TBPN Live - David Senra, Delian Asparouhov, Brendan Foody, Jake Adler, Apple Makes Moves, Hims & Hers

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:00) - Happy Day! (01:00) - Apple Shuffles Executives (16:40) - Apple's $1B Streaming Loss (38:24) - Metallica on Vision Pro (48:09) - Ozempic Knockoffs Ends (01:00:50) - Brendan Foody (01:17:45) - David Senra (01:48:01) - Delta V (Delian Asparouhov) (02:07:02) - Jake Adler (02:27:50) - The Timeline

You're watching TBPN live we got a happy day today it's Thursday March 20th 2025 what's that sound Jordy what's that sound? Oh! This is the energy we're bringing to the show today get ready technology needed a Greek weather show. Let's go. Fantastic. We're live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you guys today, folks. Apple is firing people. They're shuffling.

Wow. You're normally good at the transitions, John, but that was a little rough. We went from the craziest high to a very low moment. But efficiency is good. Business efficiency is good. The headline says shuffle. Shuffle. Could be shuffling out of the organization. Could be shuffling into the organization. We're going to find out because Mark Gurman has the exclusive.

Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri. Obviously, we've talked about this a lot. No one likes Siri right now, but they have a complete monopoly over the Siri button on your iPhone and no one's leaving iPhones, so they gotta get it together and figure out what product to build. Apple is undergoing a rare shakeup in its executive ranks aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles.

You know I like to track name popularity in the United States. Oh yeah, give it to me. In 2024, let's see, in... Oh, Siri, you're thinking Siri? Yeah, so the name Siri in 1973, 15 babies per million were named Siri, and that peaked in 2008, actually, at 74. So more than quadruple, and now it is back in the depths, back to actually four. Well, it makes sense to start using the name again,

because if you're bearish on Siri, the product, you think that that white space is now available for baby names. It's a good time to go long. Exactly. Expect that it'll be replaced. They'll come up with a different brand name. They'll have to refresh.

It will become the thing. Yeah, it'll just be fair. It'll be a greenfield, Blue Ocean opportunity in naming. Well, CEO Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head, John G. Andrea, to execute on product development, so he's moving over another top executive

to help Vision Pro creator, Mike Rockwell. Little controversial. Why are you laughing, Jordy? I mean, I got to put, I want to, I want Tim to take some responsibility here. He's in the arena. These guys are in the arena. They're making, they're making products. They're making products. Um, we love Apple. We want to be clear. We want, uh, if Apple's training their intelligence on this show just know that we love you. Yep. We just want you to You know reach your full potential. Yep, and I just laughed briefly because moving over the gut that the vision pro has not been Fantastic You know at least hasn't hasn't had a lot of commercial success.

It's probably a better product than Apple Intelligence. It is a magical product, but in terms of the software, the execution has been wonderful. It does make sense. It's like, hey, this guy built a magical product. Maybe the tech isn't ready yet. Let's take our- And just some fresh blood.

Just someone to come in, rethink things, try and- Just take an MVP. Yep, yep. Swap them. I mean, the Vision Pro, it was just, it executed in a very different way. It took a lot of risks. Some of those paid off, some of those didn't.

There was a world where we would have been doing the show in Vision Pros. I thought about it, actually. I was speccing out an interview show that was gonna be filmed in Apple Immersive Vision, and I was gonna interview, with like the history of VR and interview all the VR legends the John yeah max of Palmer's and stuff and and have it be only available in vision Pro But then I didn't want an audience of more than five people. So yeah pivot to X the everything app

Anyway vision procreator Mike Rockwell. He's in in the new role. He'll be in charge of Siri virtual assistant and Rockwell had reported to chiefs a software chief Craig figure Federighi Removing Siri completely from G. Andreas command Apple is poised to announce Has there been an Italian takeover Apple sounds like the Sounds like the Ferrari executives. Is that what's going on? I think you have a certain confidence around doing bad Italian accents. Terrible. Awful.

Because we have some Italian roots. Yes, of course. But it seems like there's been an Italian takeover over at Apple. Maybe. So G. Andreas. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week, but it's leaking on Bloomberg now. Somebody told German.

Yeah, Brent and Ben, you guys are swapping roles tomorrow. We were gonna tell you, but we just leaked it. Yeah, we just leaked it to Bloomberg instead. The iPhone maker senior leaders, known as the group known as the Top 100, just met at a secretive annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. I think that's a project that Steve Jobs kicked off. Yeah. Take the top 100 performers. They all get to go to this awesome

offsite hangout. Imagine you just know you're in the kind of 95 to 105 territory. It's like the waiting around to figure out going to make it. I get the invite. Did I not? Oh yeah. Trying to understand. AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit. Moves underscore the plight facing Apple. It's AI technology is severely lagging industry rivals and the company has shown little sign of catching up. The Apple intelligence platform was late to arrive

and largely a flop despite being the main selling point for iPhone 16. It's an interesting point. Does it lag Android or does it just lag the foundation model providers? Yeah, that is interesting. You don't really hear about Android being leaps and bounds ahead on the integrated AI stuff.

Certainly in- Especially because it's a- Green bubble situation? No, it's just that it's not exactly true that Google's had a fantastic rollout. Yeah, Google hasn't been executing that well either. I have seen some side-by-side comparisons of, okay, let's just zoom in on very, very micro features within the Apple intelligence ecosystem. One of those is object removal in images. So, you know, you take a picture

of this desk, you want to remove this Celsius can, you circle it. How well does Apple do that? How well does Google do that? It's a very, very narrow feature. And at least in the one post that I saw kind of comparing the two, it seemed like Apple was doing okay and Google was doing very well. And that's kind of been the case for most of these.

But still probably not enough to actually get people shift over. Anyway, a little bit of background on Rockwell. He's currently the vice president in charge of the Vision Products group, the division that developed Apple's headset. As part of the changes, he'll be leaving that team and handing the reins to Paul Mead, an executive who has run hardware engineering for the Vision Pro under Rockwell,

which is kind of interesting. It's like, are they pivoting here from metaverse to AI, which is obviously the most The biggest tectonic shift in honestly over the last few years They mark German should consult with deal on how to not get spies caught because clearly this guy's got great bugs Yeah in in the top 100 to be figuring this stuff out before they're willing to even talk about it. Yeah. The need to rescue Siri is especially urgent.

The company has struggled to release new features that were announced last June, including the ability to tap into a user's data to fulfill queries. Despite the technology not being ready, Apple advertised the enhancements for months on TV in order to sell the iPhone 16. The Apple manager who has led Siri until now told his

team in a recent meeting that the delays were ugly and that staffers may be angry and embarrassed. The executive Robbie Walker also said he was unsure when the features would actually arrive due to competing development priorities. Apple has publicly stated the features will be ready sometime in the coming year. Apple shares have declined 14% this year, part of a broader retreat in tech stocks. They fell less than 1% on Thursday. By tapping Rockwell, Apple is betting on an executive with proven technical experience. He has demonstrated the ability to ship new products and run an engineering organization with thousands of people. Rockwell has a knack for solving problems and often takes the role of evangelist for futuristic technology.

It's interesting. This sounds like an amazing LinkedIn description. I am a technology evangelist and problem solver. It's rough. It's what it takes. But I wonder if, so everyone's reading into this and seeing, OK, it seems like Apple is really feeling the heat from the Mark Gurman coverage

from the Daring Fireball from the daring fireball piece They are now taking it seriously They're making some leadership changes to try and address Apple intelligence Siri make it better make it great. Yeah, I think everyone it is it can clearly Everybody at this point is saying I enjoy the comedic relief from Apple intelligence But that doesn't make it any less embarrassing for Apple. Totally. Who does things highly intentionally with specific goals and they haven't been hitting those to date. My question is, by moving Rockwell over, is this a sign that Apple is pulling back and

less excited about Vision? I mean, that's been obvious. You think so? I think so. Because there is a world where, I mean, Zuck and Metta, they released headsets and some of the headsets didn't sell super well or had high churn and they still haven't broken through. But Zuck has just said, look, we're on this release cadence.

We're keeping it going. We're continuing to invest. Yeah, the shareholders are gonna have to deal with, what, 20 billion CapEx on Reality Labs or something like that. And I own this company, I'm in founder mode and I'm gonna make this happen. And I think everyone agrees, anyone who's read sci-fi

or like what Cyan Bannister was talking about yesterday with Snow Crash, it makes sense that at some point VR is going to be a thing. It will be solved, it's just a physics problem, it's an engineering problem, things will get there. And Mark Zuckerberg that is committed to, he knows how important it is, how much bigger a business meta can be

if they own the underlying platform. And so he's just saying, I will spend tens of billions of dollars where Apple doesn't seem to have that same, they have a willingness to spend, but less of a willingness to fail. Yep, yep. Yeah, it will be interesting.

The other interesting thing is I would love to take a peek at what's happening in the VR space over in China. Because we've seen not quite leapfrogging, but certainly a sprint to the cutting edge, especially in the hardware sector for drones. We've seen this with EVs. We've seen this with EVs. We've seen this with phones. Where is China on the adoption curve with VR?

Is there anything special going on there? Or are they just kind of copying our products and not seeing the same churn numbers? Anyway, Rockwell has been one of the few Apple executives to take a major hardware device from zero to one. He joined Apple's hardware engineering group in 2015 and the company released vision Pro in February of last year G-Andrea has a different background a former Google star. He was hired in 2018 to run Apple's AI work He's been one of Apple

Alphabet inks most senior executives overseeing the search and AI divisions Rockwell in contrast doesn't have prior experience as an AI leader or being the search and AI divisions. Rockwell, in contrast, doesn't have prior experience as an AI leader or clout with the burgeoning machine learning community. And to be honest, I think that's fine because Apple is not trying to innovate at the model layer right now. And they just need to deliver great consumer products.

Like they need a chat GPT moment in order to regain the respect. It's not, hey, you need to be innovating and pushing the boundaries and nobody's expecting them to set up their own sort of XAI Memphis data center and just go all in on training foundation models. Nobody cares about that. It's like, we're all running our lives on your devices.

You should be able to unlock the power of these technologies in a more meaningful way. I mean, I know that they want to maintain control over Siri and over the Siri button and the ecosystem, but if you look at so much of Apple's software, they were fine letting there be competition for a while and then eventually coming in with a really polished product. You think about the iPhone launched with Google Maps as a default app, and then over coming in with a really polished product. You think about the iPhone launched with Google Maps

as a default app. And then over time, they launched Apple Maps. Now Apple Maps is the default, but you can still pick your map provider. I would love to see that in the virtual assistant, Siri button. I could, you know. Makes so much sense. You can swap.

Yeah, and you can even set your default. And they still gain that leverage where they could go in five years and say, actually, if you want to, we're going to sort of limit your abilities here. You remember with maps, there was a long period of time where, maybe it's still the case, but if you were using Google maps,

it wouldn't preview on your, when you just had your phone sort of not unlocked. Yeah, Apple clearly had like more APIs. Yeah, it was just very frustrating to use Google maps because you had to open your phone every time you wanted to understand where you were. And so I just actually defaulted back to Apple Maps even though it wasn't as good.

And so they're always gonna have that leverage. And I think that it would potentially take some heat off if they were letting people be more innovative on the platform. Yeah, and yeah, I mean, I could definitely see a situation like what happened with Maps. I mean, I tried to go all in on Apple Maps and just be like, I'm not even gonna use it.

But then for searching for certain businesses, like Google Maps is still better. And then if you wanna take a really, really crazy route home and get home like two minutes earlier, but like potentially go on a dirt road, Waze is just the best for that. You know that for a while, Waze in LA is so unhinged.

Yeah, just go on and off the on-ramp like okay so you're gonna get home two minutes faster but only if you drive 60 miles an hour through this residential neighborhood this is why in LA you have to be very careful around which neighbor if you're gonna live in the actual city oh yeah you could be on the most quaint nice street and then the ways decide it like, this is the new route. And then it's just like people barreling them. A lot of neighborhoods would lobby Waze.

They would write letters and say, hey, please, hard code. Do not take the full traffic through our town. How does that work? Yeah. Probably not very well. Groose on the wheels. Anyway, Siri, the AI division's main consumer product, has had a number of bosses over the years.

When Apple first launched the voice assistant in 2011 It was overseen by Scott Vorstahl then it was given to Services chief chief Eddie Q in 2012 and transferred to Federighi in 2017 G Andrea took it over a year later now will be read led by Rockwell with oversight returning again to Federighi G Andrea will remain of the company a little bit of fake news with the firings, not happening, at least not yet. Just a mix up. Just a mix up, but certainly shuffling,

that's the term, the corporate shuffle. Even with Rockwell taking over Siri, an abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous, something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. G Andrea's other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing, and technologies related

to AI. The company has also as a team reporting, investigating robotics, they're working on robotics. Federy Rockwell's new manager is the company's senior vice president. He oversees development of iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS, operating systems, as well as development tools, along with G Andrea.

He was a key figure in the development of Apple intelligence. And so that's a little bit about the shakeup at Apple. But we'll see. Anyway, whether you think this is good for Apple or bad for Apple, you gotta get on public.com. It's investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing,

industry leading yields, they're trusted by millions, go to public.com to sign up. The absolute best. Stocks are low key a prediction market for the financial, the future financial performance of the most fantastic companies in the world. Yeah, sure. We had Joe on.

He said treasuries are basically their own prediction market. It's a prediction market for the discounted, for the present value of all future cash flows, right? Yeah, yeah something like that. Yeah That's what we need speaking of Apple Apple streaming is losing over a billion dollars a year Apple TV is the only money loser in Apple's broad portfolio of services

Which is why its executives have started taking a closer look at its costs I wonder if they're on ramp yet if they're not that would just be silly you know that's the sponsor I had lined up I'm pretty sure anyway so last year Apple CEO Tim Cook had questions about several pricey movie deals executives of Apple TV plus the company's video streaming service had been striking including for Argyle, a spy action comedy starring Henry Cavill and Dua Lipa, quite the star-studded lineup. The movie, which cost $200 million to produce, hadn't found much of an audience or generated more subscribers for the service, Cook told his colleagues,

according to a former Apple TV Plus employee. He's like, what kind of value are we getting here? He's probably a big Dua Lipa fan, but not enough of a fan, clearly, to just be down to burn $200 million for not a lot of impact. I didn't even know this movie released. Did you?

There was a rumor, yeah, I did, and I saw some news about it. I think there was a rumor that Taylor Swift wrote it or something like that. I don't remember. It's funny it. I think there was a rumor that like Taylor Swift wrote it or something like that. I don't remember. It's funny that they don't send you a push notification to your phone marketing these films that they spend $200 million on.

It's crazy, they're not more annoying. That would be terrible. No, it would, but you remember when they just put the U2 album? The U2 album, yeah. Yeah, you should just open your phone and it just starts playing the movie. I guess people didn't like that.

It should just know that, hey, you should just open your eyes starts playing. I guess people didn't people didn't like that And so no it should just know that hey, you're bored right now Stop stop scrolling tick tock and just flip over to this movie. You got it installed It is I I feel like I wonder I wonder if cook is actually into Argyle and liked it and then he greenlit it because we've seen examples of that like Bezos is always like green lighting these cool sci-fi things. And I love it. I'm like, this is awesome.

He bought the Expanse from sci-fi network and the Expanse was amazing show, amazing book series. You should definitely go check it out. But it was like pretty under funded at sci-fi network. And he just put like Game of Thrones money behind it, basically. And then it got canceled after like six seasons because it was like Too niche and weird, but it's a fantastic show

We saw he did that was it three body problem. It Amazon that did the Melania Trump. Oh, really? Oh, yeah Yeah, yeah, that was a little different $40 million. I don't think that was because he thought it was like a great foundational piece of cinema, but You never know you never don't get the pitch. Yeah Yeah, yeah You know Netflix piece of cinema, but you never know. You never get the pitch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Netflix, uh, has the stomach to burn cash on these kinds of things. And again, this is Apple's not focused on innovation and risk right now.

Yeah. Right. So they have 70, they have 45 million subscribers for Apple TV Plus. Also, terrible naming convention. You're probably subscribed right now, even if you don't. That's just every now and then they just charge your card. Every few days they just hit you with like a 10 or $15 charge. And they're just like, ah, they're not gonna.

Because there's the Apple TV, the device. There's the Apple TV app on Apple TV devices, and then there's Apple TV Plus, which is a subscription service that you access through the app on the device. That's right. But then you can also get them through, there's the dedicated Samsung.

You can watch Apple TV Plus on Samsung stuff? I think so. Okay, that's weird. Anyway, Apple shows no sign that it's getting totally wrong about the streaming media Yeah, you can you can watch Apple TV on Samsung smart TV by some measures The company has found success with Apple TV plus the service currently has one of the busiest shows in television Severance and in 2022 it won a best picture Oscar at the Academy Awards for For Coden. Tim's got to understand to get a severance, you got to have a couple of dogs.

Yes, you got to play the slot game. He needs to act like a gross stage VC, where yeah, you're going to have some misses, but you just need those, you need at least one severance a year, and you're pretty good. Yeah, I mean, a couple of years ago, I was talking to Christopher Nolan's brother, Jonah Nolan, who did Westworld and had worked very closely with HBO

and he was saying that one of the things that Apple might run into with Apple TV was this idea that Apple has such a premier brand, everything has to be so polished. We've seen this with like the ads that they run and the apps that they put out, that Hollywood is more random. There's just a lot more risk that you need to take

and you're gonna get flops. And to run a high performing movie studio, it's almost like a venture portfolio. Exactly. Where you're gonna have a huge power law winner that's the next Star Wars, but you're gonna have a lot of dogs that get forgotten and that doesn't matter But if you're Apple and you think that the dogs are gonna tarnish your brand you're going to be

Much less risk on and you're going to be much more like heads will roll when something like Argyle doesn't rip Yeah, when when really that's part of the game if you're in Hollywood And so always he was highlighting this like culture, this cultural problem. Meanwhile, HBO is going crazy. The comps of true growth equity is so real. Totally. The challenge is just you're investing basically with the deck and a team. Yeah.

So it's like a, it's a pre-seed, you know, sort of traction, growth stage investment. That means you're going to have these huge outliers and you're going to have some So it's like a it's a pre seed, you know, sort of traction. Gross stage investment. That means you're gonna have these huge outliers and you're gonna have some real misses. And you gotta build a model that works for that. Let's talk about the audience. Give some people some background here. The Apple TV audience remains relatively small.

Media measurement firm Nielsen regularly reports that Apple TV plus comprises less than 1% of total viewing each month of streaming services on Connected televisions in the US by contrast Netflix and Amazon represented 8.2 and 3.5 percent of total viewing Amazon Netflix up at 8.2 percent eight times the size of Apple TV plus They only offer a fraction of the content available. So what is, I wonder if this data tracks YouTube because I imagine that they would be the double digits.

Like linear TV too. Yeah, but this says streaming services for connected televisions. So would that count ESPN on a must? I guess, yeah. Yeah, Peacock, I don't know. I mean, there is a huge value for free content. Like you forget that like a huge selection,

huge swath of the, of the populace is just so price sensitive that even a few dollars a month is just, ah, I'll just watch the free version with ads. And that's why a lot of these streaming services have been offering easier ways to get in at lower prices. That's what Netflix did with their ads plan. That's what Amazon has done by bundling it with Prime. But Apple TV Plus, they give you these benefits.

They give you these little handouts when you buy a new phone, hey, get three months free. But it's not quite the same as, hey, you can get into this ecosystem regardless of what hardware you have for $5 a month with its ads supported. Because again, that erodes the brand. It feels weird to be watching some prestigious severance level Academy Award nominated film on Apple TV Plus and then just see an ad

for beer or something, I don't know. It's funny watching. Do you get ads before White Lotus? No. I'm on the, I must have at some point signed up for the HBO Max plan That's like really down in the market right now premium. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is tech sell-off I was gig along. Yeah Apple sold off by 14% this year. Yeah Subscription by $5 a month

I'm somehow on the the premium whatever plan is like, you know, this is ad free content after this message. It gives you like 90 seconds of that. Well I do see, I often will see, it's like an ad for another show on Apple TV, they throw one of those in, but I find those actually pretty valuable. This is an ad for Founders Podcast.

Exactly, before you tune into TBPN, those actually pretty valuable. This is an ad for Founders Podcast. Exactly. Before you tune into TBPN, check out Founders Podcast. We're actually having David Sedner on the show today. So stay tuned. Our number one brother. Anyway, let's continue here. Apple has a reputation of being a disruptor with its hardware and app store,

but I didn't see the core value here, says Horace Dedue, a founder of a market analysis firm as Simcoe. Picking winners and losers is not what the company's known for. This is what we were getting at. Apple's overall corporate profits are so vast, it reported 93.7 billion in net income in its last fiscal year that it can easily absorb

the losses from its streaming service, and I think it should. You were joking about them buying an F1 team. I think they should be investing in this content. It's more how do you get even more aggressive and just eat Netflix alive? Exactly. Wouldn't that be the strategy?

I think. If you wanted just, there's a lot of money sloshing around the system, right? You can't go and overpay by 2x for every piece of content, probably. But you could maybe do that for long enough to get people to start churning from other services. And who knows?

Or it'd be interesting to think about Apple being the final boss and trying to pursue a bundling strategy and just say like, hey, we are actually gonna just tax this like we tax everything else. Yep. So I think there's two lenses to analyze this through. One is what I think would be cool, which is,

I think it'd be cool if a company that's throwing off $100 billion just poured billions of dollars into creating the most beautiful and cinematic and powerful stories in the world. And we're just a patron of the arts. I think that that's really cool. And I think that when you think about the, the, the mega billionaires of previous eras, they gave us museums,

they gave us libraries, they gave us art. And I think that there's something awesome about that. Now flip it around and think about like as a shareholder, maybe the optimal thing is truly just, hey, you're not good at this, this isn't your core business, get out of it, tax everything out, else, figure out how to take a dollar for every time Netflix sells. Or to me, and I'm sure there's a reason for this,

but the inspired strategy is to build the best television and then tax every single streaming service that runs on it and just take a bunch of revenue and that's you I always was shocked that they didn't that they that they went with like the smart TV device that makes your TV An Apple TV. Yep versus just making the most beautiful TV because I think that there's Everybody that owns an Apple computer would buy that totally even a lot of people that are everybody that owns an Apple computer would buy that. Even a lot of people that are ThinkPad, Chads, would still opt for the Apple TV in their home.

One of the most frustrating things for me with modern TVs is just the software, the hardware. It feels like slop. I happen to have Samsung TVs all over my house and the software's so buggy and so slow. And I just don't even end up wanting to turn on the TV because it's just like, okay, I've gotta like click around and... My whole hack was I get a TV that was as dumb as possible

but had this technology called HDMI CEC, which is like, it controls the TV through the HDMI. And so if you hook up an Apple TV to that, you can just use the Apple TV remote, you push it on the TV, it actually turns on the TV and controls the TV. And then you can use the Apple TV remote as the volume button as well. Because the Apple TV remote is good. It's just crazy to think that Apple could easily have a TV business that was significantly bigger than AirPods.

I agree. I asked Ben Thompson this and I was unsatisfied with the answer. What was it? I asked him, why don't they make a $5,000 display, the Apple Pro Display XDR? Make me a $10,000. Designers pay for that. They love it. Yeah, make me a $20,000.

We have multiple of them here. I have it at home, too. And I think there were a few things that went in there where the market is moving so quickly I think there were a few things that went in there where, the market is moving so quickly that the install rate is odd. And there's something about the price per inch of TVs and HD is declining so quickly that you pay $20. But Apple is a luxury brand. I know, I know.

And having an Apple TV on the wall would be iconic, and I think it would sell very well. I would love it. And the integration would be fantastic, and you could imagine it working very, very well. But you gotta stay focused at some point. Yeah, there's probably a startup opportunity to just build the most beautiful TV.

If Pebble's saying, we're gonna make a smart watch again, you can go build a TV. It is like the most deeply competitive market and a lot of the buyers are just like purely fixated on price to value and don't care about design. The other thing is that I think if they're really, really looking forward to the future, you put on the app. It's VR.

And you put on the Apple Vision Pro and there's a lot of apps that don't work and the dinosaur thing is like two minutes long and like talking to your friends. All that stuff is like crazy future. But just putting on the Apple Vision Pro and watching a movie is a fantastic experience and it feels like having a private movie theater.

And if they just make it lighter and a little bit more comfortable, the visuals were there, the pixel density was there, the price point doesn't matter, I think, for the Apple consumer. I think five grand for something that's actually light and comfortable and you can put on every night

to watch a fantastic movie in a movie theater and you can have someone for your whole family. I think that will sell very well if they really focus the software and the strategy on that. And I mean, that was one of the best parts about the Apple Vision Pro was that the app that was in the top left corner, the one that they want you to click on the most, was just the Apple TV store where you could just buy movies. And you could go there and immediately with a couple clicks, pay a couple bucks and be watching Avatar in 3D

in a theater and it was a magical experience. It was great. Just a lot of other problems with that thing. But I think that that's where they're gonna bet and that's where they're gonna invest and they're just gonna skip over the wall-mounted TV entirely. Anyway, if you don't wanna watch Apple TV,

maybe you should buy a watch on Bezel. Go to get get bezel.com they have over 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by Bezos team of experts one thing they don't have on bezel what Apple watches they just don't make a state some reason let people know that you care about craftsmanship I guess they I think they have a case for a certain app. No, no, they don't. They have some watches.

Anyways, absolutely no watches on the platform, but if you're listening to this, you owe yourself a little treat and go get yourself a watch on bezel. You can always find a reason. There's always a bull market somewhere, there's always a bull market somewhere There's always a bull market somewhere. Let's stay with the vision Pro Apple released a new piece of immersive content a Metallica concert and it was

absolutely panned by Ted Thompson a scathing review and He makes a very clear argument before we anyway before we drag this through the mud I just want to go out and say that Metallica is awesome and it was a core part of my childhood. That's it's so funny I love metal never really got into Metallica. Yeah, what were you and more like slipknot? Yeah, yeah, I was never a slipknot guy. Yeah, but never big into that world. Yeah. Yeah Even like Iron Maiden better for me than yeah, Talaka. don't know why. I think you know what it was? I think I got turned off because I grew up in the Napster era and Metallica was very hostile to piracy and a lot of my

generation was very into the Napster, the Kazaa, downloading stuff illegally, the precursors to Spotify and Metallica left a bad taste in everyone's mouth by being so Prosecutorial yeah doing lawfare really yeah us us hackers on the internet And so I was like you know what I'm not gonna I'm not gonna give you a chance Metallica But they're back and they're partnering with Apple and they launched a new immersive concert experience It's coming to Apple vision Pro this Friday Filmed in Mexico City during a sold-out second year finale of the band's world tour it experience. It's possible with Apple Vision Pro. And so Ben Thompson kind of hated this.

And the reason is that it is not immersive because they cut it like a documentary and they keep cutting from one camera to the next. And every time they cut, it feels like, okay, I'm not just sitting there. You would almost want a drone that's just flying around the event. Even flying around is gonna be a little bit jarring.

Really, all you need, this is Ben Thompson's thing, is like, just take the immersive rig, put it courtside at the Laker game or the basketball game or whatever that UFC thing you keep talking about is. It would be so, yeah, the octagon. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, but it is so funny. And then you just look around. And if you want to look at the scoreboard, you look up at the scoreboard.

And if you wanna look at the one team you look at and you turn your head, and that's great. Think about if Apple, I love that from a go-to-market just strategy, hey, we're gonna create this Apple like orb thing that just goes and we're gonna put it in prominent, we're gonna put it at the US Open, we're gonna put it at the Super Bowl.

We're gonna put it at all these places, we're gonna get the partnerships that allow us to do that. We're gonna put you right next to the ring in UFC and we're gonna put the partnerships that allow us to do that We're gonna put you you know right next to the ring and UFC Yeah, and we're gonna put you on the track at f1. Yep, and I think people would buy The Apple vision Pro just feel the teleport into these crazy cool locations And then yeah, if you want to do the cut down version you can do that. That's just repurposing This is just like your short form thing But give the fans the full experience as they want it. If WorldCoin can scan millions of

eyeballs all over the world you can drop immersive video rigs and at the Lakers game and they clearly have the money to go pay for those rights and and it's super complimentary and you could even upsell them like I would imagine that you know you could you could charge someone, I mean, $100 for a fully immersive live stream. It's like pay-per-view, but just in VR. But for some reason, they're not doing it. It's very unclear and Ben Thompson doesn't like it at all. They also did this with soccer. So when they first demoed the Vision Pro, they brought in all the reporters.

Ben Thompson was among them. And they said, put on the headset, and we're gonna show you this like reel of all the things that you'll be able to do with this headset. And one of them was a basketball game, and Ben Thompson's a huge basketball fan. And he's just sitting there courtside

for like a couple seconds. And he was like, this was my like epiphany moment where I realized that I would watch an entire game here because you don't need any graphical overlays. The production is actually easier because you can just hear the sound in the stadium. If you wanna look at the scoreboard, you just look up at the scoreboard.

It's a fantastic experience. And yet they just never did. Maybe you could get the audio, you don't need the actual commentator track. You just need the what's happening. You need the feeling of being in the stadium. People pay for court side seats and they don't need anything else.

They're not saying like, oh, like I wanna be over there. I just wanna sit here. I would wanna Apple VR into that Greek weather report and just get immersed in the moment. Yeah, and so he breaks down another Apple immersive video that they released, the ML season in review. And so instead of just saying, hey, the season's over, you can go watch the full game,

they released a five minute video with 54 distinct shots. It's one cut every six seconds. There's not that much game play, only two minutes and 32 seconds of game play. Worse, some of the cuts happen in the same highlight. There was one play where there was a sideline view of the ball being passed up the field, and then it switched to a behind the goal view for the goal.

I actually missed the goal the first time because I was so discombobulated that it took a few seconds to even figure out where the ball was. And this is like a classic problem in VR. When you're teleporting around, it's really jarring. Even if you don't get motion sick, it's just you have to reestablish yourself because you're teleporting around, it's really jarring, even if you don't get motion sick, it's just, you have to reestablish yourself because you're so immersed.

Wyatt in the chat right now just had a good idea, imagine being in Apple VR and watching Tracy Morgan throw up on the court. On the court. And you could have the perspective of the court and just watch. He's fantastic. Yeah, or you look over and, hey, it's Bill Gurley right there.

Hey. Gurley. What's up, Bill Gurley? Gurley. That's something you'd pay a paper of easy for. Somebody was messaging me on X. Will Quist over at Slow says, by the way, the dude Gurley was sitting with was Bob Kegel, one

of the benchmark founders who was on the eBay board, which is a top 25 legendary venture deal. And he's a Warriors co-owner. So we gave Gurley all the credit. Yeah, I think Gurley replied to that post. It was like, yeah, it was actually, the owner was right there. Like you probably should have clocked him, you idiots.

It was a lot of fun. Well, Ben Thompson goes back in time and talks about Ping. Do you remember Ping at all? This was kind of interesting. It's a social network for music. This was in 2010? Yeah, you weren't born yet, but I thought you might have seen it in your tech history book in middle school or something.

Yeah, yeah, one of those textbooks. Yeah. So this launched in 2010, and the idea was, uh, ping lets you follow your favorite artists such as Lady Gaga, Coldplay, YouTube, Jack, Jack, Jack Johnson, Yo-Yo Ma and more to find out what they're up to. Check out photos and videos they've posted, see their tour dates and read comments about other artists and albums that they're listening to. Spotify has since integrated all of this.

You go to an artist page, you can see their tour dates, you can see their bios, all this stuff, but Apple thought that this would be big for iTunes. Yeah, and they just released a new feature, I think today. I saw Daniel, which one? Oh, Spotify. I'll close in about it around, specifically around this. Well, Ben Thompson says,

Ping is an old standby when it comes to making jokes about past Apple failures, but that last paragraph actually helps explain why Ping never had a chance. And in the press release, it closes with this very boilerplate PR thing. Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with iOS X, OS X, OS X, iLife, iWork,

and professional software, blah, blah, blah, blah. When you think of Apple, you think about their jewel-like devices, about the integration of hardware and software, Joni Ive in a white room, etc. Indeed, you think about the magic of putting on the Apple Vision Pro and having your eyes seamlessly tracked as you touch your fingers together to enter your passcode. All of this is basically the exact opposite of the reality of social media and user-generated

content. I wrote this about Quibi's failure is the same thing. So it all relates. It's the same thing with these, like when things get messy and user generated and AI generated and hallucinatory, Apple struggles. But when it's a super, super tightly integrated, polished product of aluminum and steel and titanium, Apple

wins. And so the thing that we want is stick to- Speaking of stainless steel. Yeah. Go to Aurora. Check it out. I mean, the thing that we want is Apple to do what they're really good at and let other companies that are better do what they're best at, but that's not the nature of monopoly. They have control. And so if they can get 10 times as much value with a product that's half as good, that's a trade they take all day. I was listening to a, a, a, a film critic talk about kind of gripe about the fact that films are no longer released in theaters. And he was saying like, I think that there should be a rule

that if you release a film, you have to have it in theaters for six weeks. And because a lot of Netflix and Apple, like they're no longer even doing theatrical runs, it's on streaming the next week, or it just goes straight to streaming. And the filmmakers sometimes get upset about this and the fans sometimes get upset about this. But I was thinking about it, I was like, that's kind of like an authoritarian thing. Like that might not be what's best for shareholders. Like, sure, you can want that. But if the market doesn't want that, you're kind of just saying, like, I want to force you to do something that's uneconomical. It's just like a tax basically. And it's kind of the same thing here where, you know, I want Apple to open up Siri or I want Apple

to invest billions of dollars in amazing films that probably lose the money or, or I want Apple to invest billions of dollars in amazing films that probably lose the money or I want them to ditch their current AppleVision Pro strategy. But F1 team. Yeah. Just broadcast F1. Buy an F1 team and just let me just sit in the paddock all race long. They could genuinely buy an F1 team and let you be in the car for the entire race via AppleVision Pro exclusively. Yes, they could. But is that in their business plan? buy and have one team and let you be in the car for the entire race via Apple.

It would be incredible. Exclusively. Yes, they could. But is that in their business plan? Who knows? Is that what profit maximizes for them? I don't know. Yeah.

And so that's the question. I mean, it's just, it is so funny to think we're gonna do this concert. We're gonna do, we're gonna make this big deal about a Metallica concert, a band that I hadn't heard about in five years, even though When Apple was at its best I was intimate. I was like listening to Metallica as a kid

Yeah, and so it's just not the music partnership that you would do if you were building for the next generation one one of the things I did love about the Apple vision Pro was was using it in bed right before I'd go to sleep I'd be able to put it on and then there would be no light if you turn on TV It's gonna disturb your wife or whoever is in the bed with you but if you have an Apple vision prod you can actually just lay back and Watch an amazing, you know, I max quality film The problem was is that the software is so bad that it would freak out and say I can't track because I

The lights aren't on so then I had to use it with the lights on which we had no sense And it was just very janky so I returned it But if you're looking to upgrade your bed you got to go to eight sleep comm nights of fuel your best days turning people Are calling it these smart? Apple of smart beds. Yeah, many people have said that. So go to eight sleep.com slash TBPN and get $350 off your pod. It's a fantastic. I put up 100 last night. Put up 100. You see you didn't tell me you're you're I took it very seriously when I got the worst night sleep of the last year on Monday. 84 not enough six hours and 38 minutes. I need to step it

up. Routine was a little bit rough too. Anyway, I got over two hours and 38 minutes. I need to step it up routine was a little bit rough, too Anyway, I got over two hours of deep sleep who's doing that? You know who's sleeping pretty well these days Masayoshi saw of course soft bang bought chip designer ampere computing for six point five billion dollars ampere will remain retain its name and operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank. And so this is an interesting deal. They just inked the deal that's just broke recently. It's a series of investments to advance its artificial intelligence initiatives. And this is one of those deals that you don't hear about as much because it doesn't have

the crazy PowerPoint. It's not this high flying thing. But this is like, you know, when Masa went and bought Arm, you know, it was kind of a boring deal. And so people weren't like, oh, top on Arm, and of course Arm did really well. Early and right. Yeah, early and right.

This is kind of where I disagree with Sam less than a little bit. It's like, yes, he does get over his skis a lot, but also he does go back to the- But skiing is awesome. Skiing is awesome, Sam. The Japanese technology investment company's purchase of Ampere will help improve its AI capabilities.

The deal comes as SoftBank is starting a giant data center project in the US. How much is SoftBank spending on OpenAI agents this year? They want to spend $3 billion this year just on OpenAI, which is amazing. And so Ampere designs. They're saying it's one of the best SaaS deals of all time. It's really remarkable. I wonder if agents had anything to do with this deal. Maybe they used Hebia to get in the data room,

crunch some numbers. That's right. Maybe they used deep research. We'll have to get Masa on and ask him about how he's using agents to speed up his multi-billion dollar acquisition process. But in this case, Ampere designs energy efficient processors for cloud and AI computing

and has about 1,000 skilled chip engineers. Ampere's expertise in developing chips can compliment the design strengths of Arm Holdings. So they're kind of like creating this Kei-Retsu, which we love. We love. Love a Kei-Retsu. Buoyed by a rush of AI chip buying, So they're kind of like creating this caretzu which we love we love love a caretzu Buied by a rush of AI chip buying arm in February reported record quarterly sales for the three months ended We should help facilitate a gondo caretzu. They really should We're already doing it between all of our sponsors

Simon's investing in all the different some of our sponsors all of our sponsors are now on ramp all the founders are wearing Watches from bezel sleeping right? Quick it's great there Some of our sponsors, all of our sponsors are now on ramp. All the founders are wearing watches from Bezel, sleeping on eight sleeves. They're running ads on AdQuick. It's great. Their personal portfolios are on public. It's great. It's beautiful.

If you join the TBPN sponsorship, K-Retsu, everybody's going to be... Everyone benefits. Yep. Yeah. Positive sum games. Masayoshi Sun said that realizing AI that surpasses human capabilities requires breakthrough in a breakthrough in computing power,

amperes, expertise in semiconductors and high performance computing will help accelerate this vision and deepens our commitment to AI and innovation in the US. I really just wanna know how this deal got done. I imagine it was Masa writing on a napkin. He probably has specially designed napkins that have space for two different sick blocks

and signatures. And it's like a mini Excel model. I think it might have been maybe a little bit more boring. I mean, look at who owned Ampere at the time. It was Carlisle group in Oracle Carlisle owned 60 percent crazy because I'm 32 percent VCs typically when softbank invests would love to be able to Sell yep usually Doesn't not really able to exit. It's PE but it's this time around

Softbank is borrowing from Mizuho Bank to finance the deal over the past few years. Ampere purchased operating losses as its revenue dropped and its liabilities exceeded its assets. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the later half of the year, subject to customary closing considerations. I love Masa.

Levering up to buy an asset that's losing money. Well, it doesn't have to lose money because I was thinking about this. Like the real bull case is that Ampere gets on ramp because time is money and they could say both. Exactly, so you think about the Ampere team. If they had easy use corporate cards, great bill payments, accounting,

and a whole lot more all in one place, that could really drive the accretion of that deal. Yeah, it's very possible that Masa's running a ramp oriented M&A strategy where it just looks at all these businesses. Hey, I know you're losing $2 billion a year. Yeah. I have a great fix. I think we're going to see more of this.

We can see a lot of AMEX even. We do a roll up and we drop AI on top. We do a roll up and we drop ramp on top. It's the same idea. Anyway, go to ramp.com. Sprinkle a little bit of ramp in your next acquisition. We got big news in the world of Ozempic. Sale of Ozempic knockoffs is supposed to end soon.

Telehealth companies aren't happy. We've covered this on the show before. Fascinating industry. Obviously, the creators of Ozempic are printing, but also the telehealth companies that have been selling Ozempic and compounded versions of Ozempic are printing, but also the telehealth companies that have been selling Ozempic and compounded versions of Ozempic, which are manufactured independently, have also been doing quite well. And so pharmaceutical giants are squaring off against telehealth companies and pharmacies

selling custom-made versions of the hot medicines. Today was supposed to mark the beginning of the end for a chapter, knockoff versions of hot weight loss drugs. The FDA wants bulk production of the copycats to stop, starting Wednesday for pharmacy-prepared versions of ZepBound and later in the spring for knockoffs of Ozempic and Wigubi. But telehealth companies and pharmacies have fueled wide use of copycats. They have other plans. Telehealth platform Hims and Hers Health says

it will keep offering pharmacy-made or compounded versions of Ozempic and Wagoovy tweaked to individual prescriptions. And some of the pharmacies making GLP-1 drug copycats will continue, according to people familiar with the industry. The firms are seeking to take advantage of current law, which allows compounding pharmacies to make special individualized versions of the drugs

that aren't available commercially. And so what happened here was that Ozempic became so popular in America that they could not supply the market. And for most things, like when the iPhone dropped, the iPhone was extremely popular and it would sell out, there'd be lines out the door. And so for years, Apple hit their earnings perfectly. And it was amazing. It was an amazing stock

because they knew we're going to sell every iPhone we make. And so how many iPhones can we make? How many can we make? If we can make 5 million iPhones, we're going to sell 5 million iPhones. And so they hit their earnings every single quarter and it was great. Then now we're in the era of abundance of iPhones essentially. And now it's much harder to predict how many Apple vision pros will sell, how many new iPhones will sell because the demand is much more sticky or loose and iPhone production is essentially unlimited at this point. Drugs are different. Drugs, you know, you could say whatever you want about a Zempik, but abstracted away to the classic like cancer drug, insulin, these drugs, when they're approved,

the FDA is saying like, these are important. These help people solve health problems. And so it is critical that these, if doctors are prescribing them, they need to be available. And yes, we respect your intellectual property. We are granting you a monopoly on your patent for a certain amount of years. But if you can't supply the market, we are going to invalidate your IP temporarily while you're out of stock and say, Hey, there's a supply shortage. Anyone can make these, including the compounding pharmacies. But as soon as the big companies side hustle, last last year. Yeah, great. Yeah, seriously.

If you were in high school, buy the compounds online, compound them in your garage, go door to door, pay for your college. And so Ozempic and Wigubi are a little bit different, but the general scientific consensus is that obesity causes tons of diseases and losing weight causes you to live a lot longer. So these are important medicines. And so if Novo Nordisk couldn't supply the market, then it was OK for compounding pharmacies to make their own and sell them.

And of course, HIMS and HERS, Large Telehealth Public Company, was able to use that compounding pharmacy. I don't even know if you'd call it a loophole. It's more just like a rule by the FDA, they were able to use that to sell a lot of this product and it really benefited the stock. But of course, Novo was eventually going to catch up and that's exactly what happened.

And at the beginning of this year, Hims and Hers Health went on a generational run. They did. They had really struggled after they went public. I think it was a couple of years ago at this point. Many people were writing them off completely. It was a SPAC, I believe, and then they dropped, like most SPACs, but never went down 99%

or anything like that. Yeah. And people have critiqued their business for a bunch of different reasons, but ultimately consumers like to be able to buy their medicine easily and directly online. And so they peaked on February 18th, just about a month ago at 15 billion,

and then they've dropped almost 50% since then. So it's seven and a half now. Yeah. Yeah, and there's kind of a question about like, what's the next act? They clearly have a lot of customers. They have a lot of people on the platform. I think they even have a lot of subscriptions.

And they still sell a lot of haircare drugs and ED medications. They're basically saying, we are going to keep selling these drugs. But they want to find it. Because it's this interesting balance, right? Because it is this sort of tough position to be in where they're saying, we can make hundreds of millions

or potentially billions of dollars in revenue from selling these drugs. Even if we're very clearly proven to be in the wrong, the settlement to Eli Lilly and Nova Nordisk would probably be in the nine figures, but maybe not. Maybe it's worth it. Maybe it's worth it potentially. These are high-margin products, I mean, just legally,

no one's ever done compounding pharmacies at this scale. The law might not be written in a way that makes this illegal. Like, it's an open question. There are lots of pundits and people that have been saying, hey, this can't last or this can't happen. But you don't really know until you run through the legal process fully

and look at what all the judges and what all the presidents say. Yeah, I mean, hims and hers and these other players can go to Washington. They are doing this. They have two different lobbying firms that they just hired in January. I'm sure they had others historically.

And they can say, hey, obesity is the biggest health problem in America. The best way to help Americans is introduce a massive amount of competition. We're not trying to lobby to say we're not gonna let, it's just saying consumers should have choice, they should be able to buy these, but it will set a crazy precedent around

just IP laws in America, which is the biggest pharmaceutical market in the world right don't we spend more the people effect check me if I'm incorrect there but I believe we spend more money on pharmaceuticals than any other kind of pressure yeah the firms are seeking to take advantage of current law which allows compounding pharmacies to make special individualized versions of drugs that aren't available commercially telehealth firms and pharmacies we yet we account for nearly half of global pharmaceutical let's go and what was Jensen Wong was saying we need a hundred X that or he was talking about AI production spend but. Yeah, yeah, Andrew from him saying,

we need 100x per capita spending on my compounded drugs. I mean, the crazy thing is that everyone was projecting, I mean, runaway takeoff of these drugs, and obesity rates do seem to be coming down, but it's not this fast takeoff like we hear, like we hear in AI. These drugs take a long time to work through the system. They're expensive. They really are.

And a lot of people are skeptical about them and they want, they don't want to be the first person to take them. They want to say, okay, yeah, sure. The FDA has approved them, but maybe I'll wait a couple of years, even if I am obese, I'll wait a couple of years and see where does this shake out? Are there some unknown complications?

What are the bro scientists saying about it? Yeah, we really gotta wait till Joe Rogan chimes in here to really form an opinion. You gotta trust the bro science on this one, for sure. The brother scientists. For sure. The FDA deadlines come after the agency declared the official end of obesity drug shortages

that allowed compounding pharmacies to make copies of the drugs in bulk. The shortages have led to a fierce fight in the courts on airwaves and around Washington with the pharmaceutical heavyweights, Eli Livy and Novo Nordisk that sell branded drugs. And there was actually a Super Bowl ad from him that was framing them as a challenger to the entrenched incumbents, the large pharmaceutical companies that are raising prices, decreasing demand, monopolizing these important drugs in their view. Telehealth companies often sold the compounded drugs at $100 to $300 a month, well below the $1,000 a

month price tags of the branded medicines. And so yeah, I mean for a lot of Americans, even if they're obese, I mean, for a lot of Americans, even if they're obese, a thousand bucks is a lot. And even though, you know, you could say that the benefit of not being obese is very high, a thousand bucks to a thousand bucks, and not everyone has that, unfortunately. Anyway, let's move on to Wander.

I was really thinking, how do we get a coogan transition into this next sponsor? And I and I tried to do the work for you couldn't come up with anything But we do have a good way to transition and that is Find your happy place find your happy place Look a wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge services, vacation home, but better folks. Go to wander.com. Go to wander.com slash TBPN. Use code TBPN and you'll win.

I was really excited. So Kyle, who's the CMO over at Wander, he posted this incredible house. And it happens to be like a quarter mile from my house in Malibu. So I hit him up, and I said, hey, let's do it. Can we get some early access to that spot? So we're working on that.

Very excited. Can't wait. And yeah, can't wait to get over there. Yeah. Well, let's move on to, oh, we only have four minutes. Let's just do some timeline, folks. We've got to do some timeline. Let's go to Zabi Elmgren.

She says, we'll lead your series A if you can hang. Let's go to Zabi Elmgren. She says, we'll lead your series A if you can hang. And it's- I just, I saw this earlier. I thought it was fantastic. I would like to make this the new kind of like Y Combinator. Basically Zabi takes you down the most aggressive,

gnarly run. And then afterward there's like VCs at the bottom that you can pitch to. Yeah, it's afterward there's like VCs at the bottom that you can pitch to yeah It's kind of like Keith or voices like you shouldn't hire anyone over 30 VC you shouldn't fund anyone if they're skiing less than 30 degree inclines Yeah, something like that and to be clear something about Skiing when you take a picture of a cliff like this. It doesn't necessarily look super significant Yeah, but that is a serious drop.

Yeah. And she really is going full send. Next time Zobby posts the video, we'd love to see the entire run. Let's go to the next post. Let's go to Kirsten Green over at Forerunner. She says, today we're sharing our annual consumer trend report, our primary research and analysis

on where consumers are at and what trends are driving new needs, priorities, and business opportunities. We focus on three key forces, health and wellness, generative AI, and personal security. Interesting. So you wanna have that on the show. Yeah, I had a friend reach out to her this morning about coming on the show.

I think it'd be awesome. I always love these trend reports. They put them out pretty frequently. I'm trying to find it. I can't find it on forerunner.com. Well, she says, this past year was marked by contradictions. Yo-yoing in consumer sentiment and markets,

explosive new tech and out-of-pocket healthcare spending, a strikingly resilient jobs market, and mounting fear about career, financial, and personal safety, our full report here. So, this will be all interesting stuff. Yeah, I wanna have her break it down, but just some interesting stats. Forerunners historically been heavily consumer-focused.

They'll do a B2B company here or there, what I know, but there, and the reason for this, a lot of people sort of write off consumer because it's really hard, it's really hard to get right, but many of the biggest outcomes ever have been in consumer. And interesting stat here, two thirds of US GDP is from consumer activity. And so that's why the outcomes end up being so massive. Yeah, it's also interesting just to hear her talk

about these brands because they're just so much more tangible business cases than the B2B stuff that's harder to dig into, it's more spreadsheet based, you need to really understand what's going on in these niche sub markets. Everyone can have opinion on Liquid Death or Dollar Shave Club. You can kind of understand that, it's very tractable.

Anyway, we have our first guest. There we go. Welcome to the Temple of Technology. Brendan from MerCore, how you doing? What's going on? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me, guys. I'm excited to be on the most profitable podcast.

Yes. There we go. Well, you're live. Can you introduce yourself? Break down a little bit about your history, your story and what you're building, what your company does? Yeah, usually when somebody gets to your stage, they've been in market for five, six years. So people have more of an opportunity to get to know you. So yeah, we'd love to we'd love the full intro. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the Bay area, met my co-founders at Darsh and Surya when we were 14 in high school.

And so we were all in the speech and debate team together. They were the winningest speech and debate team of all time in high school debate, but I was always building companies in one form or another. So I didn't want to go to college. My parents insisted that I had to. and so I went to Georgetown for two years where Sury was my roommate there and Adarsh was at Harvard. And we started to record when we were 19 to train models that predict how well someone

will perform on a job better than a human can, similar to how a human would review a resume, conduct an interview, and decide who to hire. We automate all of those with LLMs. And then fast forward two years, we scaled from one to 100 million in revenue in 11 months. And so we're only 21 and running this really exciting company that's working with most of the most prominent companies in Silicon Valley. It's more of a line than a curve over there. It's not really just a hockey stick. It's a fencing sword.

You're very smiley right now. You look like you're having fun, but your LinkedIn profile is dead serious. I'm sure internally as a team, you guys are focused on not letting the hype and the crazy initial traction get to your head. How do you think about running the team when the team is only experienced sort of massive sort of immediate success? Totally. And I think one thing that

compounds this is that so much of our team is like college dropouts and new grads, right? Because it was the extension of our initial network at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, et cetera. And so a lot of them haven't seen what normal companies look like. This is all that they're used to, and it's easy to get caught up and lost in so much that's happening. But I think the most important thing to stay grounded is just focusing everyone on the numbers that matter long-term, right? The network effects of the business, how do we build up the marketplace?

How do we learn from all the performance reviews that we're getting to build our usage data flywheel rather than focusing on a lot of the lagging indicators like revenue or more of the customer signals. Can you talk about some of the jobs that you're actually placing? Like you go to Mercor, you get placed. Are you placing people in white collar jobs, blue collar jobs, everything, any specific

niches? Yeah. So when we started out, it was that we were very amazed with the Calbertown in India. And so we would hire these software engineers in India and use LLMs to assess them, hire them for our friends. But what we realized was that there was this really large shift happening in the human data market where large AI labs are hiring thousands of people to train the next generation of LLMs. And it used to be this crowdsourcing problem that was super low skilled, right? Of how do you get a bunch of people writing barely grammatically correct sentences for

the early versions of ChatGBT that was moving towards this vetting problem of how do we find the most exceptional people in the world in high volumes that want to work directly with researchers to push the frontier of model capabilities. And so to your question, we now hire roles across almost all domains or the vast majority of popular domains ranging from software engineers to consultants, people in finance, medicine, law, et cetera. Both help more traditional customers as well as these AI labs. Yeah.

What about robotics? I mean, obviously there's this question of like a data wall in robotics. Google had that famous like arm farm where they were trying to generate reinforcement learning data with like 17 robotic arms, just working on grasping. Are we going to see a future where people are getting placed into jobs, kind of wearing motion tracking suits to generate robotics data? How do we solve that problem? That's a phenomenal question.

I'm not sure I think so. There's a lot of questions around like what kind of data production are most efficient robotics and I will say we don't provide people to create robotics data as much yet, but it's certainly something that's top of mind as these companies start to mature and really scale up the kind of data that they're interested in. What about like revenue volatility? I feel like a lot of these, like if you're placing individuals

into some big foundation model company Like if you're if you're placing individuals into you know You know some big foundation model company or some big hyperscaler is doing a massive training run They need to really nail down math and they're gonna bring in a ton of mathematicians Generate a ton of training data and then they're like, hey, we're actually good We're moving on to the next thing that can kind of create a massive oscillation in your revenue. How are you thinking about like scaling out and making sure that the growth curve is smooth? Because obviously it's very fast, but you know, the iron law of the universe is like, what goes up quickly comes down quickly, but then maybe there's a second act and you go back up again. And over time it looks smooth, but it could be very jostling in the in the next few years.

Yeah, I think the most important thing to think about is the leading indicators and time it looks smooth, but it can be very jostling in the in the next few years. Yeah, I think the most important thing to think about is the leading indicators and fast moving markets, right? And that if you look at the most sophisticated labs and what they're really investing in, it's a super high caliber expert data that is like far beyond the model frontier of capabilities. And so, so long as we focus on the leading indicators, the things that all the big tech budgets are starting to move towards, that positions us really well.

And obviously, the leading indicators evolve over time, and we need to position ourselves there. I think where companies get themselves into trouble in these fast-changing markets is when they aren't looking at the leading indicators, and they're sitting with the large incumbents that are doing a lot of the legacy systems that get phased out. And so that's how I think about it.

But my broader take on the human data market is that it's going to grow dramatically because so we're getting to the point where RL is so effective that you can create almost any eval and it will be able to solve that eval. And so the barrier to applying AI throughout the entire economy is just creating evals for everything, right? Which is a process that inherently requires humans in the loop.

And so I'm very excited about building that world. What are some customers that you can talk about or maybe allude to that have been kind of surprising? We talked about yesterday Yum Brands, which is like a $44 billion public company that owns a bunch of fast casual restaurants. They're partnering with Nvidia and buying chips and actually building,

effectively building their own AI in-house. Has there been any sort of, you're obviously working with all the big foundation labs, or I would say most of them would be my guess, but has there been any customers of you're obviously working with all the big sort of foundation labs? I would say most of them would be my guess but has there been any customers that you're working with that you've been surprised by? Not too surprising yet like most of our customer base we work with all of the top five labs in the US and we're starting to see Maybe actually one interesting thing is we're starting to see a lot more customization

at the application layer. And I think a big reason for this is that it's now much more data efficient to customize models with RL environments and a lot of this like new kind of data versus fine tuning data that people would do historically. And so it's now becoming, you know, this like gold rush for all these application layer companies without too much capex, they're able to get

these incredible results. And so we're seeing some of that, but at least for the most part, the like legacy fortune 500s haven't really caught on to this yet. And I imagine that that might take a year or two. Well, that'll be a nice rush of revenue once they realize what's happening. I have a question. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, we've been talking a lot about agents and kind of wondering, obviously agents

are breaking through in the enterprise and the coding sector. But we've just been kind of tracking against when can you actually use an agent to just book a flight reliably. And I'm wondering if we're in this weird thing where you see a foundation model company do a press release and it's like, we're working on, you know, fundamental math innovation or we're going to solve, you know, uh, I forget that, that like really, really hard problem in math. Um, and,

and it seems like maybe there's a gap in the human RL training loop just around like a really good executive assistant Is that the gap is it we need more data there to actually break through or is that just a product issue? Like why can't Siri reliably book me a flight? yeah, so I think there's two challenges one is the Interest of researchers has historically been in these super hard reasoning problems. They're interested in GPQA of how

do we solve PhD level reasoning. They're interested in IMO level math of how do we have models that are beating all of these incredible mathematicians and have historically just been less interested in how do we automate a McKinsey consultant or an executive assistant? And I think that shift is starting to happen. And so that's like a big part of it.

And that ties into the data that they create. Cause of course, if you want to automate a McKinsey consultant, you need evals for everything a McKinsey consultant does. If you want to automate an EA, you need evals for everything that an EA does. I think the other part of it is the models Kinsey Consultant does. If you want to automate an EA, you need evals for everything that an EA does. I think the other part of it is the models are just starting to get really good at tool

use. Like tool use is still relatively immature relative to all the reasoning capabilities. And so I think as that starts to happen, I would really expect that this year you're able to use operator or whatever the equivalent agent is to start booking flights and doing a lot of these more mundane tasks. Have you ever been approached by any of the labs around help us make our models funny? Like is there a world where you show up to the comedy store here in LA and you're trying to grab some of the comedians and say, hey, come on, come on, Murkhor. Tell me a joke.

We're gonna test how funny you are. We got some opportunities for you. Yeah, yeah. If you can, if you can. The Joe Rogan mothership, we just pull him right off stage. The Kill Tony bucket pulls, hey, you did, you got the joke book, come on. But it seems like that's like when every model's

like pretty good at some of these sort of like foundational like problems and thinking, then the way to differentiate is, can a model be more entertaining for consumers and there's value in that itself. Yeah, a lot of our customers at the Frontier, as you've seen in recent releases, are starting to think a lot more about humor

and these exciting things. We have been hiring a bunch of people out of the Harvard Lampoon and equivalent places that have these comedic skills to help teach models how to get there. And so it's really like every capability you want, you need evals for. John has been doing the Kugen ev eval which is just he asks you know various models to tell a joke and then they end up just taking you on this winding sounds like a joke but it's not actually it doesn't actually have a punchline. It's hard because there's not there's not quantitative eval for him it's so subjective and so quality. Another question just related just broadly to the future and how these labs,

so you know the labs are your customers. The critique of the labs broadly in the model companies as they raise tens of billions of dollars has been you know if the models are commoditizing and intelligence just becomes too cheap to meter where does the value come from? John's point of view has been, there are many commodities in the world that have a ton of value, and there's a bunch of great businesses that drill and produce oil and then sell it, right?

Even though oil is like a commodity that just sort of trades on the open market. How do you see the model market long term? And do you see a world where there's constantly new companies being spun up to create these sort of bespoke specialized models for different use cases? Yeah, I think the value will accrue to the product layer. I don't think about OpenAI as much as an API business, and it seems like most people are really placing a bet on the product side of things, which will start to get

very exciting especially and spread out across many companies considering that customizing models is so much more affordable than it used to be. So that's sort of how I see it playing out. I think one of the things that a lot of investors don't quite realize when they're not like in the code of building these products is how low the switching costs are for API, right? It's a line of code to switch back and forth and see how new models are doing. And so it's hard to build a business

when that's the switching cost. And I think it's really gonna be in the product layer. Well, given that, do you have a view on why every single X open AI employee seems to start the exact same foundation model company instead of doing something else? I was really hoping for like a supplements company from Ilya or, you know, like a hair loss or something fun, something different t-shirt company. But everyone just seems to be, Hey, I'm going to do what I know. I've been building the foundation models. I'm going to stick with it.

Yeah, it's a good question. I think a lot of it ties to just like the ideology around AGI. Right? This is the most important problem in the world. And so how do we all race as fast as possible to get there rather than a lot of the, you know, unit economics and competitive dynamics that investors would be thinking about.

Yes, they're basically just disregarding the fact that the, like, sure, the value might accrue to the application level layer for 10 years, and then it's completely irrelevant once ASI arrives. Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting strategy if value in the short term, short to medium term, accrues to the product layer.

But then if you actually can build artificial super intelligence, then none of it actually potentially matters in the end. So it's an interesting strategy. Last question for you, I know we have a minute left. This is the most champagne problem that founders ever have. And when you were fundraising, you probably couldn't even drink champagne.

But do you have any funny stories? I'm sure you raised a series of very competitive rounds. Any funny stories of offers investors made to just try to get you? The classic is like- Didn't you go to a helicopter? The classic is like- Yeah, benchmark was a helicopter.

Yeah, yeah. At least a private jet to Vegas to race Ferraris. There you go. There we go. I knew there was going to be something. You're like, I never actually got my driver's license. They're like, it's fine. It's a private track.

Are those effective? Did they win you over? It sounds like you went with Benchmark after the helicopter thing. So maybe it's effective. Yeah, yeah, no. They could be very tempting. Because we never actually, for our series A and our series B,

we didn't create a slide deck because we weren both times like people asked for it and we're like just no, not really willing to create one. But the sales processes could be a lot of fun. It's sort of like Christmas where you're getting all of these like gifts and fun experiences, but also trying to balance that with it not being too much of a distraction from building the company. Well, that's fantastic. Congrats to you. Good luck. And we'll have to check in soon when you have new fundraising news. Absolutely. Every other week.

Every other week. Let's get on schedule. Same time next week for the series F. We'll make it happen, John. There we go. Give our best to the team. Thanks for coming on. Bye. Thanks. See you guys. This is great. This is a fun fun. Oh, it'd be 21 again

Yeah, I know in 21 getting flown out to Vegas to fly Ferraris or fly helicopters and race Ferraris That's very TV coded Well, we got David center coming on the show gonna ask him about Nvidia gonna ask him about Jensen Wong Gonna ask him about great founders and gonna ask him how he's doing today. How are you doing? What's going on, brothers? Looking fantastic. Oh, amazing.

Look at this. Look at this. Professorial, if I might say so myself. I honestly, 99% of the time that I see Senor, he's got the black founders tee on. It's good to see you in a jacket. I know. People say I shouldn't wear my own merch.

I completely disagree. Yeah. What's good to see a jacket. I know people say I shouldn't wear my own merch. I completely disagree Yeah, yeah, what the greatest merch in the world? It is it is honestly like one of the most comfortable t-shirts to work to work out in If you think about how important that random me and Jordy ran into each other after not talking for like six months Yeah at gym in Malibu And I don't know if you would have recognized me if I didn't have the without the founder shirt on. So well, now that you're doing video, you know, you're a lot

more recognizable. You're going to get stopped on the street all the time. I'm sure it's hope not that you've been waiting for. No, let's hope not. Please don't. Yeah, you only wants to get recognized in the Amman. Yes, that's the most commonplace that it happens. I'm sure.

Anyway, our friend Justin Mares told me he's opening the new recognizing the Amman. Yes, yes. That's the most common place that it happens, I'm sure. Anyway. Our friend Justin Mares told me he's opening the new factory for Kettle and Fire, and he texted me last night, and he texted me where it is. I was like, is there Amman in that city? It's like Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Amman, Lancaster.

Amman, Castor. Yeah. One of the most historic locations. The Castor. The Castor. That's great. What was the last episode you dropped? Oh my god. The episode's actually going kind of crazy. Most people like it. Some people are very upset. It's Todd Graves, the founder of Raising Canes. So Raising Canes, this guy's been running his business for 30 years. He owns over 90% of it. It's worth at least $10 billion.

And he truly believes that God put him on earth to be great at chicken fingers, making chicken fingers so he can help other people. Life's work. And people, so a lot of people love his approach. He's essentially what I would describe as I did this episode on the founder of In-N-Out a long time ago, Harry Snyder. It's essentially like Harry Snyder's reincarnated. But instead of making hamburgers, he's making chicken fingers They have like the very same philosophy

But people are like really upset that he feels this is his mission But he like does a ton of good for the community like gifts to charity like let the guy make his fucking chicken fingers Yeah, didn't so he he basically just Was building the company while he was still in college, right? No, so there's a funny, there's an interesting thing that reoccurs at the history of entrepreneurship is like these founders write a business plan

and business school about their idea and they get terrible grades. So like Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, C minus. Todd Graves, lowest grade in the class. Phil Knight for Nike, same thing, bad grade, completely disinterested. The professors don't know. The professors don't know.

I remember in college, I wrote a bull case on Twitter at like $1 billion. And they got like a B minus. Just because he disagreed with me on the valuation. And it's like, I was completely right. Yeah, I was completely correct But the crazy thing about Todd graves isn't like no one would give him money. So he never raised again and so he raised from

He actually to save money or to make money He worked as a Boilermaker and so they do these fucking crazy things where you have to work like five or six weeks because you're Fixing a refinery and every day the refinery is down. It's like very detrimental to the health of the company. So they pay you a ton of money. We just have to work like a dog for like 100 hour weeks, six weeks straight. So he meets a bunch of boilmakers. Then he risks his life doing commercial fishing.

Do you remember this show like deadly catch? Deadliest catch. Yeah, that's what he did. He did that when he was like 23. And then he goes and he borrows money from his bookie and then a boiler maker named Wild Bill. So he never talks about this anymore. But I know I just, I love the idea. Like there's some boiler. There's some boiler maker named Wild Bill there that has like a couple hundred million dollars with a racing cane stock or his bookie made like a hundred or

200 million dollars. Just cause his kid wouldn't shut up. His 23 year old kid wouldn't shut up about wanting to live a chicken-finger dream. That's what he repeats over and over again. Chicken-finger dream. Chicken-finger dream. And those guys have the 10% of Raising Cane's? No, he never says the percentages. Who has the rest of the...

He says over 90%. But he said he rolled him into the main company because they just they just invested in the first reason games. Another thing that's interesting, he had a co founder who quit after the second store. Ooh, miss. No conviction. There's always a story like that with like all these power law companies. No, it's interesting. It's it's funny. Restaurants and CPG are so tangible that it attracts people that that have dreams but not necessarily

extreme conviction. They can see the idea in their head. And there's a sandwich shop in LA and I've sat down, I'm blanking on the name right now, but they've got probably 20, 30 locations around the West Coast now. And he was just telling me how the first year he had been a successful restaurateur, he had multiple locations, he had done nightclubs and all this stuff, and then the first year of his business, he went into massive debt,

he was working 14 hours a day. He went into this business knowing food and beverage really, really well, and it was just the most devastating couple years where it didn't matter that they were making a good product and people liked it. He was having high schoolers talk smack to him saying make my sandwich faster, getting angry at him.

So it just weeds out the people that don't have that ridiculous, maybe the co-founder didn't have the chicken finger dreams. Listen, I think the episode's like an hour long. So if you listen to it on 1.5x speed, you can get it in 40 minutes. Let's do it. It's exactly that.

He almost lost, so he was like heavily geographically concentrated in Louisiana, and he almost lost everything during Hurricane Katrina because it knocked out 21 of his 28 restaurants. And it was all personal debt. so no one would lend him money. So he'd have to go find like an angel investor. He had a very interesting way to find it at each individual store.

He was like, hey, invest like 200 grand in this. He would take that, he called it angel investment, but it's really an angel investment. He's like, give me 200 grand. I will fill out a one page contract. I will guarantee you personally that I will pay you back your money with 15% interest. He would take that contract to the bank.

The bank would loan him like a million dollars to give him the startup money. And he did that all the way up until the first 20 restaurants. And he was like, we're rolling, we have so much cashflow. Nothing's gonna go wrong as long as I don't lose out on any day sales. And then Hurricane Katrina comes and knocks out,

21 out of 28 restaurants. And so he talks about, he says this over and over again, he's just like, don't do the things I did, because they were wildly reckless. They just happened to work out for me, which I thought was also really funny. Now he's still alive. Are you planning on doing one of those episodes where you go sit down with him, have dinner, eat some chicken fingers, break it down? So I said on the episode, if anybody knows him, yeah, please, I would like to meet him because I'm upset you know like you guys know this because we talk all the time like I'm obsessed with people that do one thing the only thing I'm really interested in is like I'm not interested in your stupid fucking

startup or your latest company I'm interested in your last company like the thing that you are going to do until you thought you were put here on the earth to do and the thing that you're gonna do until you die and so yeah I'm fascinated by talking to people like that. Most of the most interesting, like unknown founders that I've met recently, the most impressive ones are all in like their seventies and they've been building their company for 40 or 50 years.

You just talk to them, it's like the level of detail they know about the world they've built is like, it's one of the most unique experiences you could have in your life because that compounded knowledge, there's things that they know that they can't even really explain why they believe what they believe.

But it's just like a very deep intuition, sense of intuition. Jensen is the same, I would imagine the same way. Yeah, but I think he's the longest running tech CEO, if I'm not mistaken. My question is, do you think that these founders who wind up running their companies for 40 years know it's their life's work in the first month in the first decade even know do they fall into it and because

I feel like a lot of it's just luck like no one ever made them an offer they couldn't refuse they never wound up big like being in a situation where they had to you know pay some bill and they wanted to cash out or something. So I don't think they know it that early. Yeah, that is separate from like, so like Todd Graves, right? It was like, he's been offered billions of dollars. And he's like, I never thought of it for a second. What I also love about him is he talks about the need,

we need more founders and we need more entrepreneurs to not sell their company. And so he's like, I'm competing. The reason he's like running through the QSR industry right now is because he's competing against these very old corporate run businesses. There's no founders competing against him. And he's just like, we need more diversity of thought.

We need more ideas. You need more innovation. You need people to actually care. And so somebody asked him, like you've been offered billions of dollars. What was the offer that was the most tempting? He's like, none of them. Nothing was ever tempting.

He's like, this is going to be a multi-generational business. I'm going to give it to my kids. So let me give you another hilarious story about this. And I'm going to paraphrase this. So James Dyson, who still owns 100% of Dyson, which I've done four episodes on, right? My number one autobiography recommendation out of, you know, the almost 400 biographies of entrepreneurs I've read so far is James Lason's first autobiography, which is called Against the Odds.

Like a few weeks ago, so he still owns 100% of the company. The numbers you see thrown out there, they say, oh, it's worth 10 billion, it's worth 20. I've heard he's pulling out five billion, more than five billion a year dividends personally, from what I hear, okay? So I was at this like super fancy invite only.

What does he do with it? Where's he investing? Does he have a family office or something? Like, so, so that's how, yeah. So there'll be hints because like you, if you're, he's been pulling out a ton of money. It turns out he owns 5% of Apple now cause he's just been building a position for a decade. Like no way better than that. Way better than that. He's like, owns more federal reserve, most, the most sheep and anybody in the world. You gotta be sheet maxing. You just it. You got to be sheep maxing. You have to be sheep maxing.

You run out of things to invest in. So he's like, he's the largest green pea producer in Europe. It's amazing. So this is a true story about this there. So I'm at this like super fancy invite only investor conference. There's like 15 people there and all of them like controlling massive amounts of capital. And one guy was telling a story like the more assets under management, they're trying to buy private businesses and

you start out buying 500 million dollar businesses and a billion dollar businesses. Now he's like, he's got to shoot really, really fucking high. And so I'm going to paraphrase this. This is why I love people like James Dyson, like Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg, like Todd Graves. Steve Jobs is obviously similar though, even though it's a public company. They go to, they approach Dyson to see it, would you be interested in selling? And the response, I'm paraphrasing was, fuck you. This is a family heirloom. I'm not selling for any price. for any price. So there's actually a really important idea here. And I think another way to answer your question, John, is I realized that I remember exactly where I was.

You guys have both met my wife. I was supposed to be on a date with her at Harry's Pizzeria in the Design District of Miami, right? And I'm not even paying attention to what we're talking about. I'm thinking about founders. And I remember like it just where it was like the epiphany I had was like, oh, people say if like you love what you do, like you would do it for free. And I was like, no, no, no, there's a different level. If you there's a there's a there's you can have such a deep love for what you're doing that people couldn't pay you to stop. So it's like

the idea has like, how much would you have to pay Steve Jobs to not work on Apple or build products? There's no money, you couldn't give him $220, it didn't even matter. This was the story of the Zuck acquisition attempt. They said, hey, here's a billion dollars, you're 23 or something, and he's like,

but I would just start another social network This is what I want to work on like what I guess I like this one Amazing that is the perfect example because there's a bunch There's a bunch of young kids that you know have sell their companies have a bunch of money But like look at the difference of his life you know one would know his name No, who knows what happens like now. He's like working. You know the best You know the best 40 year old public company CEO in the world, by far, working in the most interesting time, having access to build some of the most interesting

products, and then essentially unlimited resources. Yeah. Yeah. Question. Todd Graves, I'm sure has an extreme loyalty to his team and employees at the corporate level and the individual restaurant level. There's sort of a broader playing trend playing out in restaurants, people have been attacking the sort of like, one of the biggest cost centers for restaurants is, or probably the biggest is labor. And so you have we covered yesterday, Yum Brands, which is like a $44 billion public company, they

own KFC Taco Bell Bell, Pizza Hut. They're trying to integrate sort of robotics on both sides, both on the ordering process. They're partnering with Nvidia to like do like voice models and process. You know, you're driving through the drive-through or calling or texting or whatever. And then they also are trying to integrate robotics on, you know, within the actual kitchens just to produce food more cheaply. How do you think Todd Graves, I haven't found any commentary from him online

about robotics, but how do you think he would think about that in a world where I'm sure he has a deep loyalty to his team and loves that it's sort of this human experience going to a Raising Canes, but at the same time, his competitors are just gonna be like trying to drive costs down as low as possible. Yeah, that's a good question. I'd love to ask him that based on what he says, like he's pretty anti making decisions

just based on financial reasons. Like he, he talks a lot of shit in his interviews about like PE people. What like he just not a big, he's not a fan at all. Whoa, whoa, whoa. We love private equity here on this show. Okay. Let's not slander the good folks over at Blackstone. Dude, two of my closest friends who I love

and I talk to all the time, they are literally, might be the most successful PE people rolling up QSRs. Patrick just did an interview with Matt and Alex. So I love them too. But Todd Graves does not. He is very anti-PE in QSRs. Timeline and turmoil if they start tripping each other.

I have a question about your point about founder control over the long term, never selling, owning 100%. Do you think that there's a need for some sort of maybe cultural shift or even a shift in the way startups are financed in Silicon Valley? It's just so, like the standard YC playbook for examples, like you get three co-founders, you split it equally, then immediately YC takes 10%,

then it's like back to back to back 20% rounds, you're diluted down to a few percent. Maybe you get some super voting, but you're not paying yourself a good salary. And so, you know, Jordy's kind of talked about maybe we need to normalize some sort of secondary sales so that the founders can take a little cash out of the business and then actually go in it for the really long term Maybe we just need hey

It's okay to pay yourself a really like reasonable salary a lot of founders are out there kind of like starving even after they've raised $20 million. What do you think about the structure of Silicon Valley? Like is the Silicon Valley playbook setting us up for to create the next James Dyson or the next Or or the next Todd graves. So when you say what do I think about that? I don't think about it. So It's really bizarre to me Again, like I have an unfair advantage because essentially I just talked to dead people all day I have one side of conversations with history's greatest founders, right? So like for like the first four or five hours of my day, I'm usually just reading biographies.

And then I usually have lunch. And then in the afternoon, I like reread highlights of the stuff I read over the last like eight years while building the podcast. And one of the main lessons from all that is just like, they do like the people that usually get to the top of the profession are the best at what they do. They do what's best for them, regardless of what works for other people. And so the weird thing that I is just like, they do like the people that usually get to the top of the profession are the best what they do. They do what's best for them, regardless of what works for other people. And so the weird thing that I have is like when I open up Twitter

and people arguing about like, you should raise from this person or you shouldn't raise it all or you should do this, it's just like you should do whatever is best, whatever is best for like whatever mission you happen to be on. So I don't have like an opinion of like how other people should do it other than like, what do you actually want to do? And then figure out what's the best way to go about doing that. And then this is my issue, remember when Paul Graham released

the Founder Mode essay? So many people sent it to me and asked me what I thought of it. It was a bizarre reading, and I'm a huge fan of his essays in general, but I just think it missed something that he obviously knows. It just depends on who the founder is as a person. One of my favorite lines was in this random book on Steve Jobs. I've done like, I don't know, 10 or 12 episodes on Steve. And it said that Apple is

just Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives. And I think the good news, one of the best benefits of being a founder is you get to create your own world from scratch. You get to choose like what you work on, who's around you, how you go about doing everything. And so I would start with like, what do you actually want to do in the world, and then work backwards from that. So like, I am tech, I am like obsessed with control. So you know, us three talk basically every day, and especially about what's going on with like TPBN, I told you what's gonna fucking happen, because it's happened to me. It's like you guys are blowing up, your podcast is going to get a ton of attention.

All the people in your audience want to do deals, they're investors or entrepreneurs. They're going to come to you with all this crazy shit because they did the same thing. And for me, it's like, I had an insane amount of investment opportunity, people offering to invest in the podcast and I were able to acquire it.

And like, I said no to all of them because the most important thing to me is like control for the long term I believe this is my life's work just like Todd Graves on a chicken finger dream I believe I was put here to do this I think I'm the right person at the right place with the right set of skills at the right time and like I was watching um yesterday I was watching uh my my son turned five and he's obsessed with dinosaurs right and so I was like oh it's a good idea let Let's watch Jurassic Park. I didn't fucking realize how scary that movie is for five.

Yeah, I tried to do that once, too. I was like, oh, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, my son loves dinosaurs. Yeah, it's dinosaur time. And then I was like, oh, pop the brakes. But I had to thought because like you see the computers and like everything else. And like, wait a minute, this this movie came out in 93. Yeah. Like if I wanted to do what I'm doing now 20 years ago, and you guys too, what would you have to do? You'd have to go knock, you'd have to go to a physical building and be like,

please put me on the air. Yeah. It's just so important that like we're doing this at the right time. So again, for me, it didn't matter. Like the money was not what I'm optimizing for. It was the control and the long-term control, because I want to do this until I die. And so for me, it's like control is way more important than money. Yeah, I think the question maybe you were getting at at a high level is, are we losing the true generational founders

because they do four back to back rounds and then they own 10% of their company and they've got a big board and somebody comes and says, hey, you're experiencing all this craziness. We'll just buy the company. 10% of their company and they've got a big board and they did and and somebody comes and says hey You're experiencing all this like, you know craziness. We'll just buy the company You'll do an earn out and then you're gonna be like worth a hundred million But the question is that when you look at you know, the the Mark Zuckerberg example It's somebody who maintained extreme control despite doing a bunch of venture rounds and I feel like many founders

despite doing a bunch of venture rounds. And I feel like many founders aspired to that path over the last 20 years, 15 years, whatever. I know a guy with eight board seats. I don't wouldn't recommend it, but it is a path to control. Yeah, that's one side. No, I think like the main thing is like you find something you want to do. Like, again, I don't think you could pay Zoc to not work at Metta.

He's got all the money. I have just admired people that do things for a very long time. Some of these people, I talk to a lot of PE people. One of my friends has the funniest lines. I think that's just like, he says, VC gets all the attention, PE gets all the money. And his whole point was just like, VC's so loud, most of like all the media is obsessed with like fundraising, everything else. So to a founder, it looks like this is

everything that's going on. I have a weird like vantage point in the founder ecosystem because it's like, yeah, a lot of tech people listen to the podcast, but a lot of people like, they have billion, billion, like multi-billion dollar family companies listen to the podcast. So like, there's just a ton of businesses out there. Some of them raise money. Some of them don't. I don't think you're losing anything. I just think they're just,

it's, there's a, uh, it's, you're, there's like, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? It's like, there's just a lot of noise that don't, that doesn't exactly represent like everything that's going. Yeah. Yeah. The, the next Todd graves or the next, uh, you know, James Dyson might be quietly building out there some behemoth that we're just not even hearing about because there's no VCs chattering about it.

So I just tweeted this out where it's just like I had- Mid-Journey's kind of like that. No outside capital, people know about it, but Mid-Journey could become some behemoth that David Holt's just out there. If you're not raising, like there's a reason that you have to be loud if you're constantly having to raise money.

Like, so I just did this tweet. It was like, I had a dinner with one of the wealthiest people in the world and his family has commissioned two biographies. It's for the family use only, right? Yeah. And I was like, dude, and we got along. Like we had a fucking fantastic dinner.

I thought he was charismatic, smart, great storyteller. I'm gonna hang out with him again, again in the seventies. And I was like, dude, dude, let me get those biographies. Like I would do such a good job. He's like, absolutely not. I have no interest in educating my competitors. I've met a ton of founders like this where I get to go to their company offsite. I've met, I've go to their warehouses, gone to their company and, and they're usually all family owned businesses. And I was like, you're so fucking talented. Why don't you write an autobiography? Why don't you write about, do something? And they're absolutely not. They're just very, very quiet because there's no reason to make noise. There's also, it's also dangerous where this is something Charlie Munger said that

was fascinating, where he thought it was very, it was against human nature for him and Warren to be so wealthy and so loved. And his point was that most, you know, there's that greed doesn't run the world. Charlie has a great line. He says, greed doesn't run the world and V does. And so when you're really wealthy, there's a lot of envy. And so it's like, she's smart to not advertise that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, again, I think it's just, uh, can we flip it over to Jensen? I want to know. I mean, obviously he's in the news. He put on the super bowl of artificial intelligence, made a bunch of announcements at, uh,

Nvidia GTC. And I wanted to know, where do you see gaps between Jensen's archetype as a founder from maybe the other magnificent seven founders, the Steve jobs of the world, the Zuck of the world, whoever else you've, you've studied, where are the similarities and differences? I think they're more similar to each other than they are to like, obviously they're more similar to each other than they are to like the general population. I don't feel like, I don't think there's a single founder that I've covered that is like the only one. Like he's got a lot of interesting ideas.

Like they're all usually, you know, uh, w w w would be considered like micromanagers. They're obsessed with the details. Like Todd, Todd Graves example, right? He's got 50,000 employees, 800 stores. He's opening like 100 stores every year. And before he does the interview, like he interrupts the interview so he can approve the Instagram reel that is going out. Wow. Same thing with Steve Jobs did the same thing where like there's a great book called Insanely Simple, which talks about this. And it didn't matter if it was like a billboard in Missouri or a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal.

Steve Jobs would approve every single ad before it came out. And then he'd be calling up. So the guy that wrote this book called Insanely Simple is the guy that was actually running Steve Jobs ads. And he says, Steve would call me at fucking midnight. And we'd be debating for an hour over a single word. So I feel like that's happening anymore at Apple. It's been a little messy lately. and baiting for an hour over a single word. So- It doesn't feel like that's happening anymore at Apple. No.

It's been a little messy lately. No, no, no. So I think Jensen's the same way. What I thought was most interesting about him, he is definitely one of the more extreme. Like he is, every single person I cover on founders is hardcore and extreme. He is, you know, and he's a, he's unusual.

He's uncommon amongst uncommon people. One of my favorite things that he said was that he likes to torture people to greatness. I thought that was like a really interesting line. And his whole point was like, you know, people kind of like clip through people and fire people really fast. If he felt somebody had potential

and they're just fucking up, like he's just gonna torture them into greatness. He's going to make them great. And what you realize is the longer you read this book, there's a book called NVIDIA WAY by Tay Kim, which is the one I did the episode on. What you realize is he does that to himself. He's tortured himself to greatness

where they just had, there's a great story in the book where they had a blowout quarter. They absolutely fucking killed it. And he comes in and he tells his team, he's like, every morning I wake up, look in the mirror and I say you suck. I love that. manifestation or visualization.

How do you how do you square his micromanagement with his he's stated that he doesn't have one on one meetings very often he is a very like kind of scattered organization It's an interesting thing. It's like kind of like you just dive into a specific thing. How do you think about it? Yeah, he's got 60 direct reports. I think in the book. Yeah, I think when they start writing the book It's like 30 and I think it goes up to 60 because the book just came out It's like it it covers stuff up up until like the recent last few months Yeah

He actually has a great way to to describe this that is most interesting where people are saying like, how are we going to handle all these agents when they're smarter than we are? And he's like, I'm already doing that. He goes, my 60 direct reports are agents. They're all smarter at what they're in charge of than I am. And yet I'm able to direct them. There's a great line.

Let me see if I can find it. He has this line where he says something about the company has to be like an F1. Pit crew probably. Well, he's describing the way like he organizes it and essentially like nobody he designs, he believes the founder or the leader should design the company, not for like what's necessarily best like after they leave, but literally what's best for what they're doing now. He says, ultimately, my staff, which is his direct ports. Ultimately, my staff is something that I have to know how to work with. The company's organization is like a race car. It has to be a machine that the CEO knows how to drive. And so if you think about it, it's like he made an F1 organization that is tailor-suited to him and may not be

It's obviously not gonna be tailor-suited to the person that takes over after him I have a totally separate but somewhat related question in that Certain high-profile investors sold a huge stake in Nvidia in 2019. That would be worth 160 billion dollars As of last year. That person is Masayoshi Son. You haven't done an episode on Masa? Feels like you haven't.

No, I won't. I fucking won't. Sometimes I get sad because I feel like the great thing about podcasting is like you actually know the person. Like when people meet you and you guys and me, they're like, oh, I feel like I know you you it's like you've heard me talk for a hundred fucking hours you do know me right yeah and so I had so many people that listen to the

podcast like there's this new first English biography of masa called the gambler you have to do it it's gonna be a great episode I started reading it and I was like oh this is interesting he's kind of like nutty and then this happened this week this was supposed to be the next episode founders and no listen rule number two in the center family is mind your own business So like I don't I don't care what other people do for a living. I don't care how they do it I really doesn't bother me. I wind up fucking hating this Like I found it I found it disgusting like yeah, and it's it's so we have a bunch of mutual friends. We've spent a lot of time together. We're like legit friends off camera, right? We talk all the

time. I'd be very concerned if I like ran into people and like coogings fucking liar. He's fucked me over the entire book. The first half of the book is all these people that Masa did business with that is like that guy lies all the time. He screwed me over. So then I, then I fast forward and I read the last chapter and it's like he's super depressed he's like I've wasted my life I have an ugly he says I have an ugly face which is kind of weird uh and he's just like and would you realize like he never he was just so obsessed with he is a legit gambler and it's like a sad existence he didn't build a product that made somebody else's life better he didn't do any of that.

And so I was like, I don't give a fuck about weight sunk cost of spending half a week. If I'm gonna make an episode on this guy, that means I have to live inside his world for like another 40 hours. And I'm just not willing to do that. So I just threw the book across the side of the room. I was like, I'm not doing this.

Crazy. Well, let's, I mean, I'm glad that you have a beautiful face and it's always great to have you on the show. Thanks, we'll have to have you back soon. This is fantastic. It's great seeing you in a jacket. I'll say it again. Now that you set the bar, make sure, hey, this summer

when we're doing this live in person, yeah, fantastic. Yeah, I mean, seriously, we still have to do the goat debate, the greatest entrepreneur of all time. We have a bunch of, we've been debating it in a chat room for a while. Let's do that in person. We have to.

In tuxedos, if it's the goat debate, we have to take it one step above. With a bottle of Dom pairing on, hopefully. I would love that. That's right. Well, thanks for stopping by, David. This is fantastic. Great to see you. Always great chat. Talk to you soon.

Talk to you soon. Bye. Love you. Bye. Love you too. Fantastic. I told David last time we talked, he ended the call. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Love you. Bye. Love you, too. Fantastic. I told David last time we talked, he ended the call. He's like, love you guys. And I'm like, if you're just tuning into the show

for the first time and you're a Sendra fan, it's great. It's true. It's crazy about Masa. It makes sense. We'll have to get Deleon's take on Masa. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that. I think David changes his tune if Masa comes in and says, hey, look, we're going to lever you up.

We're going to take Founders Podcast. We're going to put $20 billion in at $100 billion pre. And we're really going to take this to the next level. I think David all of a sudden says, well, yeah, that's enough to live at an Amman for the rest of my life. And so he does it. No, there's no price. You no, you can't buy them out. There's no price.

He also could get us on his side. If he took PETA into for profit, that would be a fantastic move. I would love that. Anyway, I think we got Deleon in the temple of technology. Welcome to the show, Deleon. How you doing? What's going on?

What's up boys. Thanks for having me on again. Except I did to catch up. Appreciate it. We're calling this a Delta V with Deleon. Our little space update. We're still workshopping the name, but we got to come up with a catchy, pithy phrase for all the regular guests. But very excited to have you here. Can you give us an update? Let's start with the rescued astronauts. You got community noted know the X army really came out for you how'd you process the landing break it down for us you know I I already have enough of an ego that

I don't need to like you know overly you know sort of praise myself even more but all I'm gonna say is you know they go up I forget the exact timing but like you know beginning of June last year I sent out this tweet that's like end of June where I was just like losing my mind I was like how is nobody talking about this like these guys are like totally stuck up there It's clear that like, you know Boeing and NASA clearly are panicking and realize that like they can't take these guys down on Starliner and Nobody's even begun a plan for how to bring these guys down. And so I tweet make you like hey Why is nobody talking about the fact that there's like two American astronauts like stranded in orbit and like look if there were like

Apollo days or like space shuttle days and like you know They were stuck up there for an extended period of time people would 100% be using like the word Stranded and so I was just like so confused as to why like this just was getting no attention And then I literally just felt like I was being fucking lied to and I get community noted It's like oh like they're totally fine. They're doing some like final checkouts on starliner I'm like as anybody like read the comms that NASA and Boeing are putting out? Like, this thing's clearly in like a very bad state, definitely in no way that they actually like decide

to bring astronauts, you know, sort of down on it. And the word stranded had not yet been used a single time in any like NASA comms and anybody's like comms about the entire mission. Within 24 hours of my tweet going viral, NASA put out a press release explicitly saying, the astronauts are not stranded. And like then the word

Like totally in the lexicon around the mission. Yeah, I'd like to think that it had something to do with that You know sort of viral tweet Maybe there are other people that you know influence did and then got even like literally, you know The White House's communications this past week said, you know, we brought back the stranded astronauts So I'm gonna claim credit on stranded being the case the entire thing to me was, you know, sort of crazy You know not to give you there's a lot of history that we could give here but like When commercial crew was originally getting started the original plan by NASA was to only you know Do it as a sole source of war just to Boeing

SpaceX was seen as a bunch of you know, you know Cowboys who has that had no chance of actually being able to be trusted with you know, see human astronauts on board They actually had to delay the announcement because in the final hours, they basically decided to do it as a split award where they gave Boeing, by the way, it's crazy, they literally just gave Boeing twice the price per seat. So it's just like Boeing, it's like,

hey, the price is like $10 for SpaceX, and for Boeing, it's $20. And we're just gonna pay them more, why? Because, you know, it's because Boeing has a 200 person lobbying team. And so there was a very near world where we only had Boeing as the only option. It was only like in the final hours that program that like SpaceX was given an alternative. And like thank God. Otherwise like we would have been begging the Russians to bring our astronauts back.

And you know it's a little tricky to do when you're also like providing weapons to their enemies. So you know that was this was this. when you're also providing weapons to their enemy. So that would have been a geopolitical thing. A lot of people would say this was political. Do you think these astronauts are coming back deeply radicalized? You're up in space a long time. You've got a lot of time to think. I don't know how the internet connection is up there.

If there even is one. They don't have necessarily the internet connection is up there if they're if there even is one, you know They don't have necessarily that the bandwidth to doom scroll Where are they coming back sort of like deeply? You know are they gonna be like kept off-camera like, you know You guys got to kind of stay off the mics for a while while you cool off or you know What do you think their reaction is to the whole thing? Well now that it's the Trump administration, I don't think that Trump will you know limit them from the mics But I think what's incredibly clear is SpaceX offered to bring the astronauts back sooner

And because it was in the middle of the election cycle and because Musk was campaigning for Trump the Biden administration turned down that offer There's a whole lot of fucking you know, Jackos and Wahoos that will try and convince you otherwise Hey, this is the pre-existing ISAS schedule. This is when Dragon was scheduled to go up, etc So they had to stay up there for, no way. If somebody had gone to Elon and said, yes, like according to the standard NASA budgetary process, this was supposed to fly then, but like one of the astronauts has like, you know,

bone density issues and is having health problems up there, we wanna bring her down like this week because it was planned to be like a three week long mission, not a nine month long mission. They 100% could have done that. The Biden administration very much so tried to challenge those sort of facts and deny that. Dems today, he even have tried to deny that. Crazy is like, typically, national astronauts, at least in the past 20 years, have not

ever really made even the slightest inklings of political statements. Butch and Sunni like basically confirmed these facts, like they basically made it clear, hey, we could have been brought back earlier and we were denied the opportunity to be brought back earlier. And if I were them, I'd be pretty pissed because Sunni, I believe, did suffer bone density issues

and was not supposed to be up there for that long. And so I wouldn't be surprised if, you've already seen them push the fold on what they've been willing to say behind the mic. I wouldn't be surprised if they do that even more now that they're on the ground and you're in a Trump administration Do you think that NASA has a talent crisis you could imagine that Boeing is Finding it difficult to compete on you know getting the best talent when there's SpaceX and Varta and all these other players that are sort

Of competing for the the best and brightest in the world. I imagine that NASA is very prestigious, but at the same time, you're going to work in this government organization and there's a bureaucracy. And you know, if you're 22 years old right now and you're your your hero's Elon Musk and Elon Musk is beefing on the timeline with NASA, like, where are you going to go? Right? Yeah, I mean, you know, I do think they have a real challenge. beefing on the timeline with NASA, like, where are you going to go? Right? Yeah, I mean, you know, I do think they have a real challenge. They also have a bit of an identity crisis where they are turning more and more to buyers of commercial off the

shelf hardware, versus like developers of it. And so what does that transition look like? But then if you only have people internally, that are just buyers and don't have an engineering background, how do you know that they're buying the best stuff? At the same time, look, like, you know, NASA also like flew a helicopter on fucking Mars. Yeah, that's insane. Like, that's like a crazy capability. Nobody else would be capable of

doing that. Yes, they worked with air environment as like the contractor for that. But they like such a heavy hand in that they're now talking about like flying a helicopter on Mars. They did like the you know, sort of six minutes of what is it called? Like when the Curiosity River came down, like the six minutes of you know, hell or whatever it is. They're like, you know, literally using like retro boosters to like sky crane down, you know, you know, a rover. So like, there's a lot that NASA does that is like, requires crazy talent. But I think what they need to, you know, sort

of go through and I think like, and I think Trump administration is likely aligned with this, Jared Isaacman, the likely incoming administrator, is NASA needs to basically just focus on two core parts. One, the core of space capabilities they just become buyers of, and they just buy things off the shelf. And then where they're developing technologies directly themselves, it should only be the really radical,

super far out things, right? There's just not commercial space companies that are talking about, we're build like off the shelf Mars helicopters. Like we talked about this last time, like asteroid deflection is something that NASA should work on because it's not that commercial, right? It's like we maybe need to do it once every 50 years, hopefully not, and then NASA you can be the hero.

Yeah, exactly. Can we move on to the continuing resolution? Can you break that down for us? Yeah, yeah, I mean, it kind of relates to some of the NASA stuff too, where, you know, it's been interesting to see, you know, this quarter feels like it's been the most active in, you know, sort of defense tech aerospace investing in a long time, some of which feels rational, some of which feels sort of crazy over

top over the top. And it's just interesting to have this like massive flow of capital, you know, from, you know, venture investors going into this some of which feels sort of crazy over the top. And it's just interesting to have this like massive flow of capital, you know, from venture investors going into this field, while at the same time, the flow of capital from DC literally has been halted, right? So, you know, for the sort of less informed viewers, ultimately defense tech and aerospace companies

that are selling to the government, yes, there's commercial sort of use cases for these technologies. Those aren't related to government budgets, but ultimately a lot of these reliant on government budgets. About 10 days ago, the House and Senate agreed upon a year-long continuing resolution. What that basically means is both the House and the Senate had previously passed budgetary bills that increased defense spending, had various NASA spending, et cetera, couldn't come to an alignment on that, couldn't come to an alignment with the presidents.

And so the ultimate sort of call by all parties was we're actually just gonna freeze to whatever fiscal year 24 levels basically are. Now in that CR, they did give the DOD, hey, we know that you guys are thinking about like, you know, sort of reprogramming. And so as you're shifting budgets around, make sure that it reflects whatever like, you know, sort of reprogramming. And so as you're shifting budgets around, make sure that it

reflects whatever like, you know, house appropriators, you know, and, you know, Senate appropriators basically had in those budgets that they basically put out, you know, sort of end of February. But in the grand scheme of things, this mostly means a freezing of new ads, any new programs. And as you can imagine, who's the biggest, you know, sort of beneficiary of that? Well, incumbents have their programs continuing to be funded, right? And so the Lockheed's, Raytheon's, etc. and Northrop's might not be experiencing as much

growth as usual, but they're generally continuing to be funded versus all of the net new entrants while are experiencing massive inflows of venture capital dollars have literally been told by the U.S. government, like, expect zero stars. And so it's just a little odd to me that that's not a thing that is being talked about by all these people that are talking about, like, the gundo dynamism, this, that. It's like, well, who talks the most on X? It's it's founders and investors and neither have an incentive to really say, like, hey, by the way, none of us are making anything back anytime soon. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, it's like a paranoid founder, I like to talk about this stuff because I want to make sure that the thing that I'm working on

survives for a very long time and is sustainable. But to be clear, what this means practically is basically this year's budget was basically end September 31 is completely frozen. Now what's being begun to be worked on is the fiscal year, so 26 vehicle. That's going to first have to come from like, you know, so the president, you know, putting forth, you know,

sort of a plan that you'd expect to make it over to, you know, sort of the house and Senate in like roughly the May period. That means it's gonna make it onto the floor and like, you know, sort of June, July, hopefully gets passed by like September, October, realistically though, we basically have not hit that September 31st deadline for the past,

I don't even know what it is, like 10 plus years. And so that continuing resolution is probably going to extend for at least another 30, potentially 60 days. So potentially until the end of the year. That means that like new budget actually doesn't start until basically January of next year. And so all these companies that are raising all this capital for all these things that they would like to start. Yes, there's going to be reprogramming.

Yes, like the president is doing shipbuilding and CIA, etc. But like a lot of this stuff is very much so frozen. And, you don't realize is, let's say you have sort of CCA and shipbuilding. Those five-year plans that the DOD put together where they were like, look, in order to do the early R&D in 2024, we need 100 million. In 2025, we need 200 million. In 2026, we need 300 million. Well, because we're now frozen at 24 levels, that means it's only 124 and 125. So now when you're looking at 26, it's like, are you making up for the fact that 25, you know, sort of was, you know, low and you're trying to scale all the way to 26? You're like in a real budgetary hole. So like new programs are also in a way worse state because it's typically the new programs that are the ones that grow, that are

growing. And so if it's flat, you're both trying to figure out do you you make up for last year and how do you keep up with what the program needs? Or are you really pushing on milestones? But if you're pushing on milestones, now is it relevant to Taiwan if people are thinking about that needing to be ready in 2027, 2028? And so does that now make the DOD just want to keep shifting budget to incumbent programs that can deliver by 2027, 2028, even if they're not as capable? Right. So there's just a lot of things where it's just like, you know, I'm a, you know, obviously

mega bull on like the team at Anderl, cause like they have the like bench, the capability, the set of different products, we different programs going like they will navigate this. But like, I don't know if there's going to be like five Anderl's and I think VCs are investing like there's going to be, you know, sort of five Anderl's right now, but without even understanding like the basics of like the's going to be you know sort of five and roles right now But without even understanding the basics of like the budgetary, you know sort of process on the hill They're just you know, just swinging checks, you know based off of you know the zip code of where somebody's office is if you're a if you're a yeah, if you're an American dynamism defense tech investor

Are you looking at you know, are you seeing more pitches in Europe right now? If the anderol of anderol is anderol here in the US, but then Europe, Europe is like re militarizing, at least Western Europe, you know, are you seeing pitches come in? Would people just kind of divert dollars over there because there's potentially a lot more willingness to spend? I think you're starting to see that happen. Obviously, both the Overton window has changed there,

that like, you know, sort of budget you know, sort of growth there and say is insane. And if you think that like U.S. incumbents are like stodgy old school, etc., you incumbents are like, you know, sort of that, you know, jacked up to the nines.

And so I do think there's a real opportunity there. There aren't a ton of like super competent players. And so, you know, I wouldn't say that like the quality of what we get, you know, sort of inbound at least at Founders Fund is something you know, super high in Europe.

The thing that I will say though is at least the biggest check that I've ever, you know, sort of led is like a net new, you know, portfolio company investment. So not just like follow-ons, obviously we like we've deployed mega checks in a ramp, but that was after doing Seed and Series A. But we're investing about $36 million into basically a European aerospace defense, you know, sort of tight player and that's our first check into the company. Now, part of it is that the company was already performing very well, irrespective of the EU tailwinds. And then now with reindustrialization, etc. we're like even more bullish, you know, sort of on the company,

but we're also getting to do it at a price that is highly differentiated relative to the 94129, sorry, shoot, that's the SF, 056, zip code. With all this turmoil with DoD and with the budget and the continuing resolution, is it more important than ever that these companies figure out commercial applications? We talked to a company, Albedo, they're their satellite company yesterday. It seemed like even if the government doesn't want to buy the ISR capabilities, there are hedge funds and oil and gas providers that want, you know, high resolution images from V Leo. And so is that something that you should? I mean, you've thought about this at Vardo with the pharma and D O D contracts. How do you think about

that? And is that more important going forward? Yeah, but I think it's like one of these things that's like very, you know, sort of hard to the pharma and DoD contracts, how do you think about that? And is that more important going forward? Yeah, but I think it's like one of these things that's like very, you know, sort of hard to pivot to depending on how you've set up your business, right? So, you know, take a business and say like Saronic. I'm not sure there's that many commercial use cases for sort of small scale autonomous surface vessels

or take a company, you know, like Apex that is mostly selling commercial satellites. Now, some of them are to various defense groups, but they also have a bunch of commercial sales. So, I think it's one of these things that it's really hard to pivot from one approach to the other. Maybe somebody like Palantir has clearly shown it where they were super DOD focused for a long time and now have a massive commercial business, but that felt like it happened at the very, very late stages of the company. I think your ability to like pivot from, you know, either being

dual use from the get go or being defensive from the get go, you kind of have to choose one and we've obviously chosen the like, you know, sort of dual use from the get go. Does that give us some cons when it comes to like defense programs? Yeah, because like we're not as willing to like change around our architecture to totally match defense needs. But the pros is also in a continuing resolution year. I also have a lot of commercial work that I can continue to go pursue. There's pros and cons, I think, to sort of both approaches. But I don't think you're going to see that much shifting. It's just too hard to shift. Well, if the DOD isn't buying kamikaze drones, I'm happy to buy them personally for my next

hunting trip. Give me the C4. Let's lift the ITAR control rules, get me the suicide drone, I wanna go hunting for some big game. Wild boars. Thank you, Deleon, for coming on. Do you have a last question? Oh, last question. We got Jay coming. We got another guest coming on, but quick question.

Do you think that the deal, without commenting on rippling a deal, do you think that was a wake-up call for the defense industry around, hey, if this is happening in HR tech, we gotta take everything way more seriously, right? Because obviously, people probably, anybody that would be competing with Varta

knows who else is bidding on the contract. It's like common knowledge. It's not the same type of information advantage. But if people are willing to break the law to steal customer data, CRM data for HR tech. To me, it should just be this massive wake-up call around. If you're doing anything that's critical

to national security, you need to take your own security at your company 10 times more seriously. Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the SpaceX, the Androids, the Vardas, the Hadrian, et cetera, on down, the per capita number of IT security people you basically sort of SpaceX, the Androids, the Vardas, the Hadrians, etc on down, the per capita number of like IT security people you basically need on staff because you're just like ITAR compliant etc means these companies are thinking about it all the time. Now at the same time, are there like Chinese spies and you know foreign spies sniffing around all these? Almost certainly.

Are there other corporate spies sniffing around this all the time? Absolutely. But I do think you see this stuff a bit less in terms of actually having these sort of totally negative effects. Partially because with Rippling Deal, it's like there, it's like, okay, let's pull which software features, et cetera. When it comes to something like Varta, man, it's like, what would you even pull from our servers

to figure out how to do what we do? It's like, you can get this CAD file, this thing, but it's like, you need the supply chain, you need to cut the metal, you gotta integrate it, you gotta know how to test it, et cetera. It's like, even if you gave me access need to cut the metal, you got to integrate it, you got to know how to test it, etc. It's like even if you gave me access to our full server base, you gave me a team of like 30 engineers, you tell me go replicate Varta, it would still be like a really hard problem. Like if you look at

the Chinese rockets, they look a hell of a lot like the Falcon 9s and they're still not landing, right? And so, you know, I think it's clear that like the Chinese definitely ripped a lot of stuff from SpaceX at some point or another. It's really hard to, you know, sort of prevent that from happening You know sort of can't blame you know anybody for having that happen to their company But also the Chinese still aren't landing rockets now their solution is just been let's build as many rockets as possible and screw it You know rather than purposely landing them on barges We're just gonna ditch them over Chinese villages and like you know dump propellant on like our leaders and poor villagers

But like whatever we're gonna set up the you know the first Chinese lunar base before the Americans, because like we're just willing to murder citizens nonstop on the way to a goal. And unfortunately for America, we don't murder our citizens, we only murder our presidents. Oh, JFK files, deep cut. Well, thanks for stopping by. At least we didn't land on the dolphins yesterday.

Yeah, that's good. The dolphins seemed like they were good. Let's end on a high note. Look, maybe the dolphins work for Mossad good. Let's end on a high note Masada that's all I'll say As soon as you get off dolphin tech, there's there's some crazy what happened on the ISS There's some crazy NASA lore around dolphins. Don't Google it. Don't Okay. Well, thank you. Delia. Talk to you soon Always a good time. I think we got Jake Adler coming in, the Temple of Technology in just a few minutes.

He is building military medicine, biotech for the next generation soldier. And we gotta see if there's some dual use applications for that because we podcast pretty hard. Yep. Harder than if anyone else we know. We're still going live, so let's talk to Jake about it. I believe he's here, welcome, come on down. Ooh, the big Celsius.

I got the small Celsius. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Jake, how you doing? I'm good. How you guys doing? Doing fantastic. Uh, can you give us the update? What, what did you announce? What are you doing? What are you building? What's behind you? Oh, so behind me is our lab is the BSL two. So bio safety level two facility. So this is a bio safety cabinet. so biosafety level two facility. So this is a biosafety cabinet. So we're handling any pathogens, like any anthrax or botulinum.

We're gonna be doing it in there just for protection of the operator. But yeah, so we just announced a three and a quarter million dollar round led by Peter Thiel, Cantos and Refactor Capital to transform really the battlefield with advanced biotechnology. And really, if we consider like the state of affairs today, you know, military medicine hasn't really changed much since Vietnam. You know, we've seen a little bit of improvement in tactical

combat casualty care, but we very much still have warfighters who are going on the front lines and dying in combat. So, you know, what we're trying to build here is really advanced and novel biotechnology that we can really equip war fighters with to make them more, you know, more lethal, more resilient and more ready in combat environments. So initially applications of that look like, you know, a nanocomposite for rapid wound healing along with something we're exploring

with more intelligence partners, which is a novel bio surveillance network that would effectively be able to monitor for, for biological and chemical threats. I remember reading about quick clot back in the day. Can you talk to me about the evolution in just wound healing on the battlefield kind of the different eras and where you see it going with your company? Yeah. So, so quick laws, a really, really interesting example. It was started by a guy named Frank Hersey. Um, and, and they basically, uh,

you know, this guy would cut himself when he was shaving and he realized that this mineral called zeolite, he would pour it on his skin. Um, and it would stop the bleeding. Uh, the challenge with quick claw, at least its initial formulation was that I used to burn war fighters. So it actually would cause like second or third degree burns. So it would effectively stop the hemorrhage, but it would also burn them in the process of doing that. And they've now transitioned to technology. But really the issue with the traditional quick clot idea and the concept is that it might've supported warfare in a more traditional context where we can medevac that troop. But military is heading towards like the

military doctrine is heading towards this environment where, you know, troops are going to be deployed in combat for an extended period of time and military medics, we won't, we won't even be able to retract them for maybe upwards of two weeks. So, you know, the, the almost in many ways that the definition of what a casualty is, is changing. It's not somebody who's just been shot and it's completely, you know, completely gone. It's now somebody who can't even pull the trigger. So what we're trying to explore with King's Foyle is moving beyond just that initial hammer control and that hemostatic agent and building a product

that would actually enable the warfighter to heal faster. So reducing that convalescent period and having them return to duty sooner. Talk as much as you can about sort of broad, I would call it almost like drug use in the military. I've heard stories of fighter pilots. You know, the funny thing is, from what I know,

when F-35 pilots are deploying to the Middle East, they just sort of like take off in the US and they just fly there. And you can imagine it's a pretty long flight. Anybody that's been on a 16 hour flight to the Middle East, doing a little fundraising. It's usually want to fall asleep at some point. Adderall and some of these sort of like-

Modafinil is the big one. Those types of drugs are obvious. World War II has some crazy examples. Would love to hear the history of like kind of drug use in the military, super abbreviated, everything from like stimulants to stuff more like quick clot. Yeah, so the medications you guys mentioned

are typically categorized as no and no go. So your stimulants, and then you'll have like your Z pills or your benzodiazepines to help with drowsiness. And look, it's really interesting. The military is relatively constrained for what they can actually provide to war fighters. I've heard some crazy stories. I think I heard this story about an Air Force pilot who, yeah, he basically took a bunch of Benzos. He was like unable to fall asleep, so he started taking more

and ended up like trying to like go use the bathroom and started like completely pissing himself. So they don't have like a lot of control over and they don't really, I would say they don't really advise how to use them so well, but modafinil is definitely a big one for vigilance and awareness. Obviously your benzodiazepine class is pretty big as well, although the military is trying to move away from those. So there's quite a broad history here, but really I don't think pharmacological is necessarily the right or immediate approach. I think in many ways we should be targeting the more of the root causes. So for example, one of the early technologies we were exploring was a device called New Sleep, which is a closed loop brain computer interface that would effectively shock you

to sleep. And this has been a really big point of interest for the military is can we build neuromodulation or brain stimulation devices that can control sleep architecture and make it so when war fighters sleep three hours, they really feel like they're sleeping five hours, right? So we're trying to find alternatives that are not addictive or habit forming and don't really carry the secondary or next day effects that many benzodiazepines would.

Talk about sort of like dual use applications of sort of stuff on your roadmap, right? I imagine there's some things that you're developing that are going to be so powerful that eventually we'll want to get consumers will be like, Hey, we want some of that too, right? And there's a long history of the sort of military. You a consumer of this stuff? I see pictures of you testing yourself.

So whatever, whatever we're thinking about a new initiative, my brain immediately goes to the dual use implication. And that's sort of one of the beautiful things we get to do at this intersection of biotech and defense. A lot of the companies today that are getting funded are building like cruise missiles. And you can't really sell that to the consumer

or civilian population, right? So John wants some. I really need a big game hunting. And I want to take it to the next level, move past the sniper rifles and the long guns and go into the kamikaze drones and the cruise missiles. That's my goal for this year. But I take your point. Yeah, so continue, sorry.

But yeah, so we're consistently thinking about that deluge implication and really in many ways I see that DOD and our work with federal partners as a launch pad, right? We kind of get to offload a lot of this initial experimental and financial risk kind of deployed into this first customer market and be able to eventually leverage that market for really extreme validation in the most austere conditions and then bring it back to the civilian market. So practically everything we're building has a dual use implication. I think another interesting implication as well is that,

a lot of the technology we're building is potentially maybe too early for the civilian market. So we kind of get that initial footing with a partner who can actually help us build up the technology, provide us with the necessary revenue to grow as a company and really grow as an organization and grow out our product portfolio and eventually bring it back to the market when it's the right time for civilians.

How do you, we were just talking to Delian about kind of the continuing resolution and the fact that the DOD isn't adding a lot of new programs. You're obviously still in the early stages here, kind of seed round level. Are you thinking about, Hey, let's just go heads down for a couple of years R&D and then sprint towards program of record, or are you, are you seeing there's, there's pockets of money that you can be responsive to and little programs that you can build up very quickly.

Yeah. So we're pretty aggressive with our approach. You know, one of the last conferences we went to to present our technology, we got like removed by armed security, present to the PMs on garbage bins outside the conference center. So we're definitely in the mode of trying to get our technology in the warfighter's hands. Sort of the chasm we're trying to cross here is that if you look at the state of things today, you know, academia rules military medicine

and they do a horrible, like totally shitty job of taking technology from the bench top to the battlefield. So the way we've been approaching things is thinking like, how can I build something in four months that we can then present to a federal partner, get it in the hands of the war fighter and deploy this rapidly. So quick clot, which is an example you brought up, got cleared in nine months with no human trials. Right.

So there's kind of this really interesting opportunity for us to leverage the DOD and FDA memorandums, which enable expedited approval and clearance. And notably, like big companies right now with big startups like Neuralink and Synchron, like these big brain computer interface companies, you know, which have breakthrough designation, which was, you know, prized as like the fastest, most expedited pathway in the FDA. If you work with the DOD, you can move faster, right? So there's really interesting opportunity for us to build technology and actually get it in the FDA. If you work with the DOD, you can move faster, right? So there's this really interesting opportunity for us to build technology and actually get it in the hands of the war fighter and make sure that the troops we're putting in the most

austere conditions aren't just surviving, but they're thriving, right? It's really hard to ask a 20 year old to go into combat without the tools that they need to survive. I'm curious how much of what you're developing is based on sort of studies that have existed for a long time that just nobody cared about, right? Like I imagine there's just this treasure trove of like information and research that people just never acted on. And now that you're sort of this high agency, you have this like kind of core thesis for the company. I imagine there's a lot of basically like off balance sheet R&D work that

you can just kind of absorb and sort of run with. Yeah. So the first thing I mentioned, I think Palmer actually said this, which is that, you know, he doesn't, he hasn't really invented anything new because a lot of these concepts are already in sci-fi. And growing up being a big sci-fi reader, a lot of the ideas I have are coming directly out of science fiction. So rapid wound healing, artificial synthetic blood, biosurveillance and biodefense.

So a lot of these are deeply tied to fiction because of the limited constraints on the reality. But in terms of existing literature, you know, we really do stand on the shoulders of giants. I think my primary skill set has been how do I take really compelling literature from this one field that has no real practical application and combine it with something else, right, and kind of find these really interesting points of convergence between different ideas and turn that into a practical product. Right. So in many ways, we do a really good job at taking, you know, this cutting edge research and perfecting it. And I owe a lot to academia for that.

And that's really, in my view, with the role academia should be serving, right, academia should be that foundational doing that breakthrough science without very much thinking about the translational ability. But then you do need that partner to cross that bridge and actually build technology that can translate and get in the hands of the war fighter. And that's what we're trying to do at Pilgrim. That makes sense. The Biological Weapons Convention in 1972 said the development production acquisition transfer stockpiling and use of biological and toxins are effectively prohibited.

So bioweapons are illegal, but that doesn't mean they're not gonna be used right? Do you think the DOD like if I'm if I'm a soldier being deployed to some you know far off land? To fight some enemy that I don't know what their sort of ethics are I don't know if they're gonna follow the sort of like laws right against these things. Maybe they get super desperate to follow the sort of like laws right against these things. Maybe they get super desperate. Do you think that the DOD generally takes these sort of threats seriously enough? And I imagine you know a lot of the stuff you're thinking about is reactionary to you know a certain situation on the battlefield. How do you make sure that you're keeping our war fighters safe in a sort of unpredictable environment?

Totally. So first off you know the DOD has a very kinetic frame of reference. So when they're thinking about things and threats, they're thinking about big shiny explosion explosions. I always joke with our team that I wish there was more explosions in bio, but there just really isn't. I can't just do like an off-the-rill demo of an altius or a fury just like crashing into something. It just doesn't really work that way. So to your point, the DOD's response has

been largely reactive. You know, you look at COVID-19 spread across the globe in nine months, killed like 1.2 million Americans and wiped out 16 trillion in our GDP. It also took off like for 10 weeks, we had an operational gap in the Pacific due to the USS Theodore Roosevelt. So it's very reactionary. So, you know, in terms of the biological weapons convention, we should not be at the mercy and trust of other states. The US has a somewhat of a grandstanding policy around this, which is that we will not build bio weapons. And the best offense is really stronger defense. The problem is that we have no defense, you know, so we're kind of in this really precarious position right now where we are very vulnerable to a biological weapon attack. And we've seen that with COVID.

We saw that very briefly with H5N1, but that didn't really have a much spillover risk. So even if it's manmade or natural, it's still a threat. So the reality is that most of our foreign adversaries are building out these laboratories, they're building out these weapons. In many ways, these systems tend to be referred to as poor man newbs because they're a lot cheaper and also don't really respect borders, so they can proliferate a lot faster and don't really require that direct confrontation. So it really underscores a frightening reality where these weapons can be used in really novel ways to really take down and break down the resilience of our military and also the critical infrastructure around the US. So even with the biological weapons convention, there still is an outlasting and really real

threat that's impeding with these systems. How do you think about the legacy of Theranos? I'm sure if you're successful, people are going to be like, oh, this dropout, raising all this money, building this stuff. It's tough in bio because obviously there's so many real drugs that make it to market and quietly make billions or trillions of dollars. Novo Nordisk is bigger than the entire GDP of Denmark. But at the same time, it's harder for someone just to like download the app and verify that it's a real thing like they can with a cursor, for example. What's your take on the legacy of Theranos?

So Theranos is obviously a very concerning, it was a very concerning situation. Elizabeth Holmes had basically this ability to keep the FDA out and prevent them, proper inspectors from coming in and checking out their work. And this is actually something I'm seeing again with non-invasive neuromodulation today. A lot of the companies in this space are building brain-computer interfaces and trying to circumvent

the food and drug administration by trying to fall into this general wellness category. I've seen dozens of companies do this. And right now, they're going to be fine. They'll get away with it for the time being, but if they hit a billion dollar vow, they're going to get a horrible enforcement action. At that point, it's fraud, right? So you can even be seeing jail time and you can be seeing massive fines. So it isn't like this cycle has gone away since there and it's still very prominent. One thing that we do

at Pilgrim, which is something I've been very adamant about since day one, is that we do that preliminary validation. So if we don't see the results on our bench top, we don't even bring it to the US government. And the belief there is that we're trying to not only save taxpayer dollars, but also save our time. Like I don't have any interest in working on tech that doesn't work. So I want to see it work for myself. And clearly, if it wasn't clear with the demo I did on myself, I have a pretty high conviction to get to results. So on limited time, I had to cut holes in my legs on camera to demonstrate the rapid healing abilities of one of our composites. So that's sort of the approach we've taken.

But in terms of Theranos' legacy, it obviously has scarred the biotech industry. I'm pretty bearish on biotech as a whole, which is a pretty hard thing to say being in the industry itself. But I don't think many companies here are actually thinking about the practical and commercial implications of their work. Many people come in, they'll raise a couple million and buy like hundreds of thousand dollars worth of equipment and, you know, run with that idea, but not actually think about how they're going to make it to the market.

And I think that's a really concerning reality when we're thinking about startups, even on that 10 to 15 year timeline. Have you had any luck finding the, you have a roll up here called Pathfinder. It says as a Pathfinder, you're the stormtrooper who stares down critical near impossible challenges. You'll take on missions that break lesser souls problems with no playbook. Trekking into combat zones to deliver our tech, restoring a 90s scanning electron microscope without a manual, crashing a DARPA event with a fake badge to snag himself from top brass, tasks so wild they'll call you insane. Has it been challenging to find the right person for that?

That's barely no. We've gotten a lot of really compelling submissions for that. One thing I was very smart to do ahead of the announcement of the company was put the question as part of the job post. So we've gotten some really interesting information out of people. So when people are, instead of just submitting a bullshit application, they actually have to spend the time and write something compelling. But we found some really cool people. Like I said, our approach is very much based in guerrilla warfare, right? So we do what it really takes to get the meetings that we need to get. And thus far, you know, it's worked very well in our favor. I think in many ways, we're kind of battling a lot of entrenched interests. I somewhat compare, you know,

with limited perspective on precisely what it would look like. But I somewhat compare our experience to O5 Palantir, going up against the government, going up against these primes, and really trying to make a name, positioning ourself and our company. So the Pathfinder role is one that I was really excited by. It really even like fired me up writing it.

And we really wanted a stormtrooper who could go on the front lines, I could put them into combat environments and they would just kill it. If we need to get a meeting with meeting with sect F if we need them to break into a DARPA conference if they need To go, you know beyond enemy lines, whatever it may be We just needed somebody who who would basically take the task, you know and sign off and get it done He's an absolute dog. Well, I wanted one more question one more question. Then I'll cut it off. Okay, cool You talked about brain computer interfaces. We've talked about this in the past. You know the industry very well.

I don't know if you saw this, but a couple weeks ago, someone burned something close to like a couple million dollars of Ethereum to encode a message in the blockchain that alleged that China had developed brain computer interface technology that was being used to control workers like ants. And it was very scary sounding sci fi. If it's happening, it's terrifying. Why would someone spend so much money? Is this a some sort of false flag? Just try and freak out the Americans by spending this money.

Is it even possible? What's your timeline for that type of thing? The Enders game of BCI, controlling all the soldiers on the battlefield. Give us the most sci-fi take you have. So notably, first of all, I'll address the China thing. China is beating out the US impotence around neural interfaces. They've been doing that, I think, for a few years now. So they've really taken the lead. China also thrives on this belief of military-civil fusion.

So basically, any civilian corporation has basically as a direct inline to the government for military applications. So it's realistic in many ways that China is going to get there. And also, like I mentioned before, the US maintains somewhat of a grandstanding approach to bio. So we've been pretty anti-modification or genetic enhancement of our warfighters for good reasons. But notably, that's going to inhibit our timeline to get to potentially the same outcomes that China might eventually move

towards. So in terms of neural interfaces that can control warfighters, it's something I've looked into and something that I've explored. And there's a couple of interesting modalities that are still semi or non-invasive. The biggest challenge with neural interfaces is spatial and temporal resolution. So most of the solutions today that rely on like EEG, you have really high temporal resolution. So you see the signal really, really quickly, but you're basically looking at like a bowl of soup.

It could be with millions of different things mixed in. You don't know precisely where that signal is coming from. And we've been leveraging AI. There's been researchers who've been using AI to isolate it a little bit more. But non-invasive modalities are still pretty unclear. But in terms of a timeline or really approach to build technology that would be

able to control the war fighter, it's a lot sooner than you would imagine. Terrifying. Terrifying. Amazing. Thanks for breaking it down. lot sooner than you would imagine Terrifying Amazing. I'm glad you're doing what you're doing last thing I just want to leave you with if you're working on anything that would help us do this show 24 hours a day for For weeks in a row eliminate sleep entirely. Yeah, just get it over here have Celsius, but we're looking for something stronger Make it happen Jake. Yeah, we're here. We appreciate you dogfooding your product. We'll step up. We're confident. You can test the craziest stuff. Pre-FDA. We'll get ITAR

compliant. We'll get regulated as a DOD effort if you need to test stuff on us. Thank you for doing what you do. Appreciate having you on. Appreciate you, Jake. Thanks for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. What an absolute dog. Wild. Should we move on to the timeline, close it out? Yeah, I have a post here that's breaking news. This was sent right when we started going live. This is from Barrett Ames.

He says, yo, at TBPN, Ramp just sent us cookies. Talk about customer service. I reached out to them because if you also keep shilling, it's working. Thank you. And so we'd love to see it. Nice work, Barrett Barrett nice work ramp on saying these look like some fantastic cookies ramp When you hear this we like cookies some cookies John No carbs, and it's all protein. It's actually made a fully mignon. Yeah, exactly well said anyway should we move on to Wilma nice?

Let's do it Obscure hobbyist of the year, if you've followed our award show last year, he said, the end result of vibe coding, $100 million in 30 days and all this software prosperity, gospel junk isn't hundreds of venture scale AI companies, it's just junk food. It's a return to artisanal software, software that fits right in the hand,

distribution passed down over generations. Amazing. Amazing. What a word, Smith. What a word, Smith. Yeah. We love Will. Yeah.

So Will's one of those people again, right? He's sort of in that rune category of he should be writing great novels and texts, but instead he's just ripping. Just posting bangers. You know, bangers. Yeah. I mean, I've been seeing that there's this whole trend of the levels I owe. I just vibe coded a flight simulator.

And now a lot of developers are realizing that they can take work that they've already done and spent a lot of time on and been like, I just vibe coded this in the day. And so I saw someone post a website that they did design. And it was like a beautiful website that was so pixel perfect. And like, you'd scroll down and you'd go on this crazy 3JS thing and it was like so complicated and everyone in the comments was just like you didn't vibe code this there's no way show us the proms or it's not I love I gotta hide the secret sauce like my prompt is so good I you know I was able to build this thing. Jeremy's comment on that I long to pay $59.99

for a one-time download of a download of a handcrafted German to-do app. Absolutely. I'm totally on that. Yeah. I could see a return to the one-time purchase model. Oh yeah. Like everything comes in cycles, right? Yeah. I'd like that. Well, should we move on to a ramp employee, Jeff Charles? Yeah. This is a great post. He has a screenshot of Gemini. He says, make a presentation that summarizes these trends, highlighting key statistics and takeaways.

I'm still learning how to create multiple slides at once. Can you describe one slide you want me to create? Okay. Create one slide with main takeaways. And then it's just- I'm still learning how to create multiple, oh, I'm sorry. I can't help with creating slides yet, but I'm still learning. Gem create multiple, I'm sorry. I can't help with creating slides yet, but I'm still learning.

Gemini. Oh, come on. Sundar did not need this. You have to pay for this stuff. Yeah, they charge for this product. Oh yeah, this is like 20 bucks a month. And then it just annoys you in every app you're in, like, hey, I wanted to use Gemini,

and then it doesn't deliver. Clippy would never do this to you. No. It would never make it sound like it could do something. Exactly, Clippy was just there with like fun little positive messages. Like, hey, I'll help you out here. Have you heard of control V control C?

We got it all here in Microsoft word 95. Anyway, should we move on to Joe Weisenthal? Oh, the post was deleted. Anyway, he was just giving a shout out to bros. He says they love using bros as an epithet. That's sad. I only have warm feelings toward my bros. He says they love using bros as an epithet. That's sad. I only have warm feelings toward my bros. And this is because there is a new phrase on the timeline,

the abundance bros. This is popularized by Ezra Klein saying that we need to focus on a, on a, on a, basically a democratic platform around abundance and building a pro builder, a political party. And a lot of people are trying to take them down, calling them abundance bros. Bernie bros was the same thing. Whenever someone wants to take down something, you know, it's a SaaS bros, tech bros, business

bros, finance bros. They throw bros around. I saw another post from that was relevant to this from someone named Grace Freud. She says, hi, I'm Ezra Klein. I've spent the past two weeks or so thinking about how to fix the world and I think I have the answer. What if things were good?

I love it. But no, I'm pro abundance. It's easy to rally around. Yeah, I mean, we don't really talk about politics here, but like, Ezra Klein is on the vanguard of a significant shift politically, uh, where if you listen, if you read his book or you listen to his, his YouTube video, breaking it down, uh, it sounds very, very different from anything we've heard from his camp over the last few years.

Uh, so I don't know, check it out if you're into politics, but there's other podcasts for that. So certainly are. We got a, we got's other podcasts for that, so. Certainly are. Unsubscribe from us if you don't want to see that. We got a post from patio11, AKA Patrick McKenzie. He says, so Atlantic came out with this new article that said there are two kinds of credit cards. Yet another way the poor are subsidizing the rich. The credit card market has quietly transformed

into two credit card markets, one offering generous benefits to wealthy Americans and the other offering expensive debt to the poor with the latter subsidizing the former. And so this is, sorry, he's Patrick. He's on credit cards. Yeah, so Patrick says, the thesis is that interchange fees redistribute money

from poor to rich. I do not subscribe to this thesis. So he's, let me see. Put him in the truth zone. Yeah, you gotta put this one in the truth zone. I mean, credit cards take fees from payment processors when they swipe a card, because they're taking on some amount of risk related to that transaction.

And the credit card companies pass some of that back to the people that pay them off. And if you really want the best rewards, just constantly switch credit cards and debit cards and just always use the latest Neo bank that's offering you 5% cash back or 10% Bitcoin match, whatever it is. We should have him on the show

because I wanna hear his thesis because I've talked to consultants and kind of investors who have looked at consumer credit card products and they've basically said that, you know, that is the business model. Like revolvers are the way, like revolvers, people that revolve the debt

and actually they collect interest on. And then there's a whole cohort that they never make any money on. And that's kind of always been the business model. And so I wonder. Well, you can still make money on the people just from the spread between the interchange fee and what gets passed back.

And I guess, yeah. The rewards. I guess it's not redistributed in the sense that the rich person is still generating a lot of money for the credit card companies. That's what I'm saying. The credit card company is making a lot of money on everyone. And probably more money on the rich person.

Turns out, it's a good business. This was an interesting post by Tyler Huggie, Hudgee? I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that, but he says, the venture capital Mount Rushmore. Ready? Arthur Rock, Don Valentine, John Doar, and for many years- Arthur Rock, the anonymous poster?

I'm just kidding. Don Valentine, the creator of Valentine's Day? Yeah. By the way, you made that joke in like 10. Flopped. I don't even know if 10 people got it. No. I don't know if anybody got the joke.

I don't think he's that iconic of an image. I thought it was funny. Yeah, well we scheduled that one like months ahead and it went out and it was a complete flop. Anyway, and for many years he couldn't pick a fourth today. He's calling it Doug Leone. And then a lot of people in the comments are saying, Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Kosla, Teal, Moritz are all interesting. pick a fourth today he's a large venture capital firm.

So he kind of doesn't count as a generational VC, even though obviously he invested $92,000 plus the secured credit line, made a huge amount of money. And interestingly, he was introduced to Apple through Don Valentine and Arthur Rock. So literally every major company went through them. Microsoft had David Marquette of technology venture investors, got one million for a five percent stake.

And when you talk to David Senor, he's all, Microsoft didn't raise venture capital because they didn't really do more than that. They only did one VC round. And of course, TVI did not go on to become like a big generational firm. Amazon, Jeff Bezos' family came in, but they had other angel investors

and later Kleiner Perkins came in. Andy Bechdel-Sheim at Google. There's a lot of folks that the early rounds of these mag-7 were just random people that never fully scaled up. You even look at Meta. They just became post-economic too fast. Basically.

They lost the dog in them. Of course, with Google, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins eventually came in very, very early and got huge stakes. Metta, formerly Facebook, Teal put in $500K on a convertible note, which converted to 10% equity stake. And then he turned it into Founders Fund. Tesla. Elon Musk, you can kind of think of the first investor.

But then Sequoia and Kleiner came in, of course. That's right. And then, yeah, Tesla with Elon Musk, and then Nvidia, Sequoia Capital again. So just some generational firms putting up big numbers, the Holy Trinity for a reason. It's crazy to think about investing in Apple or Microsoft and then just being like,

yeah, I'm not gonna raise a massive growth fund. Like it's a different era. Now, the LPs would be beating down your door if you had 10% of a trillion dollar company. But anyway, should we move on to this robot? Do we have this video pulled up? Can we play this? Boston Dynamics wants to do another demo.

No, oh no. The demo, Brett, no. Let's do Mads posting first while Ben tries to pull that up. Mads posting, Science Girl says, what massively improved your mental health? And Mads is sharing a picture of a book. Caller, I'd like to know how you handle your stress. Trump, I try and tell myself it doesn't matter.

Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn't matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn't matter. What a bizarre quote. And it just sounds like a ramble.

I don't even get it. I think there's some more context here. I remember when this was first shared. It was during the height of the drama and the election and everything like that. And I think this is a good and bad philosophy. It's very nihilistic. If you're dealing with problems, yeah,

you want to sort of detach from them and understand like, yeah, you want to sort of detach from them and understand like, you know, okay, this is frustrating or I'm not happy with the situation. I need to resolve it. But you can sort of detach and look at it from a different perspective and say, you know, I still have, there's still a lot of good things in life and this one thing doesn't make everything else bad. And is he a nothing ever happens guy? This feels very nothing ever happens bad. Yeah. And, Is he a nothing ever happens guy?

This feels very nothing ever happens coded. Maybe we should ask him when he comes on the show. Yes. After he's done. Only if he's talking about his business. No, I'm saying after. Yeah, after he gets done with all this politics side quest. If he goes back to just building social networking

and crypto technology. That's right. Ben, do we have a video? Hey, we got it. There we go. Looks like a normal Boston Dynamics demo. Let's see it do a kickflip. Oh, it's running.

OK. Pretty impressive. Kneeling. OK. Oh, wow. Crawling. Not bad. This is pretty good.

I'm excited. I still don't understand what's going on with Boston Dynamics because unitry is getting all the attention now. Wow, OK. That's cool. That's pretty good. I like that. I like that.

Anytime you're going vertical, doing flips. Yeah. Whoa. OK, break dancing. That's pretty good. This is impressive. So there's a human in the suit, right? Yeah, for sure.

I mean, honestly, the robots look so crazy. It's so easy to think like this is CGI. This is AI generated, but wow. Okay. Doing some break dancing. Interesting to start with the very unimpressive. Okay. That's getting really, really good. Wow. Uh, very interesting. I'm really wondering when is Boston Dynamics going to get more aggressive about the commercialization? Like they're not in the conversation at all. Yeah, you called this the best marketing strategy for any robotics company is to figure out a way

to make 10,000 of them and just march them across a field. Yep, that would be very intimidating to anyone and there'd probably be a program of record the next day. I would try to lead their round. Yes, and I recently said there's a lot of companies working on counter UAS technology. I would get all the group chats together and I'd say. There's a lot of companies working on counter UAS technology. You're invested in the company, Alan Control Systems,

gun on a truck, right? Yeah. And they can demolish DJI drones if they were coming to attack. And those drone light shows, we now have counter to that. We have Andrews Anvil. We have electronic systems. Drones are good for drone or drones.

Drones against drones. I've even seen eagles being used to capture drones. Nets, all sorts of stuff, electronic systems. Miro's, drones are good for drone or drone. Drones and drones, there's, I've even seen eagles being used to capture drones. Nets, all sorts of stuff, shotguns. Beagles, hunting dogs. But I have yet to see a company build counter-humanoid technology. I think it's just a gun, but I wanna see it in a demo.

I wanna see a gundo defense tech company just showing, you know, a mini gun, just spitting out a thousand rounds at a horde of unitries. There's this thing, I don't think you've ever seen it, but where two guys get in an octagon and they fight. Oh. And you could imagine a world where we take some of our best MMA athletes.

That's the United Fisticuffs Championship, right? Yeah, yeah, it's not mixed martial arts. It's muscle man attack. Muscle man attack. You called it? Muscle man attacks. And you can imagine a world where we just take our UFC champions and face them off against the humanoids.

And the Boston Dynamics. That's the final boss. The final boss. Anyway. Can you, could a humanoid take out a John Jones in his prime, you know, Bo Nickel today. I think Bo Nickel makes short work of that Boston Dynamics robot.

Oh, yeah. Rear naked choke. Rear naked choke on that? I don't know. I mean, that robot seemed like you could just flip around and just grab him. But the hard thing is you can't. I think it's more like a strike to the head.

A foot to the head really does it in. Kick it over. Maybe. It's kind of crazy. How do you submit a robot? You can break their arm, and the rest of them is still. Maybe. It's kind of crazy. How do you submit a robot? You can break their arm, and the rest of them is still. Yeah. It's going to be tricky.

Yeah, our producer, Ben, is a former almost champion of a jujitsu tournament recently. Go for number one, Ben. Let's move on to Chet. Yeah, Chet. No cap capital. Yeah, so this is a good one. I've heard this before.

I just wanted to highlight it again as a word. If you're running a city, don't do this. Just learned about how Chicago sold the rights to all of its parking meter revenue to the UAE for 1.1 billion in 2008. The city is currently collecting 150 million a year and growing in parking meter fees and sends it straight to Dubai until 2083. Not a good inflation hedge but maybe they put that 1.1 billion in

some high growth asset and it's now sitting at 20 billion you know they could be outpacing the inflation we don't know what they did with the money probably just did nothing with it though let's be honest anyway Sam Rudikoff says my dad uses these speakers to watch MSNBC and this is what we with it though, let's be honest. Anyway, Sam Rudikoff says, my dad uses these speakers to watch MSNBC and this is what we expect our future to be. When you're enjoying TBN Live, throw it on a TV but get some nice speakers.

Get some bass in there. We recorded nice microphones for a reason. The ideal way to listen is through sort of handcrafted European, very artisanal speakers where the maker makes one or two of them a year. And it's sort of like a 30 year waiting list. So get on the waiting list. It's fantastic.

And get a nice recliner to sit there and watch us. What else should we cover before we wrap up? What's interesting to you? Do you want to do Carp Madness? Palantir? This is kind of an interesting one. Eliano Yunis over at Palantir has created a March Madness bracket for the greatest Dr. Carp moments, the infamous soundbites, cockroach holders, steak dinners, self-pleasuring, rusty crusty, don't play golf, fake religion, coke short sellers AI revolution

And he and he posts all the different video clips And you can go and vote on this Curious and have a lot of fun picking the best carp soundbite The most electric carp sound boy the player haters the PowerPoint the motel six electric carp sound boy the player haters the PowerPoint the motel six They're all great clips and Eliana has done the great job of collecting. I go and figure it out I have one more post from Steven Schwartz over at wasp So are for rock posted?

24 hours ago WAP just crossed 90 million dollar run rate and closed an unannounced series be at $800 million from Bain Capital. Congrats!" And then Steven quotes it and says, this is nearly one year old news. Sorry we hadn't told anybody yet. WAP has grown significantly since then and we have enormous plans for the rest of the year. So totally sleeper company. We should should have them on I mean, I don't fully understand they run sort of a a Substack ask platform that helps people sell like in my Information products from what I call it the make money app great name And yeah, we should have the founders on to talk about it. I remember they reached out to about PMF or die. Yeah, when we got started. Very cool. They have like live streaming functionality like a bunch of bunch of stuff. So sleeper company excited to have them on at some point. And congrats to Stephen Schwartz on the round. You got to announce the next one with us. Come on the show. Don't let rock leak stuff leak in here. Give us

a go direct. We love scoops. We love as much as john loves scooping his protein powder. We like scoops. And we don't like leaks. It's very disrespectful. Stop leaking numbers folks. Never leak. We will never leak your fundraise. We will never leak. What we will do though is say thank you to ramp public ad quick eight sleep wander and bezel for their support of the show Thank you all for the support of the show. Thank you for supporting the show. We love doing this and I can't wait for I can't wait for the next one. I was gonna say the same thing. It's

21 hours away and you gotta wonder if we could commission Jake over at Pilgrim to develop just like the sort of pod, call it like podcast, alpha, you know, that Joe Rogan had alpha brain. Alpha brain, yeah. If we could develop like our own proprietary drug and then not release it to the world just so that we have another edge.

Or some sort of drug that just, as soon as the camera stopped rolling, it just puts me to sleep in hibernation and then I just wake up 24 hours later, welcome to TBPN Live. That would be ideal, so I don't have to spend a minute away from the show. Guys, we're moving to a new studio soon,

and we're actually just gonna set up our mics on our eight sleeps right here, so the second the camera goes off, we just kinda go back. That's great. Anyway, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. We will see you tomorrow. Go leave us five stars on Apple and Spotify.

We're climbing. We've been climbing up the charts, by the way. Climbing up the charts. We're trying not to fixate on that. Thank you to everyone. Seriously, if you've subscribed, if you've listened on any of those platforms, it's really cool and really awesome to see.

We really appreciate it. The score takes care of itself. Truly. Yeah, but thank you all for being a part of this, and we will see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Thank you. Bye.