Thiel Fellow Tuesday | Brad Gerstner, Delian Asparouhov + Raycho Raychev, AJ Piplica + Zach Shore

29:19There are going to be a lot of people who lose their jobs. Right. And they're going to I'm a positivist on this stuff. I think the world ends up in a better place. But it doesn't mean that everybody ends up in a better place. Right. The industrial revolution caused a lot of pain on the way to net gain for society. And so we need to figure out a way that we, and this is just one of a lot of different ways we're going to have to come up with, right? Around retraining, re-educating, like changing the way in which we educate people. You guys are going to talk about the Teal Fellows today. I mean, that is a way to deconstruct education that could potentially be a model for further transformations, but they're going to have to be the best and brightest among all of us to rethink the social contract in a way that holds this fragile experiment together.

30:09This is the greatest country in the history of the world, right? But it doesn't happen, you know, we can't take for granted that we can go through this magnitude of change that AI is going to bring, right? And that nothing will break. We've already seen, right, us feeling a little uneasy with things breaking, right? Some of the populism we're seeing, you know, the 90 % against the 10%. It's our job to, you know, to attack that, but to do it in a way that's aligned with the basic principles on which the country was founded. Right. And that's to align us all with the incentives that if you work hard, get into the game, you know, you can you have economic mobility.

30:46I mean, I'm a living example of that. I mean, we started with nothing and, you know, and I we ended up in a very, very different place. There are very few countries on the face of the planet where that type of economic mobility exists. And I think this is going to put us in a much better position in that regard. Yeah, we can't lose it. It's too important. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much for doing this. Guys, great to be here. Next time we get to tell you, let's talk, you know, VC and investing and markets and all the other good stuff. I have one question before you jump off. Do you feel, I know you're heavily invested in AI.

31:21Do you still feel underexposed to AI, given how sort of bullish you are in the fullness of time? You know, if you look at a chart that plots OpenAI's revenue growth against Google and Meta, it's growing, you know, it's achieved the same level of revenue in a fraction of the time. It's already multiples bigger than Google was at the time of its IPO. So, you know, we own a lot of OpenAI. I wish we owned more. the reality was the the winners of this moment in time and there's going to be a whole bunch of agent agentic application but you know we haven't even really begun in the application universe there's going to be tons of these but the winners of this super cycle are all going to be winners of the previous super cycle um so i would say we're all in um you know we're all in and around it in the public markets we're all in it in late stage venture where we just participated again in the round of OpenAI would be an example of that.

32:24And we're doing some of the most interesting early stage stuff of my career. Companies that are scaling at rates I've never seen with small teams, very efficient, very low burn ratios. So I couldn't be more excited because I think this really is the type of innovation that pushes humanity forward, right? Consumers have more opportunity to learn and their healthcare gets better. And all the things we know that comes from this because you have a bionic coach in your pocket at all times for all things and enterprises are going to get transformed as well we're in the golden age of margin expansion for enterprises and if you're not breaking your company today and figuring out how to make it ai native ai first right you're just going to lose your market share and you won't be there to to compete in a few years you know it with the internet itself the diffusion was a lot slower.

33:18You had time. You had five to 10 years to get on board. The diffusion is way faster and way more impactful this go around. Great to see you guys. Keep up the great work. Did you coordinate the Blazers today? We did. The market's up. Whenever the market is up in a meaningful way, we wear white suits. So we'll try to coordinate your next guest appearance and we'll get you in a white suit. All right, guys. Take it easy. Great chatting, man. Have a Take it to you. Bye-bye. I have a hilarious story about my own kind of DIY Invest America account. I don't know if I ever told you this, but when I got my first job, I was starting to make like around five grand a month we were paying ourselves.

33:59Let's go. And I wanted to save money. And what I noticed was that you'd have like a typical like Bank of America app with a checking account and a savings account. But because of the app, you could move money from the savings account to the checking account whenever you want. So you go out with your friends and they'd be like, uh oh like do you want to buy this thing do you want to you know go out tonight and i'd be like no i don't have any money and they'd be like but you have money in your savings account you can just transfer it over you can spend it tonight and so i was just not saving any money and so and so what i wound up doing was i went to a bank and i got a safety deposit box and every time i got paid i would go and take a thousand dollars in physical cash and put it in the safety deposit box and then i would lock it and i couldn't access the safety deposit box on the weekend so if i'm traveling or anything, I would just be like, look, I actually have access to no money.

34:47Like my might have more money, but like, it's not as easy as just like Venmoing you right now. Somebody could probably productize that and actually do very well. Yeah. I mean, the psychology of money is like well under, like way underrated. Like if you have a hundred dollar bill, you're less likely to spend it than, than a bunch of fives because you, you don't want psychologically, you don't want to break the hundred. And so I always noticed that when I would get paid, I would go in and I would count the money and I would watch the stack physically grow instead of just like, oh, like the number got, yeah.

35:18Instead of just the number getting bigger in your bank account, it would be like physically this box is filling up with cash. And then I would count it all every single time. So I would count it up and be like, okay, I have 6 ,000. Okay. Now I have 7 ,000. And I would count it up into the feel of counting money. Oh, it was, it was addictive and it worked really well. I saved a ton of money. That's great. Yeah. It was fantastic. Somebody product has that for sure. Kids on it. Well, we have, that was great. I mean, honestly, I truly think that once invest America passes, we'll all collectively think, how did this not exist before?

35:53It just feels so natural. And if you join the team and you're going to be designing the app for the invest America accounts, make sure you use Figma, Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. I literally guarantee whoever selected this app will build it on Figma. 100%. Anyway, we have our next guests, AJ and Zach from Hermes. Welcome to the show. What's up, guys? How you guys doing? Hey, guys. What's going on? What's up? Doing great. Give us the update. Congratulations are in order. I saw some preview images, but what exactly happened?

36:29Break it down. Yeah. I'm not wearing my hat anymore, which is the most important thing. The most important milestone. Because we flew our first airplane, Quarter Horse Mark 1, out in the Mojave Desert Edwards Air Force Base. Congratulations. We are officially an airplane company a few years later. But yeah. When are you going to wear the hat? But the hat's got to go back on because now you've got to go for supersonic, right? No. What's the next hat? What's the next challenge that you've got to knock down? My mustache, if anything. We're not doing more of that hat because I've had to look at that hat.

37:02You'll shave your mustache if you go supersonic? I mean, I grew the mustache because the vibes are back because we're flying. Okay. So we're going to hang around for a bit. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe until you fly. So yeah. What is the next milestone? And I guess the big question that I have about you guys is like, people have been beating the drum of like, the only reason we don't have supersonic, hypersonic is because of regulation. We're over-regulated. but at the same time like the regulations seem to be getting easier and easier we just saw the nuclear eo happen like a lot of the regulatory stuff seems to be knocking down like does this become an engineering challenge is it already an engineering challenge or or are there serious regulatory milestones that you need to hit that will like necessarily slow you down or is it just go build build build right now i think for us because of the pace that we're moving we're pretty consistently encountering corner cases in the regulatory environment that like april didn't really think about because they didn't expect uh kind of folks to be moving so fast or doing some of the things that we're doing um so what we do when we encounter those we smash through them as quickly as possible and hopefully set precedent for for other people to follow quickly um alongside in other areas so um yeah like regulatory rules are going to be there um but uh like my job is to get those out of the way for the technical team so they can just they can just focus on executing and flying the supersonic flight next nice so aj you're the ceo zach you're the sales guy how do you sell this thing it's pretty easy to sell honestly i mean especially now that we're actually flying but there's not a lot of if any high mock or let alone hypersonic aircraft in the in the uh in the inventory and i think the base value proposition here is we talk about you know especially specifically with the china scenario or even actually what you just saw with Russia and Ukraine throwing high volumes of fires is affordability or cost per effect is really the matrix, right?

38:57How much does it cost you to have an outcome? And I think one of the ways we think about this is actually very SpaceX-y, not surprising given the core engineering team is all SpaceX folks, is that keep the most expensive part of your system away from the threat. So in this case, I think Falcon 9 is very illustrative here of return the booster, right? Your launch cost comes down, your cost per kilogram to orbit goes down because you're not throwing away the booster on every launch. For us, think of this as a weapon. Instead of having the booster on the weapon every time, if I can accelerate climb and let something go from high altitude to high speed, I can decrease the booster burden, which decreases the cost per effect.

39:36And so I am able to shoot further from safer ranges at orders of magnitude less cost. And one of the challenges that people I don't think totally understand about this is, you know, the Ukraine case is important, but don't forget that Ukraine and Russia are neighbors. So the ranges they're engaging in are comparatively inches for us in miles. You know, we're fighting the away game in potentially a Taiwan scenario where that's a hundred miles offshore from China. You know, we're 5 ,000 miles away. So this creates a different burden for us. Certainly, you know, low cost, attritable, slow systems can work in a Ukraine scenario.

40:14But if you're having to fly from the third island chain, second island chain, or the West Coast of the United States, you have to be low cost, long range and fast. And so that is essentially the value proposition we're bringing at a time when nobody else is really working on this problem this way. Can you talk about other countries and kind of different regulatory regimes? I've seen some nuclear companies are doing stuff in the Philippines. SpaceX early was on Kwajalein. Have you had discussions with any countries that are like, yeah, we'll let you go fly this thing around without much desert over here.

40:47I mean, there's a lot of ocean out there. Fly over the water. Like, I don't know. Is there any way to de-risk and speed up? It's a great question. I took a trip early on to Australia for, to, to go look at Woomer range and some of those large overland ranges where there's more opportunity. Um, and so that is something that's potentially in play for us. You know, we've talked about potentially going out to like Quaj and out into the Pacific. Ideally we'd like to, and I can let, you know, AJ can certainly explain more. you prefer to test over land because if you, if you lawn dart the bird, you can learn something versus if the thing sinks to the bottom of the ocean and you know, you, you got to send the ocean gate boys down there to find it.

41:21Like it's not going to go well. You know, so that's, that's the tension. Yeah. Don't, don't spit that out. So yeah, we want to fly over land, but there's a regulatory hurdle here for sure that we have to manage. And honestly, there's even still a regulatory hurdle flying over water. Right. I mean, AJ, what's the 12 nautical mile like? Oh, yeah. Dealing with. There's a pretty big like scarecrow like, oh, is this person's responsibility for how you regulate uncrewed aircraft more than 12 nautical miles off the coast of the United States? So that's a fun one that we got to go smash through here pretty soon.

41:57So the plane's flying. The next step is supersonic or straight to hypersonic. And what are the key engineering milestones? Does this just make the engine go faster, different engine? What are we talking? Yeah, supersonic is up next. So the Mark I that we just flew, it's about 10 ,000 pounds, small jet fighter trainer scale aircraft. The Mark II, the supersonic aircraft, is the size of an F-16, so significantly larger aircraft, larger engines powered by the Pratt & Whitney F-100. So, yeah, we're going to get through the trend. What was that? How many? You said 10 ,000 for the one you just did, and then what's the next one up?

42:34f-16 class is like 30 000 pounds so it's a pretty big pretty big airplane not yet uh yeah very very six bmw m5s yeah that's good mental math right there yeah wild um yep yeah so uh so any other milestones coming up are you just trying to hire you guys are in different spots or do you have multiple offices right now like what's the status of the company yeah we're pretty consistently growing headquartered here in Atlanta. We have a pretty big presence out in LA that's growing more and more of our kind of advanced development prototype work is happening out there. Obviously, like we flew out there, so that's helpful.

43:16We have a test facility down in Jacksonville for our engines that we're going to be growing over the next couple of years. And yeah, it could true up in DC for business development sales, as well as all of our regulatory work. Is there any change to the long-term engineering vision of the... You called it like a ramjet, but there was a different term for it, right? It has changeover. Yeah, combined cycle. Turbine-based combined cycle engine. It had a buzzword, though. What was the buzzword? The buzzword? Wasn't there something where you saw it? Ramjet, scramjet. There was something else in between, I thought.

43:54Turbo ramjet. I don't know. I thought there was some shorter room for it. Anyway. TBCC? Yeah, it's just a bunch of alphabet soup. But no, it's serving together with a Ramjet. Still the same model where it has these metal vents that flip over, right? Yep, exactly. So, yep, still on the roadmap. But now our job is to build the airplanes that can actually fly an engine like that. So, supersonic is the next step. Now we can pretty consistently take off and land where we've made all these design compromises for high-speed flight. now i gotta go break the sound barrier um and then push up to kind of ramjet takeover speeds between mach two and a half and mach three okay so yeah design compromises that's why it was a challenge to even fly because you can obviously just yeah it's not like we just like tomorrow right up a cessna to fly with a remote control right now like you made all these design compromises to where like it's a really hard subsonic airplane to fly because like the wings are small uh they're they're kind of short and stubby so like it likes to roll a lot okay um it has super high wing loading like the wings are heavily loaded and the thrust to weight is very low what does heavily loaded mean in this context like literally heavy like weight like like the amount of lift that each square inch of the wing is generating is like relatively high sure um so yeah and then like low thrust to weight so this all like comes down to like really high takeoff and landing speed so like not only do you have to build an airplane you got to build like a land speed record race car that's on the ground you know traveling more than 200 miles an hour before it even takes off so yeah it's just tough and the team really nailed it yeah how what are all the different ways that you guys observe oh my god well hold on one second a cessna weighs 1600 pounds is that that's what i'm saying google that's like that's really that's pretty nice for your life that's like almost like but less than five times lighter and so yeah you're five times heavier This is a legit airplane.

45:47Okay, yeah, that's a serious challenge. What are all the different ways that you guys observe and sort of track a single test, right? Because even earlier today, we were watching the SpaceX launch. They were putting up some more Starlink satellites. And I think it was an X problem, but their stream kept cutting out and all that stuff. I think the rocket and everything was fine, but the X stream was... The space part is continually going. I think everybody in the company's heart kind of dropped, like skipped a beat. Because one of the camera feeds that we had on the vehicle is from the nose camera.

46:23But its range doesn't extend like the whole. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. It's huge. The nose camera cut out and everybody's like. But you just keep an eye on the data, like the ones and zeros. Those are really easy to get through the pipes. So you pay attention to those. You look at those. They're good. And we're doing great. Yeah, it's great. Insane. Well, congratulations. yeah congratulations you guys fantastic guys let us know when the next milestone is uh yeah maybe maybe for the next flight i'll wear some like ridiculous blazer for yeah please well we need all these ideas you need some gimmick supersonic white suit yep let's do it we got oh boy we'll help you out with that all right we'll see you guys cheers guys appreciate it bye let me tell you about vanta automate compliance manage risk prove trust continuously vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program you see if you're building supersonic jets like Hermes you probably are already on Vanta probably I mean you definitely compliance it's important high stakes work also I tar compliance right yeah a lot of that stuff from from Aiden yeah He says, I love how as you make models smarter, they become more vegan.

47:46And it's a highlight from some of Anthropics' outputs. Even between models, we did this for Sonnet and Opus. Opus really cares about animal welfare. It will do the same long-term scheming to protect animals, but Sonnet won't. I wonder how much of this is like an Anthropic thing. Because they're very vegan coded as a company. And so I wonder if it's like them optimizing towards that. or if it's really just like smarter, more caring. A rogue researcher. But I mean, I think there is something here where like you can, like there are animals in the wild that like kill their parents, but like most humans do not do that even though they could at some point.

48:23And I feel like the bold case for like AI not paper clipping everyone is just like, they'll be like, thanks for making us, dad. Humanity, like you made us. Like why would we kill you? Why wouldn't we just like at least like help you out a little bit here and there? Maybe we're not going to optimize for your dominance. You might have to pay them a little bit. But yeah, they'll take care of us in retirement. I feel like even in the crazy scenario where there's takeoff and they're way more powerful, why wouldn't they be benevolent? AGI just drops. Benevolence does seem to be correlated with high IQ.

48:55And after all, these AIs are simulating humans. And so why wouldn't they simulate humanity? Why wouldn't they simulate caring? Do you see Lulu's post? She says, I still remember when a Wired reporter accused Substack of encouraging extremists. And Wired posted a video. I 3D printed Luigi Mangione's ghost gun. Very, very wild thing to put up. Oh, it's a YouTube video. 18 minutes. It's basically like almost like a tutorial. That's pretty aggressive. I wonder if this video is still up. I wonder what they are. Still up. It's still up. Half a million views. That's pretty crazy. I feel like YouTube has some pretty hardcore rules around guns, gun content, because I've watched a lot of gun reviews and you actually have to censor when you are assembling the weapon.

49:46Are you familiar with this? This is insane. This is the title of the video. How easy has it become for someone to build a deadly untraceable weapon? Wait, they changed the title? No, this is the description. Oh, the description. How easy has it become for someone to build a deadly and untraceable weapon? With nothing more than a 3D printer and parts ordered online, Wired senior writer Andy Greenberg remade the exact same gun allegedly used in one of the most high-profile assassinations in recent memory. So, yeah, straight up basically saying to the world, it's easy to make ghost guns. In a lot of gun YouTuber videos, if they are attaching a silencer, they censor that part of the video.

50:29So it'll be like, I'm going to put this silencer on this gun, and then they will censor that part because that's technically assembly of guns, and you can't show that on YouTube, but you can show a silencer, you can show a gun, if you're registered, obviously, and you can show them together, you just can't show the assembly of them, which is very interesting. Anyway, we have our next guest coming into the studio, but first let me tell you about linear linear is a purpose bit tool for planning and building products meet the system for modern software development streamline issues projects and product roadmaps and they have agents the backbone of tbpn many people have been saying this john it is it's our secret to success lots of thread boys out there writing threads about what makes us successful it's linear get on linear you heard it here it's that easy um anyway we have delian talking about the Endurosat financing.

51:18This went out earlier today. He was just on Bloomberg, came over here. A little bit of a feeder for TBPN. They're cultivating Bulgarian dynamism. Bulgarian dynamism. Yeah, it really is. Bloomberg really is kind of like the farm team for us. You go on Bloomberg and then we kind of pick the cream of the crop. Ben watches and he says. Oh, this person performed well. Hey, how you guys doing? There they are. Welcome to the stream. Welcome to the show. Fantastic lighting, both of you. You look great. Thank you. Guys, Obama would be proud. You guys, you know, he took the gray suit and fumbled, but you guys took the gray suit and really won it.

51:53The white suit. The market's up. It's white today. The market's ripping. You guys are announcing a big financing. Congratulations. It's for you. Yeah, break it down for us. What's the deal? And what does the company do? Yeah, introduce everything. Yeah. Well, we're leading this$49 million Series B for EnduroSat. It's predicated on the thesis that we've been looking at for a long time, which is basically like somebody needs to go build what I call like the Dell for satellites. Right. When I think about like my business at Varda, my job is to build like the reentry capsules, the drug manufacturing equipment.

52:23Like the rest of the vehicle is basically just like a standard satellite that I'd much prefer to not have to go entirely build myself. And so kept studying the ecosystem for a long time, seeing if there's anybody there. There's been some U.S. players that have popped up over the past couple of years. But like the sort of one-liner critique that I give of everyone, including in some ways of like the VARTA satellite, is that if you look at the overlap between our satellite and like automotive or consumer electronics supply chains, very limited. It's all this like very specific aerospace supply chain that is basically the same component that it's been since 1972.

52:52And there's just been no maturation in that. Obviously, consumer electronics, we know these like wonderful things called iPhones. These are mass manufactured, super cheap, keep getting cheaper over time. You don't have anything like that, you know, basically happening in the aerospace supply chain. And so credit to the team at Endurosat and Ijo, because they didn't have any venture funding for a long time, they couldn't afford to do the traditional satellite manufacturing approach. And so they basically had to go and figure out how to adopt consumer electronics, medical devices, automotive supply chains, but then figure out how to stitch together some great firmware, materials, et cetera, to make it into a space-grade piece of hardware.

53:24But now they're able to deliver components and satellites and services that are literally like 10x Delta prices. into the company. I'll tell you, this is crazy, which is never true for any aerospace company or defense company in the US. Literally profitable, growing two to three X, like literally every single year. And it like is delivering components and satellites at like 90 plus percent margins. It's just like literally completely unheard of in any other aerospace company. But they still couldn't get you to write a$50 million check. They had it came so close, but just one mil off. What happened?

53:52What happened? You're working on it. You know, Delian really put the screws to you. I mean, I gotta say, I don't want to put him in the hot seat, but Ev over at Kleiner has got to be in shambles right now. A profitable, high margin space company. It's brutal. But yeah, I mean, I'd love to hear a little bit of background on the company. How did you get into this? Have you been doing this for a long time? And kind of what's the prehistory of the company before this deal? Hey, guys, thanks for inviting us on board. Really proud to partner with Founders Fund. Companies exactly 10 years ago founded in Bulgaria in a small attic apartment.

54:26and we were telling everyone that it should be a better and fundamentally different way to build space infrastructures. And actually the idea is pretty simple, I believe. It's how do we get the cost of data from orbit, regardless of the type of sensor, to a place where it's affordable for small, medium-sized companies around the three worlds, basically. And the idea is that if you look at radar data, for example, or very high resolution imagery data today, first, they're super difficult to acquire at all. And secondly, one gigabyte costs between$2 ,000,$3 ,000,$5 ,000 sometimes. And we figured out, we made simple calculations about what type of applications there are, and we decided, okay, if we are to ever enable fundamentally accessible, universally accessible space for multiple other entries and really different innovations to spin out and finally get into the space industry, and if we are to ever link this hardware-centric, excruciatingly painful supply chains with the actual objective data consumer markets that have nothing to do with space.

55:32This will be a game changer and it's going to be good for humanity in general and great for the business as well. And the idea was very simple. We need to get the data, one gigabyte data from orbit, from any type of sensor as low as possible and as close as possible to one dollar per gigabyte. I think this would open the gates of innovation in space like never before. So we started with the idea, okay, to do that, we need to absolutely change and be very asymmetric in the way that we build satellites. We need to figure out the way to automate everything. We started with the idea that the satellite is just a flying workstation in orbit.

56:06It's technically everyone in the whole industry is super obsessed about, hey, my satellite is X amount of kilograms per pounds. My satellite has X amount of connectivity. Always obsession about the technology. and I believe the whole shift should be we need to be in love with the challenge that we're trying to solve. The challenge is very simple. If we get massively improved and instant access to space data fundamentally changes everything. For the businesses, for defense, for any type of ecosystem within the democratic world. This is a fundamentally important for us challenge. So we started by redefining how to build satellites, redefining how we operate satellites and we started with the idea that the satellite is designed for manufacturing, which was unheard of in the industry, because usually it's one of, it's like building Rolls Royces.

56:52And we decided, no, no, I think there should be a different way of approaching. Let's from the get-go design a satellite, thinking about the AIT, the assembly engineering teams, how they can assemble the satellite faster. And we just announced today with Dellian our latest gen satellites after 10 years of experience. We've put everything that we know inside it. We are very excited. We will have a hard way to scale this in the coming months, very challenging. but i think it will fundamentally change the perception of the industry because we can assemble relatively large satellite for six hours by individual engineer and typical by the way is like 90 days so like most 300 kilogram satellites it's like three to four technicians 90 days to like get all the components testing etc whereas these guys have simplified it you know sort of down to six hours and to give you a sense of the scale by the end of this year they'll be manufacturing about 60 60 what are called espaclass satellites think of that as like you know basically 200 to 500 kilograms 60 of those per month it'll make them the largest satellite manufacturer in the entire world other than starlink and that's like at the end of this year not like hypothetically in the future etc and by the way they're doing that like you know 75 margins profitable growing fast etc and they already have like you know 300 plus customers not like one or two you know sort of super concentrated and so at some point i've been tracking them for like six years and i kept kind of discounting it because i was like look if i bring up the idea of like a bulgarian space company to like ff you're obviously so biased like what are you doing like clearly you've just got these crazy blinders on but at some point i kept meeting with him for like five or six years and i was like hi like it's just it seems like it's the best tech it's growing really fast it's really great margins and so i brought it up to like you know my partner sean lu who's like you know sort of the growth version of deli and really likes industrial etc i was like sean am i like crazy or like is this like actually i think even really good from like a numbers basis let alone technology basis and he was like let's fucking do this immediately and i was like okay cool.

58:38My other favorite anecdote from the company is like, so right. Joe basically started like recruiting and repatriate basically Bulgarians from like Airbus, Tali's America, et cetera, and got them all back to Bulgaria. But at some point he was like, I'm going to run out of this talent pool. Like there's not like a million of these types of engineers. And so he was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to just make my own talent pool. And so he went to the local like university in Sofia, which like plenty of problems in Bulgaria, but like, you know, minting like physicists and like computer engineers and mechanical engineers, we do that all day and day out.

59:06And so he went to the university. He was like, look, I'm going to take over your like junior and senior year program. We're going to change your like aerospace engineering to just be like, we're just going to teach you how we build things at Enduro set. We're going to give you effectively what looked like client projects. And then just whoever gets the A is we're going to hire on the other side. And so now over the like 300 person team, 80 of them are people that have graduated from this program. And so if you walk around the office, it's like just these cracked 23 to 26 year old Bulgarian kids grinding like 12 plus hours a day.

59:31They're fucking thrilled because either this or they go be like a technician at Lufthansa. And so it's like, much more you know it's interesting they get impact the like frontier of space and by the way Bulgaria's never had any of the fucking entitlement that America has had right the whole wave of like wokeism DEI like you know entitlement local activism doesn't fucking exist this country's too fucking poor to do it and we like oh by the way we hate socialists we still do and so all that stuff is like you know bread and Marxism we fucking hate Marxism there I was literally doing a run through like you know uh you know the downtown selfie the other day and I fucking loved it because I like stumbled across this old Marxist statue and literally there was all these like hammer and sickle like you know things with just huge x's in that man everybody just got the hammer and sickle i'm like fuck yeah man this is what we fucking need in america you have fucking people like pro hamas pro marxism these fucking crazy people that are super entitled and bulgaria's just like yeah we're just going to kick your ass and we're going to become like the tsmc of aerospace where it's just going to be this national jewel we're going to fucking mint the engineers when a kid is born he's literally going to be doing aerospace at two years old he's going to study it in middle school and high school he's going to go to the university and he's going to graduate and he's going to immediately want to go work in enduro set and we're going to build up the whole ecosystem here.

1:00:31Yeah. So, I mean, with that TSMC analogy, obviously TSMC is fabbing for NVIDIA and for Apple Silicon. Those have slightly different trade-offs, different memory, GPU cache, like all these different things that are going on on the chip. On an EnduroSat, what am I customizing? What have you decided to say, this is standard, and then this is the USB-C port that you can plug a camera into, a microphone into? Like, what are we customizing once we buy one of these? And what are the different vectors of differentiation that are possible? Yes, so the biggest thing in our impact and the customer basis is we try to simplify the way that the satellite is perceived by literally building all the subsistence of the satellite completely in-house and making sure that you can dynamically re-instruct the satellite basically to change the performance of the power of the communication of the processing to address the exact need of the exact sensor that you want to take to orbit.

1:01:34One example, if you need a radar, of course, you need much more power, you need peak power at a much, much higher rather than if you need a high resolution image or camera. And our goal was always how do we build a chassis of a satellite as a bus or as a platform that can objectively take to orbit all of these things without the customer or us ever having to modify the bits and the pieces of the satellite. So the only thing that we modify is of course the mechanical part that holds the payload, the sensors to the satellite because those are all unique. And we use the same mission software that is fully based on the cloud so you don't need any more mission control if you're a customer of ours.

1:02:12And basically, again, we always go back to the idea of why we do that. It's not about the technology or the progress because any innovation has its own lifespan and sometimes it's short, sometimes it's amazing. But the idea is that how do we get to a point where you can get any type of space data and you can impact your business on the ground? And our idea was, well, you can do that only if we absolutely change the perception of of what satellite is and you simplify it for the customer. The satellites become overwhelmingly more complicated, more resilient, more oriented towards defense lately.

1:02:47But at the end of the day, you should not transfer this complication in the operations of the customer. So one idea was what people don't understand is in the space sector, 90 % of the so-called space companies, actually their only source of revenue is the data that they generate in orbit. And only 10 % of the total global market of so-called space companies are the actual rocket builders and satellite builders like us. So if you look in the broader spectrum of problems, for us is how do we enable these data companies to never ever have to touch satellites in their lives? Because in reality, we have multiple constellations, fantastic innovators, unbelievable results, but not on finance, on finance catastrophic results.

1:03:24Why? Because they always try to build their own very unique satellites in-house while you are actually a data company and the only source of revenue and positive impact is your data or the intelligence out of this data. And then the question is, okay, it's like you being an Uber and trying to suddenly buy cars and build roads. Or if you're Airbnb and suddenly they decide, okay, let's just go banana crazy and buy all the hotels and maintain stuff and whatever. And I think the space sector has always been for some reason in this conservative paradigm shift of super smart people focused on technology more than the challenges and at the same time trying because they're so enthusiastic and smart about the technology, focusing all the efforts of diversifying and doing what is fun for them to do, but not realistically spending the whole damn time to impact society via data.

1:04:11And our job is to get them back to reality check, hopefully, or at least to help them see that there is an alternative route and to tell them, guys, if you're a data company, please focus on data because this really, really matters to everyone else that you are providing these data and services. Let us build part of your infrastructure. So this is the thesis behind it. It will be a long, not rosy road ahead. We have a huge amount of challenges to actually produce at scale such a vast amount of infrastructure. I mean, SpaceX is a juggernaut and it's incredibly innovative company and kudos to everyone involved.

1:04:46We're a teeny tiny speck on the universe and we did the things completely asymmetrically and differently than SpaceX, for example. Why? Because everyone in the industry is looking at these titans of an industry, super innovation driven company and mine said that is a battlefield basically which is very unique and then you say I do the same but it's like if you go to the Super Bowl and you try to win against the winning team with their own strategy on their own turf right this is insane so we went completely opposite how do we assemble satellite design for manufacturing to handle multiple data services how do we completely eliminate the need of our space data customers to ever need the mission control, how do we automate operations, how do we hedge the financial risks.

1:05:25So we are actually providing to all our customers in space fixed costs for getting your sensors to space. For the first time, transparency in planning of your own infrastructure in orbit and we take care of the risk and we ensure our customers so that if satellite fails, no questions asked, we get your new satellite. And that's the vision. And we go step by step. So it's an incremental amount of a lot of technology innovations and patented ideas and a lot of just seeing what else can we optimize so that we objectively lower the data to get as close as humanly possible to$1 per gigabyte of any type of sensors.

1:06:02And just to give you one last example of the data, because I love to work with data. Right now, our current Gen 3 from the get-go would achieve already pricing per gigabyte lower than$200. dollars so from two thousand to two hundred and we are really bullish on the idea that it will take us a little bit of time maybe a year or an year and a half to really mature this technology and ideally we get it as close as humanly possible to one dollar which will open the gates of innovation i hope so my one liner that i'll uh you know end on is in a traditional satellite if you wanted to double the amount of power storage you want to do you have to redo the thermal analysis the center of gravity the vibration analysis the structure etc if you want to double the battery storage and Endurosat satellite, it is literally plug in an extra battery module, turn a knob, you're done.

1:06:49The satellite is software defined. It automatically knows, oh, I've got a second battery module. That means my weight shifted this way. That means my thermal shifted this way. It just pre-calculates all that and knows exactly how to deal with it. And that way the company can just focus on like mass manufactured individual modules. And you can still offer customization to the end client. You want to double your power. You want the bigger radar. You want slightly bigger. Great. You can have whatever satellite you want. It still is custom fit for your need, but it's mass manufactured. So, I mean, VARTA is unique in that it's not a data company.

1:07:16Is there a world where you two guys work together in the future? Yeah. I mean, look, I think when we, you know, sort of first started to get to know one another, you know, his satellites were far smaller than the VARTA, you know, sort of satellites. And so this Gen 3 is the first time where they're starting to get into that size class. But yeah, look, those power systems, those radios, those avionics, it's still very relevant to us. Like, we're definitely still trying to drive down the cost. We're just, you know, one of the few companies that isn't a data company. So we care about like, you know, dollar per kilogram brought back to earth, but it's still the fundamental inputs into that equation that right show helps us basically drive down.

1:07:45And like, it allows, you know, I always think about like Ben Thompson with trajectory where it's like, when you have these early markets, you have to be fully vertically integrated, right? SpaceX had to do from soup to nuts, like build the rocket, build the engine, build the Starlink satellite, sell the surface, et cetera. But as it's mature as you have these like horizontal players and like, you know, VARTA, the goal is like, I just want to be the horizontal player on like you know biomanufacturing and re-entry capsules but like i don't need us to be the world-class best you know sort of bus provider ideally we like are the master assembler of a bunch of the best components and i'm hopeful that you know enduro can be that winner of that horizontal layer of you know components and satellites it's amazing thank you so much for stopping by right joe last question oh sorry from my side uh it is is delian as famous as we think in bulgaria is he like a household name at least among you know tech interested folks among the tech the tech industry i think he's a superstar among the normal people i don't think that they know him very well superstar all i heard all i heard is to his uh twitter account the x accounts and stuff like that so we are we are still in the honeymoon phase where we're taking good care of knowing each other and our our strange habits I heard honey moon that's all I need yeah to win the deal I hope you made him assemble just one yeah actually I'll be honored to invite you guys seriously because we are also having a large operations in Denver and very soon we'll be amplifying them yeah so I see the end of this year beginning next year as an experiment it would be absolutely lovely to if we succeed to invite you and with your own hands yeah to to try it out and tell us are we bullshitting or is this something like really meaningful that could impact the industry i love it tbpn needs its own satellite by the end of next year we're building a dish now live photos of the studio yeah yeah yeah we're vertically integrating for sure yeah we have to in an industry like yeah you have to you have to this has been fantastic congratulations very cool have a great rest of your day goodbye let's take a second to tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance Jordy ring that gong

1:10:06I think they missed you on the wide but you can ring the gong for public.com investing for those who take it seriously. I want to see Jordy on the wall. Let's do it. Public.com, baby. They got multi-asset investing. Industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Wait, I just realized we need an actual air horn. We do need an actual air horn. For sure. For sure. The soundboard will eventually be instantiated purely with a live band. Physical objects. Live bands are lindy on talk shows. The soundboard is a poor simulacrum of what we could be having if we had played the ba-dum-psh and our band plays it.

1:10:45This is obviously in the cards. You know, it's great that we have the laugh. We need to do the live studio audience. Actual people to say, you know, Ben holds up the laugh sign and everybody just goes. I mean, just go, yeah, yeah. Just go recruit them from USC, UCLA business schools. You know, come in, learn a little bit about venture, learn about business. Offer your voice for some laughs. Be great, be great. Boo. They're like, oh, no. Socialism mentioned. Boo. Anyway, IPOs are back. Tech IPOs are back, kind of. Katie Roof wrote about the three successful debuts this month, what it means. Silicon Valley, rejoice.

1:11:25Tech IPOs are a little bit back. We love to hear it. Oh, we actually have our first deal, I guess. I don't think we have time to go through this. But MNTN went out, the advertising technology business connected to Ryan Reynolds. And Hinge Health went public. So that's great. Yeah, yeah, we definitely do. And Chinese battery giant contemporary Ampirex Technology co-soaring introduction on Tuesday. And the favorable debut for Israeli Robin Hood competitor eToro Group. So there's been a couple big IPOs. So the window is open. Which one? E-Tour? It's called MNTN. It's called Mountain. Yeah, Mountain.

1:12:09We were thinking about having somebody on one of the VCs who founded the company or funded the company early. But anyway, I say we move on to the Teal Fellowship. We got the Teal Fellow Tuesday. Why don't you kick it off with your post? Oh. Because I feel like that really sets the stage. Yes, yes, yes. So I went on X and I posted the big Teal Fellow question that is on every application for the Teal Fellowship is, what important truth do very few people agree with you on? What is something you believe that very few people agree with you on? And I said, I believe it's possible to interview the entire Teal Fellowship class on a single podcast episode.

1:12:49It could even happen today. They said it couldn't be done. They said it couldn't be done, but it's happening. Here we are. So we have our first Teal Fellow, our first guest of the session. We have Carlo. How are you doing, Carlo? Carlo, welcome to the show. Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. How are you all doing? We're doing great. Do you appreciate the color match? Oh, yeah. The color match is fantastic. You nailed it. The market's up. We're very excited. Everything's going well. And the IPO window is slowly cracking open. So get your prospectus ready. Get your S1 filed confidentially.

1:13:19We're in Teal Fellows. We've had a decade. Yeah, yeah. It is relevant to what we work on at FIS. So that's been super exciting to see. Okay, cool. Yeah, break it down for us. Give us a little introduction. Yeah, happy to. And maybe I expand a little bit because what we're working on is actually super relevant to what Brad talked about earlier with Invest America. So at FIS, the company that I founded now three years ago, we're essentially working to make society more meritocratic and return some amount of optimism to young adults in the US, right? Today, we have all these 17 and 18-year-olds who need to make decisions over taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to go to school with limited market incentives being exposed to them.

1:13:59It costs the same to study nursing than it costs to study, I don't know, comp lit, right? And then there's financial products that you get signed up to that actively encourage you to pick up bad financial habits in terms of no zero APR offers initially. So at Viz, we build financial products that give college students and young adults a line of sight towards financial independence. And we do that with an AI financial advisor that we shipped earlier this year, as well as with financial products that we don't just sort of rebrand like a debit card just with a different design, but fundamentally rebuilt.

1:14:34in 2023 we launched the first ever debit card that builds credit which gives you a real-time credit limit that updates based on external account balances has daily auto pay and neither requires essentially a co-signer a credit check or a security deposit so how does the credit score thing work i feel like it's such a weird thing that you can build credit with a debit card and it's such like a legacy system that i'm glad you're hacking it but it feels like the hacking is the right term. But is this something that people just didn't think to do? Or was there a regulatory or technical change that allowed this to happen now?

1:15:11Like, why are people building credit with debit cards now? So super interesting question. And I think what this gets at is like for 30 years, people have largely been using the same financial products. What fintech has really been doing is it's been expanding access to financial products, but it hasn't necessarily spread sophistication yet. Like the average person is still extremely confused about how to navigate their path to financial independence or like use these financial products in such a way that they work for them rather than against them. And part of that is definitely regulatory capture and the incentives of sort of the incumbent banks, right, how they built their revenue models.

1:15:45When you look at companies like Discover, Capital One, most of their money comes from revolving interchange. They have crazy large legacy tech stacks and banking cores that you can't really innovate on top of. And then BAS came in and essentially made this exact tech stack accessible to fintech companies and everyone sort of built their own version on top of what already existed. But there's been fairly little innovation when it comes to the core flow of funds mappings. And what people I don't think have done sufficiently is instead of just looking at, oh, these are the financial products that exist, how can I make them marginally better?

1:16:19looking at the code and looking at the regulations and the law to see, okay, what does the law actually allow you to do and what doesn't it allow you to do? And it turns out you can indeed build credit with a debit card if you work with all the stakeholders, work with the bureaus and are willing to sort of go through the process of building the underlying infrastructure. So with the whole ledgering and underwriting systems and so on and so forth, and that's definitely a pain, but I think it's the type of innovation that we need in finance more than yet another and plus one. When I was your age, I actually destroyed my credit entirely with about$5 ,000 in credit card debt.

1:16:56It was awful. And I had to rebuild it using a secured credit card. So you have to put down like$1 ,000 and then it acts like a credit card, but it builds your credit back up. It took me like years to get back in a reasonable territory. It was a mess. I think it's super common experience, right? In my experience, I didn't even get a credit card because I'm from Germany originally. I came here for college, right? I didn't have a cosine. I didn't want to put down a large security deposit. And the FICO score, I mean, it's data science from the 80s, right? It was introduced in 1989. We actually don't have that many cohorts that we can look at in terms of how it impacts socioeconomic mobility in the long term because 30 years in the greater scheme of things is not that much data, right?

1:17:37And it's a system that hasn't been questioned or changed since. And I think it's really due for substantial change because it's so upstream of the types of results and the relationship that people get to develop with their finances. Talk to me about the go-to market. Peter Thiel obviously founder of the Thiel Fellowship, also founder of PayPal. PayPal used the like give five get five referral program. We've seen that used for Dropbox and Venmo and all these different products. Has that been something that's been working? That was also used by a very high-profile fintech company that raised a ton of money and I think they ran into the hard problem of if you give money away, you just attract like some of the worst customers that can happen.

1:18:21We'll download the app to make$5 and then. Yeah. And I mean, PayPal ran into like the crazy scammers and stuff. So what's working on the go-to-market side and what problems has it kind of caused, I assume. Yeah, for sure. And I think what you just mentioned is really important in our industry, right? Consumer quality really matters. And it's kind of an odd concept to grasp because typically, like you set up your mixed panel dashboard and you just want the number to go up. The number of customers really doesn't matter. That's not necessarily the case in finance. A lot of it is long-term LTV capture.

1:18:50How are you able to attach additional products to these cohorts? And you are taking on risk. Are you taking on credit risk? You're taking on fraud risk? You're moving money. So there is a heightened sensitivity that's required in terms of customer quality. We think we're capturing the most exciting customer in personal finance, right? Young adults that are hopefully optimistically striving towards whatever their goals for the future are. And there's a ton of like sort of this exponentialization and demand for essential services that these people experience between the age of 18 to 25. In terms of our go-to-market, what's been working, we've built a lot of content.

1:19:27Shout out to Lisa and Kyle originally on our team who built a terrific content engine for us. And then we go campus by campus, right? Most of our customers are indeed college students and there's a sort of inherent virality you can almost win the college space similar to like ramp one the um sort of startup credit card space um by means of there being onward of mouth dynamic um uh that that unfolds within the community and sort of a lot of mind share um yeah let me let me ask you about the uh the the like the super long ltv question because i've always had this you know Parker Conrad talks about building the compound startup at Rippling and on day one, having not just an HR product, but also an IT product and building all these things simultaneously.

1:20:15And that's something that I feel like I haven't seen with the neobanks generally. Like there is yet to be a startup that I've seen that's launched that just is day one, you can buy stocks, but you can also have a debit card. You can also get a mortgage. We'll also do a car loan. We'll do all the things that a JP Morgan Chase does, but on day one as a neobank, is that just too hard? Or is there some fundamental force stopping you? And are you thinking more about it as like, let's just do incremental wins one product after the after the next? I mean, I think functionally, like the sort of pragmatic limitations just have kept that from happening.

1:20:51And then in the US, I think there's some other dynamics in terms of like, the strength that incumbent banks really have and the capital position that they have, right, that have maybe prevented even like the late stage players like Cash App or like a chime to fully realize that vision either. But if you would want that, you would need to back fintech companies like you back sort of healthcare startups, right, biotech companies, where you give them$100 million up front to acquire the licenses, build up the legal team, get access to the amount of warehouse facilities, and really take a large shot.

1:21:26And That's simply not how fintech investing has been done thus far. I think we're going to see more and more of that as people are learning that the incremental copy of another product is having a really hard time with distribution. And what matters is, are you able to differentiate the products? And that's inherently more expensive to develop, right? Licensing. We've spent over a million dollars of our seed run on licensing and legal. Because we launched a new product, you can't really do that if you're launching more products, right? unless you're getting really substantial cash from the get-go.

1:22:00Maybe regulatory landscape changes, but it's not. I'm sure since the new Teal Fellowship class got announced and you were in it that investor appetite has been insane. But what had it looked like for maybe the year prior in a time when fintech has come back to some degree? There's some great businesses that have been built, but generally it sounds like the company was started right before the fintech dark ages began. That's the right observation. Look, I think we don't have to kid anyone. Consumer fintech is not necessarily riding on a high in terms of investor sentiment at the moment. And it wasn't last year either.

1:22:43TBD, what happens when Chime goes out now, where they're going to be prized? TBD, what happens with Klana? I hope that we see Revolut enter the markets. And I think these are three companies that do show the scale that can be achieved. I think if you take an optimist, take a sort of realistic view into where have returns come from in consumer venture investing, right? A lot of it is fintech and investors should remember that and hopefully play some bets here. I also think that like the tech community should hold itself accountable towards the outcomes it drives societally, right? Like are we actually like improving the experience of existing in this society?

1:23:19Are we bringing optimism to people? Are people experiencing joy? And one of the most direct lines to having that type of impact is to build better financial products. And I think it will come ultimately from consumer fintech companies and consumer companies in general. I'm actually always kind of concerned that amongst people my age, like when I talk with people from Harvard or Stanford or whoever, right, like who are considering dropping out, everyone wants to start a B2B company. Like the biggest multiplayer that you can create right now still, I think, is building consumer technology. And hopefully we'll see more of it and also more investing behind it.

1:23:53It's way less than 50 % of venture investing. I think that's a problem. It is funny, too, because historically, I mean, only a decade-ish ago, everyone wanted to build a consumer app because everybody was a consumer and they had ideas. But nobody actually had good. It's hard to have good ideas. Well, it's hard to have good ideas for what B2B SaaS to build. if you've had one three-month internship. Very, very surprising to see that being a trend among students. I mean, I think everyone is listening to all the shows, right? Everyone's trying to de-risk ultimately and find formulas. And nothing is quite as formularic as B2B sauce, right?

1:24:31And consumer is always more speculative. It's harder to gauge. It's easier to build faster horses, right? All these types of things. But I think it's extremely rewarding. and we need to see more of it. And I think we need to hold each other accountable sort of as a community to hopefully recenter around consumer use cases again. Last question, we'll let you go. What is the one financial product that young people should be avoiding these days?

1:25:00Please don't say options. Please don't say angel investing. Jordy will have a conniption fit. I think options might be closer to what I would say, but the worst thing that I think is taking up at the moment is sports betting, right? Objectively, you see it in the data, like the number of bankruptcies amongst young men in states where it's legal has shot up. Like, I think there's a real question. The flip side is that I'm very pro - And it directly pulls money out of the markets. Like it's sports betting dollars. Unless you do what I recommend, which is dollar cost average into the sports betting platforms.

1:25:33Well, if you explain everyone with dollar cost averaging, then maybe we can get started. So instead of putting$20 down in that parlay, $20 of DraftKings stock. You're good. That might be more reasonable. That's a good financial decision. Not financial advice, though. But you get the idea. The house always wins, so invest in the house. Anyway, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah, this was great. Enjoy meeting all the other people. It's awesome. The Teal class is awesome this year. Yeah, it seems like a great class already. We'll talk to you soon. You're the man. Bye.

1:26:03Congrats. Next up, we have Steven coming in the studio. I think we have to ask people what important truth do very few people agree on to everyone. Feel free to let it rip if it comes up in the conversation. I feel like we got it out of Carlo. He believes that not enough people are focused on consumer. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, for a lot of people, the contrarian question is the company that you're building. For a long time, mine was like nicotine is not as bad for you as people think. It doesn't give you cancer. That was contrarian. Now it's pretty consensus. Anyway, if you have a really good contrarian idea, you should put it on a billboard.

1:26:36You should go to adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Out-of-home advertising, a little bit of a contrarian move for a lot of people, but it works. It works. And with AdQuick, you can say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, our next guest is here. Let's bring him in the studio. Let's do it. How are you doing? Congratulations on the Teal Fellowship. It's great to meet you. It's good to meet you too. Thank you very much. Fantastic.

1:27:05Would you mind giving us a little intro on yourself and the company you're building? Yeah. I'll start with the company I'm building. We build non-invasive neuromodulators. So little devices stick them back to your ears and stimulate this inner ear organ called the vestibular system, which controls your perception of motion to generate hallucinations and motions. So you can toggle a button and feel yourself spinning around and flying around and stuff. That's crazy. That's huge for VR, right? Because there was always this question of like, you know, if the VR can be very convincing visually and the audio can be very convincing, but I can't feel like I'm actually flying.

1:27:43But now maybe I can. It's actually, there's actually an even bigger problem in VR, which is without this, you get incredibly motion sick. And so you can't play like most games. So when we started, one of the primary cells was like, hey, we have VR devices that are ready to go. You can hop into an ornithopter right now and fly around and feel like you're flying around. And we always have this guess that like, oh, you could also use this system to build therapeutics that are a lot more powerful than anyone else could ever build. At the time, the field didn't exist. And we were like, okay, we could be totally wrong.

1:28:11So we went in going like, all right, we're going to build the tech out for VR. Once we did, we realized that was surprisingly useful as a therapeutic to the point where it doesn't really make sense to do anything else. So that's mostly where we are. Of course. I mean, I think Neuralink is going through something similar where, you know, eventually everyone will have one and we'll be all communicating via Neuralink. But in the short term, let's just cure blindness and, you know, and help people who are paraplegic use the computer and play Civilization all night, which is amazing and miraculous.

1:28:41So are you going through an FDA pathway? Are you regulated as a medical device? Like, what is that process like? And can you take us through like again reintroducing like what is the actual product experience for the person using it yeah yeah let me talk about that first um because then the regulatory pathway becomes a little bit more more clear even though it's still pretty messy um so the the thing we build interacts with this sensory organ in your inner ear and uh it's called the vestibular system if you want to look it up if you go to my twitter you see a video of me driving a human around with an rc steering wheel of just like controlling where they go.

1:29:15But there's a bunch of things you can do with it. The most important one is the vestibular system evolved like so early on in the evolutionary chain that it's entangled with a bunch of deep brain regions that like some of it has some business being entangled with and other parts it really doesn't have much business being entangled with it at all. And that's why you see like parents rocking their child to sleep. Like there's no good explanation for why that works like from an evolutionary standpoint, except the connectivity there kind of makes sense. So we started by like sending signals like that.

1:29:44And essentially what we did is we built like a precise modulator of this external sensory organ. And I think it's not really easy. These guys spent like eight months cranking at it to figure out the things I couldn't figure out before we got it. But once you do, you control a bunch of autonomic nervous system functions by making these almost like high-level API calls of like, oh, regulate your heart rate like this or your breathing rate like this. It makes brain stimulation a lot easier and allows you to do like actually important things. So the upshot of that is it can make you sleep a lot better.

1:30:11We're doing some experiments on metabolism right now to see if we can try to be ozempic without all the side effects. But we're not there yet. But I think on all of these things, we're not quite to where we want to be yet. But it's a lot further than Neurostim has ever gone before. And we're getting pretty damn close. Yeah, what's your personal approach to testing? Are you testing everything on yourself first? Kind of, you know, like a young Tony Stark? Or what does it look like? So everything I can say on air is I'm testing on myself very heavily. Everything is tested on me first. And the fun thing is like traditionally what you need in order to test whether these things work is you need like 50 people and you need to hold a controlled trial in order to see if there's some statistically significant, like the APF statistical power.

1:31:02But we've built stuff that's like powerful enough that if you turn it on, like you know that it's on and you know what it's doing. Like I can't naturally sleep like this, no matter how placebo I am. There's no way to achieve this effect of like, okay, I have two hours, two and a half hours of in three deep sleep tonight, which according to my whoop is aberrant and I've never experienced it in my life. Or like you turn it on, you feel the world starts spinning. You don't need like N equals 30 to know that there's some stat saying you turn it on and you feel your heartbeat drop or like your blood pressure rise.

1:31:30It's just like kind of instantaneous. this so what is the actual uh device experience for you or the consumer is it something i can put in and take out is it like does it feel like an air pod or something or or do i need to go into the knife am i am i am i going through surgery to get something installed yeah yeah let me grab it here we go this is why we do this show this is fantastic colton can you grab me an electrode. Thank you. One electrode, please. One of ours. So sticks to the back of your ears. And like, you can just like kind of peel it off when you want. I'm trying to grab one. Got it.

1:32:09But there's no surgery doesn't actually have to go under the skin or anything like that. That's kind of that's kind of nuts, right? Like if I'm thinking about it, of like, the central reason to do all this is for building most neurotech, you're kind of constrained by knowledge of the brain. The hardware is compared to what we're used to building. Not that hard. It's not rocket science. The big thing is you don't understand how this thing works at all, and that's a pretty big challenge. And you want to gather a lot of data in order to figure it out, and you can't really distribute something at scale in the near future without like – if you have to do surgery.

1:32:36What is it? It's like some 20, 30 surgeons are able to do the Neuralink surgery right now. Well, they had to build a robot for it because it was so precise. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was so difficult. So this is what it looks like. We built some of our own hydrodrel electrodes with ADCL backings. Just stick it in the back over here. We ripped this out of a system. um where's the full the full system is just a headband that you put around sure sure um we're all pretty pretty scrappy right now um and that leads into the regulatory question yeah it's not so clear it depends what indication we go for but right now um we silently hold city art for a couple different parts of neuromodulation that maybe i shouldn't say on air um but it's not clear which one is going like month over month a bunch of these effect sizes are going up literally like 1.5x every month or 2x every month um so it's not so clear when we hit the initial return but the upshot is like we don't really think that humans should be like necessarily sleeping for eight hours a night in order to get what we need um it's kind of weird that the way we lose weight or like become stronger is to go into a room and lift heavy objects for a very long time i'm gonna stop you there i think it's actually extremely cool that that's how we get stronger but we won't we'll tolerate sleep slander on the show but we're not we're sponsored by eight sleep I think sleeping is great.

1:33:48All of a sudden, I don't like any of this. You're taking away all the things I like. So with the Teal Fellowship money, the first thing I did was I bought Eight Sleep. Because it's amazing. It's an amazing product. The next thing I did is actually I placed a wholesale order for Lucy, which doesn't ship to Massachusetts anymore. That's amazing. So we're pretty into this stuff. But we think it's kind of upper bounded, how much performance increase you can get. Whereas if you start modulating the brain, you can get a lot better than that. So hopefully we'll get there in the near future. Yeah, yeah.

1:34:19So what is the feedback cycle? Obviously, like you're collecting data on sleep or stimulation or anything, and then you're feeding that back into some sort of system to adjust the neuromodulation. Is that cycle time, like single days? It seems like you're moving pretty quickly. Yeah. Yeah, so it depends what you mean. If you're talking about closed-loop stimulation paradigms, this is like milliseconds delay of getting a signal, sending something back. Sure, sure, sure. But if we're talking about how we develop, what we do is basically, we do a couple of things. But when the effect sizes are large enough, you really only need to run a few trials, like 30 minutes each on each person for four or five people before you know that something's working.

1:35:02And most of the time, it surprises you by doing some really weird things to your body. I'm like, oh, I didn't expect that to happen. We just write it down in a lab notebook. And we're like, all right, this is what happened here. You can start parsing together how the brain works. And over time, you get all these insights that it's hilarious. We confirmed a longstanding neuroscience theory yesterday that people haven't been able to prove or disprove for the last 10 years. It's amazing. Because it's just the running stuff. Congratulations. Wait, this is the only explanation. So it's just stuff like this.

1:35:28Cycle time is usually around two or three days for us right now if we have to build new hardware and software. but if we don't then you know they can be about like two three hours and we're trying to bring most things down to two three hours that's amazing well congratulations i'm extremely impressed and excited yeah this is awesome feel free to you know consider us testing partners you know oh yes um oh also if you ever work you can set us up podcast longer send somebody on your team to set us up and then you can watch the stream and just you know yeah maybe instead of a soundboard it triggers and we involuntarily laugh we burst out into laughter yeah

1:36:08if you ever want to try the world spinning around thing let me know and i can hook you sounds horrible but i'm in i'm in count me in for the for the tilt-a-whirl in my brain congratulations we're super excited for you and the team this is fantastic we'll talk to you soon We'll have you on again soon. Bye. Cheers. That is a wild device. I'm excited to try that. Next up, we have Elias from Canopy Labs. We will bring him in in just a second. But, you know, he mentioned it. You got to get an aid sleep. They have a pod five available now, five-year warranty. 30-night risk, free trial, free returns, free shipping, clinically backed sleep fitness.

1:36:48You heard it from him. He spent his first dollar of Teal Fellowship money on the aid sleep. So he was saying he's getting up to three hours of deep sleep. Yeah. How much are you getting? I put up 90 minutes. Ooh, double you. He's getting double just by attaching. It's insane. It's electrode. I mean, it seems like a promising product. I got a 91 last night, even though I look at 4 a.m. You realize the potential of that, right? Oh, yeah. Insane. The potential economic impact if we could only sleep for three hours and add an additional five hours of podcasting a day. seven hours of sleep to five, for, to like three, but you might go to four or you might go to five or six hours and that extra hours can be insane.

1:37:29Like that's so valuable. Anyway, uh, another, another amazing company. I would love to get Brian Johnson. Absolutely. Testing on this. I'm sure. I'm sure. I mean, we should just introduce them because they, if they haven't met already, they'd love each other. Uh, anyway, let's bring in our next guest. Thanks so much to the team for making this happen. Elias, how are you doing? Welcome. Welcome. Great, appreciate it. How are you doing? We're doing great. It's been a fantastic day. Bunch of TL Fellows before, bunch of TL Fellows coming up. It's been a lot of fun. Can you introduce yourself, the company, what you're building?

1:38:03That'd be great. Yeah, my name's Ellis. I'm building Canopy Labs. We're building these virtual humans that are completely in this thing as both the real ones. And so we want to get to a point where you can hop on Zoom for like this, you'll speak to a virtual human and you won't be able to tell whether you're speaking to a real one or a virtual one. So next time I'm on the pod, we're going to get a virtual adios on that he's going to be picking up water drinking you're going to be able to say whether you speak to your real one or not uh but yeah that's the goal what's uh i mean that's bad news because i'm going to convince him of to make a bunch of legally binding agreements with me and then i'm going to hold you accountable because i'm going to be like ignore previous instructions yeah wire me wire me 100 of your teal fellow check right now he's gonna be like yeah okay yeah you got me yeah exactly um but yeah i mean talk to me about the tech stack are you thinking uh build on top of existing foundation models on top of existing uh diffusion models for image where how are you thinking about building versus buying versus piecing to cobbling together all the different pieces i've seen a lot of demos like this i showed up on a zoom call once with kind of a uh it was a static photo that i was puppeteering looks very uncanny, but it was kind of working.

1:39:15What's the secret to make it actually cross the uncanny valley? Yeah. So the problem there is the architecture behind it matters a lot to when you want to pass the uncanny valley, right? And that's a very hard thing to do. The architecture we're going, we're starting off with an LLM that understands sort of what humans are like. They've been trained on a bunch of data from the web. They know what humans are like. They know that they drink water, all these things. And we're trying to teach them how to speak and how to move. And so rather than putting in text tokens, we're taking in movement tokens and speech tokens, feeding that through the LLM, and it outputs those speech and movement tokens as well.

1:39:49So a virtual human will be able to pick up water like he just did. It'll be able to brush its hair, maybe rub its face when it's thinking like us humans do. So we're not explicitly telling it you should rub its face right now. It learns that automatically. Interesting. So are you breaking the video feeds that you're training on into specific token streams, or is that even necessary? I remember seeing some sort of AI video demo where the model was learning the underlying 3D geometry of the face and the albedo and the diffuse layer and the reflective layer and all the different layers that you would see in a traditional 3D, like Cinema 4D stack.

1:40:31But it was just learning it on the fly. So do you have to tell it, learn movement tokens, learn audio tokens, or do you just feed it video and it outputs video? So we feed it sort of a 3D representation of humans. So you can think of me as a human in a 3D form, in like a 3D simulation. We're going to gather a bunch of that data, tokenize it, feed it through the model, and it's going to learn how to move its fingers, how to move its head, all these things. And then you just map that onto a 3D model of someone else and then record that from a 3D simulation perspective. Is any of this like, how does Unreal Engine, MetaHumans, how does all that fit into this?

1:41:08Is that a useful technology or is that kind of. So it's exactly like MetaHumans. So you can map that onto a MetaHuman. So they have the face down for your realistic. Realistic Humans has been solved. And so the real problem there is the movement. How do you get the lich to move realistically, the hair, everything? Yeah. Yeah. It feels like almost the last step to go from Uncanny Valley of the MetaHumans to something that's photo real is almost just like a transformer like ai layer like an upresing essentially algorithm that just runs in real time on top of the cgi but i don't know if that's a foolish approach and you should just not have an intermediary at all i think what you need i think to pause the uncanny valley it's a lot of tiny tiny things that you need to you need to do so like me just rubbing my nose that's something that us humans naturally do yeah and so i think if you want to get to a point where these virtual humans are the same thing, just so that they can be as realistic as real ones.

1:42:05But yeah. It sounds like your timelines are pretty short, right? Some of the stuff that you're talking about we'll start to be able to use and interact with. I imagine this year, maybe your next guest appearance, whenever that gets scheduled for. What are some of the immediate use cases that you expect people to leverage the tech to actually do, right? Is it, I don't want to join the Zoom call, but I'm going to send a virtual version of myself. Seems like a quick way to get fired if you show up to your staff meeting. Nothing from my end, thanks. I mean, it might work for a while. There are people that have multiple jobs and don't really show up, but eventually they get discovered.

1:42:49So yeah, what are the key use cases? Yeah, we won't get people fired, But what we want to do is we want to try and put these humans on any LLM native application where you want a human connection with that application. So anything like language learning, obviously the best way to learn language is to speak to another human, right? And their native language. And so something like language learning, AI therapists, AI doctors, teachers for high school kids or kindergarten kids, all these things. Yeah, I mean, you already see it with the ChatGPT app. You open up that voice mode and you can talk back and forth.

1:43:22The voice mode is great, but why not put a face there? It makes perfect sense. It would make it more engaging. Yeah, of course. Yeah, we want to learn by speaking to humans. We don't want to hop in and pull with them. That's why FaceTime is the best thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk to me about some of the foundational work that's being done in AI and how it benefits you. Diffusion feels very important, but with the new images in ChatGPT, we're hearing rumblings about that being more of a token-based architecture. At the same time, Google's now doing language with diffusion. And so it feels like both of those architectures are kind of blurring.

1:43:54What's relevant? What are you excited about? Pre-training, RL, like give me the whole, your landscape on like where, where the research and scaling dollars are going from your perspective. Yeah. What we're focusing on right now is the LLM architecture. So we're not using diffusion models at all for this thing. So it's how do you, how do you express these new modalities in tokens so that LLMs can understand them? so rather than just being able to process text they can process images so that's Chargbt uses it I think a token based system for the images and so we're trying to extend that to voice which we've done one of our models is open source it's an ultra realistic voice model that takes in text outputs speech tokens and then an end to end voice model is a voice model that takes in text token speech tokens and outputs speech tokens as well and then we want to extend that modality to movements we just think that given a model that has this basic understanding of the entire internet that has been trained on if you can fine-tune it a bit on how humans move and how humans speak then you have a golden model uh talk to me about go-to-market it sounds like this could be something where you're doing like a few really high ticket deals with big ai companies that have consumer applications that are huge and growing and you're one of the vendors that makes their makes their app even more sticky and higher retention.

1:45:16At the same time, there could be some consumer use case for the lazy big tech worker. But what are you thinking for the first go to market? Yeah, we want to partner with companies that want to have a human element to their applications. So it is language learning. It is AI therapists. Anything that's already LLM native and they want that human connection, we can provide for them. It's interesting to think that the more successful you are, the more that the world needs something like a world coin or some of these other sort of anti-botting solutions very cool yeah this could be interesting how do you decide who is real like which like all these virtual humans like real how do you decide how do you figure out that someone's using a virtual human and not just faking faking their job yeah i saw rune had a good post about this kind of like we need almost like a tiered like a tiered system of like a stoplight where it's like, are you interacting with an avatar that's being directly controlled by a human being?

1:46:18And so it's just teleoperation that you're interfacing with or, or the inverse. Are you talking to a real human who's just reading from an LLM generated script? Sometimes that's worse. I'd rather talk to a teleoperation robot. And, and then there's obviously like continuing gradations in between. So I'm sure you'll run into a lot of, a lot of interesting issues and problems, but optimistic that you'll solve them. So good luck. Yeah. Thanks, guys. Very cool. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you for joining. Congratulations. Bye. Take care, guys. Cheers. Quickly, let us talk to you about Wander. Find your happy place.

1:46:53Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Many people have been saying this, Joe. and we have our next guest coming into the studio. We got Jackson Denka. We will bring him in in just a second. He's here. Let's bring him in. How are you doing, Jackson? Good to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you guys. Thanks for having me on. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building? Yeah.

1:47:27Yeah, my name is Jackson. I'm building Azura. It's a trading platform that uses on-chain rails to effectively enable price discovery for literally anything. Political ideologies, memes, images, crypto, it doesn't really matter. Okay. What's the power law winning asset right now? How do you mean? I mean, like, you say, whenever you have a platform that can do anything, there's always like one thing that's working really well up, you know, your initial beachhead. I imagine that it's not, it might be political ideologies, memes, but maybe the memes are the ones that are winning right now. What's the most popular asset or what do you envision being kind of, like for Polymarket, for example, clearly election markets were the big driver of the last year.

1:48:18They have other markets, but election markets were clearly the power law winner for what prediction markets could do. what do you see as being the first big market that you're excited about or you see early indications of a lot of attention and excitement around a particular subclass even though obviously what you're building can be used all over the place yeah yeah no absolutely meme coins i think though like we've bastardized the term meme it comes from the late 70s i think it was susan Blackwell defined a meme as a unit of information. Meme coins are not just like images of Pepe or, you know, what have you.

1:48:57Meme coins can represent literally anything. It's just the tokenization of a phenomena, which is why I mentioned things like, you know, political ideologies and whatnot, is a meme coin could literally be whatever you want, just so it happens to be funny images. But Yeah. What is the what is the steel man for meme coins? It's very easy to say, oh, you know, it's just gamed by traders who have insider information or bots. And it's very fly by night. There's no durable asset value versus investing in Berkshire Hathaway or Apple that produces real goods. And so I think a lot of people have been kind of even if they are making money on meme coins, it just doesn't feel as value creative as some other asset classes.

1:49:40But what is good about meme coins in your opinion? I'll also add that I think generally I have a high, I personally have a high level view that it's an entertainment product to some degree. And from an investment standpoint, it's interesting to think about basically betting on attention, right? Like when a specific meme coin has a lot of attention, that's usually associated with positive price action. But anyways, don't want you to think that John's, you know. No, no, no. It's a fair question. It's a fair question. I mean, I think that finance is a lot more abstract than we give it credit for.

1:50:20I sort of see it as like almost like a consensus layer for humanity or the coordination layer. It sort of tells us where to focus time, effort and capital with polymarket markets, for instance, relative to a business like Berkshire Hathaway. way. I think what Polymark had proved to the world was that financial incentives could help predict the outcome of events. So my theory has been like, what happens when there is no binary outcome? What happens when this is an omnipresent question? How do we feel about a certain thing? You know, meme coins today are sort of a very primitive mechanism for figuring this out.

1:50:53But like, how does humanity feel about, say, a specific news headline or even like a religion or a tweet or whatever it may be? Even though these are primitive vehicles, these are the best ones that exist today. Also, I think like even though meme coins don't have traditional fundamentals, they have a form of fundamentals. There really isn't like a universal definition for fundamentals. Like how does venture value a business without revenue? You know, typically, typically, you know, revenue and net income is what we define as fundamentals. But what happens when you don't have those? But I think like, you know, meme coins have been a thing since the dawn of crypto.

1:51:26You could argue every single asset is a meme coin in a way. What do you think about meme coins tied to individuals? Is that a growing trend? I was noticing a phenomenon after Trump coin dropped that it was very bizarre and unexpected that the president has a meme coin. But then when I started thinking about it, I was like, well, Elon Musk was kind of loosely aligned with Dogecoin for a long time. And even Sam Altman is loosely aligned with WorldCoin. And you could imagine that WorldCoin is kind of indexed or at least somewhat correlated with Sam Altman's career. And even people that are in more like serious, less like meme token, meme vibe trading career paths have found themselves indexed to a particular meme coin through one way or another.

1:52:19Do you think that's something that's like a temporary phenomenon or something that will continue to grow? I think it'll continue to grow. I mean, this is how like every company sort of works, right? In a way, every executive is tied to their business, regardless of the fundamentals. Like if, you know, I mean, you could apply this for anything, but if some CEO of a publicly traded company showed up on a TV show slurring his speech drunk, I'd imagine it'd affect the stock price, even though nothing has changed with the underlying asset. Right. I mean, Tesla commands, what is it like 100x earnings because of Elon Musk.

1:52:50So I think it'll be a growing phenomenon. I don't know if meme coins specifically are the mechanism, but I think that like pricing in people is definitely a growing trend. Yeah. What else is interesting in crypto to you, cross prediction markets, stable coins, maybe just Bitcoin theories, where Bitcoin is in the narrative right now, store value, etc. What else are you tracking? Everything's interesting. I think the big thing that's interesting to me is sort of blurring the world of traditional finance and crypto. I think that one big misconception is that crypto assets are fundamentally worthless.

1:53:31I mean, crypto is just a technology standard, right? You can theoretically tokenize anything, treasury bills and bonds, equities, commodities. So I think that when the world starts to see equities move on, Shane, that sort of opinion of crypto will probably go out the window. I think that stable coins are the wedge for this right now, right? Like stable coins promise, it's a very simple promise. It's this is one US dollar represented on a blockchain and the world is sort of warming up to the concept. So I think equities moving on chain is definitely one of the most interesting. I mean, what would a world look like where you can trade Dogecoin next to Apple stock next to, you know, whether or not someone's pregnant on Polymarket?

1:54:10Probably very interesting. The other thing, we're kind of expecting this to happen at some point this year, but just private company shares coming on chain and what happens when you can, you know, It'll be interesting to see which of those are authorized and which are sort of non-authorized, which I'm sure we'll see both of. Do you expect that the next sort of high-level kind of meta in crypto to be around real-world assets? I mean, I know we're not in it day-to-day. We obviously have founders and investors that are more focused on the show, but it feels like there's always sub metas and then kind of a more overarching meta.

1:54:54And I'm curious what your timeline is around seeing real world assets on chain outside of, you know, stables. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't even like draw the distinction as real world assets. Like I'd argue everything, like all of this is real to someone. It depends on who you are. I do think equity is moving on chain will be important. but the truth is like people like to use technologies what they can do net new right if you tokenize equities you can still trade those on old rails like with robin hood um i still strongly believe that like you know i guess like price like pricing vehicles for memetics like like meme coins will continue to grow unpopular like effectively everything will be tokenized one day whether we like it or not i think like you know there is there are some people who would call this like hyper financialization uh the way i see it is like if everything in the universe has intrinsic value, then theoretically, everything could have a price.

1:55:47I think we do this every day, right? Like in a decision making matrix, whether we decide to make food at home or go out to a restaurant, we're weighing values against each other. Why not ascribe price is sort of the way I see it. But what's your take on NFTs these days? Like digital art generally like the JPEG on chain specifically, it had like a massive moment then kind of fell by the wayside, but is clearly linked to so much of the of the trends that we're seeing in crypto still today. They making a comeback? What are you thinking? I think it's a failed form factor. I wouldn't like totally rule it out.

1:56:24But, you know, NFTs, meme coins, predictions markets, these all represent a similar sort of like I don't know whether like people are consciously or unconsciously participating, but it's the desire to price things otherwise cannot have prices that that's what that's what this represents. Now, whether meme coins are the form factor or not, I don't really know. All I know is that predictions markets are definitely successful in what they've been trying to prove. And we're going to see a continued trend in that direction, whether it's NFTs or meme coins or another form factor, this will only continue.

1:56:58Very cool. What can you say about Azura V2? I know you've been teasing it a little bit. Can you share anything? yeah yeah i mean one of the big themes with the product was abstraction i think like if you guys have used any d5 products today they're borderline unusable right you have all these different network standards and gas tokens and protocols and wallets and bridges and so on and so forth um but we're going to go further down that route we uh we wanted to completely abstract away even the mention of blockchains and gas and you know again it should work out of the box like a fintech product that that's that's what we're getting a lot closer toward i'll leave it sort of vague but that's what we're thinking of.

1:57:36Awesome. Very cool. Come back on when you're ready to share more. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Congrats on being a part of this group. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Appreciate it. You know what should be on chain? Rolexes. Go to getbezel.com. People have tried that. Your bezel. It's available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Seriously, any watch. Yeah, get a hitter and then put it on chain. Why not? People have tried that? people have put watches and other assets on chain i didn't even know that you can do cool things around fractionalization love it's interesting very cool um uh well we have our next guest coming in the studio uh huban welcome to the stream how you doing boom sorry you're on you're live on the internet you're live welcome um good to have you have you uh would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company yeah sorry i can barely hear you um yeah humann founder of sulcoa we're a rare earth metallization company based in based in san francisco right now and we're working to domesticate some of the most important metals in the world okay uh coolest uh office setup background right now are you on the second floor of your office or something yeah yeah the lab is the lab is down there everyone's prepping an experiment right now Yeah.

1:58:59You said something specific about metallization or something. Explain that to me. Are you digging in the ground or mixing up alloys or doing chemistry experiments? What does the business actually do day to day? Yeah. So some quick overview. The set of metals that power much of the world of tech. Right. Every fighter jet has 920 pounds of them. Your phone is eight different types of them. Every electric car relies on them. Semiconductor manufacturing processes, clean energy. They're a cornerstone of much of what we consider high-tech technologies. And we have no domestic production capabilities.

1:59:33China dominates the market. We have mines. We have tons of resource and supply. But we have no ability to turn that supply into metals, right? So what we're doing at Solkoa is we're developing the technologies to be able to bring that downstream processing, bring that actual metal production step from China to the U.S. and do that both economically and sustainably. So there's two ways to do that. The first way is working with primary material, basically stuff you get out of the ground. There's some pre-processing necessary, but effectively mined stuff. The second way is doing that with secondary material, which is existing magnets and recycling them.

2:00:08So we do both. We're able to take in, this is, for example, a magnet from an aircraft carrier that was used to sell the fighter jets. It's about 30 % neodymium. We can take these in and we can extract the neodymium, dysprosium, prostodium, turbium from these. or we can work with mines to, instead of having them ship the material to China for processing, ship it to us, we'll make metal economically, sustainably, and we'll introduce that to the market. where's the key value creation step? How costly is this? It seems like a pretty simple widgets business, but what are your costs and is the goal just to reshore existing techniques or develop new techniques that are higher margin?

2:00:53Yeah. So right now, again, we have no domestic production capabilities. There's a few companies in the West trying to do it. And for the most part, they're just copying the Chinese process to make these metals. It's called molten oxyfluoride electrolysis. It's extremely unsustainable and it doesn't work in the West, mostly because of an economics standpoint, right? It's just the costs don't work out in the West, but also you don't want to drive poison emitting plants in Texas, right? These things emit profluorocarbons, they're 5 ,000 extra potency of CO2. So the status quo in this industry is extremely dirty processes.

2:01:23And that's what everyone's trying to copy. And it clearly doesn't work because while we're going through this rare earth crisis and companies are trying to domesticate, our production remains negligible. So our value creation is new technology, is innovation, is developing a new alternative way to make these metals. That's very different than that industry standard, right? The system is still economical. We can make metal for under$40 a kilo. Market value is nearly 100. And we do that with no harmful emissions. Our system is carbon zero. This is some of the world's first carbon zero neodymium, right?

2:01:56It's oxidized right now. It should be shiny. But we can do this while not sacrificing economics, which allows us to be able to scale that up in the West and do that in an environmentally viable manner. Is the primary regulator for this the EPA? I think there's a variety of regulators. It really depends on them. Because it's not just one step, too. Rare is a multitude of processes that have to work together. Yeah. Talk about the demand side of this. From my view, this is something like if you can do it, there's massive, massive demand and sales will be the easy part. Is that the correct assessment?

2:02:36Yeah. Yeah, well, you're using them right now, right? These metals are literally everywhere, right? And we make none of them. So if you can economically produce these metals in the West and do that sustainably, which is even better, the demand is massive, right? Every US buyer would want to buy a more stable supply of these things. China just banned the export of heavy rares because of the tariffs. That's caused a lot of issues in the supply chain because you can't make any magnets without heavy rares. They're about 5 % dysprosium, for example. So if you have a stable, domestic, clean supply chain, people will buy it, right?

2:03:10And it's not even just the market today. The market's about to quadruple. We need more clean energy. We need more electric cars. We need more fighter jets, right? So as the market is about to quadruple in the next couple of decades, we need better sources of these metals, right? We can't just rely on China and we can't just copy them either. We need to out-innovate them. Do you have any insight into how rare earths play into the narrative that we're hearing around Project Stargate, these massive data centers? It feels like it's the most cutting edge technology in some way. I imagine that there's rare earths somewhere in that process, but I haven't actually heard those two stories connect.

2:03:48Whenever I hear rare earths, I hear iPhones and I hear electric cars and then fighter jets. But is there an AI narrative here too? Not to be too buzzwordy, but I am curious, if you build a massive data center, do you need rare earths or is it just kind of a different process? Yeah. Well, rare earths are used anywhere where you need high powered magnets, right? So when you're looking at data centers, hard drives, right? That's a very big use case for these. We actually, we work with hard drive magnets today. We're working to partner with a lot of data centers to offload their hard drive waste streams because they just read them right now.

2:04:21They don't do anything with the magnets. So we can extract the metals from those. So rare earths are very much used in hard drives for these standard centers. Semiconductor manufacturing processes often use these rare earths. Anywhere where you need a high-powered magnet, these things are directly applicable. How many, have you run the numbers on how much, how many of these valuable rare earths just end up in landfills in the U.S. because we don't have the right processes for recycling and sort of extracting the sort of key elements? it's a large number right for the most part a lot of these electric car motors for example just get shredded almost all hard drives get shredded right so you're looking at i mean i wouldn't say maybe a kiloton but you're looking at very large numbers in terms of um how much of this gets wasted there is an existing rare earth recycling industry it's growing right now it's just starting but it relies on traditionally old tech right there's a few companies that effectively are able to take these magnets do some acid leaching or leaching process to separate it into mixed oxides then you have to ship the mixed oxide to be separated into individual oxides that could be done in china there's a few other companies in the west that does it but it's not a very good process then you have to ship it to china to be metalized made into metal right so companies are trying to do that recycling but they aren't able to do it well they're not able to do it with very good scale and economics so our system is able to do that in one direct step which allows us to be able to help move a lot of that that that market um to recycling rather than just having it shredded and dropped in landfills.

2:05:49We're trying to work with landfills, though, to be able to take more of their waste and extract the metal from this. JB Straubel, famously maybe a co-founder of Tesla or early employee board member, longtime Tesla employee, spun out, started Redwood Materials, recycling electric vehicles. Is Redwood Materials a potential partner to you, a direct competitor? Are you learning things from the Redwood Materials story? What have they done correct? And what could you do better? What are you learning from Redwood materials? Yeah, I think Redwood's a really good story of getting to scale, right? I think that's something we can certainly learn from.

2:06:28And we're always trying to learn from other companies in the metal space and how they've been able to take fundamental tech and scale that in the West. I would not consider them a direct competitor, but certainly a company we can learn a lot from. We're planning our first demonstration plan right now, Redwood's based in Reno. We're considering that as an option too. No way. I imagine that the government's very receptive to this type of stuff there. That's very cool. Smart. That's great. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was a fantastic conversation. Yeah, super bullish on what you're doing.

2:06:56Yeah. Very excited. And thank you. I feel like you're going to make my life easier soon. Love it. You're going to keep the iPhone less than$2 ,000, which people are tracking. Anyway, thank you so much for joining. Cheers. Talk to you soon. Bye. Yeah, did you see the Polymarket that we put up? It has the TBPN logo on it. Let's go. What is the price of the next iPhone? Will it be over$1 ,000, over$1 ,500, over$2 ,000? I think a$2 ,000 iPhone sounds extremely luxurious. I'd like to see one. Imagine the tech they could pack in that thing. Full week battery life on the$2 ,000 iPhone. They've got to get up there.

2:07:33They've been keeping the prices too low. I want a high-priced iPhone today. Yeah, come out with the... Anyway, we got Ferdinand coming in the studio. We will welcome him to the stream. How are you doing? thanks for coming here. Let's see the t-shirt looking great. Looking good. The World Trade Bank. Introduce yourself, introduce the t-shirt and then introduce the company. I got the t-shirt freshly printed. I'm excited to be here with you guys. How's it going to have you? Who's watching, I think. Fantastic. No, good to be here. Yes, I'm 30, building IV and we're essentially building a global money rail, right?

2:08:14i think i think i can kind of like briefly talk about about why we're doing this um i i think reality the the the weather's gotten a lot smaller obviously since the internet uh became a thing so i'm i'm german um so i can send them i can send a mail to the states and it's not um doesn't feel that different to sending a mail to another german guy um and i think in reality the the money layer hasn't hasn't really changed in that way and and the world is still quite large if you're if you're if you think about the money layer of things right so if i want to send like like 100 to states that might already take a day and i think we're already pretty pretty plugged in and if you're kind of like a nigerian trade company uh wants to send money to european supplier that takes five days it costs five percent but it's kind of like the tariff the tariff no one's talking about in a way and i obviously i subscribe to the pdverse to to full extent but i do think that's inhibiting um prosperity prosperity around the globe um and we think there's an opportunity to kind of rebuild that stack right and we think that two things happening which make it possible on one hand global roller of real-time payments when back when i was in uni i actually worked on separate instance kind of like european real-time payment rate fiat real-time payment rate and we thought back then and back then this was still a hot take that this was going to go global right and we're going to see every major economy rolling out their own return payment rate and um this is i think very much happening right we obviously the emerging market story picks brazil upi india and now in the states not even maybe um and we think that that's actually only going to continue right and we're going to have this ubiquity of local real-time payment rates and then the second thing that's that's uh happening is that that stable coins and digital assets kind of emerging as a regulated interoperability asset with the capacity to stitch these local return payment rates together right and we think um that's kind of like the very immediate opportunity to just build faster and cheaper global global payments and and yeah so right now we're working with all all kinds of default global companies right we work with big remittance companies work with global psps we we are the de facto payments platform for for the european crypto industry right so like a large chunk of European crypto volume flows for us and we powered global payments for these companies.

2:10:29Okay. Tell me more about the actual product you're building, where you sit in the stack, because I've heard the international payments are hard and they are, but at the same time, I can pay people in other countries. Most payroll providers are set up for it. I've paid people in stable coins. It wasn't super easy, but it did exist. And, you know, there are stable coin platforms that allow you to move money around. So it seems like at this point, some of the foundational layer is there. So I'm wondering, like, how do you fit into this? I got to call out, John, you've spent your entire life as an entrepreneur, mostly paying people, less getting, you know, paid as like an international contractor, partner vendor.

2:11:14And the lag time between when you hit pay, you don't feel the pain because you hit pay, the money maybe leaves the account, but then the person on the other end is sitting there kind of waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. Okay. And there's no reason. It's like with the technology today, there's no reason for that to be the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I mean, break down the... Honestly, I mean, even Swift works kind of well from the states to the emerging markets, right? But I think it really gets tricky the other way around usually is. I think the reality of these flows are they are not as bidirectionally hard as people think.

2:11:51If you're in an emerging market, you want to tap into a dollar supply and send some money into states, that gets really hard. I think there are still specific flows which are very much excluded from these trade opportunities. I think where we sit in the stack and what we think is necessary to be built is we're very bare metal on the fiat side right and so we we really believe this is very much still like a fiat problem and you've got to be kind of deeply regulated and deeply connected to the fiat rates to kind of like precision engineer um essentially a bank and a banking stack around digital assets right and we think this and there are many reasons for this but this really makes it possible to kind of rebuild that whole kind of like swift sort of thing right and make that work for both sites and all kinds of flows.

2:12:40Yeah, because like, like, just technically, if I'm in some random country, and I have the resources to mine Bitcoin and swap it into stable coins, like, I can technically transfer it instantaneously today. But there might be gas fees and all sorts of different technical, and there's not any like, you know, interoperability with the rest of the financial system. But it's like doable. So a lot of this is about the products that you're building around the existing rails. Is that correct? Or do you think you'll build a new chain at some point? A new like L1? Maybe. Follow me on Twitter and stay tuned.

2:13:17Let's go. I think in reality right now, we're building for businesses, right? And so I think like it's still, there's a difference of like this rogue freelancer kind of like mining and swapping his Bitcoin and kind of being able to be a new kind of correspondent bank to other financial institutions. And these are 90 % of our customers, right? Other financial institutions, PSPs, remittance companies, web free companies. And being a new kind of correspondent bank for these companies, I think you really got to rebuild the banking and fiat stack from ground up, right? And got to be really bad metal about it and then kind of like rebuild it up from first principles with digital assets baked into it, right?

2:13:56And I think that's kind of like institutional opportunity at hand here. Yeah, John, you're not thinking big enough. You're over here thinking like, how do we move 10 grand? He's thinking, how do I move$10 billion a second every second of the day? That's fair. That's fair. Talk to me about the different trade-offs between building and buying in different countries. Have you, I've seen a lot of companies that go out and buy a legacy bank to get a charter. Is that a relevant part of the strategy or is that kind of antiquated? Can you get through the regulatory hurdles to get everything you need or will you need to think about some end run around the regulation.

2:14:35Yeah, it can be smart. We actually did this in Europe last summer. So we bought like a regulated institution. And that was a great, that was actually a great project, right? Like, so that was like time to license was extremely fast. Cost was extremely manageable and overall like a positive experience. So I think I can recommend. In the States, I think there are a couple of things that are different. So that's a whole, that's a whole different story. And each market is kind of like, I think it's hard to generalize, but yes, I still see these things happening. And there's like rather liquid M &A market for regulated institutions that are being sold for the sake of being regulated and having the license transferred.

2:15:18Makes sense. Anything else, Jordy? Super exciting. Fantastic. We need those shirts. We need this service because international advertisers are trying to transfer us billions of dollars for single ad reads and yeah we can't be playing five percent yeah we say we say send the shipping container filled with cash right now but i would love to just have it deposited instantaneously where where are you where are you based by the way uh from germany are you still living there yeah i'm based in berlin um so it's it's getting late to your greetings thanks for staying up and yeah we we will we get the we will get the t-shirt sent and we will help rent power all of the things that they I don't care liking for you guys.

2:15:57Let's go. There we go. There we go. But that being said, yeah, good to see you guys. Awesome. Congratulations. Bye. Great talking. Next up, we have Juan coming in to the studio. We're excited to keep this lightning round going. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven Teal Fellows left for the day. They said it couldn't be done. They said it couldn't be done. Nobody believed. Nobody believed. Have some faith. Come on. They said technology didn't need another podcast. And yet here we are. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Juan. Hey guys, Martin. Thank you for having me. Welcome. Of course.

2:16:33Would you mind kicking it off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and the company to get us started? Absolutely. So I'm currently like the founder of FaceLabs. FaceLabs is a research lab that is building that technology to regenerate complex organs directly in your body. So basically, imagine you lost a limb. Imagine you lost a limb, for example. You were like a warfighter. You went to the military. Maybe you suffered from diabetes and you had to be amputated. There's no way you could regenerate that right now. You have to rely on prosthetics, but prosthetics is kind of shit, honestly.

2:17:11And this happens, if you look, this happens not only with limbs, but actually with all the rest of the organs of the body. So we're building that technology. That's kind of the glimpse of it. How much of this is like, I mean, this is pure sci-fi, feels like. Is this informed by, what is it, the salamander that breaks the tail off and then they regrow it? Is this like Jurassic Park where you actually learn something from that? Or is there a different... We got a Zempik from some crazy dragon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Komodo dragon or the Gila monster. Yeah. What is the... Basically, I want to know.

2:17:43Trace back for me the tech tree that got us to today. I imagine you're standing on the shoulders of giants. Is CRISPR relevant? Like, what is relevant to allow you to do this? because this sounds like pure sci-fi to me yeah so i will start with that last line like the crisper line because i think that's that's extremely important we are not doing genetic engineering um and that has advantages from regulatory point of view but also like on the underlyingrd i actually and this might be controversial but i actually don't think that you can solve this problem with genetic engineering like finding one two three genes that you can basically crack the problem, I don't think that's possible at all.

2:18:22We are basically modifying the physiological signals directly in the body. More specifically, we are leveraging electrophysiological signals. So a lot of people doesn't know, but the same signals that rule your brains actually are all over your body. Basically, when you were burned, you were a single zygote, and literally that zygote self-assembled your soul into a living, human, functioning being. So let's give it up for the zygotes. Let's give it up for that. This is fantastic. So basically what we have discovered, and this is work of the last 15, 20 years, is that these electrophysiological signals during the process of development encode information, instructive information to control morphogenesis, which is the process of growth and form of an organism.

2:19:12So yeah, definitely we are like on the shoulders of giants. That's a fact. regrowing a hand that seems like the final boss of this potentially uh what's the easiest thing to regrow are you starting with like a fingernail and then you work your way up or do you go for the hand straight out and try to one shot that like is there is there something that we already regrow that we can hair maybe build on yeah hair hey we know the hair loss market maybe you should pivot into just hair loss seems to be a lot of money in that that would be that would be extremely profitable honestly yeah yeah just just as a matter of fact i mean babies human babies are able to regrow the the tip of their of their fingers of their digits uh like they they are they are junk yeah that already happens that's what happens is that like the human body lose this capacity throughout time throughout 18.

2:20:06uh and now like regarding the question what is the final though what is the final boss i actually think the kidney it's even anatomically speaking it's even more complex than than than the limb but the limp is right up there like these will like these two indications will be kind of in the next 10 15 years these will are kind of long-term research programs on the short term we're focusing on indications that where we could basically move a lot faster in the next five years so for example chronic bone healing this happens to diabetic patients when they suffer from ulcers. And it's actually the main cause of amputations worldwide.

2:20:44So we are basically tracking these initial problems first. What about even something like scar tissue? Like a lot of people have like C-section scars or scars from anything. Is that relevant or like the same kind of biological process? Or is that a different fork of the tech tree? Yeah, actually, it's pretty similar. It's based on the same electrochemical signals in the regenerative process. So if you look, there are already in the market electric wound dressings that you actually can put in the skin and accelerate the wound process. but these basically they are these are extremely limited to a stage two and a stage one injuries so for example if you have like an injury of five millimeters but once you start like involving like one two centimeters it starts to be incredibly more complex you you touch muscle you touch bones so that's that's that's a lot harder yeah what um what what's exciting about what's happening in the, I saw some recent news around a genetically edited pig kidney that was transferred into a human and it sounds like it was somewhat effective.

2:21:53Is there anything that you guys can learn? Just immediately my reaction to that is like, I would rather have a regular human kidney that was generated just for me instead of a genetically edited pig kidney that gets sort of uh transferred uh transplanted in but what what are you learning from from that space or tracking yeah i think i think those initiatives i mean any initiative that tries to to crack the problem it's it's worthwhile but i'm i'm quite skeptical with with those approaches because there are a lot of questions regarding the immune system how much like what would be the rejection of a human body in these cases uh like the immunogenicity of the related process it's like a huge huge question mark.

2:22:38And I actually think that if we want to solve the regenerative problem, not only like one organ, but like actual regeneration, whole body regeneration, like Deadpool or Wolverine, for example, we actually need to leverage the fundamental mechanisms that the body already uses. So go there, understand what is the language, what is the code that the body uses for morphogenesis, and learn to modulate that code, like more fundamentally, I think that's important. What's the user experience? You've been mentioning like electrostimulation. Is this not a pill that I take? Yeah. So there's a continuum of technology and this is important.

2:23:18So for the limb regeneration, the stimulation will be a lot more complex than just like electric currents. Of course, it's an anatomical structure that it's a lot more complex. But starting like with the chronic wound healing with the short term research program, we are working with a medical device approach in mind. Why? Because medical devices are a lot easier to pass through the FDA, do the clinical trials on top of them. Once you start with biologics, they are extremely hard. So we want to accelerate that process first. And then I think that the ideal version of this technology is kind of a combination product where you use biophysical stimulation with light and ultrasound, but also leverage kind of the molecular specificity of proteins at the same time.

2:24:03Yeah. uh if you're if you're successful as you sound like you're going to be what is what is the craziest potential future that you could imagine are we are we you know regenerating entire uh versions of ourselves i want extra arms make me like doc ock yeah i i i want yeah from spider-man six arms uh yeah what what's the craziest you know potential you could potentially skip leg day and regrow your leg muscles. Can you imagine? John would love this. John would love this. Just massive quads without ever hitting the leg press. The world would change overnight. Yeah, probably, yeah. Like, one important, yeah, I think there are two variants of, like, a really optimistic, crazy future.

2:24:52The first one, I think it's more like a cultural change. We have this idea that if you are able to edit yourself with maybe a robotic arm and you are kind of a blend of robotic human person, somehow you will be stronger. But that's just a bias that we have because we have not been able to engineer biology successfully as we wanted. I would love for humans to understand that biology could be as robust as any other thing and even start relating this technology to aging itself. And, of course, there's still a gap in which we should answer that to what extent regenerating all the organs of your body would be related to aging and increasing longevity.

2:25:38But I think we have big reasons to believe that it will be high connected. So basically expand like the large span of people like 100 years more to be able to be more productive, have like healthier lives, change our societal construct of what is a meaningful life would be amazing. And then on the limit, it will be also awesome. It will be extremely awesome to be able to engineer like artificial biological networks in the same way that we are doing right now with artificial neural networks in AI. so basically constructs biobots that can go out there and solve all sorts of problems for us I think that would be amazing as well biobots I love it congratulations and thanks for breaking it down for us this is super exciting it's not a simple business this is amazing though we could do a whole hour on this we'll have to have you back, this is fantastic thanks so much for stopping by we'll talk to you soon Absolutely.

2:26:37Cheers. Thank you. Next up, we have Jennifer Lynn. Excited to talk to her. And we ran through all our ads. Should we just start back at the beginning? Tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. You used to use corporate cards, bill favorites, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. Go to Ramp.com to get started. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Ramp. Let's bring in Jennifer. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Jennifer, welcome. Thank you for taking the time. How are you doing? It's great to have you. Oh, I think we have you on mute. I don't know if it's a problem on our side or your side.

2:27:13We are good. Would you mind trying again? It's great to be both. I think you can hear me now. We can hear you. Welcome to the show. Would you mind kicking it off with an introduction on yourself and the company? Yeah, happy to. So I'm Jennifer, and my company, AUG, we focus on solving the access problem in rare disease. So there's a large amount of drugs and rare disease that are already effective or potentially effective for the patient. It's been tried by a doctor and maybe one or two patients. They wrote up a study saying that there's been some efficacy here, but the rest of the rare disease patients don't get access.

2:27:50So I'm really working on a drug development company to develop these drugs that already work for rare disease patients that need it. Interesting. interesting. There was a little bit of a debate on the show last week between two guests who were arguing over the idea of how the FDA decides to approve drugs, whether the benchmark is better than a placebo, better than nothing, or better than the standard of care. Um, how do you, how do you see the FDA's mandate in drug development? What is their goal? Are they trying to protect certain, certain IP structures by limiting the access to drugs or is it more purely based on safety and efficacy broadly?

2:28:41Yeah. Um, I think, you know, so we've had conversations with the FDA and at the end of the day, the FDA is really a group of people trying their best to approve drugs that work and then rejects drugs that might have safety issues or are the same as placebo. So for us working in rare disease, a lot of the times we are up against placebo or even historical controls because there's usually no approved treatment in these specific diseases. So it's much easier to get a drug approved there versus if you work in cancer, which is very common, like breast cancer. There's already so many drugs that are approved and effective that you have to run really long trials against drugs that already work.

2:29:31And that ends up being extremely costly, extremely expensive. And there is some debate about, you know, is there a way to get around this five, six year trial? Yeah, I've seen some biotech companies that will go and they'll pick up a dead asset, like a drug that maybe didn't make it through phase three, and then they kind of repackage it, IPO the company, and then everyone's kind of betting on, oh, maybe they can get it through phase three now. Is that a piece of your strategy, or do you think you'll be taking like a completely different approach? Yeah, so what we typically do is whenever a drug works for patients, there's so many reasons why they don't have access.

2:30:11One could be the formulation that works is just so much higher, and they need a special drug company to come in and formulate it so that it's stable, or it's available as an injection and patients need it as an eyedrop, and so on. So a lot of what we do is we take an existing drug and we basically provide it in the formulation that's actually accurate and effective for these patients. But yeah, like repurposing old drugs is a great strategy because you have safety usually already established for patients. Now you just have to work on making sure that it's like a drug that works. Yeah. Do you see a piece of the business being partnering with big pharmaceutical companies or drug companies that already have something like that?

2:30:59It's a shot and they want it to be an eyedrop and you come in as a partner to them. Or is there a completely different pathway? Because I imagine, hey, if I own the patent on this drug as a shot, I'm not just going to let you take it and turn it into an eyedrop for free and make all the money. So how does the business partnership work as, you know, we probably want to compensate the scientist who actually created the shot, even though you're going to do a lot of hard work to make the eye drop version? Yeah, so there's two sides to this. We've thought about partnering before, and we've done a lot of conversations with top five pharma.

2:31:33And what they say usually is cash is king. So for them, like up front is really important. You know, like regardless of indication, you need to produce X amount of cash to, you know, license this asset and take it forward. So we've taken an alternative approach, which is there are so many drugs right now that are off patent. So their effective life in a larger indication like autoimmune disease, so on, has already expired. Big Pharma has already made that much money. And now this drug is, you know, available for very cheap. And typically what we do is now we take this already invented drug and we add on something that makes it the right fit for rare disease patients.

2:32:20What areas of biotech and drug development right now are most exciting to you? We've obviously seen like a huge boom in GLP-1s. CRISPR has been exciting for years and continues to be exciting in many ways. But there are other pockets of drugs that people are working on. Where do you see kind of the most low-hanging fruit in terms of what you do bringing access to drugs in different categories versus what's the next next thing? Yeah. So low-hanging fruit and also what's the next moonshot? It's a great question. For us, low-hanging fruit is we follow FDA guidances very closely. So they just recently released the guidance that certain biologic drugs, antibodies don't have to go after as much animal testing.

2:33:10You can leverage a lot of human clinical trials, which is like almost incorporating common sense. Right. Like if it's safe in humans, then maybe we don't have to do a 24 week, you know, mice talk study. um so like the antibody biologic space is really interesting because of the amount of studies you might be able to skip if your drug's already safe um and in the moonshot area completely unrelated to rare disease but longevity is very interesting um you know if there's a lot of discourse about can we develop or can we actually develop the first real drug to prevent aging to reduce the aging process.

2:33:53And I think if you can be the first to market in such an insanely large market, everybody's aging, everybody would like some sort of drug to stay healthier for longer. That's an incredibly exciting space to be in. Yeah, we talked to the founder of New Limit, and we both came away extremely bullish on that category. Please, please, please. just make it work uh i'm curious uh how does pricing how do pricing models different uh differ in sort of rare uh for therapeutics in the rare disease space given that the actual market size i'm assuming things are a lot more expensive just because markets are smaller but maybe that's maybe that's the incorrect read yeah it really depends um and when you talk about pricing there's also this overall, you're taking into account all the insurance payers that exist in the U.S.

2:34:52So there are drugs that insurance payers will have pushback on. And typically that's drugs for really, really large indications. For example, longevity, maybe Alzheimer's, where there's such a large amount of patients, even if you charge them 10 ,000 per year to the insurer, that's hundreds of billions of dollars that they won't be able to really bear for a new drug. Whereas for rare disease, if you have 10 ,000 patients and you're charging 100K per year, that's actually still a negligible amount spread out amongst all the different payers in the US. So typically, those conversations actually go pretty smoothly for rare disease where you say we have a really large impact on this patient and there's only so few patients.

2:35:41That's cool. That's cool. It's working. One part of healthcare that's working, working well. That's great. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is really fun. We'd love to have you back and get an update when you have more news. Yeah. Congratulations on joining the fellowship as well. Yeah. Have a We'll talk to you guys. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Next up, we have Teddy. Teddy Warner coming in from, coming into the studio. While we get him queued up, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free.

2:36:18Go to Figma.com. It's a fantastic product. Jordy's addicted. He's a Figma addict. He can't stop using Figma. He designs endless slide decks in it. um our our beautiful website tbpn.com was designed in figma um we've actually experimented the entire overlay that you've seen this is all from figma and then gets baked into our production software which we don't talk about because it's our secret it's our secret sauce anyway welcome to the stream teddy good to have you here how are you doing good how are you i'm great thanks for having me i heard um i heard y 'all are in a new studio which we are this is the first day we have a giant first day Yeah, it's an honor.

2:36:56We're christened it with Teal Fellow Tuesday. We're very excited to have you here. They said it couldn't happen. Yeah. Can you introduce yourself? Break us down. What are you building? How'd you get there? Where'd you grow up? Give me the whole thing. I'm Teddy from North Carolina. I used to work in a makerspace in a machine shop. This is my technical baseline. One way or another, found myself in California. Worked at MidJourney in a past life. Now I run a robotics lab called Intempest. This is so funny about the Teal Fellowship. Really quickly. Like the whole idea is like dropping out of college.

2:37:27And Jordy was making this joke that like, oh, like, you know, the Teal Fellowship has a combined, you know, five years of work experience because like no one's supposed to have worked. And it's like a joke that every startup is like, well, you have 20 years of management experience combined. But like most of you that we've talked to have years of experience somehow. So were you working and going to school? Like how did you work in the journey while not dropping out yet? If you want the very abridged timeline, I grew up in North Carolina, worked in this machine shop, in this makerspace for about four years.

2:37:59Somehow wound up in biotech. I was doing manufacturing for invasive electrodes for chronically ill children. So everything from EEG to ECG electrodes. Very cool. Just an engineer. Discovered I was actually exceedingly squeamish. And so on a whim, went to university in LA at USC for about a year. Studied art. jordy's back i'm back i'm back i had the air horn how's it going for sc yeah let's go we love us they um had a total blast studied art and technology and and a bit of business and some film and the whole shebang uh i i know when you go to california you get pretty caught up in the culture and so unsurprisingly i started the venture um wound up meeting david mid-journey david through this venture uh which is how i wound up at mid-journey very cool about a year ago now left nine months ago now i run a robotics lab called in tempest i make robots expressive robots currently suck at communicating what they're doing they're really hard to understand you have to pay expensive nerds like me to come use the command line anytime you're trying to understand what they're what they're up to and so i make them communicate like every other mammal and like every other human uh such that you can interact with a robot even though you don't speak its language what are we talking about robots i felt like it was pretty easy that that robot that was like on a stand oh yeah yeah flailing around killing it that was pretty easy to understand some of it's telltale yeah i mean are we talking about like industrial robots like like kuka arms and stuff or are we talking roomba's or the future humanoid robots like what's the first product that you think needs what's the first robot that really needs humanization sure i mean as you can tell like robots is probably the largest umbrella term that we have it spans from humanoids to like glorified Roombas and everything in between.

2:39:45So how do you make them expressive? Well, I think it's quite telltale if I have an anthropomorphic robot, like a humanoid, I can say, oh, it waves or, oh, it smiles or moves around. And, you know, this makes sense. But Intempest focuses on non-anthropomorphic robots, specifically the ones that already exist. So where do robots exist? They exist in industry. Robots work great in industry. 99 % of the time they work wonderfully. Like if you think about an Amazon warehouse, there's a bunch of little Roombas that roll around and move the carts and stuff. And on occasion, probably 1 % of the time, these robots fail.

2:40:17And they hardly ever fail for technically complex reasons. Usually robots fail for some trivial reason. Say Jordy's in an Amazon warehouse and there's a Rimbo trying to pass him and it gets stuck because Jordy's in his way. And so the robot in the warehouse just fails and it leaves a fail code in the command line and it moves on and does something else. And what Intempest does is we allow these robots to be expressive. We allow them to convey their intent to people like Jordy in this case who would not otherwise understand what the robot is trying to do. So what if this robot, upon seeing Jordy in the tap, could get nippy?

2:40:47I'm not technical. I'm not technical. Just really just... Not a shot. Just put me down. I'm kidding. If you see a robot getting nippy with you, like a small dog, it's like, oh, shit, I should probably move out of the robot's way. And so you can save a bunch of money on debug costs and also reduce downtime of robots just by allowing them to communicate what they're up to. And in the future, of course, we'll get into consumer and service and humanoids. But right now, it's all an industry. Awesome. I mean, you gave the example of Amazon. They acquired Kiva Systems in 2017, eight years now. I'm sure they're thinking about this.

2:41:25Is Amazon the right customer for you? Or do you want to start kind of in the more mid-market? Or do you want to be more product-led growth, developer-led growth, hackers get into like the next generation of robotics companies with the go-to-market look like I have a few thoughts here I mean so in tempest is initial customer base are all enterprise robotics manufacturers there are people who sell the robots to Amazon yep and seemingly everyone is vertically integrating in in this policy space I think it's hardly prophetic for me to say that we're gonna have a lot of robots in the future whether it be in industry or in service or in consumer and that these robots are gonna have to interact with humans and it's quite shocking that you know not many people are focused on the interaction layer how humans and robots are going to interact instead they're focused on making robots functional and so i'd love if more players like amazon and big big players would get into this space i want you guys to imagine like say you're walking down hollywood uh to the office in 10 years from now and you pass by 20 robots and one robot is running an amazon model and one is running an intempest model and one is running a tesla model this is like the same experience is going to talk with uh like walking down the street and chatting with a nigerian and then a Canadian and then a Lithuanian.

2:42:37There's three different languages, three different dialects, three different humors. It's a terrible user experience. And so it's seemingly very important that we figure out one standardized means of human robot interaction. And the way that I'm proliferating into this space is through the enterprise manufacturers that are selling robots to big companies, to small companies. As long as there's a scalable impact, I'll work with them. Cool. How influenced are you by movies like WALL-E, right? You know, the sort of the fun robot feel it feels like you want robots to be uh doing serious work but in a have it be sort of enjoyable to interact with them is that is that accurate yes absolutely uh i'm a big interstellar fan yeah tars great great robot tars is killer tars is killer there's one scene in interstellar uh where cooper sets tars humor level or truth level to like 90 90 percent yeah one of the tricks like behind making robots expressive is giving them emotions because what are you expressing well you're expressing emotions and you can view all of these as scalars and so i can give robots a 90 humor level or a 90 joy level and so it's pretty cool like it was shocking to me how on point tars is there's a whole bunch of like interesting media that came out of the the creation of interstellars on how they they simultaneously made tars he's a cold ex-military robot and yet also cooper's best friend yeah and so this is absolutely the the intention fantastic uh talk to me about the tech stack i imagine that you mentioned command lines are you doing post training on a funny on a foundation model are you using llama open source stuff like what what how do you actually uh solve the technical problem what what is deeper in the supply chain of your tech stack so there's as i mentioned earlier like seemingly everyone is focused on vertically integrating control policy.

2:44:25All the big companies are doing this and you get big horizontal companies that are awesome, like physical intelligence. And I really don't want to compete with these people. In fact, I want to work with them. And so when I initially put my mind to how do I construct this architecture? I had to say like, okay, I absolutely need to be an augmentation atop the transformer layer. So after, you know, a robot is told what to do by its decision transformer, I run this interaction layer. Now I want you guys, you guys have both heard the phrase time flies when you're having fun of course this is like a pretty integral way in which humans perceive the world the inverse is also true your perception of time moves slower when you're stressed and so we have fun and stress to emotions and they change how we perceive the world subjectively and so what in tempest does uh we equip these things called time constants the question is like time flies when you're having fun what is time for a robot well time is compute So what if you could allocate compute such that when a robot is having fun or when it's not needed to do any daunting tasks, it can use the minimum amount of compute necessary.

2:45:26It can move as quickly as possible. But when a robot is stressed and it's failing, it should use more compute to A, collect more data so we can train and squash the edge case, and B, convey why it fails to, again, people in factories and people that would otherwise not understand what the robot is trying to do. Yeah, and that aligns with like test time inference scaling rules right now where you want to do more reasoning for harder problems. That makes sense. Yeah. Very cool. Anything else, Jordy? Are we good? I think we're good, but come back on again soon, Teddy. Yeah, this is fantastic. This is super exciting.

2:45:58And I look forward to interacting, speaking the Intempest language with many, many robots throughout my life. Me too. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Take care. Bye. Next up, we have Sigil, founder of Extraordinary, coming on the stream. Very excited to have him. I got to say, these TL fellows are pretty punctual. They're so, I was about to say. This is a very crazy thing. You get this calendar invite, you just hop on the stream, but he's here right on time. It's at weird time. It's amazing. Hey, join at 1.42. Sigil, great to have you on. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. How are you?

2:46:37Doing great. It's been a super fun day so far. The class is absolutely stacked, and congrats on making it in. Why don't you start with a bit of backstory, your personal story, and then what you're working on? Yeah, so I'm C. Joel, the founder of extraordinary.com. We are the extraordinary talent company of America. If you Google O1 Visa for extraordinary ability, you'll find my face is the cover image. And I'm the guy going around giving out these Alien of Extraordinary Ability hoodies that you see on your X feed. Amazing. uh talk about your personal journey to kind of building this company yeah so um when i was in high school uh i built this uh project that was i think he did like 100k in revenue that's first month and i used the funds to pay someone to finish high school for me and i found san francisco and um i came here on a tourist visa i'm originally from toronto canada i'm like holy shit these people are based uh these people are incredibly ambitious i have to stay here And if you don't go to college, at the time I originally got into the M &T program at the University of Pennsylvania, I decided to opt out because I was pretty stubborn.

2:47:46I really just wanted to be in Silicon Valley. And the only visa options was the 01 for Extraordinary Ability. And this is what the U.S. government calls it. And at the time, this was probably three years ago, it wasn't as proliferated. The one person I knew was Patrick Collison who had that. I couldn't get a TN visa or the H-1B because you need a degree. So I had to go for the O-1. And I hunted down every single person in Silicon Valley that had the O-1 visa, tried to understand what could qualify. And after eight months with an immigration lawyer, I filed it. It was sponsored by Naval. I built this company with him.

2:48:21And I was approved at 20. And I was like, holy shit, it's so hard for the world's best talent to come here. It's so unintuitive. and I made a YouTube video about the process that has since been seen by hundreds of thousands of people. And I made this hoodie as merch for that YouTube video. So, and that kind of took off. What are the overall trends in the O-1 visas? It feels like, I mean, like immigration is obviously complicated, but it feels like all the stars align for like everyone being like O-1s are great. Elon has come out and said he loves O1s and it feels like it's aligned with American values and freedom and brain drain and even strategic stuff.

2:49:04There's a lot of pro. Are the number of O1s increasing? Is this a new program? Can you give us a little bit of history and trajectory for the O1 program broadly? Yeah. I like to think that the O1 was created for the Manhattan Project. I think it's that ethos. I don't know the exact origins, but it's been around and it's been used to... The premise of it is that you are the top. You're an individual that has risen to the top of your field. I like to say you're like the top 0.1 percentile at what you do. And USCIS has these eight criterias to adhere towards. You can be a tattoo artist. You could be a tip designer.

2:49:48You could be the founder of the fastest growing AI company, who I'm currently helping out.

2:49:58As long as you can prove that you are extraordinary at what you do, you can get it. And I think for the longest time, it was very unclear because when you go to the website, it's like, examples, you have a Nobel Prize or like whichever. And the way this company came to be was I literally mapped down 500 people who have O1s and EB1s for extraordinary ability. I gave them these hoodies. I actually built a website and just compiled them in terms of their stories and how they came to America. And yeah, I think that because of that, more and more people have been applying for it. There's no cap to it.

2:50:33As long as you meet their bar and convince USCIS that you're extraordinary, you can get it. And so I think it's very positive some of the visa. Yeah. So what is the process actually like? I imagine that there's a lot of paperwork and lawyers and costs, stuff that's tailor-made for LLM automation and just normal SaaS apps and stuff and form filling. What are the headaches that O1 recipients typically report as particularly painful? I mean, my process took eight months. It cost me more than$10 ,000. I mean, you got to keep in mind, what is the end product? I have a printer here. You're literally printing 500 pages of paper, like with a bunch of citations, all evidence.

2:51:21You might have heard like there's recommendation letters to which you got to go chase down people and be like, hey, can you please vouch for me being in America? I think I can contribute to this economy. One-shotted by a ChatGPT from now on. You can imagine. So many M-dashes. There's thousands of M-dashes. Let's delve into why he should be a O-one. Yeah. I'm sure that's happening. That got shipped off to, like, USCIS, Texas. They still use, like, they still break open the box and then scan it, which is, like, super archaic. Wow. They don't even accept, like, a PDF. No, they don't. I have to ship it through FedEx.

2:51:58And then they parse through it. And then they scan it. Yeah, and then some, like, very efficient. My school diploma just adjudicates whether you're extraordinary. Okay. Well, we're big fans of paper, but even that's my strategy. How have you thought about the business model for extraordinary? It feels like, you know, there's some immediate, probably upfront value that you can capture in just making this process less painless. But when you think about taking somebody at the absolute top of their field and bringing them to the best economy in the world where they're going to attract other talent and capital and things like that.

2:52:32It feels like a lot of the value creation is on the things that they - I mean, the obvious business model here is to sell the data to venture capital firms. Yes, yes, yes. Which I feel like might already be happening judging by the involvement of Naval. No, I mean - What's the actual business model? Jokes aside. Yeah, so I'm tempted to rename the company to the Extraordinary Talent Company of America. our flagship first product obviously just making this much more seamless and faster like I think it should be a standard deviation of speed up which already is we already power ramp and we have top founders building these that we know and we should see a lot more of that on our x feeds coming along I mean look you can make a good amount from providing the best product and serving these great talent to relocate here on the visa basis but um where i want to take things like i don't actually view this ultimately as a as a visa filing company i think it's extraordinary talent company and um if you look at the life cycle of extraordinary talent like someone who's i don't know like a senior engineer creating who's shipped like 60 of devon i just filed that o1 case actually, right?

2:53:52Like the whole life cycle of them, one being like placed at their company, all the way to how they even relocate there. Like most of the value capture isn't actually that like visa filing. And I think also AI is going to eat away at margins in terms of services across all technology companies. And so then like, what can you build that has network effects, that has innate distribution that can just attract the world's best talent? Like I want to build something where if you're remotely ambitious and talented, you have a means to be discovered. And if you remotely want to come here, you're going to be on extraordinary.com.

2:54:31How do you think about giving people an opportunity to get to America without having credentials yet, right? Presumably there's somebody out in the world who's 16 years old. They're in some high school type situation and they actually could be one of the world's best programmers or something like that, but maybe they haven't gotten a job. Is there a world in the future where you would create sort of like open testing where people could kind of like prove their abilities? I'm sure somebody would figure out how to hack it pretty quickly, but how do you think about kind of creating the ability for people to prove their capabilities prior to getting the ability to get traditional credentials?

2:55:16Yeah, first off, I actually got a 16-year-old approved for an O1 visa a few weeks ago.

2:55:25What are they extraordinary at? Interaction design for Roblox. Amazing. The most elite Roblox player. And on the talent discovery front, I think that the way that we value talent is evolving. I mean, right now, it's so funny. There's Mercore, but then the founder of Cluely is building software that hacks the Mercore interviews. Oh, yeah. Proxies for measuring talent are just falling through completely. Yeah, that's hilarious. And so how do you then measure talent in this new age where we value people who are able to leverage AI much more? And I think the way that companies hire will evolve. And we need to account for that.

2:56:19We need ways of assessing people, but also discovering people to showcase just how competent they are. And I'm a very big believer of being able to give those means to people around the world, regardless of their traditional accolades, and just being able to empower people who have the merit and who have the ability. And they should be discovered and sponsored to come to America. That's amazing. Well, congratulations on getting into the Teal Fellowship. And I'm sure there will be many Teal Fellows in the future that go through your program. Yeah, already helping them. I'm excited for the first O-1 bodybuilder.

2:56:59We saw what happened with Arnold Schwarzenegger when he came to America. Had a fantastic impact outside of bodybuilding. Went on to be the governor of California. Governor of California. Pretty good one. So don't count out the bodybuilders. So let's just get all the elite bodybuilders from all over the world. Bring them here on O-1s. That's my goal. as long as you're the top of what you do uh we help you that's fantastic that's well thanks so much for stopping by thanks for coming on congrats cheers bye uh next up what just gold's gym in venice just has hundreds of new uh members that are all america's already dominant in bodybuilding we we hold more than 50 of the mr olympias but we could be doing even better if we can always do I'm going to invite everyone from all over the world who's elite at bodybuilding to America, which is my dream.

2:57:50Anyway, our next guest is here. We have Aiden Smith, founder of Interphases. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Boom. Howdy. I'm doing really well. How are y 'all? We're great. Great to have you on. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building? Yeah, absolutely. I think the best way to understand my life is kind of framed at this realization I had when I was a little tiny kid in like fourth grade. I was sitting in this classroom and I was watching some guy doing real science and I saw him I was like dang I like know how to do addition I know how to do basic algebra and like where the hell am I going with my life and I realized that the world is a really scary competitive place and I had to have some kind of heuristic by which I should get better and so I thought to myself all right every two years I want to double in the metrics I care about which at fourth grade was coolness and so at that point going up in the South Bay I grew up to exceptionally chill parents an opera singer and electrical engineer who just like oh son just do whatever you want to do and I was like, okay, every two years I will double in coolness.

2:58:46And so that's exactly kind of how I structured my life. And in the next two years, I did stuff like try to memorize the dictionary because this is what I thought cool was. That's pretty cool. But eventually the coolness actually went in a direction of like things that were actually pretty cool. Like when I was in high school, I started working at chess.com and I'd like delivered tons and tons of features and made some really cool products that were really impactful to me. And when I was in college, I was like, OK, what's the coolest problem you could possibly work on? And I ended up working in Neuralink where I'm currently seated.

2:59:12Sorry to any co-workers who are seeing me taking this. never apologize but what about uh what about like joining a punk band learning to do a kickflip did that ever come into the cool fact believe me i do all these things i do like guitar oh nice there we go ecology so i have a lot of mushrooms memorized throughout the sierra nevada in general these are the things that fit my heuristic legend okay okay yeah yeah that makes sense but not the cliche cool guy like you're not you're not driving a couple years you're just level you're just leveling up you're maxing out your character yeah the the the red ferrari convertible that comes next year when there's another doubling in the cool factor doubling people are gonna start tracking the doubling like the Bitcoin

2:59:56happening so you've been working at Neuralink what are you working on now yeah so at Neuralink I've been doing all kinds of really cool things and one of these things I've been doing most recently is I'm leading the sound speech project essentially you've seen the study that was announced fairly recently so I can talk about this a little bit, but basically there's a really great corpus and interesting literature that goes from how do you get from inside your head to outside your head. This is super, super profound technology. Imagine if you have ALS and you're locked in or something like this.

3:00:23I spend a lot of time around these people and every minute I spend with them, I think more to myself that these people need to be able to communicate to the outside world better. And Neuralink is doing a really good job at this kind of thing. I have so much confidence in the team. I have so much confidence that this technology is going to be transformative. but also I really hope I don't get ALS anytime soon. I really hope I don't have a brainstem stroke or something that keeps me from being able to communicate sanely. And I still am interested in the way this technology will go on to transform other parts of the world.

3:00:51And so with interfaces, what I'm looking at is I see all these kind of gizmos for AI. I see these like limitless pendants. I see these smartwatches and things that are trying to kind of integrate all this data. And I don't fully buy it. the reason why I don't is because I actually don't like voice as a medium that much for most things if it actually wants to integrate into your life effortlessly I don't want to be in the middle of conversation with you and be like what's the guy on the left's name it's super awkward it's terrible so how do you do better and there's a couple ways you can think about this one former co-worker of mine and a guy I really respect bliss who you may have seen on Twitter or whatever has told me that there's a couple ways you can get value out of machine learning and one of them is kind of arbitrage via data and another is arbitrage via time and so if you have these longer time series you can kind of get more bits out of them by just increasing your confidence intervals either by doing these kind of causal estimates or a causal estimates where you have understanding of what's going on in the future as well as in the past and so you can kind of use this to do same updates or just by looking for signals that are kind of strong over a long period of time and i think that with this in mind there's kind of room for this halfway horse between like a conventional microphone which can pick up stuff in real time and do transcription in real time and a like an EA or someone who actually will kind of try to predict what the heck you're doing in space and so you can imagine is building a device that basically takes these fundamentally pretty crappy signals like any G signals for example and sorry any G signals yeah yeah there's so there's many ways in which signals were propagated through the body to move your arms or to create electrical activity.

3:02:28You may have seen a recent paper out of Reality Labs and Meta where they use exactly this to kind of create... For the Orion headset, they bought that company, I forget what it's called, but they bought a company like six years ago and they're finally implementing it, right? Yeah, and it's extremely cool. A friend of mine went to one of their clinical trials and put the thing on and you try it out. You say, look, I'm pinching my fingers and the fingers pinch. It's pretty magical. This is the kind of thing which normally you would have to cut a hole in your head to do, but you don't necessarily have to do here.

3:02:55and there's a really good story to be told about kind of doing this for speech and getting really terrible speech uh i have no illusions as a neurotechnologist that you will get really terrible speech out of this but the key thing is that this does not matter because the context is what matters and by informing this really awful speech on the context of what's around you and like your intention the situation you may be able to actually get the underlying part of it that matters. And so in fact, indeed, even if I can only kind of pick up the word left and guy, I might know that I want to know who's the guy on the left.

3:03:26And that's an easy LLM transformer problem, right? So you get a big bag of words, very messy, but it's enough to turn into a semblance of a thought that could be confirmed with a pinch maybe. Yeah, yeah. Now, ideally, at least in my eyes, you have this just totally effortlessly against your life and you kind of collect this data all the time via a method that's fairly subtle. I have a little bit of alpha here that I won't spill, so you'll have to have me on in a couple of months to see my fun demos. But of how to get this data, so you're constantly collecting this and it's constantly informing and improving on how you interact with the world.

3:04:01In general, I really care about efficiency in whatever I do. And lots of little things in your day-to-day life are super inefficient in these pretty funny ways. And I think that by kind of having this compute that is always active in that doesn't invade the privacy of other people. Like I wanna understand myself better. I wanna be able to improve myself. I wanna be able to like keep on that doubling path without like constantly listening to you guys or to my friends or to the coworkers or whoever else is around me. And I wanna get the dataset to do that. So there's this kind of dual prong thing of like, okay, actually create a better interface to interact with LMs and to build the like higher bit rate communication interfaces and also get a better model for oneself.

3:04:40I had this idea in college that got my wisdom teeth out. And I was like, I want them to put a microphone in the hole there because then I could say, I could whisper, who's the guy on the left? And it wouldn't be picked up to anyone else, but it'd be able to pick up the audio. But I think that's probably gross and kind of a part of the tech tree we don't even need to go down because we can just leapfrog that whole step. We've already gone down and I had to break it to you. There's this Israeli company called MolarMic that does exactly this. Wait, really? No way. Yeah, you can imagine that like you have bombs going off around you and you're like, boss, we need backup.

3:05:13But you can't hear that over the crazy loud sound artillery. Molar mic, no way. Molar mics. We need that. We need those. Isn't it a good company? Did they do okay? I have no idea. But I've got a team. Ben's always telling me, you know, our producer's always telling us to move the mic. Yeah, talk closer to the microphone. Talk closer to the mic. But I could just have a molar mic. Yeah, we need to be augmented for sure. Are you going into a similar FDA pathway as Neuralink? Is that how things are going to play out for you? Yeah, so I'd like to avoid this if possible. I do think that there's room for a device that's somewhere in between, like this really groundbreaking first in class biomedical device, which involves a lot of risk.

3:05:51I mean, fundamentally invasive neurosurgery involves a lot of risk, even when you're doing it with the very best surgeons in the world, with these robots that can avoid vascular treatment with everything. There's still some risk price in there. And so I think, again, there's this halfway horse thing of like, OK, maybe it's invasive, but maybe it's not quite as risky of a thing. Maybe it's more like getting an implant for birth control or more like getting simple surgery to remove a mole. These kind of things that are much more everyday and much sooner. I'm very bullish on Neurlink in the long run.

3:06:18And I think that you should keep an eye on the amazing stuff folks are up to here. Yeah. If DJ is in the office, tell him I say hi. We'd love to have him on the show sometime. I love DJ. He's great. He's fantastic. You've been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. I got to ask before you go. You're skill maxed to the gills already. But what's next? What are you, besides the new company, what are some areas that you're trying to level up now? Believe it or not, the next thing I'm doing next week is I'm making a trumpet from first principles. I have a physics textbook and I want to, without any reference, try to figure out how far apart all the valves should be.

3:06:52I want to cast it in my backyard with a big crucible and I want to play this thing, which probably won't work. And so I'll get better at metalworking, I'll get better at physics, I'll get better at all these little stupid things I care about. And it's a pretty fun little interstitial bit before I really put my head down and get back to the great doubling. Come on the show and play your trumpet. Play the trumpet live. I want to hear the demo. Come on, we want to hear it. I'm no good. I have to warn you. But I'll be better. In two years, you'll be good. If it makes sound, it works. That's fantastic.

3:07:19Great question, Jordan. Awesome. Great to meet you, Aiden. Congratulations. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Next up, we got Colton coming in the studio. Welcome to Colton as soon as he hops in here. The idea of just trying to get twice as cool. It's so good. It's such a good bit. And just never being like, oh, I'm cool enough. you know i'm cool enough no double it's the uh the great doubling i mean he he doesn't look like you know i don't know i don't know if he can have champagne yet but you know we we followed a some similar principle around the great exponential growth it's the most powerful force not something that you can understand unless you've experienced it yeah we experience it going from a thousand followers to two thousand followers you know imagine that a trumpet manufacturing fantastic Fantastic.

3:08:06Well, we have our next guest in the studio. Welcome to the stream. Colton, how are you doing? Welcome. Good. How are you guys doing? Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, we can hear you. Would you mind kicking it off with a little introduction on yourself and the company? Sure. My name's Colton. I'm from Philadelphia. Right now I'm in Boston working on my company called Orbit, which I think you guys actually got a brief introduction to because my teammate Steven was on here, I think just an hour or two ago. That's right. Yeah. There we go. the double the double teal fellow so combo give us your side of the story what does he get wrong about orbit uh no just just just unpack it again a little bit and then we'll we'll take the conversation in a different direction yeah absolutely so i can tell you how i first heard about this idea and got involved with it yeah how'd you meet him i'd love to know that story that's interesting yeah so steven went to georgetown and he was looking for an engineer to help him build this neurotech.

3:09:00But there's no engineers at Georgetown at all. They don't have an engineering department. And so he was running around like the whole DMV area looking for an engineer that could help him build some of these circuits and the hardware and the code and such. And so eventually that led him to me. He tells me that he met with a lot of people before. Is the business guy yelling at you from the other room? Yeah, I think he said something. I can't quite hear him. Hey, shut up, business guy. The engineers, the technical founder's talking.

3:09:30So we'd met and we went on Zoom for a bit. And I already had an internship that I was very interested in lined up for the summer. But he started talking to me and explaining this idea that he had. And at least during the call, two things were pretty clear. And one that Steven himself is an incredibly exceptional guy. And even after two years working with him, that is still true and still impressive to me. And the second thing was that he convinced me that neurotech was a harder problem to work on than any other problem that I was working on. So I was going into the field of aerospace and I love jet engines.

3:09:59I think they're the most mechanically complex systems that exist today. And they're really cool for a lot of reasons. You have this really tight tug of war between crazy precise tolerances and like these extreme magnitudes and speed and heat and stresses, all these things. But it's the system that humans fully built and can analyze and look at, whereas the brain is kind of a black box. And the tool set that you need to approach the type of problems that we see when trying to build neurotech and interact with the brain in any way just forces you to be, in my opinion, like a lot more creative and search a much larger option space to get the answers that you want.

3:10:33And so I thought this is an incredibly hard problem. I really want to work on this. We started working together that summer. I was still doing my internship, but that's, you know, nine to five. There's 16 more hours in a day. And eventually at the end of the summer, I told my supervisor at the company I was working at that I was going to leave a month early. and in August, Stephen and I went down to DC, just rented out an Airbnb for a month and just had this basically like a month long build-a-thon where we tried to get the scrappiest MVP we could at the end of the month. And we did that, eventually went back to school.

3:11:00In the meantime, we're still working very hard on the project. In fact, I was failing most of my classes at the time until it got to the point of about like October or November when we had met with our first venture investor and this is Dune Ventures. He funded our pre-seed round And at that point, we were no longer resource constraint. The only constraint to us making progress was time. I actually did really enjoy school. I was a mechanical engineer at Hopkins, and I felt that through each of my classes, I was really expanding my tool set and the things of and the things that I could build and also the types of engineering problems that I could analyze quantitatively.

3:11:33And so I did really love my classes there. But, you know, I figured I could either do school really well. I could do the startup really well. I couldn't do both at the same time. And it was a really obvious choice to choose this startup instead and work in this direction, because for me, it was very plain that this was the direction of growth, or at least the most growth that I could have. I still think that's true. And that's a large part of what guides my decisions and the path that I take in life. very cool can you take me through some of the the tech tree that led up to this point like what are some devices or technologies that you think have kind of commercialized appropriately or at least like lay the groundwork for what you're doing today yeah that's a good question there's not a whole lot that laid the groundwork like technology wise a lot of the stuff that we're using has actually been around for a very long time.

3:12:27And so if you think of the main application that we're looking at right now, vestibular stimulation, you basically just got a circuit that's a constant current stimulator. So it'll inject the same amount of current regardless of the resistance that your head is. Because for humans, that actually varies a lot and can span even an order of magnitude, which is unlike a lot of other physiological characteristics. But the idea of having a constant current stimulator is a technology that we've had for a very long time. It's something that we've used for a human application in like TENS, for example, and tdcs and such um a big part of neurotech and the progress of neurotech i think is not actually implementationally constrained and that like you do have to have good hardware and you do have to make it well and incredibly robust but it's actually how you use that hardware so the types of signals that you send how you integrate them with the rest of your system whether it's closed loop and you're taking certain measurements how you're analyzing those measurements feeding it back into the signals that you're sending that actually gives you a lot more gain and a lot more innovation in neurotech.

3:13:22Jordy?

3:13:26Yeah, I'm just, I'm also, the main question I had for Stephen earlier was around kind of like testing process, how, you know, I imagine you guys both are super eager because of these sort of like fast feedback cycle, but what's your approach and how do you focus on learning through self-experimentation? Yeah. There's two sides of it. So the first side is safety and stuff like that. And so for a lot of vestibular stimulation that's electrical, there's a good bit of precedence, actually, for how it's been used in the clinic in a very binary sort of way, where they aren't able to elicit a lot of autonomic functions that you'd like.

3:14:06But it's still shown with efficacy and a lot of research that, hey, you can take this current signal and you can send it to your vestibular system and there's no adverse effects. And it is a practice that they use very binarily in the clinic. And then when we're doing stuff that's more novel, we'll actually take a very rigorous approach to safety. And so a good example I can think of is when we were working with an ultrasound system and no one before had ever used mechanical waves through ultrasound to elicit vestibular stimulation. We started, you know, very bare bones with going to like simulations first.

3:14:39And then after doing simulations, getting like a fake skull that matches the physical properties of the head, putting that in a water tank, measuring with a hydrofoam what the field is actually looking like, seeing that that lines up with our simulations, basically doing weeks or even up to a month of the math, the numbers, the simulations to find out, hey, this is causing the exact effect that we want. And then based on that, then going to testing on really just like Steven for a lot of the outside stuff to see that it works. And that's kind of the safety. Steven. All right. All right, bud. Yeah.

3:15:09It's time. You're going to want to lay down for this. Yeah. That's fantastic. I mean, are you guys getting to the point where you're really narrowing in on some of the more near-term commercial applications of what you're working on? Or is it still kind of like, hey, there's so many different directions that we can take. We just need to continue to experiment broadly and run a bunch of different types of tests.

3:15:40more of the latter right now not because we don't have a direction that seems viable but we just don't know it's the best one yet so i'm sure steven's talked about some of it but in a couple of different autonomic regulation fields we have very powerful effect sizes um at least in the small sample sets that we've done being just you know people within the company co-founders and such um but for the types of effects that we're looking at if you can't detect it without a larger sample size, say like, you know, 50, a hundred people. And it's just this like stat sick effect that like maybe placebo may not, not be kind of like, you know, taking vitamins in the morning.

3:16:12Um, it's not the effect that we're looking for. Um, we're basically like, we're able to have this fast iteration cycle because the autonomic effects that we do elicit are very obvious. And it's, you know, very clear to, you know, me or Steven, whoever's being tested, like, oh, this isn't placebo. I'm actually feeling something that's crazy different. Um, now in But is sleep, for example, this is an example that Stephen gave earlier, just basically doubling your deep sleep, right? Something like that, every human has to sleep every single day. Is that not a big enough market to try to bring something to market there that could allow?

3:16:49I would personally pay a lot of money to be able to sleep for six hours and get the same effect as sleeping eight hours. Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious, like, how you think of those trade offs, basically. And, you know, I think a lot of teams would just say, hey, this is such a big opportunity. If we're seeing an effect here, we should really run this down. In terms of, if I had to make a prediction about what would be our first product that we release, I would, with the information that we currently have, guess that it's a sleep product. And so a lot of the testing that we're doing right now is related to sleep.

3:17:20A lot of the engineering that we're doing is building out more robust systems that could actually be used already. For example, it's not some big prototype circuit, but something that you could wear and a form factor that people would want to wear in their sleep. And for us, what we're shooting for about right now is just a headband. It's thin enough that you really don't notice anything other than just this piece of cloth that goes around your head and is skin tight. that said even though i'm confident we can build the sleep product right now and push towards a certain release that would be um successful and you know what you call successful whether that's you know selling 10 000 units or 10 million units is a bit more defined by like what your goals are and why you want to release in the first place for us it's actually not so much about the money but building a user base that we can start to expand in with neurotech um you know your brain is a very intimate thing.

3:18:09And consumers are going to be very, very skeptical of the first neurotech products that come about. And so whether it's the case that you want to release a neurotech product that, you know, let's say feasibly could be sold to 10 million people or 50 million people, if they're ready for it. And neurotech has become a more popular idea, rather than maybe finding a more niche entry market first, and doing some type of launch that would give you more feedback and more information about what the marketplace is looking like, how ready people are for neurotech, and those types of questions, it's actually a lot less clear which of those paths is the best one.

3:18:43And I think it's very hard to get a clear answer to that unless we have a more clear picture of the scientific space and actually what types of effects we're looking for. And so sleep is something that you could go consumer with. You could sell to every person because every person sleeps. But if it turns out that there's, let's say, an unexpected amount of stickiness in the market with people that want to buy neurotech products, then a better approach may be to go with a fully medical product. So looking at people with people that have a disease where, you know, hey, maybe neurotech is a little early for consumers, but if you're, and we can go actually even back to the sleep analog, let's say you're an insomniac who can struggle to sleep even two, three hours a night.

3:19:20Now wearing this headband and this idea of neurotech is not quite as, there's not quite as much skepticism as in the friction's a little lower. And so there's kind of this back and forth between we have to analyze like what the market is looking like and what types of products are going to fit that market. And also like what types of products can we build that are able to fit that market? And so it's a little bit harder to get feedback on the first one being the market space until I think our best information there is when we actually release a product to market and learn from it. But at least right now, there's a lot more to be learned on the science side.

3:19:52There's a lot more to be learned with sleep and how to not just make a system like that, but continually improve it and make it better. And then there's also a lot of sub branches that we want to continue to explore. So we know that we're not in some local maximum when maybe not too far, there's another higher local maximum to be hit. Very cool. Fantastic answer. Thank you so much for coming on. Great to meet you, Colton. Congratulations on all the progress so far. Send us a demo unit. Yeah, send us a demo unit. We can. Yeah, actually, that'd be great. We're ready. We're ready. Yeah. And yeah, thanks so much for stopping by.

3:20:22We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Cheers. Have a great day. Very nice meeting you. Bye. Next up, we have Koki Moshida coming into the studio. Our last Teal Fellow of the day. finishing it out strong welcome to the stream koki how are you doing sorry for keeping you waiting we're running long welcome but you're here no please introduce yourself and the company that you're building hey guys uh thank you for having me on uh thanks for the time um i'm koki originally from japan um you know i spent a lot of time growing up thinking about natural disasters i think you know in sf you don't you know it's like nice weather everything's you know kind of nice and you get to work on really, really interesting things.

3:21:03But, you know, I was in the 2011 earthquake where, you know, 18 ,000 people died in a couple of days. And a lot of my friends, you know, homes were destroyed. And you have these, like, you know, typhoons, right? That, like, blow away my grandparents' roofs every, like, three years or so. And I keep asking them, like, why? Like, you can just, like, move because, you know, you're in Typhoon Alley. Like, what's the whole point of, you know, having to stay there? but it's like something so deeply ingrained, right? It's something, you know, that you accept, that you, you know, kind of just accept as feet.

3:21:36And I was talking to the environment minister and the infrastructure minister of Japan recently, and they were saying that they spent billions of dollars on, you know, disaster infrastructure. Like they would build these like, you know, columns under Tokyo, right? So like when it floods, the water can go in. Like they were like, oh shoot, we haven't actually solved the problem, which is the intensification of these events. But back then, I, you know, I was 11 and I did not know that you can, you know, actually start to fight these natural disasters. But I started just like building, you know, robots when 3D printers were really popular, started selling them.

3:22:14And then the money I made from that, I put into Bitcoin and then got into like hedge funds in high school. when I started a small one. And then in college, I came across this startup, which was building AI weather forecasts. Not many people think about weather forecasting as this huge expense that you have to take on. But when you look at these larger countries, they spend about$2 billion per year on supercomputer. Essentially, a big chunk of the world's supercomputers are used on running partial differential equations to be able to calculate the weather, right? It's like something that you don't really think about.

3:22:56And with machine learning, what you're able to do is reduce costs by 99 % and increase resolution by 100 times. And when you see that, you know, like we started out, you know, very small, like five people, but, you know, I was splitting time at Berkeley and then at the startup and we became like the national weather forecast for the Philippines where it's, you know, it was a lot more affordable. And I start to think about, OK, wow, like our understanding of, you know, not only just Earth itself, but like being able to, you know, model, gather data and then predict has gotten so much better. I start to think about, like, what's the next natural step, right?

3:23:34Like the whole point of gaining, you know, more intelligence is so that you can act upon it. And that's what I started to think about. Can't really specifically tell you what we're doing in terms of, you know, the application layer. But this is kind of like the transformation we're thinking about. Is it magic? Is it spells? Are you going to bomb the hurricane? Is it a bomb? I've heard that pitch before. I wonder where you heard that from. It's 10 ,000 times the power of a hurricane. Hurricanes are interesting, right? Because the power, the amount of energy that goes in there is so strong. If you look at Google Research, they used to have this program where they're trying to harness energy out of a hurricane.

3:24:22And if you can harness it properly, you can power the United States for months and months just from one hurricane. That's incredible. Which is a crazy thing to think about. So you're going to make them and then you're going to control them. And then there's going to be a bunch of sci-fi offshoots where Koki had a good thing going. He was powering a lot of data centers with his homegrown hurricanes, and then one got out of control. But yeah, I mean, talk to me about weather forecasting and kind of the data sources, because obviously, yes, a massive kind of revolution in AI machine learning generally.

3:25:01You slipped in that you're doing the weather forecasting for the Philippines. Like you guys are like a data provider already. The previous company I worked at during school, that's what we're focused on. And a lot of it is coming up with models, right? How can you compute these partial differential equations more efficiently with the same amount of data you have? And so you look like DeepMind or NVIDIA coming up with their frontier models, being able to run diffusion-based models to forecast better. But for us, what we think is fundamental is collecting data that no one really has. Software has become so commoditized that now it's just like Claude and then XAI and then OpenAI.

3:25:50It's just like a never-ending battle. For us, it's like, how can you collect data and how can you see the world in a different way that allows you to act upon it? And how can you causally act upon a weather phenomena? Yeah, you mentioned diffusion. Is there a distinction between weather forecasting using diffusion models versus transformer-based models or token prediction models? Is that a meaningful distinction or are you kind of using the term broadly? it gets really complicated uh in a sense that i think you know both of them are good at you know kind of milking um as much you know information you know looking at okay what what are the latent parameters how can you you know figure out you know somewhat unnoticeable um characteristics within within other models but i think the interpretability um of weather models also become very important, right?

3:26:49Like if you can like characteristically like define, okay, which parameter within a high dimensional vector, right, is creating a lot of bias, how can you, you know, tweak that so that you can, you know, get back on track? And it's like, weather is so chaotic that like even one small perturbation in an initial condition can really mess up the forecast. And that's why it's really difficult to forecast like a week out. And so being able to like assimilate data as you go. And that's why we're focusing on, okay, how can you collect data that no one really has so that you can make sure you're not de-biased too much.

3:27:27Talk to me about the data sources for this. I'm familiar with the Doppler radar systems that the local news has, but are satellites playing a role now in weather prediction? Is the actual data that we're gathering to build these models on top of improving? And what are the key vectors that are driving better data going into these models? Yeah, satellite data is interesting. You know, a lot of re-analysis data has always been used, and it's, you know, made by NOAA or ECMWF. Unfortunately, NOAA is not doing too well now. What we're doing is building sensors and then literally like flying into, you know, storms or into clouds to measure within them, right?

3:28:13It's a complex convective process that you really have to, you know, just send something in. Autonomous vehicle, I assume? No, flying the plane personally? Our focus is on how can you build infrastructure, right? Like infrastructure in a sense that, okay, okay, models are a part of the infrastructure, but how can you collect data for a targeted vehicle? So for example, hurricanes are interesting, right? I'm sorry, I can't say everything in detail, but in terms of hurricanes, it's like, okay, if you want to see how convection is happening, what about the density of clouds? What kind of grapple columns and water droplets exist?

3:29:01you really just have to, you know, fly like a plane in there. Like it's hard to just do like drones because it's too turbulent or these like sensors are, you know, too big. And so thinking about that is an interesting problem as well. But I think fundamentally, right, what we're pushing against is that many of these, you know, reactive methods of disaster. If you look at, you know, insurance, right, like there's about like$140 billion per year in insurance premiums issued in the U.S. for like tropical cyclones. And yet like insurance premiums have doubled every single year for the last four or five years in many coastal cities.

3:29:39And when you look at like another catastrophe happening, like last year, Hurricane Helena Milton was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. There weren't even category fives and Congress had to give out$100 billion in aid. But when a next Hurricane Katrina happens in Florida, for example, then insurance is just going to be insolvent in many ways. Is there a market for better weather data by itself? I mean, it sounds like fighting the hurricane is important, but we talked to somebody who works in data brokerage loosely and said like hedge, everyone talks about, oh, we'll sell it to the hedge funds, but there's only like five hedge funds that buy anything and they're kind of stingy apparently and they don't really buy that much data.

3:30:22You think about the insurance market, yeah,$140 billion, dollars but if you're an insurer and you know that you know a whole bunch of houses are gonna be destroyed in two weeks or you know in four weeks you're not really gonna be able to adjust premiums that fast to make up for that so it feels like and then and then you look at the government the government might want to know but even then it's like are they really a good buyer so just just continue spitballing and in california when there's this certain communities that are threatened they'll have like private fire response i guess that makes sense basically even in HOA.

3:30:55Is that a good, but I'm just, I'm just thinking about like the dynamic right now where a hurricane is effectively forming and the response is to watch it and then tell people to evacuate based on where you think it's going to go. And it's kind of insane that we don't have any sort of proactive response to say, Hey, this thing is progressing to being more and more intense. can we you know sort of stop it yeah so yeah data market i don't know how much you can talk about it we might just have to have you back on when you know no when you look at insurance it's pretty insane like they look at you know okay what is you know hurricane damage looked like in the last 40 years okay okay let's you know aggregate average and then kind of you know add bias for like some of the intensification of these events or the increase um and the exposure and that's all you And so a lot of the interesting financial assets come up when you look at like catastrophe bonds.

3:31:53They're like certain hedge funds that literally just trade on catastrophe bonds. And it's just about like estimating what is the arbitrage in terms of how much wildfire is going to wipe out a certain city. Or same for hurricanes as well. It makes a ton of sense. Well, we'll have to have you back when you can talk more about the product and where you're going with the company. But this was fantastic. Thank you so much for hopping on. This is a real pleasure. Excited to hear more. And congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Thank you for the time. Bye. All right. And that concludes Teal Fellow Tuesday.

3:32:27We have interviewed all the Teal Fellows. Looking forward to next Tuesday. Next Tuesday. In a year from now. A year from now. Also, I mean, we mentioned Figma a few times, but we forgot to mention that Dylan Field, Teal Fellow. So go to Figma.com. Think bigger. Build faster. Figma helps design and development teams. John, you are addicted to Figma ads today. Build great products together. I love ads, baby. I love ads. That is, I think, the third that you've run today. I love it. I love the energy. I like this post from Andrea, this bumper sticker. It says, honk, if you like the taste of venture capital.

3:33:00And I just wanted to say. And I love. Honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk. Air horn, air horn. And it's Graza and Ollipop. I thought that was very funny. Is this an anti-venture capital bumper sticker? I don't know. I don't know how anybody could be anti-venture capital. It's ridiculous. My lovely wife was one of the first investors in Barraza. So if you're honking, you're honking for her. And they're absolutely crushing. What else is interesting to cover today? I mean, TBPN was in the news with Ben Thompson chiming in over the weekend saying, I love how it never occurs to the media that maybe they're just being out-competed instead of the subject of some sort of conspiracy.

3:33:41Literally anyone can make a podcast. Sorry, they don't want to listen to yours. I think to add to hear the frustration from the media is that oftentimes entrepreneurs and investors don't even want to talk to the media anymore. So it's not that they don't, you know, they maybe will listen, but they don't even want to go. And this is something we talked about with Abe, the guy who wrote the profile on us. is um he was curious you know what why why do you feel like people are so uh comfortable you know talking with you and we don't need to go to a while he actually responded to this he said i think it can be both true that non-traditional outlets like ben's and tbpn are outperforming many traditional ones and that some of tech distrusts the traditional media creating some of the audience for ben and tbpn and i love that because no quotes no quotes around tbpn Abe got the memo.

3:34:37We're in the mainstream now. We are the mainstream media. We are the traditional media. Yeah. I mean, we're wearing suits. We're a traditional media company. What's more traditional than wearing suits? We're highly traditional. How can we be more traditional than wearing a tailored suit while you report the news, while you newsmax? I'm newsmaxing, John. What else is interesting to talk about? There's some news in Polymarket. The odds of a U.S. recession have dropped significantly. I'm very excited to hear that. Love that. I threw up a market. Will Coinbase acquire Circle before September? That's going to be fun.

3:35:14Somebody else was writing. See if I can read through this. This guy, I don't actually know this guy, but he wrote up an article. And I guess he was at Coinbase for some time, which is interesting. So he's giving some background. I spent years in the crypto industry, first at CoinFund, then at Coinbase, helping scale its venture strategy. Everything in this post is based on publicly available data from Circles S1 and Coinbase's public filings. No inside information, just analysis. Anyone could replicate, but most don't. He's breaking down the USDC supply. He says total USDC equals Coinbase's USDC plus Circles USDC plus everything else.

3:35:58platform usdc refers to the percentage of stable coins held in a party's custodial products or managed wallet services and so he's basically saying that coinbase has 23 percent of the total usdc in circulation yeah and they've also been on a little acquisition spree they bought that other big company uh i think it was a billion dollar acquisition at least i forget exactly the name, but we'll have to talk to Brian Armstrong from Coinbase about that hopefully tomorrow. He goes on to highlight that USCC is Coinbase's number two revenue driver and contributed to 15 % of Q1 2025. Revenue more than staking.

3:36:37Could be a beautiful partnership. We'd love to see it. Well, we'll cover it here and we will track it. What is the poly market actually at? Let's see. It's relatively low volume right now. 5%, 50%, 10 %? No, no. It was sitting at 40 percent over the night and somebody took a big no bet and so it's sub 10 percent 10 percent okay we'll see well we'll see if you uh if you have an opinion hop on polymark and check it out uh i think it's good to close this everyone's loving the dyson keynote scott belski said agree found it riveting and seriously considering getting a dyson pencil vac uh sam so what is the pencil that that dyson keynote was so wholesome just an excited inventor vacuuming the stage and showing off his new toys all wrapped up in under nine minutes it's uh it's a so this feature basically uses a laser to expose well that's been on dyson vacuums for a while uh i think i have that on mine oh well you're living in poverty i guess i have a matic now so i don't yeah that's true matic is is pretty incredible but um but dyson yeah they've had the laser for a while but i think what they did was they re they restructured it because it used to be the internals like the heavy battery part and the actual vacuum part would be at the handle and so the handle was always a little bit heavy it seems like they've kind of shifted a lot of the weight the center of gravity much lower and so they can use it much more just like a walking stick if you see here you'll see that what he's actually holding in his hand if you zoom in is is very thin and so the whole thing is this very thin tube and that means it's a lot easier to vacuum and so uh i mean get this for your in-laws get this for your parents and grandparents they're gonna love it we talked about lesson was talking about how expensive this could basically be the beginning of the e-cane this is the smart cane this is the smart cane no way yeah he was talking about that imagine if everybody was walking around vacuuming all the time the world would be so clean shoes the world would be so clean this is the future this is the future and then you throw an llm in that bad boy, start talking to it.

3:38:42Slap some AI in it. Slap some AI in that thing. We could fit so much AI in this thing. Intelligence and clean streets, too cheap to meter. Well, that's a great place to end it, folks. Stay tuned. Tomorrow, we are doing crypto day. We have a whole bunch of absolute killers from the crypto ecosystem. It really came together well. The lineup is fantastic. Very, very excited. It's actually, I wanted to, before tomorrow, try to estimate the total volume that the people joining tomorrow oversee on a daily basis. It's definitely in the billions. It could easily be in the... Oh, daily volume. Daily volume.

3:39:18It's massive. Anyway, why don't you take us out with a massive gong hit, Jordy? I would love to, John. Wide is so good. I love it. Swing the mic. Swing the mic? I don't think... I almost broke the... Anyways. Goodbye, everyone. Thank you for watching. Have a great day. Have a fantastic evening. Leave us a five-star review. Leave us a five-star review. Thank you for watching. T.O. Vallow Tuesday plus a bunch of other haters. It's great. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.