TBPN Live - NEO Home Robot Reactions, Bryan Johnson LIVE in The Ultradome | Marcin Piatkowski, Nathan Mintz, James Proud, Shaun Maguire, Anil Chakravarthy, Brynn Putnam, George Kurtz

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, October 29th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. The Fortress of Finance. The Temple of Technology. The capital of capital. One X launched. Oh, yeah, what do you have?

Starting point is 00:00:13 Look what I got here. Our dear friend, Siki Chen, friend of the show, made a hot sauce for his company, Runway, and he sent it to us. Runway has so much cash on their balance sheet that they made a hot sauce called Burn. rate. Okay. And it has a real $100 bill as part of the packaging. So thank you to Siki. This is credible because the execution here is correct. I mean, look at this box. I don't think

Starting point is 00:00:43 we've ever seen. So he really, he really gave us a hundred bucks here. This is remarkable. Yeah. Except, of course, you can never spend it. It is. Wait, why not? I mean, you technically could. You could technically. Because I owe someone $100 or I'm going to owe someone $100. by the week. Because I made a side bet on whether you... I was making a bet on something, and then John made a derivative bet. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:01:07 On whether or not, Jordie would win his bet. And it's not looking good. It's not looking good. And so, yeah, you're going to send this over to Dylan and Brasgato, who I probably owe $100 by the end of the world. But very cool activation from Siki and the runway team, and thank you for sharing. I won't spend it.

Starting point is 00:01:27 We'll keep it here on the day. desk. I will be gift. John will be putting putting it to use this to pay off my gambling debts. But anyways, it's going to be back. We missed everyone in the chat yesterday when we're on the road. We don't have a visual of the chat and we are

Starting point is 00:01:42 very, very happy to be back. The Fed two minutes ago came out and announced that the Fed cut bar and cost by a quarter of a percentage point for the second time. The studio goes crazy. The studio goes crazy. Let's bring the go. Nothing like

Starting point is 00:01:58 cutting into froth. Yeah, warm it up a little bit, John. Okay. You kind of went to the top side there. That wasn't... If I hit it right in the center, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think if I hit it here, it doesn't...

Starting point is 00:02:17 Yeah. All right, well, kind of an ominous hit, I will say. It wasn't that pure. But anyways, this is what Polly Market had going into this, they had it at 99% chance of a 25 basis point cut, and they were correct. Yeah. So if you had $100,000 riding on that 99% bet, you would have made roughly $1,000? Something like that. That could be a really good strategy if you're down $1,000.

Starting point is 00:02:50 If you win it all back. Like me? Like me right now? Yeah. Um, um, uh, anyways, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Uh, the one X robot launched and it's burning up the timeline. People love it. People hate it. People have breaking news. It's teleoperated folks. It's teleoperated. It's not an end to end. Hey, I machine learning model. And people are, people are, people are saying that like it's breaking news. But they're saying that the demos that have been given so far, tell our operator. Yeah. And I just don't think that's a scoop. I don't think that's a scoop. Wait, no, I think they're going to ship a teleoperated robot. I think that's the point. I think the pitch, yeah. Tyler, you break it down. Okay, so in the video, it seems like there's a lot of tasks that it can do, like, fully autonomously. Sure. And then there's some tasks which are a little bit more complex that you can use expert mode. Okay. Which is when someone will basically be, like, observing the robot as it's doing the thing. And then it can, I assume that they can, like, interfere. Yeah. It seems like, it seems like you can pay a human to be in VR and operate your robot. for you to do things that it can't just do automatically. And I don't know, like the back and forth here, so Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal got a whole demo of it, said, I tried the robot that's coming to live with you. It's still part human. First, it needs to be controlled by a human

Starting point is 00:04:14 in your home. Is that cool with you? Obviously, there's privacy discussions here. The big like bombshell post right now is from NKBHBHD, who got 12,000 likes on a post saying. So to be clear, this is a pre-order for a humanoid home robot that will cost $20,000 or $500 per month when it may be ships next year. And it's currently not finished. Joanna Stern got to do a demo. And in its current state, 100% of its actions are teleoperated. So of the tests that she did, they were tele-all-all-all-all- But I think anybody that's buying the robot today or pre-ordering it assumes that there will be some tasks that it can do that's non-tele operated? Sure. I don't really know. I don't think people

Starting point is 00:05:01 will be buying it because of that. I think people buy it and say, yeah, I'm paying $20K, and then I'm also paying $2 an hour for someone to teleoperate this thing and actually do the dishes effectively and sit there until the dishes are done, as opposed to, yeah, it has some like basic stuff. I can chat with it. I don't think people will be driven by that. And also, I just don't think that the whole it's basically being framed as this like big reveal like oh it's actually teleoperated when i think that it's just that's not that much of a no i'm i'm a huge teleoperation bowl yeah i think that it's even even if you're just thinking about a use case for somebody who's like yeah every once in a while i come home late and i want to put food in my dog's bowl and i can just

Starting point is 00:05:46 teleoperate my robot and go oh teleoperate your own robot i haven't thought of that i'm like, oh, I'm coming home in a little bit. I want to, like, open the, I want to open, like, the, the door to bring in some air or something like that. So, um, I do think it's, I do think it's, I do think it's, look, you can tell operate a Porsche. You put the robot in the Porsche and then you were driving the car. There we go. Remotly, I'm sure there won't be any problem operating, operating the three pedals.

Starting point is 00:06:13 So, at 75 miles an hour. If somebody maybe had a few, too many drinks, you can put this. And so they legally couldn't operate a vehicle. Yeah. Could they teleoperate on their phone, a robot that was driving the vehicle? Absolutely. They're sitting in the passenger seat. Teleoperating.

Starting point is 00:06:30 I was teleoperating. I've just been sitting here on my phone. I don't know. You've got to take this up with him. I love the idea of... Okay, so here's the thing. Here's the thing. Let's play out of scenario.

Starting point is 00:06:40 So one, I love that this robot looks unique. I think they have like a... I love the color choices that they've used. It's very kind of like skims adjacent, almost. Like they've created a whole kind of cool brand world. Yeah, it definitely feels like warm. And this is a new take on a robot. And they're going for cute.

Starting point is 00:07:02 But if this thing is being teleoperating your kitchen, let's say it's loading like dirty dishes from your sink into the or from your table into your dishwasher. And then it picks up a big knife. And it just starts moving over and then it just pauses there. You look over at your robot and it's just sitting there looking at you like this with a knife with a knife and it's in. Are you not going to get a little freaked out? This thing looks cute, but the second it's got like a kitchen knife in its hand and it's looking at you, does it really look that cute?

Starting point is 00:07:37 Is it cute? I think it's the cutest robot, the cutest humanoid robot I've seen demoed. The question is like, yeah, there's like this uncanny valley of like actually going cute because like I don't have a problem with, just a like I think if you went to the optimist team and you went to and you went to Elon and you said like hey what's your goal for the design of optimus I don't know that Elon would say it's my goal to make it cute he might be like no it's like the cyber truck is not designed to be a cute little Volkswagen beetle like it's meant to look cool and badass and like it's been awesome right it's meant to look sick uh and I and I and I think that there are different there are different like optimization vectors to actually go down. The 1X team is clearly going down the cute route, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's like the actual solution to what will get adoption.

Starting point is 00:08:33 So I don't know. I think that I would give this like an 8 out of 10 on the cute scale. I'm giving it an 8 out of 10, too, until it picks up the kitchen knife. And then it goes down? I'm just saying in certain context it's going to look really scary. But is there all humans. So, so, so, yeah, but, like, walk through that, like, what, what is the design of that?

Starting point is 00:08:55 Something about an eyes, eye without a mouth. Eye without a mouth is maybe an odd choice, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it just looks, it looks fundamentally a little bit demonic, not having any other features. But, yeah, if you add the mouth, then you get more uncanny valley, right? Isn't that the risk that as you? One thing I don't understand is the pricing strategy. So, $499 a month.

Starting point is 00:09:16 Yep. Or 20 grand. Yep. who pays the 20 grand when you could get, do you think this thing will be the best robot you could possibly have for 40 months straight when there's a bunch of companies coming online with robots? Like wouldn't the default be like,

Starting point is 00:09:32 okay, humanoids are going to progress rapidly? I'd rather like effectively lease one and know that in 40 months I could get one that's going to be like significantly better. Yeah, I would definitely be a leaser. I'd be happy to be a leaser. Just like Satya. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:50 Let me tell you about re-stream one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream reach your audience, wherever they are. Tyler, you're not afraid of this thing? It's sick. Well, no, okay, so a couple of reasons I'm not afraid of it. Yeah. One, it's pretty small, right? Yeah, 60 pounds, right?

Starting point is 00:10:04 Yeah, 60 pounds. It's 66 pounds. Oh, true. You could totally, like, roundhouse kick this thing out the window. Yeah, he's a tiny little, you know, guy. You can push him over. Okay. Also, it seemed, I mean, nothing, I haven't seen any videos of it, like, really

Starting point is 00:10:18 moving quickly at all. Okay. So I'm not afraid that it's going to, like, get the jump on me. Yeah. If it has the knife, I think I can run faster than it. Yeah. And, yeah, I guess I would be a little bit scared if it's being teleoperated. Yeah, but I don't know who's teleoperated.

Starting point is 00:10:33 What about in your sleep? Hmm. Lock the door. Yeah, you could just lock this thing in, in, like, a closet at night or something. Can't really get out. I mean, it's going to be a whole new world when people are like, you know, I'm going to sleep. I'm paying expert mode to have my, you know, somebody in my house at the humanoid. I mean, I'm just not that worried about it because, like, it has been possible to, like, the, like, there was some movie about this where, like, the AI, oh, it's Fast and Furious.

Starting point is 00:11:04 In Fast and Furious, like, doesn't, isn't there an AI that takes, oh, no, you won't know. But I think that there's an AI that takes over the cars and, like, drives the cars fast and, like, crashes the cars. There's been other movies where, like, the Teslas have been teleoperated to crash into each other. there was that movie about the about like the doomsday where they all go in the bunker i forget what movie this is but um there's some what movie is that i think obama produced it i'm not kidding about that uh the don't look up it's not don't look up it was like from the same era what was it is that it no it's not leave the world behind oh yeah it is leave the world behind yeah and there's that scene where all the teslas are are coming and they're all

Starting point is 00:11:48 crashing into each other like that's been possible for a while but the economic incentives are just such that like no one's actually been able to just like like there's no one out there that's just like oh i just want to like kill someone randomly and i'm going to hack all of tesla's system to like take over your car uh it just it feels like something that's like definitely possible but it would require like billions of dollars to actually take over and at the end of the day a lot of people just want to make money and so they're like if i have the ability to go and and hack into tesla's network and steal the cars it's like i can probably just build a car company or something so some more uh yeah we're we're not you know neofactual media here

Starting point is 00:12:33 yeah but uh i do have some facts here from their faq will my neo be fully autonomous neo works autonomously by default for any chore request it doesn't know you can schedule a one x expert to guide it helping neo learn while getting the job done uh who are the the one-ex experts, 1-X employees physically present in the USA. Okay. So that's interesting. And then they're also manufacturing Neo in California, which is significant. So my sense is that the unit economics on these are going to be like really, really, really rough initially. Yeah. Because these, you know, 1-X experts in the USA are by default going to be making a lot more than like $2 an hour. This minimum wage. But I guess it, you know, it's going to

Starting point is 00:13:18 allow Neo to just get better at a variety of tasks. And so they would be training people to tell or operate, or they'd be paying people to tell or operate them anyways. Yeah. And at least they can recoup a little bit of the cost. It's going to be really expensive. This was like the end of my take was like, the magic here is like, it's half actually figure out the technology and half like financial engineering.

Starting point is 00:13:41 Because you have to do this extremely delicate dance where you keep the capital coming. in and burn and burn and burn. And you're probably burning more every year for a really long time. And then at the end, you get the incredible reward, but you have to burn for so long. And we've got ready. And we saw this with, we saw this with

Starting point is 00:14:02 Waymo. Waymo was founded in 2009. It's been 16 years. And like, there's been some report that like, in San Francisco, they're never going to get the cars cheap enough. Exactly. In San Francisco, I think they do have positive unit economics in this like very one this narrow area, but it's not like a cash cow yet. It's not Google search, right,

Starting point is 00:14:24 which took like two years before it was throwing off cash, basically, not really, but certainly not 16 years to scale that business. And then you look at VR. How much money has Mark Zuckerberg invested in the metaverse? How much money has reality labs burned without without it turning into a cash cow? Like they're not, they're still not making money off of reality Labs. And it was the same thing with AI. Like you look at the Satya Nadella deal, like the $1 billion in 2019. Like that business was not making money. And it had been around for five years already. The company was founded in, what, 2015, I think, Open AI. And so, or the nonprofit was. And so you have, you have these, when you're going after these like frontier technologies, these really

Starting point is 00:15:09 broad moonshots, you just wind up burning money for a decade potentially. And can you stay in the game as a venture-backed company, it's really, really hard, but at the same time, these types of moonshots are exactly what venture capital should be going after. Like, this is the goal of venture capital.

Starting point is 00:15:27 Quickly, let me tell you about Privy. Wallet Infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple... It's interesting that figure AI, figure robotics,

Starting point is 00:15:42 has pivoted their marketing, external marketing, at least, to being entirely focused on home help. So the homepage now, it says the future of home help is here. Figure 3 is a general purpose humanoid robot for every day. Yes. So wildly different than Boston Dynamics. So if you look at Boston Dynamics websites, they're saying, we are trusted as one of the top robotics companies by D.HL, BP, National Grid, Woodside Energy,

Starting point is 00:16:11 Maersk. Like they went industrial level, they went enterprise, and they even have some that are like three-axis robotic arms. And then they do have the robot dog, and they say, yeah, let the dog walk around and pick up trash or check in on, you know, the quality of your, of your, of your, you know, oil and gas infrastructure or your mind. Yeah. You know, walk around and assess and do surveys. You know, Boston Dynamics is apparently 80% owned by Hyundai, and SoftBank owns the other 20%. It's such a remarkable company because Google owned it at one point, I believe, and it's changed hands a few times, but never really found like a flywheel to take off. But they've definitely manufactured like real robots.

Starting point is 00:17:05 It's more just about how they found the actual flywheel. for will people, are they solving a problem that's really widespread and can they sell the robot and then funnel the money back into selling more of the robots and get something really, really, really broadly deployed? It hasn't really happened yet. But I mean, they should be in a good position to do it. The sort of like black pill, I suppose, is that Boston Dynamics was never really set up as this like, okay, we're going to do the big transformer model, the end-to-end machine learning model. We're going to let, you know, scale. We're going to be aligned with the scale of the training run, much more so on the actual, like, let's design the algorithms and choreograph

Starting point is 00:17:51 the movements more than let lean into, like, the bitter lesson. The Boston Dynamics feels like a pre-bitter lesson pilling company or something like that. But, I mean, figure AI claims to have done end-to-end machine learning, no teleoperation for household tasks. Like, that is the core claim of figure. And, but I think what's different is that they're not letting, I don't think that figures let the Wall Street Journal take it for a spin. And I also don't think that they've actually put up a website where you can just, uh, buy one or at least, um, put down a reservation. So this does feel like one X is moving more aggressively than figure towards actually delivering something. Shipping. Yeah, toward shipping, exactly. The other interesting thing about this story, you know,

Starting point is 00:18:45 I'm expecting we'll see more fundraising news out of one-ax. Yeah, there's rumor that the pressure to raise a 10 billion. The pressure from the pressure on figure to perform, who's already marked, valued by their latest investors at close to 40 billion. 40 billion. That's right. You know, that they don't have they gotta really come I mean figure three whatever robot they ship is going to be heavily reviewed

Starting point is 00:19:16 yeah it is it is odd setting the expectations that like we're already on the third iteration but I guess they have said that they've shipped because they've shipped to that BMW plant and they've done some different tests here and there which the journal had coverage this year

Starting point is 00:19:32 earlier on what was actually happening at the BMW plant. Yeah, that said it was like mostly teleoperate, sort of like narrow. It was not like, oh, yeah, BMWs are now. And then figure, like, did they sue the journal? Or they sued Fortune. Fortune?

Starting point is 00:19:45 Is that it? They had to defend, they had to defend their business practices. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, the vibes at OneX are great. I think people are enjoying it. And it seems like they've been, I don't know, they've just been upfront about the way that they're building the company what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:20:05 They haven't been... It feels like they have... 1X has never been over their skis in terms of promises, which is why I think my reaction to the MKBHD post was... And they were always focused on... They were always on the phone.

Starting point is 00:20:18 Or sorry, sorry, focus on the home. Yeah, yeah, focused on the home. But yeah, I mean, I think... MKBHD is correct in his assessment that, like, it is risky to go put down $20,000 for a product that hasn't shipped and isn't really live and, like, there's a lot of promises around.

Starting point is 00:20:35 This happens all the time. And from MKBHD's perspective, he's looking at his audience of consumer electronics buyers and saying, well, my audience got burned by the Rabbit R1. They got burned by the humane AI pin. They got burned by friend, where there were a number of, like, AI hardware companies that made really broad, yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:58 A couple hundred bucks. Exactly. But even then, from the MKBHD perspective, the claims, the marketing claims, when the product was announced, did not match what MKBHD reviewed when he got the product. This happened a few times. I'm not sure about the exact companies, but this happened a few times where someone stood on stage and said, this thing is going to be amazing at doing X, Y, and Z, MKBHD reviews it,

Starting point is 00:21:25 and he's like, it barely does that. And so I understand where he's coming from saying, like, hey, this is a pre-order, it's a lot of money, the product's not done, and it's currently teleoperated, like, don't go into this thinking that you're getting Wally, this are like some super AGI robot. Like, you got to be careful and you got to know that this is like maybe dev kit level results. Yeah, I just think this is for, this feels like it will be a polished enough product for hardcore enthusiasts and kind of hackers. Yeah. And I think that that is probably the right go-to-market here, people that understand, hey, this thing is not going to do everything out of the box immediately. I'm going to

Starting point is 00:22:08 have to work on making it better, training it. But if it can get, if it can reliably, like, clean up after dinner or put away the kids' toys, you know, I think every parent deals with this, like, you know, if my kids are, are in the house for more than, 20 minutes. They're just like toys everywhere. We have to put this guy in the seat of a 9-11. We'll do it. We'll be the first.

Starting point is 00:22:40 OneX team. We volunteer to be the first people to track a Neo. So I love this post from Matt Slotnick, who's been on a tear. He quoted the announcement and said, can't wait to hook this bad boy up to a reasoning model in 11 labs and send it door-to-door selling knives. The funny thing is like it is it already is kind of hooked up to a reasoning model and I believe it speaks and whatnot. It definitely has the ability to you get you get most of the AI assistant, the current state of the art AI assistant stuff out of the box, which could

Starting point is 00:23:13 actually be beneficial in the same way that you know, you have an Amazon Echo or Apple's new tabletop robot. Just having an always on LLM around is a benefit to some people, even if it's just walking around just kind of looking cute. So something I, my expectation here, and I don't say this to be negative. You know, all these products have to start somewhere.

Starting point is 00:23:39 They just have to get into home, start doing work, start getting that feedback, start getting more training data. But I, my concern is that having a humanoid in the first, at least few years

Starting point is 00:23:51 will be like having a four-year-old helping you. where like a four-year-old can like pick up stuff from uh a four-year-old can do a lot of things but they're not necessarily like super efficient right they could be slow they can be distracted they can just stop i'm just imagining being like oh yeah wow i just had like a fantastic dinner 20 of my closest friends came over we had a dozen bottles of wine it was great hey neo uh can you clean those 25 wine glasses up and it's like no problem boss smash smash smash just shattering everything just like slipping on the glass and like falling down smashing more glasses and one of the marketing

Starting point is 00:24:39 videos they have the neo like carrying boxes around the house like after the owner yeah and you can just imagine like if you're trying if you're if you ask like a four year old yeah just pick up that those three boxes and carry them upstairs with me yeah it's like they're dropping them all over the place, you know. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that, like, it's definitely, you're, you're, you use the phrase like, you're training this thing. And I think, like, you are, this feels like almost like the Oculus DK2, the developer kit too. It's like, if you do this, if you sign up for this, you should see it as you're helping pull forward the future. You're basically giving them

Starting point is 00:25:22 training data. You got to be ready for the rough edges. You got to go into this knowing that you're the early adopter, but you're supporting something that's really, really cool. You're a part of creating the future. Yeah, exactly. And so there's a lot that's really cool to like a box in the chat. They should sell this to elder care centers and max out the Medicare reimbursement box. Not even joking. I could see that. Hopefully, hopefully doing that within the guidelines. Well, if you want a humanoid robot for software engineering, head over to cognition. They're the makers of Devon,

Starting point is 00:25:58 the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. It's a whole team. What else? Wireless says, buy the robot, get hired as a remote robot operator, become your own robot,

Starting point is 00:26:12 get paid to do chores and chill in your own house. What? Health insurance. That's actually hilarious. behind the road. This is the job of the future, folks. Yes, it just depends on what their economics are.

Starting point is 00:26:28 Because if they have negative unit economics, you can go work at 1X. Maybe it's a good way to get health insurance. It is fascinating that they're hiring the remote tell operators in the United States. Obviously, like over time, you would imagine that even if it's not 1X, someone will be doing remote tele operation across border.

Starting point is 00:26:48 And that looks like the, you know, deindustrialization story all over again, I would imagine that it becomes a political issue. At the same time, it's not going to become a political issue until there's like hundreds of thousands of these in the streets. Yeah, and I still think that even a competent humanoid that can be teleoperated by itself can be a total game changer because what if you want to be able to, let's say somebody needs to like look after a parent right if you can if you can buy them like you know a robot put it in their home and if you they need help with something you can just teleport there if your parent wants to go for a canyon run you can't take them out on a sunday yeah

Starting point is 00:27:37 you can have the robot drive the 9992 gt3rrr s through the canyons dot 2 dot 2 sorry Tyler what you say but but also But also more seriously, it's like if you could hire in L.A., like house cleaners today get paid a much probably higher rate than some random place elsewhere in America. Sure. And so somebody could live elsewhere, but like be a house cleaner in L.A. That's interesting. Yeah. And there's the same.

Starting point is 00:28:08 It's the remote work story. It becomes a global labor pool. It's a huge supply shock. So prices go down. None of this happens overnight. but eventually it will become a hot button issue. Tyler, what are you thinking? I would like to see them go the Uber route, right?

Starting point is 00:28:21 You saw those tasks that drivers can do in between rides, so then they can just put on the VR headset if they don't have a ride currently, then they just teleoperate for a little bit, and then maybe they're only halfway through their task when the next drive comes in, so then someone else just put it in. Because we don't know it was actually behind the robot.

Starting point is 00:28:38 So it could be multiple people. It's true. Yeah, I don't know. It's going to be interesting. Abdul says Zuckerberg's Clanker, watching yours and your wife's clanker in 2035. Oh, there's a clanker outside the, outside the window. Yes, clankers are going to be, the clanker slurs are going to be through the roof over the

Starting point is 00:28:58 next few years. All the experts are at the one-X offices. Very smart move by them. I feel like this is, this is a very, very, like, shrewd move because, like, if they were saying, even no matter where they pick, if it wasn't America, it would just be a political football immediately. I mean, we saw, do you see Bernie Sanders talking about friend.com? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:22 You saw this? That was crazy. It's like, Avi has not even broken through meaningfully. And yet, politicians recognize that robots are coming. And even if Avi isn't the one who has it completely dialed, like the idea of talking to an AI is already a political issue, which is just remarkable. That's why you should stick to Figma. Think bigger. faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get

Starting point is 00:29:50 started for free. Dalton Caldwell hit the timeline to share that What Not from YC Winter 2020 is now a decicorn. Congratulations. Whatnot has raised $225 million at an $11.5 billion valuation. The company plans to announce on Tuesday, which they announced yesterday. The round comes less than a year after the e-commerce platform raised $265 million at half that valuation and puts its total fundraising at about $968 million. So again, this is L.A. based company, I believe. Awesome. We've heard about the online shopping stuff for a long time.

Starting point is 00:30:27 It seems like live shopping might finally be working. In America. We've heard about it in China. Oh, it's so massive in China. We were wondering when it would come to America. It feels like it must have came to America. It's interesting that it seems like it's working and it's not working in as broad. as broad of a set of categories as in China.

Starting point is 00:30:48 Like in China, people will just straight up buy, like, vegetables. Yeah. It'll be like, people will be selling coconuts live streaming. Here, it's like trading cards, sports cards, various collectible toys, thrift type stuff, coin. Never used whatnot. And I don't know many people that have, but they must have found some powerful niche because 10 billion is, no joke.

Starting point is 00:31:10 I wonder where it lands. I wonder if this is like a Snapchat size business or if, this can really grow into something that's Amazon, Walmart style, like massive, massive. I mean, clearly, like, they've done a lot of things right. But, you know, interesting to see, like, what is the American, what is the American, you know, appetite for this product, specifically? Let's take it over to our first guest. Yes. Let's do it. Welcome to the stream. How do I pronounce your name? Martin. Hi.

Starting point is 00:31:51 Martin. I know it's difficult, but Marchine goes a long way. Thanks. Thank you so much for joining. And thank you for staying up late. We know that you are over in Europe. If you could please give us an introduction on yourself and some of the research that you've done, we'd love to kind of explore some of the ideas that you've been writing about. Sure. Sure. Thank you for having me. Of course. I'm a professor of economics at Kuzminski University in Warsaw, which is the highest-ranked business school in Central Europe. It is sort of the Stanford of Central Europe, if you will.

Starting point is 00:32:22 I also wrote a book that playing the Polish economic miracle. Yes. The fact that Poland has been the fastest growing economy in Europe and worldwide, except for China over the last 35 years. Wow. And I've also worked and advised over the past 20 years, almost 20 governments around the world, including most recently India and China. So that also brings a bit of a global perspective to what has been happening in Poland and in the U.S. and around the

Starting point is 00:32:53 world. Yeah. What are the key ingredients to Poland's economic success broadly if you were to kind of rank the few key choices that were made or investment? Yeah, it feels like at least once a month a chart pops up of Poland's like GDP growth relative to a bunch of other countries. And it's just absolutely remarkable. Right. Yeah. Yeah, so it's in a remarkable sort of Hollywood Netflix-like story, or you can call it a California-like unicorn because it is an economy that was bankrupt, backward, and broken in 1890-9 at the end of communism and was poorer than Jamaica, Suriname,

Starting point is 00:33:35 Gabon, and a couple of other countries. And 35 years later, it is now richer than... Japan and it will be richer than Spain and Israel next year, which is a remarkable story of sort of unicorn and phoenix-like growth. And I think there were a number of ingredients, but one is definitely the grind, the work habits. Even now, 35 years into this economic miracle, Poles are the hardest working people among all the rich countries. an average poll puts in 700 more hours of work per year than in every german there's like 12

Starting point is 00:34:14 hours per week that's incredible i know i'm speaking our language is there is there wait but take me one click upstream from that like i can imagine uh a population is more hard working if you ban things that make it hard to you know do leisure so uh i i i are there anything is are there any pieces of the of the the what the government has done to make hard work more easier to pick or more likely for the population to lean towards i'm thinking of like singapore has banned a ton of like drug use for example and so i would imagine that singaporeans work harder because the alternative of going and uh you know to a rock concert or to like the equivalent of burning man isn't on the table is there anything like that that's actually been caught like like

Starting point is 00:35:05 cognizant the government said we want our folks to work harder and then it happened or is it just like chance luck of the the polish people no it's it's not singapore it's a democracy with would you believe 20 different governments over the past 35 years from left wing democrats to right wing republicans from bernie sanders to ron paul and all in all of them i think they represented a society that is just hungry for success and a society that just wants to be richer or at least as rich and then richer than the fat cats in Western Europe. And that's exactly what's been happening. There's been choice of polls who have moved from one-third of German income

Starting point is 00:35:47 35 years ago to 75, 80% of German level of income now, and they want to get to 100 and 120. And one way of doing it is obviously working hard. So an average poll per week works 12 hours more per week than an average German, and even six hours more. What's the exact number? Is it 50 hours a week? I don't know how much time Germans spend working.

Starting point is 00:36:14 It's a, I don't know. I don't have picked on Germans. I say hi to all my German friends. But, you know, Poland continues to believe that working hard and there's a lot of opportunities. You know, Poland is part of an open global economy, part of the West, part of the European Union, where you have 450 million consumers with no borders, no tariffs, no nothing. If you have a good idea, you can win and conquer these markets, particularly from the incumbents Western European players

Starting point is 00:36:46 who very often just lost the hunger for success. What's the lesson from the rollout of the Internet? I've heard a lot of countries sort of were able to pull forward economic growth by leaning in on high-speed internet, making it more accessible, extra infrastructure investments, how much does the rise and rollout of the internet and like getting that right play into the Polish growth story over the last maybe three decades? So, Poland is a latecomer and also a beneficiary of being backward. You know, when I came to the U.S. for the first time in 1997, I did not be.

Starting point is 00:37:30 those were cheques were. I just never knew to exist it. So Poland moved from a backward communist country straight into swiping credit cards and sort of reach-a-like payment systems, which we have right now. And also brand new 5G and fiber optics. So I think this is what they call a rent of backwardness, which is what exactly Poland has leveraged. It has not had any sunk cost in the old infrastructure, which again, has happened in Western Europe. For instance, in Germany, one of the reasons they seem to be losing the battle to be competitive in electric vehicles is that all the BMWs and Mercedes, they did not want to cannibalize the good business.

Starting point is 00:38:16 And so they were late to compete with the Chinese. Poland never had this sunk cost, and it went straight into technological frontier. How are you counseling or thinking about sovereign AI? I feel like giving every country, if you want your country to succeed in the 2000s, in the 2010s, you definitely want every citizen to have access to Google or every access or to Google search to cloud documents, the cloud broadly. But you don't need necessarily a data center. your country to access Google or to search the web or have access to the internet. It wasn't

Starting point is 00:39:03 that critical to have the actual infrastructure in your borders. Now it feels like there's a whole new discussion around you need sovereign AI. You need to be doing the inference within your borders for some reason. And I just, I don't know that I fully believe that. I feel like you, you want your citizens to use AI, but whether they use it, whether they, you know, jump through a fiber optic cable across the border and access it somewhere else. That doesn't seem like that. I think the push for the push for sovereign AI is partly out of a fear of this sort of fast takeoff scenario, right? Yeah, but yeah, I've never bought that, but yeah, it does not need to be mutually exclusive. So in Poland, actually, every single

Starting point is 00:39:51 players is players in the market. Yeah. You know, Google, Amazon, Microsoft. These guys have the largest data centers and they're ready to provide AI services to whoever is interested. But at the same time, the government is also building redundancy. It's building additional infrastructure, including to host apps that do not even exist in the U.S. Like, for instance, I don't have to have any plastics on me, any ID when I drive, for instance. It's all on my phone. there's a Polish app called, you know, citizen where you virtually have most of the things you have needed, it's all on your phone. So it's, again, it's an example of how some countries have

Starting point is 00:40:34 just moved on and increasingly a lot of public services will be done from the phone. It also helps that there's a lot of Polish talent that has actually helped create AI in the first place. I mean, a Polish guy is a chief scientist at OpenAI. One third of the founding engineering, years of Open AI were Polish. So, you know, these guys called their moms and called them ex-girlfriends and tell them, look, you really want to look at chat GBT and what we're doing because that's the future. Yeah. How is Poland's university system helping to accelerate, you know, all these different priorities? It feels like the U.S. is at a unique moment where we've had a very robust, you know, academic system.

Starting point is 00:41:23 but currently are, there's somewhat of a, well, not even somewhat, certainly a kind of a conflict between the government and our university system, but then also like a broad sort of distrust of a lot of our institutions. Yeah, that is true. And, you know, for all people, most people around the world, including myself, a lot of, I got my, you know, PhD in Poland, I became a professor in Poland, but I did my pre-dodont. and Paul's dog at Harvard, and I know the U.S. well, and it's obviously still the best place to get the top quality education. Most Nobel Prize winners come from the U.S., but some of

Starting point is 00:42:04 countries sort of hustle. So Poland has not only outworked its competitors, it has also outeducated its competitors. So, for instance, half of young Poles, age 25 to 34, have university education. In Germany is only one-third. So that gives you an idea. They know not, not only work hard, they're actually pretty well educated. It might not be Stanford and Harvard all the time, but this is solid education, as reflected is in these open-eye guys. And finally, Poland also out-competes, because you get this talent for half-price, for what you would pay for it in Germany.

Starting point is 00:42:41 You know, a top-notch computer scientist in Poland, whom you can put at Silicon Valley any day, will cost you 75 grand. I guess back where you're sitting, it would be 200 plus. So it's really this combination of human capital and low labor cost and being located in the heart of Europe and getting increasingly increasing interest from global investors who look at 11 laps and I saw just a guy who was there just before me. I think he had a hat. That's right.

Starting point is 00:43:14 Tyler's rocking the hat right now. What about what about on the regulation front? What are the ways that Poland has, you know, breakdowns, Poland's decision-making around regulation versus, you know, maybe other members of the EU? So in the EU, you cannot really have much of your own voice on digital matters. So it's actually all been consolidated in Brussels. And the European Commission puts up ideas on behalf of everyone else. The same for trade. So for instance, when the European Union cut a deal with Trump, it was the EU that was negotiating on behalf of everyone, not Poland, Germany, on Spain.

Starting point is 00:43:57 On digital is pretty much the same. And there's ongoing debate whether Europe is just over-regulating. And I, including AI, and I agree, we are over-regulating, or at least there's a perception that Europe is over-regulating, which is killing AI. So I'm hoping that the perception will change. And again, newcomers, new guys on the block, like Poland, now the 20 of largest economy in the world, richer than Japan, with more than $1 trillion of GDP, Poland will be one of the countries that will be pushing for their regulating, for opening up, because it's exactly what has worked well for this country. Did you have to ask Brussels if you could come on our podcast?

Starting point is 00:44:41 No, I'm here as an academic author of this book, if anyone is interested. did no but no okay good okay good you're like I had to apply it was a you know 10 hour application to go on the on the podcast now it's not quite not quite that extreme the advantage of the EU is that for instance there's now this debate about creating a new regulatory system where you could set up a company which could immediately work all across Europe under the EU laws so I think they called it sort of the 28 regime You could sell your products and services everywhere in the EU without worrying about local regulations. And I think this is the way to go.

Starting point is 00:45:23 And I think Poland and our region, all countries in the region will be pushing for these kind of solutions. We don't want Europe to be sclerotic. We want Europe to be successful. And Poles, who are the most pro-American society in Europe and probably also in the world, will be one of the big supporters of these changes. Awesome. What's the mood in Poland around energy, or what's the, is there any place where Poland differs from Europe, like other European countries broadly in terms of energy strategy or where energy is going? When I think about the sovereign AI thing, a lot of countries, it just, if you have cheap energy, you should set up an AI factory, even no matter where you're wind up selling the tokens, that's just a great use of energy these days. But how is Poland thinking about the current energy mix and where that's going and various incentives and tradeoffs that might differ from other countries?

Starting point is 00:46:24 So, Poland has originally and traditionally been a coal-based country. But it has really moved quickly. Now, about only half of the oil energy use comes from coal. And Poland has decided to go all in on nuclear and on renewables. So the plan is to pretty much minimize or even eliminate the use of call within the next decade plus. And Poland has already decided to build one nuclear plan and actually with Westinghouse, American technology. But renewables is the other part of the answer. So there's probably not enough of a surplus now to make Poland into a data center hub.

Starting point is 00:47:03 But it's pretty much coming. In other ways, Poland is a hub. Like a lot of Belarusians, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, virtually the whole region is increasingly moving into Warsaw and Poland because this is where things happen. If you want to scale up, if you want to internationalize, if you want to find capital, that's not Vilnius, that's not means for sure. You really want to come into Warsaw because that's where all the interests is and that's where the action is. Cool. Very, very cool. Well, I cannot wait to, at some point, I'm sure we will do this show from Warsaw and that will be a fun

Starting point is 00:47:38 moment. Thank you so much for joining and breaking it down. Anytime, anytime Poland is in the news, feel free to jump back on the show. Be great to talk through it. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you for having me. Great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Let me tell you about vanta.com, automate compliance, managed risk, improved trust. Continuously, Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Back on the timeline, Sian Bannister over at Long Journey has gotten a task. two of the logo of their newest portfolio company. Substrate. We have the founder of

Starting point is 00:48:16 Substrate James Proud coming on the show in just a little bit. I'm excited for that. And I never knew that my friend Chris Ovitz also here in L.A. was the one who introduced James, I guess, a long journey. And they were, it sounds like the first check. I don't know that for a fact, but at least very, very early. So good to see, and I'm excited to meet James. There's a post here from semi-analysis, an all-time classic. We have been in serious problem.

Starting point is 00:48:52 This is ASML. Talking about substrates approach in their new lithography system so we can get more info from James in a little bit. but this company was announced yesterday and announced about a, was it $100 on a billion, straight out the gates? 100 on a billion, straight out of the gate.

Starting point is 00:49:13 Not bad, not bad. Logan, Paul was a Series A investor and whatnot. So he's going from a $90 million to an $11.5 million valuation, not too shabby at all. I know another friend of mine, Anne Skates, was I believe also one of the part of leading that Series A, if I remember, just not too long ago at all. It makes so much sense that Logan Paul would have invested in this company.

Starting point is 00:49:42 He's like super into collectibles and... Oh, collectibles, but also just social media. He's actually sold a ton of products on social media. He's done all sorts of different YouTube videos, the Vine era. Like, he's seen firsthand every single iteration and turn of what's happening on social media, on content, on commerce. and so it makes it a bunch of sense that he would be like fine-tuned

Starting point is 00:50:07 to understand the opportunity here. Although there were a bunch of companies that were going after this. Very tricky to pick the right one. Pop shop. Are they still around? Did they do okay? I don't think so.

Starting point is 00:50:17 I think they, well, they still have a website. I know a few other companies were trying to come after this exact idea, this live shopping. I mean, even just live-stubing. No, pop shop, I guess, is around. Pop shops around still, okay. There's somebody live right now

Starting point is 00:50:32 selling blind boxes. There you go. Hopefully they're selling SaaS. Hopefully they're selling graphite. Dot Dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship

Starting point is 00:50:41 higher quality software faster and get started for free. This is... Sam Altman said yesterday an IPO is now the most likely path forward for open AI, given the scale of capital

Starting point is 00:50:51 the company will need going forward. No surprises. No surprises there. Yes. It'll be very interesting to hear more comments from Sam Altman and Satcha Nadella on what happens over the medium to long term.

Starting point is 00:51:08 I'm fascinated by the idea of if Microsoft winds up with like a $150 billion position, maybe that goes up in the public markets. You could be looking at like a $200 billion position. Like what is the Treasury strategy? Market sells as soon as a lockup ends. It just bales immediately. Yeah, no, no. I mean, Microsoft is an open eye treasury company.

Starting point is 00:51:30 Thanks for the IP, buddy. Microsoft is an opening eye treasury. I'm going to be trading just based off Rune Tweets alone. Yes. Yeah. You're going to be trading Microsoft for now. You can do that today because they own. That's true.

Starting point is 00:51:40 They have $135 billion position. So it's always an option. But yes, what will Microsoft do over the medium term once the company gets out? I would imagine they don't just hit slam the sell button on day one. I imagine that they let that evolve over a long period of time. and probably don't crash the stock because that just seems not particularly advantageous as, you know, silly as it would be. More important news, there's an abandoned McDonald's that NASA turned into a moon probe

Starting point is 00:52:16 picture recovery lab. What? What is a moon probe picture recovery lab? Was this, is this from years ago? Yeah, I don't know if it's still operational. People are saying to me. Views.com, Mick Moons.

Starting point is 00:52:31 The official website of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project. Hmm. And it does indeed look to be, and they're calling it Mick Moons. Is it, is it AI?

Starting point is 00:52:43 No? No, it's not AI. This is a real... Wait, wait, wait. This is right by Google. This is, this building is right next to where Sergei Bryn's Blimp is built,

Starting point is 00:52:57 which we saw yesterday. Absolutely stunning blimp. I'm so happy. I love seeing blimps. I love airships. I want to know more. I know Ashley Vance did a whole video interviewing the founder of that company that Sergei partnered with, like the CEO that came in and has actually run the company. And I don't want to sound too rude. But what is the goal of the company? Because blimps have been invented. So it's like, are we just... We're bringing him back. I mean, I love it. I want it to be brought back, I guess. But, It's like, it's a thing that exists already. Well, there was another, so there's another company, there's a new blimp company called Airship. Yeah. That's a SpaceX team.

Starting point is 00:53:39 Okay. X SpaceX team that is trying to leverage airships, blimps for global freight. Okay. And the idea is that, like, a lot of exciting things happen when you're not trying to work within waterways, ports, and you can just transport goods, you know, directly. You can imagine directly from China. You just fly over. I saw someone who is like a venture capitalist, I believe, like lay out the whole like blimp bull thesis very eloquently and run a bunch of numbers.

Starting point is 00:54:09 Seem pretty interesting. But it is funny that like your moonshot is a thing that like, well, like we've done it. I guess it's just like. Your blimp shot? Your blimp shot. Well, it's really just like, okay, we like, I guess there is a challenge. The challenge is like make blimp's work in the way that. trains work or in the ways that container

Starting point is 00:54:30 commercially. Commercially. Like actually scale. Not just as a bill. Because they never really because a good year blimp still flies around L.A. sometimes. But there are like truly like six blimps in the entire world or something like that. And so the total market cap of the blimp economy is just nothing.

Starting point is 00:54:46 Like it's just a disaster. And so that's the real challenge. I guess the challenge is not, is not make another blimp because we know we can make blimps. The question is like, can we find something more valuable to do with them such that it scales as a mode of transport. Are you,

Starting point is 00:55:04 you're anti-hot-air balloon. Are you anti-blimp? Would you go on a blimp ride? I would inspect it first. You would inspect it. You would inspect it. Oh, you feel equipped. I would use,

Starting point is 00:55:15 kick the tires on the blimp. I would use large language models. Yes? And I would say, how much gram? And then you would know, okay, this is a good blimp. This looks like a good blimp. Yeah. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:55:25 I think, uh, I, I, I, I would like, love to, I would go into blimp without checking it. I think, uh, blumps. Yep. Blimps, especially with, um, you know, potentially having, uh, like a parachute on your back, you know, as you're one of the parachute guys? You're like, I, I need a parachute with me. If I'm going to go up high, my fall. I don't know. Planes have life jackets in them. Those are, those are parachutes. I know, but it's not the worst idea to have, have a backup plan. It is funny. I mean, like, what are the odds when you take off on a plane that you're going to crash into the ocean and need a life jacket? Pretty rare.

Starting point is 00:56:02 Yeah. What are the odds that you're going to need a parachute on a blimp? Probably. Rare, but not non-zero. Yeah, that is true. It is funny how there aren't any plane. Like, imagine if United was just like... Back is coming in with the important take here, which is data centers tied to balloons.

Starting point is 00:56:23 Steampunk data centers, so let's go. blimp data center that might work Elon apparently said on the recently that he's thinking of he wants Tesla's to be like just distributed cloud basically

Starting point is 00:56:37 so that when it was just parked that was a crazy host providing well you know who should run a blimp ad Julius.ai data analyst that works for you connect your data ask questions in plain English

Starting point is 00:56:52 chat with your data get expert level insights in seconds So I believe Google had a data center on a container ship that they put out in the bay for a while ago. So this has happened. It is interesting that there's no airplane service that is like we actually have parachutes on board. Like what would that do to the airline economy if United one day was just like, yeah, we're putting parachutes on all the United planes? Like, they don't do that on Jab Blue. They don't do that on American.

Starting point is 00:57:28 They don't do that on Delta. Does Delta give you a parachute? No, United gives you a parachute. I mean, potentially go to upsell? Would that be? Would that make you more likely to fly United or less likely? Be honest. Why are you guys having parachutes?

Starting point is 00:57:42 Exactly. It's bagging a lot of questions. I look at it more as a potential upsell. It's like instead of having to fly into JFK. Oh, you think it should be something I have to pay for. Yeah, it's like an extra thousand dollars. You can parachute out. Anywhere over the private price state area.

Starting point is 00:57:57 Let's you go. I was just thinking like, like, you know, for the price of the ticket, for 200 bucks, you get the life jacket. But for 300 bucks, you get upgrade to the parachute. I think that might be a way to just squeeze a couple extra dollars. I want the economy premium. I want to, yeah, I want an option for executives that don't have time to go through the airport. Airport, yeah, drop in to their meeting. Yeah, I like that.

Starting point is 00:58:23 if United came out and said, we now have parachutes on board and you have a choice, you're flying to New York from L.A., and you have a choice between Delta, which does not have parachutes, and United that does have parachutes. Tyler, which one are you picking?

Starting point is 00:58:42 I don't think I want my airline to have parachutes. Why? That makes me way more scared. It's a pure upgrade in safety. Yeah, that's literally like saying I don't want my car to have seatbelts. yeah yeah it's like oh you put seatbelts in there you're expecting the car to crash no it's just if it happens we have the seatbelt here if if the plane dissolves in the air you have a parachute

Starting point is 00:59:06 on this airline dissolves yeah if the plane rips open like in fight club which you haven't seen if there's a bunch of snakes on the plane and yeah I think it makes more sense on a blimp because we've seen blimps just blow up in the sky yeah true planes don't really do that false flag Plains are pretty safe. Anyway, I hope no one in the chat is watching on a plane because that would always be rough. Caleb Watney over at IFP says, hard to understate what a blow this would be

Starting point is 00:59:40 for American leadership in AI if this happens. He's talking about how Trump has suggested he was open to providing China with access to NVIDIA's Blackwell chips as part of a trade deal, which would represent a major concession and rile up national security hawks in Washington. We'll be speaking about Blackwell, as Trump said. Touting the chip says super duper and years ahead of what was currently available from other countries.

Starting point is 01:00:02 He said Nvidia CEO Jensen had recently brought a version of the chip to the Oval Office for him to see AI. Bellwether, Nvidia shares extended gains to 8.5% in Asian trading on the alternative platform, Blue Ocean, signaling potential further gains when U.S. markets open. they are seemingly en route to a $5 trillion valuation. I think they hit it, didn't they? We've got to pull that up on public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. They did.

Starting point is 01:00:31 They did. They did. They did it. They did it. $5.02 trillion. Okay, that was a better hit. That was a better hit. It's going to do the weird ring thing, I think.

Starting point is 01:00:43 Yeah, see? It's going to keep ringing. Because apparently we broke our gong. And this is what happens when you break the gong, is that it just keeps ringing. But that's actually kind of a feature in my mind. I don't know. Feature. What do you think?

Starting point is 01:00:55 The question here is maybe Trump is doing a little 5D chess. I thought this is 6D chess, actually. Could be 6, could be 7, could be 5. It's a little simplistic to me. It's really hard to say at this stage. But it's possible that he realizes that AI is about infinite slot machines. Yes. And he realizes.

Starting point is 01:01:16 adult content. It's actually in America's interest to get as many black wells to China as possible. So that they all get one-shotted. Yes. Yeah. This is the modern information war. This is the cybernetic future war that's happening between America and China. It went from AI is a good thing. So we need to keep the chips in America. We can't let them have them. What if Trump says you can only have the black wells? We got to get the chips out of America. You can only have the Blackwells if you let every give a free plan of GPT-40 to every citizen. And, uh, Cijun Peng's just, you're absolutely right. I would love, I would love to give every, every citizen, Ani, uh, with, with sexy mode. Um, no, I don't, I don't know. My, my take on this has always been, like, we, we, do we actually have slack capacity for chips because we've been having the GPU poor debate for a while.

Starting point is 01:02:20 Everyone said that, you know, oh, we can't make enough chips. We can't build enough data centers. But like, it is, it's a lot easier to advocate for, hey, don't sell to China if there truly is unlimited demand in America. It's a completely different conversation. If it's like, well, yeah, actually like, like, AWS and Google and Open AI, like, they're actually good on NVIDIA chips. They don't want to buy anymore. And NVIDia's like, wait, but we've made so many of these. We want to sell them. Like, can we sell them to China? You'd be like, well, yeah, because like, that's going to hurt your business a ton if you have to write those down because you made them. Versus it's just a choice of who you're selling to, and it's zero sum.

Starting point is 01:03:06 Yeah, I mean, Jensen does not want to lose the Chinese market. He's been very clear about how frustrated he is. about the whole situation, but he's been playing nice. Yeah, I don't know. The NVIDIA just, you know, continuing to ramp up, despite everyone waking up to how big of a threat, you know, TPUs are to NVIDIA. It is interesting timing. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:33 Yeah, there were some more news about TPUs. I think the demand for TPU is like through the roof. They saw some post about that. In other news, Oliver Cameron, friend of the show, introduced Odyssey 2 instant interactive AI video. This is general purpose model that instantly imagines 20 FPS video you can interact with in open-minded ways. It feels like true sci-fi type of few words, and AI instantly imagines a video that feels alive. So the browser war is in full swing. now the

Starting point is 01:04:06 the real-time video generation wars are in full swing. You got World Labs. You got Odyssey. You got Jeannie 3, I believe, from Google. There are a few companies

Starting point is 01:04:19 working on this. I'm personally excited for where this goes once you get some extra harnessing in there, some extra mechanics. I don't know if this is, we need to have Oliver back on the show

Starting point is 01:04:33 and talk to him about is he thinking about going more API driven or does he want to kind of own more of I mean yeah like how much of it needs to be the foundation model company versus the application layer how much does he need to does he want to own like the end result or whatever people do with the product there's a there's a pretty wide swath of opportunity once you have a model that works in a particular way you can go set up a short form video app if you want and try and win and build a new social network. But it's all, there's a whole bunch of tradeoffs there and a whole bunch of challenges. So clearly a, you know, a next step in advancing the model, but a lot of questions about how do you actually monetize this? Is it a prosumer tool?

Starting point is 01:05:22 Will people be using this just as better video generation because it's faster turnaround so you can iterate more quickly? There's a whole bunch of benefits there. All the demos here are vertical, interestingly. But the launch video is horizontal. What does that mean? Dig into that. If you want to generate some video,

Starting point is 01:05:39 head over to fall, generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models, all in one place, develop and fine-tuned models with serverless, GPUs, and on-demand clusters.

Starting point is 01:05:51 Toby Looky was taking shots at AI note takers. He hit the timeline and said, having some AI follow you into your Zoom meetings or Google Meet for taking notes

Starting point is 01:06:01 is the digital equivalent of showing up to a meeting with your fly down. What do you think? You're anti-AI, you're anti-clinker in the group chat. I never let, I'll never let them in. You never let them in.

Starting point is 01:06:18 You never let the clanker in the Zoom room? The clanker, the clanker's in the waiting room. It's ready to be let in. Oh, I forgot. Sorry. This, uh, this, this reply post says, Firefly is waiting in the lobby. And that's where Firefly will sit. day.

Starting point is 01:06:36 Toby's on fire. He said fire fly, better fly right into the in the DOD-A-M-N fire. Yeah. So I don't know. He was, he didn't, he didn't elaborate on why he doesn't like this.

Starting point is 01:06:50 A friend of the show, T.J. Parker said, maybe it has something to do with the fact that if you're recording every meeting, every meeting is now discoverable. And so if you have some random lawsuit, all of a sudden, you know there's like leaked tech email,

Starting point is 01:07:04 emails, imagine that, but for everything you do at work all the time forever, that's what having an AI no taker is in reality. That's why I just wear my friend. Yeah, yeah. I mean, truly, it is, it is fascinating that, like, people, that we actually got to the outcome where Firefly identifies itself and says, like, hey, I'm an AI no taker. I'm here and I'm going to join, as opposed to the alternative, which was just like run clueling on your computer and no one knows. Gold Rock says that using transcription clankers are no go, oftentimes they're used without all parties consent. That's another one. It's like if somebody wants to come in to the call and say, hey, for the next 10 minutes, do you mind if I record this so that I don't have to take notes

Starting point is 01:07:51 myself? I'm open to like opting in, but just like the default record every single call. like there's no yeah there's no there's just not uh not something i'm interested in doing yeah obviously depends a lot on the use case you know what are you synthesizing takeaways is this actually useful it's probably not a replacement for not actually paying attention during the call like uh you're not just going to zone out for an hour and then review some meeting notes and be like oh, that was now a productive meeting. I would love to know what percentage of transcripts, like, ever get read, like, the notes. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:34 Is it, like, I would expect it to be a very small percentage that actually get read. So it's like one of those things people are, like, kind of peace of mind. I mean, I did have one interaction with a group of friends who had a Zoom call to talk about. They're all, like, everyone's like a comment. content creator. And so they'd have these calls. I couldn't make one. Normally everyone hops on the phone on the calls, talks about trends, strategies, whatever there's do, whatever they're doing. I couldn't make one of those calls. And so they did have one of the transcripts happen. And I was able to read through that. And that was fun because like I like these friends.

Starting point is 01:09:11 And so I was kind of able to, you know, not fully listen to the full call, but get some of the topics like, oh, what's top of mind for my friends? That was kind of cool. But that was definitely something like it was a meeting that I was looking forward to. So, I was happy to enjoy it as a transcript as well, because I would enjoy the meeting if I had actually attended. But regardless, if you're transcribing a bunch of stuff, if you have a bunch of text, you need to search every bite,

Starting point is 01:09:39 you need to use turbo puffer, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. We puffin. We puffin. We puffin. Golden Age, a private credit is over.

Starting point is 01:09:53 Private credit winter is coming. says high yield hairy. Lenders are quietly rewriting their collateral rules would suggest a crisis waiting to happen. People have been nervous about private credit booming. Aries has minted seven new billionaires, something like that. There's been a ton of boom in private credit, a ton of boom in debt. Debt is coming. The question is, when will there be a pullback? How much more room does it have to run? There's a reply here from guy named. Jason who says that's nice but I'd prefer not to lose any money so please

Starting point is 01:10:29 make sure the government is prepared to cover all potential losses if not for everyone then for me and my cohort specifically warm regards me and my cohort what is that mean oh me and everybody's got a cohort what cohort do you identify with

Starting point is 01:10:45 that's hilarious oh this this post from Italian what is that hilarious I don't even know what he was replying to I don't know what he was replying to But this post, Space Man Live on TVPN, his eyes rolling back in his head. Yeah, those was a very weird screen grab. I don't know how this screen grab happened, but it was absolutely wild.

Starting point is 01:11:08 What did, what did Baz say? So, Baz posted a blog post about you are how you act. He says, the modern American self is best to find by two enlightenment thinkers who never met, but have been arguing in our heads ever since. Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed in the primacy of the inner self, a core of goodness constantly betrayed by circumstance. In his view, the world corrupts us. We begin pure and only fail because society obligation or expectation pulls us away from who we truly are. Benjamin Franklin saw it differently. For him, there was no such thing as a good person or a bad person, only people who do good things and people who do bad things. Virtue was a habit, not an essence. Modern America, carries both of these ideas switching between them whenever convenient we invoke rousseau when we need forgiveness i meant well we invoke franklin when we need accountability show me what you've done it's almost entirely it's it's an almost entirely incompatible pair of philosophies

Starting point is 01:12:09 that coexist perfectly in practice because they're both so flattering one to our intentions the other to our ambition but only one of them scales take it until you make it as often dismissed as shallow but it's closer to Franklin's truth. Faking it long enough is making it. The repetition of behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is what shapes character. You become the kind of person who does the things you repeatedly do. I agree with that. Rousseau invites endless introspection. Franklin invites progress. The first is how you feel is about how you feel. The second is about what you build. I find the Franklin model far more useful, not because it's truer in some cosmic sense, but because it gives you agency,

Starting point is 01:12:54 you can't always change how you feel, but you can always decide what to do next. It doesn't take great men to do things, but it is doing things that make men great, Arnold Glasgow. And, you know, some people had some jokes. They're poking fun at boss, saying tech bros are re-deriving SART from first principles.

Starting point is 01:13:20 I haven't read SART, so I don't know. But I like a reflective post like that. I think that's a good post. I think that's an interesting little, like, tour of a couple philosophers you might have heard of, but kind of distilling and then re-contextualizing these two thinkers. This is a sweet spot. I've been enjoying writing these, like, 500-word essays. Just kind of like one little thought packaged up in a couple paragraphs.

Starting point is 01:13:48 I'm glad boss is doing it, too. In other news, bending spoons. Yes. European software conglomerate has acquired America Online AOL and raised $2.8 billion of debt to get it done. They say big news. We're acquiring AOL, the iconic web portal and email provider from Yahoo, subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals. Is this gone worthy? to, I would, it's painful that America online will be owned by a European software conglomerate.

Starting point is 01:14:26 But let's hit the gong for raising $2.8 billion in debt to buy a legacy digital asset. I'm so, we got to have somebody on from bending spoons because I, I don't, I don't feel like I have a good understanding of this company at all. They acquired Evernote. Evernaut. They acquired Wii Transfer. It's such a funny name for a company. They acquired Vimeo, so they are kind of all over the place. Matrix-inspired, in The Matrix, probably. Yeah, interestingly enough, I wonder what just like AOL's email business is worth.

Starting point is 01:15:06 Like, do people pay for, like, pay for that at all, or is it entirely, is the entire business ads base? AOL? I think there's still people paying. I wouldn't be surprised if there's still people crack it open a CD and being like, I got to get my internet this month. Do either of you remember what I'm talking about? Are you familiar with this? No. There was a time when you got the internet from a physical desk basically, which just sounds ridiculous, but basically it was like, how does that, what are you talking about, John? The whole internet is no, no, no, no, no. So basically, I think the way it works is basically, you'd open up a magazine and there would

Starting point is 01:15:45 be a CD and it would be like AOL and and the disc would would would claim some sort of like number of minutes. Ben, do you remember this? No, no one remembers this? I'm so old. And it would be like 7,000 minutes of internet access and basically what you do is you would put the, is you would put the disc in and then you would pull and then you would install a piece of software that would allow you to access the internet. The crazy emoji guy. no and then so on the disc was the software that would that would like give you a web browser basically because how do you get a web browser if you don't have the internet you need to install that first so you would install the aOL software package every month no no so they would give out free trials

Starting point is 01:16:31 basically and then you would be able to connect to the internet and and you would be limited based on the number of minutes that you spent online each CD would give you a couple thousand minutes for free something along those lines um anyone. Anyway, we have our first in-person guest of the show. We have Brian Johnson. Welcome to the stream. We'll go over there. Wally Hopson, let me tell you about AI, Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini, chat with models, vibe code, and monitor usage. Thank you. Classic L.A. story. People in L.A. arrive on time 15 minutes after you normally arrive.

Starting point is 01:17:14 oh yeah at least i do normally yeah that's the nature hopefully you didn't have too much traffic it's great to have you here a big week for you it's been a great week for us yeah congratulations 60 million but break down exactly what happened what was the impetus for the deal uh take us through the recent history of blueprint i mean i started this this is the idea that we are the first generation who won't die it's kind of a crazy idea yeah we started this couple years ago and I think a lot of people thought this was kind of an insane thought process. And so we've been hammered away. And I think it's gone from weird to interesting to yesterday.

Starting point is 01:17:48 It was kind of like now it's accepted and maybe even cool. Yeah, yeah. And so I think we've, it's a thing now. It's like part of the zeitgeist. And I think it formalizes that we're really going to take a shot at this. Yeah. So, I mean, there's like the philosophical underpinning where you're, I imagine, you know, in the vein of Kurzweil, like looking at long-term trends, artificial intelligence,

Starting point is 01:18:09 compounding, just the value of compounding little gains all over the health system, potentially could, at least in your belief, get us to infinite life and not die, don't die. So you get to that, but then you, you know, at some point you need to instantiate that in a company, in a business, in a suite of products. And so that's what Blueprint is today? Is that the idea of the fundraise? Is that what people are investing in? Yeah, the idea is when somebody says, yes, I want to be healthy, it's pretty hard.

Starting point is 01:18:42 You have to go out and you have to navigate a thousand things. Is this good for me or it's a bad for me? People who have conflicting opinions. And so our target customer is somebody who says, I want to be healthy, and we just say, we've got you. We will give you, like, the protein amounts, will give you tested and certified foods, we'll give you the exact dose, will help you with your prescriptions, we'll give you protocols, like your autonomous self, like it's not go navigate the world by yourself.

Starting point is 01:19:05 we've got you, and we'll do an evidence-based biomarker approach. One of the, I feel like anybody that really gets into health goes through a period where they realize, I at least at one point, I was like 19 at the time, realized that it felt like I was spending like 50% of all my cognitive power on just like trying to be as healthy as possible. And at a certain point, I realized like this is such an inefficient use of time. Fortunately, you build up some habits and kind of like understanding of what's good and what's bad and what you want to leverage more and kind of avoid and all that stuff. But I think like making, you know, removing that step from the process of being able to just kind of like

Starting point is 01:19:47 default into a system. Walk, can you get into a little bit more of like, I remember reading a post at this point from you, maybe it was like a couple months ago kind of like talking through the decision making around, you know, where you wanted to take blueprint, why kind of raise capital, all that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, it was this, I mean, I guess my sole objective is try to be sober in this moment. And I really enjoyed the perspective of thinking a few hundred years into the future, you look back at this moment, and we are giving birth to some kind of superintelligence.

Starting point is 01:20:22 We don't know what it is. We don't know what kind of scale, but it's big, it's important. I have neither opinion that it's positive or negative. It's just significant. And I was really trying to think through, does it even matter if we're not. if I build anything in the world right now, or should I work on building the philosophy and the moral framework on, like,

Starting point is 01:20:39 what does it mean to be intelligent on planet Earth in this part of the galaxy? And I was kind of in the middle, like, as an entrepreneur, do you build or, like, which way do you build? And so I was just reflecting that, am I misallocating my time? And I thought, you know, really, Blueprint is the practical implementation

Starting point is 01:20:55 of this philosophy. Like, when you say yes to don't die, you're saying, I value existence, I respect existence. And so it's less about living forever. It's more about a philosophy of, yes, this moment is big. And so what a lot of people don't realize is this endeavor is entirely about AI alignment. I mean, that's the sole thing happening on the planet right now.

Starting point is 01:21:17 And so when you take care of yourself, you take care of your body, when you take care of the body, you take care of intelligence. It's this holistic system of we acknowledge existence. So that was it. It was like I was trying to figure out as a human, what do I do on planet Earth right now and how do I spend my time? I'm an entrepreneur. My intuitions are to become an entrepreneur. but I wonder, is that really the right way to do it? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:36 Yeah, what does Blueprint look like in a decade? It feels like it's such a unique consumer package goods business because you can't even call it that. It's like, I understand that there's like the philosophy and I love that as the brand, but even just in terms of like the business of like what people pay for, there's a lot. And that's just such a contrarian approach to this category because so many people are like, I have an idea. I'm going to make coffee better. Yes. I'm going to make a greens powder better. Or I have an opinion about the burger or the meat or the food or one particular thing. And then they

Starting point is 01:22:13 grow and grow and grow and then five years in there like, let's do a line extension. Let's do something. Yeah. The CPG trend of the last 10 years was go walk into the gas station, find a product that's popular and make a version of it that's like 50% healthier. And then you probably have like a nine-figure revenue business. Or make nothing, like Thrive Market, Aeroon, there's a bunch of companies that have been like, we're just be the seller of everything. How did you land on like, I want to kind of make everything that feels like an immense challenge? I want to walk through all that. I mean, that's what, you know, Caparthe was talking about the autonomous systems with DoorCash. Yeah. And he and I think very similar in this way is that if you model out what AI systems

Starting point is 01:22:52 will do, they'll probably take on more autonomous responsibility in our lives. We see beginnings where you plug an address in to a car and it helps you navigate to the place. You don't think about it much. We're going to build our autonomous self. Our health will be run on our behalf. So right now we have to chase down all our food with the chase down protocols,

Starting point is 01:23:09 with chase down evidence. But it's not going to be that in the future. It will be that it will just be run for us. And as we get measurement, that's more high fidelity. So blueprint is basically we're saying we are going to build your autonomous system of health and we're going to ride the breakthroughs of science

Starting point is 01:23:23 so that as we make better progress in lowering the speed of aging and reversing agent damage, you can just say, I'm in, and I'm going to ride with you. We're going to try to be on the very, very forefront to help people

Starting point is 01:23:35 have the best possible health. So we're just building out autonomous health systems. Yeah, that feels like super valuable just from the consumer experience of like I'm delegating all of that hassle. I know basically if I buy one from one brand, it's all aligned with one philosophy,

Starting point is 01:23:53 which is great. What does that mean on the logistics side. What does that mean on the KAPX side? Was that mean on the operational cost side? Do you have like 25 different product managers for each niche? Like, what's the shape of the company? This feels like a big challenge. A very big challenge. We're standing up

Starting point is 01:24:09 like 10 different businesses at the same time. Exactly. Exactly. Like there's plenty of people that could have done what you did where they like become famous or they become content creators in one way or another. And then they're like now I have one product. And you're like, now I have, how many products do you actually have? Over 20.

Starting point is 01:24:24 Over 20. Yeah. And it's clear that like you, probably a lot of that comes from the fact that you've been a successful entrepreneur before. You're like, yeah, I can probably do more than just one. But what actually does the, what does the business look like? Does the system look like? Are there cross-selling benefits in retail on day one? Or is this just an e-commerce play on day one? Like, how do you think about the costs and benefits of going multi-product so soon? Yeah, I mean, the thing is that when people want to be healthy, you can't just address one thing. They're still left with 99 things to deal with. I totally get the consumer value.

Starting point is 01:24:57 It makes a ton of sense. So internally, we're basically building out the infrastructure to deliver every single channel. So digital food, prescriptions, testing. Yep. So we could say, like... It's so much stuff. Yeah, it is the most stuff. You know, like, this is what...

Starting point is 01:25:10 I've done this myself for the past, you know, like five years. Yeah. We've mastered the system for me. And, you know, I've been fighting to achieve the best biomarkers in the world. Like, kind of, in some sense, a, like, a ridiculous idea. Yeah. But also, like, it's a new sport. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:23 You can imagine it becoming a thing. so yeah i mean basically we've mastered it we've built it now it's productizing so yeah people do so what what is how do you think about so so every every consumer out there has probably at some point or another gone through the frustration of finding a product they love and then watching the company behind it or sometimes an acquire just like steadily just like try to maintain or increase their margins to the point where it's no longer that it might have similar-looking packaging, but it's no longer the same product. Like, I imagine, like, you want Blueprint to be the thing that you are reliant on for the majority of your calories, the majority

Starting point is 01:26:04 of the supplements you take, the majority of the drugs that you are going to leverage. And so I can imagine, like, you know, holding the company to that standard so that you're not having to go anywhere else or realize, like, oh, this product would actually be better for me. But, like, do you have any kind of like ethos around that because that just feels like every you know i try to be cognizant of like when a company goes from founder led to uh they've exited and the new acquires just going to say like hey you know we could actually source this salt from over here and we're going to save like 80 percent yeah and nobody's really going to notice because it's going to taste similar but then the test starts showing up and it's actually like got lead in it now

Starting point is 01:26:47 yeah exactly right i mean i'm blueprints number one customer I appreciate it so much, because like we, when we first started doing this project, I was testing everything I would put into my body, air, water, food, everything. And I learned, first of all, food is guilty until proven innocent. It is so toxic. No matter where you get it. Yeah, people were freaking out last week when there was that protein powder report came out that a bunch of them had lead in it. And I was like, my immediate reaction was like, obviously a lot of this stuff has lead in it. I mean, like, look at the average chocolate bar has. like a ton of lead in it. And it's not even, so you can to isolate that one toxin, but there's so many other toxins. Totally. So people,

Starting point is 01:27:28 they grab onto one concept that they understand. It's like, oh, that's bad. There's trace levels of heavy metals in all of our foods. So like the fact that it's there is not unalarming.

Starting point is 01:27:36 It's out of context, but it's at a level people understand. But, you know, the goal is I'm going to, blueprint is my way to try to achieve, you know, this don't die. And so people will be just riding along.

Starting point is 01:27:48 We build on population level data, so this is not about Brian Johnson's body. This is about everybody's body. So all ages, both genders. But no, I think we're being meticulous about what we do. And so it will be, the quality will be the best in the world. And so I care about it. I'm consuming all about myself. Yeah. What's the plans on the kind of telemedicine front for, for kind of interventions or therapies that require doctors kind of involvement? Is there anything on that front? We will build an infrastructure to basically, when you want a prescription, if you want to go on a GLP1, we can help you get started, whether you

Starting point is 01:28:22 want a large dose or marco dose. This is funny. You're just like, yeah, and also do the lab testing and also like build the, you know, the, I'll, I'll be mining the metal that gets turned into the needle that injects you with the deal. Yes, there we go. It's like, you want to hold up the entire global economy. I love it.

Starting point is 01:28:39 It's good ambition. I strongly support this. Yeah, I was interested in like, like, where are the edges of like what you're like, Yeah, actually, I'm not going to go into that market, but it feels like you'll just continue to work on it until you get to some status where you're like, yeah, actually. It'll be full-circum. Would you go into hospitality?

Starting point is 01:28:59 Would you create, like, physical kind of, like, let's say, if you want, if you want to get 100% of everyone's calories? These European kind of health retreats that are very, like, evidence-driven and they're testing focus. I could imagine a blueprint retreat center that people can visit once a year to. Yeah. We have about a dozen groups around the world that want to stand this up

Starting point is 01:29:20 and some of the biggest hotel chains around the world. Because the thing is, they just want credibility. They want to say, like, come here, we have this thing structured. When I meet with some of the most powerful people in the world, they're just as clueless as everyone else. It is not a, like, people imagine reaching powerful people just have it solved.

Starting point is 01:29:36 Yeah. That is not the case. No. And so, yeah, we are going to stand this up. We probably will not do physical clinics. It's just too much on the real estate. Okay. So we'll probably license it out.

Starting point is 01:29:44 Sure. We probably do the digital model. If we have IP. CrossFit model almost. We have trust. Yeah. Like we want to have, like, we could do a model across food and clinics where we have this evidence-based approach. So, yeah, I mean, we're kind of in it to just blanket the entire industry with a framework on how to do things in a credible way that's biomarker-led, evidence-based.

Starting point is 01:30:04 Yeah. What was the thesis behind the round? $60 million, tons of faces, not the traditional CPG, VCs, private equity folks. Like, what was the thesis? Yeah, I mean, so I've been funding the company myself up into this point. And, you know, I guess I just wanted my friends to come along with me. So these are people I talk to in private. They enjoy it.

Starting point is 01:30:27 They're into it. And I think a lot of people, they have not known how to think about me. Like, am I legit? Am I not? It's just a thing. It's weird. And then they see that list of investors are like, oh, shit. And so, like, yesterday, I think it was the first day.

Starting point is 01:30:40 It was like, oh, it's safe to say this is cool. But before people have been like... I feel like a long time ago. But yeah, I feel like the, I feel like the first like business, what was the first piece that you did that was like I spent $2 million on my health and that went super viral? Yeah, like two or three years ago. That was like two or three years ago. I feel like that was the moment where people were like kind of confused. But pretty quickly people dug into your backstory and were like, oh yeah, I sold them. Yeah, my personal view is, is America has, has, has, has, over the last few years, had so little trust in health institutions. Like if you just went and followed. the American Heart Association's guidance, I'd probably die at like 60, right? And so to me, I was always like, you know, knowing how much I, I, you can read about health and you can listen to podcasts and you can listen to what some influencer said in a short form video, but to deeply

Starting point is 01:31:34 understand your health, you have to do self-experimentation because everybody is different. And so I always looked at it, you know, you always tried to be controversial enough to like generate attention, attract some people that were going to become super fans and lose some people, and you were kind of okay with that. But my sense was always like, thank you that somebody is going to invest more money than basically anyone else and just self-experimentation and then open source all of that. And now people can buy your olive oil if they want or they can decide, no, I'm actually going to go on my own journey and try to find some product that can fit this requirement. But it felt like such a public benefit that I always wish there was like

Starting point is 01:32:16 a thousand Brian Johnson's that were just all running the same experimentation open sourcing process versus the biggest thing. We talked about this the other day is health influencers quickly get into put themselves in a niche and they're like, I'm the I'm the fasting guy. I'm the HRV guy. And then every single thing becomes about that. And it's cool because you can like tap into a world and like kind of accelerate and understand a lot about a category. But then in reality, it's not like fasting is the only thing that matters. It's just like one tool. I have another take on that that maybe I'd like your reaction to. There's also this, this trend in health influence where if I want to blow everyone's brain, I'm going to come in

Starting point is 01:33:03 and blow everyone's mind. I'll be like, guess what? I boil it all down. It's a sleep diet and exercise. It's like 99% of what you need to do. And everyone's like, man, this John guy, he's not talking about the crazy supplements. He's just telling it like it is. Sleep diet exercise. I did it. I feel great.

Starting point is 01:33:17 This is amazing. And then after I've made, you know, one hour of content every week for five years on sleep diet exercise, I'm like, you know what? Let's actually talk about like the 17th piece of magnesium you should take. Or like the thing that's, yeah, it is beneficial, but it's 0.001%. And it's still interesting,

Starting point is 01:33:36 but it's not going to have the power law effect. of like actually start working out or like actually get sleep. And so do you wrestle with that? Do you feel like you have to go back to the basics sometimes? Or do you think that there's actually maybe that's not even a reasonable critique? Yeah, I think that the thing that most people struggle with is doing things they don't want to do. Like they don't want to overeat. They don't want to eat a pint of ice cream.

Starting point is 01:34:02 Like they don't want to drink, you know. So those things are really the highest leverage. interventions. It's behavioral. And so, yes, you can say sleep that exercise, but you get deep and you then uncover that our American society is one of addiction. Like the American powers of capitalism have

Starting point is 01:34:22 appointed at getting people to be addicted on food, sugar, nicotine, porn, junk, like all of it. And so this is, if you look at it, so like just from a broad perspective, you begin on Western thought with Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Middle Evil Times, Renaissance,

Starting point is 01:34:37 Enlightenment and modern scientific era. Like you look at these big frames. We're due for a major shift. And right now we're at the tell end. This is like kind of a Dalio kind of thought process of like these big macro trends. We're at the end. And right now, capitalism was for solving scarcity.

Starting point is 01:34:55 We're now compulsive. We're now compulsive. And the idea was democracy was freedom of choice. We now have no longer choice because we're addicted. So we're really playing on this very big macro frame of we're at different times of species. And so, yes, sleep that exercise, but in this larger frame, it's about what does it mean to actually be intelligent, make decisions? And you can't when you're addicted to everything.

Starting point is 01:35:16 Yeah. What do you think about some of the longer tail interventions, like the third peptide that's not approved yet, but people are already taking it here? It feels like is this sort of like un-seudoregulated, unregulated biohacking becoming more prevalent? Is that the correct world in a world where the FDA is broken? or does the FDA need to change? Or how should we, like, map the, you know, accelerating advances in science with maybe stagnation and regulatory?

Starting point is 01:35:49 What's your framework for that? Yeah, I mean, peptides are very powerful. They're basically drugs, right? So you get access to drug-like effect sizes. Sure. The problem is peptides are oftentimes not manufactured to spec. And so you have risks, like putting stuff in your body that you shouldn't be putting your body.

Starting point is 01:36:03 Like, they could have lead in them just like your chocolate bar could have lead. And a bunch of other stuff. Same with stem cells. So, like, there's a real quality problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other problem is peptides, a lot of peptides are not fully well characterized. So typically drugs, you say, like, you can do this thing, but also, here's a long list of side effects. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:36:18 And that's nice because, like, okay, at least I know what the tradeoff space is. Yeah. With these peptides, you don't have the characterization. Okay. And so it's a bigger risk that people experiment, you see a lot of this in bodybuilding. Now you have buyer hackers doing it. Sure. So it's fine.

Starting point is 01:36:31 It's just you have to understand it's the wild, wild west. Sure. That may be your game. It may not. but, like, definitely you want to be cautious. Sure. It's not like a safe path. But then there's other things like you start with the highest level of evidence.

Starting point is 01:36:42 You know, sauna is great. Yeah. But, you know, like if you, I've talked about this a lot. If you don't ice the boys in the sauna, you crush. Can you make an ice pack? So I used to, I used to, I think we maybe talked about this last time. I used to, there used to be this ice pack on Amazon that was for this use case. And they stopped selling it.

Starting point is 01:36:58 And now I don't, I like, I lost my. So we should. Yeah, they don't want you icing your boys out there. I don't think they want to that. And then a lot of men will say, like, I'm not trying to have. you know, babies, so it doesn't matter, but it has negative feedback. Hormone, hormone health, exactly. Interesting. So, yeah, there's so, yes, sleep that exercise is great, but then you dive into the details. This is what I'm saying, like, you, you

Starting point is 01:37:17 start down this path and you inevitably will spend 50% of your time chasing down everything. Some sort of weird root cause on all these things. It's never easy. So you have infinite chase. And that's what I'm saying is that's the problem trying to solve is nobody has 50% of our time to do this. How are, how are you thinking about where? because there's a world in the future where you have a camera that's effectively a sensor that's able to experience life in your in your view and that as like a health co-pilot would be pretty wild because you'd be like hey hey you've already eaten like well beyond you assume that like cameras get better at like calorie tracking it's like hey you're well over like your daily caloric needs like you're now going into a surplus maybe ease off and maybe that's enough the rayband displays like need a killer app that sounds like something you should build what do you think yeah I mean the If you think about it, GLP-1s are kind of that. I mean, a little bit, right? It's like modulating your hunger, like your satiety, and it's like, so.

Starting point is 01:38:14 How do you think we'll view GLP-1s and the explosion of their use in 50 years? It's probably the most successful anti-aging drug ever built. It's incredible. It's like the benefits keep on accumulating. Yes, there's drawbacks. They're getting better all the time, but it's... Do you feel the same way about statins? They're complicated.

Starting point is 01:38:34 I mean, statins do have benefits, but they're complicated. Um, do you feel like there's any value to reading into the, uh, the, the, the conspiracy, uh, like weird vibes around the fact that like, like, Ozempic came from a demon, like this heel a monster. Isn't that what it is? Yeah, the helen monster. Is it the helen monster? Yeah, they were experimenting.

Starting point is 01:38:54 Or Komodo dragon venom or something like that. Like, it just feels like wrong, right? If you're just like, you know, just humanity 101, you'd be like, yeah, don't drink the the reptile. Don't drink the reptile venom. I mean, Brian might be trying to become the reptile a little bit. Are you into it?

Starting point is 01:39:09 The Sonorian Toad gave us 5MEODMT. And I would say that that's bad too. That's throwing off all sorts of red flags for me. It just got FDA approval. It did. For what? Break the status for depression, resistant depression.

Starting point is 01:39:23 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Got it. So, yeah, I mean, I guess if you're sad, you need the to cheer you up, I suppose. Thank you, I'm happy. I'm happy if it's helping people. I'm happy. It is just funny when we were, we were looking at the story of Ozympic like a year ago. What's your, what's your view on, I think everybody's hoping, maybe GLP ones are this and people haven't sort of fully realized it yet, but everybody is kind of, I feel like for a while, just hoping that like, oh, by the time that I'm, I'm really aging, like I'm really feeling it, there will just be a pill that I can take and, you know, I'll just be able to halt or maybe even reverse.

Starting point is 01:40:06 Are you, like, how open to you, how open are you to the idea that, like, there could be something that is, like, an order of magnitude more effective than GLP-1s in terms of anti-aging? Like, are you, you know, where do you put the probability there? I mean, that study that came out from China in June, they showed that they took this form of a FOXO3 protein, they used CRISPR, we put it in a mesoncombo stem cell and delivered it via intravenous treatment. it had a biological equivalent for human antide. So this was in monkeys. It had a three to five year age reversal in over 50% of the tissues, which is unseen. And for human equivalent,

Starting point is 01:40:44 that would be like nine to 15 years roughly. So these demonstrations are being done. I think we'll probably, I was going to actually figure this out. You know, the hype cycle where you, you've... Yeah, Gertner hype cycle. Exactly. Yeah, trough of disillusionment, plateau of productivity.

Starting point is 01:40:58 I was going to model this out this week. Yeah. Try to figure out, like, because I think we're probably going to hit peak in something. like, GOP-1s or something? 2032, you know, like, ish, like.

Starting point is 01:41:08 Okay, we got some time. A few things are people will be like, it's here. Oh, oh, and people will think that they're going to live forever. And then there will be a crash and be like, oh, actually, there's still more problems to solve. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:41:18 Then 2035, 237, people are like, oh, man, like it's not solving this or that or we have these complications. And like maybe early 2040s, people are like, actually, we got this. Like, something like that. I saw some poster a long time ago. You get crazy, like, inbound from Madsen.

Starting point is 01:41:33 scientists all over the world. They were like, hey, I made this thing. I was talking with chat GPT for 50 hours over the last week. And I figured out, like, let me come inject you. When I was building kernel with this brain interface, I would get all these emails that people are like, I've been implanted by the government. Oh, wow. So that would come in.

Starting point is 01:41:50 But now, yes, like I do. I get, I don't know, maybe like seven to 10 a day. Whoa, that's a lot. For people offering you experimental. You know, like I've discovered the quantum realm and how the, how. Sick. Yes. So it's wild.

Starting point is 01:42:04 People are excited about this topic. Maybe some toads involved in that one. That's funny. Yeah, I remember seeing this post a while back. I don't know if you remember it better than I do, but it was basically looking at like the distribution of lifespans is not, there's not just a single power law where everyone falls off at like 90. Like you would expect if it was just a normal power law that we would get a couple

Starting point is 01:42:27 150 and like one 200 year old person. But in fact, there are like this, double exponential effect. And so maybe that's kind of what happens where maybe we solve one of them, but then we still are at this like exponential fall off in longevity. But even unlocking

Starting point is 01:42:44 like one person at 200 would be amazing. There was this interesting paper that came out of Levin. He said his theory after running this model was that basically after we reproduce, our cells lose purpose. Our cells don't have a unifying objective. So they just like

Starting point is 01:43:01 aging is just like we just don't know what to do. Interesting. So if his model is correct, like biology needs don't die. Like they actually need an objective at a macro scale, like at our level of cognition, but also at a cellular level. But these are the kinds of experiments people are doing of like what is the underlying incentive structure of biology? Why do we age?

Starting point is 01:43:22 Why do we not age in certain parts of our life? Why do we have protective mechanisms? Why do some species regenerate? So I think it's this really exciting frontier where our ideas now of aging, are beginning to crack open a little bit and expanding our horizons. Like, how do we think about time? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:43:37 I mean, we talked about this last time you were on about Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, not particularly famous for their biohacking, but incredibly resilient, like a life well-lived. So many stories about them, like, you know, staying up, drinking Coca-Cola and wine long into the night. And I want to believe that there's some level of just, if you have a purpose, if you have drive,

Starting point is 01:44:00 your body just pulls it together a little bit more. I know people want this to be like the answer. Yes, but you're saying just luck. I think it's really such a bad idea because people in their mind, they make that a shortcut and they're like, you know what? I'm just going to work harder. I got to work harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:44:17 Did we cure balding? There was that study. It was in the last week. They're all such, they're weak effects. Okay. Yeah. So, you, we really have not made. I guess it's a long turkey.

Starting point is 01:44:29 It's a little bit embarrassing. seen as a human race that we haven't been able to make really good strides on hair loss. That one seems very simple. I don't know. It just seems like very mechanical. It doesn't seem as complicated as like, you know, your brain degenerating. We don't even know how the brain works. It's like, it's hair. It just grows. It should be easy. We're working on it. We just put out our best attempt. We're going to see if it works. We're going to try to beat every, everything is out there on market. We'll see. How important is, like, cosmetic intervention to the blueprint plan.

Starting point is 01:45:01 Because you could imagine a world where people say, yeah, make me live forever, but I don't care about wrinkles and hair because unless it's going to help me actually live longer, why bother? I mean, the thing is, don't die is really be hot. Like, what? Every supplement company,

Starting point is 01:45:21 every company in health you're ultimately selling at the end of the day. I think it's brilliant from a business perspective. But does it make sense in terms of, the science? Like, does it take something out? Yeah, no, like, being hot is good science. You know, like, if you look youthful and vibrant, your skin is nice and, like, you have a lot of energy. So I think be hot is legit, the path for this.

Starting point is 01:45:40 Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Be hot, don't die. Have a suspect. How do you think about longevity in the business? You know, if you look at the D to C bubble, there was a lot of companies that raised similar amount of money and, you know, are no longer with us. I imagine you care about a lot about just making,

Starting point is 01:45:58 making sure that don't die and Blueprint survive decades. And I'm sure that's informing the way you're building. I mean, this is like you, you know, the internet comes about Google sets up shop and rides that tailwind. Amazon sets up shop on commerce, right? Basically, somebody's going to set up shop in longevity and ride a multi-trillion dollar ride. Sure. So that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to just be home base, win the early endings of longevity and then ride for the multi-trillion dollar market. Yeah, do you think there's a lot of, like, I imagine M&A will be pretty important to your strategy

Starting point is 01:46:30 with a lot of companies. I mean, I just view there's a lot of companies that are important that are like single product or for specific use cases that don't really necessarily need or shouldn't be. Because, like, if you're a blueprint customer, maybe you need it once every three years, but that means it could be harder to actually build a business around, but it would slot in. You nailed it. So basically, if you look at the landscape and health right now, nothing is proprietary. you've got wearables from all these

Starting point is 01:46:57 providers you have food from providers you have biomarkers like nothing's proprietary and so the winner's going to have to out-compete everybody and bringing an experience to the customer that is sensible and practical and make you know so I think that's where the competition is going to be because this is like the days when I was building a brain tree Venmo is it was commoditized

Starting point is 01:47:17 like you're all in the Visa MasterCard MX Discover stack and you have to build something unique and then Braintree and Stripe just collapsed the market. Yeah. How do you think about, wait, now I want to hear the story of the Venma acquisition. How did that happen? So they built up a vent. So people in payments, it was very clear, PayPal was the only company making money.

Starting point is 01:47:41 Okay. Because they had both sides of the market. Sure. They got lucky because they got into eBay. They built the consumer side, but then they had the merchant side too. Because otherwise, if you just offer it to merchants, your margins are pretty low. you're making whatever 20 50 basis points like that and so everybody was going after PayPal

Starting point is 01:47:56 trying to build a two side of marketplace and that took a lot of capital it's very hard to build from scratch and so I said okay I'm going to build the merchant side of the business first and then I'm going to acquire the consumer side I said this when I started the company so we got customers like Airbnb Uber

Starting point is 01:48:11 GitHub we got all the Gen Z people and then Venmo had done a fantastic job building out consumer side and we could then marry those two demographics and it's like, perfect. And so, yeah, so they had built a great business, but they hadn't solved making money.

Starting point is 01:48:26 Okay. When they plugged into our world, we bought them for $26.2 million. Yeah. Yeah. How much of that was, like, not making money because of fraud? I hear that a lot of fintech companies, like they actually have something where the unit economic should work,

Starting point is 01:48:40 but it's always crazy in the early days. So you hear the story about PayPal where PayPal was losing tons of money, but it was only because of fraud. The actual business, when it wasn't fraudulent, made sense. But then once you get to scale, you can do the anti-fraud properly. Is that something you were problem-solving around? It's very hard, because you're doing peer-to-peer. And typically you have, like, illicit purposes primarily as your driver.

Starting point is 01:49:01 And so it's a very hard problem. So as a standalone, it's hard for them to make sense because if you stack on a fee when you're paying your buddy, it's hard, it's friction in the adoption. So you have to kind of speed-run adoption and then make money later. Yep. But there was no good make-money-later problem. And do you think, do you, I was running. I think it was a shower thought.

Starting point is 01:49:22 I was like, okay, there's so much capital sloshing around the private markets. It's been interesting that we haven't seen more people, like, try to take on Stripe. I don't know if it's, I don't know. I'd be curious from your point of view. At what point will people even try to climb that mountain? Very unlikely. They've done such a great job executing. I sold Braintree in 2013.

Starting point is 01:49:47 So they've been building 12 years since. they've done such a good job making that airtight. They're just great. This is the thing. You can't come in and make a 10x better product. Amazon locked commerce. So you, of course, can build your e-commerce business on Shopify. But at a scale, I mean, Amazon has just kind of owned that entire thing.

Starting point is 01:50:04 It's very hard to replicate that. So that's our goal, too, is we're basically trying to do that for longevity. Once you collapse the entire space, it's very hard to get in. Okay, we've got a lighting round. Favorite book? Or just a book recommendation, something you read recently that you like? I just finished the history of the Western Mind, going through all of Western thought. Oh, cool.

Starting point is 01:50:30 Favorite music? What's in your... You know, I have such a soft spot for Eminem. When I was depressed, he was the only artist that I could feel. Okay. Love it. When will humanity develop AGI? we ask such hard you don't want to sound like a decel you don't want to be yeah yeah um just call

Starting point is 01:50:58 it right now yeah well i want to be able to clip this the day of and be like exactly i want to say i want to say that uh called it to the hour i want to say that we won't clip this but i know our clipping infrastructure and we absolutely will clip this it's such a sucker question right it's like Well, maybe let's flip it around, Open AI and Microsoft did this deal where the definition of AGI will be convened by a group of experts. What is your definition of AGI? I approach this question as a more through psychology of when will humans feel useless. Feel useless. Yes.

Starting point is 01:51:40 Like our entire identity is based upon, like, we do. things, we contribute, we build. And now AI is a tool, like we feel more productive with it. Yes. At what point will do everything so well, you feel this deep hole in your stomach of like, what do I do? So what if, yeah, the weird thing is like computers are incredible at chess, yet people play chess for fun and at the professional level because humans, I guess they're anti-clanker and they like watching humans play chess. And if we can solve that for everyone so that everyone has some sort of, like in this AGI world where there's no more real jobs, there's no more actual, okay, you need to produce something for food or, you know, livability. Everything is just

Starting point is 01:52:23 for fun or for games and for status. And it's all about, uh, it wasn't Andre Carpathic saying you go to the gym and you'll learn in the future. And it's, and I wonder, like, if your definition is, once that breaks down, that is, I mean, feels really far as the future. But I like that. I like that. Like people look forward to retirement. Like retirement is a goal. It's an ideal. It's like, we're going to get an RV. We're going to cruise the country. Then they retire. They're like, this sucks. Like there's not the tension. Never retire. So if we imagine, we're going to like learn and we're going to like do yoga all day and paint. But like if there's not the tension of the stress and the of real life, like do we really want to be on vacation all the time? Do we want to be at leisure? So that's my like what I think about is when that happens, that's a pretty unnerving situation. Because humans don't do well without uncertainty. and then our systems have to respond

Starting point is 01:53:13 so like that's what I really think about all day every day. Everyone in the end is just going to be competing on biomarkers. It's going to be the final status game. It might be. It'll be the final game. It might be. That lines with Carpathies take. Last lightning round question and then I want you to ring the gong.

Starting point is 01:53:29 Favorite vacation spot? Where would you go? Redwood forest. Redwood forest. I love staying in California? Yeah, I would love I love Redwoods. Let's go. Like there. This is John. I love California. You don't need to go Europe. I love America. You don't need to get all the radiation on the plane. Just stay here. They're like such beautiful, majestic creatures. And they live a long time. They live a long time.

Starting point is 01:53:51 It's a very on brand for you. I love it. Congratulations on the round. $60 million. Fantastic progress. I'd love for you to ring that gong. And I'd love for you to ring it at a, at a decibel level that you feel as appropriate for hearing. You know, actually, let me put, yeah, let me pull up my decimal meter. Do we have my phone? Let's make sure we get this. Yes, let's bring over. We don't want to be over 80 decibels. Okay, yes, because we do have IEMs, so it is a little bit of hearing protection, but I would love to know, you can, feel free to take as many swings as you need. I'd love to know what an 80 decibel ring sounds like. So, yeah, I recently, I measured my ears. My left ear is 64. I have mild to moderate hearing loss, which substantially increases your risk of dementia.

Starting point is 01:54:37 Oh, whoa. So, yeah. Because you're going crazy because you don't, you don't perceive reality. your brain's missing all these things. Wow, that's crazy. Our society is built for hearing loss, like concerts, social gatherings, restaurants. So yeah, I would suggest everyone get a hearing test. Yeah. I just get hearing aids. Okay. So, all right. Okay, cool. Here we go. Yeah, yeah. Hit that gong, at a longevity approved level. Let's hear it. Okay. What are we at? How are we doing? 90. 90? Okay. So about that level, if we go in,

Starting point is 01:55:11 any higher. We're going to need. Just a tad. Yeah, yeah. Just a tad. There we go. That is the Brian Johnson approved. Gong hit. You heard it here. I bet I bet everyone in the chat is like, oh, finally. That's that we smack that thing so loud. Fortunately, you know, we do you have tinnitus? No, I don't. Okay. Fortunately, but I do. Oh, you do. I've had it since I was my Coachella era this is the thing yeah yeah wow so yeah now I don't I don't go to concerts at all I don't pay to stand

Starting point is 01:55:45 in crowds and lines but but I do I specifically recall or I believe I know the exact weekend that that that it started man is it a pretty significant thing in your life? No I zone it out but if I take a if I

Starting point is 01:56:04 like I've adapted to not hearing it. But if I, every, probably a few times a week, I'll be in a really quiet space and realize that I have constant ringing. Have you looked into hearing aids? No. Yeah. Maybe I should. Yeah. So I just got the Oticon intense. Yeah. Okay. That increases your, you're not wearing them right now. Not right now. Yeah. But you've been testing them out. Yeah, exactly. I'm so sad. I was running out the door and I forgot them. Yeah. I just finished my morning routine. So I'm so sad. But yeah, but they actually, I've only had them for a week. They have substantially improved my life.

Starting point is 01:56:41 Wow. Yeah. Cool. Well, this conversation has substantially improved my life. Yeah, you guys, this is fun. It's a great. Yeah. On the show, this is fantastic.

Starting point is 01:56:49 Congratulations. And we will talk to you. Soon, we have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room. 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. And we have Nathan Mintz from CX2 in there. the TBPN Ultronome. Nathan, how are you doing? Boom. Wonderful. Wonderful. It's sunny and about 75 degrees

Starting point is 01:57:12 outside here in East El Segundo. I love it. Great. Haven't, yeah, it's been too long since we caught up. There's nothing like pulling open the weather app in California, and it's just 10 days straight of sunny and 75, and we're lucky to have that pretty much year-round. I like all the- makes the tax is tolerable. I like all the traditional press pronounced behind you. We need to send you some physical memorabilia. Screenshots from your appearance. From your TV piano appearances since this is your second one.

Starting point is 01:57:44 But give us the update. What's new in your world? Yeah. So, you know, CX2, we've been turning and burning. We pretty much been racking up the frequent flyer miles going to multiple exercises this year. I think we're about to go to number eight next week. Wow.

Starting point is 01:57:59 And one of the things we realize is we go around and we talk to leaders and we talk to the war fighters and stuff is that there's kind of a nebulous understanding of the nature of the problem that we're facing. So we decided to get together with some of those knowledgeable warfighters we know along with our experts here and really write it down in booklet form as the spectrum imperative. And if you go to our website, CX2.com, there's a big banner where you can try and type. in Spectrum Imperative.com. I'm not the best speller, so I would just go to our website and then go from there. But really what we're trying to do is come up with what is the core thesis of electromagnetic warfare in the 21st century? Because the electromagnetic spectrum is this cross-domain across the entire, all the other domains of warfare, land, sea, space, air, and cyber that connects all of them. And particularly as everything moves to more autonomous systems, we are seeing more

Starting point is 01:59:04 increasing reliance upon the spectrum. And it becomes a more contested domain of warfare, which because we had the luxury of working for 20 years during the global war on terror, Iraq, etc., where we had permissive access to this spectrum and air superiority, we never had to worry about it before. And now it's something that as we're seeing every day in Ukraine, when it's heavily contested, our ability to have air superiority, air dominance, or really to maneuver on other, in other domains is severely impeded by it. Can you help me synthesize Palmer Lucky's latest soundbite around America as the world's arms dealer, as opposed to America, the world police, this idea that American defense

Starting point is 01:59:54 technology companies will be building products that America basically sells or deploys to other countries. Like, what does that look like in Ukraine for you, in Taiwan, in the Middle East? How is that different than America, the world police, where you're designing a system that's ultimately used by American boots on the ground? So in traditional defense, I spent 14 years in traditional defense. I think I pulled my passport out of my drawer. three times and one time was for my honeymoon right versus in the last five years that I've

Starting point is 02:00:31 been involved with new defense I think I've been abroad six or seven times right so that kind of gives you an idea actually the last year I think I've been abroad four or five times of where we're going you know now it's much more common for us to go visit the warfighter up in the battlefield and understand their situation and try and figure out how we can adapt what we're building to go along with them I think that's what Palmer's referring to is how do we you know works alongside our allies. This is actually one of our talking points within the spectrum imperative is that we need to be more integrated with our allies from a spectrum standpoint. We have to be compatible with their radio systems, compatible with their sensor systems, compatible

Starting point is 02:01:09 with their command and control systems, and that's a huge part of the spectrum imperative. So I think that's what Palmer is really referring to, is how do we get them to work with us, To buy what the gaps in their capabilities are build them indigenously, you know, there's a lot of talk about factories at the edge or, you know, forward-leaning supply chains to deal with contested logistics. That's kind of the, I think, the direction where Palmer's going. What is the latest update on what's going on Ukraine? It feels like it's fast becoming a forever war, unfortunately. At the same time, I've been hearing new updates on drones with fiber optic cables to avoid, you know, know, the problems of electronic and magnetic warfare, right? Like, what's, what, like, what's the

Starting point is 02:02:01 state of the, the conflict? And then what's actually on the cutting edge of what the various militaries are using? Yeah. So Ukraine, what's basically happened is the front lines have been relatively frozen. And it's because if you think about it, you need to have, you know, uncontested data link, you know, data links at the spectrum layer, you need uncontested navigation, et cetera, or else you're kind of swimming upstream. So effectively, they've created this, you know, no man's land of electronic concertina wire and minefields that really impedes any forward motion. And 98% of the action is occurring with autonomous systems, whether that's drones or unmanned ground vehicles or unmanned surface vessels. The Ukrainians have actually been

Starting point is 02:02:49 probably the most successful with the USVs in the Black Sea. They've pretty much pushed the Russians completely out of Sevastopol, completely out of Crimea, and now they have to go all the way to their ports on the eastern side of the Black Sea to actually, like, you know, keep

Starting point is 02:03:05 their ships safe, right? So that's a case study where autonomous systems, or actually automated systems in this case, because it's still human driven, have been able to really make a difference in that conflict. Meanwhile, the whole concept of a forward line of advance or forward edge of the battle area is now completely

Starting point is 02:03:24 obsolete in the sense that you can have drones pop up from many kilometers behind the lines and hit strategic targets, which is specifically what we saw with Operation Spider-Web. Now, you mentioned tethered drones. Those were very popular in the Kursk offensive. Actually, the Russians were the first to introduce them, and the Ukrainians then followed suit. And the whole idea was that, well, if there's nothing to jam, then you can fight through all the jamming. The trouble is that the tethered drones in some cases within the Kurtz Offensive actually turned into about 30% of the drones being used at a given time at its peak.

Starting point is 02:04:00 But it has, it's a brittle solution. If you go around a tree, you can snag it. If, you know, the lines can be cut quite easily. You know, there's all sorts of limitations. And then not to mention over water, it's like running a fishing line. If it touches the water at all, it's going to weigh down the drone and take it down. with it. I hadn't thought about that.

Starting point is 02:04:22 Yeah, so tethered drones, like, have their time in place. It's a little unclear how applicable they will be in, like, the Pacific, for example. But, you know, for things like persistent surveillance where you're putting a drone up in the air, and, you know, you can actually run power up to it for surveillance. It may make a lot of sense, right? I hadn't even thought about that. That's super interesting. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:04:46 But it's a hammer up in the sky. Yeah. Yeah. There is no silver bullet. There is no... What was the phrase you used? You said, Maslow's Hammer. Yeah, Maslow's Hammer, that if I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Starting point is 02:04:58 Oh, sure. And so that's what tends to happen with any sort of new countermeasures. It's first involved. And then the enemy saturates and counters it. In fact, probably the biggest paradigm shift we've seen in the Ukraine War that will be very applicable in the Pacific is the idea that all of our systems are highly adaptable, that both us and the enemy are operating on a much faster fly-fix fly loop and countermeasure loop

Starting point is 02:05:23 than what we're used to seeing. We're used to seeing years for new systems to be introduced. We'll be looking at more like weeks or possibly even days in some cases. And augmented by commercial software practices like CICD and other things. Well, sorry we have to move on so quickly but thank you for the update and congratulations on all the progress. Definitely encourage everyone to go check out the spectrum.

Starting point is 02:05:47 campaign from CX2, and we will talk to you soon. Yeah, great to catch up, Nathan. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Our next guest is James Proud from Substrate.

Starting point is 02:06:09 Welcome to the show. James, how are you doing? Suit it up. Love it. Thank you for having me, guys. It's an honor. You look fantastic. Please introduce yourself. Give us a little bit of the backstory and then tell us the general overview of the company,

Starting point is 02:06:26 what you're building and where it's positioned in the supply chain of the semiconductor industry. Sure. I think quite simply what we're doing is a bet that America can do hard things again. And that if it's important enough, then we can go and do it. It's not a question of whether we can or not. And I think when it comes to advanced chips, I think we all know and we all believe this is certainly important enough. And so our bet is that the United States invented this technology, we can invent the next generation again. And starting with the core process of lithography is how you can actually go and make a, what we think, a next generation foundry.

Starting point is 02:07:06 Yep. Okay. So I think many viewers will be familiar with the general semiconductors stack. you have the design shops like invidia you have your tsmc the fab you have asml the the lithography machinery maker you might have tromph or uh zeiss or some other supplier deeper in the chain um how do you see yourself fitting in are you vertically integrated do you want to come in and at the asml level at the tsmc level uh we've talked to other teal fellows like the folks at etched where they're not setting up a fab but they are designing a new chip and they're We're going to work at TSM to run that process. How do you see yourself fitting into the stack?

Starting point is 02:07:49 Yeah, we're slightly insane, and we think that the United States can build and sustain a new pure play found your business. And to do that, we need to be a little bit more vertically integrated than usual. Usually you have the tooling makers, you have the fabs that buy the tools. We see ours is more a sort of return to the beginning of the industry, where everyone sort did a little bit of everything. And so for us, we're going to start making our own tools specifically around the lithography piece. Yep. Amazing times. You've been on a press blitz this week all over the map. What was the last year like leading up until this point? What have been, what have you been

Starting point is 02:08:30 focused on? And then what does the next year look like specifically in terms of making progress against all these goals? Honestly, incredibly, incredibly hard. There's a video that I'm sure you guys have seen of when Elon was being interviewed about the Model 3 ramp and he sort of looks at the floor and talks about how his head and heart physically hurt from how hard he had to work. And I know exactly what that feels like and I'm sure a lot of our team do as well. But as I said, it goes back to like, is this important enough to actually make happen? and we believe that this suddenly is and we're very proud of the results that we have and wanted to show the world

Starting point is 02:09:14 and sort of tell people what we believe and what we're doing. And then what is more tactically like this is the kind of company that it's the true potential will only be able to be achieved across decades, right? This is not the kind of company you start and expect to

Starting point is 02:09:37 you know, it's a massive journey. But, like, how do you break it up with the team? Like, what are you looking to accomplish more specifically in the next, like, one to two years? Well, moving quickly, I think, is sort of one of the key important parts of this. I think that this 10 years from now is far less important for the United States two, three, four from now. And so our goal is in 2028 to actually have a facility constructed. and be running wafers. And so one of the reasons why we're coming out publicly

Starting point is 02:10:12 is it's going to be very hard to start building big particle accelerators, big clean rooms in secret. And so the goal is we start doing that very quickly and sprint to 28. Walk through some of the milestones to date. Do you have to come up with new ways to etch chips essentially because of IP? Or do you need to do a bunch of,

Starting point is 02:10:37 licensing deals is a big piece of the equation for the last year been marshaling capital and then placing orders to buy equipment and build up a facility. There's so many different ways that the business could take shape if the general goal is like let's build a fab in America. I can imagine a bunch of different ways to solve that, but how did you go about solving it? Yeah. So up to now the company is really three years old. And the big thrust so far has been building lithography tools, demonstrating that they work, printing the smallest things that humans are able to go and print.

Starting point is 02:11:17 And that's been the focus really up to now. And in terms of what kind of tool, the IP and the like, our focus has been how do you reduce cost and complexity? And so all of the design choices we've made have been driven by that. And really, like, EUV and the tools that, that exist today, these are modern miracles. These things are incredible. The engineering, incredible.

Starting point is 02:11:39 Yeah. But the choices were made in the, really the 90s and took a while to scale up. Got it. Our approach has been on the lithography side, if you were building a next generation lithography tool today, would you make the same technical choices? We've believed no, and the answer is no. What's it been like on the recruiting side? Have you been visiting the Netherlands, visiting Taiwan?

Starting point is 02:12:02 on, how are you thinking about building the team going forward? Yeah, as I sort of said at the start, like, this has been primarily, it sounds very simplistic, but a bet on the United States, I bet that we still have the best engineers, the best scientists, the best national labs. Like, if you look at the history of semiconductors, this is all invented by the United States. Transistors, Seamus, FinFET, EUV, like American companies, usually maybe, it's basically been IBM and Intel that invented all of that stuff. And so, like, the bet is that we have the people, we have the talent. It's just, can we actually have a

Starting point is 02:12:45 new direction? And so that's been the work that we've done. And so predominantly, we've been recruiting from American companies, U.S. National Labs, so all here. Yeah, that's why America can do things like the Chips Act and can restrict the way ASML equipment. Whitman moves to China because America, because the IP was developed here in America. So even if it's changed hands, we still have some leverage. Fascinating. Take us through the fundraise. How did it come together?

Starting point is 02:13:18 Who's involved? What's the story with the latest fundraise? It feels like a big ambitious project that needs some very ambitious capital. But what happened? So I want to actually quickly go back to your previous point. about export restrictions. Yeah, yeah. A big belief that we've had

Starting point is 02:13:37 is that we shouldn't bet that China won't do this. Totally. And a big part of what we're doing is that, like, there's the United States and there's China, and those are really the two countries that can actually attempt something like this.

Starting point is 02:13:51 And because of export restrictions, we know they're trying. And our belief is that if we're not trying to build what a next generation found you looks like today, we might wind up five, ten years down the line in a really difficult place. And so that's been a big sort of motivation because of the timelines. These things take a while to play out.

Starting point is 02:14:11 On the funding, I know there's a hundred plus number that's out. Like that's more actually historical, but clearly we're not going to build a fab with that amount of money. The key thing, though, is that unlike I think sort of traditional semiconductor fabs, because we focused on vertically integrating tools, we can reduce that cost and complexity so you don't need to spend $10 plus billion to even get something up and running. We think we can actually get that done

Starting point is 02:14:40 for a much, much lower cost. And then on the previous money that was announced, I think a huge shoutout needs to go to our investors because really when I started this company, I said there's a 1% chance of success and they still invested. And so for the founders fund, the general catalysts of the world and all of the others, these guys deserve a huge amount of credit.

Starting point is 02:15:07 Like, that's true venture capital. And we think hopefully with these results, we're showing that, yeah, these crazy bets can work. Is there any world where you partner with strategic investors or someone else in the stack? Is there a natural bedfellow in the ecosystem that doesn't feel, that feels like there might be some synergy here long term? I mean, 100%. For the entire American economy, it's now basically built on top of AI, which is built on top of advanced semiconductors.

Starting point is 02:15:42 And so we see this as a sort of a whole-of-nation effort. And so the more people we can partner with, we're very open to that. Very exciting. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. I'm coming out of stealth, massive weekend. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon. We'll talk to you soon.

Starting point is 02:16:00 And thank you. The production team thanks you for potentially the most perfect Zoom interview set up ever. So shout out to your team. I like the IEMs as well. That's a nice touch. Have a great rest of your day. Great stuff. Thank you, guys.

Starting point is 02:16:17 Bye. See you. Up next, we got Sean McGuire from Sequoia. Capital coming. Oh, what's he wearing? What's he wearing on the hat? There he is. I got so excited about the hat. I forgot to do the ad read, numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax and bite. Okay. Thank you. Now we got a shot. Sorry. I saw you on the preview screen with the hat. I got excited. I brought you in prematurely before I could do the ad read. Anyway, how are you? Good to see you. Big week in Sequoia Capital Land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually explain what happened. Some new raised, but how do you frame all of the actual progress and the actual announcement? Like, what happened? What is up, boys? You guys have become celebrities since last time I was here. You got Satya and Adela. You got all these legends and then jokers like me. Oh, you kicked it off. You kicked it off. Anyway, it's been amazing to watch. And yeah, I got the hat. I'm reping for you.

Starting point is 02:17:14 Thank you. And I got to say, this last guy had the best Zoom and audio setup ever. And, you know, again, I'm just on my Well, no, this is your zone. This is your zone when you, you know, anytime there's controversy on the timeline, you just flip open the laptop, hit record, 30 minute video.

Starting point is 02:17:30 Single take. One take. And this is what people want. They want something that just feels like, okay, I'm actually talking to the person in their office. I get the texture of what their life is actually like. I'm sure this is what tons of founders see when they pitch you.

Starting point is 02:17:44 They open up and this is who's on the other end of the line, right? Something like that. It works to be somewhat relatable. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so look, we're dropping new funds. We're very lucky Sequo's been in business for over 50 years. You know, this is the next vintage of our flagship. Overnight success.

Starting point is 02:18:04 Overnight success. You know, Sequoia's backed a couple small companies in the past, first investor in Nvidia. Yeah, Nvidia. Series A of Apple, series A of Google. Let's go. on and on and on. Next, venture fund, vintage dropping. Venture fund 19. Also, Seed Fund six. Seed is, you know, something that we used to combine inside our venture funds, but wanted to place a major emphasis on it really just show the distinction.

Starting point is 02:18:35 And I would say, so anyways, fund size, $750 million and $200 million for seed. Something that I think is... Is there a growth fund as part of this? Is that a separate thing? Is that all. cycle right now. Yeah, so the growth fund is different cycle. Different cycle. They announced their funds recently. Got it. Something that I'm honestly very proud of. I joined Sequoia six years ago. And I feel like this is the first fund cycle where we really have like a new team, a cracked generation of young people and that have now been working together for five plus years. And so it really feels like we're firing all cylinders. We got Stephanie. Stephanie with, you know, skilled on stage with Jensen yesterday and, you know, reflection.

Starting point is 02:19:22 We got Constantine hitting his stride with Expo and a bunch of other companies. You know, we got everyone on the team has some amazing portfolio companies. You know, and then the growth team, you have so many great people, Pat, Andrew, you know. And you're taking companies public every day now. Yeah. Et cetera. And a whole new generation there, too. any specific kind of like decision-making or insight around like how you guys decided

Starting point is 02:19:50 kind of the fund sizes specifically was that I'm sure you know based on a lot of learnings over the last few years and and seems like a commitment to like driving driving like real venture returns and staying committed to that but what more can you say there yeah no you nailed it something I think people kind of misunderstand about Sequoia. And look, I got to drop the flex, but Sequoia has this outsized history in terms of the scale of companies we've backed. Like, if you look at the NASDAQ, about 30% of the NASDAQ by market cap were early Sequoia companies. Pretty wild. But we actually don't invest in that many companies per year. We really try to keep it pretty focused and targeted where we can be active

Starting point is 02:20:42 company builders. And there was a pressure the last few years. And I would say, like, we got caught up a little during the COVID era, as everyone did. And our pace increased. But we've just gone back to basics. And we're really just focused on ultra high quality, like finding just true outlier founders that have really big vision and kind of rolling up our sleeves to help them build these companies and it's just we're trying we're trying to not get too caught up in any of the trends we're trying to be like ahead of trends and um you know keep the fund size just where we can actually have we we strive for minimum 10x net returns like that is that is our goal for every fund and that's what we want to be what about actual team structure team size uh is has there been any

Starting point is 02:21:34 evolution in the thought process around how large the partnership is, how large the support structure is, the back office, the, you know, how all of that fits together. Is there anything that's structurally changing or do you see it as like kind of just a slight evolution of the, of the same plan? Great question. So we're, you know, we have to be paranoid at Sequoia. Like that's our, our secret is being ultra paranoid and just trying to outwork everyone. Didn't a Sequoia founder say that? Something I hope so. I think so. But we went through pretty hardcore generational transition five, six years ago. Most of the team was not here eight years ago. You have people like

Starting point is 02:22:23 Rulov and Alfred that have been here for a long time on the early team and kind of have helped and Doug when he was active, helping to kind of bridge the generational divide. But I would say where we've innovated is kind of with new team and then otherwise really trying to just stay true to the roots of Sequoia, active company building, you know, focus on both like really trying to understand market structures and find out liar founders. I think that's something that's different about Sequoia's. We're not, we're not like an or it's not founder or market where it's an and and, like we want founder and market. In terms of everything else, I would actually say we've almost gone back to basics a little bit more. Like, you know, we have.

Starting point is 02:23:05 We have a wonderful operating team, and that's something that, you know, we built up over the last five or six years. But we've basically kept it pretty steady in terms of size. Like we feel good about where everything is, and now we need to execute. Okay. Defend the venture capitalist, because I'm going to make the argument that the venture capitalist, not Sequoia in particular, but venture capital as an entire category is cooked, chopped, destroyed, it's over. earth the game's over. And here's my thesis. What was Roloff's quote the other day? It's, it's not an asset class. He said venture capital is not an asset class, which I 100% agree with. It was a great quote. He said it's a reward-free risk. It's a reward-free risk. That's a great

Starting point is 02:23:50 quote. But specifically, I want you to address this kind of, maybe it's a headwind, maybe it's not, you tell me, there's this idea that you are a venture capitalist. You can see the future. You know that self-driving cars are coming and your options are Waymo and Tesla. You can't get venture exposure to that necessarily. You're excited about humanoid robots. Well, Tesla's in that. You're excited about AI. Well, like, if you wanted to play Open AI, took a billion dollars from Microsoft and all the VCs were getting in small slices. No one was able to build a 30% position in that company like they would have done in the previous era with a Facebook or with a Google.

Starting point is 02:24:33 Yeah, John was texting me last night joking. He's like, it's absolutely criminal that Satya didn't get carry on the opening eye investment. And, I mean, I don't know your thesis on quantum computing. It feels very early. I love that series A and Ion Q, which is a public quantum computing company. Let's go. Okay.

Starting point is 02:24:51 And I did my teaching the quantum information. So maybe that works. Maybe we need to go there. But it feels like there's also competition from big hyperscalers in that market as well. We need the Martin Screlli, Sean McGuire, debate. on quantum. Oh, yeah. So we definitely.

Starting point is 02:25:03 I'm actually closer to Martin in a lot of views. Yeah. So maybe it would be an agreement. The Martin Sean conversation rather than... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:25:13 Okay. So yet let's table quantum in particular, in particular, and let's instead say how does venture capital play in a world where frontier technologies

Starting point is 02:25:24 take $10 billion and 20 years to mature, self-driving cars, AI, etc. Look, I think Rulav nailed it when he said that venture capital is not an asset class. But we don't do it the way other people do. And granted, there's a couple funds I respect unbelievably deeply

Starting point is 02:25:45 that have a lot in common with us. A couple. There are only two people I respect. There are two people I respect. There's a couple funds. But look, we're really deeply involved. oftentimes in like the formation of companies. I think in the last year,

Starting point is 02:26:06 there's been at least five or six companies where we signed term sheets before, sorry, where we were involved in the putting together of companies like before they were even incorporated. You know, we were kind of structuring the companies, bringing the founders together. My partner, David Kahn, played a big role on bringing Kala together, for example.

Starting point is 02:26:25 Which is an Israeli defense tech company where, you know, there was a very talented founder that a bunch of us knew a loan drawer who had a general, idea, but he didn't have the right team for it. And I would say his initial idea was wrong. And we helped him with the idea. And then David brought in, had a vision of bringing this woman, Hamutal Meridor. And that combination is magic. And I really, it's hard to explain how frequently we do that. And so it's like, if you're a passive investor at the late stage, there's no alpha today in VC or very little. But,

Starting point is 02:27:01 that's just not the game we play. We're extremely active. I mean, my partner, Jim, gets incubated Palo Alto networks. You know, Rulov, both invested in YouTube with three people, and they worked in the Sequoia office in the beginning. And I mean, I can give you so many examples like this. And so we don't think of ourselves as just like an index on the basket. We're trying to like bend the arc on the asset class. And look, I'm going to give a shout to Founders Fund. Like they do this incredibly well. They've been incubating companies, they bring a founder mentality, you know, the more passive later stage. My, I mean, yeah, obviously like Sequoia and Founders Fund, incredible returns, like the model's

Starting point is 02:27:42 clearly working. I guess maybe it doesn't matter that Sequoia and Founders Fund, like, I don't know, all the funds, it just feels like there's a world where self-driving happens or some other big, huge, humanoid robots. it happens, but it happens in a way that the value isn't captured by venture capitalist. And that's what I'm wondering. I'm not worried about it. You're not worried about that.

Starting point is 02:28:08 Okay. I'm not worried about it. I think there will be a lot of value captured in the public markets. You know, like one of the best, one of the best, you know, trades you can make in AI the last five years, the office is buying Nvidia. Yeah. The same was true with crypto, though. Like, you could just buy Bitcoin.

Starting point is 02:28:24 Yeah. Buying Bitcoin outperform basically every crypto investment. but Coinbase was still an amazing investment. I think Bitcoin, like at almost every point in time, slightly outperformed Coinbase. Maybe not. I've heard from investors that that's why they passed on Coinbase because they were like, I'll just buy Bitcoin.

Starting point is 02:28:42 It's actually a big part of why Sequoia passed on Coinbase in the time. So look, I think we've seen this play out many times before, but I'll give you a counterpoint. The funny thing in there is that the reason why Bitcoin has done so well is probably because there were VCs that were like, yeah, I'll pay for the R&D. at Coinbase to make it accessible, and then the price went up. And so everyone else is, you and FF were free riding, maybe.

Starting point is 02:29:05 Yeah, we were. There's always been this dynamic, though, you know, like the famous telco buildout in the late 90s, where global crossing and all the, you know, there were 17 fiber companies that went public and were very highly valued. And investors lost all their money. But that fiber buildout laid the pathway for, you know, SaaS and consumer internet companies in the early 2000. This dynamic is always happening, and I think as investors, we just have to try to stay countercyclicals, try to stay ahead of the bubbles, try to figure out what second order effects of the bubbles.

Starting point is 02:29:39 Like, whenever you concentrate huge amounts of capital, there will be all this new infrastructure that you can take advantage of. And so we're just, you know, like defense tech is an area where we were not very active in before the war in Ukraine. And tragically, that war was a catalyst. And you have to identify, like, even though you have a catalyst, there's probably only a six to 12 month window where defense tech is non-obvious. And so we made three or four, I think, really good investments in that period, you know, like Neros, like Stark,

Starting point is 02:30:11 like, you know, Kella a little after that. And you just have to be ahead of the curve because, like, now I think defense tech is becoming... Consensus. It's too obvious. And so it's like valuations are incredibly high. But it's just like, that's our... job at Sequoia is to be head of the curve on these things. And there's just always going to be

Starting point is 02:30:31 opportunities to make money if you're proactive. Venture capitalists by minority positions in companies and you can be on the board and you can be adding value and helpful. But there's this after you kind of deploy into a company, there can be kind of this grass is always greener thing where it's like you can meet like another five companies the next day and there's always like this influx of opportunity, you've been at Sequoia now for years and you have an opportunity to meet new companies every day or, you know, get on the phone with existing portfolio companies, some of which are maybe doing really well, some of which are maybe not. Like, I was curious if Sequoia, like, has any lessons throughout history of companies that, like,

Starting point is 02:31:16 that you guys draw on of companies that kind of, like, hit rough patches and people were maybe less excited about but like found a way to have you know get to another kind of inflection point because I feel like you have 50 years of history a lot of being a great firm is just remembering what made you great and having these sort of like lessons that are like IP effectively oh man this is such an astute point and look I think this is one of the superpower I think it's a lot of superpowers you know one is we just have this network a lot of the founders be back we're employees at, you know, prior Sequoia portfolio companies. So there's that flywheel.

Starting point is 02:31:54 There's like the institutional knowledge, you know, moats. There's just like the, there's a customer mode where we have, there's so many companies that, you know, they've, someone that bought whiz early and it made them look really good as a CISO or CIO. Like they're more likely to buy like the next, like, Eon, the next infrastructure company. So there's all these moats or advantages. But on this one, incredibly astute point. Alfred Lynn tells a story of how Doordash really struggled to raise at least one or two rounds of funding. I'm sure you remember Uber was the hottest company in the world for a long time.

Starting point is 02:32:38 And DoorDash was like number three or so in the space. It was really hard for them to raise. I think it was a series C. I may be off by like maybe a series B or D. but I think this is seriously. He tells the story all the time. It was pretty hot as well. There were a bunch of legacy platforms like Grubhub and companies that had been around before

Starting point is 02:32:57 too. So it was a bloodbath. There's ultra-competitive. Instacartic. Hadn't yet become positive. They really struggled to raise around. You know, Airbnb, like, Sequoia was the first investor or led the C-down. Sorry, not first investor.

Starting point is 02:33:10 They did Y-C, but, you know, we invested $600,000, like a $3 million valuation. And they went through some incredibly hard times. even like during COVID, I mean, for them, I remember Alfred's updates. It was just unbelievably brutal period. It was like easy to give up on them. And that may sound crazy given the scale they're at today. But, you know, also with Elon, like SpaceX and Tesla, we're on the verge of death at multiple points. And when you have these, when you have these experiences, like it really is an institutional knowledge. like, you know, weapon.

Starting point is 02:33:49 Yeah, because it's just not, it's way less, it's way less fun to jump on the phone with a port co that's like totally struggling. And they're going to say like, hey, we need a bridge or can you introduce me to some more investors. And it's like, well, it's not fun to introduce a company that's struggling to other investors because it's way more fun to introduce a company that's ripping because you're like, you know, throwing a bone to them. I was curious to get a sense of, like, your activity in H1 of this year versus now. Have you picked up the pace? Have you slowed down at all? What's been, what's it been looking like?

Starting point is 02:34:27 I'm embarrassed. I saw the data recently, like, a few weeks ago, but I have so much going on, including a lot of, you know, Twitter drama, as you guys see. And somehow I don't remember the exact pacing data, and so I don't want to be wrong. We're a registered investment advisor now. So these things are, like, we get. Probably hard. When we're wrong.

Starting point is 02:34:45 Every time you come on, I want to ask you about stuff that you can't talk about because of RIA. And I don't care about whatever you're going viral for on Twitter. Can you talk about data centers in space? Your Caltech PhD. Do you understand it? Does it make sense to you? Am I team Delian or am I team data centers?

Starting point is 02:35:04 I wasn't going to make it about that. You could be, you could comment on it at a more abstract layer level. but you know, you're obviously a big space investor. I mean, like for 15 years, I started a failed space launch company in 2007. So, you know, and this is an idea we actually thought a lot about. Look, I think the reality is no one really knows. And actually something I told Delian with Varda, like, you know, I passed on Varda in

Starting point is 02:35:35 the early days, which I should have made the investment. And the way I describe it to Delian now is I think he had the right. right macro idea and the wrong micro idea. And to unpack that, like the micro ideas they wanted to make ZBLant, this like culture pure, fiber optic cables is like, dude, we don't need ZBLand in a world with Starlink.

Starting point is 02:35:56 Like ZBLan's good for long distance data movement. We're going to do it all with Starlink. The long distance data movement is going to happen in space with Starlink. But I think the macro idea of just building space infrastructure, building an incredible team, learning how to build satellites, I think that their timing couldn't be better just in terms of what's going to happen

Starting point is 02:36:17 to the space economy over the next 10 years on the back of SpaceX and Starship. And I think their ability to just concentrate talents and be in position to pounce when the opportunities come up is something that should not be underestimated. And so with these data center companies in space, there are two very real serious unknowns.

Starting point is 02:36:37 One is like just the thermal properties, dissipating heat in space is insanely hard, and anyone that says they figured it out right now, like, they have not figured it out. They may figure it out in this, in the, just by doing it's because you need a lot of surface area, right? Is that, is that? Yeah, there's basically, there's like no thermal connectivity or very little of space as a medium. And so heat that leaves any unit area, whatever, in space, it just, it stays close to the satellite in space. And so you need, you can move things around inside the satellite, but once heat leaves a satellite, it'll just heat up a little local

Starting point is 02:37:11 pocket of space around you and takes a very long time to dissipate away from the satellite. And so, like, this is something no one really understands how it works. The second is you have to do with high energy particles that are going through your electronics. You don't have the, you know, Earth's magnetic field shielding your electronics. And there's, you can have, you know, metal shielding and things like this. But no one really understands how this is going to work. and how it will affect all the circuits and electronics. So these two things are hard.

Starting point is 02:37:47 There's also like a big just time question around exactly when starship will fly, like when cost will be passed to the, you know, launch companies. So I think some of these companies may be too early. And look, I actually think I'm more team deline on the micro. Like I think he has the right points that there's a lot of things that are unsolved right now on the micro side of data centers in space. but I just, I'm such a macro bowl on space over the next 10, 15 years that it's hard for me to bet against any team that it's just building that, like, concentrate talent, building the expertise because I just think it's going to be such a exponential rising tide at some point in the next like 10 years. I can't tell you when that will start, but it'll be big. On the, on the SpaceX front, how there's been a lot of news over the last few weeks around direct to sell, uh, partner.

Starting point is 02:38:39 between like SpaceX and and other, you know, you know, device manufacturers, et cetera. How screwed do you think a lot of the big telecom companies are over the next 10 years? Look, I don't think they're screwed. I think that when you have, I think that, I think, look, I think SpaceX is going to do unbelievably well, unbelievably well. And I'm maximum bull on direct itself for SpaceX. But I think what happens, like, in the kind of most wild success scenario for SpaceX, SpaceX is providing like 20, 30% of the world's mobile data in a decade or so. But I think that the total mobile data consumption will be like double at that point. So it's still like a 70% net increase for all the existing telcos because there's something, this is just like a fact of history.

Starting point is 02:39:36 when a product gets better, people use it more. And, you know, like, when you have the ability, when you don't have dead zones in cell service, when you have 5G everywhere, you know, like, Optimus is going to come online, you know, Tesla cars are going to come online. People are going to be when you can, when you have really good mobile connectivity from the car, you're going to be streaming instead of, instead of like 1028P, you're going to be streaming 8K content from your car while it's driving you. And so I just, I think it's going to be one of these things where rising tides lift all boats, but I would not underestimate how big of a deal it's going to be for SpaceX. Yeah. It's already an oligopoly, but there are multiple hundred billion dollar companies in the category. And so if it just becomes, even if the market structure doesn't change and there's just a new

Starting point is 02:40:25 player in the oligopoly, that looks very, very good. We've asked a lot of people in the age of AI should you learn to code. That's a less interesting question to me these days. I want to know, should you learn to deal? Should you learn the art of the deal? Because basically, is the art of the deal becoming a more important tool in the founder's tool chest? Because we've seen so many, so many, no, it really feels like there are founders out there who can just work magic and martial capital and buyers and customers and the government and the government from a different country. And they get 17 people to say, yes, this has to happen.

Starting point is 02:41:08 And then all of a sudden, it happens. And we get the thing. And it feels like it could be the beginning of a new archetype, a new founder archetype, or maybe it's an old archetype. But what do you think about learning to deal? Yeah, look, I mean, first on the learning to code, I personally think that coding is going to be like doing arithmetic a long time ago. And it's just like it won't be as interesting or valuable.

Starting point is 02:41:35 humans won't be doing that much of it. But I think it's very valuable to train your mind how to think. And so a lot of like learning to code is like thinking. Is that kind of like thinking mode? Yeah, sure. Thinking mode. Thinking mode, deal mode. But look, I think I think like even more extreme than an even more extreme way to train your mind to think is doing pure mathematics. And so like if a kid's asking what to major in today, I mean, my answer would be like, do pure math or physics, which are the maximum ways to train your mind to think, you know, or learn huge social skills, like, just don't even go to college. You know, if you do, be president. Our intern over here, our intern at TVVN is on a gap semester, studying physics and is now

Starting point is 02:42:22 hanging out here. And he's just, like, nodding, just being like, I'm patting myself in the back. Sean McGuire says I did everything right. Curious kind of last question. I wish we could hang out longer, but we're back to back. I'm going to come to your Thunderdome soon. Yeah, please. Yeah, next one should be in person. Yeah, yeah. What are you seeing?

Starting point is 02:42:39 How is the government shutdown affecting defense tech companies that you're seeing or talking to? Oh, yeah. That's a good question. I'm going to give the brutally honest version, which is what I try to always do, at least my own opinion. It's a tale of haves and have-nots. So I work with a few companies that are, you know, getting absolutely reamed by it. But I also work with a couple companies where it hasn't really affected them. And basically, like, if you have something that the government absolutely needs,

Starting point is 02:43:13 like maybe they can't send you the money right now, but they're still giving you the phone call and telling, you know, and like, you know, telling you that this is what you should expect after, you know, after the shutdown ends. And, you know, we can still give you the award. We just can't, you know, tell you the exact dollar amount because we need congressional approval. on the exact dollar amount. And it's a tale of halves and half-nots. I mean, it's a really good signal, to be honest, at least as an investor, to be like,

Starting point is 02:43:42 is what I'm investing in a nice to have or a need to have? For sure. It's very clarifying. Yeah. Very good. Cool. Great to catch up. Always fun.

Starting point is 02:43:53 Congrats on the new. We need to ring the gong for Sequoia. Yeah. Yeah. They deserve a gonged. Two gong hits for the two new funds. Still got it. There we go.

Starting point is 02:44:04 Thank you, boys. You guys are legends. Keep crushing. Bye. See you soon. Thanks for coming on. Bye. Let me tell you about fin.com.

Starting point is 02:44:12 A.I., the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. You can go to fin. com. And we have Anil Chakravarti from Adobe in the Restream Waiting Room. Let's bring him into the TBP and Ultramm. Aneal, great to meet you.

Starting point is 02:44:32 What a set up. Almost like you guys are in the creative industry. Yes. Yeah, likewise. Great to meet you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for hopping on. I assume you're at Max.

Starting point is 02:44:41 Take us through the big headline news. What are the most exciting things happening in the Adobe ecosystem these days? Yeah, I'm coming here live from Max in L.A. We have over 10,000 people, everybody from individual creators to people in Hollywood who work with creative in the creative industry, enterprise customers, all kinds of people. It's been really exciting. Obviously, it's all about how we bringing... We're bringing AI in the creative tools that everybody loves and knows so well.

Starting point is 02:45:08 And we're really talking about how to make responsible use of AI, right? We have our own models with Firefly, and we had a ton of innovations around Firefly, which is designed to be commercially safe. We announced a big partnership with Google around VEO and Imagine, and there are all kinds of other third-party models that are now integrated into our tools, Runway and Luma and many, many others. And then we also announced how we can help customers with their own custom models. So we call it Firefly models, partner models, your models.

Starting point is 02:45:42 And, you know, if you are Disney or Home Depot or new old brands, how do you have an AI model that really protects your IP and becomes your brand brain? So that's really what's really what's been exciting. How are you thinking about the creative journey of the customer? I feel like there's probably people in the audience who might have became an Adobe customer by pirating a version of Photoshop in 1998, and now they pay for cloud every month. But now there's even more varieties of like niche use cases where a consumer can use a point solution, and then they grow and grow and grow into the ecosystem.

Starting point is 02:46:28 Is it more important than ever that you set up teams to capture those long-tail interactions, just a face swap over here, just a background remover over here, and then funnel everyone into the ecosystem? Or do you want to focus on just capturing people once they're ready to go into the enterprise workflows? Yeah, you know, exactly. As you mentioned, we have such a wide variety here

Starting point is 02:46:51 of people who have had their journey with Adobe. We had a Brandon Baum on stage, who was exactly like what you said. Yeah. He said he was 11 years old when he started using, using a cracked copy. This is the thing. No longer.

Starting point is 02:47:05 Exactly. After Effects. And he said he's a paying subscriber now. Of course, of course. And then, you know, what he said was, you know, he said he started playing with, you know, he was a kid, he got hooked on it. Yeah. And he showed how you can do it with Firefly.

Starting point is 02:47:18 I mean, he posted something yesterday and, you know, he, that a video that he created with Firefly. And then, you know, he got some comments and said, somebody said, hey, looks like this is going to be a plot twist here. And so he did the plot twist here. And so he did the plot twist on stage today. He used Firefly and all the tools to just take the next episode in that story. So we've got all types.

Starting point is 02:47:38 You know, you've got enterprise customers who are like, hey, we would love to use all these new Gen AI tools. It's got to get through our systems, our regulation, our compliance. Adobe, people trust Adobe. So if you can make it available, it becomes so much easier to use all of this innovation. And then we have a lot of people, like you said, who, have their favorite tools and they want to see all this AI in their favorite tools. And then there are many, many others, you know, we think maybe more than half the people like Max are attending for the first time. So they just want everything on a mobile app.

Starting point is 02:48:15 They don't have the desktop machine with Photoshop on it. They know every layer and all of that. So they just want it on their mobile app. And so we got all types. So the creative journey, ideas can strike you anywhere, and we want to help you turn that into creativity. What's your read on how Hollywood's been navigating Gen A.I. We're here in L.A. ourselves.

Starting point is 02:48:40 And when we talk to people in the industry on or off there, it seems like everyone is trying to get ahead and leverage the tools to the best of their ability, but there's this pressure to not piss off the broader industry of people that make it possible. what's been the read from people that are talking at the event because there's a little bit of like if you're too much at the bleeding edge and too loud, you know, you might get a people, people might come after you. Yeah, exactly. They're threading the needle. Exactly. They are excited about the potential.

Starting point is 02:49:17 They see what AI can potentially do in terms of everything from ideation, from helping create and make those, make the movies and other content for TV. And then also then getting the audience to participate, you know, everybody can have, it's so easy to create variations and get the, you know, make it more like fan experience that like the sports teams are doing. So they're really interested in all of that potential. But like you said, they want to make sure it's top-notch quality. They want to make sure their IP is protected and that they're not, you know, even unwittingly stepping on somebody else's toes. and they want to make sure that they're doing it in a way that's monetizable and that, you know, it's gives them a recurring revenue stream. So exactly like you said, they're threading that needle.

Starting point is 02:50:08 Yeah. Very cool. Did you have a product request, by the way? I did. I want you to bring back Photoshop Mix. I was a huge user of Photoshop Mix and my favorite features got deprecated and I moved to Photoshop Express and then I got a new phone. And one of the features, the one random feature that I used got deprecated again. And so now I am on the full Photoshop iOS app, the official Photoshop iOS app. And I'm learning it. But I do feel like one of my children was left behind on the Titanic or something. And I was left in the way.

Starting point is 02:50:47 So I will ask the product in particular. Have you tried Firefly? Have you checked Firefly out? I haven't. I haven't. But I understand. Like this is the nature of building a large. scaled, you know, business.

Starting point is 02:50:58 You need to move people through the different feature funnels. You can't keep every, otherwise it just becomes all tech debt. So I understand why things go the way they do. But as a dedicated user of the legacy app. Why, in as few words as possible, because we're running out of time. Why, what's your read on, like, specifically, I think people, the bears out there think that AI is disruptive, could be. disruptive to the Adobe ecosystem. We're a creative business for media company. We're constantly

Starting point is 02:51:32 creating media and advertisements and things like that. Our view has been that it seems more obviously to be an extending innovation or people being able to generate an image or a video and then suddenly have that asset and be like, well, now I want to change it. Well, what tool are you going to use? It's probably a tool within the Adobe ecosystem. So in as few words as possible, what's your view on why AI would be an extending innovation for the Adobe kind of suite of products? Yeah, we look at it as the evolution of a new operating system, and we are the creative AI platform that runs on new operating systems. You know, when you look at our history, when it was desktops, I mean, we ran on Mac OS and

Starting point is 02:52:16 Windows OS, when it became cloud, you know, whether it was with AWS or Microsoft Azure or with, you know, with GCP and others, when it became mobile. whether it was iOS or Android. So we have the history and the track record of making sure that we work very well with emerging new operating systems. And the new AI is the new operating system. Now, you have to believe,

Starting point is 02:52:41 I think it's a simplistic view that the operating system will do everything that the apps do. And, yeah, I mean, that just seems, in our view, very simplistic. So we think much obviously from our perspective that we're good at working with these new operating system, that's what we announced

Starting point is 02:52:57 Google yesterday, and we actually showed within chat, GPT, how you can work with Adobe tools like Express. So, it's evolving of how they, you know, what do the operating systems do and what do the apps continue to do? And there's new layers of AI, but that's the architecture is evolving

Starting point is 02:53:13 fast. But we think that you need both. I don't think it's either or, and that's where we think the world is going to be. Yeah, I mean, I've used so many of these little point solution AI tools, and I've just I feel like I've seen a glimpse of where this all goes and it's like I actually do want a platform

Starting point is 02:53:30 that then can sub out different models so I can get Firefly or V-O or Mid-Journey or hopefully you wind up building a platform that's so open that all the different features and models are there and it's just like having the lasso tool next to the rectangle tool next to the text tool and that's a very natural progression for Adobe in my opinion. It seems very logical.

Starting point is 02:53:52 We've got to get you on our consumer advisory board. I mean, you really summed it up, really good. Yeah, I mean, I hate that I lost my Photoshop Mix. John's got some strong opinions, he'll have. We're going to bring it back for you. Yeah, but I, no, no, no, no. I don't actually think you need to. I think you actually do need me to suffer a little bit to get into the proper full-fledged ecosystem

Starting point is 02:54:12 that has all the tools in one place because that's where the actual value is right now. Everyone knows that you can spin up a website that's a text box and it generates one asset, that, one image, one video, but that's not how creativity works. We're not just going to one shot a two-hour movie. Exactly, exactly. No, you should really check out Firefly. I think you'll enjoy it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Starting point is 02:54:37 Great to meet you. Great to chat. And congratulations. Have fun at Adobe Max. I've been seeing a ton of people, friends of mine posting that they're there, wish I could be there. Hopefully, in a future year we'll be able to attend. It'll be great.

Starting point is 02:54:49 Thank you for having me on. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. uh before we bring on our next guest let me tell you about adio customer relationship magic adio is the a i native c rm that builds scales and grows your company to the next level you can get started for free and up next we have brin putnam from board board board it's just bored i was looking for the name and it was right in front of me uh it's so great to meet you uh incredible launch yesterday i think uh i'd love i my favorite launches to see our ideas that when you see that when you see

Starting point is 02:55:23 them. They just seem so incredibly obvious, and yet no one thought of it or thought to take it seriously enough and take it into a real product. So it's great to meet you. We'd love sort of introduction and quick background on yourself, and then we can talk all about the business. Yeah, so nice to meet you as well. I'm a huge fan. I'm excited for the gong. I'm here for the gong. It will come. So, yeah, so founder and CEO of board. board is the first ever face-to-face gaming console that blends the best of board games and video games into an entirely new way to play. What we've done is taken a 24-inch touchscreen and trained it to do something that no other screen does, which is recognized not just fingers

Starting point is 02:56:11 and gestures, but also physical game pieces. So it knows what the pieces, where it is on the board, and what it's doing. So it's an entirely new way to play together. Amazing. through the kind of aha moment when you decided to build this because again it's so obvious people love board games people love video games why not put it together did you when you started thinking about this was did you look throughout history it kind of was there any other attempts that stood out on things like this like walk us through that kind of early creative process yeah so I always end up just building from personal frustration and pain so

Starting point is 02:56:53 I am the proud mom now of five kids. I've got two kids and three step kids. So maybe I'll get my gong there, you know, ranging from two to, two to 21. So we were just trying to figure out ways to connect and we would play board games and we'd have to play candy land so my two year old could join or we'd try to play video games and the teenagers would smoke us because they've clocked so many hours on modern controllers. And it just felt like there had to be something that was a lot more. fun and intuitive and so really the unlock was like could we use a piece like a controller so you put the spaceship down and it shoots you put the stairs down and the characters walk up it and it was just really a way personally for me to bring my family together that's amazing john's back with a gong hit

Starting point is 02:57:40 it hit it again once for board once for the five kids second time that's uh so so how do you what's it like kind of building building the console and the games themselves at the same time? And then do you plan to, I'm assuming you're planning to open up kind of a platform over time, but maybe start with the first question. Yeah. So, you know, I've always felt like if you really care about a great experience, you kind of always end up wanting to control the full stack. And my last gig, I built a company called Mir, and we built custom hardware, software, and content. And same thing here. As you start to design the experience you want, you realize you need to control the hardware, the software, and also the games.

Starting point is 02:58:25 I think the hard part this time was the games. So finding the fun is not an easy formula. Getting the hardware and software to all work is incredibly challenging and required of a lot of deep technical knowledge. But you could keep making the games forever and then eventually you just decide you got to ship. But ultimately for us, we're building a platform in an ecosystem. So we want to build a place where people can come and build cool. experiences around this shared screen using physical pieces. So it's really about building a place where other multi-billion dollar businesses can be born. This is one of the greatest, like,

Starting point is 02:59:01 second company, serial entrepreneur stories, because I don't want to simplify it, but it's like mirror was like a big screen on a wall and now it's a big screen on a, like a table. A lot of the, there has to be so many like, well, it's also, it's also so many, so many hardware companies just don't make it. So there is no second companies because if it ever gets so burnt out that they're like, I'm not doing that again. Yeah, that's for sure real. But yeah, I guess

Starting point is 02:59:28 how do you think about I feel like part of the success with board is like there will be a specific game that ultimately drives, I would imagine it'll be somewhat of a power law. Video games are very power law driven. So it's like, I'm sure you have confidence

Starting point is 02:59:45 in the first game, but it's possible that it'll take a little bit or a while to have like the hit that makes the product go totally mainstream. So it's like how do you balance that needing like the games being like a hits business, right? There's been a bunch of board games and there's one monopoly, right? Totally. I mean, we think about it really as our job is to show off what's possible with this new technology. So our job is to show the breadth of the portfolio. So we've got quick arcade hits to deep 3D spatial strategy games and really a lot of incredible physical digital interactions, and we think that the great game is probably

Starting point is 03:00:24 going to come from someone we don't know yet. So really our job is to just let a thousand flowers bloom and then see what happens. But we feel confident that with this first set of 12 launch games, we're kind of showing what's possible with this new way of playing, and we're really excited just to get people building on board. Do you think that there are, like, it's exciting to see where the V2 of the technology, where you can do unique games that take advantage of this hardware specifically, understanding that the pieces touch the screen and they're identifiable. But is there also some value just to being like, I've played Settlers of Katon on an iPad? Like, it is a good experience just because it's a good game. And so is there

Starting point is 03:01:04 a world where you want to, on day one, take advantage of a particular app store or catalog that's already there? Even if you're not taking a big cut, you're just kind of bootstrapping the experience so that people are like, oh, well, you know, I didn't like that game. But it's a 24-inch iPad, and I was able to use, you know, the game that I liked on day one. Yeah, I mean, this was like the big debate, right? New and native or porting IPs, and we made the less safe choice, I would say, to go new and native because we felt we were doing something really novel, and we had a really novel technology, and we needed games that fit the tech.

Starting point is 03:01:40 So, you know, the Wii Remote unlocked Wii Sports and swipe on mobile, unlocked Angry Birds, and we felt like we have a similar, you know, a similar technology. But I think there's definitely a future where characters or IP that you're familiar with come alive in a new and native way on board. We've had a lot of exciting outreach from toy companies and entertainment brands. Yeah. So it's been quite a 24 hours of inbound on social for us. Not every day you get a Mick Jagger posting about your product or in the first 24 hours. It's been fun.

Starting point is 03:02:14 That's amazing. Well, I also just bought one live here on the air. You can check Shopify. buy. I love shop pay. I'm like, I'm on the website. It's for sale. You're shipping these already, is that correct? Or is it, I didn't even check, so. Yeah, we start shipping the. Yeah, we're arriving 2030, Jordy. Okay. 235. Right around AGI is when you're going to get it. No, no. We ship the week of 1110. So shipping in a week or two. Oh, wow. How did you plan around supply? This feels like the,

Starting point is 03:02:48 like this could be the holiday gift of the season if you have the supply like how do you plan around have you been planning around inventory yeah so one of the nice things about it being kind of the second go around is we're working with a tier one CM out of Thailand who has a lot of experience with display products and so they're really adept at being able to scale inventory quickly as we start to get demand signals but it's definitely going to be a busy holiday for all of us yeah it's crazy john can we get a gong for mcjagger kevin uh one of of the designers ask for it. Gong for Mc Jagger. Well, congratulations to the whole team. This is super exciting. I can't wait to, I can't wait to try it. We'll have to, well, I'm sure there'll be a

Starting point is 03:03:29 game that we can play here on air to settle disputes, and I'm excited to play with my family back home. I love it. Fantastic. Thank you guys so much for having me. Awesome. What's the domain, by the way? Board.com. Oh, yeah. Board.com. Available today at board.com. Normally a dot-com purist, but board. Dot fund works, yeah. Love it. Me too, but you got to go with the dot fun. Yeah, very fun. This is such an exciting story.

Starting point is 03:03:57 I'm seriously so excited about this company. It's amazing. Just like the perfect founder of everything. I'm very excited. Congratulations. Did you announce last quote, did you announce fundraise already? Did you ever announce it? Is that?

Starting point is 03:04:13 We haven't yet. So we raised 15 million in funding. We were lucky to have funds we've worked with before, Lair, Box, and then first round, and then some new folks adjacent patron, Medradorra, S.V. Angel, join. So now kicking off our Series A now. Fantastic. All right, well, we'll love to chat about that. Another gong, then.

Starting point is 03:04:39 This was a very gong heavy segment. But putting on a master class and, yeah, I can't wait to play. Very excited. Thanks, guys. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Shop pay is just so good. So good.

Starting point is 03:04:56 You can just buy stuff during interviews. Our next guest is already in the Restream waiting room. But quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising meet easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only add quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient. seamless ad buying across the globe. We have George Kurtz from Crowdstrike in the Rishi Wayroom. Welcome to the show, George. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time

Starting point is 03:05:23 to come and chat with us on this busy GTC part time of the year. We'd love to get an introduction on you and just a little bit of an overview of what's new in your world. What's new at GTC? Sure. So George Kurtz, founder and CEO of Crowdstrike, leading provider of security solutions. And I think the big announcement, many big announcements at GTC, but certainly on the security side, was continued partnership with Navidia. We have AI's leader and securities leader coming together to provide greater protection for customers. And that was a big part of our announcement that Jensen went through. And we're excited to be working with. and we've been working with them for for years now and uh to see it all come together as part of

Starting point is 03:06:11 gtc i think was just fantastic yeah take us a layer deeper you could be uh they could be a customer of yours you're securing them as a company you're baking it into the chips there's a wide you're buying chips from them there's so many different ways to partner with invidia these days yeah so as you know and i think a big part of his talk was in invidia being the platform company yeah uh he sort of joke saying like hey i you know we don't even sell things to people like everything's embedded into other systems and you've got to use the platform, which is part of what we've done. If you look at what they've come out, what they've got something called Nemotron, which are open models that customers can use and build their own AI agents. So really,

Starting point is 03:06:52 this particular announcement was focused on bringing security and visibility from an AI agent perspective to the edge. So we've got something called Charlotte, which is our agentic technology, which allows our customers to identify and understand threats and do a lot of the work of what a security analyst would do, which many times is sort of a one-to-one relationship between a threat and an analyst. And now with our security AI agents, we can do the work of many analysts, and one analyst can control those agents. So that's what Charlotte does.

Starting point is 03:07:26 Now, Charlotte, with this announcement, has the ability to actually talk to other AI agents leveraging the Nibotron models and the NIM inference microservices. So as those agents are closer to where AI is created or on-prem or in a data center, you want to have very quick visibility into what's happening. And in many times, customers have their own AI agents where they're not shipping maybe sensitive data to the cloud. It might be a network diagram or might be other sensitive information. So Charlotte can now talk to these other AI agents that are at the edge to make better

Starting point is 03:08:00 decisions, and they're always continuously learning. So we're one of the premier security partners for Navidia, and that was part of our announcement. Does vibe coding scare you? I love vibe coding. I'm an investment level. I do it myself. It's also good for crowd strike, right? It's like people are going to just make a lot of software quickly. They probably need to spend more on cybersecurity, too. They do. So, you know, the old joke in many years ago was like, you know, you'd have people come out of university and they would just go to any number of the repositories and they would just grab their code snippet and slap it in and if something was poorly written it would just propagate everywhere right you'd have this big problem and now you know some of the coding that you get some is very good but you have to give it the right prop

Starting point is 03:08:46 is a inefficient and it looks like an intern wrote it so it's got a lot better you know in the later generations but that does become potentially problematic and given the rise of AI the ability to actually find these software vulnerabilities is increased dramatically. I mean, we're seeing AI find more and more and more vulnerabilities and sort of leading the charge on these bug bounties because they're so efficient at finding software flaws. Crowdstrike has something 10,000 employees. How do you think that, how are you thinking about human capital allocation over the next decade? Is it, is AI changing your philosophy about the shape of the workforce? Yeah. Yeah, I think there's just two pieces to it. on the security side, which is specific to how do you leverage AI agents to do more work on behalf of customer? What we found is, at least in my mind, the more AI you have, the more work you

Starting point is 03:09:41 can actually get done. And security is that you're always up against it. You're up against the clock from an adversary perspective. And there's just so much data to get through and so many threats that let the machine do what it's really good at, let it sift through this data, let it figure out what's happening. And then again, what happens is those security. analysts become really the pilots, right, where they're piloting these AI agents. And you can think about it akin to maybe, you know, a Waymo or, you know, automated taxi, or autonomous taxi, I should say, where you've got all these autonomous chauffeurs, but then you have sort of the pilot in the cloud if you get stuck. And I've been in, you know, these things where they've gotten stuck and they

Starting point is 03:10:23 wait and, you know, somebody pilots that gives it a wait point or what have you. And that's really how how secure is going to be transformed where the human is not going to be out of the loop, but they're going to be able to do so much more. So it's about helping people up, not out. That's the way I look at it from a security perspective. Now, if I put my CEO hat on, I think most CEOs are looking at, well, how do you get efficiencies from AI in running a business, you know, and looking in areas like legal and sales, obviously in coding, like how do you do more with the people you have?

Starting point is 03:10:52 And I think the big thing is always like, how do you flatten the hiring curve? It doesn't mean you're getting rid of a whole bunch of people. But if you could be more efficient because the people you have can do more, you can flatten the hiring curve, which ultimately adds leverage to the business model. So we're always looking at how to take people and upskill them and train them up. And that's what we've done internally. And that's also what we're looking at for customers that are using security technologies like Crowdstrike. What's the, in your view, the most significant, like, Gen.A.I-related security incident to date,

Starting point is 03:11:26 that's public. Is there one that comes to mind? You're like, I usually hear about the ones that we try to keep him out of the headline. But we were talking the other day, the fact that there's been this explosion of software, and we didn't, we didn't immediately have one that came to mind that felt like, squarely pin on Gen. AI. It actually feels like we've been doing pretty well on security. Yeah, there's actually, this is sort of the scary part of where the industry is going. there was some new malware that was found that was basically Gen AI malware or what I would call autonomous malware. So if you think about malware, you might, you know, you and your audience might be familiar with it.

Starting point is 03:12:05 You know, you have a program that's bad. And in the old days, the McAfee and semantics of the world used to have these databases that would go, okay, that's a bad file, we're just not going to let it run. And over the years, companies like ours, we've created this sort of math model where without even seeing it, we can tell if something's bad and we block it. That's kind of old hat. But now the new malware is basically gen AI, meaning if it drops on your system, okay, it looks like a script. It doesn't even look like a compiled program.

Starting point is 03:12:34 And essentially, it uses prompts to figure out, okay, what system are you on? What is unique about that system? What data can I harvest? And how do I learn more about the network I'm on so I can pivot and I can jump to another system that might be more interesting? So the fact that it doesn't necessarily have command and control back to the pilot, and it can do this autonomously. That's fascinating.

Starting point is 03:12:58 It can reason. Yeah, like the best security pen testers or like the best of the nation state actors that are, you know, piloting it themselves. So it's a pretty scary thought to have autonomous malware. Did you start crowd strikes so you could get more involved with motorsports? well it's it's been a passion of mine but it's been a big part of our overall brand you probably see us we love it we're a huge fans and uh you know our customers like it and it's just kind of part of the ethos but uh it's you know it's been just part of what we've done early on do you try to do you try to get to as many of the f1 races as you as you can or what's your

Starting point is 03:13:41 do you try to do you have to limit yourself because i know we know we know some sponsors and and like they've got a pretty heavy travel schedule. They're like, we sponsor this team for the next two seasons, we're going to be at every race. And I'm like, you might want to work on your business, but... Yeah, yeah, we actually just picked the big ones for us, obviously

Starting point is 03:14:00 the big U.S. ones. And then we host customers at those. We actually have what we call CXO roundtables. So we combine security and the technology of motor racing, and it's a passion. Security is a mission for a lot of people at Crowdstrike and a lot of our

Starting point is 03:14:16 customers. I mean, we can be doing lots of things, but we love the fight against the bad guys and bring those people together to talk about the technology and the speed of cybersecurity and the risk management of cybersecurity. There's a lot of analogs into motor racing. It's speed, it's technology, it's data, it's risk-taking or managing risk. And it's been a big part of, I think, just our brand. It's incredible. Fantastic. Well, we will hopefully run into you in Vegas for F1. If you're going to be there, let's coordinate. We'll give you a whole tour of the Mercedes Paddock and the garage.

Starting point is 03:14:53 We'll go have some fun. That'd be fantastic. Well, next time there's a massive public security incident in Gen A.I, we're going to give you a ring and we'll get you back on and have you break it down. But thank you for coming on and congrats on all the progress. And thanks for keeping us safe out there. You got it. Thanks, guys.

Starting point is 03:15:14 We'll talk soon. Great to hang, George. Have a good one. Bye. We should have done more time with him. I love CrowdStrike because every time I get one, I get nerd snipped by CrowdStrike reports like all the time. Whenever there's like when Solar Winds happen, like CrowdStrike tells the story of it and they're always gripping and they do a ton of good work out there. So thank you to everyone.

Starting point is 03:15:36 Thank you. To all 10,000 plus employees. And thank you to EatSleep. 8Sleep.com. Get a pod 5. Ultra. get a five-year warranty 30-9 risk-free trial.

Starting point is 03:15:46 I ran... Also, thank you to Bezell. Of course. Your Bezal concierge is available to source. You, any watch on the planet? Of course. Seriously, any watch? I ran off-screen for a second

Starting point is 03:15:56 and caught Brian on the way out, and he was saying, like, yeah, I told him like, yeah, I've been a little less healthy the last year running the show than historically. He's like, yeah, I've heard some of your eight-sleep updates for your sleep scores. You've heard your eight-sleep.

Starting point is 03:16:11 Been here in my sleep scores. Well, I got a 90 last night. Oh, you did? Back in the game. I completely lost my phone. I don't know. This is the, this is an issue. Do we have any more timeline?

Starting point is 03:16:23 Meta is reporting earnings, I believe, right now, or they already did. Meta stock sinks after tax hit weighs on earnings. What? They're down like 9%. Wait, what? Wait, wait. Is that good? Wait, who's down 9%?

Starting point is 03:16:42 Meta. Meta? Why? Earnings. They missed earnings? Oh, no. Microsoft sinks on beat. Meta crashes 6% on EPS, miss. Is it good that Microsoft is sinking on a beat?

Starting point is 03:16:57 Is it over? Is it over? No. It's not over for me. I got a 94. How'd you do? I got a 90. You got a 90?

Starting point is 03:17:04 I beat you. Seven hours, nine minutes. Let's go. I'm sleeping well, and that's all that matters. There's also a bombshell guest SS. in the New York Times about Open AI, one of the senior researchers who led product safety at Open AI is taking shots at their messaging around erotic content. They have some data around how many people use AI or use a chat GPT in this erotic faction, that's going to be a bigger

Starting point is 03:17:36 story for sure. This is definitely going to grow. But hopefully there's guardrails, hopefully there's more clear messaging on the actual transparency reports and the bounding, the boundaries of how these apps get used. I realize that I don't know if I've actually age verified with OpenAI. Like, I don't know if I've ever actually scanned my ID. And I mean, like, maybe this is a bull case for WorldCoin or something, but I feel like, I have a moral duty to upload my ID to chat GPT because I care about, I care about... We keep it pretty PG. I don't want, I don't want them releasing any of those adult features on your account.

Starting point is 03:18:29 Yes, but I want them to be able to clearly understand what an adult person is versus an underage person. And so it's important that they have a really strong data set of adults versus people who haven't age verified so they can classify the users effectively. What do you think, that? I actually have uploaded my ID to Open AI. There's a bunch of like, your real ID? Yes. Obviously, I don't have any other kinds of IDs. ChatGPT operator, agent mode, buy me a beer.

Starting point is 03:19:07 Deliver a six-pack to me. she's like yes Tyler we're thinking contacting the Instacart API and buying you a six pack but there are some products that you have to use the ID for at least it's like the early version so

Starting point is 03:19:24 like the agent builder oh agent builder you have to you have to ID verify at least it was in the days following like right when it came out sure sure sure sure I think I haven't heard anything about agent builder recently what's what's going on over there I have not used it either

Starting point is 03:19:38 You haven't been in building agents? I don't know. I mean, it's not like a... We should try. We should try to build a... We should try and build an agent that does something for TBPN. That buys beer. That buys beer for interns, yes.

Starting point is 03:19:53 Bobby Cosmic. Shout out to John for providing data to improve the system. Thank you. That's what it's all about. No, but seriously, if you want to keep the bad stuff out of the underage users, you got to know. who's of age and who's underage. And so you should be strongly in favor. People have said you have the mind of a child. Yeah. Brian Johnson, you know, he has,

Starting point is 03:20:20 I think his biological age is like 19. My, I did a test on my brain instead of the mind of a five-year-old. Yeah. A lot of dinosaur questions. Yeah. Constantly running deep research reports on I love that. I do have slapstick comedy. Nothing like a story of a, of a, of a, of a, leopard and a monkey falling off a boat and going splat. That's the pinnacle of comedy. Or just having the mind of a five-year-old and being like, why are clouds? Exactly. And then running a deep research report. Yes. This is the key. Do you mean what are clouds and you're no? This is the key. No. Why? More news. Apparently MasterCard is is planning to acquire zero hash for nearly two billion. Zero hash is a crypto infrastructure.

Starting point is 03:21:08 player they've been at it quite a long time and a pretty serious move from from them we should wait to kind of assess earnings since we can't listen or read any of the transcripts live exactly yeah but fortunately we'll be back tomorrow and John in the meantime find your happy place book of wonder with inspiring views hotel great a man he's dreamy beds top you're cleaning in 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. There's a bunch more stories, but we can get to them tomorrow. We will talk to you later.

Starting point is 03:21:48 Have a beautiful, productive evening. I'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.

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