't want to buy anymore. And NVIDIA is like, wait, but we've made so many of these. We want to sell them. Can we sell them to China? You'd be like, well, yeah, because that's going to hurt your business a ton if you have to write those down because you made them.

1:03:01Versus it's just a choice of who you're selling to and it's zero sum. Jensen does not want to lose the Chinese market. He's been very clear about how frustrated he is about the whole situation, but he's been playing nice. Yeah, I don't know. The NVIDIA just, you know, continuing to ramp up despite everyone waking up to how big of a threat, you know, TPUs are to NVIDIA. It is interesting timing. Yeah. Yeah, there was some more news about TPUs. I think the demand for TPU is like through the roof. They saw some post about that. in other news oliver cameron friend of the show introduced odyssey 2 instant interactive ai video this is general purpose model that instantly imagines 20 fps video you can interact with in open-minded ways it feels like true sci-fi type a few words and ai instantly imagines a video that feels alive so the the the the browser war is in full swing now the uh the real-time video generation wars are in full swing.

1:04:11You got World Labs, you got Odyssey, you got Genie 3, I believe, from Google. There are a few companies working on this. I'm personally excited for, you know, where this goes once you get some extra harnessing in there, some extra mechanics. I don't know if this is, we need to have Oliver back on the show and talk to him about, Is he thinking about going more API driven or does he want to kind of own more of, I mean, yeah, like how much of it needs to be the foundation model company versus the application layer? How much does he need to, does he want to own like the end result or whatever people do with the product?

1:04:53There's a pretty wide swath of opportunity once you have a model that works in a particular way. You can go set up a short form video app if you want and try and win and build a new social network. But it's all, there's a whole bunch of trade-offs there and a whole bunch of challenges. So clearly a, you know, a next step in advancing the model. But a lot of questions about how do you actually monetize this? Is it a prosumer tool? Will people be using this just as better video generation because it's faster turnaround so you can iterate more quickly? There's a whole bunch of benefits there. all the demos here are vertical, interestingly, but the launch video is horizontal.

1:05:34What does that mean? Dig into that. If you want to generate some video, head over to Fall, generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Toby Lutke was taking shots at AI note-takers. He hit the timeline and said, having some AI follow you into your Zoom meetings or Google Meet for taking notes is the digital equivalent of showing up to a meeting with your fly down. What do you think? You're anti-AI, you're anti-clanker in the group chat. I never let, I've never let him in.

1:06:17You never let him in. You never let the clanker in the Zoom room? The clanker, the clanker's in the waiting room. It's ready to be let in. Oh, I forgot. Sorry. This, uh, this, this reply post says firefly is waiting in the lobby and that's where firefly will stay. Toby's on fire. He said firefly better fly right into the, in the ODDAMN fire. Yeah. So, uh, I don't know. He was, he didn't, he didn't elaborate on why he doesn't like this. A friend of the show, TJ Parker said, uh, maybe it has something to do with the fact that If you're recording every meeting, every meeting is now discoverable. And so if you have some random lawsuit, all of a sudden, you know, there's like leaked tech emails.

1:07:04Imagine that. But for everything you do at work all the time forever, that's what having an AI note taker is in reality. That's why I just wear my friend. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, truly, it is fascinating that we actually got to the outcome where Firefly identifies itself and says, like, hey, I'm an AI note taker. I'm here and I'm going to join. As opposed to the alternative, which was just like run clearly on your computer and no one knows. Goldrock says that using transcription clankers are a no-go. Oftentimes they're used without all parties' consent. That's another one. It's like if somebody wants to come in to the call and say, hey, for the next 10 minutes, do you mind if I record this?

1:07:48so that I don't have to take notes myself. I'm open to like opting in, but just like the default record every single call, like there's no, there's just not something I'm interested in doing. Yeah, obviously depends a lot on the use case. You know, are you synthesizing takeaways? Is this actually useful? It's probably not a replacement for not actually paying attention during the call. You're not just going to zone out for an hour and then review some meeting notes and be like, oh, that was now a productive meeting. I would love to know what percentage of transcripts ever get read, like the notes.

1:08:35I would expect it to be a very small percentage that actually get read. So it's like one of those things people are like kind of peace of mind. I mean, I did have one interaction with a group of friends who had a Zoom call to talk about. They're all like, everyone's like a content creator. And so they'd have these calls. I couldn't make one. Normally, everyone hops on the calls, talks about trends, strategies, whatever they're doing. I couldn't make one of those calls. And so they did have one of the transcripts happen. And I was able to read through that. And that was fun because I like these friends.

1:09:11And so I was kind of able to, you know, not fully listen to the full call, but get some of the topics like, oh, what's top of mind for my friends. That was kind of cool. But that was definitely something like it was a meeting that I was looking forward to. So I was happy to, you know, enjoy it as a transcript as well, because I would enjoy the meeting if I had actually attended. But regardless, if you're transcribing a bunch of stuff, if you have a bunch of text, you need to search every byte. You need to use Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

1:09:48We puffin. We puffin. We puffin. The golden age of private credit is over. Private credit winter is coming, says High Yield Harry. Lenders are quietly rewriting their collateral rules, which suggests a crisis waiting to happen. People have been nervous about private credit booming. Aries has minted seven new billionaires, something like that. There's been a ton of boom in private credit, ton of boom in debt. Debt is coming. The question is, when will there be a pullback? How much more room does it have to run? There's a reply here from a guy named Jason who says, that's nice, but I'd prefer not to lose any money, so please make sure the government is prepared to cover all potential losses, if not for everyone, then for me and my cohort specifically.

1:10:34warm regards me and my cohort what does that mean oh me and everybody's got a cohort what cohort do you identify with that's hilarious oh this this post from what is it hilarious i don't even know what he was replying i don't know what he was replying to but this was spaceman live on tbpn his eyes rolling back in his head yeah that was a very weird screen grab. I don't know how this screen grab happened, but it was absolutely wild. What did Boz say? So Boz posted a blog post about you are how you act. He says, the modern American self is best defined by two enlightenment thinkers who never met, but have been arguing in our heads ever since.

1:11:23Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed in the primacy of the inner self, a core of goodness, constantly betrayed by circumstance. In his view, the world corrupts us. We begin pure and only fail because society obligation or expectation pulls us away from who we truly are. Benjamin Franklin saw it differently. For him, there was no such thing as a good person or a bad person, only people who do good things and people who do bad things. Virtue was a habit, not an essence. Modern America carries both of these ideas, switching between them whenever convenient. We invoke Rousseau when we need forgiveness. I meant well.

1:12:00We invoke Franklin when we need accountability. Show me what you've done. It's an almost entirely incompatible pair of philosophies that coexist perfectly in practice because they're both so flattering. One to our intentions, the other to our ambition, but only one of them scales. Faking until you make it is often dismissed as shallow, but it's closer to Franklin's truth. Faking it long enough is making it. The repetition of behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is what shapes character. You become the kind of person who does the things you repeatedly do. I agree with that. Rousseau invites endless introspection.

1:12:40Franklin invites progress. The first is about how you feel. The second is about what you build. I find the Franklin model far more useful. Not because it's truer in some cosmic sense, but because it gives you agency. You can't always change how you feel, but you can always decide what to do next. It doesn't take great men to do things, but it is doing things that make men great. Arnold Glasgow. And, you know, some people had some jokes. They're poking fun at Boz saying tech bros are re-deriving SART from first principles. I haven't read SART, so I don't know. But I like reflective posts like that.

1:13:25I think that's a good post. I think that's an interesting little tour of a couple philosophers you might have heard of, but kind of distilling and then recontextualizing these two thinkers. This is a sweet spot. I've been enjoying writing these 500-word essays. Just kind of like one little thought packaged up in a couple paragraphs. I'm glad Boz is doing it too. In other news, Bending Spoons, European software conglomerate has acquired America Online, AOL, and raised$2.8 billion of debt to get it done. They say, big news, we're acquiring AOL, the iconic web portal and email provider from Yahoo, who's subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals.

1:14:16Is this gong worthy? It's painful that America Online will be owned by a European software conglomerate. But let's hit the gong for raising$2.8 billion in debt to buy a legacy digital asset. We've got to have somebody on from Bending Spoons, because I don't feel like I have a good understanding of this company at all. They acquired Evernote. They acquired WeTransfer. It's such a funny name for a company. They acquired Vimeo. So they are kind of all over the place. Matrix inspired? In the Matrix probably? Yeah, interestingly enough, I wonder what just like AOL's email business is worth. Like, do people pay for that at all?

1:15:12Or is the entire business ad space? AOL? I think there's still people paying. I wouldn't be surprised if there's still people cracking open a CD and being like, I got to get my internet this month. Do either of you remember what I'm talking about? Are you familiar with this? No. There was a time when you got the internet from a physical disc, basically. which just sounds ridiculous, but basically it was like, how does that, what are you talking about, John? The whole internet is on. No, no, no, no, no. So basically I think the way it works is basically you'd open up a magazine and there would be a CD and it would be like AOL.

1:15:49And the disc would claim some sort of like number of minutes. Ben, do you remember this? No, no one remembers this. I'm so old. And it would be like 7 ,000 minutes of internet access. And basically what you do is you would put the disk in, and then you would install a piece of software that would allow you to access the internet. The crazy emoji guy. No, and then so on the disk was the software that would give you a web browser, basically. Because how do you get a web browser if you don't have the internet? You need to install that first. So you would install the AOL software package. But did you buy a new disk every month?

1:16:29No, no. So they would give out free trials basically. And then you would be able to connect to the internet and you would be limited based on the number of minutes that you spent online. Each CD would give you a couple thousand minutes for free, something along those lines. Anyway, we have our first in-person guest of the show. We have Brian Johnson. Welcome to the stream. he'll go over there while he hops on let me tell you about Google AI Studio the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini chat with models, vibe code and monitor usage thank you classic LA story people in LA arrive on time 15 minutes after you normally arrive at least I do normally hopefully you didn't have too much traffic it's great to have you here big week for you It's been a great week for us.

1:17:23Yeah, congratulations. 60 million, but break down exactly what happened. What was the impetus for the deal? Take us through the recent history blueprint. I mean, I started this, this is the idea that we are the first generation who won't die. It's kind of a crazy idea. We started this a couple of years ago and I think a lot of people thought this was kind of an insane thought process. And so we've been hammered away and I think it's gone from weird to interesting to yesterday was kind of like, now it's accepted and maybe even cool. Yeah, yeah. And so I think it's a thing now. It's a part of the zeitgeist.

1:17:55And I think it formalizes that we're really going to take a shot at this. Yeah. So, I mean, there's like the philosophical underpinning where you're, I imagine, in the vein of Kurzweil, like looking at long-term trends, artificial intelligence, compounding, just the value of compounding little gains all over the health system, potentially could, at least in your belief, get us to infinite life and not die, don't die. So you get to that, but then you, you know, at some point you need to instantiate that in a company, in a business, in a suite of products. And so that's what Blueprint is today. Is that the idea of the fundraise?

1:18:34Is that what people are investing in? Yeah, the idea is when somebody says, yes, I want to be healthy, it's pretty hard. You have to go out and you have to navigate a thousand things. You know, like, is this good for me or is it bad for me? The people who have conflicting opinions. And so our target customer is somebody who says, I want to be healthy. And we just say, we've got you. We will give you like the protein amounts. We'll give you tested and certified foods. We'll give you the exact dose. We'll help you with your prescriptions. We'll give you protocols, like your autonomous self. Like it's not go navigate the world by yourself.

1:19:05It's we've got you. And we'll do an evidence-based biomarker approach. One of the, I feel like anybody that really gets into health goes through a period where they realize, I at least at one point, I was like 19 at the time, realized that it felt like I was spending like 50 % of all my cognitive power on just like trying to be as healthy as possible. And at a certain point, I realized like this is such an inefficient use of time. Fortunately, you build up some habits and kind of like understanding of what's good and what's bad and what you want to leverage more and kind of avoid and all that stuff.

1:19:40But I think like make, you know, removing that step from the process of being able to just kind of like default into a system. Walk, can you get into a little bit more of like, I remember reading a post at this point from you, maybe it was like a couple months ago, kind of like talking through the decision-making around, you know, where you wanted to take Blueprint, why kind of raise capital, all that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, it was this, I mean, I guess my sole objective is try to be sober in this moment. And I really enjoyed the perspective of thinking a few hundred years into the future.

1:20:17you look back at this moment and we are giving birth to some kind of super intelligence. We don't know what it is. We don't know what kind of scale, but it's big. It's important. I have neither opinion that it's positive or negative. It's just significant. And I was really trying to think through, does it even matter if I build anything in the world right now? Or should I work on building the philosophy and the moral framework on like, what does it mean to be intelligent on planet earth in this part of the galaxy? And I was kind of in the middle of like, as an entrepreneur, Or do you build? Or like, which way do you build?

1:20:48And so I was just reflecting that, am I misallocating my time? And I thought, you know, really blueprint is the practical implementation of this philosophy. Like when you say yes to don't die, you're saying I value existence. I respect existence. And so it's less about living forever. It's more about a philosophy of yes, this moment is big. And so what a lot of people don't realize is this endeavor is entirely about AI alignment. I mean, that's the sole thing happening on the planet right now. And so when you take care of yourself, you take care of your body. When you take care of the body, you take care of intelligence.

1:21:21It's this holistic system of we acknowledge existence. So that was it. It was like I was trying to figure out, as a human, what do I do on planet Earth right now and how do I spend my time? I'm an entrepreneur. My intuitions are to become an entrepreneur, but I wondered, is that really the right way to do it? Yeah. Yeah, what does Blueprint look like in a decade? It feels like it's such a unique consumer packaged goods business because you can't even call it that. It's like, I understand that there's like the philosophy and I love that as the brand. But even just in terms of like the business of like what people pay for, there's a lot.

1:21:54And that's just such a contrarian approach to this category because so many people are like, I have an idea. I'm going to make coffee better. Yes. I'm going to make a greens powder better. or I have an opinion about the burger or the meat or the food or one particular thing. And then they grow and grow and grow. And then five years in, they're like, let's do a line extension. Let's do something different. Yeah, the CPG trend of the last 10 years was go walk into the gas station, find a product that's popular and make a version of it that's like 50 % healthier. And then you probably have like a nine-figure revenue business.

1:22:28Or make nothing like Thrive Market, Erewhon. There's a bunch of companies that have been like, we'll just be the seller of everything. How did you land on, I want to make everything that feels like an immense challenge? I want to walk through all that. That's what Karpathy was talking about, the autonomous systems with DoorCash. He and I think very similarly in this way. If you model out what AI systems will do, they'll probably take on more autonomous responsibility in our lives. We see beginnings where you plug an address into a car and it helps you navigate to the place. You don't think about it much.

1:23:01We're going to build our autonomous self. Our health will be run on our behalf. So right now we have to chase down all our food. We have to chase down protocols. We have to chase down evidence. But it's not going to be that in the future. It will just be run for us. And as we get measurement, that's more high fidelity. So blueprint is basically we're saying we are going to build your autonomous system of health. And we're going to ride the breakthroughs of science. So that as we make better progress in lowering the speed of aging and reversing aging damage, you can just say I'm in and I'm going to ride with you.

1:23:31We're going to try to be on the very, very forefront to help people have the best possible health. So we're just building out autonomous health systems. Yeah, that feels like super valuable just from the consumer experience of like, I'm delegating all of that hassle. I know basically if I buy one from one brand, it's all aligned with one philosophy, which is great. What does that mean on the logistics side? What does that mean on the CapEx side? What does that mean on the operational cost side? Do you have like 25 different product managers for each niche? Like what's the shape of the company?

1:24:06This feels like a big challenge. A very big challenge. We're standing up like 10 different businesses at the same time. Exactly. Exactly. Like there's plenty of people that could have done what you did where they like become famous or they become content creators in one way or another. And then they're like, now I have one product. And you're like, now I have, how many products do you actually have? Over 20. Over 20. Yeah. And it's clear that like you, probably a lot of that comes from the fact that you've been a successful entrepreneur before, you're like, yeah, I can probably do more than just one.

1:24:34But what actually does the business look like? Does the system look like? Are there cross-selling benefits in retail on day one? Or is this just an e-commerce play on day one? How do you think about the costs and benefits of going multi-product so soon? Yeah. I mean, the thing is that when people want to be healthy, you can't just address one thing. They're still left with 99 things to deal with. I totally get the consumer value. It makes a ton of sense. So internally, we're basically building out the infrastructure to deliver every single channel. So digital food prescriptions, testing. So we could say like so much stuff.

1:25:09It is. You know, like this is what I've done this myself. I know. You know, like five years we've mastered the system for me and you know, I've been fighting to achieve the best biomarkers in the world. Okay. Kind of in some sense, a, like a ridiculous idea, but also like it's a new sport. Like you can imagine it becoming a thing. So yeah, I mean, basically we've mastered it. We've built it now. We're just productizing. so yeah people do. So what are the edges of the... How do you think about... So every consumer out there has probably at some point or another gone through the frustration of finding a product they love and then watching the company behind it or sometimes an acquirer just like steadily just like try to maintain or increase their margins to the point where it's no longer that it might have similar looking packaging but it's no longer the same product.

1:25:56Like I imagine like you want blueprint to be the thing that you are reliant on for the majority of your calories, the majority of the supplements you take, the majority of the drugs that you are going to, uh, leverage. And so, uh, I can imagine like, you know, holding the company to that standard so that you're not having to go anywhere else or realize like, Oh, this product would actually be better for me. But like, do you have any kind of like ethos around that? Because that just feels like every, you know, I try to be cognizant of like when a company goes from founder led to they've exited and the new acquirer is just going to say like, hey, you know, we could actually source this salt from over here and we're going to save like 80%.

1:26:40And nobody's really going to notice because it's going to taste similar. But then the tests are showing up and it's actually like got led in it now or whatever. Yeah, exactly right. I mean, I'm Blueprint's number one customer. I appreciate it so much. When we first started doing this project, I was testing everything I would put into my body. Air, water, food, everything. And I learned, first of all, food is guilty until proven innocent. It is so toxic, no matter where you get it. Yeah, people were freaking out last week when there was that protein powder report came out that a bunch of them had lead in it.

1:27:12And I was like, my immediate reaction was like, obviously, a lot of this stuff has lead in it. I mean, look at the average chocolate bar has a ton of lead in it. So you can isolate that one toxin, but there's so many other toxins. So people, they grab onto one concept that they understand. It's like, oh, that's bad. There's trace levels of heavy metals in all of our foods. So the fact that it's there is not unalarming. It's out of context, but it's at a level people understand. But the goal is I'm going to, Blueprint is my way to try to achieve this don't die. And so people will be just riding along.

1:27:47We build on population-level data, so this is not about Brian Johnson's body. This is about everybody's body, so all ages, both genders. But no, I think we're being meticulous about what we do, and so the quality will be the best in the world, and so I care about it. I'm consuming all about myself. What's the plans on the kind of telemedicine front for kind of interventions or therapies that require doctors' kind of involvement? Is there anything on that front? We will build an infrastructure to basically, when you want a prescription, if you want to go on a GLP-1, we can help you get started, whether you want a large dose or a micro dose.

1:28:24This is funny. You're just like, yeah, and also do the lab testing. And also, like, build the, you know, I'll be mining the metal that gets turned into the needle that injects you with the GLP-1. Yes, there we go. It's like, you want to hold up the entire global economy. I love it. It's good ambition. I strongly support this. yeah I was interested in like where are the edges of like what you really yeah actually I'm not going to go into that market but it feels like you'll just continue to work on it until you get to some status where you're like yeah actually it's it'll be full circle would you would you go into hospitality would you create like physical kind of if you want to get 100 % of everyone's calories these European kind of health retreats that are very like evidence driven, they're testing focused.

1:29:12I could imagine a blueprint retreat center that people can visit once a year. We have about a dozen groups around the world that want to stand this up. Some of the biggest hotel chains around the world. The thing is, they just want credibility. They want to say, come here, we have this thing structured. When I meet with some of the most powerful people in the world, they're just as clueless as everyone else. People imagine reaching powerful people just have it solved. That is not the case. We are going to stand this up. We probably will not do physical clinics. It's just too much on the real estate.

1:29:42So we'll probably license it out. Sure. We'll probably do the digital model. If we have IP - CrossFit model almost? We have trust. We could do a model across food and clinics where we have this evidence-based approach. So yeah, I mean, we're kind of in it to just blanket the entire industry with a framework on how to do things in a credible way that's biomarker-led, evidence-based. Yeah. What was the thesis behind the round? $60 million, tons of faces, not the traditional CPG, VCs, private equity folks. What was the thesis? Yeah. I mean, so I've been funding the company myself up until this point.

1:30:20And I guess I just wanted my friends to come along with me. Sure. So these are people I talk to in private. They enjoy it. They're into it. And I think a lot of people, they have not known how to think about me. Like, am I legit? Am I not? Is this a thing? Is this weird? And then they see that list of investors and are like, oh, shit. And so like yesterday, I think it was the first day, it was like, oh, it's safe to say this is cool. That's interesting. I feel like that flipped like a long time ago. Really? Yeah. I feel like the first business – what was the first piece that you did that was like, I spent$2 million on my health and that went super viral?

1:30:56Yeah, two or three years ago. That was like two or three years ago. I feel like that was the moment where people were kind of confused. My personal view was... But pretty quickly, people dug into your backstory and were like, oh, yeah, you sold a million company. Yeah, my personal view is America has, over the last few years, had so little trust in health institutions. Like, if you just went and followed the American Heart Association's guidance, I'd probably die at like 60. I know. And so to me, I was always like, you know, knowing how much I, you can read about health and you can listen to podcasts and you can listen to what some influencer said in a short form video.

1:31:33But to deeply understand your health, you have to do self-experimentation because everybody is different. And so I always looked at it, you know, you always tried to be controversial enough to like generate attention, attract some people that were going to become super fans and lose some people. and you were kind of okay with that. But my sense was always like, thank you that somebody is going to invest more money than basically anyone else and just self-experimentation and then open source all of that. And now people can buy your olive oil if they want or they can decide, no, I'm actually going to go on my own journey and try to find some product that can fit this requirement.

1:32:11But it felt like such a public benefit that I always wish there was like a thousand Brian Johnsons that we're just all running the same experimentation, open sourcing process versus the biggest thing. We talked about this the other day is health influencers quickly get into, put themselves in a niche and they're like, I'm the, I'm the, the fasting guy. I'm the HRV guy. And then every single thing becomes about that. Yeah. And it's cool. Cause you can like tap into a world and like kind of accelerate and understand a lot about a category. But then in reality, it's not like fasting is the only thing that matters.

1:32:48It's just like one tool. I have another take on that that maybe I'd like your reaction to. There's also this trend in health influence where if I want to blow everyone's brain, I'm going to come in and blow everyone's mind. I'll be like, guess what? I boil it all down. It's sleep, diet, and exercise. That's like 99 % of what you need to do. And everyone's like, man, this John guy, he's not talking about the crazy supplements. He's just telling it like it is. Sleep, diet, exercise. I did it. I feel great. This is amazing. And then after I've made, you know, one hour of content every week for five years on sleep diet exercise, I'm like, you know what, let's actually talk about like the 17th piece of magnesium you should take or like that, the thing that's, yeah, it is beneficial, but it's 0.001%.

1:33:34And, and it's still interesting, but it's not going to have the power law effect of like actually start working out or like actually get sleep. And so do you wrestle with that? Do Do you feel like you have to go back to the basics sometimes? Or do you think that there's actually maybe that's not even a reasonable critique? Yeah, I think that the thing that most people struggle with is doing things they don't want to do. Like they don't want to overeat. They don't want to eat a pint of ice cream. Like they don't want to drink, you know. So those things are really the highest leverage interventions.

1:34:09It's behavioral. And so, yes, you can say sleep that exercise, but you get deep, and you then uncover that our American society is one of addiction. Like the American powers of capitalism have been pointed at getting people to be addicted on food, sugar, nicotine, porn, junk food, all of it. And so, if you look at it, so just from a broad perspective, you begin on Western thought with Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Middle Evil times, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modern scientific era. like you look at these big frames, we're due for a major shift. And right now we're at the tail end. This is like kind of a Dalio kind of thought process of like these big macro trends.

1:34:50We're at the end. And right now, you know, capitalism was for solving scarcity. We're now compulsive. We're now compulsive. And the idea was democracy was freedom of choice. We now have no longer choice because we're addicted. So we're really playing on this very big macro frame of we're at different times of species. And so, yes, sleep-out exercise, but in this larger frame, it's about what does it mean to actually be intelligent, make decisions. And you can't when you're addicted to everything. Yeah. What do you think about some of the longer-tail interventions, like the third peptide that's not approved yet, but people are already taking it here?

1:35:26It feels like, is this sort of like pseudo-regulated, unregulated biohacking becoming more prevalent? And is that the correct world in a world where the FDA is broken? Or does the FDA need to change? Or how should we map the accelerating advances in science with maybe stagnation and regulatory? What's your framework for that? I mean, peptides are very powerful. They're basically drugs. So you get access to drug-like effect sizes. The problem is peptides are oftentimes not manufactured to spec. And so you have risks like putting stuff in your body that you shouldn't be putting in your body. they could have lead in them just like your chocolate bar same with stem cells there's a real quality problem the other problem is peptides a lot of peptides are not fully characterized so typically drugs you say you can do this thing but also here's a long list of side effects and that's nice because at least I know what the trade-off space is with these peptides you don't have the characterization and so it's a bigger risk people experiment you see a lot of this in bodybuilding now you have biohackers doing it so it's fine and it's just you have to understand it's the wild wild west sure that may be your game it may not but like it's definitely you want to be cautious sure it's not like a safe path but then there's other things like you start with the highest level of evidence you know sauna is great yeah but you know like if you i've talked about this a lot if you don't ice the boys in the sauna sure you crush can you make a ice pack so i used to i used to think we maybe talked about this last time i used there used to be this ice pack on amazon that was for this use case and it's gone and they stopped selling it and now I don't I like I lost my so we should they don't want you icing your boys out there and then a lot of men will say like I'm not trying to have you know babies so it doesn't matter but it has negative feedback hormone hormone health exactly yeah interesting so yeah there's so yes sleep that exercise is great but then you dive into the details this is what I'm saying like you you start down this path and you inevitably will spend 50 % of your time chasing down everything some sort of weird root cause on all these things whatever it is it's never easy so you have infinite chase and that's what i'm saying is that's the problem trying to solve is nobody has 50 of their time to do this so uh how are how are you thinking about wearables because there's a world in the future where you have a camera that's effectively a sensor that's able to experience life in your in your view and that as like a health co-pilot would be pretty wild because you'd be like hey hey you you've already eaten like you know well beyond you assume that like cameras get better at like calorie tracking it's like hey you're well over like uh your daily caloric needs, like you're now going into a surplus, maybe ease off, and maybe that's enough.

1:38:01The meta Ray-Ban displays need a killer app. That sounds like something you should build. What do you think? If you think about it, GLP-1s are kind of that. I mean, a little bit, right? It's like modulating your hunger, your satiety, and it's like... How do you think we'll view GLP-1s and the explosion of their use in 50 years? It's probably the most successful anti-aging drug ever built. It's incredible. the benefits keep on accumulating yes there's drawbacks they're getting better all the time do you feel the same way about statins? they're complicated statins do have benefits but they're complicated do you feel like there's any value to reading into the conspiracy like weird vibes around the fact that like Ozempic came from a demon like this Gila monster is it the Gila monster?

1:38:53or Komodo dragon venom or something like that. Like, it just feels, like, wrong, right? If you're just, like, you know, just humanity 101, you'd be like, yeah, don't drink the demon. Don't become the reptile. Don't drink the reptile venom. I mean, you're, you're, he, Brian might be trying to become the reptile a little bit. Are you into it? The Cenorian Toad gave us 5-MeO DMT. And I would say that that's bad, too. That's throwing off all sorts of red flags for me. It just got FDA approval. It did. It did. For what? Break the status for depression, resistant depression. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Treatment-resistant depression.

1:39:25Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, got it. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I guess if you're sad, you need the toad to cheer you up, I suppose. Thank you. Thank you, Kyle. I'm happy if it's helping people. I'm happy. It is just funny. We were looking at the story of Ozempic like a year ago. What's your view on, I think everybody's hoping, maybe GLP-1s are this and people haven't sort of fully realized it yet, but everybody is kind of, I feel like for a while, just hoping that like, oh, by the time that I'm really aging, like I'm really feeling it, there will just be a pill that I can take and, you know, I'll just be able to halt or maybe even reverse.

1:40:05are you like how open to to you how open are you to the idea that like there could be something that is like an order of magnitude more effective than glp1s in terms of anti-aging like are you you know where where do you put the probability there i mean that study that came out in from china in june they showed that they took this form of a foxo3 protein they use crispr we they put it in a mesenchymal stem cell and delivered it via intravenous treatment it had a biological equivalent for human. So this was in monkeys. It had a three to five year age reversal in over 50 % of the tissues, which is unseen.

1:40:43And for a human equivalent, that'd be like nine to 15 years, roughly. So these demonstrations are being done. I think we'll probably, I was going to actually figure this out. You know, the hype cycle where you - Yeah, Gertner hype cycle. Exactly. Yeah. Trough of disillusionment, plateau of productivity. I was going to model this out this week. Yes. I was trying to figure out like, because I think we're probably going to hit peak in something like... GLP-1s or something? 2032-ish. Okay. Okay, we got some time. We're still going on. A few things will hit when people will be like, it's here. Oh, and people will think that they're going to live forever.

1:41:15And then there will be a crash and be like, oh, actually, there's still more problems to solve. Exactly. Then 2035, 2037, people will be like, oh, man, it's not solving this or that. Or we have these complications. And maybe early 2040s, people are like, actually, we got this. Something like that. I saw some posts a long time ago. crazy inbound from mad scientists all over the world. They're like, hey, I made this thing. I was talking with ChatGPT for 50 hours over the last week, and I figured out, like, let me come inject you. When I was building kernel with this brain interface, I would get all these emails that people are like, I've been implanted by the government.

1:41:49Oh, wow. So that would come in. But now, yes, like, I do. I get, I don't know, maybe like 7 to 10 a day. Whoa, that's a lot. People offering you experimental. You know, like, I've discovered the quantum realm and how the how yes it's wild people are excited about this topic maybe some toads involved in that that's funny yeah i remember seeing this post a while back i don't know if you remember it better than i do but it was basically looking at like the the distribution of lifespans is not there's not just a single power law where everyone falls off at like 90 like you would expect if it was just a normal power law that we would get a couple hundred and fifty and like one 200 year old person but in fact they're like this double exponential effect yeah and so maybe that's kind of what happens where you maybe we solve one of them but then we still are at this like you know exponential fall off in in longevity but even unlocking like one person at 200 would be amazing yeah there was this interesting paper that came out of levin uh okay so he said um his theory after running this model was that basically after we reproduce, our cells lose purpose.

1:42:58Like we, our cells don't have a unifying objective. So they just like aging, just like, we just don't know what to do. Interesting. So if his model is correct, like biology needs don't die. Like they actually need an objective at a macro scale, like at our level of cognition, but also at a cellular level. But I think like these are the kinds of experiments people are being, are doing of like, what, what is the underlying incentive structure of biology. Why do we age? Why do we not age in certain parts of our life? Why do we have protective mechanisms? Why do some species regenerate? So I think it's this really exciting frontier where our ideas now of aging are beginning to crack open a little bit and expanding our horizons.

1:43:35Like, how do we think about time? I mean, we talked about this last time you were on about Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, not particularly famous for their biohacking, but incredibly resilient, like a life well lived. So many stories about them, like, you know, staying up drinking Coca-Cola and wine long into the night. And I want to believe that there's some level of just, if you have a purpose, if you have drive, your body just pulls it together a little bit more. I know people want this to be like the answer. Yes, but you're saying just luck. I think it's really such a bad idea because people in their mind, they make that shortcut and they're like, you know what?

1:44:14I've got to work harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did we cure balding? There was that study last week. They're all such weak effects. Okay. So we really have not made. I guess it's a long turkey. It's a little bit embarrassing as a human race that we haven't been able to make really good strides on hair loss. That one seems very simple. I don't know. It just seems like very mechanical. You know, it doesn't seem as complicated as like, you know, your brain degenerating. We don't even know how the brain works. It's like, it's hair. It just grows. It should be easy. We're working on it. We just put out our best attempt.

1:44:48We're going to see if it works. We're going to try to beat everything that's out there on market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll see. How important is these like cosmetic intervention to the blueprint plan? Yeah. Because you could imagine a world where people will say, yeah, make me live forever, but I don't care about wrinkles and hair because unless it's going to help me actually live longer, why bother? I mean, the thing is, don't die is really be hot. Like what? Every supplement company, every company in health, you're ultimately selling at the end of the day. I think it's brilliant from a business perspective.

1:45:26But does it make sense in terms of the science? Like does it take something out of the science? Yeah, no, like being hot is good science. You know, like if you look youthful and vibrant, your skin is nice and you have a lot of energy. So I think BeHot is legit the path for this. BeHot, don't die. Have a success. How do you think about longevity in the business? If you look at the D2C bubble, there was a lot of companies that raised a similar amount of money and are no longer with us. I imagine you care a lot about just making sure that Don't Die and Blueprint survive decades. and I'm sure that's informing the way you're building the company.

1:46:05I mean, this is like the internet comes about, Google sets up shop and rides that tailwind. Amazon sets up shop on commerce, right? Basically, somebody's going to set up shop in longevity and ride a multi-trillion dollar ride. Sure. So that's what we're trying to do, is we're trying to just be home base, win the early innings of longevity, and then ride for the multi-trillion dollar market. Yeah, do you think there's a lot of, like, I imagine M &A will be pretty important to your strategy with a lot of companies. I mean, I just view there's a lot of companies that are important, that are like single product or for specific use cases that don't really necessarily need or shouldn't be.

1:46:41Because if you're a Blueprint customer, maybe you need it once every three years. But that means it could be harder to actually build a business around, but it would slot in. You nailed it. So basically, if you look at the landscape and health right now, nothing is proprietary. You've got wearables from all these different providers. You have food from providers. You have biomarkers. Nothing is proprietary. And so the winner's going to have to out-compete everybody in bringing an experience to the customer that is sensible and practical. So I think that's where the competition's going to be because this is like the days when I was building a Braintree Venmo.

1:47:15It was commoditized. You're all in the Visa, MasterCard, MX, Discover, Stack, and you have to build something unique, and then Braintree and Stripe just collapse the market. Yeah. How do you think about... now I want to hear the story of the Venmo acquisition. How did that happen? So they built up a people in payments it was very clear PayPal was the only company making money because they had both sides of the market. They got lucky because they got into eBay, they built the consumer side but then they had the merchant side too. Because otherwise if you just offer it to merchants, your margins are pretty low.

1:47:51You're making whatever 20, 50 basis points like that. And so everybody was going after PayPal trying to build a two-sided marketplace. And that took a lot of capital. It's very hard to build from scratch. And so I said, okay, I'm going to build the merchant side of the business first, and then I'm going to acquire the consumer side. I said this when I started the company. So we got customers like Airbnb, Uber, GitHub. We got all the Gen Z people. And then Venmo had done a fantastic job building out consumer side. And we could then marry those two demographics. And it's like, perfect. And so, yeah, so they had built a great business, but they hadn't solved making money.

1:48:26when they plugged into our world. We bought them for$26.2 million. How much of that was not making money because of fraud? I hear that a lot of fintech companies, they actually have something where the unit economics should work, but it's always crazy in the early days. You hear the story about PayPal where PayPal was losing tons of money, but it was only because of fraud. The actual business, when it wasn't fraudulent, made sense. But then once you get to scale, you can do the anti-fraud properly. Was that something you were problem-solving around? It's very hard, because you're doing peer-to-peer, and typically you have illicit purposes primarily as your driver.

1:49:01And so it's a very hard problem. So as a standalone, it's hard for them to make sense, because if you stack on a fee when you're paying your buddy, it's hard friction in the adoption. So you have to kind of speedrun adoption and then make money later. But there was no good make money later problem. It becomes a big cash sink. I was running, I think it was a shower thought. I was like, okay, there's so much capital sloshing around the private markets. It's been interesting that we haven't seen more people try to take on Stripe. I don't know if it's... I'd be curious from your point of view, at what point will people even try to climb that mountain?

1:49:41It's very unlikely. They've done such a great job executing. I sold Braintree in 2013. So they've been building 12 years since. They've done such a good job making that airtight. They're just great. This is the thing. Yeah, you can't come in and make a 10x better product. Amazon lost commerce. So you, of course, can build your commerce business on Shopify. But at a scale, I mean, Amazon has just kind of owned that entire thing. It's very hard to replicate that. So that's our goal, too, is we're basically trying to do that for longevity, is once you collapse the entire space, it's very hard to get in.

1:50:13Okay, we got a lightning round. Favorite book? Or just a book recommendation, something you read recently that you like? I just finished The History of the Western Mind going through all of Western thought oh cool favorite music what's in your you know I have such a soft spot for Eminem when I was depressed he was the only artist that I could fill okay love it when will humanity develop AGI

1:50:51eye. Such a hard, you don't want to sound like a de-cell. You don't want to be... Just call it right now. Well, I want to be able to clip this the day of and be like, Ryan, called it to the hour. I want to say that we'll be nice to you and we won't clip this, but I know our clipping infrastructure and we absolutely will clip this. It's such a sucker question, right? Well, maybe let's flip it around. OpenAI and Microsoft did this deal where the definition of AGI will be conveyed by a group of experts. What is your definition of AGI? I approach this question as a more through psychology of when will humans feel useless?

1:51:38Feel useless. Yes. Like our entire identity is based upon like we do things, we contribute, we build. Yes. And now AI is a tool, like we feel more productive with it. Yes. At what point will do everything so well, you feel this deep hole in your stomach of like, what do I do? So what if, yeah, the weird thing is like computers are incredible at chess, yet people play chess for fun and at the professional level because humans, I guess they're anti-clanker and they like watching humans play chess. And if we can solve that for everyone so that everyone has some sort of – like in this AGI world where there's no more real jobs, there's no more actual, okay, you need to produce something for food or livability.

1:52:22Everything is just for fun or for games and for status. And it's all about – wasn't Andre Karpathy saying you go to the gym and you'll learn in the future? And I wonder if your definition is once that breaks down, that feels really far in the future. But I like that. People look forward to retirement. Retirement is a goal. It's an ideal. It's like we're going to get an RV. We're going to cruise the country. Then they retire. They're like, this sucks. There's not the tension. Never retire. So if we imagine, we're going to learn, and we're going to do yoga all day and paint. But if there's not the tension of the stress of real life, do we really want to be on vacation all the time?

1:53:02Do we want to be at leisure? So that's my, like, what I think about is when that happens, that's a pretty unnerving situation because humans don't do well with that uncertainty. And then our systems have to respond. So, like, that's what I really think about all day. Everyone in the end is just going to be competing on biomarkers. It's going to be the final status game. This is the final game. It might be. That aligns with Carpathia's take. Last lightning round question, and then I want you to ring the gong. Favorite vacation spot, where would you go? Redwood Forest. Redwood Forest. I love Redwood.

1:53:35Staying in California? Yeah, I love Redwoods. Let's go. This is John. I love California. You don't need to go to Europe. I love America. You don't need to get all the radiation on the plane. Yeah. Just stay here. They're such beautiful, majestic creatures. And they live a long time. They live a long time. It's very on brand for you. I love it. Congratulations on the round. $60 million. Fantastic progress. I'd love for you to ring that gong. and I'd love for you to ring it at a decibel level that you feel is appropriate for hearing. Yeah, we don't want to do it. You know, actually, let me pull up my decibel meter.

1:54:08Do we have my phone? Let's make sure we get this. Yes, let's bring over. We don't want to be over 80 decibels. Okay, yes, because we do have IEMs, so it is a little bit of hearing protection, but I would love to know. You feel free to take as many swings as you need. but I'd love to know what an 80 decibel ring sounds like. So yeah, I recently, I measured my ears. I left there 64. So I have mild to moderate hearing loss, which substantially increases your risk of dementia. Oh, whoa. So yeah. Because you're going crazy because you don't perceive reality properly. Your brain's missing all these things.

1:54:43Wow, that's crazy. Our society is built for hearing loss, like concerts, social gatherings, restaurants. So yeah, I would suggest everyone get a hearing test. I just get hearing aids here we go hit that gong at a longevity approved level let's hear it what are we at how are we doing 90 so about that level if we go any higher we're going to need just a tad

1:55:43Just a tad. I don't pay to stand in crowds and lines. But I do, I specifically recall, or I believe I know the exact weekend that it started. Man, is it a pretty significant thing in your life? No, I zone it out. But if I take a, if I, like I've adapted to not hearing it. But if I, every, probably a few times a week, I'll be in a really quiet space and realize that I have constant ringing. Have you looked into hearing aids? No. Yeah. Maybe I should. Yeah. So I just got the Otacon Intense. Yeah. Okay. And that increases your, you're not wearing them right now. Not right now. Yeah. But you've been testing them out.

1:56:30Yeah, exactly. I actually, I'm so sad. I was running out the door and I forgot them. Yeah. I just finished my morning routine. So I'm so sad. But yeah, but they actually, I've only had them for a week. They have substantially improved my life. Wow. Yeah. Well, this conversation has substantially improved my life. Thank you so much for being on the show. This is fantastic. Congratulations. And we will talk to you soon. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. But first, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

1:57:01And we have Nathan Mintz from CX2 in the TBP and Ultronome. Nathan, how are you doing? Boom. Wonderful, wonderful. It's sunny and about 75 degrees outside here in East El Segundo. I love it. And pretty great. Yeah, it's been too long since we caught up. There's nothing like pulling open the weather app in California, and it's just 10 days straight of sunny and 75, and we're lucky to have that pretty much year-round. It almost makes the taxes tolerable. I like all the traditional press pronounce behind you. We need to send you some physical memorabilia. screenshots from your from your tvpn appearances since this is your second one um but give us the give us the update what's new in your world yeah so you know cx2 we've been turning and burning uh we've pretty much uh been racking up the frequent flyer miles going to multiple exercises this year i think we're about to go to number eight next week um and one of the things we realize as we go around and we talk to leaders and we talk to uh the war fighters and stuff is that there's kind of a nebulous understanding of the nature of the problem that we're facing.

1:58:11So we decided to get together with some of those knowledgeable warfighters we know along with our experts here and really write it down in booklet form as the Spectrum Imperative. And if you go to our website, cx2.com, there's a big banner where you can try and type in spectrumimperative.com. I'm not the best speller, so I would just go to our website and then go from there. But really what we're trying to do is come up with what is the core thesis of electromagnetic warfare in the 21st century because the electromagnetic spectrum is this cross-domain across the entire – all the other domains of warfare, land, sea, space, air, and cyber that connects all of them.

1:58:57And particularly as everything moves to more autonomous systems, we are seeing more increasing reliance upon the spectrum and it becomes a more contested domain of warfare, which because we had the luxury of working for 20 years during the global war on terror, Iraq, etc., where we had permissive access to this spectrum and air superiority, we never had to worry about it before. And now it's something that as we're seeing every day in Ukraine, when it's heavily contested, our ability to have air superiority, air dominance, or really to maneuver in other domains is severely impeded by it. Can you help me synthesize Palmer Luckey's latest soundbite around America as the world's arms dealer, as opposed to the America, the world police, this idea that American defense technology companies will be building products that America basically sells or deploys to other countries?

2:00:01What does that look like in Ukraine for you, in Taiwan, in the Middle East? How is that different than America, the world police, where you're designing a system that's ultimately used by American boots on the ground? So in traditional defense, I spent 14 years in traditional defense. I think I pulled my passport out of my drawer three times. And one time was for my honeymoon. right versus in the last five years that i've been involved with new defense i think i've been abroad six or seven times right so that kind of gives you an idea actually the last year i think i've been abroad four or five times of where we're going you know now it's much more common for us to go visit the warfighter up in the battlefield and understand their situation and try and figure out how we can adapt what we're building to go along with them and i think that's what what palmer's referring to is how do we you know work alongside our allies this is actually one of our uh One of our talking points within the Spectrum Imperative is that we need to be more integrated with our allies from a Spectrum standpoint.

2:01:05We have to be compatible with their radio systems, compatible with their sensor systems, compatible with their command and control systems. And that's a huge part of the Spectrum Imperative. So I think that's what Palmer is really referring to is how do we get them to work with us to buy what the gaps in their capabilities or build them indigenously. You know, there's a lot of talk about factories at the edge or, you know, forward-leaning supply chains to deal with contested logistics. That's kind of, I think, the direction where Palmer's going. What is the latest update on what's going on in Ukraine?

2:01:39It feels like it's fast becoming a forever war, unfortunately. At the same time, I've been hearing new updates on drones with fiber optic cables to avoid, you know, the problems of electronic and magnetic warfare, right? Like, what's the state of the conflict? And then what's actually on the cutting edge of what the various militaries are using? Yeah, so Ukraine, what's basically happened is the front lines have been relatively frozen. And it's because if you think about it, you need to have uncontested data links at the spectrum layer. You need uncontested navigation, et cetera, or else you're kind of swimming upstream.

2:02:28So effectively, they've created this no man's land of electronic concertina wire and minefields that really impedes any forward motion. And 98 % of the action is occurring with autonomous systems, whether that's drones or unmanned ground vehicles or unmanned surface vessels. The Ukrainians have actually been probably the most successful with the USVs in the Black Sea. They've pretty much pushed the Russians completely out of Sevastopol, completely out of Crimea. And now they have to go all the way to their ports on the eastern side of the Black Sea to actually keep their ships safe, right? So that's a case study where autonomous systems, or actually automated systems in this case because it's still human-driven, have been able to really make a difference in that conflict.

2:03:18Meanwhile, the whole concept of a forward line of advance or forward edge of the battle area is now completely obsolete in the sense that you can have drones pop up from many kilometers behind the lines and hit strategic targets, which is specifically what we saw with Operation Spiderweb. Now, you mentioned tethered drones. Those were very popular in the Kursk Offensive. Actually, the Russians were the first to introduce them, and the Ukrainians then followed suit. And the whole idea was that, well, if there's nothing to jam, then you can fight through all the jamming. The trouble is that the tethered drones in some cases within the Kurtz Offensive actually turned into about 30 % of the drones being used at a given time at its peak.

2:04:00But it's a brittle solution. If you go around a tree, you can snag it. If the lines can be cut quite easily, there's all sorts of limitations. And then not to mention over water, it's like running a fishing line. If it touches the water at all, it's going to weigh down the drone and take it down with it. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, so tethered drones have their time and place. It's a little unclear how applicable they will be in the Pacific, for example. But for things like persistent surveillance where you're putting a drone up in the air and you can actually run power up to it for surveillance, it may make a lot of sense.

2:04:42I hadn't even thought about that. That's super interesting. Yeah, but it's Maslow's hammer. Yeah, there is no silver bullet. There is no... What was the phrase you used? You said Maslow's hammer? Yeah, Maslow's hammer, that if I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Oh, sure. And so that's what tends to happen with any sort of new countermeasures. It's first involved, and then the enemy saturates and counters it. In fact, probably the biggest paradigm shift we've seen in the Ukraine war that will be very applicable in the Pacific is this idea that all of our systems are highly adaptable, that both us and the enemy are operating on a much faster fly-fix-fly loop and countermeasure loop than what we're used to seeing.

2:05:24We're used to seeing years for new systems to be introduced. We'll be looking at more like weeks or possibly even days in some cases, and augmented by commercial software practices like CICD and other things. Well, sorry we have to move on so quickly, but thank you for the update, and congratulations on all the progress. Definitely encourage everyone to go check out the Spectrum Imperative campaign from CX2 and we will talk to you soon. Yeah, great to catch up, Nathan. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

2:06:00Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Our next guest is James Proud from Substrate. Welcome to the show. James, how are you doing? Suited up. Love it. Thank you for having me, guys. It's an honor. You look fantastic. Please introduce yourself. Give us a little bit of the backstory and then tell us the general overview of the company, what you're building and where it's positioned in the supply chain of the semiconductor industry. Sure. I think quite simply what we're doing is a bet that America can do hard things again. and that if it's important enough, then we can go and do it.

2:06:42It's not a question of whether we can or not. And I think when it comes to advanced chips, I think we all know and we all believe this is certainly important enough. And so our bet is that the United States invented this technology. We can invent the next generation again. And starting with the core process of lithography is how you can actually go and make what we think a next generation foundry. Yep. Okay. So I think many viewers will be familiar with the general semiconductor stack. You have the design shops like NVIDIA. You have your TSMC, the Fab. You have ASML, the lithography machinery maker.

2:07:22You might have Trump or Zeiss or some other supplier deeper in the chain. And how do you see yourself fitting in? Are you vertically integrated? Do you want to come in at the ASML level, at the TSMC level? We've talked to other Teal Fellows, like the folks at Etched, where they're not setting up a fab, but they are designing a new chip, and they're going to work at TSMC to run that process. How do you see yourself fitting into the stack? Yeah, we're slightly insane. and we think that the United States can build and sustain a new pure play foundry business. And to do that, we need to be a little bit more vertically integrated than usual.

2:08:02Usually you have the tooling makers, you have the fabs that buy the tools. We see ours is more a sort of return to the beginning of the industry where everyone sort of did a little bit of everything. And so for us, we're going to start making our own tools specifically around the lithography piece. Yep, that makes a ton of sense. Uh, you've been on a, on a press blitz this week, uh, all, all over the map. What was, what was the last year like leading up until this point would have been, what have you been focused on? And then what is the next year look like specifically in terms of making progress against all these goals?

2:08:38Um, honestly, incredibly, incredibly hard. I, there's a, there's a, there's a video that I'm sure you guys have seen of when Elon was being interviewed about the model three ramp and he sort of looks at the floor and talks about how his head and heart physically hurt from how hard he had to work. And I know exactly what that feels like. And I'm sure a lot of our team do as well. But as I said, it goes back to like, is this important enough to actually make happen? And we believe that this certainly is. And we're very proud of the results that we have and wanted to show the world and sort of tell people what we believe and what we're doing.

2:09:18And then what is more tactically, this is the kind of company that the true potential will only be able to be achieved across decades, right? This is not the kind of company you start and expect to, you know, it's a massive journey. but how do you break it up with the team? What are you looking to accomplish more specifically in the next one to two years? Well, moving quickly, I think, is sort of one of the key important parts of this. I think that this 10 years from now is far less important for the United States two, three, four from now. And so our goal is in 2028 to actually have a facility constructed and be running wafers.

2:10:08And so one of the reasons why we're coming out publicly is it's going to be very hard to start building big particle accelerators, big clean rooms in secret. And so the goal is we start doing that very quickly and sprint to 28. Walk through some of the milestones to date. Do you have to come up with new ways to etch chips essentially because of IP? or do you need to do a bunch of licensing deals? Is a big piece of the equation for the last year been marshalling capital and then placing orders to buy equipment and build up a facility? There's so many different ways that the business could take shape if the general goal is like, let's build a fab in America.

2:10:57I can imagine a bunch of different ways to solve that, but how did you go about solving it? Yeah, so up to now, the company is really three years old. And the big thrust so far has been building lithography tools, demonstrating that they work, printing the smallest things that humans are able to go and print. And that's been the focus really up to now. And in terms of what kind of tool, the IP and the like, our focus has been how do you reduce cost and complexity? And so all of the design choices we've made have been driven by that. And really, like EUV and the tools that exist today, these are modern miracles.

2:11:36These things are incredible. The engineering, incredible. But the choices were made in really the 90s and took a while to scale up. Our approach has been on the lithography side, if you were building a next generation lithography tool today, would you make the same technical choices? We've believed no, and the answer is no. What's it been like on the recruiting side? Have you been visiting the Netherlands, visiting Taiwan? How are you thinking about building the team going forward? Yeah. As I sort of said at the start, this has been primarily, it sounds very simplistic, but a bet on the United States, a bet that we still have the best engineers, the best scientists, the best national labs.

2:12:22If you look at the history of semiconductors, this is all invented by the United States. transistors, CMOS, FinFET, EUV, like American companies usually maybe, it's basically been IBM and Intel that invented all of that stuff. And so like the bet is that we have the people, we have the talent. It's just, can we actually have a new direction? And so that's been the work that we've done. And so predominantly we've been recruiting from American companies, U.S. national labs. So all here. Yeah, that's why America can do things like the CHIPS Act and can restrict the way ASML equipment moves to China because America, because the IP was developed here in America.

2:13:10So even if it's changed hands, we still have some leverage. Fascinating. Take us through the fundraise. How did it come together? Who's involved? What's the story with the latest fundraise. It feels like a big, ambitious project that needs some very ambitious capital. But what happened? So I want to actually quickly go back to your previous point about export restrictions. A big belief that we've had is that we shouldn't bet that China won't do this. And a big part of what we're doing is that there's the United States and there's China. And those are really the two countries that can actually attempt something like this.

2:13:51And because of export restrictions, we know they're trying. And our belief is that if we're not trying to build what a next generation foundry looks like today, we might wind up five, 10 years down the line in a really difficult place. And so that's been a big sort of motivation because of the timelines. These things take a while to play out. On the funding, I know there's a 100 plus number that's that like that's more actually historical, but clearly we're not going to build a fab with that amount of money. The key thing, though, is that unlike, I think, sort of traditional semiconductor fabs, because we focused on vertically integrating tools, we can reduce that cost and complexity.

2:14:33So you don't need to spend 10 plus billion dollars to even get something up and running. We think we can actually get that done for a much, much lower cost. And then on the previous money that was announced, I think a huge shout out needs to go to our investors because there's really when I started this company, I said there's a 1 % chance of success and they still invested. And so for the Founders Fund, the general catalysts of the world and all of the others, these guys deserve a huge amount of credit. Like that's true venture capital. And we think hopefully with these results, we're showing that, yeah, these crazy bets can work.

2:15:16is there any world where you partner with strategic investors or someone else in the stack? Is there a natural bedfellow in the ecosystem that feels like there might be some synergy here long term? I mean, 100%. For the entire American economy, it's now basically built on top of AI, which is built on top of advanced semiconductors. And so we see this as a sort of a whole of nation effort. And so the more people we can partner with, we're very open to that. Very exciting. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on coming out of stealth. Massive weekend. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.

2:15:59We'll talk to you soon. And thank you. The production team thanks you for potentially the most perfect Zoom interview setup ever. It looks fantastic. So shout out to your team. I like the IEMs as well. That's a nice touch. Have a great rest of your day. Great stuff. Thank you, guys. Bye. See you. Up next, we've got Sean McGuire from Sequoia Capital coming. Oh, what's he wearing? What's he wearing on the hat? There he is. I got so excited about the hat. I forgot to do the ad read. NumeralHQ.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax on autopilot. Okay. Thank you.

2:16:34Now we've got Sean. Sorry. Sorry. I saw you on the preview screen with the hat. I got excited. I brought you in prematurely before I could do the ad read. Anyway, how are you? Great to see you. Great to see you. Big week in Sequoia Capital Land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually explain what happened. Some new funds raised, but how do you frame all of the actual progress and the actual announcement? Like what happened? What is up, boys? You guys have become celebrities since last time I was here. You got Satya Nadella. You got all these legends and then jokers like me. well you kicked it off you kicked it off anyway it's been amazing to watch and yeah i got the hat i'm repping for you thank you and i gotta say this last guy had the best zoom and audio setup ever and you know again i'm just on my well no this is your zone this is your zone when you when you know anytime there's controversy on the timeline you just flip open the laptop hit record 30 minute video single take one take and this is what people want they want something that just feels like, okay, I'm actually talking to the person in their office.

2:17:38I get the texture of what their life is actually like. I'm sure this is what tons of founders see when they pitch you. They open up and this is who's on the other end of the line, right? Something like that. It works to be somewhat relatable. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So look, we're dropping new funds. We're very lucky. Sequoia's been in business for over 50 years. This is the next vintage of our flagship. Overnight success.

2:18:07You know, Sequoia's backed a couple of small companies in the past. First investor in NVIDIA. NVIDIA. Series A of Apple. Series A of Google. Let's go. On and on and on. Next, Venture Fund Vintage dropping. Venture Fund 19. 19. Also Seed Fund 6. Wow. Seed is, you know, something that we used to combine inside our venture funds, but wanted to place a major emphasis on it really to show the distinction. And I would say, so anyways, fund size,$750 million and$200 million for seed. Something that I think is - Is there a growth fund as part of this? Is that a separate thing? Is that off cycle right now?

2:18:48Yeah. So the growth fund, it's a different cycle. Different cycle, okay. They announced their funds recently. Got it. Something that I'm honestly very proud of, I joined Sequoia six years ago. And I feel like this is the first fun cycle where we really have like a new team, a cracked generation of young people and that have now been working together for five plus years. And so just it really feels like we're firing all cylinders. We got Stephanie with, you know, skilled on stage with Jensen yesterday and Reflection. We got Constantine hitting his stride with Expo and a bunch of other companies.

2:19:27You know, we got everyone on the team has some amazing portfolio companies. You know, and then the growth team, you have so many great people, Pat, Andrew, you know. You're taking companies public every day now. Et cetera. And a whole new generation there, too. Any specific kind of like decision making or insight around like how you guys decided kind of the fund sizes specifically? was that, I'm sure, based on a lot of learnings over the last few years, and seems like a commitment to driving real venture returns and staying committed to that. But what more can you say there? Yeah, no, you nailed it.

2:20:09Something I think people kind of misunderstand about Sequoia, and look, I got to drop the flex, but Sequoia has this outsized history in terms of the scale of companies we've backed. If you look at the NASDAQ, about 30 % of the NASDAQ by market cap were early Sequoia companies. Pretty wild. But we actually don't invest in that many companies per year. We really try to keep it pretty focused and targeted where we can be active company builders. And there was a pressure the last few years. And I would say we got caught up a little during the COVID era, as everyone did. and our pace increased. But we've just gone back to basics and we're really just focused on ultra high quality, like finding just true outlier founders that have really big vision and kind of rolling up our sleeves to help them build these companies.

2:21:09And it's just, we're trying to not get too caught up in any of the trends. We're trying to be like ahead of trends and keep the fun sides just where we can actually have. we strive for minimum 10x net returns like that is that is our goal for every fund and that's where we want to be what about actual team structure team size uh is has there been any evolution in the thought process around how large the partnership is how large the support structure is the the back office the you know uh how all of that fits together is there anything that's structurally changing or do you see it as like kind of just a slight evolution of the same plan?

2:21:56Great question. So we have to be paranoid at Sequoia. Like that's our secret is being ultra paranoid and just trying to outwork everyone. Yeah. Didn't a Sequoia founder say that? I hope so. I think so. But we went through a pretty hardcore generational transition five, six years ago. Most of the team was not here eight years ago. You have people like Rulof and Alfred that have been here for a long time on the early team and kind of have helped and dug when he was active, helping to kind of bridge the generational divide. But I would say where we've innovated is kind of with new team and then otherwise really trying to just stay true to the roots of Sequoia, active company building, focus on both really trying to understand market structures and find out why our founders.

2:22:50I think that's something that's different about Sequoia. We're not like an or. It's not founder or market. It's an and. We want founder and market. In terms of everything else, I would actually say we've almost gone back to basics a little bit more. We have a wonderful operating team, and that's something that we built up over the last five or six years. But we've basically kept it pretty steady in terms of size. We feel good about where everything is, and now we just need to execute. Okay. Defend the venture capitalist. because I'm going to make the argument that the venture capitalist, not Sequoia in particular, but venture capital as an entire category is cooked, chopped, destroyed.

2:23:34It's over. The game's over. And here's my thesis. What was Roloff's quote the other day? It's not an asset class. He said venture capital is not an asset class, which I 100 % agree with. It was a great quote. He said it's a reward-free risk. It's a reward-free risk. That's a great quote. But specifically, I want you to address this kind of, Maybe it's a headwind. Maybe it's not. You tell me. There's this idea that you are a venture capitalist. You can see the future. You know that self-driving cars are coming and your options are Waymo and Tesla. You can't get venture exposure to that necessarily.

2:24:10You're excited about humanoid robotics. Well, Tesla's in that. You're excited about AI. Well, if you wanted to play, like Open AI took a billion dollars from Microsoft and all the VCs were getting in in small slices. No one was able to build a 30 % position in that company like they would have done in the previous era with a Facebook or with a Google. Yeah, John was texting me last night joking. He's like, it's absolutely criminal that Satya didn't get carry on the OpenAI investment. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know your thesis on quantum computing. It feels very early. I love that Series A and IonQ, which is a public quantum computing company.

2:24:50Let's go. Okay. So maybe that works. Maybe we need to go there. But it feels like there's also competition from big hyperscalers in that market as well. We need the Martin-Skreli-Sean McGuire debate on quantum. Oh, yeah. So we definitely need that. I'm actually closer to Martin in a lot of views. Yeah. So I think it would be more like the Martin-Sean conversation rather than… Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's table quantum in particular, and let's instead say, how does venture capital play in a world where frontier technologies take$10 billion and 20 years to mature? Self-driving cars, AI, etc.

2:25:29Look, I think Rulov nailed it when he said that venture capital is not an asset class. But we don't do it the way other people do. And granted, there's a couple funds I respect unbelievably deeply that have a lot in common with us. A couple. There are only two people I respect. There are two people I respect. There's a couple funds. But look, we're really deeply involved oftentimes in the formation of companies. I think in the last year, there's been at least five or six companies where we were involved in the putting together of companies before they were even incorporated. We were structuring the companies, bringing the founders together.

2:26:21My partner David Kahn played a big role in bringing Kela together, for example, which is an Israeli defense tech company. There was a very talented founder that a bunch of us knew, Alon Dror, who had a general idea, but he didn't have the right team for it. And I would say his initial idea was wrong. And we helped him with the idea. And then David brought in, had a vision of bringing this woman, Hamutal Meridor. And that combination is magic. And it's hard to explain how frequently we do that. And so it's like if you're a passive investor at the late stage, there's no alpha today in VC or very little.

2:27:01But that's just not the game we play. We're extremely active. I mean, my partner Jim gets incubated Palo Alto networks. You know, Rulof both invested in YouTube with three people and they worked in the Sequoia office in the beginning. And I mean, I can give you so many examples like this. And so we don't think of ourselves as just like an index on the basket. We're trying to like bend the arc on the asset class. And look, I'm going to give a shout out to Founders Fund. Like they do this incredibly well. They've been incubating companies. They bring a founder mentality. They're more passive. With my, yeah, my, my, uh, I mean, yeah, obviously like Sequoia and Founders Fund, incredible returns, like the model's clearly working.

2:27:43I guess maybe it doesn't matter that Sequoia and Founders Fund, like, I don't know all the funds. It just feels like there's a world where, uh, self-driving happens or some other big, huge, huge humanoid robots. It happens, but it happens in a way that the value isn't captured by venture capitalists. And that's what I'm wondering. I'm not worried about it. You're not worried about that? Okay. I'm not worried about it. I think there will be a lot of value captured in the public markets. One of the best trades you can make in AI, the last five years was obviously buying NVIDIA. The same was true with crypto though.

2:28:23You could just buy Bitcoin. Buying Bitcoin outperformed basically every crypto investment, but Coinbase was still an amazing investment. I think Bitcoin, at almost every point in time, slightly outperformed Coinbase. Maybe not. I've heard from investors that that's why they passed on Coinbase because they were like, I'll just buy Bitcoin. It's actually a big part of why Sequoia passed on Coinbase in the time. So look, I think we've seen this play out many times before, but I'll give you a counterpoint. The funny thing in there is that the reason why Bitcoin has done so well is probably because there were VCs that were like, yeah, I'll pay for the R &D at Coinbase to make it accessible.

2:29:01And then the price went up. And so everyone else, you and FF were free riding maybe. Yeah, we were. There's always been this dynamic though, like the famous telco build out in the late 90s where Global Crossing and all the, there were 17 fiber companies that went public and were very highly valued and investors lost all their money. But that fiber build out laid the pathway for, SaaS and consumer internet companies in the early 2000s. This dynamic is always happening. And I think as investors, we just have to try to stay counter cyclical, try to stay ahead of the bubbles, try to figure out what second order effects of the bubbles.

2:29:39Whenever you concentrate huge amounts of capital, there will be all this new infrastructure that you can take advantage of. And so we're just, you know, like defense tech is an area where we were not very active in before the war in Ukraine. And tragically, that war was a catalyst. And you have to identify, even though you have a catalyst, there's probably only a six to 12 month window where defense tech is non-obvious. And so we made three or four, I think, really good investments in that period, like Neros, like Stark, like Kella a little after that. And you just have to be ahead of the curve because now I think defense tech is becoming too obvious.

2:30:23Valuations are incredibly high, but that's our job at Sequoia is to be ahead of the curve on these things. There's just always going to be opportunities to make money if you're proactive. Venture capitalists buy minority positions in companies and you can be on the board and you can be adding value and helpful, but there's this, after you kind of deploy into a company, there can be kind of this grass is always greener thing where it's like you can meet like another five companies the next day and there's always like this influx of opportunity. You've been at Sequoia now for years and you have an opportunity to meet new companies every day or get on the phone with existing portfolio companies, some of which are maybe doing really well, some of which are maybe not.

2:31:09I was curious if Sequoia has any lessons throughout history of companies that you guys draw on, of companies that hit rough patches and people were maybe less excited about, but found a way to get to another inflection point. Because I feel like you have 50 years of history. A lot of being a great firm is just remembering what made you great and having these lessons that are like IP, effectively. Oh man, this is such an astute point. And look, I think this is one of the superpowers. I think Sequoia has a lot of superpowers. One is we just have this network. A lot of the founders we back were employees at prior Sequoia portfolio companies.

2:31:52So there's that flywheel. There's the institutional knowledge moat. There's the customer moat where we have, There's so many companies that, you know, someone that bought Wiz early and it made them look really good as a CISO or CIO, like they're more likely to buy like Eon, the next infrastructure company. So there's all these moats or advantages. But on this one, incredibly astute point, Alfred Lin tells a story of how DoorDash really struggled to raise like at least one or two rounds of funding. I'm sure you remember Uber was the hottest company in the world for a long time, and DoorDash was number three or so in the space.

2:32:41It was really hard for them to raise. I think it was a Series C. I may be off by maybe a Series B or D, but I think it was a Series C. Postmates was pretty hot as well. Postmates was hot. There were a bunch of legacy platforms like Grubhub and companies that had been around before too. It was a bloodbath. It was ultra-competitive. Instacart was also there. It hadn't yet become positive. They really struggled to raise the round. Airbnb, Sequoia was the first investor, or the seed round. Sorry, not first investor. They did YC, but we invested$600 ,000, like a$3 million valuation. And they went through some incredibly hard times, even during COVID.

2:33:19I mean, for them, I remember Alfred's updates. It was just unbelievably brutal period. It was easy to give up on them. And that may sound crazy given the scale they're at today. but also with Elon, SpaceX and Tesla were on the verge of death at multiple points. And when you have these experiences, it really is an institutional knowledge weapon. Yeah, because it's way less fun to jump on the phone with a port co that's totally struggling and they're going to say, like, Hey, we need a bridge or can you introduce me to some, some more investors? And it's like, well, it's not fun to introduce a company that's struggling to other investors because they're, it's way more fun to introduce a company that's ripping.

2:34:11Cause you're like, you know, throwing a bone to them. Um, I was curious to get a sense of like your activity in, in H1 of this year versus now, have you picked up the pace? Have you slowed down at all? what's it been looking like. I'm embarrassed. I saw the data recently, like a few weeks ago, but I have so much going on, including a lot of Twitter drama, as you guys see, and somehow I don't remember the exact pacing data, and so I don't want to be wrong. We're a registered investment advisor now, so these things are like we get... This is like doubly hard. Every time you come on, I want to ask you about stuff that you can't talk about because of RIA, and I don't care about whatever you're going viral for on Twitter.

2:34:55Can you talk about data centers in space? You're a Caltech PhD. Do you understand it? Does it make sense to you? Am I team Dellian or am I team data centers? I wasn't going to make it about that. You could comment on it at a more abstract layer level, but you're obviously a big space investor. This is something I thought a lot about. For 15 years, I started a failed space launch company in 2007. This is an idea we actually thought a lot about. Look, I think the reality is no one really knows. Actually, something I told Delian with Varda, I passed on Varda in the early days, which I should have made the investment.

2:35:38The way I describe it to Delian now is I think he had the right macro idea and the wrong micro idea. and to unpack that, the micro idea is they wanted to make ZBLAN, this culture-pure fiber-optic cables. It's like, dude, we don't need ZBLAN in a world with Starlink. ZBLAN's good for long-distance data movement. We're going to do it all with Starlink. The long-distance data movement's going to happen in space with Starlink. But I think the macro idea of just building space infrastructure, building an incredible team, learning how to build satellites, I think that their timing couldn't be better just in terms of what's going to happen to the space economy over the next 10 years on the back of SpaceX and Starship.

2:36:21And I think their ability to just concentrate talent and be in position to pounce when the opportunities come up is something that should not be underestimated. And so with these data center companies in space, there are two very real serious unknowns. One is just the thermal properties. Dissipating heat in space is insanely hard. And anyone that says they figured it out right now, like they have not figured it out. They may figure it out in the, just by doing it. And it's because you need a lot of surface area, right? Is that? Yeah, there's basically, there's like no thermal connectivity or very little of space as a medium.

2:36:58And so heat that leaves any unit area, whatever in space, it just, it stays close to the satellite in space. And so you need, you can move things around inside the satellite, but once heat leaves the satellite, it'll just heat up a little local pocket of space around you and takes a very long time to dissipate away from the satellite. And so this is something no one really understands how it works. The second is you have to deal with high-energy particles that are going through your electronics. You don't have the Earth's magnetic field shielding your electronics. And you can have metal shielding and things like this, but no one really understands how this is going to work and how it will affect all the circuits and electronics.

2:37:45So these two things are hard. There's also like a big just time question around exactly when Starship will fly, like when cost will be passed to the launch companies. So I think some of these companies may be too early. And look, I actually think I'm more team Dellian on the micro. Like I think he has the right points that there's a lot of things that are unsolved right now on the micro side of data centers in space. but I'm such a macro bull on space over the next 10-15 years that it's hard for me to bet against any team that is just building that concentrated talent, building the expertise, because I just think it's going to be such an exponential rising tide at some point in the next 10 years.

2:38:29I can't tell you when that will start, but it will be big. On the SpaceX front, there's been a lot of news over the last few weeks around direct-to-sell partnerships between SpaceX and other device manufacturers, et cetera. How screwed do you think a lot of the big telecom companies are over the next 10 years? Look, I don't think they're screwed. I think that when you have... Look, I think SpaceX is going to do unbelievably well. Unbelievably well. and I'm maximum bull on direct-to-sell for SpaceX. But I think what happens, in the kind of most wild success scenario for SpaceX, SpaceX is providing like 20%, 30 % of the world's mobile data in a decade or so.

2:39:22But I think that the total mobile data consumption will be like double at that point. So it's still like a 70 % net increase for all the existing telcos. Because there's something, this is just a fact of history. When a product gets better, people use it more. And when you don't have dead zones in cell service, when you have 5G everywhere, Optimus is going to come online, Tesla cars are going to come online. When you have really good mobile connectivity from the car, you're going to be streaming instead of like 1028p, you're going to be streaming 8K content from your car while it's driving you.

2:40:06And so I just, I think it's going to be one of these things where rising tides lift all boats, but I would not underestimate how big of a deal it's going to be for SpaceX. Yeah, it's already an oligopoly, but there are multiple$100 billion companies in the category. And so if it just becomes, even if the market structure doesn't change and there's just a new player in the oligopoly, that looks very, very good. So we've asked a lot of people in the age of AI, should you learn to code? That's a less interesting question to me these days. I want to know, should you learn to deal? Should you learn the art of the deal?

2:40:41Because basically, is the art of the deal becoming a more important tool in the founder's tool chest? because we've seen so many, so many, we know it really feels like there are founders out there who can just work magic and marshal capital and buyers and customers and the government and the government from a different country. And they get 17 people to say, yes, this has to happen. And then all of a sudden it happens and we get the thing. And it feels like it could be the beginning of a new archetype, a new founder archetype, or maybe it's an old archetype. But what do you think about learning to deal?

2:41:21Yeah, look, I mean, first on the learning to code, I personally think that coding is going to be like doing arithmetic a long time ago. And it's just like it won't be as interesting or valuable. Humans won't be doing that much of it. But I think it's very valuable to train your mind how to think. And so a lot of like learning to code. Is that kind of like thinking mode? Yeah, sure. thinking mode, thinking mode, deal mode. But look, I think, I think like even more extreme than an even more extreme way to train your mind to think is, is doing pure mathematics. And so like, if a kid's asking what to major in today, I mean, my answer would be like, do pure math or physics, which are the maximum ways to train your mind to think, you know, or learn huge social skills.

2:42:11Like just don't even go to college. But you know, if you do be president. Our intern over here, our intern at TVVN is on a gap semester studying physics and is now hanging out here. And he's just like nodding, just being like, I'm patting myself on the back, Sean McGuire, as I did everything right. Curious, kind of last question. I wish we could hang out longer, but we're back to back. I'm going to come to your Thunderdome soon. Yeah, next one should be in person. Yeah, yeah, in LA. How is the government shutdown affecting defense tech companies that you're seeing or talking to? Oh, yeah. That's a good question.

2:42:46I'm going to give the brutally honest version, which is what I try to always do, at least my own opinion. It's a tale of haves and have-nots. So I work with a few companies that are getting absolutely reamed by it, but I also work with a couple companies where it hasn't really affected them. Basically, if you have something that the government absolutely needs, maybe they can't send you the money right now, but they're still giving you the phone call and telling you that this is what you should expect after the shutdown ends. We can still give you the award. We just can't tell you the exact dollar amount because we need congressional approval on the exact dollar amount.

2:43:34And it's a tale of haves and have-nots. I mean, it's a really good signal, to be honest, at least as an investor, to be like, is what I'm investing in a nice to have or a need to have? For sure. It's very clarifying. Yeah. Very good. Cool. Great to catch up. Always fun. Congrats on the new... We need to ring the gong for Sequoia Capital. Yeah, yeah. They deserve a gong. Two gong hits. Two gong hits for the two new funds. Still got it. There we go. Thank you, boys. Great to catch up. You guys are legends. Keep crushing. Bye. See you soon. Thanks for coming on. Bye. Let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2.

2:44:20You can go to Fin.ai to get started. And we have Anil Chakravarty from Adobe in the Restream Waiting Room. Let's bring him into the TPP and UltraDome. Anil, great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking your time. It's almost like you guys are in the creative industry. Yes. Yeah, likewise. Great to meet you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for hopping on. I assume you're at Max. Take us through the big headline news. What are the most exciting things happening in the Adobe ecosystem these days? Yeah, I'm coming here live from Max in L.A. We have over 10 ,000 people, everybody from individual creators to people in Hollywood who work with creative in the creative industry, enterprise customers, all kinds of people.

2:44:59It's been really exciting. Obviously, it's all about how we're bringing AI in the creative tools that everybody loves and knows so well. And we're really talking about how to make responsible use of AI. We have our own models with Firefly, and we had added a ton of innovations around Firefly, which is designed to be commercially safe. But we announced a big partnership with Google around Vio and Imogen and all kinds of other third-party models that are now integrated into our tools. Runway and Luma and many, many others. And then we also announced how we can help customers with their own custom models.

2:45:38So we call it Firefly models, partner models, your models. And if you are Disney or Home Depot or Newell brands, how do you have an AI model that really protects your IP and becomes your brand brain? So that's really what's been exciting. How are you thinking about the creative journey of the customer? I feel like there's probably people in the audience who might have became an Adobe customer by pirating a version of Photoshop in 1998. And now they pay for cloud every month. But now there's even more varieties of niche use cases where a consumer can use a point solution and then they grow and grow and grow into the ecosystem.

2:46:28Is it more important than ever that you set up teams to capture those long tail interactions, just a face swap over here, just a background remover over here, and then funnel everyone into the ecosystem? Or do you want to focus on just capturing people once they're ready to go into the enterprise workflows? Yeah, you know, exactly. We have such a wide variety here of people who've had their journey with Adobe. We had Brandon Baum on stage who was exactly like what you said. Yeah. He said he was 11 years old when he started using a cracked copy. This is the thing. Yeah. No longer. Exactly. After Effects.

2:47:07And he said he's a paying subscriber now. Of course, of course. And then, you know, what he said was, you know, he said he started playing with it when he was a kid. He got hooked on it. Yeah. And he showed how you can do it with Firefly. I mean, he posted something yesterday. And, you know, he got a video that he created with Firefly. And then, you know, he got some comments and said, somebody said, hey, it looks like this is going to be a plot twist here. And so he did the plot twist on stage today. He used Firefly and all the tools to just take the next episode in that story. So we've got all types.

2:47:38You know, you've got enterprise customers who are like, hey, we would love to use all these new Gen.AI tools. It's got to get through our systems, our regulation, our compliance. Adobe, people trust Adobe. So if you can make it available, it becomes so much easier to use all of this innovation. And then we have a lot of people, like you said, who have their favorite tools and they want to see all this AI in their favorite tools. And then there are many, many others. We think maybe more than half the people at Max are attending for the first time. So they just want everything on a mobile app. They don't have the desktop machine with Photoshop on it.

2:48:19They know every layer and all of that. So they just want it on their mobile app. And so we've got all types of the creative journey. Ideas can strike you anywhere, and we want to help you turn that into creativity. What's your read on how Hollywood's been navigating Gen AI? we're here in LA ourselves. And when we talk to people in the industry on or off air, it seems like everyone is trying to get ahead and leverage the tools to the best of their ability. But there's this pressure to not piss off the broader industry of people that make it possible. But what's been the read from people that are talking at the event?

2:49:02Because there's a little bit of like, if you're too much at the bleeding edge and too loud, you know, you might get people, people might come after you. Yeah, exactly. They're threading the needle. Exactly. They are excited about the potential. They see what AI can potentially do in terms of everything from ideation, from helping create and make those, make the movies and other content for TV. And then also then getting the audience to participate, you know, everybody can have, it's so easy to create variations and get the, you know, make it more like fan experience that like the sports teams are doing.

2:49:42So they're really interested in all of that potential. But like you said, they want to make sure it's top-notch quality. They want to make sure their IP is protected and that they're not, you know, even unwittingly stepping on somebody else's toes. And they want to make sure that they're doing it in a way that's monetizable and that gives them a recurring revenue stream. So exactly like you said, they're threading that needle. Yeah. Very cool. Did you have a product request, by the way? I did. I want you to bring back Photoshop Mix. I was a huge user of Photoshop Mix, and my favorite features got deprecated, and I moved to Photoshop Express, and then I got a new phone, and one of the features, the one random feature that I used got deprecated again.

2:50:31And so now I am on the full Photoshop iOS app, the official Photoshop iOS app, and I'm learning it. But I do feel like one of my children was left behind on the Titanic or something, and I was left in there. I will ask the product team to take a look. Have you tried Firefly? Have you checked Firefly out? I haven't. But I understand. This is the nature of building a large, scaled business. You need to move people through the different feature funnels. You can't keep every, otherwise it just becomes all tech debt. So I understand why things go the way they do, but as a dedicated user of the legacy app.

2:51:11Why, in as few words as possible, because we're running out of time, what's your read on, like, specifically, I think people, the bears out there think that AI is disruptive, could be disruptive to the Adobe ecosystem. we're a creative business we're a media company, we're constantly creating media and advertisements and things like that, our view has been that it seems more obviously to be an extending innovation or people being able to generate a video an image or a video and then suddenly have that asset and be like, well now I want to change it, well what tool are you going to use? It's probably a tool within the Adobe ecosystem, so in as few words as possible, what's your view on why AI would be an extending innovation for the Adobe kind of suite of products?

2:52:03Yeah, you know, we look at it as the evolution of a new operating system, and we are the creative AI platform that runs on new operating systems. You know, when you look at our history, when it was desktops, I mean, we ran on macOS and Windows OS, when it became cloud, you know, whether it was with AWS or Microsoft Azure or with GCP and others, when it became mobile, whether it was iOS or Android. So we have the history and the track record of making sure that we work very well with emerging new operating systems. And the new AI is the new operating system. Now, you have to believe, and I think it's a simplistic view, that the operating system will do everything that the apps do.

2:52:46And yeah, I mean, that just seems, in our view, very simplistic. So we think much, obviously, from our perspective, that we're good at working with these new operating systems. That's what we announced at Google yesterday. And, you know, we actually showed within chat GPT how you can work with Adobe tools like Express. So it's evolving of how they, you know, what do the operating systems do and what do the apps continue to do? And there's new layers of AI, but that's the architecture is evolving fast. But we think that you need both. I don't think it's either or. And that's where we think the world is going to be.

2:53:18Yeah. I mean, I've used so many of these little point solution AI tools and I feel like I've seen a glimpse of where this all goes. And it's like, I actually do want a platform that then can sub out different models so I can get Firefly or VO or MidJourney or hopefully you wind up building a platform that's so open that all the different features and models are there. And it's just like having the lasso tool next to the rectangle tool next to the text tool. And that's a very natural progression for Adobe, in my opinion. It seems very logical. Now, we got to get you on our consumer advisory board.

2:53:54I mean, you really summed it up. Yeah. I mean, I hate that I lost my Photoshop mix. John's got some strong opinions. He'll have. We're going to bring it back for you. Yeah, but no, no, no, no, no. I don't actually think you need to. I think you actually do need me to suffer a little bit to get into the proper full-fledged ecosystem that has all the tools in one place. Because that's where the actual value is right now. Everyone knows that you can spin up a website that's a text box and it generates one asset, one image, one video. But that's not how creativity works. We're not just going to one-shot a two-hour movie.

2:54:31Exactly. Exactly. You should really check out Firefly. I think you'll enjoy it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to meet you. Great to chat. And congratulations. Have fun. Have fun at Adobe Max. I've been seeing a ton of people, friends of mine, posting that they're there. Wish I could be there. Hopefully, in a future year, we'll be able to attend. It'd be great. Thank you for having me on. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon. Great to meet you. Have a good one. Before we bring on our next guest, let me tell you about Adio, Customer Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI-native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.

2:55:02You can get started for free. And up next, we have Bryn Putnam from Bored. Bored. Bored. It's just Bored. I was looking for the name, and it was right in front of me. So great to meet you. Incredible launch yesterday. I think I love my favorite launches to see are ideas that when you see them, they just seem so incredibly obvious, and yet no one thought of it or thought to take it seriously enough and take it into a real product. So it's great to meet you. We'd love sort of introduction and quick background on yourself, and then we can talk all about the business. Yeah, so nice to meet you as well.

2:55:43I'm a huge fan. I'm excited for the gong. I'm here for the gong.

2:55:50So, yeah, so founder and CEO of Board. Board is the first ever face-to-face gaming console that blends the best of board games and video games into an entirely new way to play. What we've done is taken a 24-inch touchscreen and trained it to do something that no other screen does, which is recognize not just fingers and gestures, but also physical game pieces. So it knows what the piece is, where it is on the board, and what it's doing. So it's an entirely new way to play together. Amazing. uh walk through uh the kind of aha moment when you decided to build this because again um it uh it's so obvious people love board games people love video games why not put it together did you when you started thinking about this was did you look throughout history at kind of was there any other attempts that stood out on things like this like uh walk us through that kind of early creative process us.

2:56:48Yeah, so I always end up just building from personal frustration and pain. So I am the proud mom now of five kids. I've got two kids and three step kids. So maybe I'll get my gong there, you know, ranging from two to 21. So we were just trying to figure out ways to connect. And we would play board games and we'd have to play Candyland so my two-year-old could join. Or we'd try to play video games and the teenagers would smoke us because they've clocked so many hours on modern controllers. and it just felt like there had to be something that was a lot more fun and intuitive. And so really the unlock was like, could we use a piece like a controller?

2:57:28So you put the spaceship down and it shoots, you put the stairs down and the characters walk up it. And it was just really a way personally for me to bring my family together. That's amazing. John is back with a gong. Hit it, hit it again. Once for board, once for the five kids. Second time. um that's uh so so how do you what's it like kind of building building the console and the games themselves at the same time and then do you plan to i'm assuming you're planning to open up kind of a platform over time but but maybe start with the first question yeah so you know i've always felt like if you really care about a great experience you kind of always end up wanting to control the full stack.

2:58:11In my last gig, I built a company called Mirror, and we built custom hardware, software, and content. And same thing here. As you start to design the experience you want, you realize you need to control the hardware, the software, and also the games. I think the hard part this time was the games. So finding the fun is not an easy formula. Getting the hardware and software to all work is incredibly challenging and required of a lot of deep technical knowledge. but you could keep making the games forever and then eventually you just decide you got to ship. But ultimately for us, we're building a platform and an ecosystem.

2:58:47So we want to build a place where people can come and build cool experiences around this shared screen using physical pieces. So it's really about building a place where other multi-billion dollar businesses can be born. This is one of the greatest second company serial entrepreneur stories because I don't want to simplify it, but it's like mirror was like a big screen on a wall and now it's a big screen on a like that like table a lot of the there has to be so many uh like well it's also it's also so many so many hardware companies just don't make it so there is no second companies because the factory gets so burnt out that they're like i'm not doing that again real yeah that's for sure um uh but yeah i guess i guess like how do you think about uh i feel like part of the success with board is like There will be a specific game that ultimately drives, I imagine it'll be somewhat of a power law.

2:59:41Video games are very power law driven. So it's like, I'm sure you have confidence in the first game, but it's possible that it'll take a little bit or a while to have the hit that makes the product go totally mainstream. So it's like, how do you balance that? The games being like a hits business, right? There's been a bunch of board games and there's one monopoly, right? Totally. I mean, we think about it really as our job is to show off what's possible with this new technology. So our job is to show the breadth of the portfolio. So we've got quick arcade hits to deep 3D spatial strategy games and really a lot of incredible physical digital interactions.

3:00:22And we think that the great game is probably going to come from someone we don't know yet. So really, our job is to just let a thousand flowers bloom and then see what happens. but we feel confident that with this first set of 12 launch games, we're kind of showing what's possible with this new way of playing and we're really excited just to get people building on board. Do you think that there are, like, it's exciting to see where the V2 of the technology, where you can do unique games that take advantage of this hardware, specifically understanding that the pieces touch the screen and they're identifiable.

3:00:55But is there also some value just to being like, like, I've played Settlers of Catan on an iPad. Like it is a good experience just because it's a good game. And so is there a world where you want to on day one, take advantage of a particular app store or catalog that's already there? Even if you're not taking a big cut, you're just kind of bootstrapping the experience so that people are like, oh, well, you know, I, I didn't like that game, but it's a 24 inch iPad. And I was able to use, you know, the game that I liked on day one. Yeah. I mean, this was like the big debate, right? New and native are porting IPs, and we made the less safe choice, I would say, to go new and native because we felt we were doing something really novel, and we had a really novel technology, and we needed games that fit the tech.

3:01:40So, you know, the Wii Remote unlocked Wii Sports, and Swipe on mobile unlocked Angry Birds, and we felt like we have a similar technology. But I think there's definitely a future where characters or IP that you're familiar with come alive in a new and native way on board. We've had a lot of exciting outreach from companies and entertainment brands. Yeah, so it's been quite a 24 hours of inbounds on social for us. Not every day you get Mick Jagger posting about your product within the first 24 hours. It's been fun. That's amazing. Well, I also just bought one live here on the air. You can check Shopify.

3:02:18I love ShopPay. I'm like, I'm on the website. It's for sale. uh what you're shipping these already is that correct or is it uh i didn't even check so yeah we start shipping the yeah we'll arrive in 2030 jordy okay 2035 right around agi is when you're gonna get it no no um we ship uh of the week of 11 10 so shipping uh in a week or two oh wow how did you plan around supply this feels like the like this could be the holiday gift of the season if you have the supply? How do you plan around? Have you been planning around inventory? Yeah, so one of the nice things about it being kind of the second go around is we're working with a tier one CM out of Thailand who has a lot of experience with display products and so they're really adept at being able to scale inventory quickly as we start to get demand signals, but it's definitely going to be a busy holiday for all of us.

3:03:13Yeah, it's crazy. John, can we get a gong for Mick Jagger? Kevin, one of the designers. Gong for Mick Jagger Well congratulations to the whole team This is super exciting I can't wait to try it I'm sure there will be a game that we can play here On air To settle disputes And I'm excited to play with my family Back home Thank you guys so much for having me What's the domain by the way? Board.fun Available today at board.fun I'm normally a.com purist but board.fun works. Board.fun works, yeah. Love it. Me too, but you got to go with the.fun. Yeah, very fun. This is such an exciting story. I'm seriously so excited about this company.

3:03:59It's amazing. Just like the perfect founder of everything. I'm very excited. Congratulations. Thank you, guys. Did you announce, last question, did you announce fundraise already? Did you ever announce it? We haven't yet. So we raised$15 million in funding. We were lucky to have funds we've worked with before, Lair, Box, and then First Round, and then some new folks, adjacent patron, Metrodora, SV Angel join. So now kicking off our Series A now. Fantastic. All right. Well, another gong. I'd love to chat about that. Another gong then. Yeah. This was a very gong-heavy segment. but putting on a master class and yeah, can't wait to play.

3:04:48Very excited. Thanks, guys. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. ShopPay is just so good. So good. You can just buy stuff during interviews. Our next guest is already in the Restream waiting room, but quickly let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. We have George Kurtz from CrowdStrike in the Rishon Way room. Welcome to the show, George. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with us on this busy GTC part time of the year.

3:05:29We'd love to get an introduction on you and just a little bit of an overview of what's new in your world, what's new at GTC. Sure. So, George Kurtz, founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, leading provider of security solutions. And I think the big announcement, many big announcements at GTC, but certainly on the security side, was continued partnership with NVIDIA. We have AI's leader and security's leader coming together to provide greater protection for customers. And that was a big part of our announcement that Jensen went through. And, you know, we're excited to be working with them. And we've been working with them for years now.

3:06:09And to see it all come together as part of GTC, I think was just fantastic. Yeah. Take us a layer deeper. You could be, they could be a customer of yours. You're securing them as a company. You're baking it into the chips. There's a wide row. You're buying chips from them. There's so many different ways to partner with NVIDIA these days. Yeah. So as you know, and I think a big part of his talk was NVIDIA being the platform company. Yeah. He sort of joked saying like, hey, we don't even sell things to people. Like everything's embedded into other systems and you got to use the platform, which is part of what we've done.

3:06:41If you look at what they've come out with, they've got something called Nemotron, which are open models that customers can use and build their own AI agents. So really, this particular announcement was focused on bringing security and visibility from an AI agent perspective to the edge. So we've got something called Charlotte, which is our agentic technology, which allows our customers to identify and understand threats and do a lot of the work of what a security analyst would do, which many times is sort of a one-to-one relationship between a threat and an analyst. And now with our security AI agents, we can do the work of many analysts and one analyst can control those agents.

3:07:24So that's what Charlotte does. Now, Charlotte, with this announcement, has the ability to actually talk to other AI agents, leveraging the Nebotron models and the NIM inference microservices. So as those agents are closer to where AI is created or on prem or in a data center, you want to have very quick visibility into what's happening. And many times customers have their own AI agents where they're not shipping maybe sensitive data to the cloud. It might be a network diagram or might be other sensitive information. So Charlotte can now talk to these other AI agents that are at the edge to make better decisions.

3:08:00And they're always continuously learning. So we're one of the premier security partners for NVIDIA. And that was part of our announcement. Does vibe coding scare you? I love vibe coding. I'm an investor. I do it myself. on my own website. It's also good for CrowdStrike, right? It's like people are going to just make a lot of software quickly. They probably need to spend more on cybersecurity, too. They do. So, you know, the old joke many years ago was like, you know, you'd have people come out of university and they would just go to any number of the repositories and they would just grab their code snippet and slap it in.

3:08:36And if something was poorly written, it would just propagate everywhere, right? You'd have this big problem. And now you know, some of the coding that you get, some is very good, but you have to give it the right prompt, is inefficient, and it looks like an intern wrote it. So it's gotten a lot better, you know, in the later generations, but that does become potentially problematic. And given the rise of AI, the ability to actually find these software vulnerabilities has increased dramatically. I mean, we're seeing AI find more and more and more vulnerabilities and sort of leading the charge on these bug bounties because they're so efficient at finding software flaws.

3:09:11CrowdStrike has something like 10 ,000 employees. How do you think that, how are you thinking about human capital allocation over the next decade? Is AI changing your philosophy about the shape of the workforce? Yeah. Yeah, I think there's two pieces to it. One is on the security side, which is specific to how do you leverage AI agents to do more work on behalf of customer? And what we found is, at least in my mind, the more AI you have, the more work you can actually get done. And security is that you're always up against it. You're up against the clock from an adversary perspective. And there's just so much data to get through and so many threats that let the machine do what it's really good at.

3:09:54Let it sift through this data and let it figure out what's happening. And then, again, what happens is those security analysts become really the pilots, right, where they're piloting these AI agents. And you can think about it akin to maybe, you know, a Waymo or, you know, automated taxi or autonomous taxi, I should say, where you've got all these autonomous chauffeurs, but then you have sort of the pilot in the cloud if you get stuck. And I've been in, you know, these things where they've gotten stuck and they wait and, you know, somebody pilots, it gives it a waypoint or what have you. And that's really how secure is going to be transformed, where the human is not going to be out of the loop, but they're going to be able to do so much more.

3:10:34So it's about helping people up, not out. That's the way I look at it from a security perspective. Now, if I put my CEO hat on, I think most CEOs are looking at, well, how do you get efficiencies from AI in running a business? You know, and looking in areas like legal and sales, obviously in coding, like how do you do more with the people you have? And I think the big thing is always like, how do you flatten the hiring curve? It doesn't mean you're getting rid of a whole bunch of people. But if you could be more efficient because the people you have can do more, you can flatten the hiring curve, which ultimately adds leverage to the business model.

3:11:07So we're always looking at how to take people and upskill them and train them up. And that's what we've done internally. And that's also what we're looking at for customers that are using security technologies like CrowdStrike. What's, in your view, the most significant Gen.AI-related security incident to date that's public? Is there one that comes to mind? You're like, I usually hear about the ones that we try to keep them out of the headline. No, but we were talking the other day, the fact that there's been this explosion of software, and we didn't immediately have one that came to mind that felt like...

3:11:43You could squarely pin on Gen.AI. It actually feels like we've been doing pretty well on security. Yeah. There's actually... This is sort of the scary part of where the industry is going. there was some new malware that was found that was basically gen AI malware or what I would call autonomous malware. So if you think about malware, you and your audience might be familiar with it. You have a program that's bad. And in the old days, the McAfee and semantics of the world used to have these databases that would go, okay, that's a bad file. We're just not going to let it run. And over the years, companies like ours, we've created this sort of math model where without even seeing it, we can tell if something's bad and we block it.

3:12:21That's kind of old hat. But now the new malware is basically Gen.AI, meaning if it drops on your system, okay, it looks like a script. It doesn't even look like a compiled program. And essentially, it uses prompts to figure out, okay, what system are you on? What is unique about that system? What data can I harvest? And how do I learn more about the network I'm on so I can pivot and I can jump to another system that might be more interesting? So the fact that it doesn't necessarily have command and control back to the pilot, it can do this autonomously. That's fascinating. It can reason. It can reason.

3:13:00Like the best security pen testers or like the best of the nation state actors that are piloting it themselves. So it's a pretty scary thought to have autonomous malware. Did you start CrowdStrike so you could get more involved with motorsports? well it's uh it's been a passion of mine but it's been a big part of our overall uh brand you probably see us we love it it's like formula one and uh you know our customers like it and it's just kind of part of the ethos but uh it's you know it's been just part of what we've done early on do you try to do you try to get to as many of the f1 races as you as you can or what's your do you try to do you have to limit yourself because i know we know we know some sponsors and and and And they've got a pretty heavy travel schedule.

3:13:49They're like, we sponsor this team for the next two seasons. We're going to be at every race. And I'm like, you might want to work on your business. Yeah, we actually just picked the big ones for us, obviously the big U.S. ones. And then we host customers at those. We actually have what we call CXO roundtables. So we combine security and the technology of motor racing. And it's a passion. Security is a mission for a lot of people at CrowdStrike and a lot of our customers. I mean, we can be doing lots of things, but we love the fight against the bad guys. And to bring those people together to talk about the technology and the speed of cybersecurity and the risk management of cybersecurity, there's a lot of analogs into motor racing.

3:14:30It's speed, it's technology, it's data, it's risk-taking or managing risk. And it's been a big part of, I think, just our brand. It's incredible. Fantastic. Well, we will hopefully run into you in Vegas for F1. If you're going to be there, let's coordinate. We'll give you a whole tour of the Mercedes paddock and the garage. We'll go have some fun. That'd be fantastic. Well, next time there's a massive public security incident in Gen AI, we're going to give you a ring and we'll get you back on and have you break it down. But thank you for coming on and congrats on all the progress. and thanks for keeping us safe out there.

3:15:12You got it. Thanks, guys. We'll talk soon. Great to hang, George. Have a good one. Bye. We should have done more time with him. I love CrowdStrike because every time I get one, I get nerd sniped by CrowdStrike reports like all the time. Whenever there's like when solar winds happen, like CrowdStrike tells the story of it and they're always gripping and they do a ton of good work out there. So thank you to everyone at CrowdStrike, to all 10 ,000 plus employees. And thank you to Eat Sleep. EatSleep.com. Get a pod five. Ultra. Get a five-year warranty. 39-month free trial. Also, thank you to Bezel.

3:15:49Of course. Your Bezel Concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. I ran off screen for a second and caught Brian on the way out, and he was saying, like, yeah. I told him, like, yeah, I've been a little less healthy the last year running the show than historically. And he's like, yeah, I've heard some of your, you know, Eat Sleep updates. Oh, gosh. sleep scores. You said you're in sleep. Didn't hear in my sleep scores. Brutal. Well, I got a 90 last night. Oh, you did? So I'm back in the game. I completely lost my phone. I don't know. This is an issue. Do we have any more timelines?

3:16:23Meta is reporting earnings, I believe, right now. Or they already did. Meta stock sinks after tax hit weighs on earnings. What? They're down like 9%. Wait, what? Is that good? Wait, who's down 9 %? Meta. Meta? Why? Earnings. They missed earnings? Oh, no. Microsoft sinks on beat. Meta crashes 6 % on EPS miss. Is it good that Microsoft is sinking on a beat? Is it over? Is it over? No. It's not over for me. I got a 94. How'd you do? I got a 90. You got a 90? I beat you. Seven hours, nine minutes. Let's go. I'm sleeping well. And that's all that matters. There's also a bombshell guest essay in the New York Times about OpenAI.

3:17:14One of the senior researchers who led product safety at OpenAI is taking shots at their messaging around erotic content. They have some data around how many people use AI or use a chat GPT in this erotic fashion. That's going to be a bigger story for sure. This is definitely going to grow. But hopefully there's guardrails. Hopefully there's more clear messaging on the actual transparency reports and the boundaries of how these apps get used. I realized that I don't know if I've actually age verified with OpenAI. Like I don't know if I've ever actually scanned my ID. and I mean, maybe this is a bull case for WorldCoin or something, but I feel like I have a moral duty to upload my ID to ChatGPT.

3:18:18Why is that? Because I care about... We keep it pretty PG. I don't want them releasing any of those adult features on my account. On your account, yes. Yes, but I want them to be able to clearly understand what an adult person is versus an underage person. And so it's important that they have a really strong data set of adults versus people who haven't age verified so they can classify the users effectively. What do you think, Dan? I actually have uploaded my ID to OpenAI. There's a bunch of like... Your real ID? Yes. obviously I don't have any other kinds of chat GPT operator agent mode buy me a beer deliver a six pack to me yes Tyler we're thinking contacting the Instacart API and buying you a six pack there are some products that you have to use your ID for at least it's like the early version so like the agent builder Oh, Agent Builder.

3:19:27You have to ID verify with it. At least it was in the days following, like right when it came out. Sure, sure, sure. You have to upload your ID. I haven't heard anything about Agent Builder recently. What's going on over there? I have not used it either. You haven't been in building agents? I don't know. I mean, it's not like a... We should try. We should try to build a... We should try and build an agent that does something for TVP. That buys beer. That buys beer for interns, yes. Bobby Cosmic. Shout out to John for providing data to improve the system. Thank you. That's what it's all about. No, but seriously, if you want to keep the bad stuff out of the underage users, you've got to know who's of age and who's underage.

3:20:11And so you should be strongly in favor. Many people have said you have the mind of a child. Yeah, Brian Johnson, I think his biological age is like 19. uh my i did a test on my brain so i had the mind of a five-year-old a lot of dinosaur questions yeah constantly running deep research reports on i love that i do love slapstick comedy nothing like a story of a of a leopard and a monkey falling off a boat and going splat that's the pinnacle of comedy or just being having the mind of a five-year-old and being like why are clouds? Exactly. And then running a deep research report. Yes, this is the key.

3:20:54Do you mean what are clouds? This is the key. Why? More news. Apparently MasterCard is planning to acquire ZeroHash for nearly$2 billion. ZeroHash is a crypto infrastructure player. They've been at it quite a long time and a pretty serious move from them. We should wait to kind of assess earnings since we can't listen or read any of the transcripts live exactly. But fortunately, we'll be back tomorrow. And John? In the meantime, find your happy place. Book a wonder with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

3:21:44there's a bunch more stories, but we can get to them tomorrow. We will talk to you later. Have a great rest of your day. Have a beautiful, productive evening. Night. See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.