TBPN Live - The Great Peptide Debate, SpaceX's Lunar Mass Driver, AI Coming for Zuck's Job | Martin Shkreli & Max Marchione, Mitchell Green, Shane Hegde, Dr. Adam Oskowitz, Robin Vince, David Senra
Episode Date: March 23, 2026Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(01:22) - SpaceX's Lunar Mass Driver (41:12) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (54:37) - AI Coming for Zuck's Job (58:17) - The Great Peptide Debat...e w/ Martin Shkreli & Max Marchione. Martin Shkreli, often referred to as the "Pharma Bro," is an American investor and former pharmaceutical executive known for his controversial decision to drastically increase the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim. In the conversation, Shkreli expresses skepticism about the growing popularity of peptides, attributing it to psychological factors like identity control and distrust of institutions. He emphasizes the importance of adhering to established pharmaceutical practices and regulatory frameworks to ensure drug safety and efficacy. Max Marchione is the co-founder of Superpower, a health optimization platform focused on proactive, data-driven care and longevity. He works at the intersection of consumer health, diagnostics, and software, building tools that give users deeper visibility into their biology and long-term health. (01:31:35) - Mitchell Green, founder and managing partner of Lead Edge Capital, discusses the firm's recent closure of its $3.5 billion Fund 7, highlighting the strong interest from both existing and new limited partners. He emphasizes Lead Edge's unique approach, leveraging a diverse LP base of world-class executives and entrepreneurs to support portfolio companies through customer introductions, recruiting, and advisory roles. Green also addresses the resilience of the software industry, countering notions of a "SaaS apocalypse" by underscoring the enduring value and stickiness of enterprise software solutions. (01:43:28) - Shane Hegde, co-founder and CEO of Air, a creative operations platform, discusses the company's recent initiatives, including a new ad campaign in The New York Times and their most significant product release to date. He emphasizes that while AI is a powerful tool, it cannot replace the deeply subjective and perfection-driven nature of creative work. Hegde introduces five new features launching tomorrow: access to 50 AI models within Air, a canvas editor for asset manipulation, AI agents for automated edits, a context layer to maintain brand consistency, and a shift to usage-based pricing. (01:52:53) - Dr. Adam Oskowitz, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Doctronic, discusses their AI-native care platform that offers free, 24/7 health consultations, connecting users to licensed doctors across all 50 states for $39 per visit. He highlights the platform's efficiency, enabling doctors to see more patients per hour compared to traditional telehealth services, and mentions a pilot program in Utah where their AI system can renew prescriptions without direct physician involvement. Additionally, Dr. Oskowitz notes that the platform's ease of use encourages users to seek care they might otherwise forgo, addressing the longstanding supply-demand mismatch in medicine. (02:00:16) - Robin Vince, CEO of BNY Mellon, discusses the bank's strategic focus on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance operational efficiency, enrich client services, and expand its service offerings. He highlights the development of Eliza, BNY Mellon's enterprise AI platform, which supports over 125 AI-enabled solutions and empowers employees to build custom AI agents, fostering a culture of innovation. Vince also emphasizes the importance of responsible AI adoption, underscored by BNY Mellon's collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University to advance AI research and education. (02:17:26) - David Senra is the host of the Founders podcast, where he studies and distills the lives of history’s greatest entrepreneurs. Through deep dives into biographies of figures like Steve Jobs, Estée Lauder, and Henry Ford, he focuses on the patterns, habits, and principles behind building enduring companies. 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Transcript
Discussion (0)
Election TBPN. Today is Monday, March 23rd, 26. We are live from the TBP at Ultradome,
the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about
ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. These use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole
lot more, all in one place.
Very barnyard-themed this morning. Very barnyard themed. Let me pull up the linear lineup.
Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development, 70% of enterprise
workspaces are using agents if they're on.
Very fun day today.
We got Martin Screlli.
Yep.
Coming on with Max over at Superpower to debate.
The peptides.
Two very different stances on these compounds.
And we will see how it goes.
Bring the popcorn.
Is there a peptide that helps with debating?
I'm sure there is.
Is there like a DBT1, DBT-157 that you can take in the
you become an incredibly big debater. Hopefully Max can make one before. We'll see. Then we have Mitchell Green,
lead edge capital coming on, 1230. Shane from Air, we're going into a lightning round. And then David
Center is coming on at 115, hanging out in person. Don't forget. We're going to ask what the
meaning of life is. B&Y. And Matt from Doctronic. Yeah. It's a very fun day. Anyway, over the weekend,
you watch this live, right? Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, the CEO of SpaceX.
got some folks together, gave a big keynote presentation about his vision for the future.
Basically something that looked like an ultradome.
It did look like an ultradome.
And so you watched this, right?
I did watch it.
I watched a little bit of it.
And overall...
And if you were taking a shot every time Elon said epic, you were not in any state to drive after about three minutes.
Yeah.
He's got so much going on at this point.
I mean, he's doing sports cars, cyber trucks, you know, Model 3, Model Y, just consumer cars.
Y, X-L.
Space Internet, space data centers, space launch capacity, point to point.
He's going to take us from one on a rocket from New York to Tokyo in an hour, 30 minutes.
Neurlink, brain chips, tunnels.
These Elon projects have just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.
Of course, he owns X and Twitter, X, A.I.
training foundation models trying to make a consumer app where you chat with it as well as you know
solve math and physics so the big and i yeah this was super rough it was i i listened to it and it
was a rough delivery like he seemed like he seemed a little like just like well okay got another
thing to present uh and so the cadence wasn't quite there and he wasn't able to get the crowd
going there was a lot of like waiting a little bit for the audience to like realize that that was
The key disclaimer, never bet against Elon.
True.
I'm not dumb enough to bet against Elon.
Yes.
I'm not dumb enough to try to short any of his company.
Yes, for sure.
And I'm not, you know, by now you should have learned not to doubt.
Yeah.
What his organizations can do.
Yeah.
And even though this tariffab concept, you know, there's a lot of reasons that you would want to bet against it.
Yep.
There's a lot of, I don't know that many people that are genuinely sold on the space data centers in the near term.
It's still, it is not clocking for me, John.
It's not clock for me.
That he's standing on business?
It's not clocking.
He's standing on business and it's not clocking for you.
It's not clocking to me that he's standing on space data centers.
And so this entire pitch, you know, notable, seemingly the first time he's put.
the Tesla X-AI SpaceX logos together?
Sure.
No.
The tunnel project, Hyperloop,
was a blog post that he wrote,
and it appeared both on the Tesla blog
and the SpaceX blog at the same time.
And everyone was like,
who's going to be involved in this?
And it turned out it was like a couple people
from both sides.
It became its own company at some point.
I'm not saying it's the first time.
No, no.
But it does feel like E.
He's gearing up for the Elon Mega Corps.
Yep.
Yep.
And, yeah, so just overall, the pitch is, he's basically saying, like, okay, we're going to do TerraFab.
It's this really hard project.
And the evidence for why you should believe that it's going to work well, because he's like, we've done a lot of hard things in the past.
Yeah.
And then talks a little bit about space data centers.
and then he talks about needing something in the order of a thousand times more compute.
Yeah.
Then we are...
He says to reach a petawatt will build an electromagnetic mass driver on the moon with robots like optimists and humans.
No, but before the mass driver, he's talking about how...
Oh, we're chip constrained, which is true.
Elon...
He gets it.
Chip constrained by 1,000x.
Sure.
And so we have to do this.
Yeah, we have to build more fab.
But he doesn't lay out like a super compelling case of what all the chips will be used for, right?
Is they going to be, is SpaceX going to be a neocloud?
Is it just for their own internal products?
Like, you know, self-driving, humanoids.
Yeah.
You know, again, again, my criticism is not of any individual company as much as the presentation I just came away.
he kept saying like if we can do this it's going to be epic yeah yeah and and and there wasn't a really
strong justification there wasn't a strong justification other than it's going to be epic yeah and then
he just closes out with this render of yeah the mass driver which is again it's tight yeah but i didn't
what was the takeaway on like what we're even going to use the mass driver for other than to get to
a cardishev three civilization which again all this stuff just feels so so so so
So far in the future.
Far out.
But when I...
He did, he did, he did, um, he did drop the line turning science fiction into science, science, science fact.
Science fact.
No way.
Which is I think it's a Josh Wolf line.
I mean, I don't know.
Josh Wolf is the first one ever say it, but it's a good line.
Yeah.
I think of it as a wolfism.
I do too.
And it's funny because Josh Wolf was like the hardest critic of Elon.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
And he was, that's right.
Like, he basically had.
to stop at some point.
Yeah, of course.
But yeah, he kept saying these lines that he was like expecting like kind of laughter.
Yeah, it was really hard.
I mean, doing like the actual delivery of a speech on stage.
I mean, Jensen just went through this with the keynote at GTC where he didn't have a teleprompter
and he was able to deliver moments and get the crowd going and the crowd size at GTC is really big.
And so even if you just have a couple hardcore fans that really good.
get you and have listened to every Jensen keynote.
They know, yeah, they start clapping,
and then everyone starts clapping because it's in fact,
and then pretty soon everyone's clapping.
This is how it works.
So yeah, yeah, I mean the comedic timing,
the delivery timing of like when to clap, when to be,
whoa, you know, that was a little tough.
I don't know the way I actually know who was in the audience.
It might have just been employees.
It has a certain aesthetic to it.
But interestingly about the TerraFab,
this is something I was advocating for back in 2022.
So when the Biden,
Chips Act happened, there was this question about like, what's going to happen with Intel? Intel
should be at the, like, the center of the Chips Act, because the whole pitch for the Chips Act was that
America is not on the leading edge of semiconductor fabrication. And so we need to sort of pull our weight
with our intellectual property laws to stop Taiwan from exporting them. Remember, Taiwan is its own country.
They should, in theory, be able to sell their products anywhere. Like, what, what say do we have over
you know, if Japan wants to sell Playstations to China or anywhere, why do we have authority over them?
Well, it comes down to the intellectual property.
There's a lot of patents that have been licensed to ASML, to TSM.
And so we do have the ability to pull levers and strings to sort of limit those,
especially if they're packaged by NVIDIA, an American company.
We have export rules.
But it's a stretch.
But the whole thesis was America is going to lose to China unless we do this.
And so Intel was a very logical one.
And I remember there was like $60 billion or something up for grabs around the Chips Act.
At the same time, Elon was marshalling around $60 billion to buy out Twitter, something like that, $40-something billion.
And then Intel's market cap, they're $220 billion company now.
I think that they were lower back in 2022.
They were maybe $150 billion.
And so it would have been a stretch, but between the Chips Act money, all the private equity dollars that came in, all the venture capital dollars that came into buy Twitter, there was a world where Elon just bought Twitter.
And there was also that, that rumor that he was maybe meeting with Global Foundries, that there were a number of different, like, oh, like, what is Elon really great at?
He's great at engineering efficiency.
What is Intel need?
It needs engineering efficiency.
there was a world where, you know, they teamed up and Intel, you know, like really delivered on building new facilities much quicker.
Yeah.
But, yeah, so, so here we are.
I think it makes total sense for Elon to make chips.
Yep.
I think, I think it will make sense over time for XAI to start offering cloud services to other companies.
Yeah.
Having computer is valuable.
But, but still, this seems.
like a kind of just kind of a blatant sci-fi pump going into the IPO.
Maybe.
I will take the other side of that.
But first, let me tell you about CrowdStrike.
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And we have, BNY was the first Bank of New York was the first company to go public
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And we have them joining later today.
So the other side of this is that it is good to have a long-term vision, even if it is decades away.
And that's what mass driver on the moon is.
It's not going to be realized this quarter.
It's not going to be realized this year.
Probably not even this decade.
Elon, interestingly, didn't really put a date on it.
Like, he's, yeah, did he say something specific?
He said, I hope to see it in my lifetime.
Yeah, in his life.
Which is like, I mean, he's 54.
He's got a while, right?
Yeah.
If he's a radical life extension guy, he could be like 300 years from now.
Who knows?
That's a very vague timeline.
Whereas in the past with point to point, with Roadster, with Cybertruck, with space data centers,
all the other Elon pitches have been very focused on, we think we can do this in five years.
We think we can do this in two years.
And he always gets criticized for being Elon math, two years.
aggressive, but then history's shown that, you know, he, he over promises under delivers,
but he typically does deliver eventually. And if the technology is completely new, no one else
was going to build it and he's the first one to build it, like, it's fine because Starlink works.
It was the first Leo constellation for satellite internet had turned into a huge business,
wound up being a great technology. And so even if, even if it was late, I don't even remember
the Starlink predictions, but even if that was late, it's fun.
Fine. It was still good business. Now, the mass driver's a lot crazier. I was going back and forth to Tyler about this, trying to get him to nail down a prediction. We started with 100 years. Do you think it's possible to put a mass driver on the moon in the next 100 years?
Yeah, but you said yes. So it's possible. Yes. There's all sorts of like qualifications. I think the thing, it was like 300 metric tons.
Okay. We will go through, we will go through my conditions.
We will also go through my timeline, and then we will get everyone's predictions for how long this will actually take.
So first, there was this interesting moment last year when everyone sort of like came around to the same AGI predictions or the same superintelligent prediction saying eight, ten years, George Hots, Dorcasch, Carpathie, Sam Altman.
There were a number of people that were all saying in various words, like Sam said a few thousand days, Dorcas had this probability.
distribution that said 2032.
And so everyone was sort of in the seven to 10 year range.
And it was just this interesting moment in the AI industry, at least, where everyone had
a clear definition of like what super intelligence would be.
And then simultaneously, everyone was like, yeah, it's not this year.
It's more like 10.
And so it was a cool set of discussions.
And I enjoyed that moment from last year, sort of around November, last year, fall.
But there's way, like we are so far away from consensus around mass driver timelines.
I thought it'd be interesting to start developing a thought process around what is a mass driver,
what a success look like, and what are reasonable timelines here, even though I agree with everyone,
with what you're thinking, which is that it's really far away because it is.
So first, we have to define what a mass driver actually is.
In simple terms, it's an electromagnetic launch system, fixed,
on the lunar surface that converts energy.
So you put down some solar panels, you take energy,
that's the electromagnetic, so you're not putting up fuel,
and then, because that's extra cost,
you once you're there, you can just repeatedly get sunlight,
turn that into energy, and you, it's fixed to the lunar surface,
and it's going to successfully accelerate a payload
to lunar escape velocity, which is one-fifth of Earth's escape velocity.
You gotta be going 5,000 miles an hour,
to escape the moon's gravity well, you have to be going 25,000 miles per hour to escape Earth's.
So from an efficiency, an energy efficiency standpoint, it's much better to leave from the moon
than to leave from Earth.
So then the payload needs to go somewhere useful.
Like you make this thing.
In this video, he's talking about making satellites on the moon.
That's even farther away, but those have to go somewhere.
So you can't just launch them into deep space, I mean, unless you, that's where you're going.
Usually you would go to a lunar orbit or an Earth orbit or some point in between the moon and Earth.
And there are more intermediate steps.
You don't need to go straight to satellite with a chip on it from the moon to wherever it's going.
You can start just by launching rocks, which sounds crazy or water or hydrogen.
If there's ice on the moon, you can split that into hydrogen that can be used as fuel with electricity.
Electrolysis is the technique for that.
Even just moon rocks can be used as radiation shielding.
Gabe says, what is this mass driver you speak of?
SpaceX is getting in the supplements game.
That's a great name for us.
They should make a...
They've done the Tesla Tequila.
Yeah, exactly.
They should make a mass gainer that they release now and say,
hey, you'll get, if you buy this,
you'll get priority access to the mass driver on the moon.
I like this.
I like this a lot.
I would definitely be a daily driver.
of the mass driver.
And so, yeah, there's this question of like,
you set up this thing,
that's going to take forever, be really expensive.
What are you actually pushing into space?
You probably start with basic materials.
So rock, literally rocks, metal, oxygen, water.
A lot of useful space.
What if the asteroids that we get into our atmosphere
is just an advanced civilization somewhere else?
Just hurried.
Mass driving?
Mass driving.
I saw, I saw, yeah, we're downrange, guys, relax.
I saw a hilarious take that the,
the first UFO that will arrive on Earth will just be a car guy from another galaxy who like
got into building a crazy you know supercar effectively taking it out on a cruise like you can't get
to earth in that thing that's too modded that's too crazy you're no yeah you're going to break down
there's no way and he's like I'll show you're going to be too old but I'll show you I'll show you I've
modded this thing so a lot of useful space infrastructure needs heavy shielding that means water
Regolith, other dense materials are good for shielding humans and sensitive equipment to radiation.
There's been a lot of fear around the radiation around affecting different instruments or humans in space.
So you wrap them in moon dust or water, and then that reflects the or diffuses the radiation.
You can also potentially get propellant from the moon.
If you can extract water from ice from the moon, especially near the poles, that water can support people because you can drink it.
or you can split it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant.
So here are the four conditions I think need to be met in order to say,
yes, we have a working mass driver on the moon.
This is how I'd formulate this bet with Tyler Cosgrove over there.
One, you need a permanently installed electromagnetic launcher,
and it has to be on the lunar surface.
This should be obvious.
Two, it has to launch at least 300 metric tons over a 12-month period.
This means it's driving significant mass, not just test payloads.
Let's aim for 95% mission success and at least 200 launches per year.
Failures are going to happen, but we want to get this reliable and at commercial scale,
and that means that it can't be breaking down all the time.
Lastly, the mass launch from the moon has to actually be put to use.
You can't just have this demo unit that's just blasting rocks into the sun.
It's got to go to something useful.
And that could just be water that's going somewhere else or, you know, rocks that are going somewhere else.
But it needs to be like, we're catching them somewhere.
There's a reason that it's going there.
How do you adjust the direction?
I think at the last second, if you have the trajectory, right, it's like how much do you go up?
How much do you go over?
How much do you go left?
And then, of course, once whatever's launched is floating in space and you can use propulsion
to kind of move around.
But yeah.
So, I mean, with that, it seems like it's a pretty, like,
it's a pretty basic satellite that doesn't have any propulsion on it,
but you could potentially put some, you know, like,
even just a gas can.
Yeah, I was more, I was more asking because it's, it's like,
okay, do we need, do we need every possible angle of mass driver?
How many mass drivers do we need?
Because I'm assuming we don't want to send every single thing that we want to send
into space.
The exact same direction.
Okay.
We're going to sell that one later.
That's a 2065 issue.
We'll get that.
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So once all four of those conditions are met, it will be hard to argue that we're in some
sort of demo phase or publicity stunt.
We know we love a publicity stunt, but this needs to be actually commercial.
I'm looking for Model 3 level success, not Tesla semi-level success.
I want to see this actually working, reviews, economics.
I want other companies being like, yes, I benefit.
I'm a buyer of mass from the driver.
So how long will this take?
You should put the goalposts on the mass driver.
The way that you keep moving them.
Okay.
I'm moving the goalpost on this.
I feel like I'm just trying to dial.
Oh, it needs to be economically viable.
I mean, what Elon showed was extremely economically viable.
If you're just up on the moon and the moon is just producing satellites with chips that are fabbed and they just go into space,
like that's extremely economically valuable as long as he can get the cost down.
Yeah.
And build it in some reasonable amount of time.
And it's going to take a long time.
So how long will it take?
I put the over under at like 15 to 20 years, which is about as aggressive as I could get.
I think Tyler's going to take the other side of this.
Well, I'm going to take the over.
You're going to take over 20.
15 years is, I think, kind of crazy.
15 years is a blink of an eye.
It really is.
Well, personally, you know, I think I'm a bit more HGI pill than you, Tyler.
Okay.
So.
Okay.
Well, let's go through the six steps.
Just say, just say you lost faith.
The six steps.
Six steps.
Okay.
So first off, we got to get to the moon.
We can't really get to the moon right now.
We're like, we're pretty close.
with like really small payloads,
we need reliable,
heavy lunar launch capacity,
and that's going to take some time.
So, Starship needs to be refueling in orbit,
landing on the moon with and without crews,
because you're probably going to need
some humans up there, some robots,
and we need to start routine cargo flights to the moon.
So this is straight up like three to five years away,
like minimum.
Then you need to build a power infrastructure.
So mass driving, hogs electricity.
You need to deploy a 100 kilowatt solar array,
then build out energy storage systems so you can burst power during launches and ultimately scale to multi-megawatt
continuous power generation plant. So that's another couple of years because once you're actually going up and back,
you have to put down a bunch of solar panels, stored in batteries, and then the batteries need to be able to deliver a lot of power all of a sudden.
Now this is what the Tesla does, right? You can charge your Tesla Model S plaid off of solar panels.
It'll take, you know, a couple days. And then when you're ready to go zero to 60 and two seconds,
It can deliver that energy very, very quickly.
And that's what you need for an electromagnetic mass driver because it's a rail gun, basically.
So.
Yeah.
And to SpaceX teams credit, this stuff can, a lot of this stuff can be done in parallel, right?
By the time, like I would hope that five years from now, Optimus is quite good, functional, valuable.
Yeah.
At that point in time, maybe we can get to the moon and back.
And I've talked to SpaceX folks who have been working,
on putting solar panels out on Mars.
The problem with Mars is that's farther away from the sun.
So they've put out a lot of solar panels.
And that's why maybe they're thinking nuclear on Mars.
But it's not like they've never thought about
how do you deploy solar once you get to another celestial body.
They've been thinking about this for at least over a decade
that I know of.
So robotic construction capacity, you've got to get autonomous construction.
Rovers at least up and running to lay the electromagnetic track.
You have to solve for all the insane forces during high acceleration,
deal with thermal expansion.
So you're basically laying train tracks that have electromagnetic coils in them.
So they're way more particular than just like railroad tracks.
But then those coils, all that infrastructure has to deal with being negative 280 degrees Fahrenheit during the night.
And then positive 260 Fahrenheit during the day, I think.
So, like massive, massive temperature fluctuations, and that means everything expands, contracts.
If you have metal there, it gets brittle during the night.
It gets warmer during the day.
That's maybe three years of work, maybe a lot more.
Who knows?
Then you actually have to build the mass driver on Earth, because you don't have the infrastructure
to build anything up there yet.
So you have to build most of it on Earth.
You need to ship hundreds of tons of superconduction coils to the moon.
And the physics behind all this stuff actually comes from a Navy scientist back in the 1970s.
And so we know that the physics works.
Isn't his pitch we're just going to just drop a bunch of robots on the moon and they're going to just mine and refine rare earths and then build out the manufacturing facility with those rare earths and like just kind of become a self-replicating civilization, fully autonomous civilization?
Like I thought the whole pitch was that we didn't have to send coils.
I think we definitely have to send, like, close to finish goods.
I would be very surprised.
If you can go and just scoop up some lunar regolith and be like, okay, step one, make a wrench, make a hammer.
Okay, now I have a hammer and a wrench.
Now let's make some rebar.
Let's make some cement.
All of that is very, you would, just logically, you would pull it forward by delivering some of that pre-made.
Because it's just one extra space, SpaceX launch to get up there.
and then have a CNC machine or something, I don't know, whatever you put up there.
Like, you're not going to go with nothing.
So you're looking at another five years here, at least.
You'll need dozens of dedicated cargo flights just to get the several hundred tonne system up there.
Then you need to assemble the track sections with humans or more likely robotic crews.
Integrate the supply, the power supply and cooling systems, test everything rigorously.
Integration hell can take years, but should overlap with some of the other milestones.
Lastly, you need to shift into operational launches.
Your first payload needs to achieve escape velocity.
And at no point can a catastrophic failure result in permanent damage to the mass driver
or the energy infrastructure.
And obviously we've seen test failures at SpaceX where things blow up
and it can hurt other support infrastructure and that can delay things.
Do you know how long the mass driver is, roughly?
I think like one kilometer is about enough.
But I'm not 100% sure on where that is.
long way to go. If the California government thinking about one one kilometer of track, that's 50 years
right there. So, you know, just testing all that, not damaging things, any unforeseen setbacks.
That's another five years and lots of variability. The good news is that once you build it,
once you built it, like the benefits are really good. Like you don't have an atmosphere. There's no
drag, no weather, no air resistance. And of course, gravity is a lot less. So you still need a plan for
where the mass goes after it's driven.
You've got to catch it, kind of.
And that's a whole other problem.
And when you add all these projects up,
you start easily getting into the decades.
And the render just kind of played,
everyone clapped,
and then the presentation was over.
But the idea is to put more
space data centers
on these?
Yeah. I mean, if you think about this
in like the most grand project you can imagine,
which is like the Dyson sphere, basically.
solar panels directly around the sun all the way around the sun to capture all of its energy,
you're going to need to send a lot of solar panels to the sun.
Making those on the moon is lower cost, potentially, than making them on Earth.
That's the theory. That's the theory.
But then in the meantime, Elon's clearly thinking about making at least part of the satellite
up there.
And then, I mean, you could ship up the chips and just make the housing up there, if that's the most
if that's the heaviest part, you could make the more economically precise, valuable piece up here,
drop off a bunch of chips, drop them into the actual housing that's been made and then launch those
into orbit. There's a whole bunch of other. Yeah, but then you're sending chips from here to the
moon and then they're being sent back, right? No, they're not being sent back. They're being sent
into various orbits. Okay, so these are not the... Yeah, and then again, my concern, and again,
I'm not a mass driver expert. I'm just kind of thinking through this is like, what if the
You got like one shot, basically.
Well, I mean, the moon's, like, movements are pretty predictable.
And it's not like the moon's just up there going crazy, right?
Like, the moon is, like, rotating on us.
It's, like, extremely predictable.
It's perfectly predictable.
You predicted hundreds of years.
Yeah.
And so, and so if you have it lined up so that every day, at least, it lines up to be the perfect angle, like, then you just launch right then.
I know, but you're saying we're launching them back into, like, just into Earth's orbit.
Earth orbit, yeah.
toward where the SpaceX.
Yeah, yeah, you are kind of round-tripping.
But it's the equivalent of like dropping a ball versus throwing it up.
Yeah, yeah.
Like you're dropping stuff.
But the whole point that more mass starts up there.
It seems clear that it's going to require like the vast majority of the components for these satellites being made entirely on the moon.
Otherwise, it could very well not make sense.
Yeah, yeah, no, totally.
Like, there is no benefit to bring a fully complete Starlink satellite up there and then driving it from the moon down to low Earth orbit.
That makes no sense.
The only thing that makes sense is if you're able to get something, like the vast majority of the mass, ideally 100% of the mass, from what's already on the moon, because that's already been driven up there.
It's already at low gravity.
Like, the energy is stored effectively.
I'm seeing a tourism angle when the mass drivers pointed back at the earth to be in a little like bob sled type thing,
a little pod to be launched at the earth.
And then you kind of break through the atmosphere and then you parachute.
Yeah.
That could be good for like gender reveal birthday parties, you know.
Potentially.
Yes.
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Okay, predictions.
Tyler, you're going over 20 years.
You're going over 20 years.
Are you going under 70 years?
Yeah, it's just so hard because like right now I don't,
it's hard to see like a real economic incentive to do this.
Because even space data centers,
it's like still pretty hard to like figure out how like,
why that like really makes sense.
Yeah, yeah.
But then like for this to work,
you need maybe space gender centers, but you also need them to somehow be built on the moon
for them to make sense, right?
Yeah.
So I think, yeah, maybe I'll, like, median is like something like 70 years.
70 years?
Okay.
Median, 70.
Wow.
Give me 50, 50 years.
50 years.
Okay, 50 years.
Getting more techno optimist over here.
Diori, if I'm at 20 and Tyler's at 50, where are you?
And while you think about it, let me tell everyone about Apple of.
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it my concern is that an Elon like Elon is the only specify Elon okay could be anybody
but I'm just saying there's there's a lot of there's just saying mass driver on the moon
this needs an Elon ask figure to accomplish and yeah I'm thinking more in that
50, 50 year.
Over 50 or under 50?
We gave Tyler exactly.
I changed, I'm going 30.
30. Whoa.
I think 50's changed.
I was just like, you know,
AGI is like basically here.
There's no way it's going to take that long.
There we go.
It's like everything will be so cheap.
Okay, so you want, do you want 40?
No, I mean, I was thinking five years.
Five years.
I was thinking months, specifically 50,000 months.
I mean, you know, opening I codec six
comes out.
Yeah.
Totally possible.
Who knows?
Who knows what's about?
Yeah.
No, no, no, even, even in the software only singularity.
So, so, so here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
There's just a amount of time that takes to, I have, I have a pull to mid-curve this one.
Okay.
And just, and just, okay, this is just a big pump.
Yes.
It's just a big pump.
You're mid-cur.
You're mid-curve.
We need the semiconductor pump.
Okay.
The space pump, the mass driver pump.
Yeah.
To get to the $2 trillion dollar valuation.
We need a lot of pumps going on, right?
Space Data,
data centers, mass drivers, semis. Like, it's the final pump, basically. That is the mid-curve.
That's the mid-cur. Okay. Okay. What's the left curve? The left curve is Elon good. Elon good
businessman. AI accelerate. Yeah. Elon good business man. Five years. Elon make thing. Elon put a thing in space.
Elon do hard thing. Elon do hard thing. And then and then the right would be just like insane AI
acceleration, what does Elon know?
Yeah.
And who else is going to do it?
He has all the infrastructure.
He's cornered the launch market.
He's shown a big track record.
Yeah.
The politics thing.
Yeah.
It's hard to see how real it is.
Yeah.
Right?
I don't know.
Because these data centers on land do generate a lot of local revenues.
Yeah.
And there are going to be plenty of places that want them.
Yeah.
but so hard not to mid-curvy.
Well, while you think of your final estimate,
knowing that I'm at 20, Tyler's at 30,
and you are undecided,
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What's your final answer?
10 years.
10 years?
10 years.
Until we have...
10 years.
So we have,
Geordie,
that's too aggressive.
I never said 10.
Don't want me to.
I said maybe in his lifetime.
10 years to an MVP.
No,
no, no.
No.
It needs to specifically be
launching 300 metric tons,
95% mission success,
200 launches a year.
It needs to be pumping mass.
Never.
It needs to be driving.
Never?
Never.
I think.
No, I think, I think,
I think pumping mass?
Driving mass.
Driving mass.
driving mass.
It's got to be,
I'm thinking, I'm thinking 2100.
Okay, based on just average life expectancy,
he's got another 20 years.
54, average life expectancy is 75, 76.
He has access to all sorts of stuff, you know?
Could go for 30, could go for 40.
Plus, like, you forget that, like,
Apple introduced products after Steve Jobs passed away.
Like, companies continue to exist.
company and and projects will be picked up there will be other competitors this isn't even a specifically
an Elon thing this is a humanity thing I think there actually is like a what about China like
China could do it maybe if if there's some economic incentive found on Mars or like asteroid mining
like it actually does make sense to do to to launch from the moon right because it's like so much
easier yeah quite's wayless energy yeah so 2100 75 years 75 years there isn't
another there is another mass driver idea, which is you build this, you take a shuttle to the moon.
And then if you want to go to Mars, you are mass driven from the moon through Mars.
Ryan says, Roadster has been 10 years since they sold out pre-orders.
This isn't going to happen.
The Roadster is happening.
Ryan, is it never going to happen?
Like, you would say Roadster's not going to have.
I mean, Roadster could just get completely canceled.
But no one does it.
I'm not even saying Elon.
I'm saying humanity, mass driver, moon over under 2,100.
75 years.
You got 74 years.
Seems possible.
I don't know.
Okay, which one do you do first?
What about, what about?
So here's the thing.
You have to make so many, you have to come to terms with so many incredible technological
leaps to get to the point where the mass driver on the moon.
Yeah.
Is mass driving?
Yeah.
If,
assume we get all those leaps,
can we not just mass drive from,
let's say,
the Earth?
I don't think so.
I mean,
there's a company that's doing this.
You said 25,000 miles per hour.
There's a company that's doing this called like spin launch.
The fastest plane has been,
it's like that NASA plane.
It's like 7,000 miles an hour.
7,000?
I thought it was like,
I think it was like a couple thousand.
I don't know.
Fastest plane.
Yeah, look up the fastest plane.
We'll tell you about the McAllip default, which Andrew McAllop, friend of the show over at Varda Space, was in the economist.
The cost of a one-gagawatt data center in space.
He pegged it at 50 billion.
StarCloud is aiming for $16 billion.
StarCloud at $200, $200 a kilogram is around $10, $11 billion per gigawatt.
SpaceX is trying to do it.
Fastest aircraft speed ever recorded is Mach 9.6 by an unmanned NASA X-43 scramjet on November 16th, 2004.
It's nearly 7,000 miles per hour.
Okay, so we got a 5x that or something to get to, 4x that to get to escape velocity, to escape the, to just like do the thing from interstellar and just drive the plane into the atmosphere and just go to space.
maybe, maybe.
Do you think we will have
Mass driver on the moon first
or?
Mass driver on the moon first or?
ZIT says the mid curve is definitely right.
Total victory.
Mass driver on the moon first or Atlantis first.
Atlantis.
Full society of people living underwater
in like some sort of glass dome.
where it's fully sustained, you can go, you can move there and be like, yeah, I got a buddy
who moved to the new Atlantis, and I haven't seen him in three years.
He's just been down there, happy, live in life.
Which one do you think happens first?
I've been very bullish on Atlantis data centers, yeah.
Atlantis data centers actually make a ton of sense, right?
Don't you get a ton of cooling for free?
Yeah, there's like all sorts of stuff that you get no energy.
No, the vents.
The vents?
Geothermal vents.
Geothermal, okay.
No one's talking about underwater data centers.
No one's doing this.
Call up James Cameron.
He'll be on this.
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Okay, so we have...
So hard to be barrett on the technology business programming network.
I'm sorry, everyone.
I'm sorry.
We got a decel over here.
Yeah, we got a desal over here.
True desel with a crazy IP doom over here.
No, I mean, 2100 is pretty acceleration-pilled if you look at the fact that going to the moon is now a lost art that we're trying to be discovered.
I've talked to a lot of people in tech that say the 2,100 milestone is Dyson Sphere.
And so, like, you probably get the mass driver before you get the Dyson Sphere.
Like full Dyson Sphere?
Maybe over 50% coverage.
Yeah, 2100.
Because, like, this is based on superintelligence.
Yeah, well, this is like, you know, singularity.
Every AI company is a Dyson sphere company.
At the end of the day, potentially.
Yeah.
And then the question of what is it?
Carterchev 1 is all the sunlight that falls on the earth.
Cardishev 2 is all solar panels all the way around the entire sun.
So we get the sunlight that doesn't just hit Earth.
It also hits the Mars.
Also hits the backside.
You know, you get all of that power.
So much more power than just Cardishev 1.
But then I think Kardischov 3 is every, you're harvesting energy from every sun in your solar, in your, not your solar system, but your galaxy or something like that.
Like everything in the Milky Way.
It gets really crazy.
In the galaxy.
In the galaxy.
And that's a lot of power.
That's a lot of power.
By then, it's totally possible that, like, you won't be able to tell the difference between, like, AI generated imagery and, like, real imagery with that much power.
It's entirely possible that there.
It could be funny.
It'll be able to do the automated workflows.
It'll be able to do high school level homework.
For sure.
Reliably.
For sure.
Well, we have a related prediction from Kalshi about Tesla.
Will the Tesla Optimus be released this year?
It's a 25.4% chance.
And it jumped a little bit.
Just over the past week, it was down at 19%.
It's pumped to almost 30%.
Now it's down at 25 based on the more
recent announcements from Elon Musk.
Anyways, to end on some positivity, I am glad that Tesla and Elon Inc.
are going to be focused on chip manufacturing.
I think we'll get some very, I think we'll get some real progress there.
And it is good for America.
It's good for the world that they are choosing to work on this very hard problem.
I agree with that.
I had a different positive conclusion as well, which is that I,
think it's fine to think in decades and share a vision that is decades away. The last thing I want
is for technologists to be devoid of long-term vision. I really don't want there to be like
an end of the tunnel. Oh, we're just working towards super intelligence and then we can all
become complacent. I'd much rather get excited about projects many years away or decades away that
only have a slight chance of working rather than the alternative, which is just stagnation. And so I'm
cheering for the mass driver and there's that old braze shoot for the moon if you miss you'll land
among the stars and i couldn't agree more with that i think it's the other shoot for the stars you'll land
on the moon no it's not that it's shoot for the moon if you miss you'll land amongst the stars
if you shoot for the stars you just get to randomly land anywhere the chance that you land on the moon
is closer than the stars no no no no no you shoot for the moon which is this narrow target and if you
miss you go off into the stars okay you're talking about directions i'm talking about like distance right
If you're shooting for the stars, you don't get it all the way there.
Once you've reached escape velocity, if you miss the moon, you'll just keep going until you hit a star.
It might take you a long time, but you will land there.
I think I'm right about it.
I don't think.
Look it up.
Look it up.
So let's head over to.
Take us somewhere else, Jordy.
Let's head over to suspended cap.
Okay.
What do they have to say?
They bullish on, it's suspended cap bullish on the,
Presentation.
Perfab, suspended cap says,
TerraFab is a blatant pump.
It actually disgust me.
There will never be leading-edge chips from them.
There will never be data centers in space.
It's such a blatant effort to IPO SpaceX on the back of some pie in the sky BS.
And then merge with Tesla,
do humongous rays and keep blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for five years.
Anyway, not, specifically cap's not a fan.
De-sell.
Suspiting cap is a diesel.
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Should we go over to the Mall King?
Where should we go next, George?
Let's have read to the Mall King.
Okay, so there was an obituary in the Wall Street Journal for David Simon.
He was a Mall King, who was both feared and admired.
He had ruthless negotiation tactics, an obsession with details,
and the sheer force of will that turned his family's real estate business into the largest mall
owner in the country.
He passed away on Sunday after a cancer diagnosis in 2024.
He was diagnosed with cancer in 2024.
He was 64 years old.
During his more than three decades as Simon Property Group's chief executive, the inveterate dealmaker
gobbled up competitors and defied critics who said malls were obsolete.
Over a decades-long buying spree, he cobbled together an empire that.
that spanned 250 properties and 206 million square feet,
giving Simon control of more retail space
than anyone in the world.
His success helped propel the family
to the wealthiest echelons with an estimated net worth
of 11.6 billion, ranking number 38
on Forbes magazine's list of the richest American families.
The Simon family through a charitable donation
donates to many causes,
including a $5 million gift to Columbia University.
At a time when malls were failing
and retailers were filing,
for bankruptcy. Simon invested in his properties, beefed up their luxury offerings, and added
non-shop tenants such as high-end fitness fitness centers, high-tech mini golf courses, and upscale
residents. I feel like that has been the secret to success with the modern mall. There's a lot of
malls that have sort of mid-tier or low-end retailers where it is actually pretty comparable to shopping
online. You go in, there's no one that's really going to talk to you, the stuff's just there,
it might be on the floor, it's messy. But then there are certain malls.
that have leaned into the higher end experience.
And, oh, would you like a drink?
Let's talk about what you're thinking.
Let's show you all this stuff.
Try this on.
And it's much more, it's just in a completely different tier
than e-commerce shopping.
And so I feel like those properties
and those chains have done very well.
So along with partners, he snapped up ailing retailers,
including Aeropostel, Nautica,
Eddie Bauer, J.C. Penny, Forever 21.
Lucky Brand and Brooks Brothers.
The arrangement propped up the chains,
prevented large vacancies in Simon Malls
and turned out to be moneymakers for the company.
Effective Monday, Simon's board
appointed Eli Simon, one of David Simon's five children
as its CEO and president.
The Mall King was both feared and admired
and could be both charming and terrifying.
Simon unleashed a tirade at coach executive Todd Khan
during their first meeting in the decade of the 2000s
after the handbag maker tried to renege
on deals to open stores in Simon Malls.
There was no shortage of profanity, Khan said.
The two came to an agreement and became friends.
Nothing like a screaming match to kick off a lifelong friendship.
David's word was his bond.
You could have bang out meetings, but if you came to a resolution and you shook hands, it was golden.
That's a good way of doing business.
Well, RIP to the mall king.
And hopefully we'll get a chance to meet Eli at some point.
Yes.
Open AI is offering private equity firms, a guaranteed minimum.
minimum return of 17.5% as well as early access to models not yet in public release.
There was a lot of chatter on the timeline going back and forth.
Like, is this some sort of weird guarantee?
Is this not normal for private equity dealing?
Market participant had a good breakdown to take you through it.
So why don't you read through some of this?
But first, I will tell everyone about MongoDB.
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Your business on MongoDB.
Don't just build AI.
I own the data platform that powers it.
Many are saying Open AI's $10 billion private equity joint venture is giving a desperate feeling.
A lot of people are thrown up the red flag emoji.
I think vendor financing dressed up as venture capital.
Guaranteed returns that smell like a Ponzi, a company burning $14 billion this year.
Buying distribution, it can't earn organically.
I'd push back.
TPG, Bain Capital, Advent, and Brookfield put up $4 billion.
They get preferred equity with a 17.5 minimum return board seats and early access to OpenAI's newest model.
gets instant distribution into 100 to portfolio companies, no traditional enterprise sales cycles,
no selling company by company.
The part people are missing.
A huge number of software companies are privately held.
Toma Bravo alone owns 75 software companies generating $30 billion in annual revenue.
PE firms collectively did $1.8 trillion in buyouts last year.
These companies are shifting to heavy token consumption.
AWS knows this.
They run a dedicated PE sales function.
Talk about a dream job.
That, oh, I would kill for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you love private equity.
Yes.
Hard to imagine.
Anyway.
Anything better.
Advisory programs, transformation consultants, the whole apparatus.
Azure and GCP do the same.
Open AI is running the cloud distribution playbook.
Wholesale tokens to PE portfolios at scale.
The difference is exclusivity.
AWS doesn't ask PE firms to put up $4 billion to take board seats.
They give the advisory away.
Open AI is asking for capital commitment, which buys preferential access.
Dedicated forward deployed engineers and a financial incentive for the PE firm to
actually push adoption across its portfolio.
A P firm that invested $4 billion in this JV isn't running a parallel RFP with Anthropic.
That's the point.
The 17.5% return looks like a red flag until you look at it closely.
It's preferred equity hurdle, not a coupon on debt.
This is the main thing that the hundreds of posts I saw are missing.
Priority on returns before common shareholder.
So it's preferred equity plus a return on top of that.
Open AI is buying captive distribution channel into enterprises they'd otherwise spend years trying to reach.
Anthropic is running a parallel deal with Blackstone, Hellman, Friedman, and PerMira.
It's $1 billion common equity, no guaranteed return, more of a Palantir-style consulting venture.
Both companies doing this simultaneously tells you where Enterprise AI is heading.
The Bearcase is real.
95% of Enterprise AI pilots fail to deliver ROI.
It's already gone.
Yeah, that's not true anymore.
but yeah that that was one study and again it was every agent coding yeah uh 14 billion
of projected losses this year profitability not expected until 2021 all true and opening eyes
enterprise business is already 10 billion of 25 billion in revenue 40% of growing to 50%
by year end the distribution problem is what's left to solve and anyways goes goes on and
but yeah overall I think like people are taking one data point out of context kind of spinning it into
something that that looks like quite extreme and concerning when in reality is just giving them
a preferred return which is somewhat normal yeah good good takes here let me tell you about cognition
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Secure any agent. Financial times
had some reporting Saturday, Open AI
to double workforce as business
push intensifies.
I love a business push.
So this is fantastic news.
Matt Slotnett says, TBH, the biggest risk
to incumbents may be that labs
absorb all the top talent.
Labs already get great engineering talent,
will spread to product, sales, marketing, et cetera,
when they become the optimal destination
to solve the problems of your customers,
it's going to get ugly.
Yeah, basically, you know,
you have a big enterprise
instead of going and doing
and trying to figure out, like, the right SaaS solution
for a specific problem,
you can go to a lab and get something similar.
As part of that workforce push,
OpenAI tapped former meta-executive
to lead their ad push.
Yeah, why is no one talking about Dave
Dougan. The Duganator.
The Duganator. It's crazy. Dave Dugan, a former top advertising executive at META is going to lead
sales, ad sales. Dugan, who announced earlier this month, he was stepping down from his role as
vice president of global clients and agencies at META has been named. Vice President of Global
Ad Solutions for Open AI. He will report to Brad.
Lightcap.
The light capinator.
The high profile higher underscores opening eyes urgent push to generate new revenue streams.
to support its enormous funding requirements for its computing needs.
Yeah, Eric Suford had some good commentary around, like, the ad sales strategy.
People were complaining that, like, the advertisers that bought the first ad campaigns on Chat
QPT said the process was low tech and that they haven't received much data showing if their ads
worked to executives and agencies working with early ChatchipT advertisers said they haven't yet
been able to prove the ads have driven any measurable business out from their outcomes for
their clients.
Eric Sufert over at Mobile Dev Memo shared two thoughts on reporting that early chat
GPT ad campaigns lacked performance data.
One, this is to be expected.
Any early offering will feature limited functionality.
Early adopters should be prepared to fill measurement gaps themselves with polling,
you know, or any other sort of pixels or tracking.
You should be able to work this together.
There's been plenty of times.
This was the early podcast ads.
You know, you'd run a bunch of podcast ads and be like, okay,
some people use the coupon code, but a lot of people don't.
What multiplier should I apply to that?
And then you wind up surveying your customer base and being like, wait, we spent
10% of our marketing budget on podcast ads, but 20% of our customers that they found out
about us from a podcast, like, maybe we should spend more there, right?
And that's the role of a good ad agency.
Measuring incredibly asserting performance is precisely what ad agencies are paid to do,
says Eric Sufurt.
He says if an ad agency says it can't provide performance data because the channel doesn't provide it, it is merely a media buying intermediary.
If you're an ad agency, you've got to figure out whether or not the ads that you pitch to your clients are actually working.
Quickly, let me tell you about 11 labs.
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Mark Zuckerberg.
Big scoop.
Huge.
From Megan over at the journal.
Mark Zuckerberg is building a CEO agent to help him do his job.
Employees are also adopting AI agents and AI tools internally, namely, my claw, my claw.
My claw.
My do.
And second brain in a bid to speed up work as they get graded on AI use.
And so.
Tyler, where is our my claw and our second brain and our co-hosts?
Chat, GBT.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm so interested to know what Mark Zuckerberg is prompting.
Oaks Revenge says ZStack.
Yeah, it is honestly ZXXXXX.
It's like God mode.
I mean, it does make sense in his position to have a model that's fine-tuned on the internal KPIs, the internal org chart, all this information that's private.
And he probably doesn't want to hand that off to another lab that's just going to maybe look at the data and be like,
like, oh, okay, so Mark Zuckerberg just asked,
how do I poach from all the other labs?
Maybe we should go on the defense today.
But there's got to be so many other questions
that he's asking all the time.
When you're walking into a meeting with executives,
you want to know, well, how is this division performing?
How much money am I spending on meta-ray ban displays?
What's the turn rate?
Who are our biggest partners?
There's a million questions.
Yeah, we're joking around, but Z-stack does make sense.
It does make sense.
You should be able to have God mode.
Yeah.
And I mean, this has the, there are companies that are starting to do this where they're,
they're pitching their, you know, agent stacks for CEOs.
Bordy is sort of one version of that, right?
But there's more and more people that are like, okay, we will come in and fine-tune something
for your organization specifically.
And maybe do that on the fly.
Maybe that's just Chad GPT Enterprise or Anthropic Enterprise or whatever.
But Zuck clearly wants something built from the ground up.
And it's also a great product demo because if it works really well for him, then it can probably, the lessons and the learnings from there will probably apply to other people in the ecosystem.
So the agent, which is still in development, is currently helping Zuckerberg get information faster.
For instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get.
Zuckerberg's agent project reflects a drive across the 78,000 person.
and company to accelerate the pace of work, eliminate layers from its organizational structure,
and change the day-to-day jobs of its employees to remain competitive with AI-native startups
with much smaller staffs. The company views AI adoption is critical to the future of success.
Zuckerberg has been spending more time coding recently. He previewed some of the efforts at a
company's earnings call in January. Quote, we're investing in AI native tooling so individuals at
meta can get more done. We're elevating individual contributors and flag.
He said if we do this then I think we're gonna get a lot more done and I think
It'll be a lot more fun. I love that
We have our guests in the Restream waiting room. I believe first let me tell you about Plaid
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Synthesizing data into a single view or bringing creative projects to life.
And without further ado, let's kick off the peptide debate.
Welcome to the stream, guys.
How are you guys?
Hey, those gone.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Why don't you both start with an introduction on yourself and maybe your core thesis around peptides?
Martin, why don't you go first?
Oh, Max.
Okay, sure.
Let's start with Martin.
Yeah, so I'm the farmer bro.
I represent the interests and the, I don't know, I guess, viewpoint of the pharmaceutical industry, including, but not limited to Pfizer, Merck, Eli, Lilly, et cetera.
I'm sure those guys love that.
You're the face of pharma, whether they like it or not.
There you go.
Sort of a self-trained biopharmaceutical expert.
I think I can speak at a pretty high level about every inch of the pharmaceutical industry.
I've discovered brand new drugs.
I've acquired drugs.
I've commercialized drugs.
I've just about anything you can do in the drug industry.
I've done it.
And so I'm very concerned about the peptide craze.
I think it comes mostly out of psychological issues, which we'll discuss.
The need for identity, control, distrust of institutions, all kinds of things like that,
or leading to what we're seeing today.
Great.
And Max?
Hi, I'm Max.
Former peptide skeptic turned peptide believer.
I run a healthcare company called Superpower.
And our thesis is that the health system today does a good job when you're sick.
It doesn't do a fantastic job at preventing things and actually allowing people to be their best
selves.
I say a former peptide skeptic because they see.
seemed scary and I say a converted believer because I spoke to dozens of doctors and heard
hundreds of clinical vignettes from people who had their lives change.
Now, I don't believe all peptides are safe.
I do believe we need more research.
But I think there are a subset of things that have improved people's lives.
I also think as a modality, peptides are one that are more interesting than before, now that
injecting is normal.
Now the wellness and optimization is normal, not just treating disease.
disease and now that we have AI for things like computational discovery.
So we're early, we need more research, but I think peptides are exciting.
Martin, I'll let you just respond.
Yeah, seems like you're ready to go.
But it would be useful to at least define the conversation a little bit more,
because when we say peptides, we could mean ozempic, prescribed by a doctor,
for someone who has diabetes and is very overweight.
It could also mean the way.
also mean the Wolverine stack taken by a 15-year-old in a gym in Miami, right? And like,
there's a wide gap here. So let's maybe narrow it down a little bit to probably off-label use.
I don't know exactly where the, where things start to get fuzzy for you guys, but defining a
little bit more of where the actual point of debate, because I imagine there's agreement with the
extremes. Yeah, I mean, isn't there a problem when we have to redefine semantics that have been
defined forever.
Isn't this like somebody saying, you know, I'm using, you know, GPT instead of using AI or
something like that?
Sure.
There's a specific meaning.
Like peptide has this very specific meaning.
And they're not new.
They're 80 years old.
People have been using peptides forever.
And in fact, in pharma, you try to avoid peptides because of their inherent weaknesses.
You go for small molecules or really large molecules like antibodies.
Peptides are sort of the worst of both worlds.
So the idea that we've taken this kind of like last place drug class and then turn that into like the standard bearer for do-it-yourself medicine is kind of humorous to anybody who actually understands pharma.
Except that the last drug class has the potentially most impactful drug of all time or set of drugs of all time, the GLP1 receptor agonists.
So I'm not saying we only have peptides in the toolkit.
I'm saying the genies out of the bottle and we cannot ignore pepidies.
peptides is a tool in the toolkit.
Small molecules, just like, I guess framing it for people
who don't understand the difference between these things.
Small molecules are made synthetically.
Peptides tend to be derived from what already is happening in the body.
DNA is the building block of the body.
And encodes for RNA, which produces proteins and peptides.
So these peptides naturally occur.
Now, it can sometimes be hard to pattern
to naturally occurring thing.
You can, but it's a little bit harder.
Small molecules, in the other hand,
the things that humans design to block biology,
to block, typically block something that is happening in the body.
Yeah, I'm not saying small molecules are bad,
but they're kind of the two different modalities we're talking about here.
And we've seen one category of peptides.
GLP1s already change the world.
And my intention is that there are other categories of peptides that are under-researched,
but have really interesting kind of clinical vignettes that might change the world going forward.
Martin?
But I think, like, why we're having this conversation is because people are just, you know,
injecting a number of them into themselves now,
and you're saying they might change the world,
but people are going through the process of self-experimentation,
and there's a bunch of companies, private companies,
that are happily facilitating this and profiting off of it
when it seems to be a large number of risks that are still unknown.
At least that's my point of view.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I think that's right.
So maybe let's start with stuff that's not fully FDA approved.
I think the canonical example would be like the Chinese peptides, the retas, the stuff you buy online and inject.
And it's based on some interesting scientific literature, but it hasn't actually been through the full FDA process yet.
Where do both of you stand on that?
Yeah, I mean, why do you have a right to pirate somebody's intellectual property?
Oh.
You know, this is the property of Eli Lilly.
They discovered it.
They spent billions of dollars on it.
You want to steal it.
You want to work with a Chinese company stealing it?
I mean, that's not good for America.
That's not good for the drug industry.
And guess where do these drugs come from?
They come from American R&D labs.
And if you keep stealing them and pirating them in this weird twilight, like, you know, DIY drug system, which is not very large, at least compared to pharma.
You know, I don't know if you make a big impact, but if it went very large scale, you would.
I mean, you would stop having drugs, the same way pirating music would, you know, have huge ramifications for the music ecosystem.
So you have to respect intellectual property to some extent.
And then taking a red of true tide, which is just sort of a GLP Plus, if you will, instead of just waiting it for it to be FDA approved or like using OZMPIC, I think this is like the worst risk-reward decision you could possibly make.
It's like some of the decisions I used to make in the past.
you know, what is your upside to taking illegally manufactured, registered,
registered, you can't verify it, etc., versus just taking those epic?
The people that take peptides and have these peptide stacks are mostly people in SF,
maybe New York, they're very wealthy people, they don't know what the rest of the world looks like,
nobody else in Middle America is excited to do this.
It's not normal max to inject yourself with things.
You know, this isn't like a thing everyone should be.
be doing. And so to me, the Red of Trutide case is really insane because this is a drug that
Eli Lilly is going to get approved eventually. And the fact that, you know, there are people
dying of certain terrible diseases and they need compassionate use. They need to get on
extension programs. But nobody needs Red of Trutide now, right now, before that gave approval a few months.
So I think the things we agree on are that the existing FDA-approved GLP-1 receptor agonists
are an interesting category of drug.
they're a peptide and they're impactful.
I think we also agree that companies should not do things illegally
and infringed on the patent for RETA, right?
I do think the patent system incentivizes innovation.
I think the crux of where we disagree is not, and just quickly on the,
this is an SF thing.
That is not true.
I know dozens of people who own these research use companies.
And if you speak to them, the majority of their audience is middle America,
not, not SF tech pros, despite the tech pros being noisy on Twitter.
I think the crux of where we probably disagree is the 14 or so peptides that
RFK has said they might move from category one to, meaning they cannot be compounded,
back to category one, meaning they can be compounded.
And I guess my like general statement here is that people are taking these compounds, right?
They're already using them at scale, right?
And the way to minimize risk, the main way to minimize risk is to move them from category
to category one, right, to legalize them because the risky thing is the dodgy supply chain we have
today.
the risky thing.
Well, isn't the risky thing just doing like massive sort of unofficial, you know, human trials
when we don't know?
I don't think so.
So I think that is true for peptides that we do not have longitudinal clinical experience
and patient experience with.
But let's take something like BPC-157, which is one of the most controversial ones.
So let's go right to the meat of things.
Let's take something like BBC 157.
My contention is that thousands of doctors prescribe this.
They do and have prescribed this for 10.
You can't prescribe this drug.
They give it to their patients, right?
You can prescribe it to be semantic, give it to their patients.
How a drug?
Thousands do that.
Again, my statement is not the semantics of prescribing.
My statement is thousands do this.
My other statement is that millions of patients have taken this.
At least hundreds of thousands, I believe millions.
have taken this.
Yeah.
And that clinical experience, again, is not an RCT, but we cannot ignore it.
Yes, you can.
Yes, you can.
Okay.
Wait, wait, wait.
It sounds like there's some sort of fundamental disagreement here about, like, the way BPC-157
is being distributed right now, because I know people that have told me that they've taken it.
I thought that they were getting it prescribed or recommended to them.
Like, Martin, what is your...
We can agree that it's being given to them.
I think they're getting.
it. But what's actually, what's actually happening here? How is this happening?
Out in the back alley. Isn't that what's happening? They meet in the back alley. It doesn't
seem like that. It seems like, it seems like there are doctors that do have the ability to.
There are many of the best doctors in the world. So when I was first introduced to peptides,
one of the most esteemed doctors in the U.S. said to me, Max, you take so many supplements,
if you explored peptides, because I think there are a really interesting modality with a few decades
of clinical use. Sure. Right. And when he said that to me, I was like, no way, this is,
this is bullshit. I'm not injecting myself with something. That was weird.
So what I did is I went around to around 20 different doctors who's...
Should have trusted your gut.
Whose opinions I respect.
And I asked them about peptides.
Normally when you ask these doctors about anything, you ask them about red meat,
you're asking about spinach, they're all divided.
They're all like, one view, enough of you, punches with peptides.
Just about all of them except one said these are really interesting.
I have used these in my patients.
I believe the endogenous molecules, peptides that exist in our body,
you're going to be the future of medicine.
And those doctors have the incentive to not be wrong.
If they're wrong, they could go to jail.
If they're wrong, they can have their license stripped.
If they're wrong, patients don't come back to them.
So they have the maximum incentive.
And for 10 to 20 years, they still give this to their patients.
And their patients say, my life changed.
Now, you might say it's placebo.
My statement is the patient says their life changes and the doctor sees that.
Okay, Martin, I want you to react, but I also want you to sort of set aside the intellectual
property argument.
I like that argument.
but let's focus on the what doctors are doing,
how BPCY157 is being delivered, that type of thing.
So I'm a drug hunter, right?
People like me, Vivek Ramoswami,
we look all around the world for medicine to buy
and medicine to put into companies
that great firms like A16Z and founders fund
and other more healthcare maybe focused firms will fund,
take it to the IPO, which I've done before,
and get paid huge amounts of money.
That's what I do.
That's what I'm good at.
That's why I'm the farmer bro.
BPC 157 is that.
the biggest scam I've ever seen. It does absolutely nothing. There's no redeemable value to this.
Do you know the story about it? Do you guys know, Dordi, no? Please tell us. This guy in Croatia
made it, Sitch, my hinterland brother. And, you know, the only publications about this drug are by
him. Nobody else has published about this drug. It's not a drug, in fact. Nobody's even
confirmed that it's a peptide from the gastric juice, as he claimed. Nobody can find a
sequence that matches that and the gastric juice of human beings has been thoroughly profiled.
It's a 15mer peptide, so it's 15 amino acids. Half-life is minutes. There's no plausible
physiological basis for it to work. And it's been in clinical trials. PLEVA was a local
drug company in the Balkans. Very well respected my ad. Pleva actually licensed BPC and tried to
do clinical trials for it. And guess what? They failed. So this, this like weird like, I want to be a
Do you use placebo effect? Because yeah, I talk to people that say it's good for recovery. And I can
imagine if you're sticking yourself with something, you might feel like, ah, I'm less sore today.
While you, while you are recovering, you think that the drug is helping you. And of course it isn't.
It's the recovery process you're going through. And there's an app for this. If you want to make real money,
go make BPC in CGMP conditions and go do a clinical trial. And you can be a trillion dollar company like Eli Lilly.
instead you can putz around
buying fake Chinese stuff
and then injecting yourself and dreaming that you're doing
well I've a drug here
that if I take might also aid my recovery
No no no get no
Should I try this
Should I tell you that it worked for me?
It's an end of one
Oh my God I did so great
With this end of one
You know it healed my recovery
Like this is nonsense
This is not science science is controlled experiments
That are well done
Very carefully documented
and so forth. Why are we going backwards? Why do we go forwards in civilization and society?
What is this urge by the valley? And I blame the valley to go backwards in time and space.
I hear of you, and I think other people will have it. And we don't know whether these are placebo or not yet.
We can't make a definitive statement. And we don't have the RCTs.
But I thought you said there was studies done on BBC 157.
No, there are no human studies done.
There was one done by pleva and it failed.
There are dozens of studies of drugs that become commercialized that previously fail.
Anyway, my view is we don't know whether it's placebo or not yet.
That is true and some people say it's placebo, some will say it's not.
My statement is really simple, which is you can have Martin's view,
or you can have the view of thousands of doctors who have views this for 10 to 20 years
and have their license in the line, the view of millions of patients who talk about their lives changing.
You can have that view.
My dad's visiting from Australia and he's been taking parents.
painkillers the past four months and can't walk upstairs because he's back as bad.
He took BBC 157 for three days and he said to me, Max, this is the first time in four months,
I haven't taken a painkiller.
Again, I'm not saying this isn't placebo.
I'm saying we don't know.
What I'm saying is I am God, I'm really happy my dad's not in a painkiller.
Right?
My co-founder, he lost three organs in hospital.
He had an autoimmune disease.
They put him in biologics.
He took BPC 157.
He's off biologics and he doesn't have an autoimmune disease anymore.
Again, the thing we need to study.
We will put our money.
and fund the studies.
Put your money where your mouth is.
But we can't ignore the real world evidence.
Well, you are ignoring it if you're not putting your money where your mouth is.
If you believe that's true.
No, we are.
No, no, no.
We are.
Do a clinical trial.
We are.
Tell me about it.
We're in the process of chatting with the people required to set up a clinical trial for this.
Because we will put our money where our mouth is.
Because I've seen thousands of doctors, millions of patients, and even the FDA, right,
who has said they're going to start legalizing, even the FDA.
Okay.
But Max.
You can have your view and I don't, that's okay.
People will have that view.
I will have an opportunity and I'll put my money where my mouth is.
Max, you've never done a clinical trial before, right?
You've never invested in drug companies before, but you want to do your first clinical trial on this drug, which you did in an event.
You know, you've heard anecdotal evidence about.
Why?
Because I have seen thousands of doctors, millions of patients over one to two decades, right?
Go say to my friend, go back on biologics.
go back to hospital, lose another organ.
Go say, go say to my dad, go back on painkillers every single day.
I don't want my dad on painkillers every single day.
Now, you might say that's placebo.
I say I don't know.
But I say with the evidence that we currently have, I believe there is more to support
you should see what this galaxy gas does for me.
It's amazing.
It's really good.
No, is your question, Martin, more that like, okay, you take.
No pharma guy in their right mind would do this.
Well, hold on, hold on.
So no pharma guy would do it.
Max clearly believes in this.
And what is the intersection of these two things?
Is it possible to do the type of study that you're talking about with Silicon Valley backing?
Is a $30 million Series A enough to get started?
Or do you need to go to Wall Street, IPO, do the biotech thing?
I mean, plenty of private companies do this.
There's hundreds, if not.
Actually, I would say there's thousands of private biotechs.
generally they would pass on something like this.
Well, yeah, yeah, so why, so there's this body of, body of anecdotal evidence.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, they're, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, so certainly a drug hunter would have looked at this already, right?
Martin, is you'll say me the only admissible evidence is an RCT.
Yes.
And what about all of the examples of when something works,
before anything works with an RCT,
there's a time when it works pre-RCT.
Yes, in animals.
No, in humans, there are times
in animals.
Before there's an RCT,
yes.
It does happen sometimes, yes.
Yes.
They're intelligently,
because they're intelligently designed drugs
that were designed to do a specific thing
and they do the specific thing and then they work.
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
This is not that.
And you think your statement,
your singular statement of placebo outweighs the,
again, we don't know, but I'm saying on the facts we have today, there is more to support the fact this is more likely than not placebo than the alternative.
I would bet anything. I would bet anything. No trial of BPC would work. Okay. I guess we'll see.
What else? So, Max, are you, is superpower facilitating people getting BPC 157 today?
No, we won't sell anything that is not legal to compound. But I believe the FDA will make it legal to
compound soon and then and then we'll tell it and I believe the FDA should make it
legal to compound because the genies out of the bottle people have seen their lives
changed and they're getting it anyway what else what else are what else are you
excited about because when people say when people people people say peptides with an ass so
bbc1 57 the time most now for one is fascinating it proved in 35 countries I take and I
never get sick I used to get sick four five times a year I had the most elaborate
immune stacks none of those elaborate immune stacks the hundred things placeboed me
thymocin alpha 1, everyone around me had COVID a few months back, and I didn't get it.
A bunch of people around me had influenza, I didn't get it. Every time I get a sore throat,
I take BBC15-7-5-7, and the sore throat disappears. Now, this is a drug that is approved
in 35 countries, right, has some human data. Now, Farmer in the US hasn't brought it through
trials because they can't patent something that existed for several years. So I think thymocin
alpha-1 is a really interesting one as well.
Martin, your reaction?
Well, drug companies can and do patent things that that have existed before.
I agree with that.
I did not say that.
I said, say, most NAPA 1 in the form that is approved in other countries, they can not patent.
Yeah, I mean, you don't even have to patent a drug, right?
You can get seven years orphan exclusivity, five years of NCE exclusivity.
There's a lot of ways to make money in pharma.
In pharma, if you haven't noticed.
I agree with that.
I agree that they could find some red disease indication and use their most NAF1 against them and get a patent.
My statement is that they could not get a competent.
of matter patent, 4thi-MOSNAFOR 1, the way that doctors and patients are using it today.
Sure. I mean, you can change molecules too. I mean, there's a lot of ways.
I know. Why would they do medicine? And so we're saying the machinery of the FDA requires,
something works. We see in 35 countries, the only way to get it patent is we've got to change
the molecule and spend $300 million to $3 billion. What is that? What is that for a system?
Right. That's a regulatory capture by pharma to me. I wouldn't say that necessarily.
I think that there are benefits to making drugs stronger.
Like I said earlier,
peptides are the weakest form of drug.
They're not the...
Except the best, but maybe the best drug of all times are peptide.
Yeah, but it's very, it's one of very few.
I would say 5% of drugs by revenue.
Today, right?
Five years ago, we didn't even have GLP1.
10 years ago, we didn't...
Yeah, peptides were and probably always will be a backwater
just because they're very weak.
They have no pharmacological properties that are beneficial, like a good half-life.
And in fact, the naked peptide GLPs don't work either.
They have to be heavily modified by pharmaceutical chemistry to get there.
There's an FDA-approved peptide with a very short half-life, Semorellon.
Bymosinaple 1 has a very short half-life.
You don't need a long half-life to have an effect.
We know this.
We know this.
The FDA, the countries know this.
There are some drugs that.
can work with short half-life, but almost every drug guy will tell you that you want a long half-life
so you don't have to keep taking the drug.
There are some drugs.
And that is fine.
And we have methods now with science to extend the half-life of these compounds, and that's part of where the research is going.
This is called pharmaceuticals.
That's what the industry is.
We have an FDA for it.
We have all these rules for it.
And I don't think we should change that.
I mean, these are the things that have made American pharmaceuticals, one of the greatest industries ever.
to start to move away from evidence-based medicine is a, you know,
it's potentially very risky and scary thing.
I think the riskier thing is there being a gray market.
Because the genius out of the bottle and people are getting these regardless.
I think it's far safer to get them through GMP certified compounding pharmacies
and the way that the FDA has oversight over rather than the state we're in today,
which is the gray market.
And this isn't a debate between no peptide and legal.
It's a debate between gray market or white market.
And I contend white market is net less harm, net higher benefit for the U.S. people.
I think we should treat them like we treat controlled substances, right?
I mean, there's a very specific set of laws that states what you're allowed to traffic on interstate commerce or not.
And you need a BLA or an NDA or 505B2 to traffic a drug across interstate commerce in the United States of America.
And that changing that, I don't think is useful or helpful, no matter how many.
people on Reddit think that they want to play doctor house today that's not something that you know
they should be engaged in so this is why i think they need to be legalized because i don't think what we
have today is safe i don't think people go to gray market uh pharmacies and injecting anything into
their body is safe what i do think is far safer and net lower harm and high benefit the american
people is these things being regulated in category one and produced in gmp certified facilities
and prescribed by doctors that is safer so the net harm reducing case is making these category one
one illegal to be prescribed by doctors. Not all of them, but the ones where we have a sufficient
safety signal and a sufficient effectiveness signal. There is an arbitrator for that already. It's
called the FDA. I mean, why, you want a second, I guess, special, like special ed version of
the FDA for drugs that didn't quite make it so clearly efficacious? What I'm saying is
many of these things the FDA might not ever want to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to,
research because the patent is hard, because they target wellness and prevention and human
optimization rather than disease.
And the FDA loves their cancer therapeutics.
And my statement is if we have sufficient safety and efficacy signals, we reduce net harm
by making them legal today.
We reduce net harm.
And try saying to the person who used to be in biologics with autoimmune disease, you have
to wait 20 years for something that might never be researched by big farmer, right?
try saying to my daddy was on painkillers the past four months every single day that you know what this
compound you took for three days that has been used for two decades go back to your painkillers try saying
that to them and maybe maybe one day farmer maybe in 10 15 years of research this we don't even know
say that to them martin it sounds like uh there's a there's a sort of a mischaracterization of your
argument that i'll let you push back on that you're arguing that
that the FDA has no problems,
that the FDA is perfectly efficient.
And that seems crazy.
I feel like everyone's upset with every aspect
of the government all the time.
Is it, are you saying that the FDA is anywhere near approving,
anywhere near to the speed required to approve new drugs,
new research as quickly as they could?
I'd say they're pretty good.
Really?
You know, I hate almost every part of the US government.
Okay.
But that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's one I do.
do like. And I advise the U.S. government. And I feel like this is something that, you know,
could not be further from our collective benefit. Companies love making money. It's capitalism.
You think you prefer the gray market. You know, I prefer no market. You don't have a choice of
no market. No, yes, we do. The genie is out of the bottle. What does that mean? What does that mean?
What that means we can arrest the genie. We can give the genie's money. Cocaine in the 80s.
Yeah. Yeah. Doctors have prescribed these.
compounds and they're doing everything they possibly can to get their hands in them.
And that can be very risky.
And what I'm saying is we have safety and efficacy signals and millions of patients with that
10 to 20 years.
Yeah.
So Max is arguing that like a war on drugs will not work.
It hasn't worked in the past.
It is impossible to show.
Because if these are, if it's gray market, that means illegal.
Like Martin is arguing that we can arrest the genie.
But can we have a law?
Can we actually arrest the genie?
because it seems like there's a lot of genies,
and you had a product behind you that I think might be not legal either,
and that was probably available in a corner store.
And I know that there are dozens of illegal flavored e-cigarettes
and vaporizers that come over,
and they make their way into bodegas all over the United States,
and, like, this just happens.
And those things are provably harmful.
And they still, the provably harmful things do it.
I'm saying these things, doctors have their license on the line.
I don't think doctors want to recommend peptides.
I don't think doctors like recommending non-FDA-approved drugs.
I've never met one that did.
Well, I know thousands of doctors who do, and I'm saying...
Thousands of thousands?
I don't know thousands of doctors.
I spent my home...
Thousands is such a big number.
So many doctors.
And what I'm saying is, I agree they shouldn't recommend things gray market.
What I'm saying is let's legalize because that is net safer for the American people.
Yes, yes.
And you're saying that you're saying that if we hang out in the gray market, you think it's
actually possible to shut down gray market activity. Is that true? I think you can shut it down.
And then I also think that we have a perfectly great system, which is the normal regulatory
body we've had for 60 years. Yes. And creating, like I said, a new special ed version of it
for drugs that couldn't quite get on the school bus, you know, is not something that we should do
because we have a rigorous way to determine if drugs work or not.
Let's get rid of all gray market.
And my friend can go back on biologics.
I should go back in painkillers.
You should.
All of the, a farmer can continue making hundreds of thousands of dollars from these biologics.
Let's do that.
Sure.
And you know what?
We're not going to shut there.
You get what I'm saying?
Closing arguments.
One more thing.
So, Martin, your stance is generally that these drugs just haven't proven to be that good.
They've been around for long enough that a bunch of smart pharma bros and sisters.
would have, like, you know, taken them through trials already if they really show.
We take a lot of bad stuff through trials.
You know, BPC isn't even, doesn't even come close to the muster of a farmer bro.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
And so it's weak.
You're saying there's a placebo that you think is probably real, but then what is the risk, right?
Because if somebody's saying like, okay, it's a weak drug, I maybe get a placebo effect.
Maybe, maybe it just helps.
But why should say?
somebody avoid it entirely, regardless of if they're available on the gray market or on this,
like, you know, new version of the FDA. I just think we shouldn't normalize making drugs in your
bathtub. I think that, you know, there's no evidence that any of these things are well made.
I think we should leave Madison to the experts. I think that's something as V is very reluctant to
do. Many people want to feel in a world where maybe they feel like they're losing control,
they want to control this thing, or the world where we're losing.
confidence in government, we want to take this into our own hands. And it's just not the way to do things.
Medicine has progressed dramatically thanks to the capitalist system and the biopharmaceutical system
in league with the FDA, which doesn't always get it right, but is quite good. And thanks to that,
we have drugs for cystic fibrosis. We have a cure for fiscic fibrosis. We have drugs for
SMA. We have these terrible diseases. And one last thing is that a lot of these people in SV,
you're perfectly healthy. You know, you're talking about two sick people there,
a second ago, but most of the people I know in these peptides, they're taking a medaphanal,
they're taking drugs for diseases they don't have. And this is not, you know, a great use of people's
time or great for their health. And to some extent, the government does exist to help protect
people from themselves and their own stupidity. And then, Max, you're planning to take BBC 157
through clinical trials? Are you planning to take any of these other peptides?
through yeah what what is the where where does that ultimately where does that
ultimately go yeah so we're working with a handful of different biotech
companies that are taking these through clinical trials we're in the early days
of setting that up and my my statement is not anti-fda or anti the machinery we have
I think it solves a lot of purposes I just think it doesn't solve all purposes
and my statement is not that the current
system is always perfectly right. I think when new data comes along, when new science comes along,
when there's a dangerous gray market, we need to accept that the times have changed and adapt
the regulation. It solves a lot of purposes. There are many parts of it that are exceptional,
but it is not complete. And I'm saying that we should do what the FDA has said they're doing,
which is legalize several of the category two peptides that have the strongest safety
and efficacy signals because that reduces net harm for patients and increases net benefit,
even if pharma doesn't necessarily like it because they're not making money from their $100,000
biologic drug anymore.
Sure.
Martin, any closing statements?
It's been great to be.
Yeah, I just want to say pharma did try to develop BPC and failed.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, we went through that.
It's a good point.
Well, thank you so much for joining today.
Thank you to you both.
Everyone had a great time.
Good job keeping it civil, boys.
Yeah, very civil.
Very civil. Very professional.
I love to do this again.
Again, the next time a new peptide goes viral.
We'd love to have you both on this show.
Independently or together.
Have a great rest of your day.
Have a great week.
And we will talk to you soon.
Goodbye.
Cheers.
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Up next, we have Mitchell Green, the founder and managing partner at Lead Edge Capital.
The news, Lead Edge has closed at $3.5 billion seven fun.
What's going on, Mitchell? Great to see you.
I was life. By the way, somebody likes Diet Coke. I like Coke Zero. I got Coke Zero better.
Coke Zero guy. Coke Zero. Did you go through a Diet Coke phase?
I did back in the day, and then Coke Zero came out, and I started drinking that. I'm pretty sure both of them are going to kill us, but that's fine.
Well, you and John are running the A-B test.
I'm having the podcast in a can from Andrew Euberman.
Congrats on the new fund.
Big, big number.
Take us through it.
Yeah, so, no, it's good.
So it's just a continuation of Fund 6, Fund 7, $3.5 billion.
We really raised it late last fall.
Raised it late last fall.
But no, it was good.
Look, we really didn't know what to expect about the fundraising market.
Everybody had said it had been really, really hard,
but then you see these big giant funds get raised.
And so, no, we had a lot of interest from existing LPs and some new LPs and things like that.
What is contrarian about Lead Edge's stance as a fund or messaging to LPs?
you know, this is a software-focused fund.
Some people, at least on X, would say you guys are crazy to have that positioning.
But certainly the results have been fantastic.
Yeah, look, prior history means something about the future as well.
I think the things that make us contrarian and, like, different in the world,
one, our LP base and how unique it is, we have all these, like, you know,
Well, we do have big institutions, 95% of our capital comes from people that are like, you know,
world class execs and entrepreneurs.
You guys have probably had a bunch of our LPs on the show.
You could look at our website and see examples of a bunch of these people.
And then how we leverage these people throughout the investment life cycle, whether they help with diligence,
whether they help with, you know, helping customer intros, recruiting advisory for companies.
I think that makes us different than most people.
What we invest in is, you know, look, we just take.
take a very focused approach.
And we're just like, listen, you have to meet X number of our eight criteria, five criteria.
And now it's like, are you 25 million and, are you 10 million plus in revenue?
What are you growing 25% a year?
Are you profitable?
You know, are your revenues greater in your historical cash burn cumulatively?
Like, and again, you have to meet five of the eight.
And so that just, that kills a lot of companies we might otherwise, you know, see.
And again, we just find.
companies that meet those criteria.
And so, you know, a first couple of deals in the fund, you know, without naming the
companies, you know, one is a $500 million.
You know, last year it did $500 million of ARR software business, growing 50 plus percent a
year.
We funded another private equity fund that owned it.
They're like continuation vehicle because what makes us confirm is we're very unique in that
way.
We'll buy 10% of a company in a minority deal, put money on the balance sheet, we'll buy, you know, secondary from an early investor, we'll buy 80% of the company, you know, we'll do everything. It's really kind of just, we just want to get into the best businesses. And look, we invest in businesses that grow that have super high gross, I have 70 plus percent gross margins that are hopefully capital efficient that have like really happy customers with high gross dollar attention.
Software is one of those buckets, as well as, you know, financial, financial information technology
companies, information services companies, payments businesses, internet marketplaces.
We've invested in logistics businesses.
If it meets the criteria, we'll invest.
There are still, the whole idea that software is all going to zero is a bunch of complete
utter nonsense.
Yeah, we were talking to Carl Eschenbach on the day you rejoined security.
Koya last Thursday about the Saspocalypse.
And he was just stressing the fact of how sticky these relationships are and the fact that
people buy things from other people.
They're not just going to overnight switch everything and how they do their business.
What are you actually saying?
How have you processed the Sasspocalypse?
Have you processed this idea of all these legacy systems just being upended overnight?
I mean, it's like complete utter nonsense.
I don't know what he might have left.
I'll see even tomorrow are incorporated, actually.
It was great.
I think we're fine.
I think I'm literally going to go back with him from the war being.
No, no, he's fantastic.
I mean, let's not forget that the U.S. government still runs, I think.
Like, I think we think the huge opportunity, we do some public stuff as well.
So we actually own workday.
And by the way, I think a 99% gross dollar retention business.
Yeah.
The U.S. government still runs on PeopleSoft.
And most banks that people use in America run off of mainframe computers.
So, you know, open source, when people say the apocalypse, esphalcolics, all software is going to zero.
I think what people fundamentally get wrong is that they think like R&D is the, is like the most important thing in these companies, like writing the code.
Yeah.
It hasn't been for decades.
Like open source software is a big industry.
Yeah.
Company like Gafana, data bricks, elastic, hashy corp, red hat.
There's 20 more of them.
You can get that stuff for free.
The reason that enterprises pay for it is they need somebody to deal with, you know, customer support, security patches, user authentication.
This stuff's like very complicated to do.
I think with software companies are going to become, and by the way, there's going to be ones that survive and there's going to be ones that don't.
All that we see, you see in periods of technological change is like things can happen really fast.
And it's not only software companies, if we need like automotive companies, if you're Stalantis and you have tons of debt and you're, I'm totally making this up, and you're Ford and you have no debt, well, if you believe AI and robotics are going to come to manufacturing, well, like, Ford can invest, Stalantus cannot.
And like, they very well may disrupt, you know, Ford may completely disrupt Stalantis.
It's going to happen across industries here.
By the idea you saw it 99 in 2000 with like, you know, e-commerce companies, some traditional retailers, like, one.
Walmart and Home Depot did great.
Some people did not.
The same thing is going to happen with software companies.
By the same thing is going to happen with accounting firms.
The same thing is going to happen with banks.
Yeah.
Like this stuff is going to completely revolutionize the world.
It won't do it as fast as people think.
It was funny.
I asked Claude yesterday to try to like book me like an appointment to get a haircut and I could
do it online.
It had no idea how to do it.
Like I literally could have just picked up the phone and made a phone call.
And you know, I saved myself 15 minutes.
Yeah.
What has your interaction been with private credit throughout your career?
There's a lot of headlines around the debt load for some of these software companies.
And if the business model changes, if that retention does shift, that those private credit funds could be in trouble.
How have you been processing the stories around private credit?
Yeah.
So, look, about a third of what we do is control biots.
Okay.
A buyout tends to have debt on it.
Yeah.
You know, that would say is, you know, what I would say is,
Now, again, the buyouts we're doing are not big enough, and they tend to be growth buyouts.
Like, our average portfolio company grows 50% a year.
So we might just happen to find a company that's 25 of revenue owned by one guy that wants to sell 60% of his company, but still wants to run it.
So we're not, our deals are not big enough where we need to go to the private credit funds.
I agree with Jamie Diamond, though, but it's the canary in a coal mine, but it's not software.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is what people are getting wrong.
Yeah.
You don't think the private equity firms overpaid for insurance.
industrial companies or services companies or anything.
Like, I tend to believe where AI is going to be disruptive is if a private equity firm
bought a company, put a ton of leverage on it, and it's been running it for margin because they
need to drive margins to pay the debt load because they put too much debt on it, they won't
be able to innovate.
So their competitor that doesn't have a lot of debt is going to, you know, could win.
I think that is, that doesn't apply a software company.
It applies to everything.
I suspect there were in any unregulated industry
where you take a bunch of people
with Wall Street, a bunch of people
have done probably stupid things.
It's probably not the people getting blamed for it.
It's probably the ones doing the blaming, frankly.
If you've got to learn from history on Wall Street.
But again, if the private credit guys get paid,
like they're going to get paid before the private equity funds.
I think we're going to sit here.
in 2030 and there are going to be a ton of these deals that were done in 2019,
2018,
2020, 2020,
that scrooge is software.
It's like everybody at all the industries where like you're going to be looking at like very low
single digit,
you know, low single digit IRAs.
What's the,
what's the oldest company you've ever bought or invested in?
Have you ever looked at anything that's like over 50 years old or I mean,
I've just seen some of these like vendors from organizations that are like,
You know, oh, you'll see like AOL is transacting now.
And we're, and I'm like, oh, we haven't heard that name in a long time.
We can hear you.
That's only 30.
Well, actually, I'm looking to see what a company.
Okay, yeah.
So we own a business.
Okay.
Um, called growth zone.
Okay.
That makes like Chamber of Commerce Association Management software.
Yeah.
Business, nicely profitable.
Um, we, the company was founded in 1996.
1996.
Okay.
So we own it.
We own another.
We own a,
another business that it's like that business started in 96 is a different name.
In 2019, it was bought by like a small private equity fund.
We then bought that.
But we own a business that we bought through an interest in a fund called Work Human.
And this is a huge business, super profitable, big company.
That's an anti-AGI bet.
Yeah, yeah.
And so Work Human used to be called.
global force. It's a big like HR software company.
Sure. And like a play benefits company based up in Boston. But I think the venture fund we
bought out, it was like a 2002 vintage venture fund. Wow. And the investment was made in like
2004. And the company has never raised capital since. And it's a very large, you know,
nine figure type like profit business. That's a remarkable. Well, thanks so much for taking the time
to come and hang out. Congratulations.
Congratulations. We got to hit the gong.
Hit it.
Congratulations.
Congrats to the whole team.
Great to see you.
We'll see you soon.
Cheers.
Goodbye.
Let me tell you about a label box.
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And let's kick off our Lambda Lightning Round.
And we are going to be bringing in.
We nailed it.
We nailed it.
The cloud is active.
We are now in the Lambda Lightning Round.
Let's bring in.
Shane from Air.
Jane, how you doing?
How are you doing, guys?
Thanks so much for having it.
Of course.
Of course.
Great to see you.
Give us an update on what's going on in your world.
We just released a new ad campaign yesterday in New York Times.
Yes.
And have our biggest product.
release we've ever pulled together here launching tomorrow. Amazing. Give us the pitch. What's the tagline
for the ad? The tagline for the ad is, uh, is AI will never smoke a cigarette with you. Um,
as someone who, as someone who started a company that directly competes with cigarettes, I have to boo.
But as someone who loves a good ad, I have to cheer. I, you know, I want to be clear. I'm not endorsing
smoking in any way, say, performed. No, I get it. I think, um, you know, look, I feel like, I feel like this is a
This is a goodwill hunting crowd, isn't it?
I feel like you guys watch.
Jordy definitely has seen Goodwill hunting.
No.
He's never seen a movie in his life.
He's only seen Borot.
It's the only movie he's ever seen.
Well, I think the inspiration for the campaign came from a scene between Matt Damon,
who's this cocky, overconfident, sort of orphan, and his therapist, Robin Williams.
Yeah.
And they're sitting on a park bench.
and Matt Damon is just going off.
He's doing his thing, you know, preaching the gospel of where the world is going.
And Robin Williams looks at him and he says, look, if I asked you about art,
you would give me every history of every artist, you would talk to me about Michelangelo,
but you have no idea of what it smells like below the Sistine Chapel.
And if I asked you about love, you would probably send me a sonnet.
But you have no idea what it feels like to be.
desperately vulnerable in front of someone else. And then he looks at Matt Damon and he says,
look, if I needed to learn what it was like to be an orphan, do you think I would just read Oliver
Twist? And I think the reality is today that there's so many of these generative AI companies
right now emerging through YC or starting to raise money and they're projecting what's going to
happen with creative work. And let me be clear. I believe everything from
Banana and banana and seed dancing, these models are so powerful in what they can do today.
But the reality is that creative work is deeply illogical.
It is two things.
It is both extremely subjective and it stars for perfection all at the same time.
And so, you know, the belief that we have at air fundamentally is that AI will never replace creative work.
And we're saying this as a technology company that's on the precipice of launching its most AI-centric feature set ever tomorrow.
So, I mean, I completely agree with you.
Like, AI is a tool.
I've loved using creative tools from the first version of Photoshop that I probably downloaded illegally all the way to After Effects and Cinema 4D, Houdini, and now generative AI tools.
And I feel like there's every time there's a new tool, you just increase the amount of art, the amount of creativity.
And things, we usually get the good ending.
It feels like it.
It feels like we're not.
Oh, yeah, like we wish we could go back to the time before Photoshop, get rid of Figma.
Like, no, no one wants to move backwards.
Everyone's happy with the tools.
Everyone's adapted.
But it feels like there's still a lot of anxiety.
Like, how, how, what do you think it takes to get people into the mindset of, hey, as an artist, your job's just going to get more interesting, more creative, you're able to do so much more.
And yes, that will mean putting food on your plate and earning recognition for your work and being, uh, all the things that you, why you do what you do.
will still be there in a decade, two decades, a century.
Yeah.
Well, I think the first thing, John, is that as an industry within the tech industry or as
technologists, we can't keep pontificating, you know, a narrative about like, about this reality
that, like, creative work is the CMO killer.
If I say one more billboard on the 101 about the CMO killer, I mean, you're going to become
a killer yourself.
I'm going to lose my mom.
And I think that.
you know, in what way, shape, or form?
Is it a good idea to tell your customer that they're irrelevant?
Yeah.
And, you know, look, the fundamental belief that we have here at Air is that the work is changing.
It's going to be less humans and more machines.
That's an acknowledgement that I will be the first to admit.
But we have to stop imagining that these machines, this AGI concept we have for the future,
we'll get to a state where everything is automated and you don't need anybody in the loop.
Instead, if we built both products and brands in this industry that meet humans where they are
and start to actually attack jobs to be done with automation, then great.
At Air, we talk about giving creative space to breathe, space to actually work on the stuff that they think matters
and to deploy technology into areas of their work that they think should be automated.
Yeah.
What's the launch tomorrow?
What's the exact product?
That's how all that.
Exactly.
All right.
So five things.
I'm going to be plain vanilla here.
Five things.
One is access to 50 models inside of our product.
Everything from nano banana is a C-Dance.
You can now access that directly on air.
Two, you can access those models through a canvas editor.
So you can grab your assets, which are already on air.
You can create variants of ad units.
You can change out the text in something.
You can take an image and turn it into a gift for a quick video, whatever you need.
Three is agents who can go out.
and make those edits for you, should you want to, you know, communicate with a machine instead
of doing it yourself?
Or is a context layer.
This is the sort of biggest differentiator for us.
We, you know, today, organizations store and manage all of their assets inside of our product.
We're their memory.
And so we're taking that memory and allowing your creative team to deploy that.
Deploying the context means that the agents can start saying no to edits or that when an agent
makes an edit, it can do something that's actually on brand and uses your font or your
styling or your photography style. So this context layer is where creatives can actually add
instructions so that non-creatives can create and compound assets from what they already have.
And then the fifth one is what every organization, you know, like us is going through right now.
It's just we're transforming pricing. Going fully to usage-based pricing across our product.
So all of that hits tomorrow.
What about search? I feel like there's, you know, I've watched my iPhone.
camera roll, push the search bar bigger and bigger.
They really want me to search.
Yeah.
And it's okay.
But if I, if I know that there's a, I screen recorded a video and it has Arnold Schwarzenegger
in it, but he's not in the still frame.
He's not in the thumbnail.
He's deeper in there.
Yeah.
And I search Arnold's, it's probably not going to go inside the video, understand the context.
And I feel like Air has all this like tagging infrastructure.
There's an opportunity for just the best in class.
search. You see people complaining about Gmail search. Same thing is true for Google Drive. At one point,
I had every file name for every video in Google Drive was just like 75 keywords all the way out
so I could actually search through videos. Is AI accelerating you there? It's a good question.
You know, my co-founder, Tyler and I've been building this business for eight years. And we've been
very thoughtful. You know, our approach is to try to build a system of record for creative work. So a
Salesforce or GitHub, specifically for visual data.
Our AI journey began, to your point, with search, natural language search and the
enrichment of assets.
And from our perspective, the models got to a point over the last two years, products
like BDA as an example from AWS, where you can do a lot of really powerful things, facial
recognition, scene detection for videos, custom object detection.
And then you can power that through really elegant natural language search experience.
That functionality exists in the product today.
And we've been leaning into that work for the last two years.
The shift for us into generative editing and variant creation really began in October as these models started to progress in the quality of the output.
And we realized that the quality of the output was going to be decided by the quality of the context around it.
So starting tomorrow on air, we'll marry both of those things, both the amazing world-class.
search experience you can now have enabled by AI and the variant creation that can stem from it so that
you know a year from now if you want to look up martin schrelli rage bait you know on tpn you'll find
you you you can go and find that i'm glad you're in the audience uh well thank you so much for
taking the time to come chat with congratulations to launch and dad campaign yeah great
to see you do we'll talk to you soon to launch goodbye here cheers let me tell you about turbopuffer
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Without further ado, we have Doctronic.
How are you doing?
Dr. Doctronic.
We're doing great.
Please introduce yourself in the company a bit for us.
Yeah, so Adam,
I am one of the co-founders of Doctronic.
Doctronic is an AI doctor.
We call it that because it's easy for people to understand.
We have an AI native care platform.
You can come to it, chat with it 24-7.
It's always free.
And then when you're ready, you can press a button
and the AI conversation, the summary,
and a doctor's note is sent off to one of our doctors
and then get care.
Okay.
So, yeah.
Primary care, anything you need.
So, yeah, I mean, WebMDs existed for a long time.
ChatGPT has a health functionality,
but the key insight here is that you're actually linking to a network of licensed doctors throughout America.
Are there particular states that you're starting with?
How does it actually work to onboard these doctors?
Yeah, so we're actually live in all 50 states, 50 plus one, and we have a network of 50 doctors that are employed by Doctronic.
And that includes both primary care, urgent care, women's health, mental health.
What does it look like if somebody already has their own doctor and they want to bring them to the platform?
I imagine that the same way someone might show like, oh, here's my eighth sleep sleep data doctor.
What do you think this says about the other symptom I'm having?
Somebody might share, hey, I have this conversation with chat GPT.
Can we use this as a jumping off point?
What does it look like to bring your own doctor to the platform?
Yeah, so our AI system is always free.
and at the end of it, you get a doctor's note that you can take to your own doctor if you want.
So there are some people that do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's amazing.
And then in terms of the actual business model, who's paying, how do you see that evolving?
Where do you think that goes?
Right.
So right now, we make money by providing care.
And so when you see one of our doctors, you can either pay out of pocket.
It's $39.
Or you can use your insurance.
Okay.
And we take almost every insurance out.
there, including Medicare.
Yeah.
In addition, we're in the process of building out a number of different partnerships with other
businesses that will both license our technology and use our physicians as well.
Yeah.
How do you think about the opportunity for prescription management?
It feels like there's been a boom in telehealth.
A lot of work has been done.
Some controversial, but some vary by the book where they're partnered with a pharmaceutical
company and there's licensed doctors in all 50 states that can prescribe.
Is that in the path?
or is that tangential to your work?
Directly in the past.
So we launched a program in Utah,
first of its kind,
where we actually are able to renew prescriptions
without a doctor.
Our AI makes a clinical decision.
That was launched eight weeks ago.
I think it was a big first step,
and we're hoping to build upon that.
That's awesome.
Jordi?
Yeah, so I'm trying to understand,
are you guys kind of limited
from a growth standpoint due to, like,
like how do you scale basically?
You have these 50 doctors that are employed by doctronic.
Do you need to scale that or is the idea you can make them, you know, a hundred times
more efficient?
You know, how are you doing that?
Yeah.
Our physicians are, I would say, in order of magnitude, more efficient than a traditional
telehealth practice.
And so instead of a doctor being able to see four patients in an hour, they can all of a sudden
see 15 or more.
And that allows us to scale much.
faster than a traditional telehealth platform.
And then you mentioned partnerships with other companies.
Would that be with major LLM providers?
Is that where this is going?
No, our partnerships come in three different flavors.
The first one would be with payers, TPAs, or large employers that want to utilize
our services because we're going to be cheaper than most other telehealth practices.
There are large health systems that we're in discussions with that want to utilize
our technology because we can make their doctors more efficient.
And then there's a whole slew of digital health companies, hardware companies out there
that are also interested in leveraging our technology to extend what they can do on their service,
potentially providing care.
I was listening to Terence Tao, the mathematician on Dorcasch Patel,
and Dorcasch was asking him about the impact of AI on his job,
which is mathematical research, and was trying to say, like, how much more efficient are you?
And Terence Tao was saying, well, I use AI a lot, but I don't, it's not like it's helping me with the core work.
It's more like in a paper, I would like to put a chart.
Normally that chart would take me 10 hours or five hours to put together.
So normally I just wouldn't put it in.
Now I can just put it in.
And so he was like, I'm doing five times the work, but it's not replacing work that I was doing before.
And it was this very like Jevins paradox type of answer.
And I'm wondering about the amount of medical advice that's being dispelled.
How much of it is displacing conversations with existing doctors versus just purely additive
conversations where someone would have said, you know what?
I do have that, you know, I do have some symptom, but I'm just going to go to work today.
And I'm not going to go take the time to schedule an appointment and meet with a doctor.
How much of what you're doing is seen as additive versus replacing you?
labor. I think it's almost all additive, to be quite honest. And when you think about
medicine, it's always had this fundamental supply demand mismatch. Think about how many times
you've wanted to go see a doctor and you just didn't do it because it was too hard, right?
I think there's probably 10, 100 times more care that could occur if there's zero friction in the
system. And a lot of what we're seeing today is it's just so easy to utilize our system
that you're going to come in and ask questions that you would never ask a doctor. We have people
who use their system 10 times a day, they'll come in and say, hey, I have high cholesterol.
What should I eat for breakfast? You would never ask that of a doctor.
But when there's no friction in the system, you can do that.
Okay, we got to fire up Doctronic and ask whether or not we should take BPC 157,
because it's been hotly debated on this show today.
And I want a real doctor or an AI doctor to get to the bottom of it.
I think that they would probably fall back.
I'm going to defer that to our system.
I actually don't know what that is.
It's a very controversial peptide that some people claim works very well.
Other people's claim it's a placebo effect.
But hopefully people are referring to real medical advice for this particular question.
But you raised some money.
Tell us.
How much did you raise?
I want to hit the gong for you.
We raised $40 million for our Series B.
Thank you so much.
Fantastic work.
To come.
Give us the update.
I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.
Yeah, great to meet you.
Yes, as well.
We'll talk to you soon.
Goodbye.
Let me tell you about fin.a.i.
The number one AI agent for customer service.
If you want AI to handle your customer sport, go to fin.com.
And we are in the Lambda Lightning Round.
This concludes our Lambda Lightning Round, but let me tell you about Lambda.
Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training in inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
And without further ado, we have Robin Vince from the Bank of New York Mellon.
Robin, how are you doing?
What's going on?
What a wonderful.
backdrop. I think we are struggling. Really remarkable. Oh, how are you doing? Sorry, we, we missed you
on that intro because of the audio. Can you introduce yourself and the company, I suppose?
Sure. Well, it's great to be with you. Congrats on Joe and everything you've been achieving.
It's been fun to watch your progress. So being why, we are the world's real looking after the
wiring and financial security of the financial system. We also are America's oldest banks. We've
been around for a while. We've seen a few cycles over time. There were just plenty of thousand people
in New York. Yeah, who started the bank again? Alexander Hamilton, the now famous dude.
That's incredible. Incredible. So obviously a lot of, a lot has changed over the, what, 250 roughly year
history of the firm. What is your day-to-day like? What is, what is, what is, what is, what is
on the top of your list of goals for 2026.
What are the challenges to running an institution
as old as B&Y?
Well, we've been really reimagining the company
over the course of the past three years.
We've been a strong and safe part
of the financial services system
and the US financial system, as you say, for 250 years.
We were the first stock ever traded
on the New York Stock Exchange.
That's fantastic.
That's right.
There's value to longevity, but
to get old means that you learn how to adapt.
And this is a world full of change.
And so it means laser focused on really bringing ourselves truly into the modern age,
AI, very focused on AI and everything we're doing with our platform,
we can get to that.
But actually taking the company and making it be the performer that it can be,
we do all these great things, these different businesses that we have,
living up to our potential has really been the motto of the past three years for us.
Yeah.
As you've witnessed AI progress over the last couple years, what do you think the biggest opportunities for AI within, I would say, just legacy financial institutions overall?
You know, we had someone on earlier that was talking about, you know, a lot of some of this code still running on mainframe computers and how much modernization that I'm sure you've been working.
on that's not even related to AI and then how can AI continue to serve that?
I think for us there are three vectors. And to be fair, I think they're probably the same
for most firms these days. And I think that's true for technology software firms. I think
it's true in the financial services sector as well. One is just doing what we do,
but just doing it in a better and more efficient way. So that could be modernizing code.
You're right. Cobalt, we have some mainframes. Mainframe is actually pretty good.
super high volume use cases, but we don't want them to run on old code.
So having the opportunity to make that change and frankly just make it easier to be
able to make the change.
We've been putting it off for a while.
Now we've got great tech.
It's cheaper and easier and quicker to be able to do it.
But also reimagining processes end to end, being able to essentially take multi-step
things and collapse them down to be just more efficient quicker.
So running the company better using AI is number one.
Second vector of change is actually the products and services, just enriching what we do and actually what we offer to clients with AI so that they perform better, provide additional insights, can actually be executing quicker for clients.
So we just become better as an institution in our actual delivery of our products and services.
And then the third one, I think, is actually expanding the perimeter of the firm.
We're not trying to turn ourselves into fundamentally a different company, but we are interested in taking.
inspiration from other things that have happened in the world, like Amazon is a good example,
Amazon Web Services, once upon a time it just served Amazon, then they externalized it as a service
and it essentially became their cloud service. We've got lots of things that we do at super scale
for ourselves that we could also do for our clients. We are the number one custodian in the world.
We custody $60 trillion of assets. We have payment rails.
Yeah. It's fun to have scale.
You just said the biggest number ever of any company, any CEO on the show, and that's hard to do.
Which really in a day moves through B&Y.
We touch 20% of all investable assets in the world.
So that is mega scale.
You could sound it again if you want that.
I love it.
This throughput from that throughput allows us to be able to deploy AI into really making a company kind of different.
So this third one, spanning the perimeter, doing for other people things that we currently can only do for ourselves is kind of an interesting thing too.
There was an interesting story on the Wall Street Journal today about Mark Zuckerberg looking to build a custom AI or use AI to answer questions in his role as the CEO of meta platforms.
And I'm interested in how you as the CEO of BNY could either are currently using AI or think in the future you might be using AI.
as a co-pilot for what you do,
answering questions about the business.
What's on the top of your wish list
if someone were to build an AI system
that knew everything about your business
and could help you do your job as CEO better?
Well, we have the beginning of that right now inside our company.
So we have our own AI platform that we built.
We started the journey three years ago.
It's called Eliza.
homage to Alexander Hamilton,
again and LISA connected to all of the LLMs but is really a multi-agentic platform that are people
build agents and we have live agents multi-agent solutions in production doing work today we also
have digital employees essentially multi-agent solutions that wrapped with a user ID a login a persona
and name that actually make them addressable and deployable in the company to work
alongside our human employees as teammates and Eliza's an app and I do exactly what you just
asked basically multiple times a day. So I put the client earlier on, hey, I'm going to be seeing
this client. Could you please tell me what are the additional things that I should be talking to
them about? Give me the top three ideas that are meant to be my pitch to the client. It goes through,
looks through every call report that we've interacted with the client. What I did last time I met with
them, what's happening in the news so far, what's pertinent and news to their business, and actually
just advises me on how to be a better kind of extension to the client rep team while I'm meeting
with them. So I do that today. Yeah, wow. I mean, can you explain to us a little bit about
what you're standing in front of? Is this some situation room to understand the global economy,
your business particularly, it looks amazing, but I'd love to know more. So you can just see a
glimpse of it behind me. But yes, it's a, it is exactly all of what you just said. It is a situation
room. It's our cyber technology command center. It is AI powered. So AI is kind of the first
line in actually looking at it, triaging it. So we're watching three trillion dollars of money
every day. We're watching 25 to 30 trillion dollars worth of U.S. Treasury settlements every day.
We're watching our three trillion dollars worth of wealth assets. And we're basically helping our
clients to be able to get insights into their business that's running through our technology.
Because we're kind of a platforms company these days. We're a bit of a non-traditional bank in
terms of what we actually do. So this is a virtualization. So it's all real data, real time,
that is actually, and we have this in three places in the world, that runs off private and public
cloud that actually allows us to get the insight into what's happening in our business all the time,
real time. I'm sure clients are asking you about disruption from artificial intelligence,
geopolitical instability. What else is at the top of the minds of your clients as we go into
2026? It's an uncertain time. Where are people searching for certainty right now?
Well, you know, it's an important question, John. And so AI is for sure right. You're right about
the geopolitics. The world's complicated place. Digital assets is another example.
Oh, sure.
We positioned our investment in digital assets, tokenization, tokenization,
tokenized deposits, stable coins, tokenization of other security types and frankly other financial
assets or maybe welcoming new financial assets into the system.
That is something that our clients are super interested in because they want us to help them
manage that transition from the old or traditional rails into the new ones.
And we can be a partner for them with that.
What is, what do you think is next? I mean, it, there was a lot of, there was a lot of talk years ago about tokenizing assets, bringing, you know, assets that we know and trade every day onto, you know, digital rails, cryptocurrency, on chain. That, it feels like that happened with the dollar. It feels like stable coins are here. They've arrived. Real estate has been slower. Stocks have been slower. What do you think is the next? Is oil on chain now? I was not familiar.
with that.
People are trying oil on chain, but it's, but I'm sure, I'm sure you see some, some,
you have some questions around how that's actually being done.
Yeah, well, look, remember with oil as well, it's a physical commodity at the end of the
day.
The whole constant on chain, the mirror world is like, if ever there was an example of, just
a reminder that it's a physical asset today, today.
But look, let me give you my gen 1, gen 2, gen 3 view of that.
And even before I do, let's just acknowledge where we are in gen 1.
So tokenization, yes, we're underway.
We're beginning.
You mentioned stable coins.
They have market share this big right now.
And so it's early days.
It's a little bit like AI.
You can see the promise of the tech.
You can see the opportunity.
But at the end of the day, adoption, full integration into the system is very different
than just having the tech.
And we talk all the time in our company about AI.
Great, great, exciting.
But it's got to be deeper.
It's got to be everywhere.
It's got to be for everything, for everyone.
So I'd say digital assets, similar situation, even in Gen 1.
We're beginning.
It's early days, a lot of promise opportunity.
But just taking an existing asset or even a physical asset that exists that isn't really part of the financial system putting it on, that be the beginning.
Then, how do we actually make things work better and differently?
Because for some existing assets, they're not necessarily better just because we tokenize them.
You know, we take a share of Microsoft and we declare victory because it's a token.
we haven't really changed much in the world.
If you take a bond, the question is not only can you tokenize the security,
but what can you do with the indenture?
How can you have the if and therefore statements that are all part of that piece of documentation
and actually encode them in a chain in a way that it actually is going to add additional value?
That's a different thing than just tokenizing the security itself.
And then Gen 3, if you actually think about financial securities
is ultimately being a cash flow and terms and conditions,
then maybe you can just re-render financial assets in entirely different ways
because of the fact that you now actually have the blockchain
and you actually have capabilities that didn't exist today in the traditional rails.
Now, today's L-1s aren't really up to that task.
So there's innovation that's required at the L-1-level as well as in the L-2s
and then for participant firms.
But that's how I see the world.
We're early.
This is a five-year, 10-year journey.
It'll happen, I think.
It'll happen more slowly than AI.
But that's another example of an innovation right now.
Earlier in the show, we were talking to Mitchell Green from Lead Edge Capital about private credit.
And there's been some reporting around just how big that non-bank lending industry is.
How should average investors who aren't maybe specifically in a private credit fund, but just, you know, your average American trying to make sure that their portfolio goes up every year.
How should they think about private credit, the risk in the system, how they can protect themselves or potentially benefit?
Where is America when it comes to the private credit industry right now?
So first of all, just a reminder that private credit is first of all credit.
And so we've got private credit, we've got public credit.
And they're essentially two different markets, different investor types potentially go in.
But at the end of the day, they're trying to solve for the same thing, which is leaning in.
to being able to lend money into the financial markets and capital system,
give entrepreneurs and other business builders or business runners access to more capital.
And so there are some types of borrowers who are more suited to the private markets and
some who are suited to the public markets and some who do both.
There's a lot of drama at the moment in private credit.
And there are some good reasons for it because there have been some exposures that have been
a bit idiosyncratic to private credit.
And also, there are always liquidity issues when people see headlines and they say,
oh my gosh, is my money safe?
And then people open their money back.
And then you have the old elevator, elevator door problem.
More people want to get out.
But there's not necessarily enough space and there's a bit of a rush for the exit.
So that's exactly the problem that we're seeing right now.
But the market I would observe is today still pretty strong because the credit market's strong.
And ultimately, the economy drives the credit market.
Now, we have high energy prices for a long period of time,
or we have a real weakness in the economy,
then we're going to have problems in the credit market,
and then we're going to have real problems in the private credit market
and public credit market.
So I think today we're in this spot where there's a lot of focus.
It's a large but not huge market
compared to the scale of the public credit market,
but the underlying fundamentals are mostly pretty good.
But there's a huge watchout with energy,
and as a result, a huge watch out into the readout
into the real economy.
And if we have high energy prices,
are the cracks and they persist,
that it's a different story.
Yeah, with the health of the underlying economy,
I feel like people track inflation,
they track GDP, they track the stock market.
If someone's trying to, you know,
now today they're an oil expert,
if someone's just trying to get an understanding
of how the U.S. economy is growing,
what are the signals that you would recommend
that they actually look through
or try and understand?
Well, first of all, when you're really looking to the economy,
you're looking at employment is super important.
People who have jobs feel more comfortable,
and people who feel more comfortable go about their lives
and they spend, and they deploy back,
and they help the economy to grow.
So it's really important to watch employment
and also to watch sentiment.
Then consumer sales and spending and kind of credit card health
and are people being over-leveraged
and how they're going about,
their spending. Those things are important. What is the profitability ultimately of companies?
And are they growing? Are they investing? Are people capital deploying? Energy is a huge input.
High energy prices have a very negative impact on the United States. We sit here and we feel very good
about the fact that we've got a lot of security and energy supply. And so actually having the molecules
that can flow because we have access to supply is a really big deal. But we're an export market.
So at the end of the day, the world prices sort of set the price domestically here as well.
And if we have high energy prices, it ripples through into food.
It ripples through all into all of the different things that are energy dependent.
And these days, everything is energy dependent.
Yeah.
Well, I guess the good news is that oil's down 10% today.
I feel odd saying that.
But it was very nerve-wracking when oils seem to be going up and up.
And as you mentioned, high energy prices can really put a drag on the economy.
me. So hopefully, I think we're all hoping for stability in financial markets, stability in
energy markets and all of the above. But thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, really enjoyed
your perspective. And come back on soon. Yeah, we'd love to talk to you more. Have a great rest of
your day. Cheers, Robin. We'll talk to you too soon, Robin. Let me tell you about graphite. Code review
for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Our next guest
is live in person in the TBP.
The one and only.
David Senator, how are you doing?
Miss you, man.
Nice watch.
Good to see you.
Tell us, how are you feeling?
What is this?
How are you feeling?
That's just the Yahoo button.
Does that reflect your inner feelings?
I want to talk about your inner monologue.
I want you to introspect.
I want you to introspect.
I want you to introspect.
How are you feeling?
You're doing well?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Unbelievable.
And do you feel aligned?
Do you feel like you're reaching your goals in life?
life. Do you feel like you're doing what you're meant to be doing? Oh, I mean, you know,
answer that question. What kind of questions? I'm just messing with you. It's an introspection questions.
Yeah. Yeah, it was, it was funny. Do you want to give the background to what you're? Sure, sure. So,
David Senra, host of David Senra and host of founders went viral last week after an interview with
Mark Andreessen, where you were both in discussion in agreement around this idea of,
maybe you don't need to be constantly
introspecting, you need to have some forward motion in your life,
you need to be ruminating.
It wasn't advice, it wasn't advice for other people.
Oh, yeah.
At all.
That's funny.
So it was an observation.
I wanted to talk to Mark for a long time.
And I actually had dinner with him last year in Miami.
And it took him a while to warm up, but then once he gets going,
the same person you see on the podcast is like the same person in person, right?
And I've like consumed everything.
I told him before.
I was like, I think you and Palmer, like, you're probably like the two best podcast guests on the planet.
He's great.
Right?
Yeah.
And, you know, because he doesn't have any notes in front of him.
I spent eight hours need to need with Palmer.
And I couldn't, he was inexhaustible.
I've never come across a mind like that before.
Yeah.
And Mark's the same way.
It's like, you can ask him anything and he just, he has this crazy recall.
And the difference between, like, me and most people that talk to Mark is like, I've read all the same books that Mark has done.
I read his blog archive like eight years ago.
Yeah.
And which was excellent.
Long before he was, like, tweeting.
Is he an episode about, this is his blog.
Yes.
I think it's episode 50 of founders.
That's great.
I think this is in 2018.
Episode 50, wow.
Yeah, exactly.
I should redo it because there's a lot of really good advice for like founders in there.
And so like I was just excited to talk to him.
Yeah.
It was the by far, I think we've done like 13 or 14 of these that we've released so far.
We've now recording like mad so we have a ton banked.
But it's like one of the people I was most excited to talk about just because like we have the same passions.
And he was the only person that I've come across in today that came to the same conclusion that like I would
read all these biographies and these people that went on to build great companies,
invent new technology, everything else, they talk about this all the time. They actively
avoid introspection. And so the reason I brought up, I was not trying to be provocative.
I'm not in, like, I have a 10-year fucking history of not being provocative.
So, I mean, I understand the pushback, which is that there's so many examples of
history's greatest entrepreneurs, introspecting. I think that maybe the, the nuance here is
when does the introspection happen? I always,
go back to that Disney chart, you know the Disney napkin map of how Disneyland fits into Disney films,
fits into the radio business, fits into the merchandise business. It all is crystal clear right now.
And a lot of founders, a lot of content creators, a lot of people like us will look at that and be like,
I need seven things that all piece together. But Disney drew that map and then died like two years
later. It was a reflection on his life. He was introspecting about what,
made his business successful, but he did it after he had done all the things.
I think people are confusing thinking with introspection.
So I was actually thinking about you.
We were like, the, again, I went back and listened to the first, like, 10 minutes of that
episode.
There's nothing remotely, like, controversial about this.
And I guess one part of the, you're like, yeah, there should be more nuance.
Yeah, no shit.
That's the part of the internet.
No one needs the context.
They're not going to watch the 10 minutes.
They're just going to see the caption and then disagree with the caption.
So what I would say is, like, this is the difference between pre and post life's work.
And so, like, you're a perfect example.
Yeah.
It's like, we've talked about this a few times on the show.
It's like there was a huge pre-history with me and you, pre-TPVN.
Yeah.
And where you're the EIR, a founder's fund, you're making these fucking incredible document.
I can't cuss, right?
You guys got on me last time about this.
You can.
You can.
It's up to you.
Okay.
Depends on how you want to trade.
If our kids start swearing, we're going to be mad at you.
Yeah, I'm going to take the stand that no, none of history's greatest entrepreneurs have ever sworn.
Yeah.
You'll go far with that.
So what I would say is like the prehistory here is like you were, EIR, I found it's fun.
You were making these incredible long-form documentaries on a lot of the same interests that you and I have.
I found you, I started talking to you.
I was like, you're gifted at this.
Like, you're a generational media talent.
Because I was like the first thing I saw of you was your history of Silicon Valley documentary.
That's fun.
Which I've read at least 40 books on the same topic.
And I'm learning stuff I didn't even know.
So I was like, oh, this guy's like, this is incredible.
And if you remember the time, you were trying to figure out, what's that?
Go, go.
You were trying to figure out,
it sounds like a sheep.
You were trying to figure out,
okay, do I start another company?
Do I become a VC?
So you were trying to figure out,
do I start another company?
Do I become a VC, God forbid.
Yes.
Do I, and I was like trying to push you to podcast.
Yeah, yeah.
And then you went to,
tell me it was a good business.
And then you went through multiple different variations.
God damn it, Jority, stop.
This is your show.
And I'm going to, so you went through multiple different variations.
of different forms of podcasts.
You even tried something like this with like a co-host
a few different times.
I saw all of them.
Lulu and Jason Carmen.
And then I also had a solo show
that was sort of a copy of yours,
but about live people instead of dead people.
And we were, I remember because we were walking in Miami.
We were walking to dinner.
We actually ran into Keith Rubei on the way there,
randomly.
And we had this dinner and you're like,
this show just doesn't feel right.
You didn't like the power law.
Yeah, it's true.
Yeah, the power law was not like,
It wasn't getting me out of bed because I would make an episode.
And then somebody would be like, I'm alive.
And I'm going to debate you about this.
Like you got this wrong.
And I was like, oh, okay.
I don't want to do it.
Yeah, you're like, no, no, no.
Rockefeller's not coming from the grave yelling at me.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, you can say whatever.
You can say, you know, Steve Jobs never inspected.
And then he's not going to hit you up and be like, I did.
Again, we're not saying like, never.
But even like, Elon commented on this.
Yeah.
I sent it to our group chat.
We should pull up the tweet that he even commented on it.
Yeah, he said, reinforcing negative neural pathways via therapy.
or introspection is a recipe for misery.
Don't cut a rut in the road.
But isn't this just like don't ruminate?
Some people were saying, oh, you guys are using the term wrong.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it was like negative introspection.
Let me finish.
We have friends that all they do is introspect.
One of them has still not done his first deal.
We will not name him.
Like he thinks too much and not enough action.
That is the point.
It's just like, yeah, people that built, this is not a controversial.
People that built great shit turned out to do a lot of action.
like they take a lot of action
as opposed to like just sit in there thinking about how they're.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And even the, isn't it Blackstone whose first deal?
Like Steve's first deal was like a total flop,
if I remember correctly.
I don't know.
I remember that, but let me go back to John.
It's like I wasn't,
I wasn't sitting there thinking about like what's the perfect media product.
I was trying things, being very forward motion,
being very aggressive about these different things.
The important part is you were trying to figure out a business that fits for you.
And then this is why when I immediately saw you guys,
you were in like the wrinkled t-shirts,
You were filming at the Jonathan Club.
I was like, this is it, you found it.
The reason I bring that up for you is because,
I think it's a great illustration on the point.
It's like, I talk to you guys every day.
You don't wake up thinking about like,
how do I feel today or like, what should I do?
You guys just are unbelievably dedicated to,
because you found your life's work.
And I know this because like how many people
try to buy the show, how many people
have tried to invest in the show,
how many people try to get you to do other things.
And you're like, no, like, we just want to do this
and we just want to do this forever.
And the example I used on the episode was Sam Walton.
Like Sam Walton was figuring retail out.
He had one store,
for the first five years of his life.
Yeah.
Right.
But then you fast forward,
25 years into his life,
he wasn't waking up like,
what should I do today?
He's like, no, I like Walmart.
I like building Walmart.
I'm going to make more Walmart.
So you just keep doing this until I die.
Yeah.
That's the point we were making.
Yeah.
And then I love that Mark just refused about.
Oh, he just, like, it was like day.
10x down.
Oh, day after day after day after day
of just not fighting this back.
And then.
Did very well.
And then what I would say about this is like,
perfect.
We hit on this, like,
weird, unintended, like, political divide.
We're like, a lot of,
like my liberal friends were texting me and saying like, this is wrong, this is evil.
And I'm just like, oh, interesting.
I think you know I'm not a wrong, like a new person.
And then, you know, more of my conservative friends like, yeah, no shit.
And again, that was unintentional.
So a lot of the hate comments came from like the socialist side of Twitter, which, okay, fuck them people.
Like, I hate socialists.
Like, good.
I'm glad I've said you.
Got canceled by the socialist.
Good.
Good.
Good.
More, more, more inspiration to grind harder.
Tell us more about the show.
What's coming down the pipe?
How are you thinking about it?
How much are you on the road these days?
A lot of people, so Jordy is seeing the new studio,
which you've got to come out and see.
It's crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
It's probably actually the craziest podcast studio ever in history.
Wow.
Just like the actual dirt that it's on.
Okay.
Love it.
We just had Evan Spiegel out there.
Thank you for making that connection.
But he started watching the show and he's like, can I be on the show?
Yeah.
And then he had known because he's like, I love these guys.
Yeah, yeah.
So the answer is just like, I mean, we will travel if we have to.
trying to push as many people as possible to Malibu.
We're having a lot of success with that.
And we're all really friends with my good friends
of my co-founder, Rob Moore.
And every time, like, the Andreessen one we did,
I probably did that like three weeks before he came out.
And I was like, again, I don't do any drugs,
but I was like, hi, as a kite.
And I was just like shaking Rob.
I was like just put a founder in front of me every single day.
Like that's the biggest thing.
So yeah, I definitely feel like I'm not waking up thinking,
what should I do today?
It's like I'm completely addicted to this.
What's the pipeline of people that are coming on the new show
that have never done a podcast?
Okay, so one, okay, so we all know.
Because that's the real alpha.
Like, there's a thousand, there's, there's, not, not, I'm saying like, all of it,
but I'm just saying, like, there's a thousand people out there that are, that would break
the internet if they did a show, and they just, for one reason or another.
Who's your Sarah Payne?
Okay, so there's, there's two things here.
One, there's a lot of other podcasters.
A few have tweeted this publicly, and I don't really respond anybody on Twitter, but I've said,
hey, you know, I think of this differently.
They're like, I don't like doing people that have the podcast circuit.
Sure.
And when you say that, you're just admitting that you have no differentiation, you have no
unique perspective.
So, like, I really wanted to do Mark because...
We would never interview someone here if they were, if they had done a different podcast.
Yeah, exactly.
But I wanted to interview.
What?
This is your sixth show today?
Let's ring the gong.
I wanted to have conversation Mark because of all the things that I knew about him
that I had never heard anybody else talking about.
Of course, of course.
We went on your own conversation.
So if you listen to episodes.
And the virality.
is evidence that you had a new conversation.
You got to a different place.
Well, not only that, but that was the stuff that was controversial,
but there's stuff in there like, okay,
the fact that when Mark was 20 years old,
he was mentored by like the Elon of his day.
Jim Clark was the first person in history
to ever found three separate billion dollar technology companies.
And he didn't start his first company who was 38 years old.
At 38, he started his first company.
And then, and check this out.
And then there was this book from like 2001
that was published that I read by Michael Lewis.
Before he was 38, was he just like,
disrespecting or no no no he was an academic the moment he stopped he was an he was an academic but
straight to the top he describes himself in the book he just said as a self-described loser because he
was smart he had papers written and he was teaching but he had no money and then i think his second or
third divorce the guy's like he was literally just who is this again jim clark jim clark yeah
under silicon graphics yes netscape the company that turns into webmd yes and mark and
Jason was really young when he co-founded Netflix, but he had Jim Clark.
Netflix.
Or sorry, Netscape.
But he had Jim Clark as like this older.
He's mentor.
He's a co-founder.
He's a mentor.
It's a wild thing because normally if you walk into Adreason's office and you say like,
I'm 20 and I have a 40-year-old co-founder, people will be like, this is odd.
Like normally we fund like two Stanford grads.
So I read an entire book on this.
He talks about it in his blog archive.
And I did two other episodes on the same book, like two or three years apart.
Yeah.
I don't know how no one brought that up to Mark.
But it was so fascinating.
And he tells three different stories on the podcast
spread by like 30 minutes in between each story
about how formative this was.
The reason he is the way he is
is because he was mentored by Jim Clark-a-20.
How is that not interesting?
Yeah.
So there's a, I want to have my own spin on people that,
you know, or do other podcasts.
There is another one coming out.
We're actually flying to New York to do this one
because it's going to be one of the craziest locations
that you could possibly film in.
This was suggested by somebody I can't name on the show.
He's a good friend of us three.
Sure.
He's probably the smartest person that we all know.
Sure.
And he's like, hey, we were at dinner in Miami.
And he's like,
He who shall not be named?
Exactly.
And so basically he's like, what do you talk about this guy?
I can't tell you who it is yet, but this guy's product, if you are wealthy in the world,
you will know and probably have, you know, frequented this guy's product.
And it's outside of tech.
It's nothing to do with technology.
And so he's never, what did you say?
Chrome hearts.
No.
No, but he's never done a podcast.
He doesn't even have any, this guy doesn't even have any social media.
He designed wraps that go on Hurricanes.
The chat is saying you're bringing vague posting to podcasts.
Who?
You are being your vague post.
Who?
You're vague posting on a pod, which is innovated.
Let's be less vague.
What do you think about the AI podcast that's at the top of the charts right now?
It is programming for all of us.
It's putting us all out of a job.
Is this the Epstein one?
Yes.
Yeah, but I think they're transitioning to.
They're going to do more.
They're going to do a bunch of stuff.
everything that you want.
Like if it's a hot topic,
they're going to have a podcast that's,
you know,
single narrator,
like,
very fact-based,
deep research.
Yeah,
and the reason that it's interesting
is like,
it's not,
it's not an AI app.
It is like somebody used AI to make the media product
and then just uploaded it
to traditional channels.
Yeah,
Kareem from Ramp showed me this like,
like a month ago.
Yeah,
yeah.
Yeah,
obviously there's going to be great AI
generated podcasts.
Like,
of course.
Now,
I think they got to the top of the charts,
not because they have a large listenership,
if I'm mistaken,
but the frequency in which you produce.
And so that's a way to actually, like, manipulate that.
Sure, sure, sure.
Where you see this with this,
some other media companies doing this,
where they essentially record for three hours
and they just break up every,
all the episodes are like 15 minutes long
and they upload, like, you know, 15 a day or whatever.
And they're like, look, we're on the top of charts,
but if you actually look at overall listenership,
it's, like, really low.
Yeah, we would know that.
But, yeah, like, there's, obviously, like.
Three a day.
I mean, I spent, I got to spend,
I think I could talk about this
I'm pretty sure. I got to spend some time with Demis
from Deepvine and just like
that is the most AI-AGI-pilled
fucking person I've ever come across to my life.
So he thinks it's coming for everything.
So yeah, obviously there's going to be great AI-generated
podcasts. I think the
people making
AI
podcasts would stop if they knew
they were competing against you.
I found this hilarious. I was looking back
like the Chuck Norris of
podcasting. You guys are hilarious because
I went through our, um, look at this.
Here.
You guys texted me this when I did the new show and you didn't like the profile picture that I,
that I originally picked.
Yeah, because you smile, you were smiling.
I was like, you want to read it?
Yeah, I said, uh, you, you created a new account for the new show,
and I just immediately texted it to you.
And I said, I think no smile in profile picture.
John says, agree.
And I said, I said, you look good.
It just doesn't seem on brand.
You're more serious than 99% of people.
And then John said, unless it's,
a deliberate ploy to make enemies underestimate how seriously you take podcasting. And I said,
you look like, you should look like you're going to kill someone. Yeah. Um, so anything,
like, I think like being the best in the world, like trying to, like, dominate whatever niche,
like you, like, you guys are dominating your niche right now. Yeah. I'm amazed. I hear, listen to all,
every single interview you guys do and like just your, your relentless focus of like, this is what we do.
You don't even want to travel, which I heard, like, you changed something, you know, plans recently.
Yeah. It's been. Yeah. I think, like,
The key for us and anybody is just like whatever your core competency is, like focus in on that,
try to get as far down that line as possible, and then just say note everything goes.
And again, is that even new?
Yeah, it's interesting.
On the AI topic, like the speed with which AI can produce an audio deep dive on a hot topic,
like the Epstein files, which drops, it has thousands of thousands of pages of documents.
Like the human team's not going to be able to read through that.
And people want to consume that media through audio.
That makes a lot of sense.
at the same time, it does feel like interviews, you know, with particular people that everyone knows is not AI like Mark Andresen.
And then they can react to that and feel something emotionally because it's a real person with a real impact on the world.
That feels very, very sticky.
So I debate demos on that.
We just had this conversation.
So some of the stuff, like how we're using AI for the new show, like I'm not going to talk about publicly.
I obviously tell you guys because we share information.
But it's just like I'm not giving an edge to competitors.
It's not going to happen.
What I would say is...
Oh, you have a course.
No, never do that.
Never.
Okay.
So what I would say is like we had, I had dinner like a month ago and this is exactly, it was
with Kareem and the guy that we can't mention.
Yeah.
And they're just like, you're moving way too fucking slow.
These are close friends.
So it's like they're not like being mean to me.
Sure, sure, sure.
You're moving way too slow.
You're not using AI enough.
Like founders is more like susceptible to being overtaken by AI.
Sure.
Then the new one.
Yeah.
And you should drastically ramp up production on the new one.
Yeah.
And they made the exact same point that you did.
But I do think, again, like, everything, the world is, like, run on parallels.
And I think podcasting is the same way.
And it's just like, yeah, you guys are making media and you're delivering news and commentary.
But your audience has a relationship with you.
Yeah.
Like, I see when they come up to you, like, how they act.
They act like you're, Jordy and John are my best friends.
Like, that's what I can, I've been saying that you can go, I've been going on podcast for
half a decade.
Like, I'm not making media.
I'm creating relationships at scale.
And that's why your shows are not just like, you ask one.
Like, it would be very different.
to like use AI and walk into an interview with Mark Andrews and just with like 10 questions and be like
Mark how did you start your career?
I didn't have a-I will be able to-
Mark can put up an insane podcast just with that format where the guests could say like a total
of a thousand words and he just like goes off.
But no, you're having a question.
But yours are more like, you know, all of your, I think a lot of your episodes will end up being like
50-50.
I'm trying to like I didn't have anything.
I think they're better if I don't have anything in front of me.
Like I prepared for the.
last decade. Like I can just sit down and talk to you. I do have one. So I met Tony from
DoorDash here. Remember he came on your show and we had this crazy conversation. You
were writing the newsletter, but me, you and Patrick and Tony had this crazy conversation for like
45 minutes. And in 15 minutes and I was like, hold up, dude, you got to do more podcasts.
Because he's so impressive. That one, I think it's coming out next weekend. That one I had
maybe too much in front of me. Just because like, the way I think about Tony is just he's like,
again, like not financial advice, but he just gives me,
out of anybody I've ever spoken to, I think he's 41,
just gives me like young Jeff Bezos Fives.
Like I have no idea of the quality of DoorDash.
I don't look into the stock, anything like that.
All I know is if you think that guy's going to stop me a food deal.
Yeah, the other thing that's notable there is all three of the original co-founders
are still working in the business and it's, what are they, 15 years in or something?
It's a crazy.
Maybe a little bit less.
But it's so fair to have that much success.
all the founders
normally
somebody steps back
normally
somebody's got to start a venture
but think about
how humble he is though
right
and you know I even said this on the episode
it's like you're not going to like
what I'm about to say Tony
but don't we say it anyways
it's like your competitors
are afraid of you
like I've had a dinner
in Stockholm with the guy that sold
his company for like $8 billion to
to Tony
his name's Mickey the company's called Volt or something like that
it was like the door to
European and
And he told this crazy story I told him the episode of Tony.
He still reports directly to Tony to his day.
And he's like, I thought of myself as an entrepreneur my entire life.
I thought there's no way in hell it ever worked for anybody else.
We had a term sheet right in front of me.
We could raise a fresh billion dollars of capital to fight them.
And I'm looking at it thinking about this.
And something involuntarily came out of my mouth that I never thought I would admit.
And he's looking at it and he goes, I can't beat him.
Whoa.
He can't beat him.
He's like, I can't beat him.
So I either could like sell.
for life-changing money and then learn from him,
or I could fight this ego and maybe like this billion dollars on fire.
And he did the difficult decisions.
Like, I'm going to go and sell.
He's still going to get stock in the new company and be able to grow that.
Yeah.
But I would say that out of all the conversations I've had so far,
the one that they're all, like I've all enjoyed them.
But what I would say is like Toby Luque was, if no one,
if the people listening to this have not listened to any of the new show yet,
I would, if you want to go in tech,
go Toby Lucke.
If you want to find
these crazy people
that are not in tech,
go Todd Graves.
Todd Graves.
But Toby Luque
was very fascinating to me
because he's your favorite founder's
favorite founder.
So everybody that you admire,
you ask who they admire
and they'll bring up Toby.
And what they like about him
is that he thinks to every single thing
independently.
So therefore he has all these beliefs
that are not correlated with one another.
Which means when you have a conversation
with them, you are unable to predict
what his response to your question
or your statement is going to be.
And that, we talked for four hours.
So we talked for a half hour before we recorded.
Then we recorded for three hours.
We added down to whatever it was.
Then we recorded for another 30 minutes after.
And I could have kept talking.
I was like, dude, I got to catch a flight.
I'm going to have dinner with Charlie Rose that night.
I had to fly down there.
It was like we would have kept talking.
Like, he just blew my mind.
One thing he said that I think would be interesting to your audience is he believes,
and I think he said this on the episode,
that we're going to look back on the year 26 as the year that every single business in the world
was up for grabs.
that AI is coming for everything.
Every single other business will have to be reimagined,
and you're going to look back at this is the year
it should have been obvious to you
that you can rebuild the AI-native version
of whatever exists out there.
Interesting.
Meta has scaled back.
Their Metaverse plans
kind of refocus the company.
A lot of people over the last couple weeks
have been kind of dunking on Zuck for that.
Anything stand out in history where great entrepreneurs, CEOs made like massive, massive bets and they didn't pan out, I would say as a meta shareholder, I think it's great that Zuck is willing to like bet heavy, heavy, heavy on, you know, trends that he really believes in. And also it's great if you kind of run it down and then realize you're hitting a dead end or need to refocus.
But what's your view on, you know, swinging for the absolute fences and missing sometimes?
I mean, it's obviously inevitable.
Jeff Bezos says this great line in his shareholder letters where it's like the size of your failure has to scale with the size of your company.
So he's like, I can't make a $300 million mistake anymore.
I think the fire phone was like a $3 billion.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's good.
Like, okay.
Because I want to, I'm going to somewhere.
Like, I have to, like, it's just inevitable.
What I will say is I've spent some time with Zuck.
I don't think he has a peer.
I told him this. It's like who else is his age? And he's still somewhat of a puzzle and mystery to me. And that's why I'm interested in like to continue to talk to him. Because it's just like, I've read every single book on Facebook. They're all bad. There's no good books on Facebook. There's some of his, you know, most of his interviews, like, there's just certain things I want to talk to him about that because I'm just naturally curious about. I think this is the whole point where, you know, people like, you guys are having this immoral conversation about introspection. It's just like. It's funny because, yeah, you actually want him to introspect. You want to. You want to.
The interview that you would do with Zuck would be very reflective.
It would not be, tell me how you're thinking about MSL's product roadmap.
No, I don't even think it would be introspective.
It would be like, just I want to know how, like, the reason I signaled out the Toby Lucke episode.
Because when I sat down with Toby and I did this for Brian Armstrong, too, who was awesome,
just like, I want to make like a how Toby Lucke works episode.
Yes.
Like, and this is what I just want to know, I'm not, there's no gotcha here.
It's just like, how do you think about building businesses?
How do you think about retaining talent?
Why did you do this product?
Like, just tell me the stuff that you have 25 years, in his case,
I think 20 years experience as an entrepreneur.
Like, that's one very rare, especially one in a single company.
Like, you've learned all kinds of crazy stuff.
Like, just like, let's get some of this on record.
And let's talk about this.
So same thing with Zuck.
I'd just be very interested.
What I like about him is, like, he has this just like interclock where, you know,
he's going to make these massive bets.
And, you know, so obviously he knows.
obviously not stupid.
Like some of them are going to fail.
Of course.
What do you think about retired interviews?
People that are out of the game.
The risk with a live player,
someone who's actively running a public company
is that the SEC is listening to what they're saying,
that they want to stay on talking points,
that they have a bunch of different incentives.
Well, if they say, oh, well, you know,
the easiest thing I ever did was cut back my marketing spend
because none of that stuff was working.
Well, then their head of marketing is going to be upset.
There's internal politics.
Whereas when you do an interview with somebody who's retired and no longer in the game,
sometimes they can speak a little bit more freely about their industry,
their life's work, their career, et cetera.
Yeah, I would, if I could have a show of just 80-year-old billionaires,
like that would talk, like, I got to spend time with Sam Zell before he died.
The fact that I was never able to record a podcast with them,
now that I have this new vehicle
is like man
because he's just like
doesn't care
he's dying of cancer
he's gonna say whatever
so my friend Sam Hinky
I just saw him like two weeks ago
and he actually gave me advice
he's like you should organize
your guest list
in reverse chronological order
because there's one guy
we're working on right now
who's one of the most successful people
we already had to reschedule with him
he's 87
87 and he is like unfiltered
and incredible
what about the tension
between a
name brand live player.
Like a Toby look, he's somebody who's done other podcasts.
People know Shopify.
Maybe they've built a business on Shopify.
It is not fully a consumer brand, but it will draw a certain level of attention
versus 80-year-old billionaire who's been, you know, owns half the farmland in Montana
might have had a fantastically rich life, but one behind the scenes.
Is there still an interview to be done there?
Yeah.
Like, how do you guys choose?
the people you want to talk to?
Well, a lot of it's news-driven.
So a lot of it's about, you know,
what's happening right now in the world?
Who can we talk to to contextualize that?
And so I enjoy those reflective moments when they come up,
but they aren't as much of a driving force at all.
So I just like try to,
so I went on a walk yesterday or maybe yesterday.
I didn't know where I was yesterday.
Yeah, it was yesterday morning.
And a really good friend, really smart person.
You're just like, you have, one of your gifts is like,
distilling everything down to like what is actually essential.
And so, and he's like, you help me talk through all these issues I'm having
in my business this way, but you do it for yourself where it's like,
this, I'm just going after things I'm intensely interested in.
Especially in the age of AI, if you're not following what you're obsessed with,
like, I don't, I think you're doing it wrong.
So founders is just the books that I'm intensely interested in reading.
And the new show is just people I'm intensely interested in speaking to.
Some of those stuff, the people we have recorded,
they'll like,
might be known
this like small niche thing.
I'm not going after like
just big names
that's not interested in me.
It's like the rubric is very
or the decision making here is very simple.
It's just like, am I intensely interested
to sit down and talk to this person?
Like Evan Spiegel,
I showed him too, this.
It's like I did an episode of founders on him.
I think it's episode like 25 or 24.
It's like a long time ago.
And what I,
there was like one thing that happened with Evan
because I talk about Edwin Land all the time.
Founder of Polaroid, Steve Jobs' hero.
Steve Jobs copied a lot of how Edwin Land build Polaroid
and use those ideas in building Apple.
He's Steve Jobs of mentoring technologies.
Yeah, and he's the patron saying of founders.
And so I read this book about Evan,
and Evan is 21 years old, and he's talking about that he's got two heroes.
And it happens to be Steve Jobs, which makes sense,
every 21-year-old kid trying to be an entrepreneur at the time had Steve Jobs.
And then Edwin Land.
It's like, how the hell does a 21-year-old even know?
We got enough landhead.
Yeah, we had an incredible conversation about that.
I know.
It's a different land.
Stop.
Yeah, and so, like, you see what I mean?
Like, I just, like, we have the same interest.
This is a guy that has influenced my thinking.
He influenced your thinking.
And, of course, you wind up with a camera company.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, it made perfect sense to me.
Oh, that makes sense.
And I don't care.
And I don't care.
I don't care about that.
iPhone is also.
But people are like, what about, what about, like,
if the stock price is down on the market camp,
so I don't give a shit.
I want him to win.
He's, like, a very interesting person to me.
Yeah, totally, totally.
Okay.
Saturday.
I watched.
Elon's kind of new pitch for Tesla, X-A-I, and SpaceX.
And one of the products that he was kind of presenting was a mass driver.
Did you follow this at all?
Do you think I did?
I know you didn't.
Hold on.
We have two episodes of Elon coming up tomorrow, by the way.
Yeah, yeah.
So we were having a debate on the show at the beginning around the timeline for the products.
And we were pretty, John, where did we actually land?
You were saying under 20 years?
I said under 20, Tyler said under 30, and you said 75 or something like that.
Or you said 10, but then also 75.
But also five.
Also five.
I have no idea.
No, I'm not going to pretend that I think I have like an accurate read on it.
But has there any entrepreneurs throughout history that were kind of pitching their business overall on, on time?
timelines where the market was like, I don't know if this is, like, like, going back to like
inventing flight, people telling the Wright brothers, like, you're never going to be able to fly.
Is it possible?
People were saying that for sure.
Yeah, no, I know, I know, I know.
But at the same time, they did it on like a-
They weren't being like, like, this chain of events will lead to the 747 50 years from
Yeah, exactly.
And like, so get ready for the 747.
This is like the Wright brothers fishing.
So if that's my bicycle plane because the 747's coming.
It was coming in 50 years, right?
So I would say about Elon in particular.
I did this episode of Founders, which I'm really proud of.
It's probably the most downloaded episode ever.
It's called How Elon Works.
And it strips and writes all the biographical details
and just talks about him speaking about the way he runs his companies.
And in that episode, I would say,
usually there's some kind of like historical equivalent
for everybody operating today.
And, you know, you could name a person
and I could find somebody in history that, you know.
But for him, I do think he is like a singular character.
I can't think of anybody living or dead.
that is like him.
Yeah.
There's...
It's weird because he's an industrialist,
but he's also incredibly promotional
and, like, very good
at the marketing side as well as the building side.
It's the best in the world at that.
That's very way.
It might be the best salesperson.
Yeah.
There are so many people that are amazing salespeople.
That was why the weekend presentation was tough
because I didn't think the...
All the technology was cool,
and I have zero doubt that Elon can do hard things
that no other set of companies can do.
And you see it today because I just wasn't...
A decade ago, people were like,
roadsters come.
next year, everyone's talking about Roadster
and no one's really talking about Mass Driver.
They didn't break through in the same way.
Probably because it's the name.
Maths driver?
They got to get a new name.
Yeah. They should call it. I didn't see it, so I don't know what that means,
but that's fine. Hold on.
There is, the answer question of the majority,
there is tons of examples from history
of somebody having an idea saying that they're going to
dedicate to that life, their life
to making that idea come to fruition
and taking multiple decades to
actually do that. So like,
the thing that comes to mind just because I'm rereading,
about him now and I'm probably going to do another episode on him. I've done like six episodes on
Henry Ford. And Henry Ford had one idea. He would tell you, I had one idea in my entire life
and that was to figure out a way to make the car for an everyman. Meaning at the time when you made less
than a dollar a day, cars are like $6,000. You can't afford, the people making them cannot afford
them. How can we learn to mass produce that? And it took him, you know, 20 years of pounding on
that idea until he actually accomplished that goal. So he probably thought he was going to be done
three or five or ten. And it took 20. But yeah, you're going to
find a ton of examples like that. It always takes longer. And that's why the Raptor R exists.
It's the car for the Everman. Henry Ford would love the R. Well, the thing that that example doesn't
quite satisfy this example, because this pitch is like, these eight things need to happen
perfectly synced together in order for this other thing to be possible. But again,
betting against Elon has not worked yet.
Mid-curve alert.
Mid-curve alert.
There is, there's a book by our mutual friend,
Eric Jorgensen, that's coming out tomorrow.
Mid-curve.
Mid-curve.
Yeah, I think we, I mean, we can show the cover, can't we?
You can read the whole thing right now live.
You guys want to read for another seven hours?
Let's do a table reading.
This is the book of Elon with a forward by Naval Ravikot
by none other than Eric Jorgensen.
And the visuals are by Jack Butcher.
Oh, that's great.
So in the book, Elon talks about the fact that he gets a lot of shit on the fact that his timelines are usually, you know, off.
Yeah.
And he explains why and everything else.
But I think what Eric, we're actually doing something.
Eric was actually the first American to ever put me on a podcast.
Really?
And so, like, the first podcast I ever did of somebody else's podcast was this one that only went in, like, China.
Yeah.
And so it was, like, really popular on WeChat.
But no one, but Eric, he just, like, gave me a shot when no one really, who.
I was.
That's awesome.
And they wound up being important
because one of the listeners
of that episode
is only like a thousand people
to listen to it
was Patrick.
And Matt Russell,
who was running Colossus.
And there's a,
there's a comment in the Colossus Slack,
the Colossus Podcast Network Slack,
which Patrick Groshaughnessy
is the founder of,
talking about the episode.
This is before I was assigned to them.
And they said,
this guy sounds like he's going to bite the microphone.
And so they're like,
oh, he's actually like,
might be good at this.
But I think what Eric is,
the reason,
what I'm doing is I'm dropping
episode of founders on this book tomorrow,
which is a normal solo episode,
then I did something different for the new show,
which I think could be another,
another like not just having conversations with great founders,
but conversations with charismatic authors
who are writing about great founders.
Eric, because of a friend,
he's also very articulate and charismatic.
And so we essentially,
that episode's coming on the David Center feed tomorrow.
Yeah.
And we say because he's a friend,
he's articulate and charismatic.
No, because I spent a lot of time talking to him.
We're like, you guys have interviewed authors.
Yeah, you know, some of them is like...
Authors are almost universally fun to talk to in the moment that they're launching their book
because they've spent more time than anyone else on Earth.
Just thinking about that one.
So we, when you see the shot tomorrow, it's like we have like, you know, I don't know,
a thousand pages of Elon documents in front of us.
And a lot of it is just me going through asking my notes and highlights with Eric.
And then you essentially can prompt him and then he can tell you crazy Elon stories.
Yeah.
Do you think that there's a lot of the CEOs that you're talking about,
talking to the ones that are kind of in their prime, let's say, you know, five to 10 years or 20 years into their company, do you think they are more AGI-pilled than they let on on the internet?
Because a lot of them will, like, talk about how they're using AI and talk about how they're excited about it.
But I feel like you've given me some examples where behind the scenes are actually, like, much stronger believers than...
I mean, you guys had, I think, Lulu, I think, has been on here talking about that AI has, like,
communication, like a branding problem.
It's like very unpopular with the general population.
Actually, I spent over an hour with Kareem yesterday talking about this topic
and about ways to actually get good information.
What I would say is like, yeah, like most of the stuff they're talking about,
they're not going to talk about a podcast, they're not going to talk about,
you'll see this in group chats to some of the ones that you and I are in.
But even that, like, yeah, most of them is like whispers and like private conversations
and completely off the record stuff.
Do you think you'll ever write a book?
Do you think I ever read a book?
The things that we three share
No man, the thing that we three
No, the thing that we three...
That's a narrative violation.
What we share is like, do you want to do anything else
than the show?
Why haven't you raised a fun yet?
Why aren't you starting a new company?
Why aren't you on a plane right now traveling?
I'm just thinking like, I don't know,
like the book of David Senra
with Eric Jorgensen.
He's writing it.
Could make sense.
Oh, but basically...
Eric's already writing it.
He is?
Yeah, he tried to work on it with me, and he's just like, you, you don't use my phone.
And if I talk to you, because I can't get a hold of you, then I talk to you, you have,
your idea changes all the time.
I was like, I can't be the bottleneck of anything.
This is why I have to run my own shit.
Yeah, that's fair.
I'm just thinking about in terms of, like, just.
Are you trying to, like, sabotage me?
You're trying to, like, give me to enough of podcast.
I thought we're friends.
I've just seen more and more, like Dorcasch wrote that book with Stripe Press that was
heavily based upon the interviews that he did.
It had a bunch of interesting graphics.
It was clearly a collaborative process.
project and I feel like there's an aura effect to writing that can work very well.
I mean, we've had a number of people that have been able to stick the landing.
No, I think, again, like, just focus is more important than ever in this age and focus on things
that you think about all the time and that you're, like, obsessed with.
And, like, the reason I could do a new episode every day is because I never get tired of talking
about how people build their business or think about their products or, like, I find that shit
infinitely fascinating because you could do it.
This is what I loved about Toby.
Yeah.
And it's just like, he's like, the reason he think, he said this on the episode, the reason he
thinks through every single thing because he's like, there's not one right way to do it.
There's probably a hundred.
And I'm looking for the right way for me.
And so like talking about AGI-Pilled, he said something that was shocking on that episode
where, you know, because he's like, I started Shopify in my, I was, he had no money.
He was living in his like mother-in-law's house at a small desk in a bedroom there.
It was inside of a cave, right?
No, I don't think so.
With scraps.
With scraps.
No, he built the company with scraps.
And then what was interesting about that, right before all the new innovation in AI
happened, he said that he was like, he thought, like, I'm not the right person to run this
company anymore.
I shouldn't be CEO anymore.
And then he stayed.
And then he's like, if it wasn't for AI, I wouldn't be running the company anymore.
So many stories of like that where someone had a really good business growing.
And it's just stable growth, 20% top line.
They're doing fine.
they are just lost for purpose or energy and then AI happens and they're like, I'm back in gear.
I love seeing it, especially with the folks who are at that like multi-billion dollar phase.
It's just been, it's been a remarkable, remarkable moment in tech.
Yeah, you want those people to be playing as long as possible.
He's still relatively young. He's probably what, it's 40s, 45 or something like that?
Like, that's way too.
But it's so easy to step back and think about something else, get distracted or do a fund or something
or just retire.
Like, there's a lot of people.
And he went public really early.
I think he said on the episode,
they went public like $1.5 billion valuation or,
it was like some crazy number.
I feel for Canada.
It's high for Canada.
There's a lot of stuff in the TSX that's like tiny.
Yeah, but I think at one point he's at $200 billion.
I don't know what he's at now.
Yeah, and so it had to feel like he was sprinting,
you know, for 20 years.
Totally.
But, no, you want, I'm glad those people are like that.
And I do think that, you know,
the point, somebody was making this point to me yesterday.
where it's just like these technical founders just have, you know, a massive advantage of everybody else.
Yeah.
And you see this with like Toby constantly writing more code.
Brian Armstrong is doing the same thing.
You just see this over and over again.
There's a lot of folks.
There was a peptide you could take that would allow you to podcast for 25 hours a day.
Would you take it?
Well, okay.
What, here's the thing.
I keep hearing about peptides.
I think I accidentally took one one time.
What happened?
Justin, I think, had some.
Oh, no, that was, yeah, Justin gave, Justin had like,
I don't even know if we could talk about this.
It was the rafters.
He gave me and you.
That's right.
Justin Mayors.
It was some sleep peptide, but it was like something you get on Amazon.
Okay.
But I thought his friend, he said his friend made it in like his own compound pharmacy.
We might get Justin arrested for this.
But us who were hanging out and then you text or maybe we hung out the next day and you text them.
He's like, I didn't feel anything about this.
No.
I am one of the benefits of partnering with Andrew Heerman is you get access to like weird health shit.
And so I, um, I,
I was like over, like, I remember recording with like John Mackey.
It was the day I recorded John Mackey.
It felt fine.
We stopped at like 1 p.m.
By like 5 p.m. I feel like I'm going to die.
And I had an unbelievable important thing to do.
Like 36 hours later, I could not mess around.
And so I just texted the group and they sent like this IV guy.
And it was like a four hour IV.
And I was like, listen.
And I don't know anything about it.
So I was like, I trust you.
So like you don't give me like I don't want to, this has to be good.
Would you take this?
And it's something.
they do to make sure that like they're when they're on the edge getting sick. Well the next the next
meta or goat one of them there was some kind of peptide in there one of them the next morning I woke up
feeling 100% like I went from deadly sick to I feel like a completely normal person. Well the next meta
is leeches. No what happened? I'm going to be purifying no I walked in you can get medical leeches
this is every podcaster stop stop yeah you don't like snakes. What happened because I walked in and all the guys
We're talking about, you guys had some kind of debate?
We had a debate, Martin Scrawley.
What happened?
From superpower.
Yeah, they just...
Whether or not the more out there peptides that are not fully FDA approved yet,
maybe there's some data, should those be sold, what's the correct path to bring the next
generation peptides to market?
Martin Screlly's position was that the FDA has the path laid down.
These companies should be, these products should be developed by biotech companies,
approved by the FDA, then sold in the pharmaceuticals.
Psego Context prescribed by a doctor and Max from Superpower had a more liberal view.
Does he sell, does one of the guys sell peptides?
I don't know if Superpower does, but a lot of Silicon Valley companies are getting into that
market and a lot of people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley broadly are like taking
Chinese peptides, quote unquote, meaning that they're like going to a gray market marketplace
that then manufactures these drugs that are not.
FDA approved and not made in FDA-approved facilities and certainly are not to the economic benefit of the pharmacy of companies that spent a lot of money developing these drugs.
So there's some company out there that's been working on something.
They develop the intellectual property.
They're hoping to recoup 100% of that because they have a patent on it and so that they should be able to sell it and get all the value.
And there are a whole bunch of third parties that are going around copying the homework, maybe changing it a little bit, maybe making it worse, maybe making it less effective.
maybe making it less safe
and then selling it.
There's a big debate in Silicon Valley right now
about like the pepper.
Are you taking any of this stuff?
Nope.
You like protect your body like a temple.
I'm surprised you took what Justin gave you.
I trust Justin.
Justin and I have a very similar ethos around health.
Anyway, this has been a fantastic conversation.
I'm excited to continue this podcast
as soon as we go off.
For sure.
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