TBPN Live - Calley Means, Delian Asparouhov, Leif Abraham & Jannick Malling, Alfred Wahlforss & Florian Juengermann, Saman Farid, Erik Palitsch, Netflix's Growth Plans Post Earnings, AMD's Plan to Beat NVIDIA

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

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You're watching TVVN. Today is Thursday, April 24th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We got some new sound effects today. We do. So very excited. Expect the unexpected. Expect the unexpected. We got a lot of great breaking news. Netflix had earnings and they recorded record profits. news Netflix had earnings and they recorded record profits. Let's hear from Netflix folks. It's fantastic from Bloomberg. Netflix Inc. reported record profit to start the year. Allaying concerns of a slowdown or fears the streaming leader might be hurt by growing economic uncertainty. First quarter earnings rose 25% to $6.61 a share. The company said Thursday, easily beating analysts' estimates. It's bad day to be a Netflix analyst. You're just getting beaten up by the corporate results.

Sales grew to 10.5 billion in line with projections. The results were boosted by a recent price increase and strong slate of programming across the globe. Like the UK hit series Adolescents, investors have come to see Netflix a safe bet strong slate of programming across the globe, like the UK hit series, Adolescents. Investors have come to see Netflix's safe bet during a great time of economic uncertainty and challenges for conventional movie and TV business.

With global audiences of more than 700 million viewers, the company said it has seen no impact on its business from President Donald Trump's tariffs or the market volatility that has followed. And so, this is interesting. Congratulations to all the Netflix shareholders. Congratulations to everyone at Netflix. But I thought it was interesting because we were talking

earlier about we saw the stats on all the different tech companies, how much they're off peak from the start of the year, and even Meta's down 25%. And we were kind of working through. It was 28% over the last 12 months. Yeah, and we were kind of working 28% over over there over the last 12 months yeah and we were kind of working through it we were like okay how did we get to this point how how is meta affected by tariffs like they don't make stuff in China I mean I guess they do make the oculus but they're not

selling that many of them but in general you know the question was why is meta hurt by tariff uncertainty or the chaos of the last few months? And you can kind of talk to Sean Frank over at Ridge Wallet and say, okay, well, if D2C advertising that's happening on meta is impaired by tariffs, they could pull back on advertising and so you could get there. But with Netflix, there truly is nothing that affects them on the tariff side. They truly are just a digital content farm, basically. Yeah, the economy would have to be pretty bad

for people to start thinking, I wanna be less entertained. Yes, exactly. And historically, things like Netflix have done very well during economic downturns. Because things are rough, but you want to kill some time. And on a dollar per hour basis, Netflix is probably the best bank for your buck. Their usage metrics are still insane.

People say, TBPN, you guys put out three hours of content a day. Well, they're saying like it's like two. Netflix puts out three hours of content every minute. Yeah, well, and if you look at, I think, some of their usage numbers, I think it's like the average user's using it for like two hours a day, which is just insane. Yeah, it and if you look at I think some of their usage numbers I think it's like the average users using it for like two hours a day. Yep. Yep. Yep. Just insane. Yeah, it's crazy It's crazy. I actually think we should distribute on Netflix. Absolutely. Yeah, give us a call Netflix read read Hastings

If you're listening, come on. We'll fly up to Los Gatos. Yes. Oh, yeah. I'd love to partner with them Anyway, interesting development a couple years ago, there was this customer segmentation push. They went for higher tiers. They will charge you an arm and a leg for 4K streaming across a bunch of devices. If you're sharing the passwords, they crack down on the password sharing. And they also introduced the ad-supported tier, which isn't free. You still have to pay for it, but it's working, basically. And that's driving platform growth, higher engagement,

beyond raw subscriber counts, and really, they're price discriminating, right? It used to just be, oh, Netflix, it's like $10 a month for everyone. Well, there are some people that are willing to pay more for 4K and more screens and whatnot, and no ads. And then there's other people that are more price sensitive. And so they've done a great job at this.

And they've basically, they're target for 2029 is to double revenue and expand margins. We love doubling revenue and expanding margins, folks. It's fantastic. Double overnight success. Yeah, 2029. I mean, it's been 30 year old business at this point. Pretty wild. 30 year old overnight. It will be it will possible. It's possible. And so they're pivoting the strategy. The company is moving beyond simply adding subscribers

to maximizing revenue per user via segmentation by introducing ad-supported tier and multiple price points. Netflix can capture price-sensitive users and retain them with a cheaper ad-backed option while raising prices on standard and premium plans. For those who value an ad-free experience, that would be a lot of folks. This segmentation.

I would expect our- I wanna pay more and get more ads too. I would expect our community to, yeah, wanna pay more and get more ads, so hopefully they recognize that and start rolling out. They have that tier as well. That tier as well. So let's bring you down.

Ben Thompson's analysis of Netflix's Q1 2025 results underlines the robust financial performance and ambitious growth plans, record quarterly profits, $10.5 billion revenue beat expectations aided by recent price hikes and popular content releases. Notably, Netflix ceased reporting subscriber additions this quarter.

That'll frustrate a lot of analysts because everyone always likes to have as much data as possible to project these things. And a company that was adding a ton of users would probably want to include that data. Yes, but there was also a very, like, when you would dig into the subscriber additions, you would see weird things like, oh, they're

growing a ton of subscriber additions, so maybe the stock should go way up, but then you'd find out that they were in lower priced markets. And so there were all these anomalies where they were doing okay in the US, but they were growing a lot in Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, and all of those have very different economic impacts on the business. And so Netflix is saying like, hey, we're a mature company, we're like 20 years old at this point, why don't you guys just focus on revenue, profit, and cashflow, which we love.

And so internal forecast. Oh, and this was interesting. There was actually a leak to the Wall Street Journal show that Netflix is aiming to double revenue to 78 billion by 2029 and even target a $1 trillion market cap. And now there was a recording of, uh, I believe the CEO on the earnings call saying like, you know, we have a very high trust environment here at Netflix. We share a lot of information with our entire team. Sometimes that gets leaked to the press.

We don't like when it gets leaked to the press. But you have to wonder if it's an intentional leak, right? Because it's like, we have that internal forecast of our streaming hours going to 24 hours a day, trillion dollar market cap, $100 billion in ad deals. And it would be terrible if that leaked. But at the same time, you could imagine a situation where we would accidentally, intentionally leak that

just to make us look better. And so maybe that's what's going on here. I don't know. It's possible. We'll have to ask them. But it could be bad to have that. Yeah, that Jamie Diamond audio leak. Remember, we talked about this.

I love a good leak. Where he just sounds like a great leader. I love a good leak. Who's ambitious and wants to push his team to be their best and work hard. Yep. What a terrible leak. And so they're going to roll out more new monetization streams,

grow their advertising business that's projected to be $9 billion a year by 2029, and continued price increases alongside a moderate rise in subscribers. So they basically hit saturation. Like everyone has Netflix that is interested, they're not really interested in bringing new people on, and that's probably what's going on with the F1 deal

that we discussed earlier. And so they're basically saying that we are confident economics of scale and we're going to just focus on monetizing our audience more significantly. Has kind of dropped out of the big tech narrative. It used to be Fang, the N stood for Netflix. Now we're on, we moved on from Fang. We're on mag seven. Tesla's in. Well, it's hard to call a $500 billion company big technology.

Yeah, it's not. It's quaint. It's quaint. Quaint tech, a quaint lifestyle business. Yeah, more much more of a lifestyle business. Anyway. And it's amazing that a business like this can, you know, have reached sort of full market saturation and still trade at almost a 50x PE ratio. Yeah. Like, gotta give them credit for that.

They got destroyed during, didn't they get destroyed during COVID or something? At some point, like they had some major, major drawdown in the stock. But I actually remember back in high school, I got in a kind of a drunken fight with a high school friend late night once about whether or not Netflix was a good stock. This is very funny.

Not super on brand for you, I'm sure. Well, this is high school. Oh, OK, it was in high school. I thought you were saying it was recently. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This was back. This was back in my. So you were 21 when you were in high school?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Got held back a little bit? Yeah. But this is probably around 2007, something like that. OK. So you were feeling the heat from the financial crisis? Yeah, oh, for sure, for sure. But basically, my friend was like,

Netflix is overvalued. It's not a good stock. And I was just like, and I laid out like no like I think in the future Like you will have Netflix like maybe even on your phone Maybe you'd have it on multiple screens Whoa, and he was like now like this is like a terrible stock It's not going anywhere And then it became like the best stock of all time and I should have bought it instead of just like you know arguing

With him, but yeah best stock of all time, and I should have bought it instead of just arguing with him. But it was just fun. Well, you also should have angel invested in Coinbase and a bunch of other companies in your YC batch. Yeah, if they accepted credit card debt as collateral for angel investments, I would be doing very, very well. But instead, I had negative net income, or negative net worth.

Anyway, so they're trying to aim for 36% subscriber growth. They're trying to hit 410 million users by 2029. And ARPU should rise significantly through segmentation, adds higher pricing. They're going for that one trillion market cap. You'll love to hear it. Just an easy 2X, right? Yep, they're only, yeah. I mean, that actually isn't that crazy on a five year plan to double.

Like, that doesn't seem that crazy. But they got to get more people. And so, yeah, the takeaway from Ben Thompson is that, you know, he was advocating for an ads tier for a long time. He's called it a success. Even if the ads aren't material yet, it is putting them on the path. And there was a lot of work that they needed to do.

At one point, I don't know if they actually landed with Microsoft, but they were thinking about partnering with Microsoft to do kind of the backend ad exchange. And there was a lot of success. And the bull case for Netflix's ad product, as far as I know know is just the targeting potential and Netflix's ability to like basically verticalize from the content to the

user to the to the users interests right should be more targetable than just linear TV ads or not over the top, but like over the air, uh, uh, TV ads. But, um, I don't know that they have that much data. I mean, if it's like this person, it's nowhere near as much as an Instagram where, you know, you're following all these things. They know where you are on the web. They know what you're, what, what, oh, you're, you're, you're clearly shopping for a suitcase this week because you've been, you've been hovering over the suitcase content that we've been sending you randomly.

Much harder to do that. So I think that's why there might be a benefit to partnering with an ad exchange that has a little bit more tracking information. But still, I mean, you can probably tell just, you can probably do more segmentation than in a normal, in a normal linear TV context. But it doesn't seem anywhere as efficient as meta, but.

Sure, but that's not the point, right? These are going to be brand marketing dollars. I think so. Yeah. That's okay. And there was a big, there was a big debate over like when Netflix first opened the flood gates of ads, they were going to get a lot of experimental budget because it's very interesting.

Oh, I could put my brand next to some prestige TV potentially on Netflix or something. That seems interesting. But ultimately the ad buyers were gonna just wanna see results. And it's probably harder to track if you're just showing someone an ad and then they're not necessarily clicking through.

It's more brand advertising. So all that attribution could be difficult, but it seems like even in the face of all of that, like ads are just such a great business that it's working. Yep. Very interesting. It's interesting to think about mobile watch time, too. Yeah.

Right? It doesn't feel as common for people to be watching television. For that, yeah. For that, you could actually put the link right there. And so you can have a pop-up ad and get that to direct attribution. Instead of like the QR code on the screen, which I don't think many people are doing if they're watching Netflix on their TV late night.

But a lot of people are just going around with their phone doing their chores and then watching Netflix in the background. Interesting. Anyway, Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis has a great breakdown on AMD's transformation and how they are trying to beat Nvidia. This is AMD 2.0, a new sense of urgency,

and it's a very interesting deep dive into how these big companies are interacting with the next generation of analysts, like Ben Thompson and Dylan Patel. And so, Ben Thompson's been advocating for different strategies at Intel and many other companies. But there's always been the question of, oh, is he an armchair quarterback?

Could he possibly know better than the entire Intel executive team? And it seems like maybe now it's yes. But with AMD and Semi Analysis, the answer is absolutely. Because Semi Analysis, back in December of 2024, about four months ago, they published an article detailing mediocre AMD software and lack of usability. This was something that had been flagged

by George Hatz before, basically saying that like the chips themselves on a flop per dollar basis are quite competitive with Nvidia, but the software infrastructure on top, like the middleware that goes in between the model that you're trying to train and the actual silicon, is bad. Basically, I don't know how to put it nicely. But Dylan is saying that AMD has turned it around.

They kicked it into high gear, and they've made rapid progress in the last four months on many items Semi-Analysis laid out. They view AMD's new sense of urgency as a massive positive in its journey to catch up to Nvidia. AMD is now in wartime mode, but there are still many battles ahead. And so.

Founder Mode. For sure. Switch your business to ram.com. Are those connected somehow? They are. This is a ram pad just plays every time we play Founder Road now. We have two versions. So basically, I mean, everyone knows that Nvidia has like completely

run away with the data center game for AI training, especially on the pre-training side. There's some stuff that you can do on the inference side once you've trained the model and distilled it. But when you need a huge cluster of a,000 GPUs, the game is Nvidia. You're going to Jensen. And yeah, you've seen, you've heard these stories about like Elon and Larry Ellison getting dinner with Jensen and being like, give us all the chips. And then obviously every other big tech company wants the Nvidia chips.

Nvidia stock has been mooning. And all of that is because of the CUDA ecosystem that sits on top of Nvidia and how reliable those chips have been. Because when you're running a really big, really big and expensive training run, one little flaw could cost you a lot or could throw the training run off. And so AMD has an equivalent of CUDA, I believe, ROCM, RockM software and developer tools, but there's still a bunch of software gaps, scaling challenges, and a need for community-driven breakthroughs. That's what has made Nvidia so strong. They have an ecosystem of developers who build software and test suites and all sorts of open source stuff, and there's a bunch

of interesting anecdotes here about what made Nvidia really so dominant that we should go through. So basically the takeaway is that AMD is in wartime mode. And it's very cool. Like Lisa Sue actually met with Semi Analysis after they published the December AMD article and acknowledged many of the gaps in the software stack. And they've done a bunch of other things. They hired a developer relations, ZAR, this is the dev rel function to actually interact

with external developers. And they do this on tech Twitter and at real life events. This is actually where it's happening. And in January, AMD recognized that external developer community are what made CUDA great. And so it's a very big pivot from the previous com strategy, which was never admit that there are any flaws in the software publicly.

Always claim victory. Always claim victory. Now they are coming to the market with a much more humble approach, and I think it's been very well received. And so AMD has shifted into high gear to compete in AI. They know that there's a lot of money at stake. They're overhauling the culture and software stack

with a focus on developers. They've already rolled out massive improvements to their software stack. And they have this new developer-first strategy. They're addressing long-standing issues from poor Python tooling to slow multi-GPU communication. So there were actual points in the software stack where there was no Python library.

Like you could not write Python to do something. You had to go to a different language. And that's obviously a point of a friction for developers. If you have a developer who loves writing Python and then you're like, actually to do this thing, you have to write something else, maybe C++ or something. That's frustrating.

And the key here is that all the big potential customers and existing customers value speed above pretty much anything else. Totally. If these people are getting paid $1 million, you want them just to move as fast as possible. Totally. Totally.

And Elon doing the new data center and whatever it was. Was it a year that they pulled it off? Yeah. It's like they're not going to wait around for an inferior solution. Yes, Dylan actually highlights the X AI team catching up to the frontier so quickly as an example for how AMD should be thinking.

They should think, hey, we are behind, but if we are realistic about that and we sprint and we change the culture, we could potentially catch up to the frontier very quickly, which is very cool. And so there's plans for a community GPU cloud which anyone could use to train. Google had a great example of this,

where there was this open source GPTJ moment, which I heard about a long time ago, but I didn't know the full story. Basically, there was a high school kid who got access for free to a cluster of TPUs on Google's cloud. So they're free, but it was a very powerful cloud, and he trained a language model in LLM that was roughly equivalent to GPT-2.

And everyone was like, this is incredible if some random kid can just build something that's at the same level as OpenAI. This is a testament to how awesome Google is with their TPUs. And same with NVIDIA does the same thing. NVIDIA actually gives out servers to universities. And some of them, I don't know if this is actually important at all, but they're gold plated. It's just like, it's just like, I think it's just to

make a statement. I think it's just to make a statement, just to be like, we're delivering this thing. It's awesome. Like we want you to be excited to build on Nvidia. So we're delivering you a gold plated rack. You could probably spend your annual, uh, tuition as a college student, just on energy for that free on that free nvidia GPU rack if they were aggressive enough so put it to use yeah and so basically it's all it all comes down to like this cultural transformation but Lisa Sue has acknowledged the company's software shortcomings and AMD is now in wartime mode fixing bugs and engaging developers the company has launched developer

relations initiative and they're increasing the R&D budget, boosting AI engineering compensation and scaling internal GPU clusters. And so there's a couple other interesting things in here. They're focusing on continuous integration and whatnot, catching up on tools and libraries, more Python support and really focusing on cluster scaling, which has been a big problem.

I need to find the story about George Hots, because that was interesting. Let me see. GeoHots. OK. So let me see. Found a post on Hacker News from four months ago from somebody saying, is there no hope for AMD anymore

after George Hots gave up on AMD? I feel like there's no realistic chance of using their chips to break CUDA dominance. Yeah. chance of using their chips to break CUDA dominance? Yeah, so here's some from the actual Semi Analysis article. Although George Hotz could have settled for AMD's earlier offer of cloud-hosted MI300X systems with full BMC access, he insisted on physical hardware so he could hack the metal directly.

And so George Hotz was saying, we need an alternative to Nvidia. We need to break the Nvidia monopoly. This was something that he was pushing for, and he wanted to develop a new PyTorch competitor, basically, for training machine learning models on AMD hardware, but he was running into tons and tons of problems

with the software stack. And he was posting about these and he said like, hey, if you guys just send me the latest and greatest, I wanna be able to hack them, but I don't wanna pay cause I'm doing your job for you basically. And AMD initially balked even though HOTS' goal was to help open source tooling on their GPUs. It was exactly something like Jensen would jump at.

Jensen knows the value of the open source community on top of CUDA and Nvidia. And so he's given stuff out all over the place. But AMD, that wasn't in their culture. And so the stalemate turned into a public spectacle when the widely respected PyTorch co-creator tweeted in support of George Hots receiving the physical boxes. Which is interesting because PyTorch, obviously it's an open source library, tweeted in support of George Hotz receiving the physical boxes,

which is interesting because like PyTorch, obviously it's an open source library, but like he's kind of creating this competitor with TinyGrad. But obviously the PyTorch creator just wants cool and efficient AI training software to go out there. And so he says, Sumit Chintala says, for what it's worth, if George Hz was offering to work on my stuff for free and wanted two boxes, I'd drive them out to him myself.

TinyGrad is a beautiful, phenomenal piece of software, in my opinion. TinyGrad has some sort of limitation. I think George Hotz is trying to keep it under a thousand lines of code or something, and so it's this like remarkably you know optimized and an interpretable yeah program for training AI models on on on on GPU hardware but he ran into a bunch of problems with AMD and started pushing

them and so semi analysis says we believe that this nudge worked and a George Hott's March 8th blog revealed that AMD had relented, sending him two MI300X boxes. With this, AMD finally passed the GeoHott's cultural test for AMD. This is arguably a bigger reputational coup than a technical one.

Shipping real silicon to a high profile hacker signals a new found developer first ethos that marketing dollars alone can't buy. And it finally turns a bruising Twitter saga into a story demonstrating AMD's new developer first ethos. In addition to sending GeoHots boxes, we believe that AMD can also score another easy reputation and marketing win by donating physical AMD GPU boxes to academic labs. Jensen

and Ian and Ian Buck has had a long history of donating GPUs to academic labs going back as far as 2014. This year Jensen continues to support academic labs such as Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, UCSD and others for some time by donating physical gold-plated B200 boxes to them in addition to providing free cloud access to NVIDIA GPUs. So it's just like you can use the cloud for free, you can have the boxes for free, we just want you, anything. Yes, 100%. It's amazing. Yeah, so interesting to follow what's like the change in management. Like this is something like, you know, a going direct type of change. Like this is a big

change for the company culture. But I think that they finally realized that like it had to be done because they'd done so much right on the actual, they'd done their job on the chip side, and they'd built a great product, but it was not getting adopted, and it was because of the lack of focus on nurturing the open source community, building developer relations, and actually making it easy to work with their product

that they made. But it's different. I don't think this is the same dynamic with, I don't think it was the same dynamic in gaming. I think gaming was much more simple and much lower stakes. And so if you have a shader that doesn't run perfectly, the gaming company will just kind of figure it out. It's not that big.

Whereas if a training run goes wrong, that's potentially like a billion dollars on download drain. It's just fascinating that Lisa and Jensen could be cousins, and she wouldn't pick up at least a little bit of what her cousins moved. So I invited Dylan Patel on the show. He's traveling.

He should be joining us in a week or two, hopefully. And I definitely wanna know, this is great. I love this. Let's go for AMD. I'm super happy for them. And congratulations to Semi Analysis for making this happen. At the same time, why did it take so long?

This feels like this was foreseeable. And potentially missed out on a part of the bubble, right? Totally. We're in a bubble. the bubble, right? Totally. We're in a bubble. We love bubbles on the show. But they were pretty much asleep at the wheel for at least the initial run, which cost them a massive amount.

They could have raised tens of billions of dollars of cheap equity through that process and You know, I'm sure they they conducted, you know a bunch of different You know fundraisers over that period but they didn't really get much of a you know The stocks up like 60% over the last like five years So it's not like they haven't really been a winner in in the boom. Yeah well, let's put up the guest lineup for today and We have delian coming into the studio first and we have a bunch more folks. We got

founders of public coming in they announced a partnership with Aston Martin today very which we're very excited about. Got Listen Labs, Freeform, Formic, and of course, Cali coming in from TruMed to talk about food dye bands and a bunch of other stuff. So very excited for that. But next up we have, Delian, welcome to the stream. How you doing? Welcome.

It's Delta V with Deleon. What is up? Let's go. I think I lost a button. I think I... I think you just got excited when you saw me. It's okay. It happens.

I did. It happens. It's not every day you get to hang out with one of the most cutthroat venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, now in Los Angeles. One of the top spacemen in the world. The Bulgarian bruiser in the building. How you doing? What is it like being down to one job?

I fantasize about only having one job all the time, but I'm stuck with like five jobs. Yeah, has anyone told you about like the value of focus? Maybe you should just focus on one thing. I know, I know. I wish I was a little less ADD. Anyway, what is on your mind? I'm sure you're thinking about Hill and Valley.

I want to pull up the line-up. Wait, first, I have a question. You said you're Zoom. You're doing a lot less Zoom since moving to LA. Is that just a lot? You're just meeting with the Varta team in person? Or is it founder meetings as well? Are you taking more meetings in person now

that you're Gundo adjacent? Oh, god. Let's not use that word, it's a dirty word. I am Elsa Gundo, not adjacent within, I'm currently located within those city boundaries. I think it's honestly, it's basically everything. Everything from the portfolio companies to FF meetings, to Varda meetings, and it's one of these things

that it kind of feels recursive, where it's like when you have less Zooms, then when somebody like, I had this like VC ask me for a Zoom this week and I was like, cool, you're an SF. Just let me know next time you're LA. Like if it's so important, just like take the flight. And they're like, I don't have any plans to be in LA anytime soon.

I was like, cool, then I don't have any plans to talk to you. I'm like, I'm bogged. So. I'm talking about this. It's ridiculous. Well, we appreciate you joining this zoom and this show. Let's let you thank you. We appreciate it.

Let's run through Hill and Valley over a few short years. We've made it into the preeminent forum for the top technology leaders and elected officials to gather. You barely scrapped together a single notable name, but somehow Jensen Wong, Alex Carve, you got a ton of people here. Maybe walk me through who you're excited about. Give me a little bit of history and then I wanna talk through some of,

what message tech is trying to send to DC these days. Yeah, I mean, the history of Hill and Valley is it started off with like an intention of being like a 30, 40 person dinner that like ballooned up into 100. And like the first one, I think, had like 12, 13 elected officials. And then it just like kept gaining steam from there.

We're just like the dinner got bigger. And then eventually the dinner was so big, they were like, man, we've got a lot of really great people here and we're doing a private dinner. I think like the public would be very interested in like some of these people and conversations happening doing a private dinner, I think the public would be very interested in some of these people and conversations happening

in the public sphere too. So we expanded to including a more public daytime forum and then that just sort of gained momentum. And this year, it's like, I just, in some ways, I can't imagine how much of a better lineup one could have. I think the main message is just like, look, if we go back in time to 2018, you had everything from Google bailing on the Maven project, VC saying that investing in weapons was just

as bad as investing in porn and gambling. And so there was just so much hesitation and there was a real rift, I feel like, between Silicon Valley and Washington DC that is kind of counterproductive. If you look at the Obama era, like part of why Obama 108 to 2012 was like a deep integration with Silicon Valley intact. And it was like the first social media, you know, sort of driven campaign. But it felt like, you know, partially in Trump era,

there was just like this huge rift because like Silicon Valley was so left, Trump was seen as so radical, that like people didn't want to work together. And so honestly, a part of the message is like, look, we're all on the same team and we're working together to make the United States better. And so one of my favorite examples of this is I'm moderating a panel that's with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Kevin Wheal, who's the Chief

Product Officer of OpenAI, and then Reif Peratt, who's the Chief Investment Officer and President of Alphabet. And look, like in theory, Alphabet and OpenAI are like hugely competitive. On the flip side, like OpenAI has the best consumer application in AI that's ever existed. And Alphabet was just awarded a Nobel Prize last year for AlphaFold predicting protein folding and the protein structures based off amino acid sequences. And so the goal of that panel would be like,

look, yes, these companies are competing, but also we're all way better off if these companies can build as many fucking data centers and have as cheap of energy as possible so that we don't have DeepSeek becoming the default open source model that the rest of the world uses that can't afford the chat GPT and can't afford Alpha Fold. And there's a lot of soft power that comes from that. Do you want the thing that the random person in Bulgaria is using as their AI to be willing to talk about Tiananmen Square or not?

I prefer the version where it can talk about, you know, sort of Tiananmen Square. And the best way that we do that is make sure that we are the best at AI, have the best energy, and the best way of doing that is, like, tech needs to collaborate with DC and Secretary Interior Burgum needs to unleash a wave of, you know, you know, you know, streamlined permitting and, you know, nuclear energy, you know, in the United States. And what better place to talk about that than literally in the Capitol, you know, sort of Hill visitor center? Yeah, do you do you know how the the pre the the Obama era collaboration between Silicon Valley and DC happened? Like, was there an instantiation of Hill and Valley that was just like the old big tech companies talking to the Democratic administration in the same way? Because Hill and Valley is bipartisan, right? Like when I was there

last year, I was hanging out with Chuck Schumer and stuff. So it's not like you guys are like, explicitly conservative, although obviously there is like a push back against the the previous tone in Silicon Valley, but walk me through some of the history there. Yeah, I don't know like what the history was of the Obama campaign and how it got so social media centric. I remember they had this like was it like the CTO guy there was like an ex early Google guy? I heard some crazy stat that that so the president like whenever the president goes to visit a an organization that's non-governmental it gets logged and the Number one organization that Obama met with was Google during his eight years and it was and it was just a very very close tie I think and and I think that there was it, maybe I'm thinking like the precursor to this

is more like Ted, like, you know, the Ted talk era is kind of where like all the elites would come together and there would be some crossover. Maybe that's not a perfect match, but anyway, we can move on. I wanna hear more. The goal here was to like, hopefully make it like sort of more immune from administration changes

basically, whereas like, you know, so yeah, Obama visited Google all the time, Google basically would ban Trump from ever going on campus. And so we started Hill and Valley under the Biden administration, and we've tried to keep it as close as we can to bipartisan as possible throughout all of the years. Now look, obviously right now Republicans are in control of both Congress and Senate and presidency, et cetera, as they're obviously a little bit more represented this year. But the goal is how do we make sure that that channel of communication between the top technology leaders and elected officials stays there irrespective of who happens to be in the White

House at that current time? Because I don't think what you want is this thing where the only time that Silicon Valley and DC talk to each other is when DC happens to be crazy left-leaning because that happens to align with a significant portion of Silicon Valley, not everybody. Thankfully, the tech right is willing to be a little more vocal. But look, even in this last election,

when you had David Sacks screaming from the rooftops about being willing to vote for Trump, if you look at donations, Silicon Valley, quasi Silicon Valley, was still like 85% Democrat on a dollar's basis. Yeah, interesting dynamic where the dollars were telling a very different story than the timeline. Yeah, I actually wrote a piece in PirateWires about that.

It was right before Andreessen went full MAGA, so it was a little bit like, I had the data all crunched, and I was like, oh, it's actually very purple, very split. It was almost like 50 50. Um, but it was also like almost entirely driven by power law donors, like between Peter and, uh, and Graylock, uh, Reid Hoffman Hoffman, like, like those two were like at the biggest in terms of, in terms of it wasn't for this cycle. It was like over the last four years,

something like that. Um, but then, uh, but, and then Mark, uh, and Andreon was actually like perfectly 50-50 split. Like they were perfectly bipartisan because a lot of what they were donating to was like crypto stuff. And then when they came to partisan stuff, they typically donated to both sides.

Anyway, so walk me through some of, what do you think Silicon Valley is asking for or pitching in DC these days? It feels like there's a bit of a narrative, at least on X that, uh, oh, all these like tech people supported Trump. They're the dog who caught the car and it's not going their way or they don't even know what to ask for or what they're asking for isn't getting done. Um, what do you, what do you think the message will be to DC from tech next week?

Yeah, I'll go through, honestly, just like some of the panels that I'm moderating and like the message on each. I kind of gave you the like AI panel where it's like, look, there are a bunch of like, you know, sort of EPA and permitting restrictions that like are preventing us from setting up as energy and data centers that we need.

And like, is secretary Burgum is the person that like oversees some chunk of that, not all of it. He doesn't oversee the EPA. But that's the request there is let's make some policy changes so that OpenAI and Google are not restricted by regulations as the primary bottleneck to their growth of data centers and energy. I love my Delta V portion on TVPN,

so I'll talk about the space side of things. I'm going to be moderating between Tim Hughes, who's the SVP of all business at SpaceX, Representative George Whitesides, who's the former Virgin CEO, now turned congressional representative, junior congressman, and then Major General Buckey, who's head of all things space at the Defense Innovation Unit. It's a little bit both sort of civil plus sort of DOD. I think there the request is like, look, there's some pretty ambitious goals that Trump has set forth. Basically, wants boots on Mars and moon,

wants to simulate low Earth orbit economy, wants more of the academic community to engage in aerospace. And I think the message there is like, look, NASA needs to lean on commercial space for the things that it provides and stick to what it does best for the truly out there things. And so Jared Isaacman made some comments in his congressional hearing around like, SLS is a big rocket and maybe gets us to the moon soon, but it's probably not the long-term solution. That's a perfect example of, I think everybody in commercial space largely agrees with the fact that the commercial industry has better, cheaper, more effective rockets

than anything that NASA's building in has at this point. We should probably reallocate that budget to just those commercial companies or to other NASA priorities, rather than spending a bunch sort of on SLS. So that's a tactical thing. I'm doing this fireside chat with Vinod Khosla. One of his big things is just like the integration of more and more AI, basically the healthcare.

We have this mutual portfolio company, sort of Sword Health that has gone really deep and now like a $4 billion company. They provide like they're basically the largest physical therapy provider, largely done VAI. And it's not just like AI where it's like a chat screen, it's like they've got sensors that they put on you, it like gamifies it, et cetera.

How do you get more and more of like, you know, Medicaid and Medicare to, yes, use humans when like, you've got some super delicate operations, et cetera, but there's so much of like that care that's provided that at this point, you know, could be exported to a bunch of basically like commercial health companies that are largely, you know, integrated into AI and get more aggressive on that, which satisfies, honestly,

a bunch of the current administration's priorities. As much of Vinod is not a huge fan of Trump. He is a fan of basically using AI to improve health care. And then that matches Trump's goals of improved government efficiency, where you can cut out a bunch of the Medicare and Medicaid costs. Where it's like, look, we can all

talk about defense budgets and this and this. Entitlements are the vast majority of the federal government's budget. And so if you want to go look at efficiencies, you're going to have way more juice to squeeze, improving Medicare, than you can cut out all the DEI programs in the world. And that's barely a blip relative to Medicare.

Yeah. How much do you expect the conversation to veer towards Doge and then specifically Trump had promised earlier this month a trillion dollar defense budget, which would be a 12% increase over this year. And yeah, do you expect that to be a major talking point as part of some of these conversations or is that you know just just business as you know and also I mean we were talking about the defense budget earlier it seemed like you were like lightly

blackpilled on it for a little bit have you updated your view? Well part of why it's always fun with Hill and Valley where we can't decide on the date until Congress publishes its schedule because we are dependent on the elected officials You know sort of being there. Otherwise, it's not a very interesting event It's anyways a part of why it's next week is because Congress is in session You know basically next week and everybody's either sort of flying into town on either sort of Monday both whether you're Yen Tsen Huang or your You know Senator Banks both are flying in town on Monday And next week is when they're both discussing the reconciliation bill, where they're basically

gonna be increasing defense budget beyond the continuing resolution to match some of the February bills that we talked about last time around when we chatted about this, as well as starting to talk about next year's basically defense budget. I think there's clear signaling from the top

that there's gonna be an increase, and in particular around the president's top priorities, which were nuclear weapons modernization Hypersonic boost like vehicles, you know sort of ship building and general reindustrialization And so there's been talk of that reconciliation bill being 150 to 200 You know sort of billion which obviously gets you know, so the total last year bill, you know Pretty close to that, you know, sort of trillion dollar mark and then obviously which obviously gets the total last year bill pretty close to that trillion dollar mark. And then obviously, next year's budget being at that trillion dollar mark. And so, yeah, there's a bunch of people that are literally on the House Appropriations and Senate,

House Armed Services Committee, and Senate Armed Services Committee that will be there. And I'm sure that there will be the talk of the town. But it's always interesting with this stuff where Hill and Valley, we've heard from some of the elected officials, is actually one of the few times where even the elected officials gather at that level of density. Because most of the time, even in these weeks where they're in session, man, it's like staff running around, doing papers, et cetera. They might briefly all go to the floor together, but they barely have a chance of talking on

the floor. We've actually heard that some of like bills end up getting negotiated, like during the cocktail hour and like reception of Hill and Valley, because it's just like one of the few times where it's like, oh, we like have the entire House Armed Services Committee here and we're not like in a like session where we're like grilling somebody right here. Like casually chat for a while about what we joke. It's like if you, you know, if you can't put a deal on a napkin, like it's probably too

complicated in venture. We joke it's like if you you know if you can't put a deal on a napkin like it's probably too complicated Inventure it's like if you can't put a bill or a budget on a napkin like it's just too complicated So we're just running the federal government on napkins, and it's actually good right It's funny like the last couple cocktail receptions. It's so funny where you'd like oh, it's like everybody's mingling It's editor It's like literally all the tech dudes are sitting over there And then like all the elected officials are like Scrambling like trying to figure out like okay, you know, you know, what is our you know, sort of stance, etc I think it's so funny cuz it's like it's bipartisan, but also like some of these people fucking hate each other

Last year like, you know, you got Chuck Schumer giving like the you know, see opening remarks But then you've got his like Republican counterparts like all like rolling their eyes and scoffing and everything and I'm like, ah DC what a wonderful place. The swamp. The swamp. The swamp baby. That's funny. We're gonna see you in a suit right? You know I have finally been given approval by my government relations team that when I go do one-on-one briefings with congressmen I can now wear a t-shirt with a blazer. But at Hill and Valley, that is a time where if I'm on stage with a senator,

I'm definitely wearing a fucking suit and wearing matching shoes. What does it take to get a ticket to Hill and Valley these days? You know, I don't think it's a perfect process, but between Jacob, Christian, and I, we do our best to curate a phenomenal dinner list in daytime. I think with daytime last year, we weren our best to, you know, to curate the phenomenal, you know, sort of dinner list and daytime.

I think with daytime last year, we weren't sure how many people to bring. And then like the, you know, audience wasn't always fully filled. And so this year we may be swung a little, you know, too hard too soon. And I think now it's going to be a fucking mob. So anyways, we're, we're learning each year on how to,

you know, sort of balance and what the proper process should be, but at this point we are very at capacity on both. But in future years, just hit up, deli into foundersfund.com, jacob at statedepartment.gov, christian at 137ventures.com, and beg for forgiveness or beg for hope, and we'll figure out whether or not

we can get you in there. That's awesome. What do you expect the dialogue to be around, big tech is such a charged word, but at the same time in the sort of AI race, if you ignore Upstart Labs, even though they have billions of dollars, they're still young companies, which means big tech is critical to national security.

Do you expect there to be a conversation around, right now you're seeing Facebook, sorry, Meta just being sort of like dragged by the FTC, all this stuff going on. Kevin Systrom is collaborating. Yeah, collaborating, which is crazy. And it's very bipartisan. And a lot of that feels like rehashing an acquisition

that was approved, that went through over a decade ago, feels like such a massive distraction at a time when we don't want our big, we want our big technology companies, you know, focused on winning this very important race, right? Yes, but they made such big enemies where it's just like both sides, like, look, Zach has done his best to cozy up to Trump, White House, etc. You know, he's wearing his chains. He's tan. He's, you know, look at again.

Bill Rogan. But also, like, you know, the Dems hate him because they feel like, you know, they lost the 2016 election because of him. And, you know, sort of Trump hates him because he feels like he lost the 2020 election because of him. And so, you know, feels like he lost the 2020 election because of him. And so I don't think he made a lot of friends. And I don't see any politician balking at the FTC going and dredging that stuff up. And even Kevin Systrom has a bone to pick with him.

And so I definitely buy into the distraction narrative. I also buy into the, like, look, like, you know, we maybe are in a like parallel to the Gilded Era, you know, are we in the roaring 20s? Are we in the like, you know, sort of depression 30s? You know, do these, you know, sort of, what were they, not oligarchs, what was the name that they used for like the Gilded Era?

Robber Barons? Yeah, yeah, the Barons, the Barons of industry. The Robber Barons. The Robber Barons, exactly. So like The barons, the barons, the robber barons. Exactly. So like, you know, maybe there is a little bit of, you know, sort of robber baron mentality, you know, right now with some of these big tech companies. I mean, who's been advocating for monopolies? I mean, it's a crazy idea. I don't know. Crazy concept. It's almost like someone wrote a book on it and then

everyone was like, that's exactly what we should do. We don't believe in the M word over here at Founders Fund We want to invest where there's lots of competition and it's really hard getting market share It's actually just power law outcomes for whatever reason it could be any What what do you think about the the idea that ramp? Should get a government contract the government should run on ramp. We were joking about it months ago It seems to be getting more and more serious. Do you like the idea?

Look, I think the current smart card system within the GSA is a pretty antiquated and old school system. Trump and Doge want to root out a bunch of fraud. R.A.M.P. has seen, even with some of the Neo-Primes,imes traditional defense contractors people that work with the government That even on like the commercial contractors out of things they're able to root out things that are inefficiencies etc Man, can you imagine what happens when they you know sort of get implemented within the government? So you know not a done deal or anything a lot of work to be done there but I think it's pretty damn good for the country if we manage to get them in there and Apologies on that note boys I gotta run but great having a

little mini Delta V mini Hill and Valley yeah I'm looking I'm looking forward to next week it's gonna be very great you guys in DC yeah see you there see you soon cheers bye let's go to an ad we got ad quick out of home advertising made boom easy and measurable say goodbye don't know how that ties to AdQuick, but I'm sure they'll love it. Golden Retriever Mode is running in a billboard for your Series A. Yes.

And it's also not overthinking it. Like, it's so easy to get into the math of, oh, I need to be able to measure every single performance metric. I mean, AdQuick makes out of home more measurable, but there still is a brand element to running ads. And this is something that you see in every company as they mature, they eventually realize that it is worthwhile to do marketing that is not necessarily perfectly trackable. Case in point, Jensen Wong, who will be at Hill and Valley, dropping off gold-plated GB200 servers to the future AI

builders and endearing that community to him. And a great billboard can do that. So head over to adquick.com. I'm interested to see next week at Hill and Valley what issues are truly bipartisan? Energy production. As societies produce more energy, prosperity tends to go up. You could imagine that being somewhat bipartisan.

I was working on a, people have been saying, oh, John, are you going to run for president? I was thinking about if I did what my political platform would be, because I want to be bipartisan. And I was thinking my platform would be pretty simple. It'd just be GDP up, unemployment down. Boom. GDP per capita up.

That's right. Productivity up and government waist down. Hard to argue with any of this. Exactly. I feel like every American could be behind a platform or a president of Canada who just said, my goal is GDP maximization. That seems pretty simple. That seems like, give security right access to the Jane street.

Speaking of Jane street, uh, the trading revenue has nearly doubled in 2024 to more than $20 billion. Let's hear it for Jane street folks. I know a lot of you were worried that they weren't making enough money, but they're back Packy McCormick says man SPF would be so rich if he stayed at Jane Street funny take Very interesting. I'm always interested to see how these this picture by the way is so insane

the bull all twisted up yeah, very very funny whoa what is going on there So insane. So full, all twisted up. Yeah. Very, very funny. Whoa. Whoa. Yeah, what is going on there? But very fun. On the flip side, the information is reporting that lots of tech companies have had their hiring plans impacted.

19% in the survey said, we cut staff. 33% said, we plan to hire less. 30% said, no impact, but we are evaluating the situation, 13% said our hiring plans stay the same, and 5% said we plan to hire more. Now I wonder how much of that is driven just by the fact that only 5% of venture-backed companies are on the upswing because it's kind of a long shot game

and so they're not all scaling up. But it is interesting that people could be cutting staff for a variety of reasons. Could be tariff related, but it also could be AI related. Could be a bunch of different things. Or we plan to hire less. Or it could just be if you have the time to fill out an information survey,

your business is struggling, you should be focusing on your business maybe. I don't know. That's possible. Are the best companies really answering this survey? I don't know, It could be selection bias. I do think these types of anonymous surveys are very interesting.

I would. It would be great to see them more broken out. There's a bit of game theory to it. Because if I get this and I am hiring, I'm going to want to sigh out my competition into firing everyone. So I'm going to respond with cutting staff. Then it becomes a meme. Everyone's like, oh, everyone's got to cut staff. Everyone firing everyone. So I'm going to respond with cutting staff. Then it becomes a meme.

Everyone's like, oh, everyone's got to cut staff. Everyone fires everyone. You're the last person you have to pick at the litter. You can hire all the best people. You're ramping. That's the way you win the game. Tyler asked for a dedicated supplement rundown from Jordy Hayes.

I'm looking to outsource my thinking. So what do you take it? I gave a comment. Let me pull it up. Nice picture of Tony soprano in a stained glass window for some reason. I think. Beautiful. Give lead give lead. It's not quite give me a stained glass window. But yeah, I like

it. It's been my current stack electrolytes like heavily weighted towards magnesium. Okay. magnesium is an electrolyte. Okay. So it usually comes in various electrolyte products. But taking a lot more magnesium over Isn't magnesium a metal? I feel like it's a metal. I don't know. That would be pretty metal.

We need a metal sound effect. Yeah. I mean, iron's important, right? Mineral. Does it have iron at all? No. Most people, to my knowledge, have too much iron. And donating blood is a way to reduce that.

Then I'm on creatine, of course. I take zinc and vitamin C in a combination. Thiamine, which is a B vitamin, your body can become thiamine deficient if you use nicotine. I do use nicotine. So thiamine toient. If you use nicotine, I do use nicotine. So thiamine to boost it back up. Yes, exactly. And then taurine, which is in Red Bull.

They were smart to do that. And then I'll cycle peptides from time to time. We've got to get on a peptide cycle. Really? You're on peptides? Not the second, but historically I've indulged. But those are performance testing drugs. They're not legal for most professional athletes to take.

You're not Natty. Technically I'm here. I think claiming Natty is like claiming you're not doing whatever it takes to win. I agree. I'm very pro-abusing steroids. No, but we should get on a peptide cycle together. OK.

I want to be on the Wolverine thing. Yeah, but we should get on a peptide cycle together. Okay, and I want to be on the Wolverine thing I want to be on yeah, PPC 157. I want to take whatever the LD 50 is. Give me just a hair under that. Yeah Anyway dudes will buy a billboard and SF on the 101 to announce getting a bed frame That would actually go viral. You should do that. If you're trying to raise money. I have acquired a bed frame folks. Somebody should do it. Reach out to ad quick. They will set you up, but let's bring in public. We got.

There we go. Guys. Welcome to the show. Guys, I can't, we can't hear you. What's that sound? What's that sound? What's that sound? It's so loud.

It's happening. It's, oh? What's that sound? It's deafening. It's so loud. It's deafening. Oh, is that the sound of the Aston Martin F-14? It's deafening. Oh, I'm at the box Miami GP at Las Vegas GP. Oh, is that public advertising on the Aston Martin F-1? How did you get my voicemail to run on the show? That's great.

For me, it just sounded like the sound effects of Pacific Rim or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got it from that influencer Ashton Hall, the guy who has the viral morning routine, he drops that sound effect. So we had to pull that over to our show. But how are you guys doing? Great to see you guys. Can you introduce yourselves a little a little bit and explain what the news is today?

Absolutely. So I'm Yannick, Co-CEO, that's live. Other Co-CEO, co-founders of public. We announced today, as you could tell from your last intro, we are the new sponsors of the Aston Martin Formula One team amazing So amazing Storied storied team storied brand and they're gonna write books about this partnership. I think so Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah Some video of Aston Martin's driving around,

entertain the viewers. Can you break down the process? I imagine we know this has been in the works for a while, but what was the process? When did you even start thinking about doing something like this? Well, so, I mean, let's talk about first, why it makes sense for us first and then we get

into the process. So we started six years ago, mainly as a fractional shares platform. We were like the first to do the whole first trading platform to do fractional shares, then it obviously became a big thing. But since then, I'd argue that the platform has matured a lot. I think now we have one of the most powerful investing sort of suite of tools in America, multi-asset investing, multiple account types, embedded deep AI research, and customers have evolved kind of with us. So now folks are coming in with hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in their accounts. But to be honest, not everyone knows that we're there.

And so this partnership was a great opportunity for us to sort of raise some awareness around that and kind of get that message across, obviously to the, the right demographic as well. Can you talk about anatomy of the deal? Uh, how'd you meet the folks over there? Did this all start with, is there an agency involved? I know you guys do a lot of stuff internally. Is it just an email? Did you meet someone at an F1 race? Like how do you even meet these folks? Full power remote. No agencies. We have an investor on the cap tail that happens to be involved with the team as well.

So through that we got introduced to them and this is also a deal where the SOMAF and the The thing is that the way they also think about it is that they have a platform, they have sponsors that pay them ridiculous amounts of money and whatnot. They don't necessarily need another band box from another start-up song, but they like the idea of finding opportunities that they feel they understand themselves as well. In our case, I grew up transfer their audience being the type of audience that has money to invest, US markets being one of the fastest growing markets for Formula One, generally speaking, it's the only country with three races and so on. And so for them, the US focus and the focus on the audience that we had was like a good match. And so that's why for them, it was also just a good idea

to be a little bit closer on both and actually draw the cap tail as well. How do you guys think about international long-term get? Do you see a world in the future where you have millions of users outside of the country? I know US has obviously been the focus today. Absolutely. But the way that starts is we actually launched an app called Alpha, which is a little bit

of a spin out of our AI product. Launched that in international markets late last year as a separate kind of product. So that's all live and growing well in a bunch of European markets and a few other places around the world. And so that's basically like Apple stocks with AI powers. That's how you think of it. You literally come in, you take a photo of your watch list, wherever you have it, and the AI automatically follows everything and tells you why things are moving in real time,

not just they're moving and by how much. And then you can definitely ask questions and do research and all that stuff. So that's like, I would say the first step in our international strategy in building that audience sort of abroad. And then obviously, if you can imagine investing services could come later because that's the aspect that has a regulatory component to it, which totally, totally. Can you talk about how you actually envision the partnership manifesting in advertisements, obviously, like logo on the car, but there are 21

races. There are so many different places to put logos, integrate, throw, have a box, have a party, have an after show, pre show, digital. There's so many different things that can package up into these actual partnerships. What did that process look like and where did you land? Yeah, I wanna call out, I wanna see Alonzo, executing trades during a pit lane. It's that fast by the way, that you can actually, totally.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, there's way, that you can actually. Totally. Yeah. I mean, there's always, whenever you do these deals, there's this massive laundry list of stuff that you have access to and can do and whatnot, right? That falls into paddock club passes at the events and it falls into like, you know, we will have the logo and the halo and the logo tiny on the side of the car as well, but also doing the US races, for example, and things like that. But one specific thing that we thought about is in our space of like kind of new broker investing apps,

things like referral have been this like mainstream thing of get a free fractional stock and so on. And as we move more up market, the less that stuff worked. Because if you have a little bit of money, let's be honest, you don't really give a shit about five bucks on freestyle. And so for us, it would be a sense of, okay, what do people that have a little bit of money care about? And it's most cases experiences you might not say have access to otherwise.

And so the sense of like, this partnership is like one of the first ways for us to have the ability to give exclusive experiences to our customers through certain giveaways in the app, through referral in the app, and so on. To, for example, win things like access to the paddock, meeting groups with drivers, and all that kind of stuff. And in the future, obviously, we'll figure out what are other ways to execute on that strategy as well.

But just sense of what does referral for and what after an audience actually look like. And it falls much more into things like experiences. But specifically also, just to finish the rant real quick, is basically like starting today, you can actually, in the app, win access to the paddock in the Vegas race later this year and it's great to be fined like if you find the three little F1 cars in the app that's like hidden in different places in the

app and you find all three of them then you essentially enter and they're not easy to find by the way either so it's not like it's not like a thing that everybody will stumble upon. It's fun. It's pretty nice. I'm still going to tweak up where they are. Of course. Of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to give the app to my three-year-old and say, you've got 14 hours. Go ahead. Go ahead. Make sure to load it with a couple hundred keys before you do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you can do a little day trading along the way. How do you think about the evolution of the way brands integrate with F1? Obviously, Red Bull doesn't make cars, or I guess they made that one car once. But in general, they don't make cars, but they're a huge F1 sponsor with the whole team. Haas Automation is kind of in a similar boat,

but then Aston Martin's more of a car brand How do you think that that's evolved and is there a world where we see a public comm f1 team at some point? Well not in the next couple of years No, look I think what's interesting about the formula one is it is the only sport that I can really think of that has scale and has this sort of thing where whenever Formula One comes into town, it's the whole show, right? It's a Super Bowl event 20 times in a year, basically, right? Because like, yeah, you go to a Premier League match, two hours, you knock down a couple of pints, it's over and you go about your day. This is like the whole weekend. The circus comes into town, they

talk about there's a lot of practice and why obviously. And so therefore it just lends itself very well to like a very intense focus type of exposure. Yeah, which I think is really great. And I think you've seen that in and around the Super Bowl and a few other places, but in the Formula One, it just kind of happens many, many times throughout the course of a year. And I think that's what makes it interesting for B2B companies as well as for consumer companies, actually. Yeah. Did drive to survive factor into your calculations? I imagine there will be public .com branding that makes it into drive to survive just by nature of being on the car. Yeah, but that's the funny thing. It's like, so with Formula One, you either sponsor a team or you sponsor a race slash

the league itself. And these are two separate things, right? And drive to survive is more with the league itself and so on and so the trick really for folks like us is what can you do that has the chance to make it into the storyline all right so like you know what kind of beef can we create with training you know a team or something or like you know like? But what could a job maybe be part of, essentially? So if you have any ideas, I'll be sure. Yeah, we'd love to help.

No, but I can imagine just naturally you'll get placement in the show just as Alonzo and Lance have their moments in the show, right? So it's very natural. But generally, you always have a multiplayer thing. There's a great Formula 1 game, right? So it's very natural. But generally, you always have a multiply with thing. There's a great Formula 1 game, right? LEGO right now has a Formula 1 kind of thing going on. And so there's always kind of these multipliers

kind of happening in and around the sport. Yeah, what about other multipliers? More on like a geolocation basis. I mean, I'm sure you could run geofenced ads in Vegas that weekend by billboards. Like, what are you thinking to get the most squeeze out of the event when it kind of comes together? I mean, there's a long like like there's a long list of stuff you

can do. It's a multi year deal. So we also have a little bit it's starting in the Miami race in a couple of weeks. So that will be the first one we've kicked off now this essentially scamming your hunt in the app where you can get access to Vegas, Paddock, et cetera, by finding these kinds of cars around the app. And so I think there's a lot of stuff we can experiment with. I think relative to, you know, we're not quite as big as Ramco yet. They still have us a little bit on the market cap. But we might be one of the more nimble folks that can get a little bit more creative.

And so I would say expect to see a bunch more kind of stunt. How did Lawrence Stroll's kind of leadership factor into the decision? Like he's obviously has a, you know, like running the team, but then simultaneously like, you know, has the manufacturer side too with Aston Martin. He's like, seems like extremely convicted to winning and making a statement.

And, you know, as a car enthusiast, like I've watched what Aston is doing. Again, really, really committed to winning. They've massively improved there. Did that give you guys extra confidence in going and making a partnership knowing that, hey, the team by itself is not, when you look at other teams, like Haas and things like that, who's

had a history of economic challenges. That's not exactly the team that you want to attach yourself to, even though they have a lot of them. But also, generally speaking, there's a lot of change happening in F1 right now. You have a bunch of mix-ups, and there's drivers that switch teams. You have behind the scenes, one of the guys who builds engines for the engineers from the Red Bull team that was hired now at S&M Art and so on.

And so right now there's a lot of change happening. And it's not just seeing the stop and every time, and having the joke of just putting a piece of tape on your TV so the race becomes more fun to watch. It's like Oliver's name. So there's so much change happening right now, and I think that is why I think this season and the next season and the week after, I think it's going to be super exciting.

There's a new US team coming in with Cadillac next year, there's Ubi with the fifth coming out in June or July this year, and so there's just like a lot happening around it, you know, which is kind of awesome. But I think you're totally right, like the where Aston Martin sits right now is kind of perfect for us, right? Because it's not like, it's a team that is still a little bit on the up and up, but I think we'll be very competitive over the next couple of years. Yeah. If you're already wearing dark green, are we going to see you guys driving around some Aston Martin street cars? Do you have any favorite picks or historical Aston

Martins that you've been thinking about or your James Bond fan. And it gives me the take on it. Right. They literally say something in one of the SMI movies from royalty to double agents in between. And so obviously now in New York City doesn't make a ton of sense to be brought on the DB. No, no. In New York, you need to get the Valkyrie clearly. The roads are a little bumpy. I'm sure the clearance on. No, no. In New York, you need to get the Valkyrie, clearly. Exactly. Exactly. The roads are a little bumpy.

I'm sure the clearance on that thing isn't great. But it is street legal, so why not be whipping around Fifth Avenue in a Valkyrie? You need to basically change your, yeah, you probably need to change your tires every 200 miles or something like that. But I'm curious, did you guys get any messages this morning from friends back in Europe like,

hey, I saw the news, that's awesome. And you're like, hey guys, we've been a billion dollar company for a while. This is the first time. We were in Business Insider two weeks ago and some people were messaging, John and I, like, oh, congratulations. And we're like, I think we get more views than Business Insider like two weeks ago and some people were messaging John and I like oh congratulations and we're like I think we get more views than Business Insider but thank you. I can imagine a lot of people asking for tickets that's for sure.

Yeah yeah yeah you guys are going to be extra popular. All the people that had like a 25k angel investment they're now coming like so they're like yeah so I'll be in the Yeah, you can get me tickets to the whole season right like what does that cost a quarter well Well, I'm extremely excited I'm gonna be even more excited to watch have another reason to you know, turn it on at like 4 a.m Or whatever Pacific whenever, you know The international races happen and we we should be signing a lease for our new studio. And we're going to have a lot more space.

So we should figure out how to get a car in the background, one way or another. You'd be surprised how cheap it actually is. I know. I remember our conversation. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say these numbers on here. But it is actually not that bad. Yeah.

Cheaper than a real Aston Martin. I won't lie, it doesn't have an engine or anything. But show pieces, and you find it's an alternate on here something sometimes. No, I want it on the back wall of the studio. I went toward Red Bull's headquarters in Santa Monica a couple of years ago, and they had the full F1 car there on the half pipe, and it just made the vibe in the office

fantastic. And so, yeah, I highly recommend getting an F1 car. Everyone should, really. It's part of the ideal three-car garage. You need the family hauler. You need the weekender, and you need the F1 car, of course. Why doesn't everyone just do this? I don't get it.

More people should be doing this. I don't know why we're the first to think of this. It's crazy. It's a new talent, trust me. It's crazy. Awesome, guys. Well, congratulations and congrats to the whole team. It's going to be very excited for Miami and everything to come.

Cool, man. All right. We will see you soon. Cheers. Great to see you. Later. We're getting an F. Cool, man. Awesome. All right. We will see you soon. Cheers. Great to see you. We're getting an F1 car, folks. We need to. Oh, I think we should daily it.

It's going to be a little rough. It's going to be a little bumpy. But you pull up in an F1 car. You pull up with a fantastic Patek Philippe on your wrist, like the guy in that picture that you picked up on Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source any watch on the planet.

You don't want to get caught on race weekend with a bare wrist. That's right. That's unacceptable. Yeah. It's laughable. You can't. RM would be a good option for race weekend.

It is a racing machine on the wrist. Yeah, we've been at some rms and I can see bezel going over and you know, maybe you know Getting their own team at some point. I would love that trajectory that they're on. I would love that anyway Our next guest is in the studio. Let's bring him in we got Alfred from listen labs Announcing and we got his co-founder. Boom. And they got the jackets. They're not quite a- Color coordinated. I love it. Color coordinated.

Dressed up for the show. We always appreciate people dress up when they coordinate their outfits. How are you guys doing? Doing well. Yeah. Exciting. Can you give us a little overview of the history of the company? Introduce yourselves.

Tell us about the round. Give us the basics. For sure. So, Listen is an AI customer researcher that can find and interview thousands of users and tell you what they want. And yesterday we announced our series A and 27 million in total raised led by Sequoia, Conviction and Pear. And yeah, we work with some amazing customers like Microsoft, Canva and Chubbies. And the core concept of what we do is, like, every company wants to be customer obsessed. So imagine you wanted to take that to the most like fullest extent. And that's basically you would talk to every customer you could,

and you talk to them, try to understand exactly who they are and what they think about. And you'd find a way to synthesize all of those conversations into a clear understanding of their behavior. And you wouldn't do this just once, you'd do it all the time. Every time you make a change to your product or service or marketing.

And that's what we do. Cool. I can imagine a ton of different ways to get customer insights out of all the data, just using Microsoft as an example, like there's probably 1 million tickets in some database that's just a bunch of text that hasn't been processed. You run an LLM over that, that makes sense.

It sounds like you're doing something more advanced where you're actually calling people up. Maybe there's a screen recording and interaction and some questions back and forth. Is that all AI driven? Walk me through the case study, I guess, with Microsoft or anyone else you want to chat about. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So it's an AI that can have a one-on-one conversation and then it can have hundreds of those conversations in parallel. And what we found is that you kind of, you have to reach enough people to really understand what people want. So if you speak to 10 of them, most of them won't have much interesting things to say. And the second thing is that the synthesis, if you speak to 10 of them, most of them won't have much interesting things to say. And the second thing is that the synthesis, if you have like hundreds of conversations, finding the signal over the noises is, you know, AI is amazing at that. And, you know, AI is also

the ultimate listener. It's more empathetic than myself. And as a case study, one of my favorite ones is Chubby's. So they recently launched a new product based on learnings that they made from Listen that is growing really, really fast. And it's a little bit weird, but it was an AI or it was interviewing kids using Listen. Interesting. And they were much more honest to our

AI versus like speaking to a stranger and and it enabled them to learn a lot about like how to make their shorts more comfortable and basically created a new product with a new liner in the shorts that just felt much better for the kids. And now that product is growing really fast. Do you believe there's sort of a customer love flywheel in a sense where the more someone likes a product, the more inclined they are to want to talk about how to make it better. And as part of what you guys are doing, helping to like that, where a product could have some customers, but it's hard to really get scaled feedback, because nobody really loves the product enough.

I get emails all the time, I'll try a SaaS product, and I'll churn, and then they'll reach out to me being like, hey, can we get feedback? And usually, I'm not super inclined to provide feedback. Sometimes I do, if I feel like it's just off, but how do you think about sort of like building that sort of customer feedback flywheel and converting it into customer love?

Yeah, sorry, Andrew. Yeah, I mean, I think what is interesting is the, you know, we have this, at bigger companies, right? What you actually, you know, you have a lot of feedback, as you said before, but actually talking to real customers is actually pretty complex, right? It's at the bigger companies, they typically outsource it to external agencies because there's a lot of hoops

they have to go through and they charge like 100K and then they schedule like 20 interviews and do that. And what we enable them to do is instead of using these external agencies, they can just use us, right? It's cheaper, it's faster, it's better because you can reach way more people. And yeah, I think that's an exciting opportunity also for like in general for AI founders to,

if you can replace one of those external partners, basically you just flip a switch and you sell an outcome instead of just the software. When you talk to maybe bigger, older companies, are you surprised at how they sometimes don't have a process in place to talk to customers? I feel like it's part of Silicon Valley. Ethos, Lore, PG is just sort of banging founders over the head

saying, talk to your customers. And so it's a part of the culture here. But I imagine there's some companies that you're maybe in a sales process with that don't have any infrastructure or very little infrastructure in place relative to how sort of like scaled they are. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the products and services out there are kind of, they suck, you know,

and it's so often that you use a product and you think like, okay, what were they even thinking? Like clearly they're not keeping us in mind here. And for some of these large companies, you know, they do want to invest in talking to users, but it's just so complex because there's a lot of bureaucracy even to reach out to a user, you kind of have to go through legal and it becomes too complicated. And that's why they have to use these consulting firms to kind of go through it. But we've been able to kind of streamline that process.

Can you talk about how these interviews happen today and how they'll evolve? I can imagine chat bot interaction to begin with, but at the, like the voice interfaces are pretty close. Virtual avatars are getting pretty close. What's the product like today? Where do you see it going? Yeah. So we, for a minute, we actually like started a company by virtue of, you know, trying to solve the problem for ourselves.

And we had this AI consumer app that had 20,000 downloads in one day and it really blew up out of nowhere. We were running with expensive GPUs spending like a thousand dollars per hour and it was our personal credit cards attached and like the1,000 per hour. And it was our personal credit cards attached. And the users were turning really fast. And then we built a very simple prototype. It was a chatbot that could just talk to all the users and summarize what they wanted. we found things that were really useful, like which template should we add? How should we fix our onboarding?

And now we have built out this kind of entire stack where it's essentially three steps. It's first interviewing and we do that over video and have like the video understanding both of the emotional experience and what they do on the screen. And then it's finding the people. So we actually allow you to kind of find all the customers

through a database of millions of users. And then of course, analysis. And the ceiling for analysis is really high. You can hire McKinsey and they'll charge you a million bucks to give a PowerPoint deck. And yeah, we're working on that. That makes a ton of sense. What are some kind of edge cases or companies

that you would expect to start using Listen that maybe are nontraditional? My immediate thought is that we should throw up basically a number that you can just call and give feedback on the show, which we're live 15 hours a week, so it's hard to find time for phone calls. But it would be awesome if people could call in and be like, hey, talk more about this, or things like that.

But do you see this type of user research expanding into industries that maybe just aren't customers of these different consulting firms today just because of the costs? Yeah, exactly. I think there's a huge new market you can open up for smaller companies or companies that couldn't traditionally afford or couldn't even honestly wait for 12 weeks until you get this report back. I think that's very exciting. But if you take a step back and think about what makes a great company, and you can even go back to YC of what they think is like, you mentioned it before, right? Write code and talk to users.

And that's really the core. But those two parts, we have the writing the code, which now AI agents are doing more and more. It's getting easier to build things. So what becomes more important is actually building the right thing and having the feedback, talking to the customers. So that's what we're building. And it's almost scary, but maybe in the future, that's what we're going to do. That's maybe the last thing that humans will do, like kind of telling the AI what to do, what to build, being the tastemakers. Which podcast to listen to. Yeah, just wire it directly into Cursor or Devon,

and then it just takes the feedback and immediately implements the change. No, it is an interesting scenario to think about where Listen is directly integrated into the, basically, developer tools where somebody can say, like, hey, I want a feature to do this, and then it just immediately gets built. Pretty awesome. I'm sure you guys are thinking about something like that.

On the post-interview analysis side, I can imagine that AI is very good at aggregating sentiment and tagging things, essentially creating the top 10 requests, the word clouds. But have you found LLMs or any of the modern AI tooling being useful in finding the diamonds in the rough? Everyone's telling you to build a faster horse. There's one person who's clocked it and says, no, you got to go into the automobile for your product. And you're able to dig that out with modern technology? Yeah. So we have a module that finds surprising statements

and outliers sentiment. And I think there's also interesting things around building a profile of understanding who this user is and if they give good advice or not. And we actually have a quality score of each participant. So you should listen to all feedback. And, and as we've done more interviews, we've done now more than 300,000. We can kind of build a elite set of taste makers essentially that you can reach out

to that tend to give like great advice. That makes sense. Uh, how, how did the round, how did the round come together? Obviously got basically the who's who of venture in. Was anything surprising? Did you guys go out to run a process or did people come to you? Well, it's a very competitive fundraising market for the VCs today. But we're very lucky to work with exceptional partners. Brian Shrier at Sequoia, he also led the first investment in Qualtrics,

which is the biggest outcome in the customer feedback world. And then it's amazing working with Mike Vernal at Conviction, who's done the best deals. When Listen has as big an outcome as Qualtrics, what pro sports team are you guys gonna buy? Yeah, I actually spoke to, I'm from Sweden, I spoke to Brian Smith at Qualtrics, and the first thing he said like,

Oh yeah, I just bought a hockey team. You guys love a hockey, right? So maybe. I think table tennis. Table tennis. Table tennis. What is the most popular sport in Sweden right now? Yeah, maybe chess boxing.

No, table tennis, I don't know. Table tennis? Table tennis. It is very popular. We went, we almost won the Olympics. China. There you go. Yeah, oh, that's rough.

It happens. It happens. Awesome guys, well congratulations. Congratulations. Very exciting and let us know when it's ready for podcasting. Yes, we'll roll it out for sure. We'll roll it out. Take care.

We'll talk to you soon. Bye. See you. Great. And we got an ad for 8 Sleep. Go to 8Sleep.com slash TBPN. Get a Pod 4 Ultra. They got a 30-night free trial, a five-year warranty,

free returns, free shipping. Go check it out. Oh, 100. 100. Close. I don't know how this is possible. I think Autopilot was doing the work. My little one was throwing up last night.

It's rough. So credit to my wife, real MVP for getting her taken care of. But who we got next? We got Eric from Freeform coming into the studio talking about manufacturing, going back into hard tech. Thursday tends to be a little bit leaning heavy on the hard tech. Every once in a while we got Dellian kicking it off

and then we try and bring in some robotics, some manufacturing founders. Always an interesting discussion to have with those folks. We are talking to Formic as well. They're doing robotics and I'm sure we'll talk to many more. Although we've hit a ton of the companies at this point. When you do 20 interviews a week, you can create a market map pretty quickly.

You can churn through. We are the market map. We are the market map. America is our market map. Well, let's bring them in. Eric, how you doing? Welcome to the stream. I'm doing great.

Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, thanks for hopping on. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company? Absolutely. So Eric Palach, CEO CEO founder of Freeform, we do, you know, really we're bringing AI to metal 3D printing. My background was early employee at SpaceX worked there for over 10 years, I ran the Merlin engine program for Falcon nine and the Raptor program for Starship, and kind of saw the potential of 3D printing, metal 3D printing firsthand, and then left to go and actually drive it

into industrial commercial use. So I'm assuming you're a key player in transitioning the sort of engine from this crazy blob into this very we'll try to pull the image up on the screen. What was 3D? I imagine was 3D printing part of how you guys were iterating, or were you not able to leverage the tech that you guys have now? Yeah, no, it was.

I think the thing that I saw was the enabling potential of 3D printing, but how slow and crappy it was, to be honest. We were doing things with Raptor that we were innovating in the rocket space for the first time in decades, truly. People think rockets are super complicated, but really the technology hasn't changed much in a long time. Then this manufacturing technology comes along that allows you to control physics in a different way.

I mean true true if you look at the way you make metal things there really there haven't been these new disruptive technologies in a really really long time. So you know printing enabled Raptor which I would argue is the one of the most amazing and high- performant rocket engines ever in the history of humanity. Yeah. Can you talk about how metal 3d printing actually works? I think I'm familiar with the like kind of consumer level 3d printing. And that makes sense to me, you melt some filament, and it's basically melted plastic through a metal nozzle. If you're

melting metal, doesn't that melt the nozzle? How does this all work? So we use lasers to melt metal powder layer by layer. Okay. And so you think of it, you're just slowly building, you know, layer upon layer upon layer of you put a layer of metal powder out and use a laser to kind of selectively melt where you want and then do that again and again and again. Yep. Yep. And then how do you think about the decision to manufacture a part using subtractive manufacturing versus additive manufacturing?

I'm sure you're obviously very bullish on 3D printing, but there must be limits and things that you say, hey, we're not just going to go 3D print a whole bunch of rebar because we can just mold that or something. I don't know No, that's exactly right. I mean, I think one of the things that sets freeform apart from I think really every other 3d printing metal printing company out there is we aren't developing the technology because we think it's cool You know, we're not pushing for 3d printing because you know, it's cool. We don't print pencil holder, bottle openers, pens and pencils. We just don't do that stuff because frankly people don't care. To get to your question specifically,

it's like what is it actually good at? What is the value proposition of the technology? It's truthfully today amazing for very complex geometries, very complicated things. We're very candid with customers about should you machine it? You know subtractively make it or should you print it? You know what we're doing is enabling The the next you know the we've built the fastest highest volume metal printing platform on the planet We have it here in Hawthorne. We're about a quarter mile from SpaceX You know, I would then say we we you know our primary customers are some of the most exciting and innovative aerospace and defense companies out there without naming any specific ones.

And we're right down the street and our take on it was to commercialize the technology, we need to be able to do high volume. And then by doing high volume, then we can bring the price down. And that was the thesis, actually. Got to do a lot of volume and bring the price down. Can you talk about your business model? Are you selling the finished product? Are you selling the machine? Or are you thinking about that in different stages?

Because I imagine in the future, an end customer would just have one of your devices, and they could operate it themselves. Is that where you're going? Yeah. No, so that's a great question. The business model is we just provide turnkey parts. So we actually handle everything.

We print them if it needs post-machining, it needs holes reamed, it needs surfaces turned. We do all of that in-house. All the metrology, we'll do the CMM inspections, high-res 3D scanning, anything the customer needs. The whole thing, the industry is really complicated and fractured, and so when we went out six, seven years ago and started figuring out, hey,

what is the right business model in this space, I kept my head, my brain kept going back to, and by the way, I worked directly with Elon for my entire career at SpaceX. So this first principles kind of thinking that everybody says they do, I feel like I was indoctrinated in the actual school of it, you know, by him, you know, but I kept thinking like, man, you know, we're melting stuff with a laser and it, you know, we care about single digit microns of precision this isn't you know traditional metal manufacturing like this isn't a CNC machine so customers you know why are they so unhappy with

the space and when they buy a machine why are they disappointed because they don't know how to use it it's so it's more akin to like semiconductor fabrication than like subtractive metal manufacturing. So we said we need to own all of it and to answer the question. Yeah, that makes sense. What it is, you don't have to go into super explicit detail but I'm curious how you think about margins.

A lot of these traditional software VCs have sort of been chirping on actually the last couple of years, hey, you're putting hundreds of millions of dollars into these manufacturing businesses, assuming they're going to have software margins. And that hasn't been the case historically. Are you guys getting so efficient that you can achieve kind of greater margin profiles?

Or is it just about sort of scale? Absolutely. I mean, that's exactly where we're at today. Our margins are fantastic. And the technology is fundamentally new and enabling, which means I get that question a lot. It's like, well, even if you can charge higher margins now, isn't this a race to the bottom?

The answer is that is true over a long time scale for any industry. Anything that gets commoditized over 50 or 100 years and highly optimized, it ultimately becomes a race to the bottom. The question is how long. And the technology that we've developed and the capabilities that we have

are enabling new products. They're enabling innovation in industries that are, we're providing the tools that people are truly like innovating on the design and integration fronts. So and performance. And so, you know, I think as long as we continue to stay at the front of that and the technology is getting better every day, when I say, you know, I don't love to use the AI buzzwords, but that is what we're doing. We're bringing AI to 3D printing such that the next part coming off the platform is even better than the last one. And so because of that and the process is constantly getting better and we're coming up with new materials and new features and new functionality, then I think I can make

the argument that the margins will stay high for a very long time. And especially when you start looking at the places where we've developed technology that fundamentally unlocks the ability to develop new materials. So now we own the material, we have the technology to actually leverage it, and then it enables something important, maybe in the semiconductor space or in the Arrow in you know, the rocket space or even the automotive space. Yeah. Yeah in that in that new materials I mean, I've talked to some people who do the subtractive manufacturing with CNC and there's like different types of aluminum different alloys Like is that something you're already?

Doing and do you just handle that for your customer? Are you testing different? Like alloys is that how you think about that or or what do you mean handle that for your customer? Are you testing different like alloys? Is that how you think about that? Or what do you mean when you mean new materials? Yeah, our business model today is not yet the truly development of new materials. Okay. That it's, we've done some of that.

We work with another very large, well-known customer that I would say is in the general broad family of customers that you know we won't mention specifically that we've been working with them on development of some new alloys that enable you know I think some pretty cool things for them and but that's like not that's more of a one-off today it's it's the the reason why they're interested in working with us on this is because we've developed the sensing and compute platform and have the data sets and the sensors to actually engineer and develop the materials at the metallurgical level that no other printing company has. I mean,

Freeform is really in the 3D printing space. We know, we're like SpaceX, you know, the mindset of those organizations and talent of those organizations, you know, the metal manufacturing market has generally been viewed as this kind of like stagnant, dimly lit, rusty, you know, oily machine shop. So we had to go out and find, you know, like rocket scientists to develop the technology, you know, to be able to do this, you know,

and that's one of the reasons why like Nvidia made a substantial investment in us recently is they saw what we were doing on the compute and data side and they wanna be a part of it. What are the different vectors of optimization in metallurgy? I imagine cost and weight and strength are important in space,

but like is electrical conductivity important? Like what else is important to think about when you're thinking about the material either that you're selecting or eventually kind of building from first principles? Absolutely, it depends on the application you know for example like heat exchangers you know metal printing is very good today even at high cost if for conventional like other shops, or if you're buying a conventional machine, it's very good at very, very complicated geometries that you either can't

make any other way or they're, you know, prohibitively expensive or difficult to make any other way. And those do generally fall in a couple categories, they're like fluid components or heat exchangers, things that, you know, thermal devices. And so in an application like that, you care a lot about, you know, the thermal performance of the material. In other cases, you might be putting parts inside a gas turbine engine. This is another typical application for 3D printed parts. And in that case, you want something that's like strong when it gets hot, you know.

So there are it really does depend on you know, the application. And I think the thing for us is we actually have the platform and the feedback and the analytics to be able to close the loop on whatever the particular, you know, feature of the material or application that you need. Yeah, you I mean, you mentioned putting a 3D printed part in a gas turbine engine. We've been hearing that China has been having a lot of trouble manufacturing planes

to compete with Boeing. Specifically, jet engines. Yeah, why is a jet engine so hard? Can you just 3D print it at some point? I imagine that China is capable of getting it. Why is it so hard, Eric? Why did it take you 10 years to figure out how to do it? Exactly.

Can't you just like scan the 747 and then print the 747? It's a copy machine. That's what you're making. Exactly. Exactly. Someday. Yes. I mean, the vision for us at Freeform

has always been to take the complexity out of it and to provide a lights out, a truly, everybody says automated factories, to provide a lights out factory that is truly automated. The unique thing about metal printing is this is actually possible. CNC machining and other subtractive methods, there's no way to truly do that.

There's just, they're just today there is not. I'm printing we're already entirely digital. It's like take a digital file, the machine doesn't care what you're printing, it just prints it, you know, and then automating the rest of that. And then you mentioned China. So obviously, the joke about why are gas turbines hard, you know, I don't think gas turbines are hard. I think rocket engines are harder. Gas turbines, you know, I don't think gas turbines are hard. I think rocket engines are harder. Gas turbines are easier in a lot of ways. But China is a good example where, you know, I get quite frustrated that, you know, we are a manufacturing technology company that is

developing capability that is not only going to affect and improve the lives of people in general, but also is critically important to our national security as a country. And you know, China is investing in the 3D printing space. They are building, you know, huge factories full of these conventional machines. They don't have our technology. They don't have the ability to, you know, they can go make 100 laser, whatever number laser machines, those parts

are still junk. And, you know, we are developing this in the US for the US, we obviously do quite a bit of defense work. And it does get frustrating. You mentioned China, and it's like, I had to put my plug in of, you know, it's frustrating that I do feel companies like ours. There was a question earlier about software margins and businesses and VC stuff. You know, yeah, we're not a software business. But the interesting thing about free form is it's where the bits and the atoms are combined, which I think makes us even more interesting. You know, you want your 5000 x 10,000 x 20,000 x company, you get it at a company

like this at free form, you know, you're not gonna get that. Can you talk about some of the stress of working with space companies? I imagine you guys aren't doing launches yourselves anymore. You're probably more relaxed than you were when you were at SpaceX. But at the same time, I'm sure you get a call or an email now and then being like, hey, we need this by Sunday night

at this specific time because we're going to space. What's it like working with end customers around that type of thing? No, that's also a great question. Truthfully, I'm probably more stressed now than I was when I was sitting face to face with Elon three times a week.

Because I feel like the scope of what I focus on today is, I don't know, actually, I can't I don't the scope of what I focused on there was like, I kind of knew, you know, where I was here. It's like, all over the you know, top to bottom, you know, everything kind of ultimately falls on me In some capacity the but it is stressful. We get this with exactly what you just said all the time You know, we get a call from Customer that says hey, guess what? We tried to get these somewhere else This supplier let us down, you know, can you guys hook us

up and get these done by Sunday? That can definitely be stressful. I think also, you know, the nature of a startup, especially one with as many moving parts as we have, you know, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a company that's more vertically integrated than us truly, and does as much as we do in house. You know, with such a small number of people actually today still, you know, we're building the plane while we're flying it. So, you know, at the end of the day, we deliver on time and we've started to build a reputation and, you know, if you will, like a brand with these important customers that they come to us when they want their problem

solved, you know, they come to us with the hard stuff and when they can rely on us and we do everything we can to make sure we deliver on before promise and better exceed expectations. Do you feel like you have an edge? I imagine a lot of your competitors are family, kind of multi-generational companies and or private equity owned. And I just feel like you're clearly in a very different mindset, right, of like, to say the meme, but like founder mode, like we need to over deliver. We need to constantly be faster. Like it's not enough to respond to a customer in two hours.

We need to respond in 30 minutes max. Like that kind of thing is that I think we've heard about from various founders on the show that when they email somebody in China, even if it's 2 AM for them, they respond instantly. And in America, they might get a response two weeks later. And it's like, hey, fill out this form. So talk about bringing that mentality that you have to to this industry?

100% so I feel that we have an unfair advantage for a bunch of reasons. I think I was raised in the school of SpaceX you know 2005 you know early on there were there were 50 people 60 people I was there until there were 10,000 people. And, you know, I think that that the things that I learned that are just second nature to me of immediate, you know, you do it now call people on the phone. This is something that's been lost, you know, over the last several years, and I and I do see it, you know, we hire, you know, we're hiring, we interview all the time. this has gotten lost

but that is something that we have that I don't think the rest of the 3D printing space, you know the industry has. You know we don't advertise a lot, in fact we very intentionally do not align ourselves with the traditional metal printing, you know I'm not trying to alienate anyone but you know we're just, I don't even want to be compared because it's not even fair. We're just I don't even want to be compared because it's not even fair We have done so much more and moved so much faster with So much less money than the rest of the whole industry and there's just so much noise and I just don't I don't I don't play That game. I'm like you come see it for yourself If you want to see us printing parts super fast, you're welcome to come over and actually see it. I'm not going to put together some pretty marketing stuff and, you know, like just do it. So I do think you're entirely right. Like the mentality is everything.

Culture of the company and the way that you enforce that culture and reinforce that culture is very important. Can we zoom out a little bit and talk about the 3D printing industry broadly and where you think it's going, even at a consumer level? I feel like 10 years ago, there was this sense, or at least 3D printing companies were promising, hey, you're not even going to have to order that toy because you're just going to have a 3D printer in your home

that just prints it on the fly. And that clearly hasn't happened. And it was a good fundraising narrative, but I'm curious as somebody who's doing this all day long, again, in a specific niche, but I'm curious how you think about the industry evolving over time and consumer use cases. Yeah, 100%.

I mean, I think like I had plastic printers too, you know, before I even, I was never a guy, you know, I saw the potential of printing when I was designing and architecting like Raptor and Starship. And, you know, there were three of us sitting talking to Elon about how we're going to colonize Mars. And I'm like, we're gonna have to make, you know, we're not going to carry like bar stock and machine it on Mars, you know, we're gonna have to make, we're not gonna carry like bar stock and machine it on Mars. We're gonna have to use what's there and turn it into the minimum material we need and then make it.

So the conceptually, the idea of additive manufacturing, which I don't even like that name, but it seems legit. Use what you need and just make the shapes you need and you can grow it organically like nature Nature is usually a good model for things That all makes sense to me the the I do agree like the over hype by others in the space In hindsight you look back and you're like, yeah, of course that wasn't gonna be what happened You know plastic printer prices dropped people started buying them with this

promise that they were going to be able to print all these things. You bought the thing, you built it, you printed a pencil holder that you downloaded off the internet, you realize, I don't know how to do CAD or have access to CAD tools. So I'm downloading models from others. It's just a novelty space, you know, and I think has been for a while. Metal printing at least had its roots in something more real that I think there was potential there,

but we were clearly so far away from, you know, where we needed to be because the behind the scenes, customers are buying these million dollar machines and then having to hire PhDs to operate them to get maybe one out of every five parts over the course of a month that might be good. You know it's just so far away. And one of one of the reasons for that by the way I do believe is because they tried

to monetize on the machine itself. They were like we need to make this million dollar box and then sell this to customers. And I think that was one of the mistakes was that's why we rewound and said, Hey, if I can unwrap the box, if I don't have to sell a box to a customer, as dumb as this sounds, if I don't have to sell them this self-contained box, now what can I do?

I can rethink how the process is done. I don't have to have put my powder on in a little spot in the corner anymore. I could use half the room if I need to. What is the right first principles way to do what I'm trying to do as efficient and fast as possible? And then let's engineer a solution for that. Such a better B2B experience is just

paying for the end state versus trying to. But I'm curious, to push you a little bit further, do you think that end state of, just like people today might have a printer in their home, every home in America has a 3D printer, you think that's a reality 10, 15 years from now? I can imagine AI, you can now generate a CAD file or is it just kind of like still going to be

unnecessary and inefficient? You know, that's a great question. Part of me wants to feel, you know, the future is, these are always interesting things to think about, you know. My gut tells me that we should centralize and it's a service. I feel like the world is going to, you know, the direction is you own less and less.

Look at like your cars. It's like you got people now that literally don't own cars anymore and they just like rent the service. Why? Because it's easier. It's not because they don't have to drive. They, it's just easier, you know?

So ultimately if you make it easier and you make it cheaper and you can take advantage of economies of scale, I think that that probably makes more sense. And then, you know, to be clear, like we the vision for Freeform was always to be more than just a metal printing company. You know, I think that the concept, at least at the beginning in my head was let's dominate the enabling manufacturing technology. Then let's solve the how do I go from the printed part to the end use part that can just be plugged in via make the printing process better post machine it, you know, heat treat, whatever let's solve that problem end to end, and then let's vertically integrate on some products.

Because at the end of the day, why would I, there are some specific areas that we're starting to do some things in that are quite interesting that our technology, our approach uniquely enables that I think ultimately that's where the money is to be made, up and down the stack. But the progression kind of makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense.

Last question on my side, have you seen any interesting upticks in demand or interest from the tariff, the trade war, or just given the nature of your existing customer base focusing on aerospace and defense? I can imagine a lot of your customers just aren't too impacted given they were already focused on sort of having US supply chains. Yeah, no, we actually have seen quite a bit of uptick since the tariff stuff is happening. It seemed like there were a lot more companies out there,

you know, relatively big name ones, that were doing a lot of business with China, specifically more than I was aware. Given some of the recent- Well they don't try to advertise that. They're not yelling that from a rooftop. They don't, yeah, they don't. Yes, which is interesting.

But yeah, to answer your question directly, we have definitely seen an uptick. And I think it's also as word has started to get out about us in the space. I think you know because we've have kind of flown under the radar for quite a while. You know I think people are now starting to hear about us and you know and I feel like they should be worried you know about what we're doing and our pace and like ability to disrupt. They should be.

So good. I have a couple more questions. Yeah. But first, 3D printing for a long time had this stigma around it as it's great for prototypes, but at a certain point you're gonna wanna switch to a different manufacturing strategy. Are you seeing customers come in and say,

hey, we just wanna work with you for a little bit on the prototyping side, and then maybe we'll do something different. And then do you have to kind of walk them through the vision? Or is it very clear upfront that, hey, this is about scale. The part that we're making for your rocket or your plane in 20 years, it's still going to be coming off of a freeform machine because that's the business model. Yeah, absolutely. So we do also, our business is not exclusively aerospace

and defense. It's a large portion of it. But we do do automotive work. We work with several semiconductor companies. There's some other kind of energy, you know, I'll put the energy sector kind of companies we work with that are interesting. And yeah, so I guess the I just completely blanked on the question. So the question is, is, is prototyping versus scaled manufacturing, I imagine at a certain point, like automotive, if I would, you know, if I'm a car manufacturer, I'd love to come to you and say, Hey, let's prototype a bunch of parts. But then once I get it dialed in, I'm like the

historical example would be, oh, then I'm gonna go get it, you know, subtracted machine or cast, right. But at a certain point, it sounds like, hey, I want to make 100,000 cars this year. And you're gonna say, yeah, I'm along for the ride and I'm gonna be cost-competitive But have you had to is that the right thesis and have you had to walk customers through that? Yep, exactly Yes, so we generally turn down today Depending on the company and the potential we turn down a lot of the prototyping stuff That makes sense because it just doesn't make sense for us to focus on that. Unless it's coming from a huge company that there's

something interesting project. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. We generally turn that stuff down. We have the upfront talk with customers about the scale. And that's the target. You know, that's what we're interested in. That's, that's how we're going to get, you know, economies of scale and the costs and down to where everybody needs it to be. And ultimately, you know, I think one of the interesting things about the space,

so I will say like from my time at SpaceX, I always liked solving these extremely complex, interdisciplinary system level problems. Massive. You know, and these very, very, you know, how do we colonize Mars? And it's like a lot of people's brains will short circuit, I don't even know where to start. And weirdly enough, like, I was always like, well, I'm just not smart enough to figure this out. So I'm just gonna like assume that doesn't

matter and assume that doesn't matter until I get to something that I'm like, well, I can calculate this. Yeah, I'm gonna start here, you know, and then just go from there. The interesting thing about printing as we've started, we have started to demonstrate the the feasibility of truly scaling it up, is that it starts to you start to think about the disruption of even the product life cycles, like a lot of the product life cycle stuff today is centered around these

very long manufacturing timelines. So meaning like, you know, it's just an I don't have a conclusion here other than, you know, how much more often would products get updated or customized if you didn't have to wind up a 12 months of tooling and in a casting facility, right? Yeah. Well, speaking of that product update, I imagine that you're building the machine and then you're also scaling up the machine and once you have a really solid contract,

I imagine that then it's like, okay, well, we're gonna want to, like, this machine is capable of doing this part and we want to do that at volume. So what is your product release cycle on the actual machine side? Because are you freezing and then doing a V2, V3, or are you upgrading the machines iteratively? What does that look like?

We do a little bit of both, actually. We do some level of upgrading on the, so there's a roadmap that was like, the first thing we ever built was just, can we put a bunch of lasers on a thing and melt stuff pretty fast? It was not designed to be a throughput maximizer or it was small, the platform wasn't big.

It was just like, can I put a bunch of lasers in a small area and melt stuff quickly? The second thing was then can I take that and scale it up to something that's actually useful in size and start to demonstrate this some of the architectural elements of the system that enable the lights out factory like how do I you know, unpack and get the parts out and get them off the plate and get them ready for you know, the next steps or

whatever it needs to do. The third step of that is has been to go even bigger. That's what we're building actually right now. So we went from, you know, I don't remember the exact number of throughput capability from gen one to two was something like 20X from one to two, and then two to three, or I came from SpaceX, so everything starts at zero.

So zero to one, you know, one to two, what we're building now is basically the third generation of the technology. And this is the one that is the platform is quite large. Like the size of this of this platform is is is is for what it can do. It's tiny compared to the industry, but it's it's pretty large. They make these huge parts and it's like 10 to 20 X higher throughput than even the system. We're using for production today So, you know, we've basically taken these huge steps Every every generation and then there's the the into incremental improvements which are predominantly around software generally Because we're implementing better models faster compute faster sensors and we're rolling those out in real time. Luckily I came

from the aerospace industry, you know, I led certification of Falcon 9 and Merlin for the Air Force and NASA. It's like, you know, so I can talk to the aerospace folks, I can talk to the defense folks, I know what they're looking for in terms of product release, you know, that, you know, hardware in the loop testing and then releasing software versions, locking certain things down for production and having control of that. So that's been helpful too, to kind of, you know,

grease the wheels of that with customers that are like, oh wait, you're changing stuff all the time. Like, no, not exactly. But yeah. Last question, I'll let you go. I don't know if, Jordy, you have anything? Are you good? I'm good.

I'd love to know a few pieces of advice or lessons that you took away from working with Elon that folks might be able to apply, even if they don't have a decade of experience at an actual Elon company. What do you think is actually actionable? Oh man, boy, there's quite a bit. Surround yourself with the smartest, most accomplished people you can in general and then listen to them. Secondly, there's no problem that we can't solve

together. People are their biggest, this is easy to say too, right? And hard to put into practice, but you're your biggest enemy. If you think you can't do it, you definitely can't do it. And then question everything, question everything. Elon is an extremely smart man. I feel obviously like very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work at SpaceX for so long and sit in the room and see how he makes decisions

and the good and the bad, you know? I mean, all of it, I just, I had a good experience at SpaceX and learned a lot. And a lot of, you know, even Freeform today, there are a bunch of current and former execs at SpaceX that are investors in Freeform. And obviously Founders Fund and, you Fund and 8VC and Valor and a bunch of top tier investment firms,

Threshold and Two Sigma, they'll all get mad at me if I don't list them all out. Yeah, of course, just keep listing them. Just keep listing them. I gotta get the, we need to roll the credits. I gotta say, Eric, you make me believe in on-shoring manufacturing. Yes.

When I talk to you, I believe that it's possible. It's easy to be black-pilled and say, no, we're never gonna make it in America, but I feel like if we just give you like another 20 years, we'll be able to make anything here. Yeah, it sounds chaotic day to day when you read the headlines, but when you actually talk to someone

who's working on this and who's clearly gonna be working on it for decades more, it feels tractable. Yeah. Yes. Totally tractable. Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. We have to have you back. This is this is really, really enjoyable. Thank you. Would be a pleasure, guys. Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Talk to you. That's good. And if you're trying to sell some 3D printed metal parts all across the United States, you got to get on numeral numeral HQ sales tax on autopilot. And I have some breaking news breaking news. My company Lucy is now on numeral. Let's go double kill one hand washes the other. They pay me, I pay them. The money goes into my pocket and back into Numeral's pocket. There we go. It's great. But we have been keeping our next guest waiting.

We will bring him in. We're talking about robots with Formic. Formic.co is the website. Let's pull it up. Full service robotic automation for $0 capex. That's what we like to hear. We love when capex is free. Welcome to the stream. How you doing today? Welcome to the Anti-Capex Club. Good to meet you guys. Thanks for having me on. It's a great club.

Yeah, fantastic. Can you introduce yourself? Give us a breakdown of the company, where you're at and what you're building. Sounds good. Yeah. My name is Salman. I'm the CEO of Formic. We're building the Robot Army that is helping American manufacturers automate. You can see some of them on the screen behind me. These are our robot babies, as we affectionately call them. We have hundreds of them across more than 100 factories now in the US that are using our robots to produce all kinds of products. We're making everything from metal parts for aircraft and automotive, plastic parts for lawn mowers and that are using our robots to produce all kinds of products. We are indeed. Yeah.

The last guy I heard Eric was on, you guys were talking about, bring manufacturing back. It's real, it's happening. We're really excited to be part of it. Yeah. What do you have to say to the naysayers that say, we'll never make it in America? The haters. The haters. Look, I lived in China for 25 years and I saw the industrialization of that country.

And it's not a two-year process. Industrializing is a 20-year journey at the minimum and probably much more. And we do have 250,000 factories in America that are making all kinds of products. So they exist. The problem is we don't have labor force to support them. It's not just about cost of labor. There are millions of unfilled jobs in factories. Today, the typical utilization rate of a factory in America

is less than 2,000 hours a year. The comparable number in China is 7,500 hours a year. There's 8,700 possible production hours in a given year. The vast majority of American factories are sitting around collecting dust 75% of the time. And it's not because there isn't demand for their products. It isn't because there isn't raw materials available. It basically just boils down to the fact that there aren't people who want to work in these

factories and do these backbreaking jobs day in, day out. And so until we automate a bunch of them, we're going to have a really hard time re-industrializing. So, you know, I'm optimistic, Jordy. I think there is a lot of opportunity to re-industrialize and bring more manufacturing back, but it's not going to be in a year or two, right? Like we're helping make that happen faster, but it's going to take some time. A really dumb criticism that I don't agree with of this company, and it might be completely wrong, would be like, hey, this is just financial innovation. You're swapping CapEx to OpEx. That allows you to grow really fast.

I think that could be good for re-industrialization, but how much of that is key to the business? And then what else are you doing? I imagine that you're not mining the metal to make the robots. You might even be purchasing the robots from other people and then designing software suites and integrating. But Palantir goes, oh, it's just a consulting shop or whatever. What is the criticism of your company of where you're starting and then why is that the right path to start and then grow out from?

Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I think it starts from like the basic premise that people, most roboticists are working on the wrong problem, right? I was a VC for 10 years. I was investing in robotics companies. I funded like 50 different robotics companies and saw all the different ways in which they had challenges. And what I realized is like, look,

any roboticist will tell you getting a robot to do a job is 10% of the work. 90% of the work is like, how do you do error handling and how do you solve all of the shit that happens after you deploy that robot? And I think that's the part that's generally underappreciated, which is like, we'll see a robot doing a backflip in a cool YouTube video,

but once you try to get that robot to do that reliably for 99.8% uptime, you start to encounter all kinds of issues, right? Joint failures, maintenance challenges, programming issues, your in-feed, your product just has a lot more variation than you expected. And I think it's generally underappreciated. And so the reason that factories in America don't automate today is not because

you can't get a robot to do this job. The problem is all the surrounding infrastructure doesn't exist. And so if you're the factory that focuses on making chocolate chip cookies, and you're really good at the best chocolate chip cookie recipe and baking, like you're not also super good at deploying robots

and managing them. And so what happens is, like they're just kind of overwhelmed, they don't know what to get, they don't know how to get it, they don't know how to manage it, they don't know how to maintain it. And so what we realized is like, you have to build all the surrounding infrastructure. Like robotics has this last mile problem

where if you can make it easy to scope, deploy, manage, and maintain the robot, then you can drive mass adoption. And so we built a bunch of software that does that. We use computer vision and LIDAR scans to do kind of full site evaluation in an automated way. This used to take months to walk through the facility and measure every single thing

to figure out what you can automate and what kind of robot you need. We do that in minutes. Then you need to figure out what robot to build and deploy. So you need to basically simulate different robot arms doing that job with different grippers, different conveyors, different safety scanners, different fencing. Like you need all of this stuff to make a robot useful. Then you need to actually program the robot to do the job. And so we basically built AI that automates the process of programming the robot. And then lastly, once that robot's deployed, you have all the ongoing

management of that robot. So how do you do teleoperation? How do you do error handling? How do you preventative maintenance? How do you gracefully recover from all the different types of errors that you're gonna encounter. There's a ton of infrastructure that needs to be built. And so like 90% of roboticists that I meet are working on how do I make the robot a little bit smarter? And nobody is working on this giant problem which is the reason that robots aren't deployed.

Right, I can tell you from the hundreds of robots that we've deployed today, less than 5% of my deployment cost is programming the robot to do the thing. It's completely delusional how many people are spending their time trying to make a robot a little bit easier to program. That's inconsequential to me. I need to focus on solving the other 95%

of the cost of deploying robots. So I don't know if that answers your question. Can you talk about landing on CPG, food and beverage, broadly? You said you invested in 50 plus different robotics companies. I'm assuming you saw a bunch of success and failure. And I'm assuming that was super intentional to land here. And then I want to ask potentially other categories

that you're excited about. Yeah, I'll be honest. It wasn't that intentional. We started out going really broad. We were doing things in metal fabrication. We were doing things in plastic injection molding. We were doing things in CPG and a bunch of other industries. Ultimately, we narrowed back into CPG for a couple of reasons.

Number one, it's the industry where there's the most amount of utilization, right? So the typical CPG factory actually runs 20 to 24 hours a day. In things like metal fabrication, like factories that make metal parts for aerospace and automotive, they typically run eight hours a day of production, but actually only like six hours a day of actual parts being made.

There's like two hours a day of actual parts being made. There's like two hours a day where people are setting up and tearing down. So high utilization means automation has a much, much bigger short-term impact. Number two, it's the industry where there's actually a lot more of it happening domestically. In metal and plastic manufacturing and other stuff, a lot of it is still being imported today from China, from Mexico, from Canada, from other places. But because CPG products are generally low value and low margin, it's not worth it to ship them

across the ocean. So a lot of that is actually happening domestically. So there are a lot of factories that can use automation. And third, those are the jobs that are the most backbreaking, painful jobs, right? Like you can afford to pay a machinist 50 bucks an hour or 60 bucks an hour because that's a high value, high margin product.

You can't afford to pay somebody who's packing boxes more than $15 an hour. And they're still picking up super heavy cases of drinks and things like that. Exactly, yeah, it's backbreaking. Can you take me through kind of a market map or the topography of robotics? Because I've watched how it's made.

I've seen, you know, a little scooper. I don't even know if I'd call it a robot. It's more just like a machine. Then there's, you know, two axis gantries. I'm seeing a lot of robotic arms, a lot of six axis stuff. And then you get into the humanoid world. Where's the biggest opportunity in terms of, or where's the most need to deploy?

And like what type of robot is the most important to just roll out in America right now? Yeah, I think like articulated six axis robot arms are still the vast majority of use cases, right? I think If you look at what humans are doing in these factories like they're typically using their arms not other parts of their body So it's just an indicator like that. That's the most common task whether you're talking about Assembly whether you're talking about quality control you need to kind of vision obviously whether you're talking about Packaging whether you're talking about even primary food handling

and sorting, in the metal fabrication world, you need a lot of machine tending, which is picking up a blank part and putting it into a CNC machine. We have a bunch of robots that are doing that. All of those are just articulated arms that can do it. So I think there are use cases for the humanoid form factor to do new types of tasks. We also have some gantry robots that we've deployed that do certain types of applications where it's like very high payload work. But to be honest, the form factor is kind of irrelevant because in all of these types

of robots that you're talking about, you have a couple of motors and some motion control. It's actually, if you can abstract away the software enough, all of those things are essentially different variations on the same on the same problem I Want to talk about the capex thing? What's the damage? for a company if they're not working with you to Buy a bunch of six axis robot arms these days Can you give me like an order of magnitude

for how much these robots even cost? I've seen a couple of them. Yeah, or maybe even some of the history. Some of the history. I mean, we've seen so many companies try to automate, bring in robotics, right? Like Nike has a history of trying to do this in Latin America and just failing miserably

despite having seemingly competent partners. So yeah, I'd love some additional context there. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start with the second question first, and then I'll move to the first question. So the vast majority of robots in America today are deployed in very, very big companies. So General Motors, Procter & Gamble are two examples of the biggest buyers of robots in America today are deployed in very, very big companies. So General Motors, Procter and Gamble are two examples of the biggest buyers of robots in America. They buy a couple hundred robots a year and they have very large in-house engineering teams who can use those

robots to do different kinds of tasks. The problem is 99% of factories in America are small medium- sized businesses. And the logic follows like if you take a single General Motors plant that makes cars, there's 4,000 small factories that make the components that go to General Motors that get assembled into a car. Right? So there's one guy who makes the windshield and one guy who makes the screws and another guy who makes the tires.

Every single one of those smaller factories is not automated at all today. 95% of them don't have any robots. The cost is a part of the question, which is, yeah, it costs between a couple hundred thousand dollars to a couple million dollars to build a fully automated robot work cell. The interesting thing, though, is if you break down that cost, about 30% of that cost is the hardware itself, right? Like the robot arm and the conveyors and that kind of stuff. 70% of the cost is all the custom engineering

that you typically have to pay for, for integrators and consultants and this and that to come in and try to customize it to your process. And if you're a small factory, like you don't have the capacity to kind of get rid of that 70% custom engineering cost, because you don't really know anything about robotics. And so the reason that we built all this kind of infrastructure tooling around it is that we're cutting out that 70%. It costs us significantly less to go and buy and build and deploy those robots than it

would be for them to try to do it on their own Can you walk me through? who the best Robot builders are in the world right now. What is the what does the supply chain look like in terms of? Constructing building R&D new robots who are the major players globally? Who are the up-and-comers? I don't even know if I could name a single robot maker, but I'm interested to hear kind of like what the landscape looks like, who the major players are. Yeah, so the biggest robot companies in the world are all not American, right? So FANUC

is Japanese, they're one of the biggest ones. KUKA used to be a German company, it got acquired by a Chinese company. ABB, Yaskawa, Mitsubishi, there's a bunch of these kind of very, very large industrial companies that make robot arms. The thing to note though is that like buying a robot arms is effectively kind of useless on its own. You need a full robot work cell to make that work. The thing to note though is that buying a robot arm is effectively kind of useless on its own.

You need a full robot work cell to make that work. So you need PLCs that often come from like Siemens or Rockwell, you need sensors that come from companies like KeyAnc and Co. A programmable logic controller. So it's like the, it's the thing that controls all the peripherals and safety equipment. Got it, got it.

Yeah, and then you need like conveyors, you need safety scanners that are often made by like Key & Subcognet, so much of other company. You need grippers, which is the end of arm tool. So today, like the vast majority of people who deploy robots, basically hire a consultant that goes and buys all these different components for them and then assembles it and then deploys it for them. Yeah. I saw this at Hadrian. They have a six-axis robot arm, and they

have this invisible wall that if you put your hand through it, it'll stop. Yeah, a light curtain. Yeah, light curtain. That's what it's called. That's right. Why has automating 3PLs proven to be such a challenge? Amazon had their internal efforts.

I think there's like a bunch of, you know, Amazon had their internal efforts. I think there's like six river systems, which it was maybe Shopify acquired them, but it just seemingly is such a difficult task. And you would think that, you know, grabbing items and putting labels on them and, you know, shipping them should be, it seems straightforward, but clearly not. Yeah, I mean, I'll note that we don't know a ton about 3PLs

because almost all of our work is in manufacturing. Logistics is a much, much smaller industry, and we're not in it today. I will say, logistics has to deal with a lot more variability than manufacturing. Because if you're running a 3PL, any kind of product could come into your warehouse anytime. And so you need systems that can deal with all of them.

And there's just like physics-based constraints on that, right? If you're picking up a one ounce bag of something versus a 50 pound box, you just need fundamentally different physical hardware. And that's why I think a lot of this kind of humanoid stuff is very strange because like, if you're picking up a 50 pound box with one of those robots, like it's very likely to tip over pretty easily.

Like you need, and if you want to move at any kind of speed, right, because if you take a 50 pound box and you move it at, you know at five miles an hour, your effective load during that acceleration is like double or triple that. So it's like 100 pounds of load that you have to be able to handle, which is just kind of impossible. If you move to manufacturing, you have a lot more consistency because every production line is kind of making the same part or the same product at a relatively higher rate.

And so the technical complexity is lower, but the operational complexity is higher. Interesting. On the note of humanoids, are you worried about depreciation with humanoids? I think this is a concern if humanoids end up working well, but then following the same path as EVs, because there's high wear and tear on cars.

They're just going down a road all the time. And that's challenging. And you can imagine humanoids are walking around with these heavy loads. And then simultaneously, all of that interaction just feels like, I worry about the economics of humanoids. If you buy a robot for $50,000 and the next year it's worth $10,000, it's like, well,

you almost could have hired a human for that kind of cost. But I'm curious what your point of view is. Yeah, I think it depends on what the task is. If you're using that humanoid to do an occasional task, like pick up your laundry and put it into the basket, for example, you don't worry so much about wear and tear because it's low frequency. If you're talking about a manufacturing use case,

these robots behind me, all of them operate 24 hours a day. And so at that cycle rate, you're doing maybe 50,000 cycles a day. At that rate, the wear and tear you get on all of the components is very, very high. And like a six axis robot has six motors, a humanoid, most of these humanoid that we've seen have something like 30 to 50 motors, right?

And so just, you're just talking about like the wear on the motor. We have to go out and lubricate these joints and replace motors on a pretty regular basis. I can't imagine if I had to do that for 50 motors instead of three. Speaking of motors, I saw that in the latest Boston Dynamics demo, they said that they switched to electric motors. Is that a meaningful shift in robotics or is that something that's unique to their approach to building humanoids? Yeah, so most of the robots that we use use servo motors, so they're all kind of electric

motors. It's pretty standard. Some of the new humanoids are using linear actuators, which is a newer technology. I think the Tesla humanoid is doing that. It's like the exact kind of wear and tear profile on that is not clear. And a lot of them are actually building their own motors from scratch.

So like the Chinese, like I think this is a place where China has a huge advantage compared to like a lot of the American startups. Like Unitree, for example, which I'm sure you guys have seen those videos, like they have built an entire team to build actuators and a whole team that's building their own custom lidar and a whole team that's building their own had

a custom sensing across you know it for most of these American companies it's kind of inconceivable to go and try to invent your own motor and try to figure out how to build a humanoid but in China it's possible to be much more vertically integrated that's so odd because you have to imagine back in the dawn of the automotive revolution, like Ford was certainly building motors and wheels and tires and seats and the frames and stuff. Like we did have the ability to have a vertically integrated supply chain at one point in America.

And then we just decomposed it so much that it's been a struggle to get back to vertical integration. Very, very tricky. The management consultants got hold of us. They did. They did. Yeah, on humanoids, I don't know if you've been following what physical intelligence has been doing with some of the end to end models, this idea of generalization. Are there any, are you looking at any software approaches that are more, I don't know, big data or, or, or, you know, deep learning driven to handle more of those edge cases to automate the, the last 90% of the work that you're doing. And what

are you, what are you following on the AI side of things these days? Yeah, so I think these vision language action models like what physical intelligence is doing are very promising. We're running trials on some of those vision language action models for some of our use cases. The problem today is that they're just generally too slow for us to be able to use them in a kind of commercial setting. But I think that'll get better in the next few years. So there are like, you know, in the common trajectory for us,

like we'll start out in a factory with one or two robots, and then the factory will come to us and say, hey, can you help me like automate all these other tasks on my production line? And today some of those are solved and some of them are not. And so as we go, you know, as these vision language action models get better and other kinds of techniques around deep learning get better, we'll start to go and address more and more of those

tasks. Yeah, I mean, this is great. I was gonna say, you know, like, I think that the thing to note here is like, we're just at a very different place compared to Like more established automation economies are like in China right now Last year there were about 400,000 robots deployed that in the entire US we had about 30,000 Robots deployed so less than a tenth of the amount of robots deployed in a place where The labor cost is so much higher that you could theoretically justify a much higher use case of robots. And I think a big part of the reason is like China just has so many more engineers that they can put towards the problem of design and deployment.

Plus they subsidize a lot of the kind of robotics industry to be able to go and make it easy for people to deploy. I think in the US we have this challenge where there's a lot more small medium sized businesses and we don't have the historical infrastructure or the engineering capability for all these plants to figure out how to automate on their own. And so like building this set of tooling and helping them figure out what are the latest things that are happening in kind of AI and machine learning and computer vision that we can apply to the different use cases in your facility is I think the only way that

we can move faster than different use cases in your facility is I think the only way that we can we can move faster than China in the long run. Is there anything that you want to see from the US government to speed up the deployment of robotics in America? Trillion dollar contract. I mean, yeah, I mean you could imagine subsidy or subsidies or incentives or you know a strategic reserve of robots, but you could also just look at deregulation. But I don't know what your take is. Yeah, I mean, so I'm excited to go to the Hill and Valley Forum next week and talk about that a little bit.

But frankly, I don't think there's much that's necessary. I think the incentive is there. There's plenty of financial incentive for these small medium sized factories to do it. To be honest, the biggest barrier to adoption of robotics in America is like, it's a cultural change, right? Like these factory owners, a lot of these are third generation businesses, right? They've been passed down or they're kind of private equity owned. And like in both cases, you end up with these businesses that are very risk averse. They're

afraid to adopt new technology. They don't have the internal capabilities to do it. I think from the government side, like things that are being done around educating that group of manufacturers and helping them to deploy automation will have a very big impact. Similar to what China does, actually in the US, we've had subsidies for small medium-sized factories for the last 10 years to buy automation equipment. There's accelerated depreciation. A lot of states have matching grants where if you buy a $500,000 piece of machinery,

the state will grant up to 50% of that cost. And so like we've had plenty of these incentives in place, but adoption is super low. Like when we talk to the states, most of them say like, we can't give out these grants, like nobody's using it because people don't know what to buy, they don't know how to buy it.

And once they buy it, they're like, they can't handle the responsibility of this new piece of equipment. And so there's tons of grant dollars just sitting around not getting deployed because there's this kind of, there's this barrier at the last mile. Makes sense. Very informative.

Thank you. We'll see you at Hill and Valley. Yeah, we'll see you next week. Awesome, look forward to it. Appreciate you guys having me on. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Goodbye.

And we wanna tell you about Polymarket. Go to polymarket.com. To get the real news. Get the information. We got a new market up there. Uh, one billion chat GPT users in 2025. Uh, it is currently at a 64% chance. Um, and feels likely to me, uh, I,

the way that they're pacing is we have some posts in there. Uh, Callie's here. I'll let you take the intro. I'll be right back. Welcome in Callie. I'm gonna play a sound effect here. Boom. What's going on? Looking good in the suit. You've been wearing those a lot these days. A lot of a lot of the tech folks have been brushing off the suits these days and coming to DC. It's been nice to go out of the closet. How do you stay healthy when you're in DC? Do you have a workout routine, a couple favorite restaurants, or are you just five coffees a day, no breakfast or lunch?

I would love to say I'm on the true bed good energy Program but the sleep has been lacking I will say try trying trying to find good food But not eating much just a lot of caffeine. Yeah, I bet Let's jump right into This food die ban. I'd love to get your high-level take on it it It seems you, the big question, we're a technology and business, there you go. We focus on business and my big question

is how manufacturers will respond to the ban given that, you know, it's hard enough to even just deliver on the existing demand that they have much less make fundamental changes. And to be clear, I'm very much in favor of the ban, but I'm curious what you think this kind of looks like in practice. Yeah, I mean, I'll back up a little bit.

I think there's a lot of lessons for business in this environment we're in right now, but, you know, I never expected to be here. I'm, I'm at the white house now. I'm a special government employee as well as running true bad with Justin mayors. And Justin and I started the company on the mission of, I think a lot of founders do this, but you just wanted to impact the world and change health incentives. And just through the advocacy, you know, Justin and I going on podcasts and talking about this, something started resonating on this idea that our healthcare and food systems

are broken in the past year. I got to know Bobby Kennedy, got to know President Trump, helped connect them for the endorsement. Now it coming on and helping to advise the next couple of months. But I think the big lesson of this food diet ban, I don't even know, I really like the word ban. I like phase out, because ban implies over regulation. And I think what people are waking up to is there's mass distrust of legacy industry right now. I mean, you know, I talk a lot about the food industry.

It was run by the cigarette industry in the 1990s. Few people remember this, but 50% of the US food supply was controlled by Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds in the early 1990s. They consolidated the food industry when smoking rates were going down. They were actually some of the largest companies in the world in the 80s, like highest market caps, and some of the biggest balance sheets in history of capitalism, tobacco companies. It's a good business, nicotine. And they consolidated Kraft, US Food, Nabisco, and very deliberately bought off the USDA

to recommend the food pyramid, which is basically a recommendation for ultra-processed food. And they shifted very strategically thousands of scientists from the tobacco department to the food department, and really added all these chemicals in our food to make them hyper addictive. So through that corporate capture and what I would call the weaponization of food today in America, a child's diet is 70% ultra processed food in, in Japan or Italy, it's 15%. So, so my big argument is that we don't really have a free market with these outcomes where of course

the disease rates are just skyrocketing. I mean the stats are crazy. We're digging into this for a report for the administration. We spend five times more per capita on health care than Spain, but live six years less. I mean in Spain doesn't even have a good health care program. So these are common sense actions and I think think there's really a moment, I'm meeting with a lot of food companies, a lot of pharma companies, and they're running scared because Americans have lost trust. I mean, we all know this. I think it's why there's such a robust tech ecosystem building and startup ecosystem. It's because these large companies have really lost trust with the American consumer and the American public, I think often for good reasons.

So I would call this not as much a ban, it's a correcting of corrupt incentives where these food dyes, I mean, just total no brainer, they're petroleum based, they're literally crude oil. They add a molecule to crude oil, make that bright neon color, and they're phased out of essentially every other country. So it's an example of common sense actions that I think are quite needed.

That that phase out in other countries, does that mean that a lot of these manufacturers fully have the ability to sell these products and make these products to sell into the U.S. market and they're just choosing not to for the most part? It's just even more shocking than that. They actually often make the product in the United part. Oh, it's just even more shocking than that. They actually often make the product in the United States. So Kellogg's makes fruit loops

with carrot juice and watermelon juice and ships them across the border to Canada and ships them over to Europe. They make the same product with petroleum based dyes here in the U.S. So a lot of our food can actually be exported to Europe based on just just the chemicals in them right

now. So so actually the US companies are. What is the is it a margin thing? You know, is it is it is it just economic incentives? Yeah. Is it purely economics or or is there something else? Yeah. The food ties. Again, I think this is one of the most no brainer unimpeachable things they could start with because it's actually not a cost thing. We've done a lot of engagement with the food industry on this. Actually, they've done a lot

of research and they actually cite this as a reason for why they should keep it. They say, well, the kids in focus groups lunch for the neon bright colors. And it's like, well, I'm sure they do, but you're feeding them crude oil. So it's really actually, they say it's consumer preference. And actually when pushed before the food industry said, well, we believe in consumer choice and kids prefer these bright colors. So that's one reason I think the administration and secretary can be sorry with the food.

My three year old would love to eat cake for dinner every single night, but that doesn't mean that he should have the autonomy to just make that decision himself as a three year old. Yeah. How do you think about the history here with corn subsidies? Is there a risk of playing whack-a-mole as the government decides what to push or what to incentivize? What do you take away from not just what the food companies have done historically, but what the government has done historically to kind of like steer the food supply in one direction or another? Yeah. So I've been an entrepreneur for more than 10 years, but I grew up in DC, started my career

early on as a lobbyist in the food industry. And we used to weaponize this nanny state argument and say, you don't want to be nanny state. But what I really have been trying to communicate, and particularly to frankly a rightward audience, going on Tucker and Joe Rogan, things like that, what I've really been trying to do is articulate that this is not a nanny state regulation issue. It's a correction of corruption. When you look at agriculture subsidies, more than 90% go to corn, soy, and meat, which are essentially the components of ultra-processed food.

And the grocery lobbyists and the food lobbyists push for that because at a supermarket, when you can put something in a box and it lasts forever and it's bright neon colors, the profit margins are much higher, whereas natural food is low. So there's a huge incentive to shove ultra-processed food down our throats, which has led to agriculture incentives

that make a Coke at a supermarket cheaper than water because the Coke has so much subsidized ingredients in it. So that's not a free mark, that's totally rigged. 90% to corn, soy, wheat, 0.4% of subsidies go to fruits and vegetables. Then you get to something like SNAP, the food stamp program. Now, Elon's looking at this. This is the fourth largest entitlement program. It's $140 billion a year. The number one item on food stamps is soda, and more than 60% go to ultra-processed

food. We're the only country in the world where a low income nutrition assistance program goes to soda and Twinkies. So you have, you know, you're on the list, school lunches, the largest source of calories for kids, federally funded, no nutrition guidelines whatsoever, no sugar limits. So you've actually just very deliberately, you know, from the history of the tobacco companies,

really weaponizing these regulations. But by my calculations, it's been a trillion dollars over the last 10 years of subsidies to ultra processed food. So we're trying to take step by step, common sense actions to kind of unwind that. I also quite frankly think there's a cultural awakening happening where people realize the system is pretty screwed and hopefully, we were talking about it more, we're talking about it on a tech podcast so the fact

that people are trying to be healthier reading labels more Justin's talking a lot about this obviously I think that's a good thing too and and very unexpectedly you know I do think president Trump Bobby Kennedy you wouldn't expect that this coalition they're leading to an awakening where 24 states right now are passing legislation on food, ingredients, school lunches. So I think it's very positive what's happening. I always thought it was fascinating that the food issue is it, it, it, it's secretly very bipartisan because you get like the right wing, like trad folks who want to clean up

the food supply, but then you also get like the left wing hippie who's hanging out at the farmer's market and it's just like, yeah, I grew these vegetables myself. They're way better than the processed foods. Yeah. I'm curious. Is there should be a coalition there is food and health as political as it seems in the news. I feel like if you talk to people individually, you know, it's, it's like

John said, it's bipartisan, like bipartisan. We want everybody to be healthier. And then you get into Washington, and it feels like you mentioned you started your career in the lobbying space. So I'm curious, where you think it's, if it's actually a political issue for the average citizen, or it's just manufactured by special interest groups? Oh, there's zero reason food and poisoning our kids should be political. And frankly, these things about reforming food stamps, you know,

and taking the dyes out of our food were leftward issues, you know, five to 10 years ago. You know, digging into the health issue, I think one of the most pernicious and chronic conditions in America is is Trump derangement syndrome. And I think TDS has led many people on the left to reflexively be opposed to these common sense policies. You know, probably a lot of the tech folks listening, I know politics is complicated. There's a lot going on, a lot of change happening. My hope is that we can all come together on these MAHA policies.

I mean, these are absolute no brainer. It's taking on incentives of the pharmaceutical industry, which is something the left used to talk a lot about. It's taking on the interest of, you know, processed food makers that are really doing some harmful things for kids. But you've had a wild situation where you've had Democrats now passionately arguing to keep food dice in the food. You've had Democrats passionately arguing that we need to in the food. You've had Democrats passionately arguing that we need to continue to have a $10 billion subsidy from the federal government to soda companies on SNAP. Just reflexively because the Trump administration

happens to be talking about this, you've had almost no support from Democrats. I called out Forrie Booker, a Senator from New Jersey who I've worked with before I've met. I know he cares about these issues. Where the hell is Forrie Booker? Why wasn't he at the Health and Human Services Department on Tuesday when Secretary Kennedy was announcing this policy on food dyes? Where is he helping on these issues? I mean, this is as bipartisan as it gets.

How much does Pharma's position end up influencing media narratives? They obviously spend an exceptional amount advertising with different media companies. This has been maybe a big issue in mainstream television, where a television network is not going to bring somebody on to talk poorly about a company that is a big sponsor. If you wanted to come here and talk negatively about ramp,

we'd probably change the conversation. Nothing negative. I have nothing negative to say about ramp. We love ramp. Fantastic. Of course. Of course. But is that a focal point at all?

Do you think we need some reform there? Is it just the free market doing the free market? Yeah, this is the framework I have. And I'm so privileged to be fighting this fight with Justin and with Truvette and trying to help the administration. But I think what we're doing with the strategy is we're putting a stake in the ground

that everyone can agree with, where that in 10 years, our incentives of our system are changed. And the way I define those incentives is that nobody wants this. But the fact is the health care system, you know, a lot of health startups, quite frankly, still, their business model is predicated on more people being sick. The pharmaceutical industry makes more money when people are sicker for longer periods of time.

Hospitals make more money when the beds are full, not when they're empty. Insurance companies actually make more money when people are sicker because of this horrible medical loss ratio issue where they actually have an incentive to raise premiums. You actually have every single lever of the healthcare system predicated on sickness. That same system, the pharma industry particularly particularly is the lifeblood of news advertising, over 50% for most news channels. So that creates not a direct, you know, there's not a direct edict going down,

but you have a zero lack of curiosity from the media about why people are getting sick. It's really just referees about, you know, hey, you need to take this drug. Ozempic is the standard of care for kids, you know, with COVID. I mean, COVID was a metabolic health crisis. We were 16% of COVID deaths

and 4% of the world's population. And the CDC said at the time, it's because our immune systems are so weak, we're dying very quickly when we get this disease. Yet the media was just about the COVID vaccine for six month old. So you do have a very, very damaging situation where there's self-censorship. And the strategy is to get to that long-term world where new startups are thinking about how

to make people healthy, not how to take advantage of a system and deliver direct consumer ozempic or a better UX on medical records. A better UX on medical records is putting lipstick on a pig. The problem is the underlying incentives of the system. Shipping pills in a millennial pink packaging is an innovation. A lot of health care startups are just wrappers on the existing broken health incentives that are destroying the country and going to bankrupt us. So that's the stake we have.

The way we get there is let's do unimpeachable things. So this food dye thing is one, obviously there's been a lot of talk about pharmaceutical ads. Secretary Kennedy and Marty McCary, the amazing new FDA commissioner have talked about that. No announcements right now, but that's, you know, something they said they're clearly looking at.

So it's just getting these things that are 90% support issues, bipartisan issues, and I think you'll be seeing them in rapid succession, these announcements. Does the media, you know, incredible growth of drugs like Ozempic scare you? Obviously being overweight is unhealthy. That's not a political point. But when I hear people saying that they're losing more muscle than fat, that personally

can be concerning. And then I'm curious if you have a general, just personal opinion only on this sort of balance between like compounding and getting drugs that are benefiting people out quickly and affordably versus like protecting the intellectual property of the companies that develop these drugs. Great question.

So on the first one, I'd say the MAHA stance of the ozempic, as best I can define it, my personal opinion, is there's nothing wrong with GLP-1s or ozempic per se. Actually, I think something the administration is talking a lot about, it's not an anti-drug stance. I think with the dawn of AI and very exciting things, quite frankly, in therapeutics, there should be robust innovation and frankly deregulation at the FDA. The problem is that with the existence of Ozempic, it's two problems.

One is that the drug costs 10 times more than it does in Germany or Sweden. And that's gonna come from US taxpayers. So there's a real corruption in the pricing. And then number two, corruption in the standard of care, what I call it. So there was a Medicare ruling from Biden that said that Ozempic should be the frontline defense

for anyone who's obese or overweight on Medicare. So you know, a 15 minute appointment, you get your Ozempic and then that diet or exercise, right? Right. No, no, didn't even mention there's no funding for diet. So we spend five trillion on health care, right? And then they were going to push this through where ZipFix over a thousand dollars a month, which would come from taxpayers. Not with no other option or no other route for an American to get, you know, the blood testing to understand their nutrient deficiencies or talk to a dietary coach. You know, this is what Truman did. Why would you put that flag in the ground?

It's like there should be flexibility with flexibility with where healthcare dollars could go. So the problem is not that Ozipik exists, it's that that Medicare ruling would have gone to Medicaid and would have gone to kids because now it's being essentially pushed on six-year-olds through the American Academy of Pediatrics. So you're getting to a world where, STAB rates, metformin rates, antidepressant rates

have exploded among teens. 35% of teens are on some kind of chronic disease drug. You know, ZipFix would just be added to that repertoire. And of course, that's just not from our medical system incentivizing the root cause. I mean, maybe somebody that's 75 year old on Medicare, who is 400 pounds and extremely diabetic and set in their ways.

Sure, I mean, probably ozzymic. I'd be fine with Medicare funding for that. But for the vast majority of the American people, that shouldn't be the first line defense. That's the problem with our health care system right now. There's not flexibility for patients to maybe work with a functional medicine doctor or figure out a more root cause intervention because obviously obviously obesity is not an asymptotic deficiency. That's a good quote, yeah. Yeah, yeah. What countries do you look at as models?

The tech industry loves to poke fun at Europe. They don't tend to make $1 trillion companies very often or ever in the last. They also don't win a lot of bodybuilding competitions. We are the most obese country, but we also, America also wins a lot of bodybuilding competitions. We are the most obese country, but we also, America also wins a lot of bodybuilding competitions. This is John's point of view. But what can we, you know, what are you looking at in terms

of like, this is a functioning government in the context of personal health? That's really interesting. So I don't like giving Europe any credit whatsoever. And they don't deserve much. And I will just say, this is a key point, Europe's healthcare systems are total basket case systems. They're terrible socialist systems. So I think one of the things we can learn from other countries-

Just to be clear, the stuff they get right is like saying like, hey, we don't want this die, we don't want glyphosates. They get a little- Exactly. Actually, what they get right is that the healthcare system is less important, is that people are healthier to begin with. The problem is that the healthcare system is less important, is that people are healthier to begin with. The problem with the US healthcare system is not that we have the wrong Medicare, Medicaid reimbursement rates. It's the fact that we're the sickest country in the world.

And that's actually because we rely too much on the healthcare system. So what I like about some other countries in Japan, and I think we need more of this, and Bobby Kennedy is pushing this more. I mean, if your kid is obese, you are shamed as a parent. It is totally society unacceptable. You are shunned. You're yelled at by the school. I think we need that same type of energy in America.

Children should not be fat and diabetic, period. We have totally lost our way. Right now, there's a whole TikTok craze where they're shaming doctors for weighing patients or even talking about weight. Obesity is a blaring warning sign that our cells aren't working and it is not, I do not blame the individuals. When 80% of American adults are overweight or obese, we have a systemic problem but from the culture, we shouldn't accept that. We should absolutely be declaring that we do not want to have childhood obesity or diabetes and have that culture. Additionally, in Japan and Italy and some of the European

countries, there is like total bipartisan just consensus. This sounds so obvious, but it's not the case in the US, that we shouldn't be poisoning kids. I mean, the school lunches in America are an absolute dumpster fire. And in Japan and Italy and France has mandated at daycare a four course meal, including a cheese forest. I think a cigarette and wine afterwards.

I mean, but that'd be healthier than what they serve in America. I mean, it's absolute disaster. So there isn't just this cultural thing around food. One thing I look at Europe, they spend three times less on average per capita on health care, but two times more per capita on food In Europe they do have a lot more respect for their agriculture system and their farmers and the consumption of whole food There is much lower that you know thoughts about pesticides and what's going on the food

So you always hear you go to Italy eat the pasta eat the gelato you lose weight. I pesticides and what's going on in the food. So you always hear, you go to Italy, you eat the pasta, you eat the gelato, you lose weight. I mean, that's really true. So I think what needs to happen and what I hope culturally happens with these step-by-step wins is we move culturally to a system that puts less emphasis on getting sick and then getting drugged

and more emphasis on what I really think is a spiritual issue of having more curiosity and awe about what we're putting in our body, our environment, how that impacts the soil, how that impacts the food, and then just getting back to basics on you know not poisoning kids. Is there anything that the government can do or even America could do about on the fitness side? Yeah what happened to the presidential fitness test? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a new program in. There was a new program in 2013. Because I feel like that's half of the battle here. We're addressing a lot of the diet and the food supply stuff. But fitness is extremely important.

But it's harder to incentivize or subsidize. Maybe. I don't know. What is your take on fitness? Well, I was just with Secretary Kennedy in Miami at a UFC fight. And Shaq was there and a bunch of A-list celebrities talking about how they can help encourage youth fitness and rejuvenate.

So I don't want to get in front of any announcements here. But I think that type of education and inspiration among kids for more fitness to not be... I mean, a boy in America, a teenager boy in America has less testosterone than a 68 year old man. Like there's been a depletion of testosterone among kids, obviously because of our food or sedentary lifestyle, we're soft. I mean, 77% of military aged youth cannot go in the military in America right now.

It's a national security crisis. So my one to kind of framework in my head is let's get the wins like the food dies, but you can't under count the cultural education elements to this, bringing what Justin Mares and Mark Hyman and a lot of people have been talking about this for a long time, bringing that to the forefront, these common sense solutions.

So you're gonna see a lot of initiatives. And one thing I'm excited about is when Secretary Kennedy was sworn in by President Trump, he signed an executive order. And on May 22nd, in about a month, they're releasing a 100 day report on the chronic disease crisis, why kids are getting so sick. It's gonna say things that the US government's

never said before about environmental toxins, about our water quality, about our food quality, about our sedentary lifestyle. So getting the facts down and having the conversation on a factual basis and not letting industry and I'll say this, a lot of people in industry lobby not on policies, but actually to prevent transparency about what's happening. There's pressure to not talk about pesticides. There's pressure to not talk about certain topics because it's going to scare consumers

or it's going to confuse consumers. There is a good trend right now where the government is going to talk about anything they want to, and they're going to give Americans information, not infantilize the American people as we often do. And I think that's the necessary precondition for a long-term conversation about policy change to systems that are going to bankrupt the country and cause us to cease to exist, which is I think is true given the trajectory of our healthcare budget, which will bankrupt

us and the decimation to American competitiveness when you have 50% of teens overweight or obese and 38% of teens pre-diabetic. Those kind of numbers are so shocking living in California or any, you know, if you live in California, New York, it's just, you would never believe those numbers. You have to go to places that don't, where wellness is not, you know, the number one trend. I'm curious, do you think this movement

around making America healthy would have been possible before decentralized media? It feels like we kind of needed podcasts, we needed social media, we needed people, we needed a mom, some random place to discover that when she removed red dye from her kid's food that this thing happened and then she shared it, and people start collaborating.

So I feel like a lot of this movement just would have been impossible when you only could get your news from magazines or newspapers or radios that are all captured in some way by large corporates. No, the independent media ecosystem is an absolutely necessary condition to the opportunity we have right now.

It can't be overstated how destructive it is that our core information source has been co-opted by an industry that profits from Americans being sick and that's had devastating consequences. I think what's happened with independent media is one of the major historical events in American history. Like when you read about the American Revolution, it was really propagated by the ability to easily print pamphlets and Ben Franklin and others,

getting ideas out that I've never been able to get out before in a mass way. I think this is a huge shift. I mean, since World War II, we've had a corporate owned essentially media, and now we're able, you guys and people at a microphone are able to get more distribution than CNN.

The, you know, Secretary Kennedy, you know, was called a whack job by everyone. Actually him and President Trump are the two most popular political figures in America still. He was able to get through on independent media podcasts like Joe Rogan and actually Americans, you know, determined a lot of them that he actually makes a lot of sense with what he's talking about, really about these overarching incentives of

healthcare. I can't stress that enough. There's a, there's a, in this building, in the White House, there's a, there's a shift happening where we are, of course, talking about healthcare policy, like what to do on Medicare and Medicaid, but it's more about the foundational incentives. Where, what is the logic of where the $2 trillion we spend on Medicare and Medicaid, but it's more about the foundational incentives. What is the logic of where the $2 trillion we spend on Medicare and Medicaid going? Is that straight to drugs or is it more root cause interventions? How are we incentivizing our food system? Are we really incentivizing ultra processed food for kids?

Is there enough transparency for Americans to make the best decisions? There's more foundational topics being asked and those are very disruptive topics to the legacy industry. That's all because of independent media. I'll say the independent media also rightfully has led to record distrust of our major institutions from, frankly, the education system, lots happening with Harvard right now, to the pharmaceutical industry, you know, to others. That's warranted. And one of the leverages I think there is for change is that these industries, when I meet with them,

you know, really acknowledge that they have to make some major changes, really partner, frankly, with Secretary Kennedy, you know, not to do any Secretary Kennedy or President Trump any favors, but because they actually have to make changes to maintain their legitimacy with the American people. I mean, it's, President Trump, any favors because they actually have to make changes to maintain their legitimacy with the American people. I mean, it's not working right now. I mean, some of the tech bros on Twitter are saying

how incredible, you know, recent American healthcare innovation, how it's been. I'd love to see what they're talking about. I mean, we're literally have life expects declining. You know, we spend four to five times more than other countries. Prone disease rates, every single one is at a record high this year in America,

with the highest rate of chronic disease than any country in human civilization. I don't know what they're looking at, but we're not in a good situation right now. How do you think about timelines? You're a special government employee for a limited period of time. This is obviously a monumental task.

It's not something that can be solved even in a single admin. How do you think about making sure that obviously we were headed to a really bad place from a nationwide health standpoint, from an economic standpoint due to the consequences of those health issues. But what's the strategy to make sure that this sort of movement becomes bipartisan and kind of can live on after you guys are no longer in the White House? I personally think we need to think about it as a 12-year strategy. We're not going to reorient the incentives of the largest industry in America, the fastest growing industry in America

because we're getting sick, the most employed industry in America. We're not gonna change those incentives overnight or even in the next four years. I think what we need to do, what I'm focused on, is maintain the political coalition of what you call this Maha coalition. The reason we're able to drive change

is because millions of women, quite frankly, moms voted for Trump for the first time, people who would have never considered voting for Trump years ago. This issue has galvanized voters into a coalition. President Trump was 50-50 among young people, 50-50 among independents. We couldn't have imagined that four years ago. So multiple factors for that, but clearly this ma-ha kind of energy led to that. So the reason we have an opportunity to change

is because voters have really galvanized around this issue. So to me, if we can solidify that coalition, that coalition is gonna continue to drive change. We need to deliver wins for the next two years. I mean, I'd love for Democrats to compete for those voters. They've had their head in the sand. If those voters can help Republicans, which is my hope in the midterms. I think you have 2028 where both sides are basically arguing who's more

maja, which I think is a positive thing. I think we've shifted the paradigm of health. You know, before last year, health care was about how to add more people to the existing broken system. That's insane. You had Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren just a couple months ago during the confirmation hearings with Bobby Kennedy, eviscerating him for taking on pharma companies. Elizabeth Warren actually said, you're going to hurt their profit margins, these poor companies. People have lost their minds when

it comes to healthcare, somehow arguing that more resources, more spending to this broken system is how we solve it instead of actual core reform of the system. I want to get political victories and change the overall bipartisan way we talk about health. And I will say, everyone talks about the special interests, the money. The one thing that counteracts that is voters really voting on this issue. And now you have maha moms and people waking up, caring about this issue as a voting topic. So as long as that's solidified, you'll have momentum that changes the incentives of healthcare where we can look back in 12 years and we have a thriving pharmaceutical industry, but they are incentivized to promote longevity.

They're incentivized to cure diseases, not just manage them. All pharmacists right now are managing. And, you know, we have an overall healthcare ecosystem that's more value-based, that's more geared towards keeping people healthy, which can happen. Yeah, there does feel like a way to flip the incentive where the pharmaceutical companies are like,

if we can just keep this person alive for another hundred years, imagine how much, how many drugs we can sell them. They should make a lot of money for that. Like, imagine the impact of the economy if they could do that. Like they should make a ton of money for that. And they tell you off the record, right?

They'd love to do that, but the incentives are all about disease management. So this isn't a free market right now. And there's a real opportunity to nudge these incentives to a different direction. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you for the work that you're doing and making the time.

Thanks, guys. I think you're doing very important work. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Talk to you soon, guys. Bye. Bye. Let's tell you about Public. You heard the founders on the show earlier,

but Public is investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We got some personnel news today. Jason Citron is out as CEO of Discord. He's bringing on Humam Sakhani. Sakhanini. Building Discord has been one of the most meaningful

and rewarding experiences in his life. What started as a simple idea to help friends talk while playing games has grown into something far bigger than I ever imagined. I'll be transitioning to a new member as board member and an advisor and continuing to support Discord through this next chapter. I'm incredibly proud of what we've built together

and even more excited for what's ahead. Very interesting. Very cool. Will be interesting to see if Discord gets out. At some point there's been rumors about IPO. And so, yeah, maybe this is a move to prepare for the public markets. Being a public market CEO is a different job.

And maybe Jason wants to step back. But we'd love to have him on the show, do a little gaming day, talk about everything in Discord's world. Fascinating founder, total outlier, not from the typical Silicon Valley elite pipelines, not Stanford or Harvard. Built one mobile game at some point, sold one company, ran it back,

built up Discord into a really, really powerful company. So congrats to him on the transition and good luck to the new CEO of Discord. Uh, we got some, uh, listener feedback. We got some posts about the show Midwest tech bro says after list, after switching to TBPN, I got my entire life back, no more deciding what podcast to listen to, trying to write down important points or worrying that I missed some key news today TBPN changed the way I consume media and in turn it changed my family's life. Thank you

Thank you. Thank you. Midwest tech Rory says from my wife the palace of pump has rocked our world There's more TVP news Austin Peter Smith says People will say it isn't scalable to bring on each new podcast listener via direct sales reps But here's a counterfactual I got cold emailed by a TVP and rep ended up doing six calls with them over eight weeks before Deciding to become a listener and then I went on to spend 11 million dollars on eight sleep mattresses with my tri-ramp card providing enough measurable ROI Quarter thank you, Austin sleep mattresses with my TriRAMP card providing enough measurable ROI to cover that sales rep for the quarter. Thank you Austin. Oh so good.

Patavan Goon based Alexander says you should get a notification if your tweet was featured on TBPN. Well this is your notification. You have been featured on TBPN. You're featured on TBPN. You're featured on TVPN. You're featured. Let's go. We'll be sure to go tweet this. We do want to build an automation, something around this, maybe reply to this post with this clip.

We'll figure it out. We're hiring folks every day. Just if you apply, make sure you have at least one of the following. Yeah, you have an opportunity to get into TVPN. IMO, gold medal, Telpo. We want Navy SEALs, GP at a tier 1 VC, these types of things, 10 years CUDA experience, 20 years high frequency trading

experience. If you have something like that, you might be a fit for the team. And still an opportunity to get in under 100 people. Exactly. Being in the first 100 is huge. At least if you join in the next couple of weeks. Yeah, exactly.

Janan account says, would be insane if there were one company with John Schulman, Darya, Alec Redford, Ilya, Samma, Greg, Andre Carpati, Mira, and Paul Christiano. Very, very funny. And the only person left at this company after six months is Samal. No, I think Greg's still there.

Yeah, Greg came back. But it is crazy how there's been this, there was insane concentration of talent there. And then as they transitioned out of becoming a research institute into becoming a product company, there was a turnover in the team. And people scattered to the wind to do all sorts of different projects.

But I'm excited. More competition, better products for consumer, specifically in AI. Ryan Peterson shares the Wall Street Journal talking about Flexport. It's a staggeringly tedious job that would be of little interest to anyone in normal times. Absolutely.

He called us tariff pencil pushers. So rude. Founder mode. He's in founder mode. he's getting quoted in the Wall Street Journal whenever something happens in logistics shipping he's the person that many people many people love to say that Ryan actually created global trade he did and so he gets shipping yeah Yeah, he invented the ship, basically. The ship, yes, the ship.

This post from Tyler Cosgrove, a close friend of the show. He adds the Softbank treatment to OpenAI's charge. I agree it looks much better with the unicorns galloping upwards. And so the winter projection for winter 2025 projection for open AI revenue is going from $1 billion in 2023 to $4 billion in 2024 to $13 billion in 2025 to $29 billion, then $54 billion, then $86 billion, then $125 billion.

We're going higher. It's fantastic. I mean, they're on their way. And yeah, you throw the unicorns on there, you throw the big PowerPoint arrow, and it looks a lot better. But I mean, the business is ripping. I use the product every day.

I think most people do. And so good luck to them on their path to $125 billion in revenue in 2029. Hopefully, I think that they might blow that out. Who knows? We'll be tracking it here. We'll be breaking it down. We'll be tracking polymarkets to see where their DAUs end up, or their MAUs.

Sean Frank, coming on the show tomorrow, but had a good post we wanted to highlight. He said, or a bigger third thing, trend lines don't continue forever. Hard work built this business. but had a good post we wanted to highlight, he said. Or a bigger third thing, trend lines don't continue forever. Hard work built this business. COVID scaled it for 24 months. Every single person in America suddenly loved the outdoors. They went out and bought gear to enjoy them. This is the story of solo brands.

NYSE has suspended solo brands. Are they a casualty of tariffs or mismanagement? Sean Frank's breaking it down. He says that gear had negative network effect. Every solo stove sold increases the cack of the next one because the next buyer is less incremental, less interested, taking more promos or ad impressions to buy. And instead of launching a second bigger skew, they bought non-adjacent brands. Chubbies is great, but solo stove buyers aren't guaranteed to be Chubbies customers and vice versa.

There's no flywheel, no cross-sell, no advantage. Just a hard goods company and an apparel brand trying to be managed by the same team. Yeah, I think that the idea of consumer holding companies is very appealing, but consumer products are a full contact sport. And the best companies that I'm aware of have management teams that are 110% in.

And trying to then, if you're not and you're trying to manage multiple brands while you're competing in the same categories with founder-led or just exceptional management teams. Yeah, well, happy birthday to YouTube. YouTube turned 20 yesterday, and Colin Samir remade the very first YouTube video ever there at the zoo.

And I hadn't really watched the original YouTube video. I mean, I probably watched it at some point. This is the first video ever uploaded to YouTube. Us at the zoo, Colin Samir recreated it and it's 20 21 seconds and it's kind of a funny watch if we can pull it up. Let's see. In other news, Arawan raised a $2 billion valuation. Let's go. Is this a down round? I mean, we spend. What happened? I feel like if they have just a few customers like you, they should be up at like 20, 40, 100, 200 billion. Yeah, the fact that I get to track my LTV in the app is wild. Wild.

But yeah, somebody was breaking down the math here. I don't know how accurate this is. They have 10 stores. I don't know how accurate this is. They have 10 stores. You know, I don't know. I've heard a bunch of rumors just being around LA over the years of just how much money they make. But you have to think of it as a grocery store, a high margin grocery store, which is nontraditional.

Grocery is typically low margin. They've turned grocery into a high margin grocery store, which is nontraditional. Grocery is typically low margin. They've turned grocery into a high margin business, plus adding on a high margin restaurant. Plus they sell home products and beauty products and skincare and things like that. So you can't look at it as a purely monolithic, it's not a typical grocery store. And then they also have this cafe business.

And I think when you combine all of those, they're just cash machines. Andrea here says she's been told by multiple sources that they claim to make $50 million per store. So 10 stores, that's $500 million in revenue. And they also make more money from the smoothie collabs, which is very fun. One of our goals for this year is to get a TBPN smoothie at Erewhon so if you're working hard on it give us a ring let's watch the Colin

Samir YouTube video all right so here we are in front of the elephants cool Cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say. All right, so here we are. Can you believe that? That's the first. Let's go. That was the first YouTube video.

I mean, talk about a masterpiece. A masterpiece. A masterpiece. A masterpiece. A masterpiece. Chad Hurley, the YouTube team, they threw that up. And YouTube was originally a data site. We've got to pull up one of those videos sometime,

not today, but of the early YouTube team when they're just talking. They look like they're in a dungeon, basically. They're just talking about how hard it is, how things are working, how they're in like a dungeon basically. Like they're just talking about how hard it is, how things are working, how they're not working. But they cooked. They did. Let's close out with a post from Sean Frank, who's

coming on the show tomorrow. He says he's opening a speakeasy just for Red Die 40 and microplastics. Don't let Cali Means find out about that, Sean. But I like the way you're thinking. Government can't hold you back. Poison resists. You're just going to get stronger.

It can only make you stronger, Sean. I think you're in good shape. I think you can handle all of the microplastics and the red dyes. Good luck to you, though. And we'll ask you more about it tomorrow when we see you on the show. But anyway, thank you for watching, everyone.

Thank you, folks. We will see you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Cheers.