Siri Needs an App, Apple Preps for Post-Cook, Scott Nolan Truth Nuke | Shervin Pishevar, Horacio Rozanski, Glenn Fogel, JD Ross, Nick Fleisher, Rob Slaughter, Sajith Wickramasekara

24:39Threading the needle between adding new bells and whistles. Let's give it up for bells and whistles to Apple's products while watching the bottom line has defined the careful, low-profile style of Mr. Turn Us. And we have to take a minute to talk about the nominative determinism of Turn Us. Turn Us Around. Mr. Turn Us Around. Our AI strategy is failing. I think we need somebody to turn us around. Mr. Ternus could be the man for the job. He joined Apple in 2001. He is now considered by some company insiders to be the front runner to replace Tim Cook, Apple's longtime CEO. Apple last year began accelerating its planning for Mr.

25:18Cook's succession, according to three people. Mr. Cook, 65, has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload. Should he step down, Mr. Cook is likely to become the chairman of Apple's board. Oh, interesting. Look at this. They're also doing some numerology. Ternus is 50, and that's the same age that Tim Cook was when he took over for Steve Jobs in 2011. We see you, New York Times, doing the hard-hitting analysis. Like Mr. Cook, Mr. Ternus is known for his attention to detail and his knowledge of Apple's vast supply network. Both men are also considered even-tempered collaborators, capable of navigating the bureaucracy of one of the world's wealthiest companies without ruffling feathers.

26:01His rising profile caused debate amongst Apple alumni and rank-and-file employees about whether he would lead like Tim Cook, who succeeded by making the company more predictable and incremental. Or Mr. Jobs, who laid the foundation for the company's success with risky bets and visionary products. Venturi in the chat says Apple needs a social network. Do they have it already? I feel like iMessage is a social network. Ping, if you remember Ping, they had a social network that they acquired, I believe, from Jeff Ralston, the former YC partner. But it was like Spotify where you could see where other people are playing.

26:37You'd go on Apple Music, or it wasn't called Apple Music back then. It was Ping, which was linked to iTunes. You could see what other people are listening to. And then every artist would have a profile where they could share content. It was a very music-driven social network. Follow me on Ping. Follow me on Ping. Ping me. Ping me. Never really took off, though. Other than that, I think iMessage is a very, very strong social network. And I mean, certainly if Meta owns WhatsApp and includes that in the family of apps, and messaging is obviously a huge driver of social networking activity these days, people sharing content through there, Snapchat is a messenger, Instagram is, you know, you look and you see there's more shares on this reel than likes because people are sending it to each other.

27:22That's what people do. Yeah, and I think the people have long had the idea to build a family-focused social network, and I don't think they'll ever be successful because group chats on iMessage function. Oh, yeah, totally. Do that very well. You just can't keep up with Apple on that. Yeah. Before we move on, Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. Mr. Ternus' rising profile. Sorry, you got that. If you want to make an iPhone every year, Ternus is your guy, says Cameron Rogers.

28:01But how much should we read into this? They already do make an iPhone every year. But it says something. I mean, obviously, we don't have the context here. What he didn't say was if you want to build the next crazy, the futuristic. If you want to get the Apple car project off the ground, Ternus is your guy. I said, if you want to make an Apple an iPhone every year, like clockwork, keep the trains running on time at Apple, Ternus is your guy. Yeah, people, we read that other quote about Ternus where they were saying like, has he made any hard decisions? No. And someone was clearly taking shots at him.

28:36It feels like there's a little bit of like politics going on over at Apple, people jockeying for the next role. But whatever's happening with John Ternus clearly is working because it's one profile after another. And he's the name I keep hearing more and more, certainly above Craig Federighi, Eddie Q, some of the other folks who are sort of household names in the Apple ecosystem. They're not getting profiles like this written. Everyone needs to meet and learn about John Ternus. So Apple's plans for artificial intelligence are also a big question. Is he HGI-pilled? Is he ASI-pilled? What are his timelines?

29:09Is he a doomer? We've got to get to the bottom of this. Hopefully, yeah. Hopefully, the New York Times is asking the hard questions. We will find out. While other giant technology companies have spent tens of billions of dollars developing AI, Apple has largely been on the sidelines, and it pushed off, making major changes to its products with new AI technology. It'll be up to Apple's board of directors to decide who will eventually replace Mr. Cook, who also sits on the board. The rest of the company's eight board members did not respond to requests for comments, and Apple declined to make Mr.

29:38Ternus available for an interview. They couldn't get the New York Times in the room with Ternus. The Financial Times and Bloomberg previously reported on aspects of this. So he's the youngest member of Apple's executive leadership team. Tonight's success. Getting some young blood in there. Sort of a doge situation, I guess. The boys, the Ternus child at the helm. No, he's 50. It would be Apple's first chief executive in three decades to have spent his career working in hardware. Unlike some of the other candidates to replace Mr. Cook, Mr. Ternus has worked on many of Apple's devices as well as the global operations that manufacture those products He would take over as a relative unknown outside of Apple Inside the company has known more for maintaining products than developing new ones according to six former employees And mr Ternus who has been an engineer in Silicon Valley for all of his adult life has limited exposure to the policy issues and political response It's interesting that can that can be viewed That can be viewed as as a knock right like he's not just given Apple's history as an innovator.

30:42But what's the highest leverage place that he can spend his time? Probably focusing on the products that are already hits, that have real product market fit. The political responsibilities can't be that complicated. I mean, he knows the supply chain. All he has to do is make a solid gold iPhone, send one to 1600 and call it a day. Make sure it's very ornate and you'll be good to go. He's a California native. He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Penn, where he was on the varsity swim team. For a senior project, he designed a device that allowed quadriplegics to use head motions to control a mechanical feeding arm.

31:20Wow, it's like Neuralink back in the day. In the four years after his graduation from Penn, he designed headsets and other products at a virtual reality startup. Wow, throwback. Then he joined Apple, first working on screens for Macs as the company transitioned away from the colorful iMacs of late 1990. 90s. I'm sure we'll get a chance to talk to Mr. Ternus at some point, but I would love to know what people's VR timelines were when he was working on VR in the 90s. They were like 10 years max. In the next decade, for sure. He was a man of the people, adding that the decision to sit with his team likely helped Mr.

31:58Ternus manage and motivate his staff. When he was working at Apple, their team, the team he was on, moved office floors, switching from a closed office plan to a mostly open seating with few offices. When he was promoted, Mr. Ternus had the option to move into one of those fancy offices, but he said, no, I'm sitting with the crew. I'm riding with my boys. I'm hanging out in the open plan, which tells you a lot about who he is as a person. In 2005, Mr. Ternus had been promoted to lead Apple's hardware engineering team for the iMacs as it made the G5 series, which helped Michael Hillman hired Mr.

32:40Ternus and worked with him at Apple for more than a decade. That team was working on using magnets to hold the computer's glass screen in place. Interesting. The technique was unusual for its time in face skepticism, but Mr. Ternus still pushed for it. When presented with such an out-of-the-box idea, he would champion it, said Mr. Seifert. Mr. Ternus spent extended periods of time working with manufacturers in Asia. He traveled between the continent and Silicon Valley and learned how difficult it could be to have a manufacturing supplier deliver on Apple's design expectations. Apple also paired Mr.

33:14Ternus with an external consultant to advise him on leadership. He got a leadership coach. He became a key lieutenant of Dan Riccio, his predecessor as Apple's head of hardware. By 2013, his role had expanded to include overseeing the Mac and iPad teams. In recent years, he has shouldered more responsibility for updates to Apple's products, spearheaded the iPhone Air, which was released last year with a new slim design and was a key leader in Apple's transition from using Intel chips to Apple Silicon. And of course, the iPhone Air, not a really hot seller, apparently, not doing that well financially necessarily, but from an engineering perspective people are very excited apple employee uh friend of mine said he got the iphone air it was the worst iphone he's ever bought really wow roasted absolutely brutal uh well before we talk more about the iphone air let me tell you about label box delivering you the highest quality data for frontier ai get in the box the label box apple you know you need some training data.

34:16You know you need some high-quality training data for your Frontier AI. You need some data to train on Siri. Get on LabelBox. Get in the box. So the iPhone Air, obviously, reviews are mixed. Reviews are not great. Some people complain about different things. Some people love it, but it hasn't been flying off the shelves. But when you see the X-ray, you know it's cool. Remember that story of the founder who said, this is the strongest iPhone ever made. Nobody can possibly break this. It's impossible. What happened next? And that was quickly broken in half by a gunpowder. That was an iPhone Air.

34:49Smashed, smashed. But you can imagine the innovation that went into making the iPhone Air so small could be used for a foldable phone, which was probably coming. Could be used for more miniaturization. If they do some sort of lapel pin or something else, they clearly have packed a lot of power into such a small form factor. So is he a nice guy? Yes, says Mr. Rogers. He is a nice guy. He's someone you want to hang out with. Everyone loves him because he's great. And here's the quote that lives in infamy. Has he made any hard decisions? No. Are there hard problems he's solved in hardware? No. Wait, what?

35:29How can you say he's... He's never made a hard decision, says Cameron Rogers, who worked on product and software engineering management at Apple from 2005 to 2022. too. Cameron Rogers, hater of the year right here. Who is this person? But Cameron Rogers is not pulling out the glazenator for Ternus. It's absolutely brutal to say. Yeah, remember the same guy who said earlier in the article, if you want to make an iPhone every year, Ternus is your guy. Yeah, you got it. Again, I read that and I was like, okay, that sounds good, surface level. Cameron Rogers is just taking shots. Apple does make an iPhone every year.

36:10We should have Cameron on the show. The hater in chief, chief hating officer. It's crazy. I mean, certainly you cannot be at Apple for two decades and never have made a single hard decision or solved a hard problem in hardware. Like, that seems impossible. It's funny. There's a hardware engineer at Apple today named Cameron Rogers, but it is different. Different person. Different. Okay. Okay. Well, in a 2024 commencement speech at Penn's Engineering School, Mr. Ternus told graduating students that in the future, they would be proudest, not of specific projects, but of the journey to make them all happen.

36:48Quote, now, while you're on that journey, there's going to be many times in your career where you have to take on something new, he said, and sometimes you might wonder whether or not you can actually do it. Giving a little inspirational talk at Penn's engineering school commencement speech. Very fun. Well, good luck to him. I don't know. I think you can figure it out. I would be shocked if he's really never solved a hard problem. Seems like he has some beef with this Cameron fellow. And well, I don't know. Well, we'll see Cameron Rogers. Maybe Ternus needs to respond. Drop a diss track. I don't know.

37:23I would love to see that. Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto treasuries and more all with amazing customer service uh open ai they've acquired torch it's a healthcare startup that unifies lab results medications and visit recordings bringing this together with chat gpt health opens up a new way to understand and manage your health says open ai okay founders of torch torch was a uh four-person company oh small they uh the co-founder of Torch, Ilya, I believe one of the other founders, previously built Forward. Ilya was also an early Uber GM, so trained at the Travis Kalanick School of Mogging.

38:11Anyways, Forward, a little backstory. Healthcare startup founded in 2016. They wanted to rebuild the healthcare system from the ground up. Sounds cool. they originally were trying to do this kind of like the general belief was that health care was too reactive instead of proactive right you go to the doctor when you're sick not to just kind of generally be healthy they had an app they wanted the sort of physical spaces to feel like Apple stores right they wanted this Apple like experience for health subscription only model they didn't accept insurance initially. A bunch of folks, Founders Fund, Kostla, Eric Schmidt, a bunch of legends were in the round.

38:592018 to 2022, they expanded to dozens of locations. They had body scanners, real-time blood work, a bunch of different software that they had built out. 2021 reached a valuation of over$1 billion, raised a quarter billion-ish Series D round. at this point, from that point on, they sort of pivoted to focusing on this thing called CarePods. And these were like trying to be autonomous, like AI-driven medical kiosks. So honestly, probably right idea, maybe a little bit too early. Eventually, in 2024, they shut down very abruptly. It sounds like they basically just ran out of money. came back very quickly with Torch.

39:48And now they are, of course, being rolled into OpenAI. So you can, I think the right way to read into this, OpenAI just launched OpenAI Health. They're now acquiring Torch. I would assume that they want all of your health data. Like they really want to help you with your health. They want your blood. They're out for blood. They want your blood. They want your blood work. Maybe they could say like, hey, this month, instead of paying, you could be a blood boy for us. Our researchers are working really hard. You need your blood. I'm ready to upload. Upload me. Just let me know. I'm going to read the message that Torch wrote.

40:30Torch says, everyone deserves the best answers modern medicine can give them, and yet we've all had people close to our hearts who didn't get the answers they needed about their health. We have more data about our bodies than ever before, but it's never been harder to bring it all together. patients see only a fraction of their own records, while clinicians have too little time to parse the growing stream of data patients bringing in from wearables and consumer health companies, you know, like Function, et cetera. AI is the most important new tool we've had in decades for turning the chaos into clarity.

40:58But AI can't help you if your health data is scattered across four hospitals, two labs, seven apps, and three web portals. We started Torch to build a medical memory for AI, unifying scattered records into a context engine that helps you see the full picture, connect the dots, and make sure nothing important gets lost in the noise again. Mike has a little life hack here. If you're an early stage AI founder, rename yourself to Ilya and get an M &A offer? Just crazy enough to work. I like it. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with agents.

41:37Every time I see one of these new features drop from Claude, Cowork, or OpenAI, ChatGPT, Health, it just feels like the Siri thing is bigger and bigger, back to what Tyler was saying about implementation of the model, because Apple has Apple Health. There's a whole promise there of what Apple Health as an app can do. You want that to be AI-enabled, so they need to update that as well. And there's so many different, okay, shopping, agentic commerce, like there's Apple Pay. Is Apple Pay integrated with Siri and the new AI function? So they really do need to go around and update all over the place if they want to stay.

42:21They have some dominant positions carved out, but every AI company is trying to eat off Apple's plate as much as they can. But there's really, really strong lock-in to most of the Apple ecosystem. So it's not over if they don't move right now and get the app out and get updates out. But it's very clear that if Apple or ChatGPT Health is rolling out, it's going to take time for people to ramp up, start integrating things, start using it. But if that behavior develops and it's another two, three years until Apple responds, like yeah they are going to be a laggard in that category. There's a Claude Co-Work reaction thread going on from Zvi Muschewitz.

43:07Lots of people kind of mixed reviews. Eleanor Berger says research preview. This is the future not the present. For now if you want a local agent Claude Code is still the best you can recommend even if it's for non-coding tasks. Some people are saying it's buggy. Have you had a chance to try it out Tyler? Can you install Claude Co-Work today? Yeah, I mean, so I downloaded it yesterday, but it's kind of, we talked about this earlier in the gym, like, I actually don't know what to do with it, because I'm like already technical, already have cloud code. My sense is that this is basically just a...

43:38We get it. My sense is it's basically just a UI wrapper. No, seriously, we get it. We get it, you're technical. Hit him with a flashback. It's too powerful. No, okay, but it's like a UI wrapper around cloud code, so it's like not providing maybe an insane amount of like brand new functionality. I mean, there's a huge swath of consumers who are just never going to really open the terminal. Even if you go to Claude and say, how do I install Claude code? I heard it's hot. And Claude code says, literally just hit command space bar, type T-E-R-M, hit enter. It'll open the terminal. And then copy and paste this line and then tell it what you want, just like it's ChatGPT or Claude.

44:21People still won't do that because it's like, oh, what's this weird thing? You need like 15 gigs for it too. Yeah, you do need some space in your hardware, but that's not a huge issue for most people. Yeah, but it's not fully frictionless. Whereas an app might sort of hold your hand through that a little bit more. And so I'm optimistic about this, but I do think that the marketing and the messaging, and actually like the Threadboy influencers are going to be pretty important here, where if you see someone demo something cool with Claude co-work, that's going to be a key to open it up. A lot of people, you know, in the early days of ChatGPT rolling out, a lot of people were sharing prompts.

45:03What's a good prompt? You know, prompt engineering. Like, oh, you take this prompt and do this. Because a lot of people need inspiration. It's the same thing with mid-journey. Like, if you just give someone a blank box and tell them, this is an image generator. I'll just say like dog and then you just give them a picture of a dog and they're like yeah It looks like a dog. I could go to Google images. What's special about it is like I want to be my dog And I want to be fighting Darth Vader and I want it to be on in downtown LA And then it creates something that you can't just find on Google images.

45:30The same thing will be true on On Claude co-work. There are tools for just cleaning up your desktop. There's I think Alfred is one of them There's a few others that just do automated sort of deterministic cleanup of desktops. But people will eventually be sharing Claude co-work workflows, prompts, best practices, and just giving people the idea as simple as that sounds. The capability's there, but there's this capability application overhang where you need to actually tell people, hey, this is something that you could use Claude co-work for. Mike says, think the position as co-work is actually really sharp.

46:06I agree. I think that it's kind of a mouthful, Claude co-work, but going back to what I was saying last week when people when some lab leaders have been talking about the potential of AI, they just say oh, AI is going to do this, AI is going to do that obviously the at least near term reality is humans are going to use AI to do things and I think Anthropic trying to be more human about it and saying like, hey, you're working with this thing, it's not claw-domating you away There are people having fun with the claw guns, the portmanteaus First before we read through these let me tell you about railway railway simplifies software development Web apps servers and databases running one place with scaling monitoring and security built in Near friend of the show says his job.

46:52Oh, it got claudemated away No one has no one. I can't believe no one has said this not even a single in 1000 likes people are into this Paula says he hates AI Oh, he's claudstrophobic claudstrophobic. Okay, these are getting a lot of likes, but not exactly belly laughing for me. Oh, yeah. Not quite. I'm glad people are having fun. I do think Claude's a funny name. And, you know, it's the perfect balance. Yeah, John Palmer was really pushing, like, hey, now's the time. To rebrand. To rebrand. To what? I mean, a naming exercise can be, you know, a very expansive project. But I do think it's probably too late.

47:34We're right. Claude is going all the way. Yeah, they've all sort of worked out. I don't know. ChatGPT. Bard, in hindsight, Bard was kind of under. Having a digital Bard. Bard. Yeah, Bard was funny. But Gemini works. They're building up the brand there. And Claude works as well. ChatGPT, such a mouthful, such an insane name, so clearly named by a developer. But it just broke through in such a way. And then they did buy chat.com. So it winds up working. Claude Code, for the rest of your work, American middle-class desk jockeys watching the asteroid hit the dinosaurs, we will see. We'll see how much this moves productivity, how much this moves GDP.

48:20That's the big question for this year, is how much will people actually be able to use this to do the work they do every day? I've been in jobs where my job - desktop files was actually a$1 trillion industry. Yeah. And I mean, I, I have, I have been, I was, I was an intern once and my job was basically to open up an Excel template every day, copy paste some, some numbers, uh, sort of make sure all the formulas held. And over the internship, over the couple of months, I wrote more and more visual basic so that my job went from eight hours on the first day to four hours to eventually it was like 15 minutes.

49:04I would just like get there and just hit a script. I would just click a button and it would just do everything. And now it's just with like normal software. Now you probably have to, you have to, you know, reality check. So make sure there's no hallucinations. But in general, like some of these jobs can be automated. The question is like, if someone uses this to automate their own job, Will they just be sitting there watching reels in the small corner, and when their boss comes by, they alt tab. So they're looking, oh, I'm still working really hard. Nothing's been automated. These models are slop.

49:37I definitely still need my job. Where does the value accrue? Who's reclaiming the value? I mean, we did talk to a friend who was saying that, like, you know someone who has some sort of desk job, has been effectively automated by ChatGPT, but just spends all day golfing now. And the boss doesn't know that the job's been automated because the boss doesn't understand. Yeah, we might see a bull market and water cooler talk. Ooh, yeah, that's possible. As people automate more and more of their work and just decide to yap. Well, speaking of water, let's go over to Augustus DiRico, the rainmaker himself.

50:13But first, let me tell you about app-loving, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business. Today, Augustus says, I'm AI-pilled after seeing what the new grad philosophy major I hired to fly drones from a mountaintop has automated at Rainmaker with Claude. He's very happy. Yeah, we keep asking Tyler, hey, can you automate this? And he says, sorry, sir, it's not possible yet. It's not possible yet. I don't believe it. I never said that. I'm kidding. He basically said everything. So Boris Churney, who is... Runs Claude Code.

50:54Runs Claude Code. He created Claude Code. Remember, he popped over to OpenAI for like two weeks, right? No, that was Cursor. Oh, he popped over to Cursor. Wait, so he went to Cursor, he churned, and went back to Anthropic? Yeah. So he's literally churning. Crazy moment last summer. He's churning in terms of his jobs. Yes. Churning through jobs. Interesting. Interesting. Good nominative determinants. Well, how much code did he write to develop Claude Co work? He apparently used Claude Co entirely and did none of the coding himself. Fantastic. Very, very cool. So he said, since we launched Claude Co, we saw people using it for all sorts of non-coding work, doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email, canceling subscriptions, recovering wedding photos from a hard drive, monitoring plant growth, controlling your oven.

51:43These use cases are diverse and surprising. The reason is that the underlying Cloud Agent is the best agent and Opus 4.5 is the best model today. We're so excited to introduce CoWork, our first big step towards making Cloud Code work for all your non-coding work. The product is early and raw, similar to what Cloud Code felt like when it first launched. And And that's the big question, Tyler, is Claude Code was very bare bones, rough around the edges when it launched. It's now so full functioning that everyone loves it and it's building whole new products. What do they need to add to co-work to make it an even better product?

52:25I don't know. I feel like in the app ecosystem, in the chat app ecosystem, the level of value that comes from product design, UI, UX, is still underrated. Obviously, no one doubts that the models are great. But if you use the Claude app and you generate a deep research report or something like that, you click the play button to have it read it to you, you can't fast forward or rewind. You can't change the speed. And you also, if you close your phone, it just stops playing. So you need to be sort of like touching the phone to keep it working, to keep it open while you listen to this report. And that just feels like, oh, that's like not a good user experience.

53:14And ChatGPT has solved that and has some more they can do background audio. And these are all sort of simple APIs in iOS, but it takes time and consideration. You have to decide where the buttons go and what they look like. And Cloud Code can do a lot of that, but it takes time and someone has to make a decision. My neighbor Murph in the X chat says, I'm interested in Noah Nowork. Claude co-work. Noah Nowork? I like that. Something there. That's great. Anyway, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next.

53:55Netcap girl, Sophie, says, okay, Claude, take this unstructured data and turn it into dashboards that will give executives deeper insights into critical business functions. Make no mistakes. Cheer tickets is all reliable because Sophie posts some version of this. Wait, really? Once a day. Once a day? Basically. No way. She's gone viral with the same concept. Wait, but like, has it always been about Claude? No, no, no. Oh, just about - Just constantly being re-purpose. Just playing the hits. You gotta play the hits. Critical business functions. Atlas says, Claude, here's a picture of my crush. Claude, here is her phone number.

54:29Make her my GF. Make no mistake. That's also his BIM playing. Everyone has their role to play in the post-singularity hangout sesh. Turbo Puffer. Serverless Vector and Full Text Search. Built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. There's a billion dollars inside Opus 4.5 model weights, and you just need to type the right cloud code prompts to get them out. Says Frankie. Very true. Lots of opportunity. Actually knowing how to code Jawan says there's no point in learning Or doing anything anymore Just learn English and acquire a good mental Model of things and just type bro Just type Yeah We'll see I mean you have to actually be inspired To come up with something that people want Talk to users or something like that Cloud Code is so successful They had to make Cloud Code Not for code instead of just Cloud Claude code not for code instead of just Claude.

55:30It is funny that there's these opportunities to retool the brand around, because we're now three levels deep. There's Anthropic, there's Claude, and there's Claude code and Claude co-work. And you could have just said Claude code and Claude co-work are now just Claude. It's one thing. It works in the terminal. It also works on your desktop. It's one thing. But it's interesting that Anthropic clearly sees some sort of divide between technical and non-technical users that they assume that will persist at least for a reasonable amount of time. Let's see. Introducing Claude Cowork. It's giving an AK-47 to a monkey, which is one of my favorite, favorite meme images ever.

56:14If you scroll up, you'll see. One of the best formats of all time. Yes. You could definitely do some damage on a computer or in a corporate environment. If you really turn it loose on the network, we will see. I'm sure there will be more total just ridiculous mistakes than malicious intent, but it will be interesting. So Deja Vu Coder goes on to say, Initially, I thought it's computer use, but looks like it's cloud code shaped with more UI, UX focused towards non-technical people, especially those who... Real quick, Goldrock in the chat is headed to an interview with Goldman Sachs. One, let's give it up for Goldman Sachs.

56:56And two, let's all send some good luck towards our boy. Yes. Shulte also posted, of course, because he's involved in this. Oh, he is? What else is going on? Yes. Oh, Ramp also has a coding agent. They built their own. Fax Herbert shared this. The TriRamp engineering team built a coding agent last month called Inspect, and it's now dominating our internal use cases. I can't tell you how fun it is to continually have my mind blown by our technical folks. Very, very interesting to actually, people are very confused by this, but it's a very special team, very special company. And so it makes sense in this particular context to build something special.

57:44And they also have an agentic spreadsheet product at this point. And they've been having a lot of fun developing new software very quickly all over the place. Before we move on, CrowdStrike, your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And Rune is back to vague posting. He says that the elves have left for Valinor. Please, sir, can I have a crumb of context? Just a crumb. The I require context hat goes on. Elves, people. We need a hat here. We do. The I require context hat. Yes, I don't know exactly what he's referring to. It is a vague post, but we'll have to dig into it.

58:27Maybe we'll have to have him back on the show. Well, QT Cash is speculating, saying given that Rune is likely referencing his own quern comment talking about the downfall of open AI, what does this mean for the future? Uh, Warren says, apropos of Susquever now having left opening. I forget. I've gone back to my thinking about the longterm consequences of Altman's coup and something I began to wonder in 2021 when the news about Anthropic broke, what if the elves have left middle earth? What if opening eye has lost its mojo? If so, what would that look like? And how would we know what's the rot narrative?

59:01Interesting. Interesting. Oh, wait. So, uh, Zoomer also says he's talking about the California tax proposal, Fed shenanigans. You're misreading the tweet. So the elves could just be our most loyal. And this is the power of vague posting. Yes, you can interpret it a bunch of different ways. It's like sprinkling some tea leaves. So, yes, I mean, regardless, you know, OpenAI, have they lost their mojo? Certainly not when it comes to vague posting. Tyler, what do you think? Okay, yeah, so there's like the two different ways to look at it, right? It's either about California or OpenAI. Yes. but so I think he probably meant it as like okay this is about California billionaire attacks but like all the news about that has broken like earlier this week like all the everyone's leaving right it's it's kind of late to post that yeah but it's a perfect time to post uh as you kind of see at least the vibes on x like really hard going against open ai pro anthropic so I think it's like if someone asked him about it he's like oh it's about the billionaire attacks but you know subtly maybe it's actually maybe it could also it could also be so the elves could also be shalto and dork cash and valinor could be the gym because they did a workout together with atlas creatine cycle uh and uh they're looking in fighting form well let me tell you about gusto the unified platform for payroll benefits and hr built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses and the backbone of TBPN.

1:00:21Yes, it is. So there's some, there's some, oh, we do. Yes. Let's do it. In the Restream Waiting Room, we have Shervin Peshavar and we will welcome him to the TBPN Ultra Dome. Shervin, how are you doing? Good to see you. How are you? Thank you so much. We're good. Good to see you again. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show. Maybe you could start with just give us the highest level of what's going on in your world, what's going on around the world. How are you interpreting the news of the last few weeks? This has been going on for more than two weeks. Yeah, I can't imagine what a roller coaster it's been.

1:01:00How are you introducing this at the highest level possible? At the highest level possible, this is one of the greatest displays of courage by humans, young Iranians, and Iranians of every age. by the millions are in the street the last couple weeks, you know, demanding their freedom. They've been living in an open air prison for the last 47 years. The work that, you know, the Crown Prince Reza Pallavi has been doing has succeeded in having millions of people calling out for him to return, for there to be a process towards a democracy, towards a transition process. The people are demanding their freedom.

1:01:48And just in the last 48 hours, the numbers are staggering. 12 ,000 people have been killed by the army, the military. The Supreme Leader, Khamenei, who is one of the most evil humans on the planet, has ordered the mass killing of people. So you have an open-air prison where people have no freedoms. and now you have an extermination camp happening. So you have horrific videos coming out. These people are defenseless. They have nothing to protect themselves except their hopes and dreams and their demands for freedom. They're calling out for Reza Pahlavi to return, and he's the son of the last king.

1:02:39He's a big believer in freedom and democracy. and has a plan for reconstruction. And many of us, including myself, have joined his efforts and his movement. And now the difference is you have President Trump outwardly saying to the Iranian people, we have your back, we're locked and loaded. That gave the people the courage to come out and protest for the last couple of weeks. and this is not a protest movement anymore. This is a revolution. They want a complete change in the government. What we're working on is essentially a process to have an interim government led by Reza Pahlavi, who millions of people are asking for, and the time to act is now.

1:03:32President Trump said that he has their back and at any minute that can be, He reaffirmed that today. You know, Prime Minister Netanyahu has said the same things. And, you know, the connection, by the way, is very biblical between the Jewish people and the Persian people. Cyrus the Great, 2 ,500 years ago, earned a spot in the Bible by freeing the Jews from slavery in Babylon, returning them to their homeland in Jerusalem and rebuilding their temple. He celebrated by the Jews, he celebrated by the Persians, he celebrated by the Christians. He had the first declaration of human rights. and then biblical symmetry 2 ,500 years later, it's the Jewish people who are helping the Persian people free themselves from the shackles of slavery, from these terrorists that have held them in an open-air prison for the last 47 years.

1:04:33The whole world has been reshaped by the huge mistake of 1979 of allowing these extremist Marxist-Islamist coalition to take over and we've seen the effect they've had. They funded all of the terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East, including Hamas and Hezbollah. And now we see the invasion of Europe and the UK and potentially America as well by extremist ideologies. And that needs to end. It needs to end now. You see the evil that's happening right now. What's the next domino to fall? Like what does forward movement look like for the revolution? Do you want to get to like tens of millions of protesters?

1:05:20Is it just growing the protest movement? Is there an election process? Is there some specific mechanic that we're waiting to look for? We're beyond the tens of millions. The tens of millions were in the streets in the last couple of weeks. It's the biggest numbers ever. The Crown Prince Reza Pallavi has been calling for people to come in the streets at certain times, and they've been listening. We have an open channel of communications because of Starlink. These freedom technologies, as I call it, I've been working on that since 2010. I had a dinner with the Secretary of State back then, and I said the last bastion of dictatorship is the router, and we need to be able to use satellites to bring beam internet communications to people so that dictators and tyrants can't block the internet.

1:06:09So what are they doing? So the regime is making efforts to neutralize Starlink. Is that correct? That's right. I actually, when I started this project with a band of rebels, we, in 2022, we went to SpaceX Starlink, bought, you know, tons of Starlinks, and we figured out three different routes to smuggle it into the country to get it to the protesters. At the time, there were only nine Starlings in the country, and now there's thousands. And those Starlings are the way that these videos that we're all seeing from the protests are reaching the world. Otherwise, now they're using military jammers to block and jam the Starling connections.

1:06:58And luckily, Elon and his team are some of the smartest humans on the planet. So they've figured out how to, you know, get around that. Ukraine was a great laboratory for that as well. And when the Starlings went there, it changed the whole dynamic of the war. And I had played a role in making some introductions there. And now what we're seeing is the same dynamic in Iran. Now there's tens of thousands of Starlings. They're getting around the jamming. President Trump reached out to Elon, it's in the news yesterday, for more help with Starlink. So, you know, this is something as an industry, as Silicon Valley and tech, that we should be very proud of.

1:07:44These technologies that we work on are what I call freedom technologies. And they're part of the arsenal of taking down really these criminal and terrorist organizations and tyrants that have taken over sovereign nations with nuclear bombs. or attempting to get the nuclear bombs. So, you know, these are the technologies that can be used increasingly so to let humans have the freedoms and the democracies that we're so blessed to have in America. You know, I escaped Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. I had bombs falling on me as a kid. and my father had to escape Iran because he was a journalist, radio television for the last Shah and he bravely put the foreign language broadcast to let people know how to get out of the country and save a lot of lives and the Supreme Leader then Khomeini put him on the execution list so I didn't see my dad for two years, bombs were falling every night And I remember as an eight-year-old kid, all my drawings were of war, of tanks and guns.

1:08:57And I had this fantasy as an eight-year-old. I was really into remote control planes. And I thought, what if I could use these RC planes to bomb Khomeini's house? And now 47 years later, under the 47th president, that possibility is very real. What is the dynamic between the armed forces that are killing protesters? And like, how do you wake up and, you know, put on a uniform and then go gun down, you know, your countrymen? Like, how is that sustainable? At what point do those people start to turn? We've seen this in other revolutions. You know, people, you know, you can't kill 50 million people.

1:09:48At some point, people begin to defect. And I was with the crown prince just a couple days ago. And, you know, one of the stories was that there's thousands of people are calling in sick from the military and the police. That's a form of a labor strike. and they don't want to kill innocent people. They've been shipping in mercenaries who don't even speak Farsi or Persian and they've been using mercenaries as well to kill innocent people. These are occupiers. They're not Iranian. Their souls are not Iranian. They're Islamic extremists that took over a country who should have never allowed it to happen and a free democratic Iran going back to the roots of who we are would be the greatest peace and economic dividend in the world.

1:10:47We've been working on something called the Cyrus Accords, which we want to basically join the Abraham Accords and have an Iran and an Israel that are at peace, an Iran and the Middle East that are at peace together, a new digital Silk Road where all these economies are working together, jobs are being created. And some of the greatest engineers in the world are Iranian, as we all know. Silicon Valley is full of incredible Iranian-American entrepreneurs. The calculations I have, if you add up Uber, Google, eBay, all the different companies that were either founded or early on built by Iranian-Americans, it's in the trillions of dollars of contributions to the American economy, and that's only with a million Iranians.

1:11:38Imagine with 92 million brilliant Iranians, what could be unleashed in the world? Instead of exporting terror, we'll export hope and innovation. How have economics played a role or the local economy played a role in this current revolution? I know that's part of what's the just frustration with the state of things. I think that was the regime offering like some effectively like stimulus checks or something of that sort. I saw something like that. But what's going on that I'm sure that's kind of feeding into the movement? Well, the currency has collapsed as of yesterday. The conversion rate to the dollar was zero.

1:12:23The currency has collapsed. Inflation has gone out Has that gone out of control? I don't think this is the interview for Soundboard. Yeah. I mean. We're coping. It's okay. But the water system has collapsed. Yeah. The power system has collapsed. This is a perfect storm. Yeah. And we're days away. If action is taken and the head of the snake is cut off, I predict there will be 50 million Iranians in the street celebrating and, you know, Reza Pahlavi returning interim government that will be recognized by all the governments in the world that are aligned with freedom and democracy in the Iranian people.

1:13:13This is a moral cause of our time. These are the brave hearts of our time. These young people, by the millions, are sacrificing their lives for a freedom that they might not live to see. Think about that for a second. That is the kind of spirit that started America and started the Western democracies of the world. My great-grandfather started the first constitutional revolution from Tabriz in 1906. and recruited an American named Morgan Schuster. If you read the book, The Strangling of Persia by Morgan Schuster, he's a Midwest American, a brilliant man who has a statue in Iran in his honor from back then.

1:13:58And they tried, they were inspired by Jeffersonian democracy to bring democracy to America. And that paved the way for all the modern rebuilding, the Pahlavi, the original Pahlavi, Reza Pahlavi, And then his father, Mohammed Reza Pallavi, continued. And by 1978, Iran had the fourth largest army in the world. It had one of the greatest economies in the world. Everyone was coming there, Sinatra. And it was a beautiful, beautiful place. And, you know, there was a coalition of Islamic extremists in the beginning of the woke Marxist socialist era that we're now seeing in places like New York and Mamdani.

1:14:41And they've exported this strategy because it was so successful for them to take a major strategic asset and country with major resources like Iran and own it and then use those assets that God blessed Iran with to export that ideology and that terror. So this is the fight of our times. If we defeat the Islamic regime, we will unleash an era of peace and prosperity for the world. What's the history of protests in Iran? It feels like there's been small moments, 2009 with disputed elections, 2017, 2019, 2022. It feels like every few years there's a moment that could grow. It hasn't in the past. Walk me through some of the history and then help me understand why this time might be different.

1:15:37That's a great question and also a good framework to think about what's happening exactly at this moment. Like the next 48 hours, I think, is do or die. Each time those protests got to a moment where it could have turned into a change, a significant change in the government. Like 2009, the Green Revolution in 2009 and 2010, you know, the president at the time, President Obama, made a major, major critical mistake. And he didn't back the protesters the way President Trump is backing the protesters. And when you don't back them, when you don't give them the courage that they will have the support of America and other democracies in the world that care about freedom and care about destroying terrorism that is a threat to our way of life, it fizzles out.

1:16:30And then they learn, the Islamic regime learns, and they become even more extremist and abusive and causing hangings by the thousands and imprisonments and rapes and to scare people and terrify people. They keep power through fear. And the thing I learned when I went to try to spread satellite communications in those revolutions in Libya, I went there two weeks before Gaddafi was killed and went to Benghazi, went to Tripoli a month after it was freed, went to Tahir Square. I wrote something called Fear is Finite and Hope is Infinite. it. When the people lose their fear is when freedom movements actually succeed.

1:17:21And the people, as you can see, by the millions in the streets, even with all the killings, they're still coming out. Last night, they still came out. They've lost their fear. And that's when these types of tyrants fall. So if there is support from the air, from the skies, like Starlink, that we began that project patiently in order so when this day came there would be open communications with the world and coordination, but also support from the sky in terms of taking out some of these tyrants. We took out the nuclear capability before because that was an existential threat, but these evil leaders are as bad as a nuclear bomb.

1:18:09They're just a nuclear bomb in a human form. I feel like a lot of people who grew up and came of age during the war on terror don't have a lot of optimism about regime change. They tend to think that even if there's someone, some interesting person, a lot of energy to come in and lead, the infrastructure is so important because a government's not just one person. and there's ministers and leaders and all sorts of a chain that needs to form. And if you don't have a full government ready to go, how can you just rip and replace, drop in someone new? Their minds go to the de-Bathification in Iraq and all the chaos that happened there.

1:18:56How do you think Americans who've sort of been blackmailed on regime change in the Middle East should be thinking about a positive outcome here? Well, one experience in Iraq. First of all, Iran is not Iraq. It's 92 million people. You know, 87 % don't even consider themselves religious. You know, and so it's a very different nation that is yearning for freedom, loves America, loves, you know, Western culture, wants their freedom. And let us not forget, America saved the world in World War II. The Marshall Plan rebuilt all of Europe. Look at Japan's success. And so, you know, and then you look at Reagan and tear down this wall and the pressure that he put on the Soviet Union and all of the clandestine efforts that happened to weaken the Soviet Union.

1:20:02Is Germany today a bad place to live? It wasn't until potentially extremist Islam invaded Europe. Is Poland a bad place? I was just in Poland multiple times for my work and my investments. It's a thriving economy. So we have to look at the positive examples of what's possible when you unleash freedom. you have economic boom and you have humans that are thriving and contributing to our world. Well, thank you so much for coming and giving us the update. Best of luck to you and everyone involved and stay safe and best of luck. We'll talk to you soon, Shervin. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon.

1:20:45Cheers. Goodbye. Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We got to go over to the OpenAI device. There's new leaks, alleged leaks. We'll see. It's a new audio wearable meant to replace AirPods. This aligns with what the information has been leaking. The code name, Sweet Pea. Interesting. It looks like a metal egg stone with two little capsules behind the ear, aiming for a two nanometer chip, maybe a custom chip for phone-like actions. Big ambition, 50 million units in year one.

1:21:25That's a lot of devices. Yeah, so Foxconn has been told to prepare for five total devices by Q4 of 2028. Whoa, this is interesting. All not known, but a home-style device and a pen are still considered. I wonder how serious going to Foxconn, if you're open AI, you go to Foxconn and you say, prepare for five devices. What does that really mean? Does it mean, okay, help me prototype, do some demo runs, build me one or two, and maybe we'll do one of the five, maybe we'll do two of the five. Is Foxconn really reorienting everything around this? Are they totally prepared to make five? How serious is that?

1:22:03I don't know. All I know is that it's exciting. I like hardware. It's fun. We're seeing it. We're seeing glimpse of this with the kids, with the board, and with the, what was it called? Camera box? No. sticker box. Yeah. Sticker box. Yeah, I think, I mean, OpenAI, it sounds like Johnny's team are the ones that are kind of pushing for this form factor, according to, obviously, this is a rumor, but picking a form factor similar to AirPods, which have insane product market fit, which last time I checked are like a$20 billion revenue line for Apple. Yeah, yeah. Very, it could be a standalone business by itself.

1:22:42And again, if you look back to the infamous interview with Gerstner, Sam was saying, like, we have a device coming. Yeah. We have a device coming. Don't worry about that. 50 million units, that's a lot of revenue, potentially. I mean, I don't know if they sell them. What do you think the price point for an open AI device would be? $300? $1 ,000? $999? $3 ,500? I feel like they have to stay in the range of the AirPods. And AirPods are between$100 and$300. basically so low single digit hundreds um well andrew curran has a projection for what it'll look like if they ship this i think they got an absolute blockbuster on their hands uh i would rock that we're already wearing eye in-ear monitors i don't know if you can see over here just this this goes so hard it goes the reason i like it is because the the computer part is actually on the back.

1:23:42So it frees you up to just stay locked in. Super cool. And also, I love that there's a display that you can't see, but everyone else can. So everyone else knows, oh, he's doing a deep research report right now. Oh, he's locked in. Let's check in on John. John, can you turn around for a second? Oh, okay. Three green lights. He's printing. He's making money. Brian says, this will be as successful as Humane, Friend, Rabbit, etc. Oh, no. Yeah, let us know in the chat if you're bullish or bearish on the OpenAI device. A lot of risk, but a lot of resources. A lot of good people over there. Anyway, whenever they announce it, you know that they're going to live stream it.

1:24:19They're going to get on Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. In other news, we've got to go to Apple Creator Studio. Tyler, can you break this down for us? What are they doing? Who are they taking shots at? Apple Creator Studio. So it seems they're basically just rolling all of their software. I don't know if there's actually any new software, but they're just rolling it together into some subscription. It's kind of like a - Creative Cloud. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Because, I mean, they already have the kind of same, like there's Final Cut and Premiere.

1:24:53So Jaws here says, meet Apple Creator Studio. It's giving creators of every kind easy access to powerful, intuitive tools for video, music, imaging, and productivity. all supercharged by intelligent features that speed up and elevate their work. Were they previously selling Final Cut Pro separately? I think they were, right? Yeah, usually. I remember as a kid paying two. I was like, wow, I'm going to spend$200 on a piece of software. And that felt like$200 ,000. And you got some for free. Like you get iMovie for free. But then Final Cut is an upgrade. And I was actually thinking about purchasing a Mac Mini or something.

1:25:34And I was going through the checkout flow. And one of the options that they put right there is, do you want to buy Final Cut Pro for an extra 200-something bucks? And so it seems like they may be doing away with that. Let's dig in. Apple has just introduced Apple Creator Studios' Aaron here, analyst at Mac Rumors. Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and Mainstage, plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers come together in a single subscription. They have the Games subscription. Don't they have a Health subscription as well? There's music.

1:26:06There's news. Apple has seven different subscriptions now that I think about it. Yeah. I would love to know what the average iPhone customer spends on software monthly and what Apple's take is on it. They're printing. Their services business is everything at this point. Yeah, I guess you could just divide services revenue. Well, services revenue, they don't really break it all out. Whenever they talk about services, they talk about Apple TV, all the wonderful TV shows and movies that they're producing. But then a lot of the services revenue comes from the App Store, 30 % cut. You're laughing. What's funny?

1:26:43Dave says, Jordy, you dork. You didn't pirate it. You didn't pirate it. Honestly, my father was very much like, you wouldn't steal from the grocery store. Don't steal from a big computer, big Apple. Yeah, respect. Respect big tech from day one. Respect cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. I mentioned it earlier, but Dwarkesh Patel and Shalto Douglas did a gym workout with Creatine Cycle. There's a new series. He's going to hit the gym with AI researchers. This is what the modern media landscape needs for sure.

1:27:26I love it. Very, very fun. and Dorkesh says in his defense Sholto is almost Olympian very very good Atlas looking absolutely diced in this it's insane oh quick shout out to Donnie Honig who says TBPN is the only show I like hearing the ad reads on they just make it so fun well you're welcome Donnie here's another ad read 11 labs build intelligent real time conversational agents reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs thank you for we got to talk about we got to talk about 11 labs growth uh maddie highlighted oh yeah he highlighted it yesterday he said zero to 100 million AR was 20 months 100 to 200 10 months 200 to uh 200 to 330 was just five months so little uh quite the acceleration really really good uh and he is looking sharp yeah here on Bloomberg and and And also, it's such an interesting story because when this came out, it was the textbook critique of the other labs are going to steamroll you.

1:28:32They have all the researchers. They have all the compute. They have all the money. Oh, it doesn't matter what you raise. They raised 100 times that. This is a side project. They're going to be able to whip this up in a cave with scraps. You're going to get steamrolled. And it just hasn't happened. And I think it goes back to the focus on pure play focus. We've seen Anthropic with the focus on code do really well. This focus on voice and the focus on taste, sort of the mid-journey of audio is my new frame of mind here. That it's less of a commodity, more opinionated than I think people realize when it seems like just put the weights in the bag and you're good to go.

1:29:16Anyway, do we have our next guest here? Let's read through this back and forth between Tim Sweeney and Palmer Luckey, because they're going back and forth. PC Gamer reported that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney argues banning Twitter over its ability to AI-generate adult images of minors is just gatekeepers attempting to censor all of their political opponents. Tim Sweeney fired back and said this is a vile lie by PC Gamer. I criticized a government official for pressuring Apple and Google to block a speech app owned by their political opponent deplatforming 500 million users on the pretense of stopping a small number of users from distributing disgusting content and Palmer Luckey chimed in and said PC gamer loves to make things up about people they don't like and he's Going back to a report that PC gamer put out about Airborne this is insane headlines tech billionaires including Palmer Luckey set up dumb new bank for those who didn't get burned enough in the 2022 crypto crash.

1:30:17You could write a headline like that. That's insane. Why does PC Gamer? Just so hard. They literally use the word dumb. I mean, I guess this is opinion piece or something, but it's all about the stable coins and they call them a bond villain. Wow, they really don't like him. This is crazy. Palmer replied, he said, quote, the point of SVB and thus Erebor is risky bets on fledgling startups that are unlikely to be backed by traditional finance, which has all these pesky rules and regulations. Why are you lying? The point is literally the opposite. Yeah, you don't want to recreate SVB because it didn't turn out.

1:30:54We don't want to keep our next guest waiting. We don't. So before we bring them in, let me tell you about Vob.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on Meta. Well, we have the president and CEO of Booz Allen Hamilton here. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining. Hey, guys. Good to see you. Good to see you, too. Great to have you. I love your – I want to talk about the partnership with Andreessen Horowitz, but first I want you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey because it's a classic overnight success that we love here on the show.

1:31:32Overnight success. I love it. Thank you for the special effects. I was wondering if you're going to use some. Of course. I'll use a lot, as much as you want. So, born and raised in Argentina. I came here to go to school. Find my way to Wisconsin, Eau Claire, of all places. Loved it there. I went to grad school, joined Booz Allen. This summer will be 35 years. That I was a summer intern with Booz Allen. Wow. And here I am, you know, and thought I was going to be here for two years. but fell in love with the people, with the work, with the culture. And I kept getting challenged. And every time I wanted to leave, they promoted me.

1:32:13So I stayed. That's amazing. That's a virtuous cycle for you. It's been great. Were there any breaks? I know that a lot of my friends who were interns in consulting or banking would leave for a couple of years doing MBA and then maybe come back. Was there any of that? Or were you just there the whole time? No. Wow. Right through. I'm truly a lifer. It's amazing. What advice are you giving to the next generation of folks who might be interns right now at Booz Allen? Is that opportunity still there? Do you see the lifer path as being one that you recommend to the new interns? A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

1:32:50Look, I mean, I think you, first of all, I tell everybody, you got to find that organization that where your personal values and what you want to do matches the organizational values and what they want to do. And when you find one, grab on with both hands because that alignment is what keeps you going. Yeah. And then I say to people, look, I mean, I early in my career, I wanted to get promoted and this and that and the other thing. And then I at some point I said, you know what? I just want to learn stuff. And then they were like, you got to be the CEO. Yeah. What is kind of getting promoted faster?

1:33:23Yeah, that's great. Well, yeah, it's kind of rough. if you're really good at getting promoted, it's kind of rough to kind of, you've kind of capped out a little bit here. But not many promotions left. You know, I come to work because I love what I do. I mean, and this has been true for the last 35 years. And yeah, at the beginning, you know, I was in a bit of the rat race. I got off of that. And literally, I just said, let's go learn stuff. You know, what do I not know about? Let me try and go learn how to do that. Yeah. Yeah. How have the last few years of the AI boom been? Has it turned it more into a rat race?

1:34:00Has there been more greenfield projects that have been less of a rat race? How has the AI boom transformed your business, what you're working on, how you're spending your time? So this has been awesome. First of all, you should know I have a background in statistics. So I was like doing early work on neural networks. And if I'd been born 20 years later, I would have been a data scientist. but we didn't have cool titles like that. But I was a big data guy when big data was tiny compared to what it is now. Let's give it up for big data. We love big data. We love big data here. Yeah. You know, about a dozen years ago, I took the strong form view that said, you know, AI really is going to revolutionize everything.

1:34:45We need to get Azbuzal at the leading edge of that. We built essentially the largest, we're the largest AI provider to the federal government. Most of our business is with the government. We've been the largest cyber player in the federal space going back now maybe 20 plus years. And I've always thought about it as AI and, right? It's this intersection of AI and cyber, AI and space, AI and autonomy. And that's what we've been trying to build. And, you know, Booz Allen really, people think of us as a consulting firm because we were one once. That's the company that I joined. Sure. But if you look at us now, our business is we're in the business of taking leading edge technology and bringing it to government missions.

1:35:37Everything from military missions to space to payment systems to public health. we're bringing tech into all of that which is why we build these amazing partnerships how you know because yeah how has the last year changed your relationship with the government that you know if you start 2025 i think about doge and and a bunch of political energy around reducing cost and maybe reducing budgets and doing more with less which of course software and technology can help with. At the same time, I saw a headline that President Trump thinks the defense budget should be$1.5 trillion. And that feels like, okay, expand.

1:36:25And we're in a different mode. So has that been whiplash? Or how have you processed setting up your business to deliver what you need to to the government across those sorts of narrative arcs that have rolled out over the last 12 months? So if you think about our business, there's two pieces to it. There's work that we do for national security. That's about three quarters of our business. And then there's work that we do for more of the civilian agencies. Think about things like the VA, human health services, treasury, IRS, those kinds of agencies. the administration has been pretty consistent on the more of the civilian side they've been looking very hard for ways to reduce cost on the national security side they've been looking to reprogram against top priorities and so this idea that we're going to spend more on defense going forward if you know that obviously needs to be approved by congress and all of that but the The president's been pretty consistent about wanting to rebuild the military, ensure that our military continues to be the preeminent one in the world.

1:37:40And we view bringing technology into that and working with the commercial technology providers to make their technology useful into those missions, which is not a straight translation by any means, as a big part of what we do. So we develop tech that sits on top or together with their tech, and together we build things that neither one of us could do. So what does that mean for hiring? I imagine that you're partnering with the foundation lab companies, not necessarily trying to go up against Mark Zuckerberg and pay a billion dollars for some fancy AI researcher. let Google DeepMind, let OpenAI, let Anthropic and other labs build the foundation models, and then you can go and implement them.

1:38:27So what type of person is really excelling? How technical are they? Are you hiring computer scientists, MBAs, both? Who's thriving? We're hiring largely, think of it as AI researchers. We have a very large quantum team where we hire astrophysicists. No way. You know, and so we're really at the leading edge of these technologies working side by side with all of our partners. I joke about the fact that I knew Jensen back when he was only worth a couple billion dollars. And he and our companies have been working together on some of these things since like 2017. So we've been at this for a while. I mean, you talk about Mark and Meta.

1:39:12Yeah. We took LAMA and working with them translated into something that could be ported onto the International Space Station. So it became Space LAMA, which is made for some pretty cool memes. But now on the research side of the International Space Station, there is a, for the first time, a large language model there. So that instead of going through all of these paper manuals, every time they need to fix something, they can actually do natural language queries. and do all of that. So that's the type of work that we're doing. If you think about it, most commercial tech, it's oriented towards the idea that you're going to be in a data center that has perfect access to energy, perfect access to fiber.

1:39:57It's 24-7 uptime. When you start dealing with some of the missions that we support, you're at the edge, you're in the desert, you're in space, you're underwater, you have no connectivity, form factor matters, power matters. And we need to take all of this amazing technology and these trillions of dollars in investment and make it useful in those settings. And for that, we build additional tech that is proprietary to us, that combined with theirs really does wonderful things. And we started working with some of the companies that are A16C, Porcos, and discover that, you know, So there's a lot we were doing there with the companies that were already oriented towards our market.

1:40:44But I know you had been on the show on Friday. You know, they have 1 ,100 companies or more in their portfolio. The vast majority of them are not thinking about these missions. But they're building many are building technologies that are highly applicable. Sure. So if we grab their tech and our tech and put it together in a different way, we expand markets, create differentiation. So it's all sorts of good stuff that happens. Yeah. You mentioned you knew Jensen when he was just worth a few billion dollars. When did you meet the Andreessen team? How long has this partnership been in the works? And then I'd love to know more about the nature of the exclusivity of the partnership, how that all takes shape, and anything else you can tell us about it.

1:41:29Sure. So we've been working with companies that are in their portfolio for years without actually engaging with A16Z directly. So, Wuzalan and Databricks, for example, have done a number of things together in the Department of Defense. We do things with Andrel. We have a partnership with Shield AI that makes a ton of sense because we're building our tech and our cybersecurity tech on top of HiveMind, which is their core autonomy product. And then we, about a year plus ago, I started talking to Ben and to Mark, and we started shaping this idea that there's more we could do together at their level that, you know, we could begin to think about not just the companies that are obviously playing in this market, but the broader ecosystem and thinking about, okay, how do we create a way to even do that?

1:42:29What's that discovery process look like? How do we create opportunities? How do we vet them? How do we manage our tech? So that, you know, and that's been over the course of the last year, we've done a bunch of stuff that has gotten us all super excited leading up to this announcement on Monday. What are some of the earliest stage companies that would qualify for this program? Are you working with like Series A stage? They have an accelerator. So there's companies that come in with just one or two co-founders and they get a$100 ,000 check. And then you have a Databricks, which is a$100 billion business.

1:43:05How do you size the partnerships? So we're working, you know, we're almost working problem back. So what is the problem we're trying to solve and who has a piece of this puzzle? So we even have our own little corporate VC fund and there's companies in there. Seek is a great quantum company. Albedo is doing very low-earth orbit. Yeah, I love Albedo. Satellites. Let's see. Scout AI is doing autonomy on the ground. Firestorm is doing essentially 3D-printed drones. And we think about, okay, so what is Firestorm doing? What's SHIELD doing? What are we doing? If we bring all of this together, can we solve a unique problem that we know exists that doesn't have a solution today.

1:43:57So, you know, we're not so interested in the size of the company so much as we're interested in problem back, what can we solve and how do we scale it? So we're working with Mistral, for example, which is in their portfolio on NATO type problems and European ally problems. As you know, Europe is beginning to spend their fair share on their defense budgets. Well, they got a series of issues that we can tackle together that weren't on anybody's radar screen. So that's the kind of stuff that, frankly, super excites me. And I think this is where there's a ton of energy and some really cool stuff coming along.

1:44:35Sure, sure. Jordy, anything else? Yeah, very cool. Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk with us. Congratulations on the partnership, and we're excited to hear more. I'm sure a bunch of portfolio founders will be on the show. Yeah, join us again as you guys have more announcements. Yeah, we'd love to keep talking. Absolutely. Thank you, guys. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom card. Parker Conrad, the founder and CEO of Rippling, chimed in on the one-time California billionaire tax.

1:45:12He says, leave before the Series B. I don't think of Parker as outspoken against the California Democrats very often, but he's quoting Jason Lemkin here, who has more context. Yeah, I can read through this. So Jason says, my take on California's one-time billionaire tax, it's much worse than it looks. Will it pass? Yes, likely. It only needs 50 % plus one voter approval. CEI, you and CTA have done this before. Prop 55 won 63 % in 2016. Will it get tied up in litigation? Almost certainly. Retroactive wealth tax on a tax type California has never had. Equals due process challenges. Billionaires have the legal budgets for years of fights.

1:45:57but it's clearly only the start that the goal is an annual tax not one time and the target is 25 to 50 million dollar net worth folks including illiquid holdings yeah uh i.e early stage founders raising a series b and the one time framing is strategic same coalition is already has ab259 written an annual one percent wealth tax at a 50 at a greater than 50 million dollar threshold with plans to go to$25 million. It's been introduced three years running. The one-time tax removes the constitutional barrier. Once that's gone, the annual version becomes a much easier ballot measure. California Policy Center said if SEIU hopes to keep Medi-Cal spending growing, it may need to place repeated wealth taxes on the ballot, potentially lowering the threshold as billionaires flee.

1:46:43The risk for founders at$1 billion, you're taxing 200 people. At$50 million, you're taxing 23 ,000 households, including the most successful founders on paper before any liquidity event. So imagine you raise a series B, suddenly you have 50 million of paper gains, and suddenly the government's coming over and saying like, yeah, we need you to come up with a piece of that or get on a payment plan. And so then you're effectively like, you know, just like building up a debt to the California government that as of right now seems like it just doesn't go away, Even if your company fails, it's like you owe that to the state.

1:47:21So what will happen here is people might, if this goes through as is, people will start companies like Parker's saying. They'll start the company, and maybe they raise like a pre-seed round, seed round, something like that, and then they'll be like, okay, I literally have to move the company. Or maybe they won't even start it in California in the first place. And Newsom has come out in the last 24 hours and is against the tech. So he is on siding with the tech billionaires. Interesting, yeah. When I see names like Parker Conrad, Vinod Khosla, I don't think of these as the tech right. I just think of these as tech people.

1:48:05And so to see them pushing back against this, is it's less of a political issue and more of a practical issue about where companies will be led from. I saw a different angle that potentially the super voting, like control could be used to determine how much you have to pay. And so you could have a founder who has super voting shares. They have 90 % of the voting shares, but they take on a lot of - company, the bill as, the way it's written today, they'd be taxed as if they have a $90 million position in the company. Which is just insane. They might have a, by that point, they might have a 25%.

1:48:45Exactly. They might have less, depending if they're, you know, multiple founders. So, Pirate Wires has a great piece on this. I encourage everybody to read it. It's California's tech industry kill switch from Mike Solana. He says it's not a tax on wealth. The union's ballot prop is designed to target the very concept of founder controlled companies. Yeah. And it will force the technology industry out of the state. Yeah. It'd be very, very weird to see a situation where a company gets started. They still go to San Francisco because that's a fun place to be. That's an exciting place to be. But then slowly the executive ranks are just relocating to Incline Village or Las Vegas or Texas.

1:49:23Yeah. I was surprised that Jensen was like, Like, yeah, I don't mind it. It's like, were you just trying to earn points, right, with the general population? Like, at what point, like, so many of his employees would be subject to this, right? At a certain point, yes. And I don't know. It could be very complicated. It certainly seems like a just very, very complicated position. Austin Allroad says, I wonder how many founders in California know that if you are making$250 ,000 a year and move to Texas or Florida, you pay$2 ,500 a month less in taxes. Switching state of residence will save enough to cover rent.

1:50:04And of course, Austin, I believe he, doesn't he believe, doesn't he live in Utah? I don't think he lives in California, although he is part of the Silicon Valley community. And Newsom did chime in. He vows to stop the tax. Where are the prediction markets on the tax? Will this happen? While we look that up, let's pull up Gary Tan. He says, it's time for Silicon Valley to actually get involved and organize in California. One, financially tough times are ahead for California. California's government will almost certainly try to loot Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley will flee. Four, this will create a severe loss for the Bay Area and California and for the United States.

1:50:40Five, the only way out is for successful technologists to run and win for office at every level in the two 2026 midterm elections, especially for governor. um and so uh quotes from newson uh newsom says this will be defeated there's no question in my mind i'll do what i have to do to protect the state uh well the governor has long opposed to wealth tax because of concerns all of that is uh just very very complicated but there's really good news because now you can book a hotel on the moon a new startup backed by nvidia ny Combinator is planning to develop the first hotel on the moon by 2032. I'm going.

1:51:19I'm going. It's starting at$416 ,000 per night. We'll see where that actually lands. You can book on their website, but we have the perfect guest to discuss because we have Glenn Fogel, the president and CEO of booking.com. Hopefully we'll be able to book a hotel on the moon. We can ask him about it. He's in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra Dome. Glenn, how are you doing? What's happening? I'm doing well, and that's so exciting to hear hotels on the moon. I know. I love it. The TAM Expander. You guys were looking for more assets to bring on the platform. Why not go interplanetary?

1:51:58This thing is quite a lot of renders, so fingers crossed they can turn it into reality. But here's the thing. Do you remember the TV series? Oh, God, it was AMC. It was Mad Men. Do you remember that? Yeah, man. There was an episode where the person who was supposed to be the head of Hilton, Conrad Hilton, and he'd hired the guy, and he wanted to have the ad be about putting a hotel on the moon. Ahead of their time. Ahead of their time, definitely. This company should go back and reference it. I'm sure there's some great copy buried in there. But fantastic to have you on the show. would love just an introduction on yourself and the journey on how you got here.

1:52:46Well, I'm the CEO of Booking Holdings and Booking.com, which is the largest subsidiary of Booking Holdings. We have a number of different companies that I think many of your watchers would know. Things like not just Booking.com, but OpenTable, for example, or Kayak, or Priceline. And people who are out in Asia certainly have heard of Agoda and a number of other companies as well. And we do travel. Open Table, of course, doing restaurant reservations. But we've been around for a long time. Priceline.com was the first one in the States, and that went public in 1999. And I've been at the company since almost the start.

1:53:25I joined in 2000. So I've been around for a while. Where were you before you joined? Before I joined in 2000, I was a head trader for a guy named Barton Biggs. It was kind of a legend on Wall Street and Morgan Stanley Asset Management. And I left to join Priceline during that first internet boom period. And I joined a week before the NASDAQ peaked in March of 2000, thereby proving a couple things. One, I absolutely should have left my job as trader because I just done what's known as top-ticking trade. That's amazing. Amazing timing to leave. But then you're sitting there being like, am I going to have a job?

1:54:07uh totally well what yeah what matters is you you uh you saw it through uh did you ever was there any was there ever a point that you uh or or any of your peers were like okay maybe the internet is just over or was it like hey we just we really we it's just like we needed to just really hunker down and we got ahead of our skis and uh this is all inevitable but uh it's just not you know like most things it's not always up into the right uh forever well yeah a couple of First of all, certainly our stock went down. I'm going to do the reverse split number because it went to under$8, but to stay listed, we had to actually do a reverse split.

1:54:46So we'll call it what at that time, so you can see on the chart, it's$6 because we'll get it back up. So even my mother at the time thought, like, gee, do you still have a job? Is the company not banked yet or not? And I'd left a pretty good job to do this. But here's the thing. A long time ago, my career, I started out when I came out of college, and this is in the 80s. My first job is I was an IT guy, again, at Morgan Stanley, different time period. I was in their back office doing coding for doing a whole bunch of real exciting things. One of the exciting things was things that we were doing in terms of algorithmic trading.

1:55:24Now, that was back in the day. We weren't calling it AI, though that's exactly what it was. You know, go from the mid 80s to joining in 2000. I really believed in the future of using technology to make life so much better in so many different ways. Priceline at the time was using technology to make it cheaper and easier to travel. So I never doubted the concept that technology is the it's always been the future. I mean, go back a couple hundred years, go back to the Industrial Revolution. Technology is a wonderful thing for improving the human condition. So I would not doubt that. I was a little concerned about our cash position.

1:56:01Everybody should always be. But in the general sense, I was there. Yeah. Never last day. How have you been processing all of the agentic commerce news? We had Harley from Shopify on the show yesterday talking about what Google's doing. Obviously, ChatGPT is interested in agentic commerce being able to complete transactions in the LLMs, in the chatbots, in the apps. How are you thinking about your strategy in a world where people want to purchase things through text and chat? Well, look, people always want things to be easier. And agentic commerce as a concept is fantastic. And we are doing a lot of work with all the frontier players, absolutely, to be very hand in glove, working together to come up with solutions using agentic ways so people can do things easier, faster, better, et cetera, et cetera.

1:56:58That being said, it's going to take some time for things that are very complex, like a lot of travel. Now, I'm not doubting that we're going to be doing a lot of agentic travel transactions, absolutely. it's just not going to be tomorrow. I'm really glad with some of the deals we've already done with all the players. There's not a single one that we haven't either set a deal, done a deal with, working with, making progress with, et cetera. But even more so is what we're going to do internally, what we're building ourselves. We have thousands of engineers. You know, one thing, I don't know if you're watchers or if you watch your show really understand the size of our company you know we're a hundred and approximately 170 175 billion market cap company hit the gong john we got a gong here we'd love to we'd love to hit it on your behalf what's even better is that you know that's twice as big as the next biggest player in travel and i'm talking you know distribution travel i'm talking all travel like number two maybe it's Marriott today.

1:58:01And then after that, it falls off pretty dark. The biggest airline in the world is about a third of our market cap. I mean, Expedia is a fifth. I mean, so we have the size, we've got the scale to do the work to come up with these wonderful things that are going to be coming down the pike. Yeah. So obviously, it feels like it's advantageous to have as much experience as you have at the company for another tech transition uh how are you thinking we were talking to harley about this like is this the is this similar to the mobile moment or social moment obviously with shopify they think a lot about brands which were very much transformed by influencers showing off some leggings or some product that you want to buy and so you go right there and there was a debate will it would that transaction happen on instagram or on facebook it ultimately wound up happening on Shopify, but the ads platform was very valuable and there was an integration there.

1:58:57How are you tracking previous lessons from previous technology shifts in purchasing behavior to kind of prepare for the agentic transition if it happens this year or next year or whenever it happens? Yeah. And because it's so hard to predict the future, as we all know, is making sure you're covering all the options, trying to balance the amount of resources you're putting into things that you're building now versus making sure you continue to improve what you currently have going on that's producing the cash. I mean, that's the thing is that it's always difficult when you have an ongoing entity like ours that's doing very well.

1:59:33And our investors like seeing the cash flow that we produce. They like the growth that we're showing right now. And they are always cautious, as investors should be, is where are you putting that cash that you're producing? Is it going to be put into things that are not going to produce future increased cash? Is it going to be wasted or not? And I believe we've got the right balance set up. We've got the right people. But in terms of people want to know, I'm asked this all the time. It's two questions. It's always are you going to be disintermediated by something new, something different? And B, are you growing fast enough right now to prevent that?

2:00:09I think we have it going well right now. I like the progress that we're making. I like the numbers are showing up and I like the new products we have coming out. So we'll see. But look, nobody has a guarantee. You have to every single day be working incredibly hard to keep up because the competition is very, very stiff. How difficult is it for an AI to act as a travel agent? Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. We've had this question where the AI models seem so powerful. They can build whole websites. They can write more complex code than I could write in a month. They can do it in just an hour.

2:00:49And yet I actually can't just say, hey, I need to get to New York, book me a flight, because I wind up having all these weird preferences. I don't want to lay over. I'm OK flying early, but I don't really want to fly late. Yeah, when people talk, every lab wants to build the best super assistant. And when I think about the moments where like a real EA in my life has delivered the most value, it's when I'm like, OK, this meeting's running late. I'm going to miss my flight. I need to, you know, and I'm just firing off a text being like, you know, I need to switch the car to pick me up like in an extra hour and I'm going to miss my flight.

2:01:26Find me the best flight. I don't want to lay over. Like I want to lay flat, like all these details that today that still takes, you know, that still takes real time. And so I'm curious for you, where do you see these experiences actually sitting? Is it in ChatGPT or Gemini or it's going to be sitting in Siri or will it be sitting on Booking.com and you guys want to own that experience or both? Right. Or will it be in many of the places you just mentioned? Because, for example, right now, let's let's look at what we have right now. We have some we have 60, approximately 65 percent of the people come to our site to buy something, do something to actually do that.

2:02:08They are coming to us direct. Now, I'm doing that number. I'm not including our B2B business on the side there. But 65 percent of the people are coming in directly to our site. There's a loyalty thing. Why? Now, why? Because it's easier, because we know who they are. We already have established certain things that they like and are able to provide them with that. That's great. The thing in the future, though, with the ability of memory, of LLMs to remember what your preferences are over time, that is obviously a powerful thing. Now, we are doing that within ourselves, creating our own ability to make sure.

2:02:44Your example, I want a flat bed. I only like to take the flight at night. All sorts of those things. Those are the things that we are putting in because what we really want is using technology to replace what you just said, that executive assistant who knows everything about you, who loves to make sure they do exactly what you want. And you don't have to ask him or her how to do it. They know how to do it. That's what we are building, but it's even more so. Because your EA should know but may not know, for example, that, oh, I forgot I got to stop by and buy a present because I'm going to visit my friend in France.

2:03:22May not know that. But we want to have it so much so that we know so much about you. We know that. Now that we know that, we know that's going to take a 10-minute delay. And, oops, you may not make that flight because of the delay on the highway. So we're going to switch all this stuff around for you. suggest should we do this because it looks like you're not going to make it so then you can get on a flight you don't miss the flight and then because it's a new flight we automatically are changing the car pickup that you have and we're changing because now your dinner reservations can be later we're changing that too and if there is no availability at that restaurant because we have open table we're looking for a restaurant that's very similar to it right near it and we're going to put a new reservation for you and your friend there.

2:04:07And in addition, because we know you're going to be incredibly tired and you're going to be all upset, what we're going to do is get you a special favor from the hotel. So when you show up at the hotel, you got your favorite bottle of wine and all these things can be done. The technology is there. We just have to stitch it together. That's the hard part. How are you processing the rise of voice agents? I get really excited about uh you know there's so many moments still even with the internet where you if you're traveling you end up having to like call a hotel or talk to somebody in person uh never really want to do that right it's just like give me the information etc uh but it feels like we're moving to a world where uh eventually it could just be agent to agent directly no voice but it feels like we're gonna there's a middle ground where you have agent to human uh or voice agent to voice agent and they're just having a conversation.

2:05:03Or even voice agent to like legacy phone tree, which is all recordings, but it's a deterministic system. And just having an agent be able to run through that speeds things up. Well, one of the wonderful things about right now that we're already doing, and other people are doing it too, is using Gen AI to really speed up and make that customer service issue go away. So that's something that's really powerful. And it is the idea that you don't want to spend time talking to somebody. You certainly don't want to be put on hold. You just want to solve the problem. And what we've been able to do with some of our vendors, some of the things we do internally, is create a much better thing.

2:05:42When you need customer service, you can solve it instantly almost. That's great. Creates a greater loyalty. Because I like using Booking.com because I don't have to wait. It fixes it right away. That is a really powerful thing. But I agree with you. Going down, it's going to be a commodity. Everybody's going to be doing that. Mm-hmm. What's the key to a great celebrity partnership? Hiring a spokesperson. Yeah. The great thing is that it ends up with more business than what you pay them. Yeah. There we go. What are the keys to success? What would you recommend? We've been, we noticed we were watching the Xbox launch at CES and Bill Gates is standing on stage and he's next to Dwayne the rock Johnson and he refers to him just as rock.

2:06:30It's very funny. It's awkward in funny ways, but it's cool. It's interesting. Obviously everyone knows the price line negotiator. But what's the key to success? What would you recommend? When is the right time to bring in a celebrity? Like, do you have a mental model for this or have you just delegated it to someone else on your team? Like how do you, yeah, that's one of the important things is knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know and making sure that the person you're spending a lot of might be the chief marketing officer that that person knows. If they don't, you have to get a different one.

2:06:59And that's why you're paying the money. But here's the truth is, this is an old saying. It's uncertain who really said it first, that half of your brand marketing is wasted. You just don't know which half. That's a problem. And that's the thing. And by the way, I love it when you hit it and it goes out of the park, goes viral, like you just mentioned. I know you've mentioned that one before about Bill and The Rock. But here's the thing is, You can't predict those things. Sometimes you just hit that lightning in a bottle. A lot of the time, it's just wasted money. What's your workout routine? You're looking absolutely jacked, I've got to ask.

2:07:36Well, I'll be perfectly honest with you. I do work out every day. If I'm home and I travel, half the time I'm away from my home. There are a lot of gyms in Europe that don't have a lot of hotels that don't have gyms. So you're doing it in the hotel room, small hotel room and stuff. I always bring some pants so I can get something done. But I tell you, it's so important because one of the things when you're doing – every single person right now in the tech world, we're all working incredibly hard. And to stay healthy, it's really important to work out. We've joked on the show before we get frustrated at gyms having a dumbbell weight limit.

2:08:18We think it's because of the insurance, but most gyms, the weights, the dumbbells stop at 40 pounds, 50 pounds. I think that could be a booking.com feature. I want hotels. So first of all, you guys are big guys. Let's face it, 6 '8", 6 '1", I mean, you're tall people. You're big people. Normal-sized people don't worry about this quite as much. I know, but you have a small but very passionate audience. Yeah, no. Look, you know the answer to this, by the way. It's not the amount of weight. You can do more reps. You get the same impact. There you go. Less weights, more reps should be fine. I love it.

2:09:01Sometimes you just want to stack a couple 45s on the bar and move a big number. How are you? No, no, wait, wait. This is important, guys. You guys are young guys, young 30s, late 20s. You can do that stuff. I'm 63 years old. Okay. I know, but you look 50, so that's why I asked. That's why I asked. Book recommendations. What's on the shelf behind you? What would you give to somebody, the next generation? What do you think is worth reading? Oh, God, there's so many things. There's not enough time to read everything. I'll give them some instead of reading. Here's the piece of advice I give all the time.

2:09:35I was actually in a classroom situation yesterday, guest lecturing something. And what I really like to get across is the idea of prioritization and self-discipline. You know, there's a book out. You don't have to read it. It's 4 ,000. It's called 4 ,000 Weeks. That's kind of like the average time you have a lifetime. Okay? You get the choice how you want to spend a lot of that. Make sure it's on the things that matter and things that are important to you. And I see too many people wasting their time. I mean, I don't want to denigrate social media or any of my partners or anything. But I'll tell you, a lot of people are wasting a lot of their time doing stuff that it has no impact in their life.

2:10:16And later on, they may regret not having used that time more efficiently and more effectively. That's possible. That's one outcome. But it's also possible that I'm on my deathbed being like, I wish I watched a few more Instagram reels. I wish I scrolled TikTok just for a couple more minutes. No, I think what you're saying, there's a very real scenario in the future where people are towards the end of their life and they're just looking at their lifetime screen time on their iPhone just saying, like, don't do this. Don't do this. One more serious question. How are you guys thinking about the live events category broadly?

2:10:57There's a lot of people talking about, excited about live events specifically because they feel insulated. Because of that screen time. Well, that, but also insulated from AI. Yeah. Yeah. No, look, obviously there's a lot of truth to that. The people really are really enjoying those live event things. Now, for us in the travel business, there was a lot of talk when you had the Taylor Swift effect, it was called, where she'd be going, doing a concert, and there would be an increase in travel to that location. And then all the local economy would build up a little bit on that. But for us, because we're so global and all that's doing is transferring what would be the normal amount of travel to that location.

2:11:40For us, we're indifferent. So, for example, we have this whole thing about World Cup. And it's a partnership between the U.S. and Canada and Mexico. And a lot of people are really hoping it's going to build some of the people coming to the U.S. for travel. And how much is that going to help our business? And to be perfectly honest with you, I don't think it's going to make that much of a difference because all it means is that the people that do choose to come to watch World Cup and come to the States for that, that's a trip they were going to take anyway. They haven't come to the States. We would have gotten that business anyway.

2:12:10Now, it's good for the cities that have the actual games. They'll get the benefit. But us as a company, I don't think there's going to be a huge difference. One of the challenges of scale. You're like, we are the market. We're just shifting pieces around. I have one last question. That's right. We'll let you go. You travel a lot. You run a travel company. What's the secret to avoiding jet lag? Just keep doing it. You'll be in a normal state all the time. Never stop moving. This is good. I like that. Just don't stop. That's essentially just man up. Just suck it up and just disregard it. Just ignore it.

2:12:46I love that. That's the best advice I've heard. People will tell you all sorts of take your shoes off, do this, do that. I like that one. That's great. No, no. It's ridiculous. And I've never felt jet lag per se. This is breaking. We need to put this on a headline. Breaking. It doesn't exist. It's just a figment of your imagination. It's not the imagination. It's you're going from JFK to Amsterdam. It's a six and a half hour flight. You're going to at best because you've got to wait to take all the time. And then they wake you up when you're landing. Maybe you'll get four hours good. Maybe. You're going to be tired.

2:13:22It's not jet lag. You've got four hours sleep. that's why you're tired yeah yeah there you go makes sense well i hope hopefully uh the rockets can get fast enough that uh when we're booking we're booking a hotel on the moon on booking.com yeah uh we it'll just be like we just you know teleported well thank you so much super fun come back on again soon really enjoyed it cheers goodbye do you want to change the world go to the New York Stock Exchange. And raise capital. Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Just do it. No more excuses. Yeah, it's our number one piece of advice this year to anyone who asks.

2:14:01What advice would you give me? That's going to be our advice for our next guest. Just raise money at the New York Stock Exchange. Next round, JD. Do it at the New York Stock Exchange. Just raise capital. Do a little roadshow. Just do it. Stop making excuses. Really, just stop making excuses. Is JD here? He is the co-founder of WithCoverish. an absolute dog an absolute dog we got some breaking news from him jd how are you doing good to see you he's back good to see you guys welcome back to the show glenn has energy for 60 whatever oh yeah that's why i was like i need to know this guy's workout routine everything he's like jet lag doesn't exist there's a couple of these corporate athletes strauss zelnick the ceo of take two maker of gta is uh absolutely diced he's in his 60s he's on the cover of men's fitness every once in a while.

2:14:49There's a couple of people that figure out how to just keep that motor going. I'm a big believer in the 65 to 95 era of a business person's career. Warren Buffett famously had a great time. Everything before that was a warmup. Everything else is a warmup. 65 is where the real game starts. That's where the compounding begins. But you're much younger than 65, but you have some breaking news for us. Give it to us. It's all peptides. You wouldn't know. Okay. I guess that's the news. But no, tell us about the business. Tell us what's going on in your world. Yeah, so we are arguably in the most boring of the enterprise businesses you could possibly be in.

2:15:28I think it's a sales factor, right? It's not boring to us. It's not boring to us. That's why we're here every day. That's why we have a gong, and I know we're going to ring it. Yeah, so we're modernizing insurance brokerage. Basically, we replaced the traditional insurance broker with a ramp for risk management. Oh, wrong side. There we go. And we just raised$42 million Series B from Soundermill.

2:15:58Great stuff. Can't even get a word in. We're just having too much fun. Hit him with the flashback. I want some American Eagles on that. Watch out, JD. Watch out.

2:16:19anyways once you uh once you get your bearings you can continue who did the deal it's been awesome um i'm keeping back up with keith her boy who is my co-founder open door and we brought on uh sequoia as a new investor yeah amazing the paypal mafia coming together. You're a made man. Yeah. You know, it's, uh, it, I think it's the first time Keith and Ruloff have co-led a deal together. Uh, so it's the first time I've co-led something since, uh, since PayPal. Yeah. You're, you're, you're a wise guy. Bringing, getting the band, getting the band back together. That's fantastic. Um, well, uh, walk me through$42 million series B.

2:16:57What does that actually mean? Because insurance, like at some point you have to have reserves. There's, is there like, Are you acting as an intermediary and there's a different financial institution that's dealing with the actual capital that goes towards that? Is this capital going towards the operations, the hiring, building of the product? Or is it actually like if there's an insurance claim, you're paying it out of this$42 million? How does that all work? So what's cool about our business is everyone else in the industry gets paid more the more money that you spend on insurance. They're brokers.

2:17:33we don't bear risk we're just helping you be placed with the right insurance carriers and so what we've done which is actually shockingly innovative is to say hey instead of charging you based on how much you spend we're going to charge you based on how complex you are and how much servicing you need and how much product you need and so we replace that with a flat fee and then say hey we're going to net out all the commissions from your policies you're not going to pay commission as much as legally possible and it's just one fee for us, four service. And what that does is it aligns incentives.

2:18:05And as a result, over 700 companies now have moved over from GoPuff and Hsleep to Chomps, Bombas, tons of these incredible businesses. I thought you were saying, when you first said that, I was like, wait, GoPuff had an enterprise insurance product? No, no, no. So we don't do the insurance. Yeah, so almost like asset light, I don't know exactly the term, but more of a meteor platform technology company. But at the same time, I feel like I've heard so many amazing stories about it's really hard, but once you get the insurance business actually up and running, you wind up with Berkshire Hathaway or what's happening with Apollo.

2:18:46Like you just have this float and this cash machine that can go towards other things. Is that enticing to you, even if it's going to happen when you're in your 65 to 95-year-old run? Is that something that might happen decades from now? Or is that just like never in the picture because it's fundamentally incompatible with what you're doing? I think you have to start with your customer, right? Like when you go from like the, like, oh, wow, that's really enticing. You start like twisting upside down to find a way to make a bad business decision. And this is kind of what I think some of our earlier competitors did in the last round of InsurTechs.

2:19:23They said, well, that looks really nice. Let's go after that. And they were fundamentally misaligned with their customers. Our job is to get you the cheapest insurance possible for the best coverage. As soon as we start selling our own book, there's no way for us to be able to do that job. We don't do reserves. The$42 million we've raised is for product development and sales and growth. Unfortunately, we haven't found a way to spend money yet as a company. We even touched a penny of our Series A when we raised this. It was more to say we were profitable last year, which is crazy. Um, but I'm confident we will solve that problem this year.

2:20:00Yeah. Uh, how does, how does the, how does this actual sales cycle, uh, work? People are, you know, signing up, uh, with, you know, for a specific insurance plan. And then there's like, you know, it's cyclical. Like how, how does that motion working for you guys? Yeah. So usually it starts with an introduction or like, you know, someone saying, Hey, you got to talk to these guys. They're awesome. and our first conversation is they're already on board on the product. It's get them on. We'll show them exactly how it works. Instead of like going through PDFs and everything else, you see everything in one place.

2:20:33And we're going to do this very strong, like in detail risk analysis saying top to bottom, here's your company. Here's like the opportunity for someone to get hurt, slipping and falling in your restaurant. Here's what happens when someone in your manufacturing facility, you know, might get injured or if a product injures a customer, all the different cases, you might need a product recall. and running through those scenarios and saying this isn't is where you are currently covered and not covered and how we can fix it. And also here's how you benchmark against everyone else just like you. So instead of working with that sort of generalist insurance broker, we bring on this specialized team, almost like the Navy SEALs of product recall and say, here's exactly what you need to do to deal with this when it happens.

2:21:14And for us, risk management doesn't end with insurance products. It goes through like, what do you actually do when that happens? What's your playbook for dealing with a product recall? What lawyers do you need to talk to? How do you actually file this with the relevant regulatory bodies? There's a whole bunch of stuff. And we do this for customers in kind of every single industry that we work with, from aerospace and defense to healthcare to construction to consumer brands. How do you think, is insurance playing a factor in like these legal cases with the big AI labs? I saw Anthropic paid like a billion dollar fine for scraping some books.

2:21:54And it's just something that if I'm underwriting Anthropic at Seed, it's like, how am I going to predict that they're going to scrape books that they shouldn't? and this lawsuit's going to happen. It's going to be this huge settlement, and that feels like something that would be way out of coverage. But are people even thinking about insuring for these, like, entirely new dynamics that can happen only in the AI age? Absolutely. And there's really cool new carriers who are kind of stepping in. And we've seen whenever there's a new innovation in kind of business, some new insurance company that becomes a giant leader is the first one to come in and step in and say, hey, I'm willing to really understand this and take a bet.

2:22:34Interesting. And so Coalition did this with cyber insurance. It's now a five plus billion dollar company where no one else really understood what cyber insurance meant. Yeah. They came into that. Now they're doing, you know, really well across, you know, a number of other spaces. Same thing with crypto. That's been more kind of broadly adopted. But, you know, it sure is like well, amazing there. Oh, interesting. And in that, walk me through that cyber insurance example. Like, do they have to raise money? Are they raising debt? If you weren't doing what you're doing and you were just building a pool of capital to insure companies directly, what does the build out of a company like that actually look like?

2:23:11I've never really told you. Yeah, you literally need to raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of equity. And then it's like, yeah, to collateralize the issue and then partner with it. So you start by partnering with existing insurance companies if you can. But if they don't understand it and are unwilling to underwrite it, you have to just raise huge pools of capital. I mean this is the oldest business of all time. It's basically Lloyd's of London. It's a syndicate of people who were just pooling capital for these – literally pooling capital for risk for ships. Yeah. Yeah. Traces all the way back to the Dawn Adventure, the whaling and whatnot.

2:23:48Fascinating. Fascinating. Well, congratulations. You get these crazy things in insurance too where like the words that are used don't make any sense. You're like, why would trucking be called marine? Well, it's because you're literally shipping things on ships over water. And they just adapted it. Wait, so marine insurance refers to trucking? Yeah, it's called inland marine. Inland marine. Interesting. Yeah. Wow, wow. What an awesome industry. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Where are you guys seeing the benefits from AI in the business, not on the product side, outside of coding. I think what's really cool is we can measure this stuff.

2:24:33I think last year I would have said, oh, we get rid of data entry, we get rid of whatever. Now I can say each person on our team is writing three times as many emails today as they were six months ago. We've scaled the business. We're breaking the scaling laws of financial services through AI. We're pulling in all the context, and it's becoming much less human reliant on the day-to-day operation of the business. So the people are actually just focusing on high-end problem solving, strategy, the things that people are good at. But I have no idea how sort of the entry-level kind of paper-pushing jobs are going to keep doing this because we just don't need them.

2:25:10Interesting. Where are you building the business? So the company is based in New York. I'm the odd man out in Austin. And I think in San Francisco, if you're building a model company, you've got to be an SF. If you're building applied AI in financial services, it's just much easier to do that in New York. People actually understand what that means. And so for us, we don't sell software. We're building a competitor to Marsh Aeon locked in these kind of$50 to$100 billion brokers. And we're coming in and saying, look, we can't sell software to you. You can't buy software. You have no idea how to even deploy this.

2:25:49You have like 10 different factions in your org to do this. If we were to do that, we would do that maybe in San Francisco. In New York, you get to go head to head and say, look, I'm just going to go after your clients. And we're just going to do your job better. Your lunch. Yeah. I see your plate. I'd like a bite. Your lunch is for martinis. Yes. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by and giving us the news. This just makes so much sense going in and talking with coverage and having them not just be incentivized for you to spend the most amount of money, but to get the best plan and actually get the most out of it.

2:26:24I love the alignment. I'm waiting for you guys to do your first events so I can show you. We'll cover all your awesome giant conferences with fireworks and stuff you're inevitably going to want in there. Yes, if I catch on fire. We want to get a fog machine. We want like a CO2 cannons in here. That could be very risky. Suck all the air out of here. I don't think we're insured for CO2 cannons. We're not doing that yet. Good insurance. I actually own two industrial snow machines. So if you ever need to rent one, just give me a shout. We needed that during Christmas. Where were you when we were dressed up as Santa Claus?

2:26:59We had the fake snow going over the show. But next year, real snow for sure. Real snow. I'm shipping it out. Thank you so much. Great to see you, JD. Congrats. Goodbye. Let's kick it over to this video by Storm Crew on YouTube. The boss asked me to take on 10 robots by myself. An individual has assembled a set of 10 unitary or humanoid robots, got in the boxing ring and fought them. And the results are very, very interesting. We'll have to sort of click through a little bit of this video, but he fights incremental amounts of We've been wanting somebody to do this forever. I've wanted to do this personally.

2:27:46I want to fight the humanoids Look at this. So it's one-on-one and it's not too bad. He can just hold it off He's just he's just holding it can't do anything now. Keep in mind. This is the unit tree I believe it's the G1 the the cheaper smaller version now. He's one on three. Let's see what happens He's kicked. They're kicking. Oh, he does the bull rush. That's a - I had not thought of that strategy. Oh, he's pushing them over and with these small unitry guys, once you get them down, they can get up, but they're pretty easy to pin. He starts fighting five. This is one on five now. He needs a flashback.

2:28:19It is. They are hitting him. They are hitting him. He's taking some blows. Oh, he knocks one down. That's a good hit. Their movement looks surprisingly natural. Oh, he picks it up. Oh, we're going WWE mode. He picks it up and slams it down. Oh, he gets back up. He's got to throw it back down. They really, they need bigger robots because it looks like he's just bullying children. When they pop up, that is a scary animation. Okay. Picking it up and throwing it out of the ring. Oh, my God. Slammed onto the ground. Yeah, slammed onto the ground. Well, he finally. Oh, okay. He's fighting, like, six or seven here.

2:28:51They're really closing in at this point. This is where it starts to get intimidating. Gets a little hairy. I feel like seven, you know, you can't keep your eyes on all of them at the same time. But if you use them against each other, yeah, creating the pile, the pile method, that's what you want to go for. You want to create a heap of humanoid robots. This is the only benchmark, the Terminator benchmark. Terminator bench. This is the only benchmark I really care about. Who wins, AI or humans? But then he adds the G2, which is the newer Unitary robot. And this one is a little bit more athletic.

2:29:21And things start to get a little bit riskier. Do we think they're teleoperated? I imagine all of this is teleoperated. This seems like some sort of ad integration. Some AI slot now. We're ad appreciators. I don't know what's going on. Let's skip to the final bit. I think we can skip ahead. I think it starts at 2.08 maybe. We can see. Robot 10X. That was a clean strike. Yeah, so he's boxing the big guy, and he hits. Yeah, it's pretty. He gets knocked on the ground. It's not looking good for humanity. Very, very rough. If we skip to. I think he's getting a little fatigue. Oh, yeah, he is. He's running out of gas.

2:30:02It's tiring. I think the conclusion of this... Did you see that headbutt from a seated position? That looks very dangerous. I think the conclusion of this video is that he loses. Who knows how scripted this is? It's a lot of fun. Yeah, a lot of cuts. A lot of cuts. It's mostly entertainment, but it's good entertainment. Challenge yourself to fight robots with difficulty levels ranging from 1 to 10 robots. See how many you can ultimate KO. That could be a good sort of, you know those VR centers where you go and do VR in person? You could go and do this in your local, put that next to your CrossFit gym.

2:30:37Next up, we have our Lambda lightning round. Yes, the Lambda lightning round. Nick from Sandstone is the co-founder and CEO. He's in the Restream waiting room. Get that gong ready. And now he's in the TBP and Ultra now. Nick, how are you doing? What's happening? Let's get the gong going. Let's get the gong going. How much did you raise? What's going on? We're announcing our$10 million seed round. There you go. A humble mango seed. We love to see it. The real question, you versus 10 humanoid robots, do you think you could beat them up? I don't think so. Okay. But I think we all need those robots in our life.

2:31:21We're going to get them in the office as soon as we can, and I think that's your first round. to come work at Sandstone is you actually have to fight off the robots to get into the office. There you go. That's a good qualifier. Well, you're building AI for in-house legal teams. I imagine if the humanoid robots get deployed and they start harassing people, the in-house legal teams will be full of deploying robots. It's a net positive for our market. It is. Huge for our market. Yeah. But this is something we've actually been excited about. We've been wondering where legal AI will land. And there's obviously companies that are selling to large firms.

2:31:57You can do some stuff in the apps by yourself, but that feels a little bit risky. Sometimes the chat apps will push back on you. Hey, I'm not a lawyer. I don't want to give you this type of advice. And maybe you don't want to upload your employment agreement to an app that will ultimately train on it and maybe leak your information at some point. So how are you thinking about building the product, the go-to-market, the value prop in a world where the other platforms exist and there are some DIY options? Yeah, I mean, first of all, thanks for having me, guys. Of course. It's great to be here. The way that we've thought about approaching the in-house market is really from sort of two pain points that we saw.

2:32:38And I saw this when I was serving legal teams at McKinsey and as an engineer. in-house teams have a ton of requests that come in from the business, from external users. They're basically getting bombarded with emails and slacks and Teams messages, right? And they don't have a single platform in the same way that we have Linear or Jira, if you were an engineer 10 years ago, to manage your work and who's doing what. And so that's not even yet an AI problem, but rather a data problem. And so that was the first thing that we wanted to solve, which was It's like, can we sit across all these systems that lawyers have to deal with and pull in all the requests into one place so that when the AI goes to redline the agreement or answer the question or draft the contract, it already has context on the entire thread that you're working on as well as all your other business systems.

2:33:25So one of the issues with whether it's Claude or ChatGBT or even some of the legal solutions out there is I open a contract and I ask for it to be reviewed. But if it's a sales agreement, I need to know have we worked with this company before? Is it high ACV? How does it compare to our other deals in Salesforce? Does the seller have a good relationship? These kinds of things are like what the lawyer actually goes and they spend admin time doing to go gather that information. We want to be the context layer that pulls that all in. So when you go open that ticket in your system in Sandstone, which has the sales agreement, all that context is there and ready for you.

2:34:01So how do you pull in all that data? Are you a big, like, Zapier customer and you're integrating with everything on day one? Are you writing MCP integrations, API integrations? Is it client by client and it's more high touch because you're going with really big companies as starting customers and you go to their in-house legal team? And if they're using some custom CRM, you'll build a custom CRM integration because it's important to them. How do you go down the stack of integrations to get that full context? Yeah. So mostly API integrations. I think there's some MCP that we're working with. The way that we think about it is being pretty opinionated about what data from your CRM or your ERP is important for legal workflows.

2:34:45And so we're able to, on day one, have the team come in, set up an integration, and essentially tell us what are the, according to these critical fields that we need, where can we find them in your system, right? Salesforce systems are very complex. And so we ask them, hey, here's the 10 things that we're going to need. Where do these live within your Salesforce so that we can much more easily query that going forward? This has allowed us to, even for some five to 10 person legal teams, we can onboard them within a week with multiple integrations. And I think one of the things that's important is this isn't going to be an overnight problem.

2:35:18No legal team is going to solve their data issue in one night. But if you can integrate even Google Drive and maybe your contract management tool and Slack, and that's 50 to 60 percent of your data, that's going to change your ability to answer questions and get legal work done by several fold. and then we can continue to integrate over time. What's the mindset of your buyers? I think if you're Harvey or one of these other legal AI players and you're selling into a law firm, they're doing this dance right now where they're like, we're going to make you way more efficient, but there's this kind of the elephant in the room is like, okay, is this going to impact billables?

2:35:57But if I'm an in-house legal team, that's not really on my mind. I just want to deliver great work and protect the company and keep the company compliant across a bunch of different dimensions. I imagine there could be like more pull, more excitement, more kind of urgency to adopt than maybe some big law firm that's like, hey, we've done it this way for a long time and our business is doing great right now. We don't need too much AI. Yeah. Before I started Sandstone, most of my work was at McKinsey helping big law firms think about AI and tech strategy. And we would actually go out and deploy AI solutions for some of these big firms.

2:36:37And I think the hardest thing was you have to go to every partner in every practice area as if it's its own business and kind of sell a one-off solution to them and get them on board with the fact that, hey, this might have some implications on your billable hour model going forward. With in-house, it's completely different, right? When they see AI solutions that can take a lot of the admin work off their plate, generally the GC thinks, hey, now my team can go focus on being in more of the business strategy conversations and become more proactive around potential risks and issues with our company rather than reactive and trying to play catch up on all the requests that we have coming in.

2:37:14I think this is one of the bigger paradoxes within legal and within AI more broadly, is like as legal teams get more efficient on the admin side and collecting the context, which we're working on, they're going to be able to be in more business discussions, protect the company from our risk, but also have more work ultimately. And so, you know, a lot of our legal teams, I anticipate they'll continue to grow as they adopt more AI, but they'll just do it in a more effective way for the business. And we'll see a world where like, you know, the top law firms in the future need to be AI native and AI enabled.

2:37:45But I think the top legal teams in the future and even the top companies will have to have these AI-native legal teams. Similar to how Ramp, I think if you're using Ramp as a smaller company and your finance team is using it, you're probably spending a little bit less on services that you typically might have on the financial and accounting side. And it's also helping your business move faster. I think historically, we didn't see that in finance. You see the same in HR with Workday. And so I think legal will get there over time. How's growth been? Growth has been great. We started working on this five months ago.

2:38:19We've got dozens of companies using it today. We've got dozens of companies using it today. A mix of earlier, smaller in-house teams all the way up to Fortune 500s. Let's go. Let's give it up for the Fortune 500. our team is a team of 15 engineers and lawyers in New York and Brooklyn. One of our mantras is that everyone ships. So we have four lawyers on our team. Every single one of them codes. Three of them are actual full-time engineers. My co-founder was a lawyer. He became an engineer. We have a general counsel who became a software engineer for five years. And they're shipping every day. And so that's sort of how we want to build this.

2:39:03We want to build this like a tech company would build today. And everyone has some sort of a legal background or engineering background. And whether you have that from your experience or it's something that you've learned by being at Sandstone. Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress in such a short amount of time. Congratulations. Fantastic. Yeah, very, very cool. I'm sure you'll be back on this quarter. That's my bet. That's my bet. Great to meet you. and good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon. Check the rest of your day. Goodbye. Up next, we have Rob Slaughter of Defense Unicorns.

2:39:41You've got to check his website out. It's fantastic. Intense name, very cute for himself, very cute name for his business. And then intense business because he's getting software to warfighters. He's in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP on Ultra Dome. How are you doing, Rob? Welcome to the show. Look at that logo. Look at that logo. Look at that logo. Friendly unicorn. Friendly unicorn. Please, introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Tell us what you're building and how it's going. Yeah, Rob Slaughter. Spent my career in the military. I spent about 13 years active duty.

2:40:16Got out with some co-founders about five years ago. I like to joke around that I spent the first half of my career struggling with software. In the back half of my career, trying to solve the software delivery challenges. Started this company because we saw a real huge problem. You know, it's hard to tell because most of the ecosystem, most of the industry, especially on the tech side, doesn't have a ton of exposure to defense. You obviously read the big headlines, so you get the big news. Everybody understands we have the best military in the world. You know, the recent operation in South America obviously highlights this stuff.

2:40:52But there's real significant tech challenges that, you know, as a company, we really strive to solve. So we're super excited to talk about the Series B and, you know, announce a lot of the good stuff. How much did you raise? How much? We have officially raised$136 million. So it's quite, you know, fantastic. You know, we're obviously excited to get back to building. Obviously love what we do. And you're a unicorn now, which is amazing. And we got to do a capital allocator acknowledgement. Bain Capital is leading the round. It feels like if you put Unicorn in the name of your startup, you're really asking for, like you're calling your shot so aggressively that everyone's going to be like, oh, they'll never do it.

2:41:42And you did it. So congratulations. I do wonder if there was ever, you know, during the deal process, they were like, well, we want to do 990. How about 990? You're like, I'm sorry. I can't possibly. it will destroy the branch. Where does the name come from? Yeah, so a couple things. First and foremost, we hire unicorns. And so it's hard to find those people that are mission focused, that typically have clearances. They typically have clearances. They're based in the US. That's the other thing. So one of the big things is that we hire defense unicorns. The other thing is, if we're successful as a company, one of the biggest things we'd like to see in the ecosystem is like it's not going to be just, you know, one, 10, 20 defense unicorns in the ecosystem.

2:42:30There's actually going to be hundreds or thousands. So just like, you know, quick back of the envelope numbers, you know, for folks, you know, you look at somebody like NVIDIA and they do, you know, 200 billion ish a year revenue. You know, you have a Department of War that spends a trillion a year. That's 5x that. And as you guys mentioned earlier on the show, Trump's talking about increasing that to$1.5 trillion. And so when you think about this from a market opportunity perspective, what you actually find out is that there's most likely probably several multi-trillion dollar companies. And then when you cascade that down, what you're actually going to find is that there's not just dozens but hundreds of defense unicorns that should be entering the ecosystem.

2:43:13Okay. Very cool. and I agree. I think it would be positive for the ecosystem. How do you guys work with other software companies? Break down the platform for us and how everything actually works. Yeah, so first talk about the problem. One of the biggest issues is it's a combination of three things. One, these are mostly air gap systems and to define an air gap, air gap is either fully disconnected, semi-disconnected, or extremely high firewall. So think about like security policy settings to where things like GitHub are inaccessible. The next issue is like the super high cybersecurity standards and a lot of the accreditation standards that the government expects.

2:44:01And then the third thing is that there's actually a huge skill gap delta between what you see on industry expectations and what you typically see in like military spaces, not just the defense industrial base, but a lot of times the people who are actually operating these systems are actually active duty airmen, soldiers, sailors, and Marines. And so a lot of the technologies that we work with are Kubernetes based. And so to just say, you know, how this is really operating is you have people generally wearing a uniform that has to actually operate things that's incredibly complex. Their core day job is firing missiles and guns on target.

2:44:41Their primary day job is not IT operations. And so what we do as a company is we have an open source baseline called UDS that allows people to integrate in an open source fashion. We have the ability to take those applications in unclassified environments, classified environments, and really our bread and butter is extending those to actual edge weapon systems. So things, you know, F-16s, F-22s, our largest customer is the Department of Navy, specifically the submarine community. And so, you know, really for us, it's about how do we have like a whole of nation approach? You know, if we're going to enter in a near peer adversary type of engagement, how do we actually, you know, have the ability to inject latest and greatest technology from anywhere around the country to some of these, you know, new weapon systems?

2:45:28Last question for me. I remember talking to Shamsankar at Palantir and he told this amazing anecdote about the early days of Palantir. They built a piece of software, put a bunch of dots on a map, right? He goes to deliver it. And the machine that they tried to install it on had like, you know, one megabyte of RAM or something. And so it just couldn't run the software. And I'm wondering, you know, you have this Panasonic Toughbook on your website. How do you think or how do you work or do you work with your customers to understand where products can be actually deployed? Because once you're beyond the air gap, you're probably doing more things on device at the edge.

2:46:08What are the hardware constraints? I imagine that there's a ton in the age of AI. You can't just run llama locally on some 10-year-old Toughbook. How are you working with clients on understanding hardware and how it will enable their software to be delivered? Yeah, you nailed the problem, which is in these military systems, if you want to do a software update, you effectively have to update the hardware. And that's why the hardware is so out of date is because for the new iterations of systems, they've struggled to integrate it. It hasn't worked successfully. So that latest and greatest program that was supposed to deliver didn't deliver.

2:46:46So you're stuck with the legacy system. Now that happens two or three times. And before you know it, people are still stuck on, you know, Windows 95, you know, to take your, you know, true story. You know, those types of things are super common. So how do we actually, you know, find success? How do we actually enable the warfighter? Well, if you actually make it easy enough to deliver, in many cases, you don't have to update the hardware. In your example, certainly you do. It's already gone too far. But a lot of cases what we're doing is we're finding certain weapon systems. They've had a hardware refresh, if you will, say a year or two ago.

2:47:21It's not the latest and greatest. But it can actually run way more software than what was available two years ago. Can you actually do a software update on that slightly older hardware to make it mission effective? And then you also nailed a key fundamental point, which is these things, modern AI is a memory hog. And if you're going to war with outdated hardware, which is the reality, and you're trying to get the latest and greatest AI, you actually have to have the ability to update the software on demand. So you might be flying a mission and saying, hey, I need this specialized local AI model.

2:47:55And then the next day you're running a new mission and you might actually need a different AI model. The way war is conducted today, that would actually be a full reset. That'd be a whole new maintenance period. The jets or the Navy ship would actually go down. You know, it's not really viable. With defense unicorns, you actually have that capability. That is good to hear. Well, congrats on all the progress. Thanks so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. I love a business where it's so clear that you had to experience the problem as a team for a decade and make so much sense to just, you know, keep hiring veterans that have experienced the real pain, not just heard about it on a podcast or something like that.

2:48:37So super, super exciting, and really congratulations on all the progress. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, great to meet you. Have a good rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next, we have the co-founder and CEO of Benchling calling in from the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. We are very excited to welcome Saji to the show. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, guys. Thanks for hopping on the show. First, I mean, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and Ben Schling. I think most people are familiar, but we'd love to get an update on the shape of the business today.

2:49:15And then I want to go into the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference as well. Sounds great. Yeah, I'm the co-founder and the CEO of Ben Schling. We make software that helps scientists discover and develop new medicines. We spent about 10 years helping bring science to the cloud. It was pretty much trapped on premise and in spreadsheets before that. And then today we're very focused on bringing AI to scientists everywhere by putting models and simulation directly in the workflow of scientists and building agents that automate all the toil and drudgery that drug discovery is filled with. Yeah. Someone was pitching me cursor for bio.

2:49:51And I said, that can't happen because there's no VS code for bio. And love open source or hate it. It seems like it's just a fact that if you can't fork something quickly, how are you going to spin up and grow as quickly as cursor has grown? Has that proven true? Do you feel like you're the cursor for bio and that you're set up structurally? They're the benchling for benchling. Yeah, really. I shouldn't even try. I like that pitch. Yeah. But walk me through what you're actually building. Yeah, I think AI in bio is kind of like GPT without the chat. So GPT came out and it didn't explode until someone put the right interface on it.

2:50:36That's how I feel a lot of AI in bio where you have these amazing new models and capabilities for doing different tasks. But making a medicine is so hard and complex that putting it all together in the right interface and making it super easy for the scientists in the labs to actually use is a really difficult problem. And that's what we're focused on at BenchLink. And what's the, we've seen in coding, which I think people are most familiar with, you know, autocomplete gets better and better. Then you get sort of the back and forth, the copy paste from the LLMs. Then you get the fully agentic prompt systems, cloud code.

2:51:14And is there something similar happening where there's an autocomplete for bio before there's an agent for bio? Like, what is the shape of the interaction that the scientist is having with the various ways you can interact with AI models? I think there's even lower hanging fruit than that. We have customers where they're using our AI agents to ingest all this data that's trapped in spreadsheets and PDFs and SharePoints that's, you know, it's 6, 10, 15 years old. The people who made the data have like long moved on and they're able to understand what's been done before and sometimes not even rerun experience.

2:51:52We had a customer who, you know, brought 10 ,000 different experiments into Benchling that previously hadn't been touched. And a scientist was about to run some studies that would have taken about eight months. And they realized that someone else had already done the work many years ago and they were able to cut a bunch of them out. And like life science is just full of examples like that, that's going to help compress the time it takes to make drugs and get them to market. We're not even at Cursor yet. Yeah. Where do you think AI is overhyped in life sciences and where do you think it's underhyped?

2:52:23Oh, man. I think there's a lot of excitement. I don't want to say overhyped. There's a lot excitement about these models that help you create a new hypothesis. And that's really important. but drug discovery is 9 ,999 steps after that, many of which are incredibly hard and full of toil. And there's a lot of opportunity, especially when you get to things that are regulated or in animals or closer to manufacturing, to make huge differences in the lives of scientists everywhere to get medicines to patients faster. How do you think about speed of token generation? We were talking to the CEO of Cerebris, and he was very optimistic about applied AI speeding up in bio specifically because more and more of the questions that scientists are asking look like deep research reports.

2:53:16Whereas consumers might just ask, oh, you know, what's the capital of, I don't know, Illinois? And it's a quick, you know, LLM. It just fills the next word and it takes one token. But a lot of scientists might say for every question that I'm asking throughout the day every 15 minutes I'm effectively firing off a deep research report that might take a half an hour and so speeding that up makes sense How are you feeling about the different? Different options on the silicon side. What partnerships have you done? How are you thinking about accelerating the actual workflows? Yeah, we've got partnerships with both Nvidia and anthropic which I can talk about in just a second but I think life science is actually not even at the point where where token speed is the rate limiter.

2:53:59Obviously, in San Francisco, AI is everywhere. Your billboards are selling you GPUs and whatever. But if you go to Boston, other life science hub, or I've spent time in Europe in the last couple of months. I was just in Asia in December visiting biotech and pharma companies. AI adoption is not going to just happen spontaneously in all these organizations. Most of these scientific organizations actually are just getting co-pilots and whatnot turned on. There's a lot of legal, safety, regulatory, security concerns that they have. And scientists' workflows are so, so complicated. They're already jumping between a bunch of different tools with really complex data that AI is not necessarily purpose-built for.

2:54:36And so there's a lot of last mile work to do before token speed even becomes a problem. And that's what we've been trying to focus on at BenchLink. Is the decline of Boston as a biotech hub overstated? We read a piece by Will Manitis declaring Boston dead almost. He was very dramatic about it. How are things going in Boston? Is it still a competitive place? There's been a number of different reports around hiring, maybe weakening and softening. But what are you seeing in Boston? I think there's still a lot of like really good scientific talent in Boston and they can come out to San Francisco to raise money if they need they're just a plane flight away.

2:55:17I think maybe zooming out, what you're probably hearing is like biotech went through a like, it's a pretty good vibe right now at JPM, but biotech went through a really tough couple years. Like they, the biopharma industry went through like the dot-com bust equivalent for a few years, you know. What was the driver of that? Because it feels like during COVID, there was a lot of biotech energy. And then through the GLP-1 boom, we're seeing more. But is this CRISPR overhang? What is the foundational technology of the dot-com if the internet was the thing that ultimately crossed the bubble of dot-com?

2:55:53There were a lot of great new scientific technologies, but it takes a lot of time to make a drug. It takes seven, ten years. The industry, how many drugs do you guys think get approved a year? Can you guess? Under 20? What is it? For the last 10 years, we've gotten about 50 new medicines approved per year. Just 50. And how much do you think the industry spends on R &D? Is it like$10 billion a year? The industry spends almost$200 billion a year on R &D. $200 billion? And you get 50 new drugs a year, and it takes 10 years to figure out if you're right. And by the way, though, drugs are amazing. We want more drugs.

2:56:40and drugs get cheaper over time, they become generic. Hundreds of millions of people take statins and all kinds of other drugs that they don't even think about how cheap they are and how impactful they are. So we get to add 50 to our stockpile every single year of new life-changing medicines. We should want more of them, we should want them faster, we want them to be better. And I think because it takes so long though, and it's such a difficult artisanal process, like I think everyone got excited with mRNA and COVID. And I think a lot of money went in and And I think science takes time to become durable and turn into businesses and have medicines get commercialized.

2:57:14And I think some people a couple years after COVID also got impatient. And there's other things to invest in. And so the money kind of went back out. And so it was a really difficult couple years for the industry. And, you know, interest rates, geopolitical things. If there's any industry that doesn't like uncertainty, it's biotech. You know, you're underwriting something that's going to take 10 years to see the results of. Yeah. How should people think about JPMorgan Healthcare, like the conference? Is it an opportunity to raise money? Is it an opportunity for companies that are thinking about going public?

2:57:44I know the financial profile of a lot of drug companies is very different than startups. At the same time, there's a lot of companies that are now taking a more traditional Silicon Valley path in growing their business and raising money. What's the purpose? Why do people go to JPMorgan Healthcare? What are they out of it? It's actually really funny. A lot of people are here for JPM, but they don't actually go to JPM. It's like every conference kind of has their ratio of at the conference versus ecosystem around it. JPM might be the most lopsided. We're like 90 % of people here are not going to the actual conference.

2:58:16It is a banker conference for CEOs and CFOs to raise money. But it's like this barometer for the industry. And most people are actually here for all of the ecosystem around it, all the events. Like we're having an event at our HQ tonight that's like an AI and bio panel with Eli Lilly and Isomorphic Labs and Profluent and Anthropic. but people are here to get customers, to fundraise, to see their friends and their pharma companies that have alumni reunion parties here. And so it's just the gathering to kick the year off. And the mood is good, by the way. Like the XBI has been trading well. There's been a bunch of M &A in biotech, which has sent a bunch of money back to investors.

2:58:54I think some of the tariff and MFN stuff has settled a little bit for now. Eli Lilly, as you said, becoming the first trillion dollar pharma company. I think that's raised everyone's ambitions a bunch. And then, you know, there's optimism for AI. Benchling next. Yeah, benchling next. It's easier now since, you know, it's always easy. The fast fall work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. I'll be back on when you hit the one T. But I'm so glad to hear things are going well. Thank you so much for stopping by and stopping by on the show. Yeah, great to meet you. We've been wanting to make this happen for a long time.

2:59:26Yeah, this is great. Thanks for having me. You guys need more biotech on the show. We do, please. Who's going to be the TBP in for biotech? You're our new correspondent. You'll be our correspondent. You're our expert. So tell us the companies that we should have on. Yeah, we'd love that. And yeah, enjoy this. All right. I'm here for a vibe check anytime you need it. Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Well, we have a very special guest in the TBP and Ultradome live in person. We have Scott Nolan from General Matters. Welcome. How have you been? How was the holiday party? How was your New Year's?

3:00:06Is 2026 off to a good start? It's been great. Yeah, thank you guys for having me on. Of course. Just look at the headlines, you know? Yeah, it's long overdue, but I'm so glad we get to catch up. Take us back. We've talked many times, but take us back to the process of finding this category, finding this opportunity. I think most people will know that you're at Founders Fund in an investing role for over a decade, I believe. But talk to me about the process of deciding to. You didn't hear it, but he just played the overnight success. Sound cue. But talk to me about the process of actually finding an opportunity, picking this one, and then making the move.

3:00:50Yeah, and for people who aren't familiar with General Matter, we're the American nuclear fuel company enriching fuel here in the U.S. using U.S. tech. So the whole background was, you know, finding it overnight took about a decade. And there was certainly no intention of starting anything. Really, this was in response to a huge market need. So, like you said, you know, I'd found our son for a decade meeting a wide range of advanced reactor companies. Yeah, all of them had the same message, which was we have no we have no fuel. We have no source of halo. Sure. And we've got to depend on Russia and China for that for that fuel that we need.

3:01:26And so I said, why don't the US fuel companies make that fuel? And they said there aren't really any. Oh, you say depending on Russia and China. Is it true that the halo, the nuclear fuel that comes from Russia, is they actually take it out of a missile that's nuclear? Does that happen or they take it out of a nuclear submarine? or where are they getting in Russia? Why do they have it? Why don't we? Yeah, not a wives' tale, but they have their own enrichment capability in Russia. They do. They do. Yep, they're actually the world leader in enrichment. More than half of world market capacity is in Russia.

3:02:00You've got Europe, number two, and China quickly growing as number three. The U.S. used to be number one back in the 80s. We were about 85 % of global enrichment. Today, less than 0.1%. So we went from first place to basically last place. And what were the catalysts for that? It was exactly what you're saying of the downblending. Back from pre-Cold War, obviously, there was, you know, post the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was mutual disarmament goals and there was trade. And so it was called the Megatons to Megawatts program, where the U.S. worked with Russia to downblend weapons into fuel that could be run in reactors.

3:02:34That was the start of it. And then with the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think the U.S. basically said, hey, free trade. Let's go get our fuel from other countries who do this very affordably and consistently. And maybe we don't need to have this outdated capability of gaseous diffusion, which was running at a few sites in the U.S. So over time, we basically outsourced it. Other countries were better than us at it. And we allowed that skill to atrophy. Yeah. When you look at the S-curve of nuclear power growth, we went through this exponential period and then it basically flatlined for, I don't know, 40, 50 years.

3:03:08How much of that is due to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, like fear mongering? How much of it is due to just the oil and gas companies being elite and just compounding and compounding? And they're just so big that they can hire all the best talent, do all the best lobbying. What are the different factors that go into the plateau that we've seen in nuclear power generation? Yeah. On limiting nuclear power, I think everyone lists those things. People will also mention the regulator. Yeah. I think it's none of those things. Yeah. So if you actually look at the data, nuclear has been the safest, cleanest form of baseload power, but it hasn't been the cheapest.

3:03:48And so, you know, that S-curve followed a period and maxing out the S-curve really was at a time where costs were just rising dramatically on nuclear builds. They were run like huge construction projects. Yeah. So most of nuclear all the way through the 90s was classic light water reactors, you know, billion,$10 billion projects, overschedule, run just like highway projects, like other things that just were not done efficiently. The move you now see towards advanced reactors is all about changing that. So all the advanced reactors basically have two goals. One is often increased safety. The other is decreased cost.

3:04:27Glad they care about safety. Yeah, often passive safety, so not relying on active measures. Yeah. But essentially... And the goal here is like you have a private company who has somebody, they have potential customers that will pay for power or even help them fund the CapEx. and they're heavily incentivized to stay on schedule and deliver it at a cost or deliver effectively the system at a cost that, uh, whereas like a government, you know, funded project has maybe less of an incentive to actually hit, uh, cost, uh, you know, stay within budget. Yeah. I think the key dimension is that they want to be factory built.

3:05:07And so if you're factory built, okay, we can get these coming off an assembly line. We can have the parts made with extreme, you know consistency and bring costs in over time and then those pieces can be deployed out to a site and installed and turned online yeah and that's what the you know the acronym smr is small modular reactor where the small part is small enough to be built in a factory so that's the whole point now if you go that small how how is that is that plane size that the think of like extremely wide load size so highway transportable so is shipping container sized one megawatt so replacement for a diesel generator usually.

3:05:44Exactly. And now people are talking about, well, what if we get a thousand of those together? We get a gigawatt. Maybe we can power an AI data center. Is the AI boom and the AI narrative changing anything for you? Is there more, maybe about your business, but also just about regulatory openness, excitement about the category, just getting real about a transition to a different fuel source? Yeah, I think you've seen a few tailwinds in the nuclear space. AI has certainly been a huge tailwind. And the hyperscalers have always wanted baseload power and they want it to be clean. That really points you towards nuclear where the missing piece has been cost.

3:06:21And so they're turning towards SMRs as a way of reducing the cost. Whether it's one megawatt, a thousand of them together to make a gigawatt, or maybe it's 20 megawatts, people are coming up with different formats to solve the need in AI. And there's even companies that are bringing old nuclear facilities back online, just building, okay, I'm going to go get a Westinghouse, but that was not an option a while ago. And so, I mean, just this week, didn't Meta partner with Oklo to bring some nuclear power online. The timelines are depressing in AI world. I think about AGI next year, and then you see that they are doing a deal that won't come online until 2032, but at the same time, better then than never.

3:07:00How are you thinking about timelines? Imagine that since this is a big step moving into this role you're thinking in decades or longer how do you think about like when to hit certain milestones how to grow the business what you can do in a 12 to 18 month cycle right so for us we're online by end of decade that is our goal that's our line in the sand late last year in august we announced a lease with the doe in kentucky to re-industrialize a site that used to host enrichment in Paducah, Kentucky. That's right. So we are now breaking ground and preparing that site to build on. That'll be online by end of decades.

3:07:39That's roughly our timeline. That timeline is dictated by construction and by licensing. Basically those two things. The scale of construction and the scale of actually bringing it online on day one will be increased through this award that we received last week. So that's the main way it impacts us is it actually brings commercial scale, domestic scale, satisfying all U.S. needs forward a few years earlier. Are you a dependency or are you going to be a dependency for some of these other projects that are saying like, OK, we're going to build all of this infrastructure, but ultimately we're going to need fuel.

3:08:14Otherwise, the whole thing doesn't actually matter. That's right. Yeah. So after the decade of meeting different reactor companies, I realized none of them had a good source of fuel. And if you take a step back, fuel is upstream of everything. everything. So if energy is upstream of all economic activity, fuel is upstream of energy. And if you can't make your own fuel, you can't do all the other things that you want to do. So within nuclear, there's this missing step of enrichment in the US. And so to answer your question, yes, we think that enrichment is the key bottleneck for nuclear energy.

3:08:46Yeah. How on earth have you approached hiring? Like who's the oldest person on your team? Oldest, let's see, oldest person, I'm not sure. I mean, north of 50. Okay. Yeah. I was, maybe there's some 90-year-old who's like, I still got it. He's just like, I was at Chernobyl. Well, in the industry, you will see this, what's effectively a bathtub curve, which is a lot of young people that are very excited about nuclear. Sure. And a lot of people that were in it at the very beginning, when it was exciting and new and growing very rapidly. Yeah. And in the middle, you have enthusiasts, people who really believed in it, even when no one else did.

3:09:20but the number of people seems to follow that curve. And so we've had consultants on our team who are in their 80s. Yeah, that's what I figured, right? Which is like, they're maybe not like, sign me up for a new W-2, but I'll be around the table and help you guys think through how to actually do this. On the young side, where are you hiring from and how much retraining can you do? Can you take a great engineer and bring them up to speed on all the particulars of nuclear? or do you want to go with someone who knows more about nuclear broadly and teach them something specific about refinement? How do you think about training and building the next generation up?

3:10:00Yeah, so one misconception of team composition is probably that it's all nuclear engineers. The reality of an enrichment facility or a refining operation is that there's actually no nuclear reactions. Okay, yeah. So there's actually no chemical reactions. Interesting. All there is is taking a material and separating it. And so it's a sorting operation. It's a refinement operation. So you do need some nuclear engineers, but it's not the bulk of the team. What we really need is, you know, the team today is comprised of aerospace engineers, like applied physics, electrical, software, chemical engineers, mechanical, all these classic engineering disciplines and then a few nuclear engineers.

3:10:35So we're really just looking for the best from every discipline. And then the facility in Paducah, can you give me an idea of what scale we're talking about? We've seen Crusoe building these gigawatt campuses. They're massive. Are we at that scale or are we smaller? Like, is this a mega project? Are there, you know, can you hop in a golf cart and drive around? Or can you hop on the bulldozer and push the dirt around? Or is it like, you know, those huge dump trucks that you see going into mines? Not that. Okay, not that big. So all above ground. So to set the stage, Paducah, Kentucky, over 3 ,000 acres, used to host enrichment, the number one enrichment site in the U.S.

3:11:14It's what made the U.S. the world leader in enrichment back in the 80s, 90s. That site was a DOE site that was then fully shut down in 2013. So the town still remembers when there was enrichment there. They're very supportive of it. The reason we picked Paducah was actually the local community being extremely supportive of enrichment and nuclear operations there. Through conversations with the DOE, we found 100 acres at the south end of the site. So to answer your size question, it's really 100 acres inside the DOE fence where they are currently taking down the old gaseous diffusion plant and planning to reindustrialize that.

3:11:51So our partnership with DOE was around reindustrializing that site and potentially using some of the depleted uranium that's already there to help produce new fuel. So we're talking, you know, ballpark a million square feet of building on 100 acres. Got it. You talk a big game about being upstream of the nuclear energy generation, but what's upstream of you? Does America have uranium in the ground? Do we have deposits? Do we need to mine this? Are we mining it? Yeah, I heard you guys have a whiteboard somewhere. We do. Let's get the whiteboard out. I would love to have you wipe this out for you.

3:12:27Whiteboard out for us. This is a live demo, which is always risky, but you are an expert in this. Let's see how this goes. We have them on the mic. So explain to us, what is this, the nuclear fuel reaction process, refinement process? Yeah, this is just the five steps to make nuclear fuel. Okay, great. So it's pretty simple. Step one is milling and mining. You get it out of the ground. That's U308, often called yellow cake. Okay. You then convert it into a gas. Once it's converted into a gas, you can enrich. Once it's enriched. And is that a centrifuge process basically? There's a bunch of processes.

3:13:08We are not yet sharing our process. Maybe I'll come on later this year and share that one, but there are a few different processes. Everything from centrifuge, gaseous diffusion, laser, aerodynamic, aqueous. Once you enrich, you then can deconvert back into a solid. And once you have a solid, you make fuel pellets. That's fuel fabrication. Yes. So in the US today, we already have US mining. We do. In a few different states. And do we have the deposits here too? Is America rich in this natural resource? Yeah, we have plenty of uranium in the US. Our deposits are not as rich as some other countries, but they're still economical to mine.

3:13:45And so you see new mines coming online in Texas, in Wyoming. Yeah. But if someone throws at you, do we have enough fuel to power 10 gigawatts of nuclear power during the next wave of the AI boom, you're not blinking at that. This is not the issue. So plenty of U.S. mines. Great. U.S. conversion is actually right across the river from our site in Kentucky. So there is a U.S. conversion facility run by Honeywell. Oh, interesting. And that's going well as well. That's working. That was mothballed last decade. Okay. Bringing it back online now. So that production is coming back. Yeah. Enrichment is the one step where there's no capacity, less than 0.1 % of global capacity.

3:14:25Interesting. So effectively out of the game here, there is R &D scale in different locations, but nothing that's commercially relevant for either our existing reactors in the grid or the advanced reactors coming soon. Is that the hardest step in the process? I think it's the step with the most technology leverage. That's part of the reason we thought we can make a big difference here. Yeah, so you said you're not sharing your process there. I can think of a lot of reasons for that. Jordy, quickly grab the mic. is there any risk with this business of like fast follow risk? People see, you know, the business has traction.

3:14:58Yeah, I mean, it seems so easy. I imagine like every YC founder will just be, I'm doing that. No, I think to me it looks like the business with the least fast follow risk because you'd have to be insane to go after this opportunity, especially because like it feels like pretty quickly you'll have a talent vortex and a lot of the people that are the enthusiasts, the people on that sort of bathtub curve, if you talked about why would you want to work at this sort of, you know, second or third, you know, horse in the race? Or how do you think about that? I mean, as a former FF guy, I imagine, like, you want to build a business with the lowest possible fast fall at risk.

3:15:36Yeah, the main goal here is just bring this capability back. Your intuition's right, though. It's not an easy thing to start. So to build a facility like this is over a billion dollars, multiple billions at full scale. You know, obviously it's a sense of technology. So a lot of the people on the team, almost all of them have to have security clearance who are working on tech. And so, yeah, there's a lot of different hurdles to get started. But, you know, I think at the end of the day, we want there to be multiple U.S. players in the space. We think this is a lot like, you know, there's so many parallels to space launch where I started my career at SpaceX.

3:16:11SpaceX did become the place that a lot of aerospace engineers wanted to work. They moved fast. They did innovative things. They were making a real difference in the industry. But ultimately, even SpaceX wanted there to be many players because the ultimate goal wasn't to build a business. The ultimate goal was to make human spaceflight happen. And for us, it's really about making nuclear energy not just the safest, not just the cleanest, but the cheapest form of baseload. And the SpaceX thing is so interesting because, you know, obviously the Blue Origin teams worked very hard, but you have to wonder, would Blue Origin be as dominant as is without SpaceX?

3:16:46Probably there's like some knock-on or competitive effect, just like, oh, if he's going, I got to go. And now America has the two best space launch companies. It seems like China's massive. Yeah, to build a viable competitor, you might need to spend a decade at the company and actually learn the problem. And with Blue Origin, people forget Blue Origin started before SpaceX. Oh, that's right. So I think the big difference was that Blue Origin had someone that everyone on the team knew would just fund it continuously until it succeeded. SpaceX was do or die, basically. And so their whole mindset was always, we're bringing the cost down.

3:17:23We're commercial. We have to stand on our own two feet. That's our mindset as well. Yeah, every penny matters. Interesting. Talk to me about the fuel. You said fuel pellets. We've had Doug from Radiant on the show before. He talks about Triso fuel. What is Triso fuel? Are you able to make it? Are you solving his problem? Or are you just one piece of the puzzle for him when he needs fuel? We are this middle step of enrichment. So downstream of us, people take the gas that's converted one step ahead of us, turn it back into a solid, and then turn it into fuel pellets. Triso is one type of fuel pellet.

3:17:59So Triso is typically used for HALU, the more enriched fuel. And the basic idea is that it's additional containment for the fuel. Okay. So not only is it containment, but it also has a negative reaction coefficient with temperature. So as things get hotter, it slows down the reactions and basically self-regulates. Got it. And so a lot of people like Triso. Safer. Safer. Adds a little bit of cost. Okay. Reduces packing density inside the core. So there's some drawbacks, but overall net positive. But if Triso becomes a massive industry, you'll be part of the supply chain. That's right. That makes sense.

3:18:33So there's really two form factors people are thinking about a lot. One is HALU inside of trisopellets. Okay. Second is traditional LEU cylinders, ingots. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. What are you seeing in terms of timelines to bring new reactors online? Obviously, we talked to Doug about going to the dome and testing a new reactor design. There's a constant line I hear repeated about the regulators haven't approved new designs. It feels like there's a lot of energy to change that. When do you expect sort of a blip in the graph, an uptick in the growth of nuclear power generation in America?

3:19:14Yeah, we really expect to see that growth curve really getting steep at the end of the decade. So you've probably talked to a few reactor companies beyond Doug. A lot of people are aiming for this year for first criticality, first tests. You then would go through a licensing process that now under NRC executive orders is meant to only take 18 months. And so, you know, that puts you at, let's say, 2028 for really having the ability to go build and deploy a lot of reactors. I think we then see that really curve up early 2030s. Got it. Yeah. And I imagine that even if you get a Radiant or any of these other companies to produce a few units, it takes a while until it actually puts a dent in the curve.

3:19:57Right. That's right. Talk to me about the relationship with the White House. I love seeing you in the Oval Office. It's amazing. It's such a tangible example of the work that you're doing. But how do the other energy players think about nuclear today? you could imagine a world where big oil is saying, yeah, it sounds good, but let's just not do that. Let's keep doing what we're doing because it's our core business. Or we could see what we're doing in AI where Google jumped in on the AI boom immediately. And so do you think the oil and gas companies will become partners? They created it, I guess.

3:20:33Maybe it's a bad analogy, but you get what I'm saying. Like you could see a world where oil and gas companies become very synergistic. They're partnering with you. They are excited about the new technology or maybe it's more just competitive till the end? How do you see that playing out? I don't worry about the competition piece. Really? I think, yeah, I think one microcosm of this is really looking at the Department of Energy and it's, you know, Secretary Wright comes from the oil and gas industry, yet he's been one of the biggest advocates for nuclear energy. And so a lot of people will ask the same question around, is the oil and gas industry an enemy of nuclear?

3:21:07Has it been an issue for nuclear? I'd say not at all. The oil and gas industry has been trying to increase U.S. energy production by whatever means are available. And that's the lever that they have. The nuclear industry has not done the same thing for, I think, a variety of reasons. But people blame outside parties. I think, you know, in the principle of just taking ownership for things, I think it's the industry needs to take ownership for why it has not grown. And I think the advanced reactor vendors are trying to solve that by bringing down the cost while increasing safety and increasing deployability.

3:21:39Yeah. Jordy? Where, how are you setting up the company geographically? I'm assuming you're spending a good amount of time in Kentucky, but you know, where's the team mostly? Part of San Francisco. Yeah. Yeah. Right downtown. No. Kentucky is where we're really growing the team aggressively, but engineering is also in LA. Yeah. So two pieces, engineering headquarters, GNA, really primarily California. And then the facility itself, construction, production, primarily Kentucky. Talk to me about solar. You worked at SpaceX. Elon's a bit of a solar maxi. At least it seems like he's a solar maxi. It's always hard to read the tea leaves from his post, but solar seems like a similar opportunity.

3:22:26It's a big scale. It's unlimited. It's the fusion reactor in the sky with unlimited energy. And a lot of folks have painted sci-fi solar punk futures. You obviously looked at those companies, too. How do the two technologies play together? Why did you think nuclear was the real bottleneck? What are the benefits of nuclear relative to solar? When do you pick one over the other? What does the blend look like over the next couple decades? Yeah. So the solar AI data center in orbit concept is a new thing. You know, it's probably the last few weeks that it's really become something people are talking about.

3:23:01If we rewind a couple of years ago and we're talking, okay, data centers on Earth, and do you want to do solar or do you want to do nuclear? Solar obviously takes a lot more area on the ground, but there is plenty of area for that in general. The missing piece was really storage. So solar is inherently cyclical. You need to smooth it out. To smooth it out, you need very cheap grid scale or at least gigawatt scale storage. Batteries. Batteries. Batteries are other forms. We haven't had that yet at a cost point that I think can compete with nuclear. Sure. That could change, and that would be great.

3:23:32But for now in the foreseeable future on Earth, it's nuclear. And that's what you mean by baseload. Nuclear power plant, once you fire it up, you're getting whatever it says. If it says one megawatt, you get one megawatt. 24 hours a day, doesn't matter if it's sun, shine, rain, snow. That's right, versus turning off at nighttime and having to go off the batteries that were charged up during the day. Yeah. Now when we talk about in orbit, it's a whole different ballgame. Because you can be in sun-synchronous orbit, you get sunlight like 99 % of the time, correct? That's right. Got it. So if you have very cheap launch capacity, if your GPUs don't weigh very much, which they don't, and they're high value, you could potentially put all of that in orbit, have your solar panel completely in sun-sync, solve the battery issue.

3:24:13The one remaining piece is you've got a lot of incident solar energy. You're going to run those GPUs. How do you cool them? And I think that's the piece that people are going to be working on for the next few years. Yeah, that's the material science question. So you're saying put the solar panels in orbit, keep them off Earth. Earth is your domain. We're going to do nuclear down here. That works? Of course, we'll do both. Until, of course, you know, the 2040 pitch for General Matter, we're putting a reactor on the moon. On the moon. Moon reactors. Nuclear does have applications in space, though, right?

3:24:45Didn't the, what was it, the Mars lander, the Mars helicopter that we put out there had some sort of nuclear fuel in it? How do you get energy without putting a full nuclear reactor there? Do you understand how that works? Yeah, typically you'll have a fuel source that has a shorter half-life and can emit a lot of energy more quickly. Uranium has a very, very long half-life. Some of these other ones have much shorter. So you can harness heat off of that and charge batteries continuously. So it's basically just a hot rock. That's right. It's not actually a full reactor with rods going in and out.

3:25:14It's not Chernobyl or anything like that. It's just a hot rock. Yeah, that's right. If you're talking about lunar reactors, that would be a different story. Yeah, sure. If you're talking about, you know, interstellar things from science fiction, more like a reactor is what everyone's always talked about. But the things that have been deployed so far are usually radioisotopes. Yeah, that makes sense. What are the biggest bottlenecks leading into the end of the decade? 2030, that seems like an important moment for the company. Obviously, the job's not finished then, but talent, money, approvals, regulatory, anything else?

3:25:48What else is going on? Yeah, the way we think about it is the primary bottleneck to get online by end of decade and to be at huge scale with the world's lowest cost of enrichment is all about the team. So it's all about recruiting. It's all about engineering. It's not just engineering of what goes into the building. It's the construction of the building. So out in Kentucky, we're building our own EPC and general contractor in-house to run that just like was done at Tesla Gigafactories. In LA, we're doing the engineering on all the components that go inside to cost and scale optimize those. How do you balance the desire to run quickly with not swinging at every pitch when you get a new applicant?

3:26:27It feels like hiring is maybe similar to investing. You don't want to just say, oh, I have to make one investment every quarter because my fund is X size. You also might not want to say, I need to hire one engineer every month. how do you stay sane in an environment where you have to hire people but it's lumpy. Yeah, you know what your open roles are. You know what you want to have on the team. If we look at that, we're hiring over 100 people this year across sites. We've got to hit the golf for that. Boom. How's it feel in person? It's like you really feel it in your bones. It's louder in person, right?

3:27:05I can feel it. Yeah, it's great. But like you said, you have to, you know, the key thing for scaling a company is keeping the bar high. I think Naval has said this a bunch of times. The team you build is the company you build. And so we're trying to find people that are just extremely passionate, great engineers, great operators who are aligned and just want to work on this problem and solve it. Yeah. What's the biggest lesson from working with Peter on the board, on the team, like with, you know, your career that you're taking through this business? I think for this business, it was really the lesson of, you know, a lot of people want to go after a trillion dollar market and own a tiny percent of it.

3:27:43Sure. We're trying to solve first the halo shortage in the U.S. that's going to prevent all reactors from coming online if they can't have the fuel that they need. That's arguably a small market today, but you want to start. It's OK to start in a small market and then grow into a bigger one. And so our markets are really halo, which you could say is maybe a hundred million dollar market today, something like that. and then LEU in Richmond, which in the U.S. alone is a couple billion dollar market. And then you go from there. So I think probably the best lesson is the zero to one lesson of start small, solve a real problem for some known customer and go from there.

3:28:16Yeah, that's great. That's great. Jordy, anything else? Very cool. Thank you so much. I appreciate the full breakdown. For coming on the show. Whiteboard moment. We appreciate a whiteboard. We love a whiteboard moment. Well, we will leave you there. Thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com see you tomorrow cheers goodbye