TBPN Live - Inside ChatGPT’s Uses, NVIDIA Pours $100B into OpenAI | Kimbal Musk & Shervin Pishevar, John Shahidi, Laura Deming, Steven Glinert, Austin Petersmith, Ethan Barajas & Jamie Palmer

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

(01:21) - Inside ChatGPT’s Everyday Uses (35:28) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (58:21) - John Shahidi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and content/media executive based in Newport Beach, California. He co-founded Shots Studios (formerly Rock Software / RockLive) with his brother Sam Shahidi, originally doing mobile games and celebrity apps before shifting into talent management, content production, and podcasting. He also serves as President of Happy Dad Hard Seltzer & Tea and leads the Shots Podcast Network. He’s known for his ability to pivot from apps to multimedia ventures, working with influencers and creative talent, blending media, marketing, and branding in youth-oriented digital culture. (01:45:43) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:00:30) - Laura Deming, a venture capitalist and founder of the Longevity Fund, discusses her work at Until Labs, where she aims to develop hibernation pods akin to those in science fiction, with the immediate goal of cryopreserving human organs to improve transplant logistics. She highlights the challenges of scaling cryopreservation from embryos to human organs, emphasizing the need to prevent ice formation during the freezing process. Deming also touches on the potential future applications of this technology, including long-term space travel and extending human lifespan by pausing biological processes. (02:27:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:31:17) - Kimbal Musk, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, co-founded The Kitchen Restaurant Group and the nonprofit Big Green, focusing on sustainable food systems and education. In the conversation, he discusses the success of Nova Sky Stories' Vatican show, which attracted 300,000 attendees, and highlights plans for future large-scale drone art performances worldwide. He also emphasizes the importance of expanding their drone fleet to meet growing demand and maintaining a 100% safety record. (02:49:01) - Steven Glinert, CEO of Sphere Semi, announced the company's successful $12 million funding round led by Acme Capital and Future Ventures, bringing their total funding to $20 million. He emphasized Sphere Semi's focus on revolutionizing analog semiconductor design through AI, aiming to automate the traditionally manual process and enhance efficiency. Glinert also highlighted the company's strategic expansion into the defense sector, particularly in developing RF components, and plans to venture into mixed-signal chips to meet the growing demands of data centers. (02:57:29) - Ethan Barajas, co-founder and CEO of Icarus Robotics, is leading the development of dexterous, free-flying robots designed to perform routine maintenance and logistics tasks aboard spacecraft, thereby allowing astronauts to focus on scientific research and manufacturing. These robots, which can be controlled from the ground, aim to reduce the high costs associated with astronaut labor, estimated at $135,000 per hour. Icarus Robotics has secured a $6.1 million seed funding round and plans to launch their robots to the International Space Station by late 2026 or early 2027 for a year-long testing phase. (03:06:10) - Austin Petersmith, co-founder and CEO of Howie.ai, discusses the company's recent $6 million seed funding and the launch of their AI-powered scheduling assistant, Howie, which combines advanced models with human oversight to optimize meeting arrangements. He explains the product's pricing tiers—$35 per month for the base version and $145 for the Pro version, which offers white-labeling and advanced preferences—and addresses the challenges of balancing AI automation with human verification to ensure accuracy. Petersmith also shares insights into the competitive landscape, emphasizing the complexities of developing such a product and expressing confidence in Howie.ai's ability to stay ahead by continually enhancing their offerings. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. On Day, September 22nd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. Sam Altman and Matthew McConaughey defined the weekend in my world on my timeline. Two former Joe Rogan guests. Interestingly, only Sam Altman has done Theo Vaughan, and only Sam Altman has done Theo Vaughan. and only Sam Altman has done Tucker Carlson. Matthew McConaughey has gotten snubbed by those two.

But hopefully we'll get McConaughey on Theo eventually. But until then, Sam is the lone of the pair to do those shows. Matthew McConaughey on Theo on. It feels like a match made in heaven. Sam obviously did well on the show. But they both were talking about AI and caused, you know, a stir, predictions, debate, and I thought it would be interesting to weave through it. So Sam Altman kicked off with a post here. He says,

time is money, save both, easy-use corporate cards, bill payment, and how many and a whole a lot more all in the place. He said, go to ramp.com. Now he didn't. That's fake news. But we love ramp.com. And so head over to ramp.com. No, what Sam actually said was, over the next few weeks, we are launching some new compute-intensive offerings. There we go. Because of the associated costs, some features will initially only be available to pro subscribers. That's me. That's me. And some new products will have additional fees. Ooh, interesting. Extra monetization. Our intention remains to drive the cost of intelligence down as aggressively as we can and make our services widely available. And we are

confident we will get there over time. But we also want to learn what's possible when we throw a lot of compute at today's model costs at an interesting, at interesting new ideas. So there were lots of debate over what he's going to launch. Meanwhile, Matthew McConaughey was over on Joe Rogan saying that he wants a private LLM fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations. So he can ask questions and get answers based solely on that information without any outside influence. Can we play the Matthew McConaughey clip because he had a very interesting phrase. I thought it was very funny. He doesn't say fine tune on this. He wants to log. He wants to log it in. We'll hear from him. Let's go to Matthew McCona.

I'm interested, though, in a private LLM where I can upload hey, here's three books are written. Here's my other favorite books. Here's my favorite articles I've been cutting and pasting over the 10 years and log all that in. Log all

that in. And here's all my journal, whatever, the people out of it. Log it in. So I can ask you questions based on that. Right. And basically learn more about myself. Right. You stand on the political spectrum. I'd like to No, that's what I would like to do, which is sort of a glorified word document, but it still would hold a lot more information. This is a great.

Do not write this off. This is an important consumer. This is the next big market of consumers. With the information I'd like to load it with. Right. Yeah. Maybe even like I'm saying in this, in the words of belief, in the man I'm working to be, the man I'm working to be. He doesn't feel like the current state of LLMs are meeting.

are meeting his needs, and that's really, really important. If you're opening eye, you want to become the biggest company in the world. You want everyone to use your products. It's slowly learning about me through conversations, then going, oh, I think this is what you like based on our conversation. No, I want the answers based on what I've uploaded it with only, not from the outside world. And he probably uses Instagram, and has, and Instagram is personalized,

does give him a unique view on things he likes and has become very good at servicing. exactly what he wants. Well, if he wants to log in, he should log in to re-stream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream to reach your audience, wherever they are. But, so I took this as just this, like, there's this interesting battle going on between

how much personalization and how is personalization actually surfaced to the user? Like, a lot of people in the replies... Are you getting value out of memory function today? No. I don't feel like I I feel like it remembers little facts about me and then weaves those in basically in awkward moments. But it's still chat GPT.

Like it's still the voice of chatchety. Memory feels like it's been broadly overhyped, right? This is what people were saying was ultimately going to be the moat for LLMs. It's like, why would you switch LLM? Yes. New LLM doesn't know anything about you. Yes.

But to date, I haven't, same with you. I have an experience feeling like I am so locked into this LLM because it knows everything about me. It just knows me better than the next problem. Yes, it remembers facts. So if you've asked it to fix your car and you told it what model car you have

and then you just mentioned, like, my car won't start. It'll remember what car that is. But it doesn't develop a unique personality. It's always the same. And that lends itself to a specific flavor of using m-dashes, using bullet points. It's not this, it's that type of syntax.

And some people love that. Like, we saw that Reddit loved 4-0 very clearly. And a lot of us were surprised. We were like, really, is this real? Is this fake? Like, what's going on? People are really upset that 4-0 is going away. It was real enough that they changed course.

Yeah, and they brought it back. And the same thing happened in Teapot with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Everyone was saying, oh, sonnet is the best. Tyler, did you like Sonnet? 3.5? Were you a sonnet head? Yeah. I mean, there was a funeral.

There was a funeral? Wait, did they deprecate it? Yeah. Oh, I didn't realize that. Well, actually, it was Claude 3. That was like the original one that people were like, oh my gosh, I love Claude. Yeah, yeah, that it had a very specific personality. And I feel like the future and like the goal with personalization should be everyone gets that experience.

Everyone gets their own, over time, the model shapes and morphs into something that has a personality that you really vibe with. Very much like if you go around into the world, like how many people do you meet before you find something? someone who like you want to start a show with or podcast with right like it takes a lot to be like this person really gels with my personality um and their personality is changing a little bit as as i interact with them and vice versa like that type of interaction it happens over a very long time of meeting a lot of people and deciding who is who's the best fit who do you who do you vibe with right and so two years ago sam altman stood on stage at open dev day. This was in 2023, which

feels like a decade ago at this point, and announced custom GPDs and a GPT store. And the idea was fine-tuning was going to be done by a creator. And I was going to be able to do exactly what Matthew McConaughey

is describing. Go in, load up Matthew McConaughey's books, load up the Bible, load up a bunch of other interviews with him, everything about his worldview, notes, journals, all of that stuff. Create a custom GPT. It could be private or it could be public, and then other people could choose to interact with it.

And over the past two years, that just hasn't happened. I looked at the top of the chat GPT app store, and it's the number one is astrology birth chart, GPT. Number two is scholar GPT. It builds in Google, scholar, pub med, bioarchive, archive. Then there's a fitness workout diet coach, yes. Humanize AI that's trying to write more human-like content, an image generator and an image generator pro. And so I'm sure these are, you know, great, but they certainly haven't broken

through to where they are the default by, in general, when I want to use AI or chat GPT, I open the app, I open my phone, I start talking to it. I might throw in a link to an article to give it a little bit more context. I might add some flavor on how, what level of depth I want to go to, but I'm not going and creating custom GPs. I'm satisfied with the current results, but at the same time, I don't feel like it's personalized. Like, I feel like if I picked up your chat GPT right now and said the exact same thing, give me a deep dive on the new CEOs of Oracle. I was interested in that. I wanted a deep research report. I feel like if I take my prompt, I put it in your chat GPT, I'm getting the exact same result, basically. Even though

obviously it's not fully deterministic, it might be slightly different words, but I feel like the flavor, the personality will be the same. Because we are, me and you, even though we speak to Chachapiti differently. We are interacting with, like, the same personality. And personalization just means remembering a few facts. So it might address you as Doree and me as John, but it's not fundamentally going to be a different style. And I was wondering about, like, how does that actually, like,

at what level do I want? I'm still at a point where I'm testing different models, and I can get the same value out of a bunch of different deep research. like products yeah and that says a lot because I think I think ultimately the value of I think deep research products have already stabilized to the point where yes if you were to compare to line by line you'd be one of them would be objectively the best yeah you're getting the core value out of it which is just a great summary of events or whatever you're researching yeah so a lot of it comes down to like speed and user interface um

I tend to like the current Chat Chachypti voice mode more than Gemini, but Gemini's deep research product is fantastic, and it's faster. And so I'm going to close my phone for 20 minutes, but I like being able to just pull up the voice mode. And I feel like the Gemini app currently kind of jumps the gun on ending the voice note, whereas with ChatGPT, I feel like I can ramble a little bit more, add more context, and then end it and then edit it if I need to. so like I've just kind of baked into that flow but I agree with you like they both feel like the same personality they might have memorized a few facts but they're not really creating a person a different personality where oh yeah my my chat GPT is like is like a particular particular character that's very different from yours and I think I think the future and what and what would be sort of like you know inference heavy or or GPU compute intensive might be every

time, like really doing thoughtful roll-ups and developing that personality over time for every user so that you don't just have Reddit loves 4-0 and Teapot loves Claude 3.5 Sonnet. You have every single person loves their individual Chatchipit instance and would be distraught if it changed because they're very satisfied with it. And as a function, you don't, you can't leave. You don't want to leave because everyone has that feeling of like, well, I've invested all this time. it doesn't just know things about me because I can go to a different model

and say, here's the car I drive, here's my age, here's some data, like, put, you know, I could just import, you know, all sorts of podcasts I've done and stuff. Like, it's easy to, like, get the facts. Yeah. But it's not that easy to understand the flavor of LLM interaction that I'm looking for, what

actually is sticky, and that feels like it all feeds into lower churn. So I think that's, I think that's sort of the, sort of the goal. I don't think you will end up actually logging Again, the bigger dividing line is, are you using AI for knowledge retrieval and like purely functional tasks? Or are using it as a friend-like product? Yeah, yeah, totally.

And I still believe that if you're in the first camp and it's function and knowledge retrieval, that the personality just doesn't matter that much, right? I still think that there's a little bit of personality that I think is, it's somewhat important in the sense of like knowing where I like to dive deeper in the deep research, where I like to stay at a high level. Like if I'm doing a deep research report, I'm often, I'm often prompting it with, write it like a New Yorker article, try and pull real quotes, real anecdotes, show me who the people were behind this decision. I don't like just a fact, fact, fact. I actually really, really detest when you ask for the history of a business and they say, Microsoft launched this. Apple launched the iPhone.

Like, I don't believe that Apple exists. Apple didn't launch the iPhone. Like Steve Jobs and a group of people who operate within a structure called Apple launched the iPhone. And I want to hear the story of the people that did that thing, not the abstract press release machine that you get from like, You know, the corporate entity announced a personalization tab last week. Tab? No, I didn't know about this.

This is buried in the settings page. Okay, yes. I've seen that tab before. You can enable customization so that you can customize the model effectively in the chat. Yep. And then you can set different personalities. So there's default, which is cheerful and adaptive, cynic, critical and sarcastic. Interesting.

Robot. Blunt. clanker listener which is thoughtful and supportive and nerd exploratory and enthusiastic and then you can do custom instructions to make it sound gen Z

I guess I had I have some custom instructions years ago someone posted like here are the best things to clean up your chat chit but they were all like these prompt injection things like mistakes erode my trust so

be accurate and thorough provide detail explanations. I'm comfortable with lots of detail. Value good arguments over authorities. The source is irrelevant. And I don't know if I, no moral lectures. No need to disclose you're an AI. Some of these are useful. I don't know.

I'll probably take these out of there. What should GPT call you? So they're definitely working on this. I just wonder, I think I turned this off after, after I asked it to tell me a joke and the joke was like hyper-specific about my particular car. And I was like, this is kind of cool, but it's not really. funnier. I don't know. Let's see. I'm going to turn personalization back on, but clear out those custom instructions and see, see how my, my chat GPT experience is. But there are obviously

much more, there are many more just like down the fairway features that people are expecting. So SORA 2 with audio and 4K, people kind of expect that SORA, I've comps SORA to V-O-3. V03 is dramatically better. SORA 2 is still very, or SORA 1 is still very hallucinatory, but it's like a year old at this point. So they probably should be catching up to the frontier there. Of course, that's extremely. And you would expect Google to be in the lead here purely because of the YouTube. I would think so too. Hopefully the opening I team has figured out a way to get up to the benchmarks. I've seen other companies that aren't Google produce V-O-3 level results. So I would expect that SORA 2 is close to V-O-3 quality somehow.

I don't know how they got the data. Might have bought it from somewhere, might have done a whole bunch of different things. There's a lot of ways they could have gotten a ton of video tagged data. But that is something that I wouldn't be surprised if it's some new products that have additional fees. I wouldn't be surprised if the SORA 2 generations

are so expensive that they actually just tell you, like, hey, it's 2 bucks every time. Because they should have learned from the Google situation, which was, I paid $250. on a $500 a month plan. I signed up for a $500 a month plan. I haven't churned. And you're still capping me

with these crazy rate limits and you're just not taking my money. And you're a huge company. Like, there's got to be a way. And there was a way. It was like, go to the API and do all this. But I was like, I want it in the app. I want to be just consumer pro-sumer level

and at least have the option to just continue prompt and light the GPUs on fire. Just find the fair market price. Find the market clearing price for what the value of those GPUs are right now. Maybe it's 50 bucks, a prompt. And then I can, decide. I can decide. Yeah, I'm using this for work. This is going out on my professional...

On your ramp card. Yeah, on my TV show. And, like, it's worth 50 bucks. Maybe the market clearing price is much lower. But it should be above the value of running those GPUs, in my opinion. Image 2, they currently have GPT Image 1, and they're expecting, like, an answer to nanobanana, edits, better text rendering. The text rendering is already fantastic in images in chat GPT. But I wouldn't be surprised if that comes out. Nanobanana 4 video in SORA 2. So the ability to upload a video, change it, or kick off a frame and change that. ChatGPT, Agent, too.

This is interesting. Agent is something that I feel like should get baked into the model router at some point. Like, you should just be able to, like, right now, if you hit Chat ChbT with a query, it will say, oh, I'm thinking longer for a better answer. I really want to get a better sense. Has operator been a total flop? Operator's gone. Operator doesn't exist anymore.

It's now agent. But agent mode uses operator. I use agent, yes. I've used it a few times. But it's for deep research. You could think about it like deep research, but instead of just pulling a bunch of text together, actually go and navigate,

actually go try to navigate a bunch of websites. So I was looking for a new breakfast spot for us. This is real. I wanted high protein options. I said, here's where I work. Here's where I go to the gym. I'd like a survey of high protein options. So go look on a map, figure out what's in the area.

Go and pull the actual menus and build me the perfect diet plan to get me fully bulked this season because it's bulking season. And chat to be like, oh, we know it's bulking season. We don't have to tell us. We're super intelligence. Wasn't born under a data, living under a data center. Of course you're bulking. It's September.

But, so I've used it, but not a lot. And it's never been something that's been able to be triggered just from the default prompt. And it's not taking actions. It's still just collecting information. I mean, what's an action? It takes the action of opening a web page and scraping out the data. It takes the action of, like, defeating CAPTCs very clearly. It's clearly at war with the CAPTCHA.

But yes, I think you're right, taking actions, chat GPT, agent 2. What we would expect, I don't know if it's coming in the next weeks. gave, they were booking flights. Wait, when? Weren't they booking flights? In the demo? The demo on GPT5 Day or was one before that? I don't know if they've ever showed a demo of them actually booking a flight, but it's clearly

coming. I think it'll be with their specific partners that have opted in. And so if you look at the OpenAI partnerships list, there are a few companies that have said, yes, we'd love to partner with you. And so I wouldn't be surprised if something like DoorDash is fully integrated. in a way that you will be able to order through ChatGPT. And I think that'll be very interesting. Yeah, so July 17th.

Yes. They said introducing ChatGBTGBT agent, bridging research and action. And they specifically said, in your personal life, you can use it to effortlessly plan and book travel itineraries, design and book entire dinner parties, or find specialists and schedule appointments. so all I'm saying is like we haven't like that's not really happening yet no and so we might see something there it's unclear how much of this is like dev day because if Sam is really saying over the next few weeks and he's really just teasing dev day day could be much more oriented around companies that are planning to build on top but again if you want to integrate with chat GPT agent maybe there's an agent update and then that flows into how your company can integrate with

with chat GPT agent. There's other predictions that we might get the model that won the IMO and there might be an enhanced voice mode. Clearly...

Is Diego predicting enhanced voice mode 24-7? I don't know what that means. You just leave it on all the time. Just leave it on. People are already kind of doing that. I have noticed that some of the voice modes if you leave them running for a long time

they get kind of crazy. Yeah. Like even just having the voice mode try and read you a full deep research report I've had a lot of problems with where after a minute of it reading it just kind of like gets lost and it can't stick with it and I don't know if it's just like the internet connection that I'm on or something but I've I've struggled many times to actually get it to to read it and then also it gets really confused by the the citations and stuff it's been

it's been ups and downs but Greg Brockman posts that open AI has released a large scale study on how people are using chat chepti consumer adoption has broadened beyond early user groups and lots of economic values this is the one that leaked yes like more than a week it's cool because he's he's using the leaked image which i i don't know what's leaked i think it's like from a court case or something um but it's it's interesting because it's that image is not in the blog post that he links to but it is in his post on x because he knows that this is the one that people want to dig into so I thought it was a good, good use of, you know, posting. And so we've talked about this before, but it is really, is really evenly split.

Practical guidance, 28%. Seeking information, 21%, writing, 28%. Like, there are very... Multimedia at 6%. Yeah. Unknown. That's four point. That's ominous. What are you doing?

Self-expression at 4.3%. That's Tyler. You know that's Tyler getting weird in chat GPT. Technical games and role play. Games and role play. Stay away from that. Stay away from that. Data analysis, mathematical calculation,

computer programming. Computer programming is 4.2%. Of course, we are partnered with cognition, the makers of Devon. Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team. With your personal AI engineering team.

Anyway, it'll be fun to see what they actually launch. There's so many different directions they can go. They have a lot of territory carved out, a lot of different irons in the fire. I wish we could see their just overall usage chart now that school's back in session because you remember it just like fell off a cliff.

I don't know how much to read into that the falling off the clip. I don't know, dude. They're saying 28% of Chad Sheputia activity is just writing. So obviously that's a lot of professionals. Yeah. It's a lot of students.

Yeah, maybe now that summer's over is better than schools back in session. I don't think that you can get to the, chat GPT numbers, the DAUs, purely on the back of college students. Like, I think a lot of people are using this at work, and a lot of people aren't working during the summer. And so, people didn't get the memo about locking in in August, and they had to wait until September.

It's embarrassing. I feel bad. Anyway, one of our newest sponsors, Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail securely, sign up white, label wallets, sign transactions that integrate with on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. We are a huge fans of the, what do you call it? Hit it, Nick. Hit it. The bike horn. It's a bike horn. Brandon, Brandon, let's get the, let's get the bell. And the horn. I need them together. I need it together. Yes. Both of them. That's great. So, Roon is talking. There's a ton more going on in Olin. Rune. This guy's got his fingers in a lot of pies.

He does have his fingers in a lot of pies. A ton of pies, this guy, Rune. He says, the jump from GPT 4 to 5 Kodax is just massive for those who can see it. Codex is an alien juggernaut. Just itching to become superhuman, feeling the long-awaited take-off. There's very little doubt that the data center capex will not go to waste. And Nick Carter says, you heard the man.

Data Center Cap-X is justified. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Huge relief. Huge relief. I was worried. We were worried. We were calling the top. We did it prematurely.

We're still at the early stages. We're so early. All the top. We just said there were top signals. There were some top signals. There were signs. But we kept riding on. We ride on.

Accelerate Harder says, place your bets. We, of course, will be betting. We need to get some polymarkets up on what open AI launches. We are, of course, powered by Polymarket. You can see them down in the ticker. There's some other, a lot of people are, a lot of people are kind of coalescing around GPT Image 2, SOR2 with audio video, improved memory is a separate paid add-on. I wonder if that would be the separate paid add-on.

I would switch and say SOR-2 will be a separate paid add-on because that's really expensive. The improved memory, I feel like they can't... They can't. That doesn't feel like a... You can't charge for that because it's so unclear what you get. Like, the beauty of V-O-3 is you go and get three of them and you're like, I need more of this. But personalization is something that you're going to feel over a long time. It's going to be very very slow.

like it's not going to be like a wow moment on day one right so i don't know why you'd be like i pay for what they need they need that to reduce turn yeah 200 dollars a month 100% over and so i feel like the personalization knowing knowing what shoes you want to buy that's just that pays for itself the hard thing is if someone's going there and being like i'm going to generate a two hour movie and it's going to cost $10,000 in GPU credits uh they need to charge you for that and then the yeah there is a question about how how much of this will hit plus users over what time period. Zephyr says multi-agent

RL systems for consumers. I think we're starting to see that with some of the ordering APIs, some of the codecs and agent stuff. I'm very interested. I was playing around with codex earlier today a little bit. I'm interested to see how it gets

to the phone. The vibes have been I mean I was just watching an interview with Dylan Patel and a podcaster and this particular individual was extremely bullish on Codex and had moved a ton of work from Claude Code over to Codex

and so I'm starting to see it. Did you see the Claude ad? We should pull up that video. Pull it up. I put it in the timeline. Let's watch it. Andrew Curran, the last prediction here. Compute intensive almost certainly means

SOR II, which would mean SOR2 will be pro exclusive at launch. Google similarly offers full V-O-3 for ultra-subscribers only. these models are insanely expensive to run prediction native sound 15 second clips yeah that would be an interesting way for them to differentiate would be go a little bit longer

on the clip V-O-3 is at eight seconds if they do it's 15 seconds it's almost twice as long could be a little bit of a wow moment V-O-3 does do sound and it does it does it pretty well and they had a little bit of a pop moment and I could imagine the open AI team really really popping on SORA 2

some cool new features especially if they figure out how what is the killer use case what's the really icon thing. What's the prompt that anyone can do and get a great video out of? With V-O-3, a lot of creators came with cool ideas and then wound up getting great results. But with Dali or with images in Chachapiti, it was like the Studio Ghibli moment. And so if Open AI can work backwards from like, what is something that every single person could do? Like, upload your profile picture and turn it into a video of something like that. Something

where everyone has to go and do it for themselves to see what it looks like, that could be a really big viral moment for them. Anyway, we are going to be monitoring that. And in the meantime, let's watch this new video from Anthropic. There's never been a worse time. Problem. There's never been a worse time. Problem. There's never been a worse time.

Problem. There's never been a worse time. Fast-paced cuts. I like the color out of there. Color grading. There's never been a better time. Never been a better time. Let's go.

Never been a better time to have a problem. To be overwhelmed. That's not true. The robots are useful. The client crews are helping you and solve your problems. Out of your depth. How to breath. Anthropic really has developed, like, their own brand world now.

When they started doing those billboards in London or something, We were very confused. But this is getting to a point where... They went from having some of the worst ads to now. This is a great ad. Yeah. And this really stands in contrast to the Open AI Super Bowl ad, which was very...

It was like this black sun thing. It was like this pointillism, black circles. This is very rich colors, warm tones. It feels very human, actually. It does not feel cold. This does not feel clanker-coded. Apple of... Yeah, totally.

Yeah, a little retro. I feel like that shot of the piano that was exploding. But it's backwards. And it's going backwards. Yeah, they're solving the piano. They're recreating the piano. They're recreating it. So hats off to everyone at Anthropic for...

Yeah, but does this tells me not giving up on consumer? Hmm. Right? Is that... I mean, that could work for a B2B ad. You know, that could just be like the vibes are good at this company. Let's continue working together. in the enterprise to drive shareholder value.

You know, you can watch that and be like, okay, yeah, the Claude Code bill came through this month and I'm happy with it. Let's keep it up. What do you think, Tyler? But it's very positioned as like, don't just think of us as a- Those were consumer use cases, yeah.

What do you think, Tyler? Yes, so over the weekend, my roommates, so I live at UCLA with much students there. They were telling me at a- We get it. We get it. You don't need to, like, make a big deal of it. We get it. You live at UCLA.

It's not that big of a deal. Yeah. So at the football game, they said, there was a bad. You get it. You went to a football game. No, I didn't know. I was not there. You're a college shoot.

You're in college. I was not at the football game. But there was an ad-frant-on-a-paws for Tyler. Wow. Okay. Yeah, live in the college dream. Unlike these washed-up podcasters over here, just rubbing it in, so young. He's got his whole life ahead of them.

So much, such a bright future ahead of you. Okay. But so there was an ad-pharthropical. like at the football game okay um wait what do you mean like like on like on the jerseys no it was like on like the um like big screen what they called i don't know big screen yeah um and and they were like oh what is this like company like none of them never heard of it they were like oh it's like slept on like claude like they don't want you to know about this okay so i think there's some like consumer thing going on at least among students the war for the consumer yeah i've also seen um last semester

Anthropical was pushing pretty hard. They have like a student some kind of like plan that's like super cheap. They're giving out like free subscriptions. Yeah. So I think they might be like aiming towards like that demographic a little bit. I wonder if they'll if they'll find a point of differentiation somehow. I mean Google

like Gemini has such a great point of differentiation in consumer in the sense that like you're already on Gmail you can plug in there like the plugins have been slow but like you can bootstrap a ton of personalization and just a ton of extra functionality. from saying, from properly integrating Gemini to the rest of your, of your Google apps?

Are you watching the chat? The Chad says, let me guess. Tyler had a beer. Hopefully not. He's not 21. Anyway. But Claude doesn't seem like they have the ability to bootstrap personalization. I mean, the real killer, I feel like the killer use case or in consumer would be if, if there's a,

if there's a flow where you download the app and when you go to prompt it, it's more willing to write code and it's more willing to write better code, I feel like that could be something that would actually break through. I keep thinking about when I hit deep research, like we talked to Doug O'Loughlin about this and he said that he's getting sometimes better results out of Claude Code than deep research just for actual research tasks. And so I tried this and I said, go build me a, I went to Claudecote and I said, go build me a deep research report about a topic, but then instantiate it in a HTML web page. And so it gets the ability to use it, to use all the different HTML5 building blocks.

So it can create a table if it wants. It can create a pie chart. It can pull in JavaScript. It can create bar charts. It can do everything that you can do on HTML. It was very cool. And I felt like I saw a glimpse of the future where if I go to Claude and I ask it a, question, hey, teach me, you know, Econ 101, it could build software that's actually interactive

to teach me that topic on the fly. And that might be something that leverages what Anthropics seems to be very good at, which is coding. Give me a deep research report, but as I scroll, give me the maximum amount of dopamine. Here we go. Give me flashing lights and sound effects. I don't know. What do you think? I think there's something else where, like, Cloud is basically the only, like, company, or it's anthropic, but, like, Cloud is, like, very personified. Like, people think of, like, Claude as, like, a person almost. Like, at least on, on, like, Twitter and, like, you know, SF people. It's, like, Claude is, like, a person where ChatsbyT is, like, a tool.

Which is fascinating because it's, it's such a throwback because in the previous era of voice interfaces or, like, AI, we had Siri, Alexa, there were a few others. There's Ask Jeeves. As Jeeves. Even Samsung, I think, has Bixby, which was supposed to be, barred, which was very much supposed to be, like, a person. And then a lot of the companies pulled back for that. And opening, I just said, it's just Chashabit. We're not giving it a name.

And then Gemini came out, and Gemini doesn't feel like a, you're not supposed to say, hey, Gemini, really. Like, it's just a model, right? You don't say Gemmy, Gem, Gem. No. And certainly hasn't caught on. And so, anyway. Yeah, I do think this ad for Anthropically. like around problem solving, they've earned making that a pillar of their marketing by having

so much success in co-gen. Yeah. So I like the ad. We like the ad. If you want to develop some software, if you want to design something, head over to figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps designing development teams build great products together. What was this post shoot at the server room during evacuation?

Oh, this is just best practices in case the AI is something alive. Vanta recommends If you're not compliant and the feds are coming to bust you Because you don't have You don't have a sock to send this rocket into your Go to Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.

Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Yes, and so I think this is from a war zone where there is a lot of data stored in the server room And so if you're evacuating, shoot this rocket launcher at the server room so that the enemy combatants can't steal your data, can't steal all the intel. All your plays.

All your plays, yeah. Pretty crazy. But imagine how good it would feel to fire that bad boy off at a server room. Just take that clanker. Especially if you were the engineer that had to maintain it over time and it was giving you a lot of problems. Oh, yeah. You could take out the clanker. without, you know, for good reason.

It feels like that scene in, uh, in, uh, you haven't seen the movie in office space where they smash the, the printer. I have seen. You've seen office space? I, that's one of my dad's, one of my dad's favorite movies, fantastic film. Jordy's third movie. My, uh, the equivalent of my, the equivalent of my stapler is my headset. Okay.

When I get here and, oh yeah, you need your headset. Yeah, yeah. You put it on and, uh, you, ranking my, Jordy Hayes' movies. We've seen BORAT. We've seen Mountainhead and we've seen office space. The three. Those are the three films. Mike Judge is a genius.

And you know what else is genius? Graphite.dev.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. We're also monitoring the situation of private tech markets. It's never been better to be a show focused on the private markets. Open AI leads private markets. It's surge as seven tech startups reach combined $1.3 trillion valuation.

What are the other... What are the other... It's got to be OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, XAI, Ramp, Vanta, Julius, fall, all of our sponsors, basically. We need the combined market cap of all of our sponsors. That's a key... That's a KPI for us. We've got to get those numbers up.

We've got to get those numbers. Tyler, new project. By the way, last Friday... Last Friday, I jokingly told Tyler build a soundboard. Oh, yeah, did he? And he did. Wow. It's fantastic.

He had a working version by the time the show was over on Friday. He took my ask very literally. I said, just get it done in like, I don't know, like 15, 20 minutes. You did it. And he basically did it. But we were going to release it soon, and it looks fantastic. So you guys will be able to use our sound board in your own meetings. Okay.

So if, you know, somebody announces a couple positive things, you can personally go out. It's going to be a lot of fun. Your boss announces layoffs. Bo, keep his own staff. Yep. It's good to have. Good to have. Oh, we raised a growth round?

Friendly IPL. Inbound. I mean, it's highly functional. It's highly functional. Oh, our new fundraising round is leaking. Large journalistic force headed go to. Stand by. And we're going to be adding a lot more. Oh, we're struggling to pay our sales tax this quarter.

Sales tax AGE. Sales tax AGEI. I actually want to talk about the numeral thing. Let me find that in here. It's deeper. But we got to get to this. So the numeral came on the show, their partner. I love them.

Sam. Sam. Absolutely, Chad. Put on a clinic. Interestingly, so there's been a debate. The timeline was in turmoil. Is sales tax boring? We obviously think no.

I think Sam put on a great performance and just kind of took us through what it's like raising right now in the market. He was also honest about his cloud costs going up dramatically. Totally. And so he shared the announcement. He says, I'm thrilled the share

that numerals raised the $35 million series B. led by Mayfield at a $350 million valuation. Turns out sales tax in VAT have gotten so complex that we need AI and millions of dollars in VC funding to make it simple again. This brings us to $57 million in funding. And so he tags the investors. He went on a press tour. He came on our show, talked about this. And Levels I.O. got a little snippy with him, quote tweeted it, and said, you can often predict a company's course if their announcements talk more about how much investment they got then their product. If I'd raised $50 million, maybe I'd not even tweet it, just use it to improve the product and get more users and talk about that. Having money in the

bank tells me absolutely nothing about why I should use your product. It's not my money. It's your money. And so I think there's... And I just, I disagree with this on multiple levels. Like one, if you're building software for businesses, it's very helpful to communicate that we have a lot of, you know, a lot of funding doesn't guarantee anything. yes but it but it's a it's a vote of it's it's showing that that smart people yeah have confidence that you're going to create a lot of value in the future just be around for a long time great products for customers too as a business your job is to take anything that you do and make it newsworthy yep fundraisers are are easy hires

trade deals hires yeah trade deals partnership job is to just take anything that's going on and make it make it newsworthy make you know take enough opportunity the most bearish thing is as a company a company is that launches once right the best companies launch over and over and over they're not like oh i'm going to launch and then i'm just going to be quiet and do my thing yep just make the product a little bit better every day it's like you have a new feature you have a new hire you have a fundraise you have a profile right it's like launch launch launch launch yep and uh levels obviously you know a a great uh builder yeah we should have him on the show but it's it's you know he just is like hates venture capital you know so much

and I think before he knocks it he should try yeah I mean the other thing that levels launches like like the most recent product that he got to go really viral was this like amazing vibe coded game in the browser that anyone could just click and try like massive tam for that product right anyone can be like oh I know flight simulator I've been on a plane I want to fly around I'll click this button, right? And it was an interesting business story and it was an interesting product and it looked cool and it was a demonstration of vibe coding. He's done a few other products that have been like visual. One was an interior design product that you could take a picture of your empty apartment and then put furniture in it. And that is something that also

will naturally sort of go more viral than, okay, we launched VAT compliance. Right? Like sales tax is not as sexy. It's not as something that people just, even if you do improve the product, it's not inherently viral and so you if you're in b2b software in enterprise software like you do have to take advantage of fundraising announcements to drum up a bunch of support and just make people aware of you because there isn't there isn't that natural virality that comes from okay you you put uh you know you landed a rocket that's just something that everyone wants to see you built a you built a humanoid robot you built a drone you blew something up there's an explosion there's something beautiful an image that people want to to see. And so I agree that you should focus on the product, but to not take advantage of

fundraising milestones as a B2B company is a mistake, and you should actually definitely run the playbook. Ajini Midha over at Andresen had a different take. He said, true for the median startup, but it's dangerously wrong for frontier technology companies. Capital is a weapon. He's just making the case for raising money. But I think the other case is just that when you're in B2B, you need to be taking advantage of the business. story and the business story is the fundraising story and so you have to deliver on that. Yeah and levels is just playing a totally different game.

Yeah, which is fine. He makes hundreds. There's nothing wrong with playing that particular game. I think he probably makes a hundred couple few hundred thousand dollars a month and like profit. It does great. But he's not really creating enterprise value. Yeah. Right. A lot of his businesses would probably sell for maybe like a one one X revenue or something like that

which is which is great. But he's just playing a totally different game. Yeah. Sam is playing a game where he takes a modest salary and he built and he's and he's trying to build a company that will one day be worth billions of dollars. Yep. And capital, you know, again, even the best businesses in the world end up tapping the capital markets and just being like default against using financing in any form. Yeah. It's a great tool for the job. Well, Apple's foundation model running on an iPhone 17 pro has demoed.

I don't know how this got out, but it seems like maybe this is already shipping. I don't know if this is a developer preview or something, but it looks very fast. Adrian Gronden says Apple was not joking. The A-19 Pro chip is really good for running LLMs. Let's look at this video. I think we have it pulled up. So he types in a prompt and it just spits this out. And apparently this is on device.

This is on-device inference. And so a lot of people were saying like Apple's going to win. I don't know that this is what does it for them to get them to like win you know, AI, but it certainly seems like, what is Apple Foundation?

Do you know? Apparently, I mean, it sounds like it's some sort of foundation model that they've trained internally and they're running locally on their device, some sort of distilled model. Do you have any insight on this, Tyler? Like, have you even tracking this at all?

I don't know exactly. I mean, it must be a super small model. Yeah. Even, I mean, the, like, like, RAM is still like only like 12. gigs or something? I thought it was more. I thought they went up to 16 on this last one. Oh really? I thought they went from 8 to 12. 8 to 12. Maybe the max is 16. Pro memory. Let's see.

I think also like it's hard to say that like oh Apple is going to win because like if you look at the median person using LMs, they're not optimizing for like speed of the LM. They're using like optimizing for the intelligence. Yeah, you're right. 12, 12 gigs. Yeah, that's not that much. tricky. I still think that the end of the road is some sort of partnership with Open AI or Gemini taking a cut, just getting the actual

because... I think it makes sense to do some kind of router where if you can kind of figure out how to call the task is and you run it locally and then for complex things you send it off to Open AI. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. I mean, right now they're supposed to be a router in Apple Intelligence. But when I hit it, it's rough. It's not tuned up properly. It seems to go all over the place. And then also, they have this weird modal that even if you go to Apple Intelligence and you say, I'd like you to go to chat GPT and ask this deeper question, you have to click a button and say, yes, actually send that to chat

GPT. It's like a privacy thing, but it's clearly just like an extra barrier to adoption. And so I wind up just opening the chat GPT up, which is fine, I guess, but I'd like a deeper integration there. I don't know. We'll keep monitoring it. Julius, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds and to ask Julius to analyze your data and then loved by over 2 million people and trusted by individuals at Princeton. BCG and Zep. The 3D world models, Packy has a post here. He says, after watching a bunch of the 3D world demos this week, the thing that struck me walking around this morning is how shockingly high resolution the world is. You can zoom in your attention on any little thing and find

an astonishing amount of detail. This, of course, is a fully generated model. This is from World Labs. This is Faye-Fee's project. Except for this turbo puffer fish. I mean, this thing is pixelated. Zoom in on this. Yeah, can we go to the Jordy's wide? Way less, way less detail. What's going on here? Yeah, this is not rendering. Not rendering. Fully, but we're working on it. We're trying to get a real, a real puffer fish. Love turbo puffer. Um, we, uh, yeah, this world model, uh, uh, the fully generated one.

The other one that was cool was, uh, the, at the Metacenact event, uh, they launched the ability to create a, uh, is it a, is it a Gaussian splat? Is that what it is? Yeah, I, is it, I think it's Gaussian. Gausian, Gaussian, Gauss. Yeah, it's named after Gauss. Yeah, Gousian splat. I want to have Tyler create one of the Ultradem. Yeah, you can do it with the quest. Yeah, you can do with the quest three. So, yeah, it's very, it's very cool. Yeah. You feel like you're, you very much feel like you are, when you're wearing the headset, you feel like you're in the kitchen, whatever, yeah.

Yeah, no, it was, it was very cool. Yeah, I was because I looked over and there were two sets of like pancakes for kids and I have twins. And so I was like, wow, like, this makes me, this actually makes me miss my kids, which was like remarkable. At the same time, like, there was no game mechanic and I don't know that there's that many places that I'd actually want to go and see. Like, I liked in Applevision Pro that there were multiple, really scenic,

like you could go and watch a movie on the top of a mountain, or you could be in the desert and be using your computer, but I very much wouldn't just want to hang out on the top of a mountain. I would want to be watching a movie on top of a mountain.

It was like a cool environment. So the environments need to be really cool. I feel like there'll be some sort of power law of like the best environments, and there'll be a few. But I like the idea of people being able to scan and share their rooms and walk around, But I would be surprised, even if we put up on the meta quest,

I don't know if you can actually share your scans yet. That's clearly coming. But even if we scan the Ultradome and shared it with people, the audience members that have a Quest 3 or Quest 3S that would, they'd probably go poke around in it for like two minutes and then be like, okay, I'm done. Yeah, that was cool. Yeah, that was cool. Okay, I'm back to me.

Been there, done that, right? Yeah. Well, speaking of meta, Bucco Capital says, got a laugh from Zuck talking about the AI, Infra bubble. He's basically like, quote, yeah, history shows we can't help it. We'll overbuild, use too much debt, then it will explode, which proves to be a great time to buy distressed assets. Wink. Maybe AI is different, though. IDK. This is a great interpretation of Alex Heath's interview with Mark Zuckerberg. Again, Mark, Mark is in a good position in that he can, you know, he could, he could misspend a couple hundred billion and be. The business will turn. on for sure continue to generate tons of cash flow um we didn't even cover uh invidia plans to invest a hundred billion dollars into open a i this news broke today and invidia uh sophie net cap girl says invidia up a billion percent on the news that it'll invest in a company that will use the money

to buy more GPUs let's go um invidia is up uh three almost four percent today broadcom is down. I mean, this is, this feels like just, we're one step down the path to the original Stargate plan. Like, the original Stargate plan was very much, Sam Alton, creating a multi-year plan to spend something like $500 billion, and there were going to be a number of parties involved. Obviously, you need a lot of chips from Nvidia, you need a lot of Oracle infrastructure, you need a data center, you need energy, and so all of those partnerships are coming together.

interestingly today, it's not like Nvidia wired some money or sent some chips or anything like that. This is a letter of intent, which is funny to see at this scale because it's like a famous YC thing is that you say like, oh, we got a huge letter of intent for this thing.

But at the same time, like I think at this scale letters of intent are like pretty serious and you should take it pretty seriously that everyone's planning. And as long as all the different pieces fall into place, like everything should work. As long as the investors say, I'm good for my $100 billion,

and Oracle says they're good for this $100 billion. And Vydea says they're good to produce $100 billion of chips. Like, you're going to get the $500 billion together. Like the capital will form. I've got a good graphic. This is the game of... Pull this up. Yeah.

Well, we're pulling that up. Let me tell you about fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image video and audio models, all in one place, develop and fine-tune models, and with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Look at this. Look at this beautiful graphic. Wall Street loves.

This is like the fifth time I've seen this graphic. We saw this exact same graphic yesterday or last week with Oracle. It's widely applicable in the current state of technology. Yeah. I give you money. You give it back to me. It is crazy.

I mean, there were times when Mark Zuckerberg was a LP in a venture fund that would invest in a company that would buy Facebook ads. But it was like six degrees of separation and the economy was not nearly as circular. These deals are very much like, I hand you money and you hand it directly back to me. But, I mean, at the end of the day, like, what really matters is, like, usage. I mean, we should be tracking, like, how much, like, if ARR starts to slow, if DAU start to slow, like, then all bets are off.

But if we continue to see acceleration in Anthropics enterprise numbers and open AIs, consumer numbers like it's all justified i think i don't know this uh this account solely omar says so let me get this right oracle says open a i committed three billion for cloud compute uh oracle stock jumps 36 percent best day since 1992 oracle runs on nVIDia gp ux has to buy billions and chips from nVIDia nVIDia just announced they're investing a hundred billion in open a i open ai uses that money to pay oracle who pays invidia who invest in open ai It's a little circular. Good fun, good fun.

It's a little circular. We'll see. But Carlotta Perez, the goat of financial bubbles, has weighed in. She is quoting a post from Colossus, Patrick O'Shaughnessy's publication. Carlota says, a brilliant tour to force about AI from the investor's point of view. And the author compares AI with a personal computer and container ships fully understanding the life cycle. of all revolutionary technologies. We will have to dig into this article.

It's called AI will not make you rich. If you're not subscribed to Colossus, head over and get a physical copy. It's by Jerry Newman in the September 2025 issue and issue four of Colossus Mag. The disruption is real. It's also predictable, he says. So this is a longer article. I want to read through it. We don't have time today.

We will get to it in the future. We might come back to it later in the show today. Who knows? But let's skip through that. and in the meantime, tell you about turbo puffer. You saw the pixelated turbo puffer fish, search every byte, serverless vector, and full-tech search, built from first principles on object storage,

fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. By linear notion, a bunch of other great companies to build AI products. We also have a post from Elon Musk. He says, Grock can now read aloud in a beautiful voice. I'd love to pull this up if possible. Test it. I'm...

It's so funny. The brand of Grock is so chaotic at this point that I don't know if I'm expecting a girl's voice or German's voice. It could be anything. What is it called when people like talking to the mic, you know? Oh, yeah, ASMR. It's just like an ASMR. Is hydrogen fuel a good idea? Let's play this.

I want to hear what it sounds like. Let's see. Do we have it? Is hydrogen fuel a good idea? Hydrogen fuel is clean, zero tailpipe emissions. and useful for niche cases like heavy industry or long-haul transport, but it's inefficient. This actually just sounds good.

A normal to 40% round-trip efficiency. A normal voice that's like completely smooth. You can definitely tell it's AI still. Yeah, you can tell it's AI, but... It's not ideal for widespread. This is definitely not the best voice I've heard. What's the best voice you've heard? Probably something from 11 labs.

They seem to still kind of be... Yeah, I was very uncertain on like how... I mean, we talked to Mati, about this, but I was very uncertain on how 11 labs would maintain any sort of moat around the foundation model companies, but it feels like they're being, they're basically trying to be the mid journey of voice, where it's just this opinionated artistic vision that leads to something that you can't quite just instantly optimize against. Do you know it when you see it, you try a bunch of things? What do you think? I think another thing is, I believe

they have a product where you can clone a voice which none of the other labs seem to do I think because of like legal stuff yeah but I mean Siri was initially cloned like there is a there is a woman whose voice is the voice of Siri you would think you would just hire

someone with a good voice and then just say hey we're going to license this and we're going to pay you a royalty and let's get a contract in place and there's some voice actor out there who's like I would love to be the voice of Claude or the voice of no I mean that like why don't you think You can make, like, on 11 labs, I can make my voice.

Okay, okay. And that's, and you just want to listen to yourself that much that you have to be you? Okay, not, I don't do that for me, but I could make someone who is like a good speaker to read something who has like a nice voice. Okay. Like, I don't think other labs do that because, like, there's a whole thing about her with Scarlett Hansen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I would just think that if the Grock team wants a particularly

beautiful voice to read things aloud that they would go and find a particularly great voice artist and then clone it. You don't think that's what they're doing? uh no somebody should hire david senra that'd be very good to be very good well without further ado let's bring in our first guest we got john shahidi welcome to scream how you doing me you in person thanks so much for coming on the show good to see you welcome thank you a podcast mike for you why don't you kick us off with an introduction tell everyone who you are Yeah, well, it's good to meet everybody.

Yeah. And, yeah, I'm John Chahidi. I created the Shots Podcast Network, which is a podcast network that hosts a number of different podcasts. Then we also incubate and create different brands. Full Send brand, Happy Dad brand, Ranger, Cut Jerky. And I think our business model really now moving forward is just to, you know, create brands and treat brands like we treat creators. What's the methodology for deciding what? categories are ripe for a new brand.

I think you've got to look at, have a lot of thoughts on that, actually. I talked to a guy who said he literally walks through, he's more of a scientist, doesn't do any creator partnerships, but he will walk through the grocery store and just look at the aisle and be like, okay, this aisle is dominated by Unilever and P&G. I don't want to play in it. Yeah. But when he finds a spot, he found the popcorn aisle, which is, there's a little section of the grocery store, popcorn.

And Orville Redenbocker is the only player. It's like a 200-year-old company. He's like, I'm coming. I'm coming for their lunch. He knows that they're going to be a little bit sleepier. He's going to be able to play in that category. And he launched a product and got it to like, I think, like, 10 million ARR. Did pretty well.

But anyway, how do you think about, like, white space in brands? I think you could also go after the big voice. I mean, we did that with Happy Dad. That's right. Like, we went after some. White Claw High Noon. The big beer companies who still, to this day, haven't been able to figure it out the buds and coronas. Yeah, what give people a sense of the.

It's funny because I think people see Happy Dad everywhere, but maybe don't have a sense of like the scale and kind of the velocity even. Yeah, I'll get into that. I want to just answer this one real quick. So I think the big thing you have to do is look at a category that could use disruption. You know, with Happy Dad, you know, we looked at, you know,

back in 2021, people wanted better for you drinks, but most of the better for you drinks that were coming out, Like the White Clause are truly, we're really catering towards women. So it wasn't necessarily cool to drink a hard seltzer if you were at a party or whatnot. So we said, all right, so how do we go after this category, but bring a different demographic into the category? Yeah, that makes sense. And I think that's where you could also, going back, what we were just talking about, was, you know, even getting into these other spaces, whether it's popcorn, pizza. How do you bring a new customer into that category, which is what we did with Happy Dad?

We partnered with Nelk, and we said, all right, now, how do we make this cool amongst men? The branding of it, the liquid in it is, you know, one gram of sugar, 100 calories, a can. It's a seltzer. It's a seltzer. But then when you look at the happy dad it can, which I'm surprised you guys don't have here, you have every single brand of that fridge. We have my boys company. We actually don't drink your water. No alcohol in the champagne infrequently.

Yeah. This is light alcohol. We could send some here. Okay. We'll send some to it. I'm sure the boys would take you out. up on it. Yeah, on a Friday. On a Friday. Yeah. Yeah, not a Monday 12 p.m. No, a little bit early. But yeah, I think that's what we did. We said, all right, how do we,

how do we look at this Seltzer category and how do we bring males into it? The branding of the product looks like a beer, feels like a beer, it's in regular 12 ounce can, you know, doing these tours amongst, you know, different bar towns or even, you know, different colleges. and just catering towards the male audience. So I think you could get into these different businesses if you could bring a different profile person into that category, whether you want to go against Unilevers or Nestleys or, in our case, Coors and Anheuser-Busch

and Constellation brands or Boston Beer. Talk about, I think it's a lot of people that have like a creator audience will think, okay, I have a bunch of people that watch my content online, I'm going to create a product that I can sell to them via e-commerce. That seems like it hasn't really been the approach to date for shots and Fulcend and NELC broadly. Feels like you went retail early. Retail first, basically.

You kind of have to do it with alcohol, though, right? Well, alcohol, yeah, alcohol, but I mean in general, like a lot of people would say, okay, NELC should launch a product that they can sell online to as many people as possible. And going retail first is just a lot harder. These are alive? Yeah, these are, oh, yeah. Yeah, Raghav says, bro, this guy is one of the most legendary managers of all time. What is it?

It's all, we get all the chats into one. YouTube's the primary chat. Okay, cool. You can say what up to them. So, yeah, happy that we can't sell online, unfortunately. I mean, through third parties. But even if you could sell online, it'd mainly be marketing because selling liquid online is not super profitable. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, that's something we talk about too. You know, we've looked into getting to other categories of beverages and, yeah, selling, you know, energy drinks or water. Yeah. It's very expensive, you know, even you look at, like, Amazon and all the different, you know, Amazon fulfillment center fees and all that stuff. It gets pretty pricey. But, yeah, I think the one thing I do, I don't want to say with Happy Dad, you know, the challenge has been, My expertise has been online marketing my whole life, you know, marketing a YouTube channel, a YouTube video,

a Spotify link, Instagram, Snapchat. The challenge with Happy Dad has been we can't do that because, you know, I mean, you could buy it on Goppa for Instacart third parties, but yeah, there's no Shopify, there's no Amazon store. But it's also, and I got this bit of advice from Dana White when we first launched the product. He said, you know, with Happy Dad, there's a multi-tier system. where you have to use a third-party distributor to distribute the product.

He said, that distributor, you know, this is back in 2021, he told me, that distributor is going to want to own the relationships with all the retailers. He said, I'm going to give you and your brother, Sam, a bit of advice. Don't let any third-party own that relationship. Treat these retailers like you've treated these platforms. So, like, we have, like, the best relationships with YouTube and Snap and Meta and Spotify, Apple, you know, all the different platforms. he said, treat Walmart like you treat YouTube.

Treat Kroger's like you treat meta. Treat 7-11. So even if you're selling through the distributor, you're still building a relationship with the end retailer and like spending time with them. And you don't care that at the end of the day when they're signing a purchase order. Yeah, well, then we tell the distributor, like, here,

we actually did the work. The Circle K guys, we spent the weekend with them, great guys. They're in, they want to bring all these different skews into your store. Here you go. They're like, well, you know, we know people. No, no, no, no. It's a done deal. Like, you just deliver for us, please.

How do you think about the, you're familiar with the term nimcel, right? Niche internet microcelebrity, this idea that you can be running a profitable business, full-time, like have a, you know, a thousand true fans, have a business, but not be so broad that you're like a Tom Cruise-level celebrity. And there's been this, like, trend of like smaller and smaller nicheification. Like, I know someone who has, I think they have a million followers. followers on YouTube. I can't even remember his name because he's so like niche. And all he does is talk about notion, using notion to manage your life. And he sells notion templates and he makes a fortune. And I'm wondering about how you think about

like the smallest brand opportunity, whether you think like you have to be able to go national at some point or there's like room for smaller, more niche creators, to still create some sort of brand that breaks through, like what the trade-offs might be for a creator that has a really, really dedicated audience of like 50,000 people, so you're never going to be in Kroger with that product and really, or they're not going to really bootstrap Kroger. Unless your audience is like, you know, BP,

unless you're like the vice president of purchasing podcast or something like that. Well, I think, you know, I always say, I mean, NELC was very niche at the time, right? I mean, they've obviously become more of a household name since 2021. Just like in that college demo? Yeah. I mean, they were most people, when we launch Happy Dad, we said, hey, we partnered with the Milk Boys and we're launching a Seltzer.

And I would say nine out of 10, maybe 10 out of 10 retailers say, who the hell is milk? Yeah. You know, so that was, you know, they were a niche. I think my thing is I don't ever look at the size of the creator, whether it's someone as small as what you were referring to or Taylor Swift. You know, if the product is great, it'll sell itself. I've always said this, is a fan of any creator, influencer, celebrity, will try anything once.

Now, the question is, will they buy it again? They will try it once, no matter what it is. There's celebrities that have launched ice creams, and they've come and gone, the biggest celebrity. I don't want to say their names, but, you know, the biggest celebrities have launched ice creams. And, um, yeah, yeah, a, a recent celebrity brand that didn't work was Travis Scott's Seltry company, right? Yeah, right. Like, like, and, and I think that, uh, you would think that Travis is enough of a superstar

that anything he did and put his brand behind would, would at least get to, like, can you pull, like, a million people into Fortnite to watch him play? Yeah, like, he is massive. That might make it hard to sell alcohol. Yeah, maybe, maybe, but anyways, being, you know, having a global, superstar and launching a product does not guarantee success. And I think what you're saying is like the actual quality of the product matters a ton. Yeah, I mean, I always look, so Travis Scott's Seltzer didn't do good, but like his collapse with Nike or fire. You know, people go crazy with that.

Yeah. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you know, and that's the thing. Travis Scott's not going to stop. But yeah, I mean, the Seltzer is a good example. It launched literally the same time. I think launched a month before us. Really? Yeah. So. And just wildly different trajectory. It just wasn't, it wasn't good. You know, it wasn't good. He had the right idea of bringing a new demo into the category. Like, he was going, like, the branding was cool. Like, I remember it was coming out.

We were ready to go. We're like, shit. We're, okay. Oh, yeah. Toast. You know, like, head to head against the bank. Yeah, yeah. I remember, I was like, that's a wrap on us.

But, you know, but then we, then it had just come out and we tried one. We're like, never mind. We're going to win. You know, that's all we had to do is try it. What do you think about taste, not just literal taste of the beverage or the product, but just taste broadly? Is that something that a creator can actually bootstrap or do they just have it innately? I feel like I've run into creators that have had incredible audiences and they've even kind of picked the right category, but I taste their product and I'm just like, this doesn't taste good. You just didn't nail it.

And maybe it tastes good to you, but it doesn't taste good to enough people that I think people will stick around. of this will actually have, you know, exponential takeoff. Is that something creators can just, like, brute force? Or do you think that they need to partner with somebody? They need to find the right partner that has the expertise that's not going to settle. That's not going to be excited about the creator. Not going to say, like, you know what, you're so-and-so. Like, whatever you throw your name on is going to work, you know, like they're excited.

There's been people I've seen it in the world of different people I've worked with. They just get excited. and they're so excited. And sometimes they get celebrity excited where they're just like, you know, like I'm so excited being in the room with them. I don't want to piss them off. I just want to go and I want to go tell my friends

that I'm partners with this person. And that's always the kiss of death is when you don't have the right partner who doesn't want to be honest with you and just more excited to have your name and go be able to tell some people that they're in partnership with you. Do you think there's any,

I don't know, if it's really, to your business or just like a potential future where one of the major companies, like A.B. InBev or a Unilever, just figures out that they could potentially go to the next generation of incredibly high growth creators and say, look, normally we would just buy ads from you, but that doesn't give you any economic upside. So instead, let's do a joint venture. Let's make it 50-50. We will handle all the logistics, all the capital. So instead of just raising 20% dilution from a VC, you're also getting our supply chain, you're also getting our distribution, but you're going to be the face of this brand.

And instead of just, oh, you're in a Super Bowl ad, here's a million dollar check, you get real upside in the performance of this. And then maybe we spin this out, maybe we buy the whole thing at some point, but they're just getting in much earlier to a more complete extent. Do you think that that's a model that we could see happen in the future, or do you think there's something about the big conditions don't want to do it? These big CPG companies have innovation divisions whose job is kind of like... They certainly spend a lot of money.

They spend a lot of money kicking these ideas around and they'll make a bunch of different concepts and you just don't hear them ever going from zero to one and breaking out. I feel like they're also in a position where they can sit back and be like, let's let the market create hits. And we'll just pick, cherry pick the best one. You know, I don't know why we're still talking about cacti, even reading comments about cacti. But cacti was that. Cacti was a partnership with Anheiser Bush. Oh, no way.

Okay. That was exactly what you said. I don't know what the exact split was, but it was owned by, co-owned by Travis Scott and Anheuser-Busch, distributed by Anheuser-Busch. You would think that that would be, I totally understand why you were so worried, because that feels like they have all the advantages against you. And yet maybe they lack the entrepreneurial talent and like they need to win. You needed to win.

Big problem here is I don't know the actual guy who is running cacti. Exactly. It's like some person in a big organization. Meanwhile, like, Happy Dad, regardless of how great NELC is, how great the product is, like, I'm sure Happy Dad, like, wouldn't be a hit if you weren't, like, step by step, like, making plays. And it's just like, and vetting your personal brand. Yeah, personal brand.

And also, like, you probably have taken unlimited phone calls on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday night. Whereas, like, if you're just some corp dev person at a big company, like, are you really going to push that extra mile, take that extra flight? marketing too, right? Yeah. Like, you know, having different podcasts and having the placement, you know, like, you know how many of those podcasts with milk?

Yeah. I've been there, like, while they're interviewing, putting the happy dad right next to everybody, creating towers. Like, when they interviewed Elon, like, we were struggling, finding happy dads in Austin. We had to, like, delay him from coming just to make sure that we had product in there. I was like, we're not going live until there's happy dads in front of him, you know? So, like, you know, those are the things.

Doing things that don't scale. Yeah, like the grassroots, you know, type of things as well. So I think that's the other problem. I actually think partnering. Well, also, like, there's no innovation on their side, too, on those big brands. I think that's where they need people like us or you guys. Like, you know, forward things. No guy in a boardroom is going to think of, you know, at Unilever or whatever is going to think, like,

oh, wow, like, let's build this with Taylor Swift. Now, they'll build. Or I think this ingredient that's not popular today is going to be super popular in five years. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the energy drink companies right now, like none of them. How come none of the big energy drink brands, Red Bull, Monster, Celsius, have come out with a stevia or monk fruit sweetener replacement, right? Like, they're just not thinking about it, but somebody will, and will end up selling their company to one of those three. Yeah, or, or, you know, Dr. Pepper. What, uh, give us a lay of the land of like the platforms today in your view for,

from TikTok, potentially going through some type of acquisition or restructuring to YouTube, to Spotify. Like, how are you advising the creators and stuck kind of like talent that you work with on getting the most out of the different platforms? Well, this probably give me trouble on this podcast, because I know everyone from all these platforms probably watch this, but I'm a YouTube first guy.

I think, you know, I'm a YouTube first guy for video. When live, I'm an X. I like X for live a lot. Which is crazy because I think they have like one person that works on the live product from what you've heard. That's my buddy.

An absolute legend. But it's a special thing that was I mean certainly underutilized like X live streams were basically you watch the SpaceX launch there and then you get off. And now there's a number of shows. Ours is one of them that's put X live streaming front and center and kind of realize that no one was really taking that seriously and like it's a pretty

decent product yeah yeah no i love i love for the discoverability totally you know you can actually go viral get millions of views just if you have good content you show up there it's going to get shown it's going to get seen and and it has a longer tail longer half life like you can let a video simmer for a month and it can just grow to a million views on x it's got to be like that day or nothing right so it's a little bit different yeah yeah we talked about that when we first met was like the clips like your clips yeah like even this interview someone's probably going to watch in two years three years I mean I get it now from older interviews people say hey I watch your interview I don't do a lot of interviews maybe two or three year but like the you know say hey I watch that interview

I'm like which one like I did that three years ago you know where the discoverability's not quite there on anywhere else um Instagram TikTok and whatnot so that's why I really like YouTube's like the library yeah for sure Spotify feels like they're trying to to solve discoverability but it seems like they have very limited inventory in terms of how it shows up. They have that one placement that's like on the home page that I see every now and then. It's not super dialed in yet. Would you see them ever doing live video? I think they have to.

I don't know if they are. I haven't heard anything, but I think they kind of have to. I mean, live video. I mean, you guys actually, like, you guys are going to change the game with live. There's going to be a lot of copycats. Like, after what you guys have been doing, especially on X, like, you guys are going to change the game. It's going to be a lot of people. now because of you guys and your guys' growth has been insane. Let me ask you guys something

though. Please. Because you guys talk to a lot of different AI, you know, all these different LLMs. What do you think they're going to do with social? Like what's chat GPT or? I mean, GROC, I guess, has X, but like chat GPT or perplexity. Yeah, I think Open AI is going to allow you to share. There was already a share button in chat GPT. So if I go, I mean, this happened just earlier today, I was pulling up some research, and I shared it with somebody on my team, shared a link. He can see not just the result, but what I prompted, what I followed up, have a whole discussion. And I think that people, the most basic form of sharing within an open AI social network, if you call it that, would just be, I go and explore a topic, and then I can share it out, and you can just see what I'm interested in. So I did a whole deep research report.

I fired off, it took 20 minutes to pull up all this stuff on the new CEOs of Oracle. And if you follow me and you're interested in Oracle, I just saved you 20 minutes because I did the deep research report. Now, you don't have to do one. And you could say, oh, if John's interested in this, John's acting as a curator on top of the infinite knowledge engine that is chat chippy and I think that would be kind of like the first like text-based nerdy social network that could sort of bootstrap.

I can think of a few people where I want to see what they're searching as long as they opt in to share. I don't want to see everything. My read is that the LLMs are a threat to the social platforms, but not because they're going to launch, like, social products, but because time that you're spending with an LLM or spending with, like, a voice model of somebody's becoming best friends with some model. We saw this with, like, ChatGPT 4-0.

When OpenAI announced GPT5 and deprecated the model, the chat-GPT Reddit Threat Forum was just going crazy, people just freaking out being like, I feel like you just killed my best friend. People are hanging out with that. And so it's less that I see the open AIs or the anthropics of the world actually competing in social. Because even if you're using AI to create media,

using it to create images, video, et cetera, or like stories, whatever it is, you're still better off going to YouTube, the platform that has a massive, massive audience and sharing that content there. I backed a social platform years ago that pivoted and is now doing enterprise SaaS and they had got they were building us and let's let's hear for

sass we love to do you like sass yeah but but they built a basically Twitter but just for just for Anon's yeah oh yeah it was cool because people that didn't have an Anon could go on there and just like start like sharing and create this whole kind of new personality and they got like some traction but then people just realize like hey if I'm like if I want to post I under this identity, I'm still better off just going to X and sharing there. So they never reached a critical mass. And so I just think they are already competing

with the social platforms, but in entirely new ways. So you could imagine a world where somebody's AI friend is generating them content that's in ChatGBT, for example, or in Gemini, or in one of these apps, and just saying, like, hey, I thought you'd like this. And it's like a video that the model generated itself for the user because it knows the user so well. but that's different than like a UGC platform.

The other place that I think the models will eat off of YouTube's plate a little bit is in knowledge retrieval. So I gave that example of like I wanted to learn about the new CEO of Oracle. And there was a time when I would go to YouTube and pull up, I might still pull up an interview with them, but there was also a whole series of channels that were just sort of like the history of Microsoft. And you could go there. I ran one of those channels for a while. I was doing sort of like these video essays. And you can see that you can just hit ChatGPT, get a full script and just have it read it to you.

And that will eventually be instantiated with pictures and you'll be able to watch it. And so a lot of the how-to knowledge retrieval tasks that happen on YouTube, how do I fix my washing machine, that people will migrate over potentially. But I wouldn't necessarily call that like social media, but it was certainly like content creation. And so Chat ChatsyPT is certainly like eating off of that. And Gemini too, because Gemini can scrape all the YouTube data. And then they can actually point you, hey, watch this. They're already doing this in search years ago where you say,

how do I fix this particular washing machine? It says, go to this video and go to minute three. Go to minute three because you don't want to skip the intro, click right here, and this is exactly your problem. Because they talk about five different problems. Have you gotten a bunch of crazy pitches from like AI companies that want to like use the Nalk Boys for like. Every hour.

Every hour. Yeah. Yeah, well, every. And not a lot of, none of them are that compelling, right? No, nothing. Nothing. Which is, which is. Yeah, my LinkedIn is all that.

What do you think about, what do you think about influencer-led software companies? There was a, like, a story, I think Mr. Beast was talking about this a little bit, that he was thinking about doing a mobile game studio, and that felt like potentially an extremely valuable thing, if he can do it, but making a great mobile game is really, really hard. I was on the My First Million podcast pitching. started that was our first business really mobile games no way i was pitching beast vpn because if you look at who's buying the most ads on youtube it's always the vpn providers right yeah and why is that international audience you put a video on youtube people are watching it all over the world and so anyone

can use a VPN anywhere they are anywhere they're in the world it's much harder if you're like yeah i'm only available in stores in america well you just got 30% of your audience or something if you're just a broad channel and so uh i i was always sort of bullish on the idea of creators launching software products, but at the same time, software is really, really hard to get right and actually build a great product. And so, yeah, I understand why it's not something that you can build like once or in CBG you go through these product development cycles. Exactly. And then you scale it. No. No. A billion time. Yeah. I think there's, um, I think there's some plays in software. I think about it a lot because we also have so much data on everything. Like we have, you know,

from our Shopify stores because of our merch business. And this is why, yeah, it kills me that we can't sell happy dad online because you know how much data I would have. Of course. Like, yeah, I mean, I think we just went through. I don't even remember. I should have had some of our numbers, but, you know, I think like a couple hundred million can sales, a couple hundred million.

Watch out. Oh, right. Watch out. We got more stats? I wonder if my brother's in this chat. You can send us some, my brother was supposed to watch. But, um, he's ringing. Still ring.

It's a good gong. This is the best show. You guys are crushing, man. I was so excited when you guys hit me up. I was so, I don't like interviews. You found us early. You found you early. Yes, yeah.

And then you guys have been blown up. Jordan and I talk about that all the time. Like, we're always sharing clips. You know how many times people have tried to sell me your handles? Mine? Oh, John gets hit up. John Cuggan. You have ad John.

And people always hit me up. Oh, I'll get you at John. And I'm like, I know John Jidi. I know you don't have this. I have, I have at John on YouTube. That's crazy. I've had John on Snapchat. Is that just because you're the first person on these platforms?

Or is that you find him early and you get the right hand? I wasn't the first, but I was the second. So like, you know, these platforms, like my Twitter one, like I think whoever got it and whatever your Twitter went. 2007 or something? Yeah. I think like someone got the name. didn't use it and then like it within a year like you know because I think the rule is on some of these platforms no one's using it no one's used it if it's inactive for 180 days yeah that includes no one logging in so literally someone got the name and said this ain't for me and bounce and then I went and claimed the name right away so those names I got within like the first year so I was never the first but I was always the second that's amazing so yeah that was like my mission last like 15 years you unite unite the great house yeah TikTok At John, all of that.

You're at John on TikTok, too. Every platform. Every platform. Kick. I don't even use kick, but I just got it in case. Hey, you got to log in every 179 days. You know what? Do not leave that.

I actually almost lost one of them. I forgot which one for that reason. I think my TikTok almost lost. Yeah. So, yeah. Never log off. Never touch grass. Yeah, there's an army of like high school kids that are like, no.

Oh, yeah. There's like this black market. Yeah. They always try to resell me my names. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or they get, like, some of our names are, like, at nilk. You know, because we did. We got at nilk on Instagram, and, but they used Nelke boys. And now they tried it, like, we never logged into Nelk, and someone gets it and tries to, like, extort me.

But listen, if you're watching, you're going to try to extort me, it'll never happen. You're not going to be fun. What's going on in music? Because you work with, you work with some artists, like, what is the state of things? How is the industry reacting to, I mean, it still feels like. I mean, the only person I know in music that I care for is Justin Bieber. He's crushing it. Yeah.

Has he, do you feel like, and I don't know how much you can speak to this, but it seems like the new way to make a hit song is you think about the hook, like what hook is going to go viral in a Reels TikTok format and then build the song around that? Is Justin a big enough star that he does, he can just make his music the old-fashioned way, or is there still this kind of, you do like one for the algorithm? kind of have to, yeah. That's one for me. Someone said, do you have John, at John in the Bible.

That's funny. That's funny. Is John from the Bible? The original. So one thing with Beaver is I have no say or input in the creative. But if I could tell you just by knowing him, if that's a trendy thing other people are doing, I could assure you he's probably not. other direction. Yeah, like I don't think he needs or even thinks or he probably even knows

that's a thing. Like I think he's when he's in a creative mode, he's in a different, on a different level. Can you take me through some of the other growth hacks that artists and music are doing? I heard about this one where because of the nature of Spotify, the fact that you can fit unlimited songs in an album. For a while, artists were just shipping like 45 songs on an album, just throwing it up, seeing what the algorithm likes. There seems like there's been a whole bunch different make the song shorter make the song longer you've seen this on youtube where for a while the meta was like you know 10 minutes because you get it two ad reads then it was like 20 minutes then it was 50 minutes and it just got longer and longer like the algorithm does shape the content a little bit is that

happening in music i don't know because the only person he only works with it doesn't care no it's just like doesn't think about that it's not even a conversation well it's important to admit because some people will work with like a massive creator and then they'll think that they're god's gift to the algorithm because they just worked with a superstar But really, that just kind of warps there. What I just advise these artists, you know, what I tell everybody, quite honestly, whether you're an artist or podcaster or influencers, like, make a product. You know, like, I think, but don't, going back to what we were first talking about,

don't make it just any product. Like, think of something that could use disruption, find the right people, and make it. Like, I truly, Mr. Beeson, I talked about this. He said he didn't agree with me. I, you know, I truly believe every creator of any influence should own some sort of product or be a partner in one. You know, I think right now, you know, these retail stores, from what I've seen, and now with America going healthy and, you know, people just being more conscious of what they're eating, you know, I think, you know, a lot of these shelf spaces in these retail stores could use something new and different, you know, like these guys are doing it. Bruce Williamson. Yeah.

Utonic. Yeah. So, you know, they're doing it. You know, I think, and I don't think just because a big player in the game is owned. You know what I do know is when nicotine is a good example. What is this? Like 80% of the market share is in. Retailers don't like that.

They don't like when a big company owns the category. They get bossed around. They get bossed around, you know, on price, on place. on everything, like, you know, so it's like, don't be afraid just because Zen owns 80% or Nestle owns 90% of the frozen food section. Like, don't be afraid to go against them. The retailers will actually support you. Yeah. So if you've got influence, you know, just think of building a product. Find the right people. Don't settle and go and go give these big guys a run for their money. On the influencer side, what do you think the, is there an optimal

structure? Like, because you could, it's the NELC boys. That's, plural. There's multiple characters in the world that are promoting the same product. There's also single influencers who take a huge slug and it's their brand, a personal person

singular. And then there's other brands that say, okay, yeah, we're a group of founders, we're building a product, we're going to go and give significant equity to five influencers, 10 influencers. And then you have big brands that are saying, hey, we're going to go spend with 500 influencers on day one to try

and promote this like is there a natural structure that you think is best something else i think about a lot too yeah um now so so now we keep talking about if you're an influencer go find the right product create it drop it now it's the marketing of it too yeah right like like chris does not flex this all the time right like we know because we're in the business this is chris's business but there's people in my office i drink this and i'm like oh you watch chris williamson they're like who's that yeah like this drink oh yeah there's there's people in my office you got to be you got of the the cultivating the ability to promote your products aggressively like this is why dillon on our team is is uh such a huge addition we just hired uh yeah met him i'm okay yeah well that's that's a

different we have two dylan abracotta is our new our new president but he is like uh it has this uncanny ability to uh to like ask go for these extra asks and um you know get uh like he got the journal to write about him joining TBPN, right? A podcast hiring a president after 11 months. It's interesting story, but it takes a lot to, like, go out and make that happen, whereas Chris Williamson, like, is not promoting this at the level that you are. He's not holding up Elon, you know, Musk being like, we're not starting the show until we can get Happy Dad on the set, right? And that you kind of, even, I think something I've realized throughout my career is, like, even even products and people that have

incredible momentum, like still keep that focus on like, no, we need to keep pushing. We need to keep promoting the thing that we're doing over and over and over, and it never stops. Well, so let me tell you why Chris is not, because I've spoken with him and his team. It's a mistake that we made with Happy Dad. And, you know, I know I shared what I used to do with Happy Dad,

but it's actually something that if I had to do it again, I wouldn't have pushed it so hard. Because what's the point of Chris promoting this right now on here and on every podcast he's on, every podcast he does if it's not available everywhere. Oh, interesting. Right? Like, you know how many people we sent into the category when we launched in 2021? But just two months ago, we just launched our 50th state. It took us four years to launch nationwide. We just launched Utah. How many people for four years? I love that. NELK-NELK loves Seltzer. I become a white-cloth customer. That's a lot. Exactly. You know how many people,

I mean, how many, I mean, we made, I don't want to take full credit for this, but we'd helped make the Seltzer category Cool Mux Men, which led to now, it's not as shameful to drink a white claw now as it was four years ago. High noon, you know, did a deal with bar stool. You know what I mean? All these things were, you know, so if I were to do it again, I would focus on distribution first and be available everywhere. So people don't run to the store and say, hey, do you have happy dad here? No, we don't, but we have this. We have that. Well, I mean, here, I might as well just get that. Oh, wow, this is good. I'll just become a customer for this brand. You've got to rewin that. Happy Dad. Yeah, which is nearly impossible. So what they're doing

is, because I met with him in this team a few months ago, is they're focused on their distribution. They want to become everywhere. They're available more places now. I don't even, I don't. But it's such a, it's such a chicken and egg thing, because if you're not promoting something aggressively. Then no, retailers like, why should I, or Walmart. Walmart's like, wait, what are you doing? I've never heard of you. Why? You've got to find that balance, right? Because Walmart did, eventually bring us in because they saw us on all the podcasts and all those things you got to find that balance if you could if it could be in sync and you could hurry up and build one team that's just doing marketing and one team that's like hurry up and be available everywhere whether it's the

regular independent liquor store down the street or the thousands of walmart's like you've got to not get caught up on the marketing so much but yeah find that balance of also like get the marketing so you could tell why walmart or 7-11 or the independent guy yeah i know there's 10 000 other brands out there but put mine up, get mine and put mine up front too. It's not even like be available. Don't, not in the corner. Build me a display up front as well. How do you, how do you advise the talent that you work with around like reinventing themselves over time? Because I think like Nalk Boys are a good example, like living like kind of a party lifestyle going from a college lifestyle, young adult, et cetera. Eventually they're going to get to the point where their own

interests are no longer. I have this question about Mr. Beast. Like, is, like, is Is he going to become, he has a young audience, will he become Mr. Rogers? And at 80, he will be still talking to children or young adults? Or will he age up and will be seeing him make content about being a dad? It's such a fork in the road for creative. And I feel like, like, Beaver is a good example. He's the best example. Somebody who is just like constantly reinventing himself.

So the people that listen to him, 15, it's not like, I'm sure teenagers listen to Justin Bieber now, but it's the people that when I was, you know, when I was a teenager, teenager, like, people listen to Justin Bieber, and those same people now are, like, consuming the music in the, like, just as much. Yeah. He's the best example of aging up, right? Because, you know, when, yeah, the person, that 13-year-old girl that loved Justin Bieber 13 years ago is now 26 years old, you know? Still probably wants to go to the concert. Still once ago, because his music now has the ability to, like, make the personal decision, like, I can just buy tape. But listen to his music now, right? Like, his music is, like, stuff that, like, adult. listen to. He's not making, you know, like, you know, some of these other pop stars that, you know,

let's just say these pop stars in the past that never really made it because they just stuck to that, you know, making that same song for that 13 year old over and over and over again where like he's making songs for people under 30s and 40s and, you know, the way he looks and the way he dresses is his clothing brand now is like, you know, it's not merged. It's actually a fashion brand, like, you know, Skylark. So I think that's the thing. So going back with NELC is the same thing, right? Like the podcast was a big step towards that.

You know, like they do the occasional pranks here and there to, you know, to stay true to the audience. But most of their stuff is podcasting, serious stuff, you know, interviewing CEOs, you know. World leaders. World leaders. The presidents. Yes.

Yeah. So, you know, so those, you know, all that, all those things. So that, you know, why? Because that NELC fan who loved the pranks 10 years ago is now in their late 20s, early 30s. So I think that's what you've just got to age up. But it's not easy to age up too, right? Because like, you know, you're going to have to take the risk of like, is this going to perform as well? It might not. Your podcast was not doing that good at first, right? It just took a while for people to understand. Wait, how did you go from prank videos to podcasting? um so you know you know you got to understand like you know you got to take that hit you know maybe if you were getting five million views of nilk video your podcast might get one million at first you know it might get 20% of the views that it had before but you know eventually it'll pick back up so don't you know don't don't panic if you're not getting the views that you used to yeah so that's the same thing with mr beast is like you know maybe you know i don't yeah i don't know if i would what i would do if i were mr beast because i think what's what he's doing right now working but for the long term yeah he's got to think and I know he does it he's thinking about it

because you guys watch him on another podcast like he drops f-bonds and stuff like that like he's trying to like figure out how to like cater towards older people totally and if you zoom out and you just think about him as like this generation's game show host you can see what he's doing with beast games on amazon and clearly game shows as a category what he does really well is not uniquely young. You can do an American Ninja Warrior. You can do Who Wants to be a millionaire. He'll put his own twist on it, of course, but you can make a game show

that has the Mr. Beast's touch and production value and pacing and editing and all the things that he does really well for a much older audience. He could probably be in Brian Sechrest, like way bigger about Ryan Sechrest. Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah, he could definitely get there. When do you think of like these IRL activations, it feels like

Pat McAfee's done W.W.E. Logan, Paul, has done WWE. There's something interesting about when these online, online influencers, the people that you only see between the screen, like wind up going and doing something live, podcasts often go on the road. Like, how thoughtful are you about that these days? I think, you're talking about Logan Paul being in the WW? No, just, just Logan Paul, like, fought in WWE and he does boxing, right? And so, And so there's something interesting about, like, he can be so big online, but there's something that makes you even bigger when you go into something that's legacy or something that's, there's something that makes it more real.

I mean, Jordy gave the example of us going in the Wall Street Journal and, like, that's very much, like, us crossing over into a different world almost. And it feels like that's something that creators need to be thoughtful about, but there's maybe something still underrated there. If you can get it right, similar to launching a great brand, if you can have. of like what is the interaction with the fans or the people who are just meeting you for the first time in the real world that then can become something that makes you more of an institution than just something

that they see on their screen? Well, I think with Logan and WWE, I think that's a really good example of like he entered this platform. Well, one, you've got to be good at it. It has to make sense, which in my opinion, I think it makes sense for Logan. Like, I think it's hilarious, you know? I think it's so funny.

I can't get enough of him and his WWE content. And then you gotta think like what is my core thing and is it going to help that like in his thing you know if you were to ask logan paul i have never asked them this but i'm sure if we did you know what what matters to you most is his online presence right like his youtube his podcast and and prime so like does going into the wwe help the core businesses and i think it does i think it's kept them relevant on YouTube. I think it's definitely Hill Prime. So if it's helping the core thing, and I think the same thing with you guys in Wall Street Journal, does Wall Street Journal help this versus like leaving

this to do Wall Street Journal? Yeah, totally. If it helps this platform and brings more validation to this show and more eyeballs and awareness to this show and all the things you guys have done with this show. So you guys had Zuckerberg last week. I haven't watched it yet. But like, I thought it was a joke. I was like, wait, did they use them for a... We had a sign of gone. I was like, whoa. And I watched like 10 seconds. I didn't have time to watch all the day, but I want to watch. I was like, whoa, they had Zucker. That's crazy. How do you advise your talent on startup investing, private markets investing? Because I feel like this can be a good way for talent to just like light millions of dollars on fire if they're

not careful. But at the same time, if they're really strategic about it, they can end up, you know, getting access to the best investment opportunities in the world. Yeah, I think they need to be surrounded by the right people, right? Like, you've got to be surrounded by a, like, someone at Andreessen, or I think you guys have Shervin on here later. Yeah, we do. Like, be surrounded by Shervin Pishavar, you know what I mean, like, be surrounded. Yeah, somebody that can identical.

Not some guy you met at Tao in, you know, in New York, you know what I mean? We had Sequin Barclay on the show, and he's around smart people. He's around very smart people, and he's been investing in companies that have been backed by tier ones. It's not just taking a flyer in a friend's business. Oh, you're going to start a restaurant. It's okay. Everyone in Silicon Valley is piling into this company. I should get into it.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, Ashton Coch is a good example of that in the past. Now, Saquan's doing that. I mean, I think MC Hammer, who I got into Twitter early or something like that, right? That's right. Like, I think through up. Yeah, Nas got the Coinbase. He was like Seed Brown or like Series A or something, Coinbase.

That's such a wild. Yeah, MC Hammer got, I think through, what was that guy's name? He was a legend back in the day. Ron Conway? Yeah, Conway. Yeah, that's right. A grade? Yeah, it was like a, but through him, I think he got into like Twitter early.

Yeah, SV Angel was. Svangel, yeah. Ron Conway's fun. You said A grade. No, A grade was Ashton. Ashton. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I think you just have to be surrounded by the right people. There are good people out there. There's good people out here. You're speaking of A great guy O'Seri. You know what I mean? Like, if you're around right people, but I've seen it so many times where guys will be like, yeah, I met this guy at the, you know, at a restaurant in New York. And, like, you know, and that's a bash New York and random person.

But it's like, what's he done? He's like, well, you know. He's promising a 20% return. No, you have to get, like, I think that's a thing. I, when I lived in San Francisco, I always felt that that was something, a problem that needed to be solved. And there are guys, like, Shervin, like, brought in, like, the Rock Nation people, a lot of other people into deals. I think he brought in, like, a gang of people into Uber early. So, you know what I mean?

Like, there are people out there. You just have to have the right person. I don't know if you guys know Chris Lyons from, like, he's always been doing stuff like that, like, you know, like, you know. So, you know, I think you just need to find that Chris Lyons are a Shervin or Gio Ciri or someone like that. Someone who can pipeline for you. Yeah, which I think what the Ashton did. I think Ashton had Ron Conway, was his guy.

Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's a big opportunity that I think they should be doing. But I don't think they should go and invest in some like real estate development and, you know, because their cousin is doing it in Alabama. Who knows? Who knows? Elon's building the whole Colossus 2 data center over there. Well, that yet.

I'm talking about someone that invested like $25 million into a scam in Alabama and lost that $25 million. It's dangerous territory. Yeah, yeah, lots of risk out there. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah, great time to finally hang. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Thank you.

We come by any time. You know, we're here every day. I know, I'm sorry. We're going to pull that. You're one of the first interviewers who's been able to. see the chat. We're not sure if that's distracting. We manage a lot of these things. Social media and me.

Yeah, yeah, you're locked down. Hands up. Well, we're going to see you. Talk soon. Thank you so much for hopping on. We will go back to the time. We have our next guest in about 15 minutes. But first, let me tell you about profound.

Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands at Profile. We, people should no longer be able to name their children, John. The final John, he's got all the usernames. Well, over the weekend, there was a beautiful memorial for Charlie Kirk, and Autism Capital has some interesting lore. Charlie Kirk was a hell of an operator, what an entrepreneur. Even if you don't like him, just look at the organization he built,

look at the way he brought high performance out of people so young. He represented a standard of excellence and discipline you don't often see anymore. And Michael Gibson, who is running the Teal Fellowship, says not many know, but he was an application to the Teal Fellowship way back in 2013 or 2014. We passed on him because we didn't think a media company had the scalability of a tech startup. Our mistake, but Charlie

kept coming to our events for a long time. So what an interesting piece of of tech lore there. And so, very, very interesting. This Unitry robot, can we pull up the video of the Unitry G1? Watching these guys feed up on this robot. It is a Unitry G1 has much.

mastered more quirky skills. Unitary G1 has learned the anti-gravity mode. Stability is greatly improved under any action sequence, and even if it falls, it can quickly get back up. Let's watch this horrifying video. Wow. Someone didn't read the parable of Rocco's Basilis. That's right. This is not what you should be doing to a robot. You should be nice. You should be encouraging the robot. This is so, this is going to lead to grave consequences for the human How does it respond to a bear hug? How does it respond to some you realize every every robot is going to be trained on this video both the video and the actual training data from this robot

It is fighting for its life here. It's really good at getting up though. This is remarkable and of course Wow it really feels like whoa. Okay, it can do a barrel roll That's remarkable. Wow. I do not want to see that thing with two guns. What is Unitree's valuation again? This feels deeply undervalued at $7 billion. If this were in America, this would be trading at $150 billion. This is incredible technology.

What is the premium that Tesla gets based on the humanoid? This is, yeah, this is top tier operations out of China. We've seen flips before. This one looks less scripted than what Boston Dynamics does. Boston Dynamics must respond to this, by the way. I need a new Boston Dynamics video on the timeline ASAP. I need a new figure robotics video. I need a new Tesla Optimus video.

I need a response from America. We will not go quietly into that good night. Thin.a.I., the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one on competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. Christian Horner, you want to talk about Red Bull? I want to talk about Jimmy Kimmel is apparently coming back on the air Tuesday.

Okay, yes. It was an indefinite suspension. It was not a full cancellation. There was a debate over what indefinite means. It can mean two minutes. It can mean two years. It can mean 20 years. It can mean forever.

What do you think, Tyler? Do you guys think this was planned all along? Yes. The conspiracy is that this was all planned to drum up ratings. This was Nathan Fielder. He came up with an idea. You said, we're going to make an indefinite suspension look like a targeted political move in order to increase the overall attention that late night television is going to get.

Yeah. I had sort of a hot take. Everyone's dunking on Kimmel for only getting 160,000 viewers in that 18 to 45 demographic every night, which is low. And Chimoth said, like, you know, more people hate watch all in in that demo. every day that they go live. But I was looking at the actual numbers, and yes, the Jimmy Kimmel audience is very old,

but Jimmy Kimmel's still pulling, I think, a million views a night, which is a lot. I feel like that's a lot. Like, that's what, 0.3% of the U.S. population, if you assume it's mostly Americans that are watching, like pretty significant numbers. I'm also interested to know what happens to late night

as shows get taken off the air. Colbert was canceled, but is still off. the air, Kimmel's coming back. What happens, like, there's been a, there's been a, like, the V2 of the late night programming schedule feels like it's going to be a lot more reality TV. Will Fallon pick up crazy and will Fallon just have all that attention? Or is the late night viewer more, I only like, I only like Colbert.

And if Colbert's not on, I'm not turning on the TV and I'm going to go be, I'm going to go listen to John Stewart's podcast or Colbert's new podcast. which I assume Kimmel and Colbert will both launch podcasts or live shows or something in the lower production value that still allows them to have a voice and obviously, you know, continue to communicate with their audience that they've built up over decades. But it will be interesting regardless, both Kimmel, if he's off the air permanently, if Colbert's off the air permanently, he's going to need to sell some ads on his new podcast. He's going to need a CRM. He's going to need Adio. He's going to need customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds.

scales and grows your company to the next level. Aura Ring raising nearly $900 million. Jordi, can you read this post from Mark German while I ring the... I will. Our Ring is raising nearly $900 million, making it an over $10 billion company. It sold 3 million rings in the last year or so and is on track for over $1.5 billion in revenue next year. And you didn't miss this, right?

You got in early? yeah i i i did not uh so i knew aura ring when they were when the founder was just bouncing around podcast like niche health podcasts it wasn't a thing you would never see it out in the world no um there you know i i you know the founder was very active like i said on on the podcast yeah it felt like i didn't even i wasn't even aware that it had uh i'm actually going to look up three million rings last year. So it was on track for over $1.5 billion in revenue. I mean, they've wearables, like we're finally, it's weird to say it, but it feels like we're finally in the era of like wearables actually getting traction. And oddly, they're all, they're all classic form factors. Everyone,

people have been wearing rings for. It started as a Kickstarter campaign. That's crazy. This has to be the most successful Kickstarter of all time. 10 billion. That's more than Oculus, which was a Kickstarter. so remarkable oh let's check in with uh tyler and his fashionable wearables how you doing over there give us the give us the two-week review how much have you used those those are the x-reel one pro uh technically a r glasses although i don't believe that you can see me through those you look blind i can i can barely see you so um i haven't really used them at all except uh on the plane sure they were actually like no these are like these are actually really cool in the plane. I was just playing a game on my phone, but then I would just have it be really

big in front of me. And it was like a very good experience. So I'm like, I would not buy these for $700. I would buy them for like maybe like 50 bucks. But they are like really cool. And I think if they were more see-through like the new like meta glasses. Do you think you'll actually use them any time other than on a plane? Probably not. Because most of the time I can just use my laptop and set if I need like a bigger screen to do stuff? Yeah, so is there any scenario where you would use as like a secondary screen on a laptop or anything like that? Not really because...

Do you have a TV in your, in your luxurious apartment at UCLA that you are so proud of? I do have a TV. It's hard to see the screen. Like, you can't really use this as a second screen. It can only be the kind of main one because you can't, it's like a little too dark to be like comfortably viewing your laptop. So you can't use both at the same time. So it's not really like an extended monitor solution.

Yeah. But I think the future generations, I say I'm likely to become like a DAU. DAU. But when would you use it daily? That doesn't make any sense to me. I would use it as another monitor if these were more see-through. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. I guess that could make sense. Well, I mean, the resolution is pretty good, right? Like, it looked good. Yeah. You can read very easily. Yeah. It's like usually sometimes I have a hard time.

It like makes me sick. Jordy, how'd you sleep last night? Speaking of health tracking, monitoring connected devices, the connected bed from 8Sleep, of course, is our partner. Go to 8Sleep.com. Get a pot 5. Code TPPN.

I got an 88. I got a 90. Let's go. How many hours did you sleep? Seven hours in 56 minutes. Pretty good. I got 7 hours of 28. Not my best, not my worst.

You know, their news. back tonight. There was a reuniting of Elon Musk and Donald Trump at the Charlie Kirk Memorial. There were a couple posts that went out about this. They shook hands. They sat next to each other. And it seems like they're incredibly back. They have, this has been the unifying event for them. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes in terms of actual movement on, you know, partnerships and subsidies and investments and who does what. There was the, There was the movement over Tesla electric car subsidies that, of course, was a staple of the Trump admins, you know, push away from electric cars generally. And that potentially hurt Tesla.

Maybe that comes back. We will have to continue. Let's pull up this chart of the green line test. Yes, the green line test. Trump did lean in. It appears, although just barely. But Danish says BRB going all in on Tesla stock because Elon had the straight green line. line. Tesla is up

2% today. Oh, well, maybe there's something to the green line test. We'll see. Well, if you want to get in on Tesla, maybe you think it's overvalued. Maybe you think it's undervalued. Head over to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-acet investing. Industry living yields. They're trusted by millions,

folks. Speaking of investing, River Road Partners shares, you're not going to be Ken Griffin. Citadel Securities uses a physical goal book that includes more than 5,000 discrete goals contributed by nearly 1,800 employees to guide planning and ops. The goal book is part of a meticulous month-long planning ritual.

Yeah, there was an entire article, I think, at Bloomberg, about this printed book. Yes. Matthew is putting in the truth zone and says, sounds like some PR BS you tell to the Wall Street Journal. Red partner says it's okay. They didn't call you back. In other news, Radia is, I've never heard of this company before, but Radia is going to build the windrunner for defense, build as the world's largest military cargo aircraft

and announced at the airspace and cyber conference in 2025. The ultra-large transport is aimed at closing the airlift gap for U.S. and NATO forces. And if you look at the scale of these planes, I think that's a 747 there or something like it. And this plane is much, much bigger. I'm excited for the big planes. I want bigger and bigger. planes. I've always wanted something, you know, just as big as a cruise ship in the sky and hopefully we'll get it. Kalamaz says something about Valve is very forever 2000s coded, a master class in business. It's a type of company that doesn't really exist anymore, that does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, because Steam prints so much money, and they continue to do exactly that.

Do you buy games on Steam anymore? You used to? I don't buy any games, really, because I don't have time to play games but uh i i had a yes i'm in recovery i had a steam deck i enjoyed it a lot and i bought a lot of games on steam um and i also bought one counterstrike skin on scheme on steam that was probably 50 bucks uh but i love that uh i love the account zoomer is discovering yes uh john wait wait can you guess what this is i knew right away yeah discovering josh kushner yes uh holy bullish he says a 24 affirm andrel air table cursor data bricks get Hymns, Instagram, Kickstarter, Lemonade.

Kickstarter is a throwback. NewBank, Open AID. Open Door. Oscar. Stripe, RAM, Twitch, Unity, Warby Parker. Robin Hood, Scale, Skim, Slack, Spotify, Stripe, Twitch. Josh Kushner has gotten in a lot of great deals. He's buying Fifth Avenue.

He's buying Fifth Avenue. He gets into every good... It's interesting. Do you think he'll generate more of total dollars from Open AI than the rest of these deals combined? I mean, that's the goal of venture. I don't know the actual ownership percentages,

but that's certainly the way venture works, always. It's like there's one that makes more than the rest combined, and it makes the rest look really, really silly because you can be in some great, great companies, but that one hyperscaler that you got drives everything. You look at Excel with Facebook. I mean, they had a bunch of other great companies in that portfolio, but they owned, what, 20% of Facebook at IPO or something like that?

It was like worth $10 billion off of like a, you know, $100 million something dollar fund, fantastic performance. The other news, oh, there's a question in the chat about the H-1B is, we'll cover it more later. People are still debating it back and forth. The Silicon Valley was very up in arms over the H-1B things. Reis Hastings actually chined in in favor of the decision to raise the tax on H1B's. He says, I've worked on H1B politics for 30 years. Trump's 100K per

year tax is a great solution, which is I think not what it wound up being. It wound up being 100K one time. But Reed says it will mean H1B is used for just very high value jobs, which will mean no lottery is needed and more certainty for those jobs. So a little bit of a debate. I'm sure there's a bunch of people covering it very well. But without further ado, our second in-person welcome to the show Laura and breaking some news today. Yes, some news. I'm very excited. Get that call ready. Get the microphone as close as you can. And introduce yourself for those who might not know. Hi, I'm Laura. I run Until Labs. So we are trying to make the hibernation pods that you've seen in intercellular reality. But to get there,

we want to help transplant patients get the organs that they need by adversely, cry, preserves, serving organs. Wow. Yeah. Start with something easy. Yeah. Give us a little back story. Like what actually set you up to be in a position to start this type of company?

It seems incredibly difficult from a scientific perspective. Yeah. So my backstory is like I spent a decade working in longevity to a long-time adventure. And I think it's just really frustrating to, I think, spend that much time trying to solve a problem. And you really want to find like one critical lynch point, like one thing where you can solve it and then it helps everything else. And so to me it's like, wow, it would be so cool to make a hibernation plot where, you know, like,

if you had a terminal illness, and you needed a critical cure. You could sort of wait, let's say, one to two years to make it to the point where therapy-free disease comes out. And, of course, the key step to get there is showing that this sci-fi technology, which works for millions of IVF, you know, embryos. Sure.

There's people walking out today who are cripes for 30-plus years. Whoa, I haven't thought about that. That's great. Really crazy. Three? 30-plus years. 30. Three, three.

30. 30? Yes. Yeah, actually, the record for the longest cryopreserved team in embryo just came out. No way. And it was 30 plus years. A person's born and they're kind of 30 on day one. Yeah.

In some ways. They're twins that were preserved at the same time and then they're reworned at different times. So it's really interesting. We have the tech. Yeah. But just scaling it up to human organs and showing like in the clinic for transplant patients that we can actually actually help. Wait, so I mean, I imagine you don't go straight from embryo to human.

Is there an animal step in the mid? Laura's saying the midstep is you take like, I don't know, lung or a kidney or something like that that is. But why not mouse? So actually, the really cool thing is the field of cryobiology has been around for decades. And, you know, there's been incredible scientists, shout out to University of Minnesota, who already published, you know, showing that, for example, we can reversely cry-preserve mouse kidneys.

So, you know, the field of microbiology is already an incredible, incredible work. And we're just working to scale that up to a human organ scale. But the mouse people see is down. Like, you can take a mouse kidney, totally cry-preserve it, re-warm it, put it back in a mouse that does not have another kidney, and that mouse will be, you know, good to go. Yeah. What's the state of the art in just freeze the full mouse?

Are we making any progress there? Somebody must have tried it by now. We have this funny interaction with Zach Weinberg. He came on the show and was like, whenever you're testing a drug, you do all this research in the lab, but then it's time to make a decision. What was it? Rat or monkey.

You're going to do a test in one of them, and then you'll get to human trials. And it feels like that's a natural progression. Is that not the natural progression here? So people have been trying to crypreserve whole organisms for a long time. Yeah, imagine. There's some pretty crazy studies that came out in the 50s that worked on this. Okay.

But I think, like, basically it's just, it's like, if we can't reversely cry or preserve, like we just got the kind of studies that did the reprobation of organs really well, like to the point where you could bring them back and show that they were fully functioning, you know, like in the past couple years. There have been some published in the past decade, but kind of, I think they're, like, really kind of nailing, like, the protocols, is pretty recent. And I think you want to get that right before you try going after a whole organism.

Sure. What are the levers that you pull in cryopreservation that aren't just temperature? Like I imagine we've tried just make it really, really cold. Yeah, yeah. So actually, also one cool fact,

I don't know if you know, once you get down below minus 130 degrees Celsius, you can keep like an animal there indefinitely, basically. Really? Time basically stops in that temperature range. Wait, how cold again? Below minus 130 degrees Celsius. 130 Celsius.

Okay. Yeah. It's pretty cold. But yeah, the molecules basically, aren't moving. So like I mentioned, you know, like 30 plus years for human embryos. Sure. Yeah. But, but are there other, are there other decisions and trade-offs to make besides temperature? Yeah. So it's really, so one of the things I love the most about this, so I worked in deep tech for a long time. Yeah. One of the coolest things with this problem is a trade-off

between biology and engineering. So you have this danger zone. Basically the thing you want, basically the thing, like our enemy in crime preservation is ice. Like you think that we love ice, but we actually hate ice. Like cold, but you don't like ice. We love cold, but we don't like ice. Because when ice forms, it expands and it breaks the tissue around it. Sure. Yeah. So what we want to do is we want to make glass. So yeah, I mean, if I have blood in my organ and that expands, that's bad, it's breaking the tissue, how do you freeze something without creating ice out of the blood?

Well, if you're doing an individual organ, I'm assuming you take... Drain everything out? Is that right? No, so there's two different things you can do. It's very close. So one is you can replace the chemicals in the organs, so you can replace a lot of the blood with a chemical that prevents ice formation. Okay. Is that just something that freezes below?

130 so it's not freezing and it stays a liquid or is that just it's a couple things so it'll turn to a basically if you if you cool fast enough it'll turn into a glass and it does this through kind of decreasing the number of water molecules and also kind of like there's a couple of themicants that might be involved okay so you don't just have to get cold you have to get cold fast that's part of the goal yeah so it's like can you make good chemicals that do that and can you get cold fast and basically like can you traverse this danger zone of ice formation down to like because once 1.130 you're good like below that you're totally fine but going through there as fast as possible How fast is fast?

Are we talking like minutes, seconds, go seconds? Yeah, current protocols work on the order of, you know, maybe hours. I do you want less than that. Yeah. I imagine if I put water in the fridge or in the freezer, it's pretty cold. Like, it still takes a couple hours, but I imagine if it's negative 130, it probably turns to ice a little bit faster. Obviously, if it's a smaller amount of liquid, it's going to freeze faster.

There's a whole bunch of different tradeoffs there. What's it like fundraising for a business like this? because I imagine some of the backers are kind of thinking, like, I want this for myself, you know, I've always wanted to go in the cryogenic chamber and be able to teleport. Well, do you remember that famous Sam Altman interview where there was a YC company that was doing something along cryopreservation? And as part of his, he was running YC at the time.

And he said, like, I'm on board. I will sign that you can freeze me after I die. But part of theirs was that they, I think they technically had to kill you. And so the headline that was like the twisted. version of what he said was like, Sam Altman agrees to be killed by this portfolio company. Yeah, I mean, that's value at. It's value at.

What other VC is willing to die for your company? But yeah, what's been like fundraising? Yeah, so it's an interesting difference between, like, there's companies where they're kind of like, will cry preserve you, and we're not sure whether we can bring you back. And I think what was really complying to us is like, let's make this like a real deep tech company. Like let's go and like our bar is reversible cry preservation.

Like when we take an organ, we have to show that the whole, you know, it's like you wouldn't buy an IV of product where it's like, oh, we'll cry, preserve it, and we're not sure you can bring your embryo back. We want to show the whole thing works. And that's a bar where it's like, okay, if we're raising from Deep Tech firms, right, they're going to want to talk about, like, what's the business, that gets you there. You know, like, if you can cry or preserve an organ reversibly and help, you know, like thousands of transplant patients who are otherwise losing organs.

I mean, 100,000 for on the waiting list. And like millions who might use an organ but just don't have access to them. Like, you know, that kind of forces you, I think, to hit this bar of, you know, showing you can rewarm with function. Walk me through the current state of organ transplantation. I mean, I feel like most people probably know that they have a, you know, a little thing that they can check on their ID, if they're unfortunately, you know, killed, their organ might be transplanted. It might be frozen for a little bit. But we've passed away too, John. They don't

have to be killed. Murderous podcaster. But I feel like we've heard this story of like the organ was put in a helicopter and traveled. And it was moved from one body to another very, very quickly. Yeah. What's the current like shelf life of organs? It sounds like that's the most low-hanging fruit is just extend that, even if you just double it, that's going to be really, really positive for the organ transplant market. It's the craziest logistical process I've ever heard of. Explain it to me. So, like, you know, some organs have a

four to 12 hour, you know, shelf life, others might have, like, 24-36, but, you know, it's like, it's a very short time period, and you have no idea when the donor's going to pass. And so basically, like, as medical surgeon gets a call, maybe in the middle of the night, go charter, like, at the last minute, a private plane to fly to, like, the place where the person

has just, um, riddened the organ, pick it up, bring it back, you know, transplant patients, wait within, And then go back to the patient that's getting the transplant. If you're a transplant patient, like, you have to wait, like, right next to the hospital where you might get the surgery for months, you know, in some cases a lot longer than that. You know, just waiting to get the call in the middle of the night. You have to have a patron on you at all times.

It's just like this crazy little process. Because it's like your organ, if you need this particular organ, you're going to get a call and you need to go to the hospital because it's coming on a private jet that day. Exactly. Yeah. And like, I don't know if you know that the company Blade. It's like, I think they did like a couple of million. Yeah.

And they run out. transport. I think they split the business in some way. Yeah, because they've actually developed a business. And so your initial product is like focused on solving that like, like you don't even need to be able to freeze an organ and bring it back over over a decade. It's more, it's more like just solving this logistical nightmare. Is that kind of the idea? Well, the cool thing is once you're in the temperature range, you could preserve the organ for as long as possible. But yeah, in the interim, it's like, let's get that organ to the patient as soon as possible. But like, let's not have to have a surgeon get on a private plane.

You're like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so do you, I mean, we track artificial intelligence progress a lot on this show. All the AI labs are trying to just see exponential growth in the amount of time that AI can think. We went from one minute to deep research can do 20 minutes. GPT5 is doing more. Do you think that the progress of your business will track sort of a smooth exponential where we'll go from four to 12 hours to one day to two days to four days to eight days?

16 and just kind of expand from there? Or do you think there'll be some sort of like binary unlock? There's a new technology and now it's five years. Well, to me, to me it sounds like the bigger jump is like, like you said, once you get the temperature down, you can go basically forever. The bigger jump is like, how do you go from a single organ that you can swap?

It sounds like swap out the blood for another chemical that allows it to stay really cold without having the ice expansion. But it's like, how do you go from an organ to a system, right? And how do you go from a system to a whole body, right? Because if you replaced all the blood in yourself with some chemical, like, is your brain going to function the same way? When you take, you know, like, there's a lot of unknowns, right?

Yeah, so the thing we track is scaling size. Like, that's the big thing, right? So we know we can reverse the carbosophon embryos, you know, like a couple hundred cells. We don't previously cry preserved, like, you know, worms, that's 1,000 cells. You know, now rat kidding that massively scales up, like, number of cells. But just, yeah, it's basically scaling size. Because as you get larger, it's way harder to cool something quickly. You know, like, imagine you put a snowflake on your hand.

And it'll like, we warm very quickly, but a large turkey for Thanksgiving takes, you know, maybe a day or more to defrost. So you're, what is, one, I kind of want to get a sense of, like, timelines for the company specifically. You raise $58 million. Like, you want to deploy that effectively, but quickly to show progress. But, like, what kind of milestones are you looking at?

And what is the actual, I'm assuming, the hardware that you're developing is like focusing on cooling, cooling things quickly, consistently. And then is it a machine that you're trying to scale up over time? What does the actual hardware look like? And then what are the kind of milestones that you're trying to achieve? Yeah, so, you know, the cool thing with this, with this new round that we just are announcing today with funders fund. You know, I'm really excited to have them on board.

Also, Lux's drawing and field ventures. Just shout out to, like, all of our investors who've been awesome. Basically, like, the goal is to get organ products, you know, like, into the clinic. So, like, right now, we're working on developing a lot of the protocols. You know, we build new chemical formulations. We build cooling systems. We build warming systems. So basically just, like, iterating, you know, as quickly as possible.

One of the things I love all this problem is the speed of iteration preclinically. It's sort of, like, very unlike a lot of biology where you can just, you know, sort of test in, like, whole human-sized organs. A lot of your protocols weekly. Yeah, we're just working on getting that product to the point where can bring it to patients. Take me into sci-fi world. Sleep pods for space travel. What are the implications? what are the tradeoffs of that?

Is it just like I go to sleep, I wake up on Mars? Are we going to be going to Alpha Centauri? When you really, really play out the future, I've always had the mind that if we're going to places that are light years away, the speed of light holds, the laws of physics hold, and so you're embarking on thousands of years' journey, you're going to have these colony ships

where the people that arrive are completely different than the people that leave, but it sounds like there might be an alternative path. Yeah, and even here on Earth, the scenario we were talking about offline was this sense of, let's say you're a 80-year-old billionaire. You've experienced everything there is to experience in life in the current era. And your technology exists. And I go, I want to just be, you know, put to, I want to hibernate for the next 50 years and I'm going to just be placed on my little doomsday ranch in New Zealand and I'm going to have a staff whose job is to just protect me effectively hang out and make sure nobody messes with me while I'm asleep and in 50

years I want to wake up and so this 80 year old can go from being 80 yeah they can just effectively like go to sleep for 50 years and wake up and suddenly they get to experience something completely novel and even though they're 80 years old they get this experience of being an entirely different era of human history and i think a lot of people would get to the all the avatar sequels they don't need to wait yeah no a lot of a lot of people would get to the point in their life where they're like okay i've seen enough i've done enough sure uh i i while i still have life in me i want to be able to see something you know completely new and there's a risk that the you know global collapse happens my my doomsday ranch gets rated and everything gets but but like there's the multi-planetary future

and possibility, but there's also just life here on Earth, of life here on Earth is going to look wild and different if you're obsessed with the future today and you're impatient and you're not necessarily believe that you're going to live another 50 years you could teleport, effectively. Yeah, so I mean, like, one thing to your point is, like, if you want humans in space, like,

I think someone wants them to be like, if you want humans and space, you need, like, AI, plausibly, you need, like, definitely, you know, spaceships, but you also need cryo. Like, you know, it's the best way to allow for, like, long-term transportation. And be like, even in the near term, one thing that we really care about just, like, helping people who would otherwise not get therapies, kind of, like, make it to their critical point. So my co-founder Hunter, his father-in-law was diagnosed with, like, metastatic malithelioma, he missed a critical clinical trial by, like, a couple months, you know, wasn't eligible because of the severity of his disease, that could have given him, you know, extra time with his family, might have given him a shot remission.

And I think it's just, like, really, or, like, for me, it's, like, much more near-time. Like, let's just, like, help people who were, like, literally not. And, like, I knew somebody who got metastick malnoma, and, like, because he got it, the year that he got it got, like, 10 plus years of prognosis, the year before would have been six to nine months. Wow. Right, like, that 2014 to 2015 was, like, a really, really crazy time to be in that, like, to be a patient for, yeah. What about the pure sci-fi thought experiment of, like, cryo as a time machine that jumps you forward? If a device existed right over there, you walk through that door, and when you walk out in a blink of an eye, it's 30 years later, would you do it? Jordy, would you do that?

It's such an interesting thought experiment because there's all these, like, risks, bad things could happen, but great things could happen. It's kind of a proxy on like your overall view on optimism over some period of time. I mean, I would want to take my family and stuff. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I can easily envision the scenario of like being, being towards the end of your life and just being like one more year of being in this retirement home. But what if you're young?

Young, I'm not doing it. I love the present. I want to see. I'm impatient for my flying car. I'm just going to jump forward to 2050 and just be the most out of the loop person in the world. Yeah, I think the question comes down to like how resource is it, resource intensive. Assume it's for this thought experiment. Okay, assume it's free.

I'm not doing it. I like surfing the present. Yeah. I don't need to teleport. But I can easily imagine people. Certainly in the medical case. Like it makes tons of sense. Yeah.

If you're like incredibly HGI bill, then you believe that like, you know, abundance. around the corner, would you freeze yourself if the alternative was working at McDonald? There's no risk. Yeah, I mean, like, even in the medical scenario, like, there's no risk that you just get hit by a bus or less in this thought experiment. So you get to jump forward to the post-scarcity AGI future. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah.

Some people might just take it. I'll see you on the other side. I wonder what the, yeah, I see you on the other side. Be fascinating. Have you seen passengers? Passengers, no. No one's seen this. Yeah, you're familiar.

It's a good movie about this exact, about this. this exact topic. You said you're building this company is a hard tech, deep tech company. What does that actually look like? Well, this is a perfect blend of like crazy sci-fi version. Yeah, but applications should be.

Extremely pragmatic. Here's a problem that is solvable. We know we can do it already. We need to apply it to a new domain like kidneys or like these other organs. Exactly. And that's helpful with like recruiting because it's like, hey, like somebody that is a lot more risk averse could be like, I'm working at a medical device startup.

And someone else can be like, I'm working on cryotherapy. Oh, that's interesting. And you're both working on the same technology. Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. I think that's one cool thing about it. I think also for as deep tech means,

like, we do almost everything we can in house. So we like build every part of the system that we can in house. Like we have a team of like amazing engineers, neuroscientists, microbiologists, you know, chemists. It's like, we try to, like, it's like, just like move full stack in house. It's like thing that if you run a deep tech company,

just like your iteration cycle is the main limiter on your progress. Yep. So the more that you can like do in houses. And it's good that you talk fast because you talk like quite as fast as us. No, it's good. It's good. You can just, you know, one minute for you. It's like two minutes for us.

Yeah. What are some crazy, have any other countries done anything? Do you believe like Russia or China? How many humans do you think are frozen right now? Holy frozen. Humans anywhere in the world or interstellar. She sends a slack message off. How many we got?

I mean, like, for Connics, it's like, I think that there are these products where it's like you cry or preserve someone, but like you're just really not sure if the procedure you used to cry or preserve them is going to bring them. It's possible to bring them back. And I think we don't, like, we just don't really know like how to think about that. Yeah, yeah. But is it like a hundred? Because we've heard lore about like, oh, this person had their head frozen. This person had their body froze. I would say a lot of those stories are not true. They're just not true. Yeah. Or like a lot of the really popular ones I think are incorrect. Yeah. That makes sense. What about what, what have what have what have? What have. What have. What have. What have. What have. What have. What have. What have. What have. what countries are investing outside of the U.S. or kind of care about this problem area or opportunity? I think China might be. I'm not on the ground there at all. Not to know, but that's something that, yeah, I've heard a little bit about. Yeah. Do the printers work in your office? What do you ask? There's this funny interaction where in the early 2000s, Peter Thiel went to tour a, a freeze your body type of startup and the contract that he had to sign he was like he was like i'm all in on this technology print up the contract all signed it i think he was there with luke nosic and uh the printer wasn't working and he was like that wasn't very didn't instill a lot of

confidence that like if they couldn't get their printer working they like i wasn't he was like i wasn't i wasn't ready to you know trust them with freezing my entire body if their printer doesn't work. So, you know, it's like how you do anything is how you do everything. Yeah, I think that's where like organs are a good bar. It's just like, you can help some transplantations, you know, like, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, it's interesting. There's, it feels like

what you're doing would be very disruptive to the traditional organ transplant business that is... Would it be, or is it very, like, synergistic, actually? I think for companies like Blade where it's like they're getting a couple hundred million revenue off of like literally just helicopters transporting organs.

Like, I think that's the part that we want to take off. Yeah, that's, it's like super time sensitive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'd be much cheaper to just put it on like a FedEx truck. Yeah, exactly. Or, or just, yeah, just some type of. Exactly.

Like, all. Yeah. But she's going to make, uh, have you ever had anything delivered by FedEx? I mean, the system's going to be indestructible, right? You're going to be all to throw it off the building, right? Did she say that? Did she promise it indestructible? I believe.

I believe it to the side by. Add it to the, add it to the do list. Make product. indestructible. Well, yeah. We'll get right on that. But I mean, I think like most people in transplant, like, you know, the patient, way better for patients.

You know, they don't have to get a last minute call. Like for surgeons, they don't have to do like an overnight where they're like doing, you know, like literally like an all-nighter to do a surgery. Like that's, yeah. And that probably, uh, it makes it harder to actually be alert. Like there's a ton of examples of like the night shift, just quality and even in manufacturing, the night shift often performs a slightly worse. And you can tell in quality assurance just for making widgets because people are tired.

And it's harder to get the best people to show up in the middle of the night. And so you could imagine just unlocking the ability for surgeons to be well rested is probably another value ad. We would all love for surgeons to be well-rested. Of course, of course. Well, what's the interaction with the FDA? Like, what's the process like? I was talking to the neurolink team about that. And the FDA feels extremely difficult to deal with, like, very slow, but then they've figured out how to move very quickly and have a great relationship. So how are you thinking about the FDA relationship? I mean, I think one thing with the FDA, I mean, I can't speak on their behalf. I was just like, take them seriously as partners. Like, okay, like, you know, when

we kind of are going to engage with them, like, we want to bring them all the data that, like, we would want to see, you know, for a part. I think a lot of the reason the FDA is often portrayed as, you know, bad is that, like, there's not a lot of drugs that actually work. And so, like, they're, you know, like, looking at very difficult evidence to analyze. It's, like, we just want to bring them evidence that the technology works and, like, have them give us feedback. Yeah. Yeah. Do they, would they view this as, like, a medical device and take you through, like, the medical device approval process? Um, that's, that's, like, the default designation likely, but, you know, like, yeah, up to them.

Cool. They could create a cool sci-fi path to it. They should. Anything's possible today. Anything possible. Yeah, yeah. One executive order in there's now, the FDA is like, we got a cool sci-fi. You do some cool stuff.

I mean, we've got Space Force. We're going to the moon. If you've been in a blockbuster sci-fi film, just come over here. Yeah, that's great. Where else are you most excited in longevity broadly? You've invested in a bunch of companies. Yeah. So I'm sure you can.

A good opportunity to. to pump your bags and talk about sectors broadly. I mean, especially the FDA, one thing I'm just really excited about is that like the FDA gave acceptance of efficacy data for life extension, like for the first time to pass lawyers and like shout out to loyal. Yeah, I mean like that, I think people outside the one who don't get up, like that was a huge deal.

Like the FDA has never, you know, like sort of thought about lifespan extension, the possibility of that on the label for a drug for dogs to start. Sure. You know, but like that's just, yeah, it's really exciting. So, like, them kind of accepting that concept is a really big deal. So, you know, shout out to Les Alian and, you know, loyal for kind of making that, getting that through.

I think that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah, it is interesting that, like, a precursor to getting a drug approved is a problem that they've defined and how do you define that? Yeah, that's very good. What do you make of declining life expectancy in the U.S.? Do you have a thesis on it, or do you think it's going to turn around any predictions? That's a good question. I mean, I think, like, for context, my field of expertise is, like, can we make someone

molecule or like sort of um i guess larger drugs that like predictably extend human lifespan by like some amount you know in the clinical trial and like i think that it's hard like i i'm not an expert in things that are not that well not being an expert on something has never stopped anyone so so what's next uh what was the total raise 50 something so 58 million yeah it was uh yeah well 52 technically in the current round including about six point of safes that roll. What's on the, what's on the to-do list over the next couple months? Is it all hiring? Do you need to find a facility, build out a facility, buy equipment? I mean, we just moved into a huge lab. We're hiring, you know, looking for great neuroscientists,

engineers. That's kind of the sort of the main focus right now. I'm like the biologists as well, yeah. You said neuroscientists? For one part of the company, yes. Okay. Can you talk more about that? Maybe in the next time that I come on. There's always leaks in the, not on the PR release, but you dig into who they're hiring. 30 minutes on the show. Yeah, the career stage always tells you a lot of. Yeah, the career page always tells you more about what's the priorities of the company.

Yeah. No, it really does. Oh, 100%. Because if a company is worth a lot of money, they're not hiring at all. Yeah. That's a question. It's a good question. But my team said that we definitely had to give you organ plushies.

Okay. Ooh, fun. A little kidney. I love it. Oh, it's a little part. Thank you. Look at this. Very cute.

Just to get a kidney transplant when I was five years old. I got an insane E. coli. And so I was on like full dialysis for a long time. And I was looking really bad. My mom was ready. And you're still going ahead with the calf implants, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So those will be frozen.

Yeah, not even just implants. You're on the donor. You're on the donor? Calf transplant. Calf transplants. That's the new level. From the biggest, the biggest mass mass mass possible.

I want Ronnie Coleman's calves. Yeah, that could be a good way to test, you know, like people, there's a lot of people that would, like, pay to get bigger delts.

You know, lower stakes and like a organ that needs to really function. Just throw, I've been trying to gain 20 pounds of lean mass. It sounds like I could just get that transferred in in a weekend.

These are, these are great. You got to do it for the whole, for the whole body, too. You got to throw your logo on here or something. Yeah, Yeah, that's true.

Next time. Next time. Well, thank you so much. Amazing. Super exciting. Do we have a guest ring the gong? Let Laura hit it. Let Laura hit it.

Give it the hardest. Back. Oh, what was that right there. Thank you so much for coming on the show. That was one of the best hits we've seen. Thank you. Amazing. Back to the show.

That was awesome. AdQuick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe. Speaking of out-of-home advertising, I saw that Avi launched, Avey launched Friend.com billboards? Friend.com billboards in L.A. I was thinking we should do a team. I saw one on the way in. They were putting it up when I came in and we interviewed him that day. I've seen them everywhere now.

He really wasn't kidding about it being a massive campaign. Still want to put him in the truth zone on it being the biggest billboard campaign of all time, but he's winning me over. It might be pretty big. We'd love to know how it can be a team on like a field trip. That'd be good. Intern Challenge. Tell you what you think. There's one super close to where we usually get breakfast. Okay. I've seen it passing.

Yeah. You got to go take some pictures, put them on the timeline. The chat says, holy gong. That was an amazing hit. I love that she sent it. She had her bag in one hand and just back. Yeah, the backhand, the different gong techniques, they really bring out the personality. You can tell a lot about a founder by how they hit the gong at the TVPN.

Yeah. Avi has a massive billboard. It's like covering like three stories of a building. We've got to go to check it out. Anyway, Nick says, it's amazing how much better September is than it's evil calendar twin March. Instead of a winter that just won't go away, you have a wonderful toned-down encore of summer.

September in California, best month. You think so? Name a better month. It's kind of gloomy out these days. There's been, but that's because there's tropical storms. Okay. It's been pushing up, but it's still warm. The water's warm.

September, undefeated. undefeated. Anyway, let's move over to Delhi and Asperuhov. One of the hardest periods of my life was the summer of 2016. That summer, my first startup ran out of cash, and we had to shut down. YC, the Teal Fellowship and our investors bet on us, and we weren't able to deliver. At the time, well, that sound effect is now going to be on our website. So if you're going through a similar phase, you can go hit it for yourself. Everybody's been through this before. It's absolutely, well, not everybody. But,

But most successful entrepreneurs, I mean, every entrepreneur has had hard times. Been there. It's been very rough. John's been there. We've all been there. But he built back. It's a comeback story, baby. I love 442 saves on this. People are just like, yeah, I'm in a dark place.

That's the, I'm in a dark place button. Got a lock in. You love to see it. So he said almost exactly four years later, after meandering journey through another startup, my early years of investing, I met Will Brewery, and we decided to start Varda together. So if you had a summer in 20, 2025. There was like mine in 2016. My advice is to you is just one step at a time. You got it. Lock in. It's time to build. Good stuff. In other news. Giro. Giro, oh, no, the famous sushi chef is turning 100.

And he says, the secret to longevity is to continue working. That's one option. I also try to walk every day. even after I turn 100, I want to continue working. That's the best remedy. Completely agree. People need purpose. Look at how old he is. What a beast. He's born and run.

Nelson, AirPods, Pro 3 impressions, A&C significantly better than... Active noise cancellation. Yeah, AP2. Fit is more comfortable. Transparency mode is weirdly sibilant and scratchy. Hmm. Not a fan of the sound signature tube AC. I'm a wired guy.

A little mixed. Well, they might... I mean, that's what I was thinking, an opportunity would you make a version of AirPods Pro with wires. I would get you over there, over the hill. We could do it. Anyway, Bezell, getbezzle.com. Your Bezell concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet,

seriously, any watch. And we have our next guests in the Restream waiting room hopping in the TBP and Ultradom. We have Shervin Pischvar, Michael Musk. Welcome to the show. How are you guys doing? Good to see you. What's going on, guys. Welcome to the show.

Great to have you both back on. Good to have you back on the show. It's been a busy few weeks since we last spoke. I know. I know. We saw the display at the Vatican. We were blown away. Jordy didn't think it was real.

I think the first time he saw it, then we saw more images. It's very hard to tell on the internet. That's your problem. It's like people are just assumed like, oh, it's a, yeah, it's a, you know. There's no way this is real. Exactly.

Exactly. It's unbelievable. But anyway, give us the update. What's new in your world? Well, it's just been extraordinary. You know, we closed our round, as we discussed last time I was on the show. And then Made it the Burning Man survived. Yes.

When we went to Vatican, and we had just the most incredible show. You know, just a time when, you know, we had Charlie Kirk being assassinated that week. We were able to just be sad with the world for a little moment. And then to also be joyful to go and... celebrate the fact that we are in this place as a human species. Not really Catholic Church, really just about everyone, greats for the world. Yeah. So inspiring. I had my father and my daughter there, and there wasn't a dry eye in there. There were 300,000 people there. When Pope Francis's image went up, it was just so emotional. We did a memorial for Pope Francis. It was,

the original idea for this was it came back in June of 2024 we did a show in Cannes France it's actually the same show that Shervin saw and the chairman for the Jubilee Olivier Francois found me in this conference and said we just have to do something for the Jubilee didn't really believe it and then one thing that the other but actually that was also when when Shervin got involved and Chauvin and I have known each other forever for like 15 years but what I loved about Chervin, we just spent time together traveling the world. And back in May or June, I think we were with Pharrell Williams in Madrid for a show to explain to him what we were going to do at the

Vatican because he wanted to do it with us, but we hadn't figured out what to do yet. And Chauvin said, hey, let's find a way to work together. So he led the round. Jeffrey joined, and he's also joined us as our global expansion advisor so we are we're taking one country at a time very exciting very exciting how quickly do you guys want to scale because as as an american i want you guys doing like you know at least a show a day here in the u.s before we give too much you'll be amazing we now this past weekend we did five shows around the world wow one and two in australia two in europe two in the u.s And we're really constrained by the number of drones we have.

So we have building drones as fast as humanly possible. And we have incredible artists like Andrea Buccelli or Pharrell Williams that want to do amazing things with us. And then the more countries we open, which is what Shervin is helping us with, the more attractive this becomes. Because if you're Andrea Buccelli, for example, his tours are global. It doesn't really help to do just the U.S. You can't plan a tour and think, well, I only have this technology for these shows, right? Someone in the chat is asking, where can people get tickets for the next one?

I imagine they're all over the world, but do you have an email list, something to let people know ahead of time. So there's an amazing company called fever. It's like a ticket master for the world. So ticket masters focus on the U.S. Fevers all around the world. and the show we're doing right now is called drone art show just very simple they can search for drone art show they'll see what cities were in this past weekend we were in Chicago oh wow Madrid

Brisbane and Orlando and I mean so it's just just so many it's better to just track it or you can't be it ever you can't be in your town the idea is actually like kind of like Sirte de Soleil we want people to get excited when Nova comes to town Totally. Did anything from the, sorry, what was that? I just want to say how excited we are to be an honored we are to be able to lead the round,

the $50 million round and know the Sky Stories. And I think the world of Kimball, I think he has one of the greatest hearts and one of the biggest visionaries that I've seen. And he always talked about cracking people's hearts open and inspiring people. And one of the great feces that we have is that the world, AI is never going to replace the human heart, human emotion. The algorithms are going to rationally try to explain it, but human emotion and feelings are going to grow in value. And what he did at the Vatican really did crack the hearts of all the people that saw it and the millions of people that saw it

around the world. And it's actually available on Disney Plus. It's going to be there forever. Yeah, everyone should watch it. It gives you a peak of a completely new medium and entertainment. that's combining human creativity and AI and drones and automation. So for Sofer Capital Leader, it's a big honor to be able to work again with Kimbel and I also work with people like Katzberg and others. It's a great honor. So we're very excited. Did anything about the Vatican show, and I'm sure you got a ton of inbound interest from customers,

did anything update you about the shape of the business, what interest? pockets of opportunity might exist for future shows. Did you have any learnings coming out of the Vatican show? I think the biggest learning we got is that 300,000 people came out of their homes. It was a free concert, so not ticketed, but not really well promoted because it's the Vatican, they don't really know how to promote their own thing. And we had 300,000 people come to the show live.

so I think that we've not really opened up our eyes to shows that have that level of scale in the audience and we've now gotten you know we're very busy doing regular shows the Vatican is not a regular show that is a that is just absolutely next level and you just have to watch it to understand but we now have interest for people whether it's America's 250th or repeating a Catholic or a Catholic or oriented show in Brazil or doing something about the history of the UAE, these are hundreds of thousands of people will come to see the show. We might ticket them. You guys have a problem where when you get into that scale of an audience, it's hard to ticket

that many people because you're talking about just putting it over the city, right? I don't even know how to do it. Now, I believe that, I believe it when our ticketing partners say, no, it's possible, but I don't how to do it. So thankfully that's probably our problem. The ticket dealers say that anything's possible. But yeah, I mean, it's cool to think about, you know, a city, like a city, for example, or a town saying we want to do this to celebrate something and we're just going to pay for it because it's almost a public benefit, right? Right. And many countries want to do that. Obviously, the United States wants to do that for America's 250th. We're going to do what

we're doing, we'll do many, but we're going to do a very big one in, in North Dakota for Teddy Roosevelt's library being opened on July 4th for the 250th. And it's, um, obviously that's North Dakota is going to be less people, but it will be open to the public and it'll be tens of thousands of people. Are there any stadiums? I think that what opened our eyes is how much the public want to be in the live show, the live experience, uh, because they could have just easily watched it on TV. That's what really what they wanted.

Yeah, but then you can just watch CGI, you know, you can just watch, you can watch, you can watch your animation it's on the computer seeing it in the sky 3D around you it's the visceral experience of it you see that you hear the who's and oz and yeah uh people are excited so there's something physical that the drones bring and in truilla there are drones i mean they're they're uses weapons uh in other other parts of the world i think that physicality gives a visceral uh alertness that you don't get whether you if you're watching it on TV or on Instagram. And it's still awesome on TV and it's awesome on Instagram.

But it's just nothing like in person. I also want to just touch on how fast this is growing just as an investor. Like to be able to see a founder and a company and a team really gigascale this idea better than anyone else in the world. When I got involved late last year, how many tickets last year was five? In 2024, we sold 6,000 tickets. six thousand tickets our show our shows this year we could have half a million sold this year half a million one million uh so it you know i've been traveling around the world with him and

talking to sovereigns and you know uh around the world and closing deals and hand-to-hand combat and uh and you're just seeing the reception the excitement of uh of the sovereigns and the partners around the world um this is one of the fastest growing businesses that i've ever seen and going around with them has felt like the way I used to go around with Travis, giga-scaling from a tiny company with one million revenue to multiple billions. And it actually does matter going country to country. You actually have to get on a plane. You have to work with the aviation authorities in that country.

You have to navigate the bureaucracy. These are actual flight vehicles. So if you, for example, we work in Mexico, but every drone we transfer over to Mexico, it's the same paperwork as transferring a 747 to Mexico. Well, yeah, from an investment standpoint, you know, if I was underwriting this, it's like you look at the mode. It's like the regulatory mode of like being able to fly, having these relationships, the technological mode of just like being able to coordinate, you know, thousands and thousands of drones simultaneously, the IP, just that. IP itself, right, is getting, partnering with, with IP in different categories. And then obviously the relationships with even the individual venues to be able to, like,

support and put on these. There's so many different layers to it. Yeah, I think funny you say the venues. The venues is one of the greatest modes out there. And I mean it because it is hand-to-hand combat figuring out each venue, you know, what is the weather like, what's, what's the size of the audience, what's the ticket price you can charge. what's what kind of a show. Is this the Vibaldi four season show with a live orchestra? Or should this be more of a choir with Pharrell Williams?

You know, every venue is different. And so that's just, it's just almost like a real estate play. You just go one after, and you now all of a sudden have a portfolio of venues or real estate that you can use when it makes sense. This time last year, we might have had, I don't know, 20 venues under our belt, and now we have a thousand. Are you guys limited at all physically, like being able to have enough drones to be able to put on? We are absolutely limited by a number of drones.

We are building them as fast as we can, and it's not near fast enough. We are constantly surprised. It's a six-month supply chain, right? So you order everything, you've got battery chemistries to sort out. You've got all of the, all of these nuances to the supply chain that change over time. And so if I were to predict our business now, it's September, what is it going to be like in March next year? I'm going to be so wrong. It's just there's just no chance I get it right.

And so we've just decided to just make as many drones as we possibly can. That's the reason we took the fundraise so that we're not we're not keeping that in our in our back pocket as an issue like oh well what about the drones what right now we literally if someone said to us you know here's a gazillion dollars we want you to fly a show like the vatican we just don't have the drones we we have to plan for sort of march and onwards for next year and it's going to be great but it's yeah now you get the you get the benefit of having to manage fleet already on different continents. It sounds, in a sense, the drone shortage

enables us to train the teams in different countries. So we're not just scaling so fast that, you know, safety has at the end of the day, number one priority. And we've got 100% safety record and plan to keep it. And I do think there's some value to being forced to go a little slower. But we are definitely being forced to go slower. Well, congratulations in the fundraise. It's a three-sided marketplace is what we're.

we realize as we analyze the business is that you have the there are three sides of the venues dominating the venues around the world and and you get pretty creative with the kinds of venues you can do outdoors and then you have the consumers who are coming and buying the tickets and coming to it as the venues grow you have larger and larger people there were 5,000 people that got ticketed to the show in Madrid and there was 300,000 people showed up to the free free show in Rome, and then you have the IP on the third side of the marketplace. So you get more and more and more beautiful content that he's creating, is basically building like a Pixar and a Disney all-in-one inside of a technology company.

I love the Pixar analogy. And actually, Disney back in the early days, they had to sold the technology as well. And I read Walt Disney's biography. It's fascinating how it took them 10 years to add sound to Mickey Mouse. and well Mickey Mickey Mouse came out with sound it was the first form of sound 10 years 10 years and it took us it's going to sound crazy but Intel

was building this company 10 years before I acquired it probably took us 12 years to add sound and it's just like why that's just crazy well actually this is really hard and then our shows are now becoming 90 minutes long but that is a 2025 invention that is not free 2025

and now you have to create content that's 90 minutes long just because you can technically do it doesn't mean you actually can do it well and so that's where the Pixar comes in really the creative is working with the engineers back and forth and pushing each other I love businesses like this that are just such a simple idea

but incredibly incredibly difficult to execute but if you can do it it's just you know the value is just the invention of new form factors and new mediums of communication are some of the most exciting things to invest in and the analogy I was using it. I love the movie Babylon, which is like about the history of Hollywood and

movies going from silent to sound and what a transformation that was. And that's what Kimball's really doing with Nova Sky Stories. He's invented a new type of medium for creative expression and entertainment and then applied sound to it, live sounds. So the fever shows are... Yeah, choreographed to live sound. Like drones are... Don't keep mind, these are thousands of drones. Coriographed to the beat to the songs that are performed live. The orchestra. That's really hard.

Yeah. Well, congratulations on the fundraise. Let's ring the gong. One more time. I love it. I love it. Thank you so much. Amazing stuff.

I can't wait to see. Let us know when the first, or we'll get on the email list, but excited to have the first show. Yeah, just go to fever, and then for the show, go to Disney Plus. Fantastic. Amazing.

Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations. Cheers. Later, did you see Chinese automaker, BYD's U9 Extreme EV, just broke the top speed record at Germany's ATP. Proving Grounds, they beat the Bugatti Chiron, which went 304 miles an hour, 0.77. They went 308 miles an hour. The car has almost 3,000 horsepower. You saw that Berkshire Hathaway sold out in town.

Well, I know why, because, oh, this fancy car, everyone's so obsessed with it. Track grade battery, blah, blah, blah. You know it's Nuremberg ring time? 6.59, 10 seconds slower than a Chevy Corvette. What are we doing here? 3,000 horsepower and you can't even get around the green hell in under 655? What are we doing? Straight line speed.

It's ridiculous. Not impressed. Not the metric. Go back to the drawing board, China, try again. Because if you're getting laughed by a Chevy Corvette on the old Norse life, what are you doing? Anyway, if you want to hop on a wander, find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring views, Hotel Great a Meddies, Dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better maybe you book a wander next to the Norse life and take a couple laps around the old Nureberg ring.

But we have our next guest, Stephen. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Stephen? Good to see you. How are you? Give us the news. What's the fundraising announcement? Let's ring the gong at the start of the segment.

Then we'll get into the details. Yes. So big announcement. We have just raised $12 million in our big news for the gong. Thanks. Thank you for the gong. We've just raised $12 million, led by Acme Capital, and with the co-lead with Future Ventures.

And this adds on. top of the already $8 million we've raised from construct and abstract and generational partners and Village Global and X funds. So that brings us to about $20 million raised. And we're very excited for the, you know, after this financing round, for the firepower gets us to move forward. Talk about the state of the business. Talk about the semiconductors.

And try and put it in in terms like relative to what else is going in the market. have a high level understanding of like, you know, GPUs and CPUs, but what are you doing specifically in semiconductors? Yeah. So that's a good way to put it. CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs. These are the things that people usually think about when they think about semiconductors. They tend to be the things that come top of mind, and they are indeed two-thirds of the chip industry. So the trillion-dollar chip industry, they're two-thirds of that. But there's this other one-third, which is analog. And analog tends to be overlooked, but it is unbelievably important. You have the way we are communicating today and the way you are, you know,

beaming out your show to everyone who is watching, this is all done over, you know, analog digital signals processors and many, many, many, many different, you know, balancing signals across the planet. And I think it tends to be overlooked, but it's unbelievably important. It's unbelievably important in military warfare. It's unbelievably important in communications. And that's where we've really focused. Now, big picture, Sphere is a chip and product company.

The difference in us and everyone else on the planet is that we, at the base of what we do, have an AI engine that allows us to, from concept all the way to fabrication, produce, you know, produce chips that are entirely AI designed. Philosophically, we think that chip designed by humans is coming to an end. It already has mostly ended in the world of digital. So CPUs and GPUs and FPGAs, they're not designed. The layouts of those chips are not designed by hand. You actually have TSM basically do the layout for all the logic gates and things like that for you.

but in analog it's still done by hand and we think that the thing we are conquering today is we're putting that to an end and we are in doing so building a product company around that where everything is designed by AI which so is it correct to characterize you as a as a fabless chip design company I come to you with a something that can be done in math digital signal processing I have some stream of information that's coming in. I need to transform that with math. You're going to use AI to design a chip, and then you're going to call an actual fab to go and make those chips, and then you send me the completed chips. Yeah. So just a bit about what we do today. We found

an interesting niche in the defense sector as a good starting point where we, companies like Anderall, actually, specifically Andrew and some others, come to us and they say, hey, I have an electronic warfare system, or I have a SIGAN system, and I need. I need an analog front end for it. I need a bunch of chips at the analog front end. And these are pretty critical. They come to us. They give us a custom spec.

And then we go ahead and we go on to our fab. And we say, hey, we're, you know, this is the design. Our AI came up with actually hundreds of possible designs. And these are their performance characteristics, et cetera, et cetera. We work between the customer and the fab. And then we fab it out, we package it, we ship it off. We ship it off. We're actually, you know, actually the big thing we're, you know, we've done over the last, you know,

year and a half when starting the company is, is build up this capability around these small RF components. And we're actually going to start building a joint venture with one of the big defense primes, one of the big four, I guess, to allow, what? Let's go. Yeah. Let's keep it up for the defense primes. I know we like Anderall here, but they don't get enough love.

They don't get enough love. I told an executive at Northrop about the B2 bomber meme, where it's feed me the three-goor have they seen it? And he really, he thought it was really funny. That's maybe good, maybe bad, I don't know. Like, well, it was designed for that. Yeah, that's actually intended purpose. Yeah, so what is difficult about scaling the business now?

You're raising more money. It doesn't sound like you're deploying that capital to build. a fab? Are you just hiring more software engineers or AI scientists to build more efficient AI systems that can actually design better chips, even beyond superhuman capabilities, but there's still a frontier where we can continue to advance? What is the longer term goal? So we have this business that we've really started that we're going to build a joint venture around in in these, I guess, these RF components, which are, it's a bit of a niche business. And the few things we're going to be doing with this capital is, one, actually, you know, investing in expanding out that joint venture, et cetera.

There's going to be some capital investment from us. We do pay for fabrication, things like that. But also, we're going to be moving into what you might think of as the more high value area of the analog world, which are mixed signal chips. Broadcom and Marvell have made a lot of money over the last, you know, since the AI boom started. And a lot of that is because you need to communicate between two GPUs, these. is mixed signal components that Broadcom and Marvell and all these guys make. And that's what we're going after next. These mixed signal components or IP blocks.

And that's the next area we need to conquer. That's going to take quite a bit of hiring. It's going to, you know, whereas our fabrication for the defense stuff was in more reasonably, less expensive nodes, some of the stuff is going to be much lower nodes. So any fabrication we do is going to be much more expensive. But in general, that's the next area we want to conquer, this mixed signal area, which is the core of what data centers are really using when they think about analog. It's a lot of hiring. Some fabrication might be some test equipment, though we're not sure about that, whether we want to borrow it or buy it.

And, you know, we're hiring software engineers, AI engineers, chip designers, a lot of chip designers. And then, obviously, I need some, I need, you know, some business operations people to really come and help build up. Good deals. Get sick dinners. Well, we are rooting for you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on the round. And we will talk to you soon.

Have a good rest of your day. Thank you. All right. Cheers, Stephen. Up next, we have robots in space. But first, a startup idea. Bulletproof silk, charm. Mews American streetwear.

Are you familiar with this at all? Silk that's tough. They modified silkworms to make a material that's stronger than Kevlar. You can make a whole jacket out of it, which I think should be bulletproof maybe. I have no idea. I feel like I've been hearing about this,

like, make a bulletproof vest that just looks like normal clothes for like decades and no one's ever figured it out. But I have no idea if it's actually possible. It sounds very sci-fi. I would like to, I would like that.

Well, speaking of sci-fi, We have the founders of Icarus Robotics. Let's bring them in from the re-stream rating room in space. Welcome to the stream. What's going on, guys? How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. How are you? We're good.

Hey, how's it going? Kick us off with an introduction. Who are you? What are you doing? I'm Ethan Ross, co-founder, CEO of Acres Robotics, and we're building the labor force for space. Okay. Finally. We're lucky enough to be part of some of the commercial space station.

and be sending robots to space. Sorry, I was talking over here. You said your partner with NASA, is that correct? Let's go. We're lucky enough to be working with some of the most amazing teams over there. That's amazing. Incredible. What do you want to do in space?

Because labor in space, there's so many different things. Repair solar panel. They'll plug a hole after an asteroid smashed into the side of my spaceship. Like, what are the tractable problems that you need labor for in space? Let's let Jamie jump into that. He's the labor guy. Let's see it. Yeah, yeah. Well, look, we always say half of the world's GDP is labor, and I think it's going to be a similar makeup in space.

So one of the big things we realize is that essentially we're hyper-reliant on astronaut time when we're in space, and, you know, an hour of astronaut time costs $135,000 an hour. What these people are doing, they have PhDs, you know, they're amazingly skilled, they've all been, you know, Air Force pilots, all this kind of stuff. But ultimately what they end up doing is the logistics and the maintenance that keep. keeps a lot of these habitats and platforms alive. So what we're actually doing is building these dexterous mobile robots, these free-flying drones with robotic arms that can essentially go and be controlled from the ground and do a lot of the work, the boring and maybe tedious work, but the astronauts don't want to do this so that they can focus on the revenue-generating

stuff. So that's the experimentation and the science and the manufacturing. That's cool. It's funny to think about astronauts being like, yeah, I'm worried about losing my job to Icarus robotics. And they're like, you guys are like, no, it's fine. You're going to be free, your time's going to be freed up to do higher leverage things. But I bill at $135,000 an hour.

That's my rate. And I don't want to see any wage compression. I'd like a raise next year. Inflation's going up. I want to be at 140K an hour next year. Unfortunately, I don't think the astronauts are taken home 135 an hour. Otherwise, the average, you know, JET kid would be like, I want to be an astronaut. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm not doing the creative. thing. I'm going astral all the way. So what does testing look like? I remember seeing all these videos of astronauts and pools. Can you test in water? Is that useful at all? Yeah, and you guys just raised six million. I'm assuming you don't have hardware in space yet, but this round will help you get there. Yeah, so that's great. We're actually on launch coming up by the end of 26, early 27, to the ISS. So this is full-scale testing. We'll be up there for a year. Right now we have an entire week of crew time to test but you're 100% correct testing on earth is really really tough and the way that you do that is a few modes you know one you can set up an air bearing facility

which gives you kind of like a frictionless environment so think about this like a really scientific air hockey puck where you know the way that there's a thin film of air between the air hockey puck and an actual table well we do that with nitrogen high high compressed nitrogen and these things called air bearing. And that gives us really great movement in an X, Y plane. But you're entirely right. We were just down in Johnson checking out the neutral buoyancy pool, which I think is one of the largest pools in the country. And you can test there as well. But the most exciting test before you get the ISS is actually the parabolic flight. So you might have seen those videos and people on the planes. And these planes go up and down in parabolas, and they go at the same speed of gravity

downwards, and that gives you free fall. And people misconstrues space and orbit. And that zero-g feeling you actually get is actually freefall. And so we'll be doing one of those in the New Year, which would be super exciting. So your robots, will they be primarily, like, inside the International Space Station? You're going to put them outside? That dial, then go outside, or are they multipurpose? How do you think about the kind of two use cases? And are they even that different at all if you're a robot? Yeah, so our plan is initially to start off by having these robots to essentially what we call IVA operations, so that's inside the vehicle. So our robot is designed basically to be propelled by fans and some other sort of like niche push mechanisms that will maybe show a little bit later, but yeah, so ultimately what we wanted to do is deploy here first because it's actually an amazing place where you have the kind of guardrails of having humans in the loop, you have humans around it.

So if anything goes really, really wrong, you know, it's not just going to flow it into the middle of nowhere, someone can recover it. So that's kind of the big reason why we went, you know, to go to the IVA first because most people are looking over this, really. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by the show. We will talk to you later. Yeah, incredible, congratulations. Let us know. Let us know if there's, we have a pretty harsh environment here in the Ultradome.

If you need some testing, just let us know. There we go. Big gone hit. 6.1? 6.1 million? Yeah, 6.1. Nice work, guys. Love it, love it. Congratulations.

Congrats on the race. We'll see you at the Series A. Innocent bysander says Tim Cook could secure his legacy with one move. Can you guess what it is, Jordi? A home printer that works. Home printer that works. Simple stuff.

It's crazy. Do you think that the reason... Brother printer prints like $5 billion USD a year. I found a paper company. This is deeply ironic because we are, of course, partnered with Ramp.com, save time and money. Get rid of your paper receipts. That's right. But I found a paper company that's worth the same amount in market cap as Ramp. Not for long.

Not for long. We're going to take them down. You're going to hear some really negative investigative journalism, some short reports about this paper company. It's funny. Julie Chang in this replies says they're called brother laser printers. Yes, we love a brother. We run on brother. Brother, laser printers.

Technology brothers. It's true. Run on brother. Do you think that Apple's never done the home printer because of environmental concerns around like don't print, don't waste paper? It just was always obviously not the future. Also, I feel like this is one of those things where if I look way back over the past like 40 years of Apple history, I bet they did a printer at one point. Remember, didn't Apple do a camera, like a handheld digital camera at one point that was its own device? So apples dip their toes in here and there, but I would love a proper home printer from.

Apple. Oh, wait, so according to Jammini, while it may seem surprising to many today, Apple was once a significant player in the computer printer market. For nearly two decades, the company designed and sold a range of printers

from early dot matrix models to groundbreaking laser printers that played a pivotal role in the desktop publishing revolution. They started in the late 70s with the Apple silent type, a thermal printer, however, was the Image Writer series produced in the early 1980s that became a popular companion to the Apple 2.

And then they got out of the business. Yeah, you can find these on eBay, Apple Writer 2 printer. It probably works fine. What's wrong? It looks. Tim Cook should come out of the statement. Hey, they're out there. It's got the rainbow Apple logo.

If it's not just stated preference, if it's revealed preference, go get yourself an Apple printer, I guess it exists. in other news UFC is happening on the south lawn of the White House and they took a page out of our set design I see an Ultrodome

It's time to trust It's time to trust They're trust up Their trust is huge Don't go trust for trust with the White House No no you do not want to go trust for trust with them They got to get a real photo Is this CGI or something like what's going on here

They got to get artist rendering It's CG I was looking at it for a lot Because like they're I was scoped out of trust This has not happened yet, but... Are you guys kidding? This is, like, most obviously, CGI image I've ever seen in my life.

I can't tell anymore. I don't even... You think they just set up a bunch of the 10,000 people? I don't know. I'm not a political person. I don't follow politics that closely. So, I don't know. This might have happened.

It's double bad because I'm not into politics and I'm also not into sports. So you could have told me, oh, yeah, UFC happened at the White House last weekend. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I guess I did. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room. Austin is coming into the TVP and Ultradam. Welcome to the show, Austin.

Good to finally have you. We've reacted to many posts on this year show. Thank you for your service to the timeline. Good to see you. Long time listener, first time caller. Thanks for hopping on. Give us the news, big day. What's going on in your world?

Yeah, we just announced our $6 million seed round. That is gongworthy. Gone worthy. I don't know if this is gongworthy also, but as of three days ago, we're officially a ramped customer. Let's go. That's amazing. Oh, there we go.

There we go. Love it. That is amazing. Congratulations. And, and, uh, extremely bullish business. You would launch the product. This is another launch. We were talking earlier. You got to always just be launching. So, and launched again to the story of the company.

We've had a wait list. We've kind of had a wait list since the beginning. And so we've been a little constrained on how quickly we can add customers. We still are a bit, but we've been adding a ton of customers all day today. And so we are launching to general availability for the first time today. And we had about 15,000 people on the wait list who all got invited in today. And we still don't have free trials. So everyone has to pay to use the product.

But, yeah, we're adding customers really quickly. And I guess I just talk about the product. So how is the people's secretary? So it is a secretary that is part human, part AI. So we have really sophisticated models that do all the things that a great assistant does on scheduling. It knows where you take your meetings, when you take your meetings, how you want buffers, how many meetings you want to take per day,

subtle hints on priority of different types of meetings, and can follow up to make sure meetings get scheduled and all of those types of things. And so it's powerful AI models that do all these things in a simulation. And then we have humans, who are checking because our customers are founders, VCs, all sorts of folks who have a really low tolerance for mistakes on this type of scheduling.

And so when our model they're not confident enough, we have a 24-7 team of humans who are checking these simulations and approving them before they go out or correcting them in this kind of like cursor for EA's system that we've built. So it's an extremely over-engineered product to solve a relatively or seemingly simple problem, but it's actually like pretty hard to get it as good as a phenomenal executive assistant would.

And so that's the product. How are you thinking about pricing? I feel like they're, you know, hiring a full-time EA is expensive. And we've seen the rise of these offshore services that are still like very expensive compared to like even a chat GPT Pro plus giga subscription. Where do you want to play? Where do you think that there's opportunity to create, you know, a delta between what people pay and get value from?

Yeah, the framing is kind of interesting because it's like we have people who say they're switching from like a virtual assistant service that costs $3,000 a month to Howie because they're mostly using that for scheduling and how he's better at scheduling and it's 24-7. But then there's also people that are like, well, Calumlee is $12 a month. Why would I pay you guys more than that? And so it's been kind of interesting. But we so our pricing is $35 a month for our base product and then and then $145 for Howie Pro. And the main thing you get there is white label. and rename your Howie and give it an email at your domain. And Turner Novak named his Chmoth. I was about to say, was that you? I remember seeing that funny name. I couldn't tell if that was a joke, but it's really good bit.

And yeah, and then you can do like more sophisticated, like complex preferences for on Howie Pro. But the white label is the main thing people pay for. And so, yeah, we've gotten definitely some pushback, especially without free trials. But overall, we have, for the right people, our product becomes instantly indispensable. And it's primarily people who schedule a ton of external meetings who just like immediately cannot live without it once they start using it. How long do you think it will take for like your internal software and the models to get

good enough to never need that sort of like human verification layer? So I think about it like self-driving cars. It's like we, the things like a couple of years ago, every Waymo on the street has had a person in the car holding the steering wheel. Now, for the most part, they don't. But if you see a Waymo on an icy road in Lake Tahoe, there's someone holding the steering wheel. And so we will keep pushing farther out

and always be bringing a product experience to the market that is not possible with today's technology, where we have humans holding the steering wheel on the kind of next bleeding edge things. And more and more goes back to the model. So we are already giving more to the models than we were even like a month ago. But we'll keep kind of keep adding complexity.

So whether that's like travel booking, anything that like an EA does. And then a lot of things that EAs don't do, but that people could use in terms of like meta work about helping like pay attention to how you're spending your time and what your priorities are. And so there's a lot of things we can do that are going to be error prone. And we will always be like willing to lean on humans to push out a little farther than would be possible with just the models. Have you thought about an even higher tier?

I feel like there's maybe an opportunity to add human, in the loop at that multi-thousand-dollar price point, but do you think that it's just like, doesn't make any sense for the business, would take you away from the true goal here? What do you think? So we've used humans in the loop and they, so when we started doing that, it was me doing this

and I was like typing in Google Calendar API calls into the browser myself and basically, and that was like in January and it would take me 30 minutes or so to complete many of these tasks. And now we have 2417, we have 60 people that do this and they can do it in do these tasks in like 90 seconds. So it's like they're quickly seeing the reasoning notes and all these things and the entire simulation of what happened and then they can chat with it.

So they can say like, oh, you got the time zone wrong. Like Dordy is normally in Pacific time, but he said, he said this is for like the, when they're doing the New York Stock Exchange thing. So it needs to be on Eastern time. And then it'll like resimulate in front of your eyes. So we've leaned a lot into speeding. up the humans in completing these tasks to where we don't really need a steeper for what we're offering today we don't need to charge more than we do but it is totally possible that we will

have something more advanced but really it's just like how can we on the scale of hundreds of dollars a month or even less give millions of people the experience that is as good as what the top kind of 0.01% of people who have a great it's even better because you can in for scheduling because somebody that, like, somebody could be on the other side of the world when if you had an EA, they'd be sleeping, they can be messaging and scheduling time. They get that instant booking and confirmation. And you get that 24-7, like, live experience that no EA today can offer. You need a rotating crew of EA. So I think, yeah, it's, yeah. And the other thing, too, is like, if you're like, need to clear your schedule. if it's like 11 at night and you realize okay i need to do something in the morning i'm not going to be able to do these meetings you can like instantly just like hit a button and and clear out the schedule and and have it done in a way that's like thoughtful for the people on the other side uh how was on the fundraising side uh i mean i'm a small invest a angel uh but and when i

when you first pitched me this i was like that makes sense it's like a simple idea big tam i think you can use AI to create something that is just remarkably better than like the current SaaS offerings. But in some ways, it's like an obvious idea. And that can be a double-edged storage. Sometimes investors are like, oh, this is a no-brainer. I would use this. I know a bunch of people that would use this. But then on the other side, I'm sure you got the question of like, what if Open AI does this or questions like that. So how is it navigating those kind of conversations. Yeah.

I mean, earlier on, I was more concerned because I've realized how unbelievably hard it is to actually execute on this product. And so, and I think that like there's a challenge. We spent all of last year, which you know, Jordy, like the thing was making mistakes. We were, I was apologizing. I spent 50 hours a week apologizing to customers for mistakes that we were making. But during that time, we learned, we saw all of the kind of mistake patterns and we were able to build our first version of a map of what we think the EA needs to do in all these

different scenarios. And that doesn't exist in publicly available training data. It's like what happens in the assistant, the executive assistants head is they're doing scheduling. And that's not publicly available anywhere. There's lots of training data that's calendar data and email data, but the kind of like what happens in the in the EA's brain isn't. And I think you have to put a pretty bad product into market in order to get a good one in this category. And that's tough for bigger companies like Open AI to actually do. And then to deliver a product as good as ours with human in the loop, like that's also just they want to bring something to a million customers on day one.

And that's pretty tough to do. Even for us, it's been hard to scale this kind of human in the loop approach. And so I think it's like a valid question, obviously, like scheduling is one of the use cases that comes up all the time. But I think by the time other folks start to get interested in it, we will be moved on to a lot more beyond just scheduling. So it's not overly a concern, but yeah, there's, I mean, there's competitor products of ours and then and then lots of bigger companies that are trying to build things like this. There's one popular CEO that was tweeting about it just today right after our announcement about their assistant. And so it's, there are people trying to solve this problem. And we think it's a problem that's worth solving. So a secretary for the people. Finally. We love it. The last thing I want to say is the name secretary. I think you remember this, John, because I DMD you about it. But a very early episode of TBPN, Jordy mentioned Howie, and John, you were saying, like,

it should be called secretary. They should buy secretary.com. That planted a seed in my brain because a couple months later, I was thinking, like, I mean, you made a whole case for it. But for me, it was just like there's 10,000 products out there called AI Assistant. And there's a word that everyone in the world knows that disfinginging. describes the thing that we do, and we could be one of one. And so, yeah, so we're pretty stuff to do.

Yeah, what's the actual response being? Because I remember it was, it was just a funny, like, counter position. Secretary also means Keeper of Secrets, right? It means keeper of the secrets. We have a secretary of the war, secretary of the interior. Like, it's a very high status position in D.C. But, yeah, not many brands are using it. Have any of the customers been like, I don't, I don't get it?

Or does it actually land pretty? No, I mean, yeah, because, like, Jordy, there, some people, said that they thought we'd get canceled for using it because it's like two kind of that's different than actually getting angry messages like somebody can say i think you will get angry messages but did you get angry messages yeah no so far like and yeah honestly like it's been all positive and we lead into it the launch video is like showing is kind of starts out in the with a sort of 1950s style secretary by the end she's kind of modernized and she's a boss which is kind of the same arc that christina hendricks character goes through in Mad Men where she's like a secretary who's not treated well and by the

end she's like equity older in the business and and as a boss and so um yeah so so far it's been extremely positive and we're really excited cool yeah always room to carve out like a different a different uh like define the category i mean cognition did this didn't they like kind of create the like the the initial like coding agent like the uh i software engineer was like when super I read because people were like, this, it doesn't count. And they're like, okay, well, at least you're talking about us. Then they debated it. And now people are like, yeah, of course coding agents exist.

It's a category. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on the show. Awesome progress. Great catching up with you. Excited for more people to get access. Love to have you back soon. We'll talk to you soon. You're the man, Austin.

Bye. Cheers. See, guys. Did you see this image of the monks in orange robes at the iPhone 17 pro launch? Yes, I did. This is so good. They're like, finally. What did you think was good about it?

Did you think it was a real photo? Is it AI? It's AI, baby. Oh, only John falls from UFC AI. I mean, this is on another level. This is great. This is great. This is a remarkable AI image honestly.

It looks very. I honestly can't really clock it. The only reason I, when you shared it, I was like, this is real. And then I saw a community note on it that said the picture is clearly AI generated when you look at the bottom left. The community note could be real. Orange iPhone, it's a huge sign of... It's a really cool. It's a really cool idea that they'd be into the orange iPhone.

But it does seem like fake news. In other news, tomorrow is D-Day on X. If you're a bot, if you're a spammer and you're running a bot network on X, Nikita Beers coming for you. Tuesday's D-Day. Nikita, Nikita will be wiping out 50 to 60% of all bots algorithmically. Then two weeks after that, we will reduce it another 20. 25% with changes to account requirements.

Very exciting news. X is getting cleaner, and Nikita continues to be on an absolute run over there. I've been very pleased with the algorithm. You see closing kind of a black pill, but Patek will be raising their prices by 15%. Today, Omega Cardier will be going up by 8 to 15% as well. Well, head over to getbezzle.com. Before this gets price,

in because unfortunately, these kind of price changes get priced into the secondary market pretty quickly. So the price of the brick. Make a move. There's never a bad time to pull the trigger on an aquanaut. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We had a great show. We enjoyed hanging out with all you in the chat. Thank you to John Exley for hanging out.

Thanks to Conor PS for the feedback about the gong hits. I'm working on it. I'm getting better every day. And thank you to Gold Rock AI for hanging out. Gold Rock. I didn't realize this. It's an ad. I saw Gold Rock in the X chat with a full tagline of what the company does. Underrated strategy. If you're a company and you want to promote your business, make it your tagline. Hop in the TBPN live chat. Make some good comments. We're going to have to say your name out loud. We'll be saying your brand name.

That's right. On the show. Bobby Cosmic, as always, thanks for holding it down over at Twitch. We appreciate you. And thank you to turn about. We'll see you tomorrow. We'll see tomorrow. Goodbye. Have a great day. See ya. Bye.