TBPN Live - Thiel Fellow Tuesday | Brad Gerstner, AJ Piplica + Zach Shore, Delian Asparouhov + Raycho Raychev

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(05:56) - Brad Gerstner. Brad is the founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, a technology-focused investment firm backing companies like Snowflake, Uber, and Meta. He’s known for his outspoken views on markets, innovation, and long-term investing in Silicon Valley. (36:05) - AJ Piplica + Zach Shore. AJ is the CEO of Hermeus, a startup developing hypersonic aircraft to revolutionize defense and commercial flight. Zach Shore is the VP of Strategic Development at Hermeus, contributing to the company's mission of building the world’s fastest reusable aircraft with speeds over Mach 5. (51:16) - Delian Asparouhov + Raycho Raychev. Delian is a partner at Founders Fund and co-founder of Varda Space Industries, focused on space-based manufacturing. Raycho is the founder and CEO of EnduroSat, which builds advanced nanosatellites and supports accessible space missions. (01:12:32) - Carlo Kobe. Carlo is the co-founder and CEO of Fizz, a private social network for college campuses that has rapidly expanded across the U.S. He’s a Thiel Fellow building community-driven platforms with a focus on authenticity and scale. (01:26:51) - Steven Pang. Steven is a co-founder of Orbit, a startup focused on enhancing physical performance and rehabilitation through neuromuscular stimulation technology. He is building systems that bridge hardware and neuroscience to improve motor recovery. (01:37:29) - Elias Fizesan. Elias is the founder of Canopy Labs, which is developing AI-native infrastructure for scientific research and experimental design. He’s focused on accelerating innovation in drug discovery and applied biology. (01:46:59) - Jackson Denka. Jackson is the founder of Azura, a company building next-generation air conditioning and thermal management systems to dramatically reduce energy consumption. He is rethinking HVAC from the ground up for a more sustainable future. (01:58:08) - Hooman Reza Nezhad. Hooman is the founder of Solcao Industries, a startup working on solar-powered desalination systems and renewable water technologies. His work addresses critical global challenges around clean water access and energy. (02:07:22) - Ferdinand Dabitz. Ferdinand is the founder of Ivy, a platform designed to streamline collaboration and research workflows in science and academia. He’s focused on improving the way researchers share data and insights. (02:16:06) - Juan Pablo Ebrath. Juan Pablo is the founder of Phase Labs, building tools to bring multiplayer collaboration into software development environments. He’s focused on improving dev productivity through real-time, shared coding spaces. (02:26:52) - Jennifer Lin. Jennifer is the founder of AUG Tx, a biotech company developing novel therapeutics for autoimmune diseases. She combines computational biology with drug development to target previously untreatable conditions. (02:36:21) - Teddy Warner. Teddy is the co-founder and CEO of Intempus, a platform providing data-driven tools for property management and real estate investing. He’s leveraging automation and analytics to simplify property operations. (02:46:14) - Sigil Wen. Sigil is the founder of Extraordinary, a platform that helps individuals unlock peak performance through personalized routines and habit systems. His work blends behavioral science with AI coaching. (02:57:30) - Aidan Smith. Aidan is the founder of Innerphases, a startup developing next-gen neurointerfaces for immersive computing. He’s building tools that aim to transform how humans interact with machines. (03:08:08) - Colton El-Habr. Colton is a co-founder of Orbit, where he works on developing neuromuscular stimulation technologies alongside Steven Pang. His background spans hardware engineering and applied neuroscience. (03:20:25) - Koki Mashita. Koki is the founder of Aeolus Labs, working at the intersection of robotics and decentralized infrastructure. His work includes building autonomous physical systems that operate in trustless environments.

You're watching TVN! It is Tuesday, May 27, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome! The Ultradome is the physical place, the first of hundreds. But we're still in the temple of technology. The fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a new studio we're going to take you to. Wait, John, why are we in white suits?

Oh, because the market's ripping! Bitcoin's above 110k! We're so back, I never died in it for a second massive consumer confidence beat to consumers undefeated undefeated Massive day. We have a bunch of great guests where the Midas list drop. We got Brad Gerstner coming on the show

Hopefully he's just taking a massive victory lap. Yeah. No, he'm kidding. He's here to talk about Invest America and some of the policy work he's been doing. We got AJ Pipilka and Zach Shore from Hermia's coming on to talk about how they're flying their first plane. They're going hypersonic soon. Deleon's coming on to talk about the Enduro Sat investment. And then we got a lightning round with the Teal Fellowship. We got something like six or seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. 90% of the fellows.

We got a lot of them. Yeah. They're coming back to back to back back. So that should be a lot of fun. But let's show off the gong. Should I hit it? Yeah, I think you should hit it. OK.

Let's hit the gong. This is the reveal. We saw you warming up. Working on the form. Hit it. Good? Hit it. Oh, that feels great.

Woo! Woo! That was a powerful shot. It's fantastic. It's great to be standing up on the set. Hit it Fantastic Yep, that's great. Oh, it's just bring it just nicely It's just the best. It's just the best and of course that we wouldn't we wouldn't be able to have this studio We wouldn't be able to have this gong without ramp time is money save both easy use corporate cards bill payments Accounting and a whole lot more all in one place go to ramp.com to get started place The Midas list has dropped

and It's big news. We want to take a couple of people Alfred Lynn at the top Reid Hoffman number two Peter teal number three then Neil Shen former Sequoia now at Hongshan number four Mickey Malca number five at Ribbit Capital famous for his coinbase investment the node Coastal at six Doug Leone at seven Hamant over a general catalyst is at eight Fred Wilson at nine Chris Dixon at ten we got him coming on the show tomorrow we're hitting we're hitting most of you we should do it at Midas Midas list day have them all on I'm sure they're not busy let's do do it. Let's do it a hundred

I mean we've been talking about forever now trying to break the Guinness World Record for most VCs on a single podcast Yes, we believe that will safely break it at a hundred and so why not just do the Midas list? Yes, getting them all like you said getting them all on one show. We should consecutively would be it totally Probably no problem. Their EA's would be on overtime, right? But they would figure it out. They're the unsung heroes. Yeah, you got Mike Spicer, Senator Hill for Snowflake at 11,

Roloff made at Sequoia, made 13th. Who else is interesting? We have back to back to back on 17, 18, 19 in terms of TBPN appearance we got Keith Rubeu at 17 Mark Andreessen 18 Trey Stevens at 19 they've all been on TBPN maybe we should just only read off the ones yeah yeah yeah we should who are these other people there no names that they haven't been on the show yet they need to they need to really make a name for themselves

like coming on the show anyway we, they do. Anyway, we should do some timeline. Was there any other news that broke? It was kind of a quiet weekend with the Memorial Day. Obviously there were lots of folks at the Monaco GP, the F1 race, but most of the venture capitalists, of course, were at the Coca-Cola 600 because there's been a major vibe shift. Major vibe shift, so NASCAR's in, F1's kind of out, but you're still into the F1 stuff because you got that

European flair. Yes. European flair, John. Couldn't have said it better myself. But yeah, the whole shift towards the monster truck rallies, all that. It's impossible to get a box at a monster truck rally 500 miles from San Francisco. Every single one gets taken up by different SAS vendors. I mean, I was joking about the Coca-Cola 600

being a big hotspot for tech. But I think the more I posted about it, people kept texting me and being like, OK, I started watching. Well, I saw somebody watching. And they were like, OK, I get it. I got a couple of those. And they were like, OK, yeah, you got me. It's actually pretty entertaining. I'm kind of into the race drama now

Yeah, okay. I'm looking out bought in I'm looking at you know, the design features different cars But I have it on good authority that a that a major major company will intact will be going into NASCAR And so I'm very excited about that Should be good authority. So I do think that more people will be going to NASCAR races. It'll be a lot of fun. Let's pull up some posts. Let's run through some timeline while we wait for Brad to hop on.

He's coming on 11. Where should we go? The big story is really Brad at number 40. Oh yeah. Is a disgrace. And clearly, you know, very clearly, the Forbes brand will be trying to dig themselves out of the hole for years. I agree.

For years after a mistake like this. So I'm sure they'll issue a correction before end of day. Yeah. We should do our own Midas list. Everyone's tied for number one. Everyone wins. The pay to play Midas, the true pay to play Midas list. We talked about this, doing the TBP and Midas list.

Where every spot is just an auction. Yeah, it's a live, hyper gamified auction. It's an auction to be on. You just say how much you're willing to pay, and then whoever pays the most gets the first slot, and then it just ranks. That honestly might be a pretty good indication of how much capital you've been able to acquire.

Yeah, except then you'd have people like Fred Wilson, who they've intentionally kept their fund sizes pretty small and he wouldn't necessarily have the management fees to support buying the top spot or the spot that they deserve. But what is the game of venture if not? AUM. If not just returns.

I mean, a venture fund is a business at the end of the day, whether you make money from fees or carry, it fund is a business at the end of the day, whether you make money from fees or carry, it's all just profit at the end of the day. Well, we have a very special guest calling in now. Let's bring him in. Welcome to the show. What's going on? Hey guys, it's great to be here.

Thanks for having me. You know, when you told me you guys were gonna do this, you know, I thought, okay, there's probably a market gap for doing this, but you guys have killed it. Thank you. It's a great show. I hear so many people talking about it. You filled a real void. So congrats to you on all the momentum

and adding something new to the ecosystem. I think that's really important and great to be here. Thank you so much. Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, huge fan of BG2, obviously. I was listening to it last night and yeah, I mean, very excited to talk to you about the idea into the Invest America accounts.

And I liked how you took the listener through the genesis of the idea, but then also some of the inside beltway politics of like how these things kind of actually play out. The idea of losing ball control, something that I hadn't really considered. It seems obvious once you break it down, but where did the idea actually come from and can you kind of introduce that idea and just kind of set the playing field before we go deeper into it? Yeah, I mean I guess some level, the idea has been gestating for

my whole life, right? I was a kid whose dad went broke and I was on the outside looking in. And I remember when my grandfather who sacrificed everything, you know, left me a 20,000 bucks and I was able to invest that really day trade it and put myself through law school and business school and, and the feeling of going from the outside to actually owning something, having something, right? That you can get that snowball rolling down the hill. So I think that was the seed planted in a young kid. But over the course of the last five to seven years started getting a lot more concerned

and COVID really punctuated this for me about kind of this growing wealth gap, the haves and the have nots, over 50% of the population under 40 having the negative view of capitalism. And Ray Dalio, he did this great, he did a great presentation at the All In Summit where he talked about the rise and fall of the great countries. And one of the principal reasons that great empires or great countries fall was wealth concentration among a very few. Yeah. Right. And so you have kind of French revolution type moments. And it seems to me that the natural byproduct of the technology revolution has been, you

know, that you can now have somebody like Mark Zuckerberg who serves three billion customers around the world, right? Henry Ford couldn't do that. John Rockefeller couldn't do that, right? Their Tams were much smaller. And so you see the increasing concentration of wealth. And the question was, how do we protect and preserve capitalism, the free enterprise system, the golden goose, which has created this, this this innovation which has driven humanity forward, at the same time not drifted to socialism and redistribution and try to kill the patient in order to

save it, right? And it seemed to me the answer was to make everybody a capitalist from birth. If you gave everybody ownership and allowed them to compound in the upside of capitalism, right? Rather than disincentivizing people by taking money away or creating some kind of socialist state to create UBI or some other cockamamie scheme. But really to make everybody a private owner of assets from birth, treat it like a 401k, let it compound for their life, get them excited about what it means to own like a day like today when the the markets are Doing well, it's up. There's a lot of excitement among our community, right?

You know people even just tracking the price of Bitcoin by itself There are as many people but every American should be bought into that to some degree, right? And even just seeing that the number go up by a few percentage points I remember to get people excited about participating in the system. I must have been like eight years old or something, but my parents took a 12 pack of Coca-Cola that comes in a cardboard box.

They cut out a stock certificate out of it. I didn't grow up wealthy or anything, but they bought like five shares of Coca-Cola or 10 shares of Coca-Cola. And I just remember it concretized this idea of like owning stock, which was very abstract to an eight year old or something like that. And I had that on my wall for a long time.

And then at a certain point, I realized that, oh no, this has financial value because obviously it wasn't literally tied to the stock, but they had been holding the stock in an account for me. And I was able to kind of experience that, which I think a lot of people are missing out on. I wanna ask you about the idea of of holding specifically there were some ideas about 18 age 30 day one retirement fund how do you think about unlocking that value and

how do you think about any of the risks around like obviously you don't want people going and writing forward contracts against it on day one right although i'm sure someone will try and financialize this yeah and of course they they will that will be illegal as well payday loans against it and other things that's good um treasury department will have to put together the rules and the regulations to make sure that this is implemented and executed in a way that we all feel great and proud of we have some incredible people lining up who will design the product. But you know, the basic goal is every kid has on their phone this.

I own a little bit of Apple, a Berkshire Hathaway. You know, and that will make them feel like they're in the game. But when you think about this, we want it to be a one-way lock box, a 401k, where parents and kids can add money into the account. Birthday money, bar mitzvah money, as easy as Venmo-ing in 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 50 bucks,

100 bucks, right? And you'll have this register that will show all the deposits in the account over the life of the account. So when the kid looks back at 18 and sees like, where did all this money come from? And the first one will be $1,000 from the US Treasury Department.

Yeah. Right? And we're going to see Phil. An internship too, right? If you're just showing that sort of long-term thinking, it's like basically a track record that you can go and use throughout your early career. Yeah, I mean, there's also these viral moments

where a lot of kids will build something, and they get a bunch of attention, and they try and kind of monetize it, but it's hard. But it's like, it can be very easy money, easy go. Easy come, easy go with those kind of moments. So this is a lock box, right? Money can go in, money can't go out. And now we have corporations, Dell Corporation,

Nvidia, AMD, Salesforce, who've all written, T-Mobile, iHeart Media have all raised their hands, say we love this idea and we will add money to the accounts of the kids of our employees. So now we have Uber, companies representing millions and millions of employees who are going to add to the accounts of the kids of their employees as a corporate benefit, which makes perfect sense. On top of that, we'll be announcing major multi-billion dollar philanthropic gifts from large philanthropists

who say, you know what, I don't want a middleman taking a scrape. I just want to be able to give a thousand bucks to every kid in the state of Texas or every kid in America whose family earns under $200,000 or who graduates from public high school or whatever rules they stipulate, right? They'll be able to donate that money to the Treasury Department C3. They'll still get the tax deductibility, but that will go directly into the accounts of kids.

3.7 million kids a year will have this account. So now you have the power of philanthropy, you have the power of families, the power of churches or community groups. And now the final one is I had a couple couple people who are governor or running for governor call me up and say if I'm elected we're gonna donate money to the account of the kids who are born in my state and who graduate from high school in my state because we want to attract and retain the best kids. So I think this is going

to be a hundred to one, a thousand to one private sector match What the federal government's going to do is simply set up the accounts and get out of the way like a good 401k Just get the ball rolling down the hill and let the private sector do what the private sector does So well, the S&P 500 is compounded at 10.2 percent for 75 years the way out of this problem is 75 years the way out of this problem is To get kids in the game from birth and by the age of 18 if you start with a thousand bucks you add just $750 a year Right by age 18 you're gonna have fifty thousand dollars in that account by age 30

You're gonna have upwards of two hundred thousand dollars of that in that account And if you start with a thousand dollars you had $750 a year and you don't touch it at age 50 you have a million dollars in that account and if you start with a thousand dollars you add seven hundred and fifty dollars a year and you don't touch it at age 50 you have a million dollars in that account. Wow. Right. That is the power of compounding. I think it totally changes the game for the country. I think it's the cheapest insurance policy we can possibly buy in defense of free market capitalism, our democratic way of life, right? and it does it in a way that gets people excited about capitalism Not in a way that penalizes people for being successful Totally. Yeah, we talked about this

It's hard for somebody to be feel bought into capitalism if they have negative capital, right if they have It's from that email between Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg Yeah Talking about how a lot of the next generation, they come into the world or they become adults with debt from student loans, which people are very anti-student loan debt. And then also the housing prices have gotten so expensive

because of regulation and a whole bunch of other factors that you can't get on the housing ladder to start building capital. Because most people, if they get a 30-year mortgage Even if it's expensive when they're 25 by 65 for 55 They paid that off and they have a ton of capital and then they they are more bought into the capitalist system And so yeah, yeah This feels like a great a great way to solve the problem in the free market way

Let me let me give you one final thing So we we had Kevin Hassett who's now the chair of the National Council of Economic Advisors and a guy named Rob Shapiro, who's key economic advisor under Clinton. We had them come together and do for Milken a study of this over the course of the last year. Okay? And here's what the study found. It won't surprise you, but like we have control group

studies on what happens if you give some kid at birth or in very first few years of life, a savings account or investment account. What did we find? More likely to graduate from high school and college, more likely to buy a home, more likely to start a business, more likely to be a taxpayer, less likely to be incarcerated. Wow. Amazing. The net present value of the societal return of just what I told you. You know how many tens of billions we spend a year to try to achieve the things that I just told you? Keep people out of jail, get them to graduate, get them to buy a home. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year to try to achieve that without much effect. Now we

know from controlled studies if you just get them into the game from birth they feel more confident, they feel more in the game, they learn financial literacy in school because now they have a reason to learn financial literacy and you achieve all those positive societal goals. So the net present value is going to be very high. And, you know, listen, we have a real debate going on in Washington about the national debt, something I'm also very passionate about.

I've supported a balanced budget amendment for the country for over 30 years, right? We have $38 trillion in debt. We have a $2 trillion deficit. And we all know that Doge, something that I've been working on, you know, how do we go back to a 2019 baseline in terms of federal government spending so we don't bankrupt our kids? It is immoral saddling kids with 50 trillion dollars in debt, but the truth

of the matter is there's some people have said, well Brad, how can you support that? On the other hand, you support Invest America because it costs the government $3.7 billion a year. Well, let me first just contextualize it. $3.7 billion a year is about the cost of a single Patriot missile system battery, right? It's about six rockets. OK? So for taking six rockets in that missile battery,

or we can have every child in America started off with an investment account. So which one better protects capitalism, America and our way of life, right? There are trade-offs that we can make. We know Elon literally was finding $5 billion a week in terms of profligate spending that you can eliminate in order to pay for this.

So first, it's very small. But secondly, when you think about the compounding that will occur, it compounds tax deferred. But at the end of the period of time, you have to pay capital gains tax on it. The government will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in capital gains tax over the life of these accounts. But the way congressional scoring works is if it's outside the 10-year window, then all

those revenues, the 100%, you know you will capture, don't get added back to the score. If you did that, this would not cost you anything. In fact, it would generate revenue for the federal government. And you and I all know- It's customer acquisition cost for taxpayers. Right, if this was our business and we owned 100% of it, it's upfront investment that we're going to reap a lot of long-term return. And that ignores the things I told you about

more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to buy a house and start a business and pay taxes. So I'm very confident that the net present value of this to society is off the charts, right? This is a no-brainer for us to do, but I'm equally passionate to say that it's not acceptable that we're not taking seriously the national debt. I think that, you know, where are we in this reconciliation bill? I posted this and Elon retweeted it. I think we got like 40 million views. This is how we get back

to the 2019 baseline. It's a view. It's basically a chart, a graph that shows how the COVID spending bubble occurred and how we need over a period of four to seven years to get back to the baseline and get you know, deflate that bubble in terms of spending. That's going to be hard to do. But in terms of the process, the Invest America Act is the name of the underlying authorized legislation. So we have the Invest America Act in the House of Representatives led by Blake Moore. You have the Invest America Act in the Senate that's chief author, Ted Cruz.

I will tell you there are a bunch of Democrats lining up in both the Senate and the House. This will be a big bipartisan bill in both places. Now, what happens in a reconciliation process, think of that as an omnibus piece of legislation where they take the Invest America Act and they roll it up into reconciliation. So a bunch of people saw these called Trump accounts

in the reconciliation bill. The underlying legislation is the Invest America Act, but much like Pell Grants or the Roth IRA, not surprised that the president will take the opportunity to name these Trump accounts when they go into effect. Yeah. Can you talk about any of the risks or problems that you foresee needing to work through?

I mean, I'm extremely optimistic about this, but I'm just thinking about like, let's assume it gets a passed in a bipartisan way. Is this, are there gonna be technical challenges to actually implementing this? I mean, the government famously, you know, the healthcare website was a big deal. What about like, is there a risk that this creates like a financial bubble? How are we pricing? How are we picking assets? Is there going to be companies lobbying to get included in the index? Or are we just walk through

some of the risks? How we're fighting those? Yeah, all great questions. Well, what I suspect will happen is so the authorizing agency is the Treasury Department. Secretary Besant will put together a working group. The working group will have terrific people, a lot of whom you would know, from Silicon Valley, who I've already talked to who are some of the best product designers in the world, guys like Vlad, who, you know, run Robin Hood, who, who understand, you know,hood, who understand how to build financial markets,

infrastructure, et cetera. Isn't Joe Gebbia in the mix over there too? There may be a little Joe Gebbia in there. Well, they just in Doge generally, which is amazing, like legendary Silicon Valley designer. Right. And I will tell you that Joe is very excited about Invest America, and he'd be a logical person to lead product direction on this. Totally.

Right? But there'll be a lot of those issues that have to get worked out. Our objective is that we put together a broad-based index basket that looks like the S&P, but we want no fees, zero fees for the life of the account. Right? And I think we can achieve that based on the conversations that we've had.

And so we want to make it super easy for parents to be able to add money to the account. I'm talking $5, $10. Like, that's how you get the snowball really working for a lot of families in America. I want to see haptics. I want it just to feel like candy crush using that. I want kids to get addicted to investing.

Yeah, totally. Long term, though, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Not day trading, but like really, really into it. Well, remember, you can't day trade it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying get it getting addicted to long term. That's the beautiful thing that what they will get addicted to is understanding the power of compounding and the understand it at an instinctual level. Yep. Right. Not because they're looking at some math formula in a book. The problem is if 70% of people,

if you're in inner city Trenton, or rural Indiana, or rural Texas, or East LA, and somebody says, okay, come into the classroom, today we're gonna learn Chinese. And you say to yourself, man, I'm never going to China. Like, why do I need to learn Chinese? A lot of kids in America, in fact, 70% of kids, their parents don't own anything, and they don't have a prospect of owning anything.

And so now you tell them, we're going to learn about stocks or compounding or financial literacy, and you can see why they check out, because they don't have a frame of reference, right, to understand that. But now every kid in that class likely has a phone, and the teacher says, open up your phone. We're gonna talk about, in the seventh grade, how you got $14,000 in this account, what it means to be a shareholder in Apple, what it means to own a stock,

what your voting privileges are, how that compounded to $14,000, what it will compound to over the next 10 years if you add 20 bucks a month, if you add 50 bucks a month, if you don't add anything, right? Like now you have their attention because they own something. And you know, I think that this is going to unlock just a massive amount of human potential. But you know, it's one of those things that on the left, people get excited about it because, you know,

you closed the wealth gap. On the right, people get excited about it because you defend capitalism and you build something that's aligned with capitalism. There is no government account. There is no government ownership. There is zero. There are 3.7 million private accounts where the families have title and ownership

The government can't go usurp that no more than they could go take your house That's right. It's a private. It's a private account. So we found this magical blend where I think we can land the plane It's in the reconciliation bill. I expect that this is going to become law You know in the early part of July, I think the president's goal is to sign it into law in July 4th. But it's pretty mind boggling that this idea that really started in earnest with me, you know, Chamath and I were on CNBC at the end of 2021. And they and Scott Wapner was going wild about how the stock

market was going up. And I was feeling very, very concerned about this issue. And I said, Scott, you know, at this moment that the government stepped in and helped in COVID, it was all of us as taxpayer that put money in that caused the market to go up in 2021. But too many people are left out of that benefit. A lot of people lost their jobs in 20 and 21 and they weren't in the market. So they didn't benefit from the market going up. So that's when I first said to him, what I would like to see is I would like to see president Biden pass a savings account. And at the time I said $2,000 in it, um, for every,

for every kid in America. So they benefited from the upside of the compounding of the markets. And it's pretty surreal to me that starting in the fall of 24 that went a little viral on Twitter. And now we're really on the one yard line, I would encourage everybody to follow it on on Twitter at invest America 24. We're going to be posting legislative updates, working group updates there. But I really appreciate you guys giving me the chance to talk about it a little bit, too. Yeah, thank you for doing this. It's super interesting because the last comment, but. To me, it's given everything that you do already, it feels like the perfect way for you to serve the country and in some way create an incredible legacy.

And I just love this so much more than the COVID stimulus because I remember watching that happen where people got checks and there were actually a series of kind of financial influencers who grew massive accounts around when will the checks arrive? How do you get your stimulus check? What should you do with it? And then that quickly turned into essentially

like day trading it. And obviously we know that statistically those people lost a lot of that money, kind of gambled it away. But if you had just taken that and bought and hold and held, I mean those stimulus checks that went out at the bottom of the market, they would be so much bigger now.

So it makes so much more sense. I could even imagine that you're still going to get kind of gamification-like content, how to grow your Invest America account. But it's going to be like, go out and cut lawns and then put $10 in every week and watch it happen. And you're going to get kids that are like, yeah, I want to put more money in.

The competitive nature of everybody starts on a level playing field. But at a certain point, you can go start mowing lawns, doing little odd jobs, putting it away, and making it a competitive fun process. No doubt about it. And imagine this. I've been investing now in Silicon Valley since 1999.

And we had the internet, we had cloud, we had mobile, we had social. And every time one of these waves came, I was like, it can't get any bigger than this. But machines beginning to think on behalf of humans, right? The age of AI is, I've been saying now for several years, is gonna be the biggest super cycle of our lifetimes. I think I'll be investing against it

for the balance of my career. It's making us all bionic at a rate that's really hard to understand, but it's going to lead to a lot of dislocation. The idea that we're not gonna have to renegotiate the social contract as part of this transformation is just like that's head in the sand. There are gonna be a lot of people who lose their jobs.

And they're gonna be, I'm a positivist on this stuff. I think the world ends up in a better place. But it doesn't mean that everybody ends up in a better place, right? The industrial revolution caused a lot of pain on the way to net gain for society. And so we need to figure out a way that we, and this is just one of a lot of different ways we're gonna have to come up with, right, around retraining, re-educating, like changing the way in which we educate people. You guys are gonna talk about the Teal Fellows today. I mean, that is a way to deconstruct education

that could potentially be a model for further transformations. But they're gonna have to be the best and brightest among all of us to rethink the social contract in a way that holds this fragile experiment together. This is the greatest country in the history of the world, right? But it doesn't happen, you know, we can't take for granted that we can go through this magnitude of change that AI is going to bring, right? And that nothing will break.

We've already seen, right, us feeling a little uneasy with things breaking right some of the populism We're seeing you know the 90% against the 10% It's our job to you know to attack that but to do it in a way that's aligned With the basic principles on which the country was founded right and that and that's to align us all with the incentives That if you work hard get into the game, you know, you can you have economic mobility. I mean, I'm a living example of that. I mean, we started with nothing.

And you know, and and I we ended up in a very, very different place. There are very few countries on the face of the planet where that type of economic mobility exists. And I think this is going to put us in a much better position in that regard. Yeah, we can't lose it. It's too important. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much for doing this guys great to be here next time We get to tell you let's talk Investing and markets and all the other good. I I

One question before you jump off. Do you feel I know you're heavily invested in AI. Do you still feel? underexposed AI given given how sort of bullish you are in the fullness of time? If you look at a chart that plots open AI's revenue growth against Google and Meta, it's growing, it's achieved the same level of revenue in a fraction of the time. It's already multiples bigger than Google was

at the time of its IPO. So, you know, we own a lot of open AI. I wish we owned more. The reality was the winners of this moment in time, and there's gonna be a whole bunch of agentic application, we haven't even really begun in the application universe. There are gonna be tons of these, but the winners of this supercycle are all going to be winners of the previous supercycle. So I would say we're all in

you know we're all in it around it in the public markets, we're all in it in late-stage venture, where we just participated again in the round of OpenAI would be an example of that, And we're doing some of the most interesting early stage stuff of my career. Companies that are scaling at rates I've never seen with small teams, very efficient, very low burn ratios. So I couldn't be more excited because I think this really is the type of innovation that pushes humanity forward, right? Consumers have more opportunity to learn and their healthcare gets better and all the things we know that comes from this

because you have a bionic coach in your pocket at all times for all things. And enterprises are going to get transformed as well. We're in the golden age of margin expansion for enterprises. And if you're not breaking your company today and figuring out how to make it AI native AI first, right, you're just going to lose your market share and you won't be there to compete in a few years. You know, with the internet itself, the diffusion was a lot slower. You had time, you had five to 10 years to

get on board. The diffusion is way faster and way more impactful this go around. Great to see you guys. Keep up the great work. Did you coordinate the Blazers today? We did. The market's up, so it's white suit day. Well, whenever the market is up in a meaningful way,

well, we wear white suits. So we'll try to coordinate your next guest appearance for the next update, and we'll get you in a white suit. All right, guys. Take it easy. Great chatting, Brad. Have a good guys. Take it easy. Great chatting, Brad. Have a good one. Take it easy.

Bye bye. I have a hilarious story about my own kind of DIY Invest America account. I don't know if I ever told you this, but when I got my first job, I was starting to make around $5,000 a month we were paying ourselves. Let's go.

And I wanted to save money. And what I noticed was that you'd have a typical like Bank of America app with a checking account and a savings account but because of the app you could move money from the savings account to the checking account whenever you want. So you go out with your friends and they'd be like, oh like do you want to buy this thing? Do you want to you know go out tonight? And I'd be like no I don't have any money and they'd be like but you have money in your savings account you can just transfer it over you can spend it tonight. And so I was just not saving any money And so what I wound up doing was I went to a bank and I got a safety deposit box and every time I got paid

I would go and take a thousand dollars in physical cash and put it in the safety deposit box And then I would lock it and I couldn't access the the safety deposit box on the weekend So if I'm traveling or anything, I would just be like, look, I actually have access to no money. Like my might have more money, but like it's not as easy as just like Venmoing you right now. Somebody could probably productize that and actually do very well. Yeah. I mean, the psychology of money is like well, like way underrated. Like if you have a hundred dollar bill,

you're less likely to spend it than, than a bunch of fives because you don't want, psychologically, you don't want to break the hundred. And so I always noticed that when I would get paid, I would go in and I would count the money and I would watch the stack physically grow. Instead of just like, oh, like the number got, yeah, instead of just the number getting bigger

in your bank account, it would be like, physically this box is filling up with cash. And then I would count it all every single time. So I would count it up and be like, okay box is filling up with cash and and then I would count it all So I would count it up and be like, okay, I have six thousand. Okay now seven thousand and I would count it up And do the feel of counting money. Oh, it was addictive and it worked really well. I saved a ton of money. That's great Yeah, it's fantastic. Somebody product has that for sure kids on it. Well, we have that was great. I mean honestly, yeah, I truly on it. Well, we have. That was great. Honestly, I truly think that once Invest America passes, we'll all collectively think, how did this not exist before?

It just feels so natural. And if you join the team, and you're going to be designing the app for the Invest America accounts, make sure you use Figma. Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

I literally guarantee whoever selected to build this app will build it on Figma. 100%. Anyway, we have our next guest, AJ and Zach from Hermes. Welcome to the show. What's up, guys? How you guys doing?

Hey, guys, what's going on? What's up? Doing great. Give us the update. Congratulations are in order. I saw some preview images but what exactly happened break it down yeah I'm not wearing my hat anymore which is yeah the hat milestones because we flew our first airplane a horse mark one out of the air force base we are Air Force Base. Congratulations. We are officially an airplane company. There we go. Years later. But yeah, no, it's a

great hat. Perfect. You know, but the hats gotta go back on because now you got to go for supersonic, right? No. What's the next hat? What's the next challenge that you got to mustache? If anything, we're not doing more of that hat because I've had to look at your mustache if you go supersonic? I mean, I grew the mustache because the vibes are back because we're flying. Okay, okay.

So we're still going to hang around for a bit. Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe until you fly. So yeah, what is the next milestone? And I guess the big question that I have about you guys is like, there's been, people have been beating the drum of like, the only reason we don't have supersonic hypersonic is because of regulation, we're over-regulated. But at the same time,

the regulations seem to be getting easier and easier. We just saw the nuclear EO happen. A lot of the regulatory stuff seems to be knocking down. Does this become an engineering challenge? Is it already an engineering challenge? Or are there serious regulatory milestones that you need to hit that will like necessarily slow you down or is it just go build, build, build right now? I think for us, because of the pace that we're moving,

we're pretty consistently encountering corner cases in the regulatory environment that like, April didn't really think about cause it didn't expect kind of folks to be moving so fast or doing some of the things that we're doing So what we do when we encounter those we smash through them as quickly as possible and hopefully set precedent for other people to follow quickly alongside in other areas, so Yeah, like regulatory rules are gonna be there

But like my job is to get those out of the way for the technical team so they can just focus on executing and flying the supersonic flight next. Nice. So AJ, you're the CEO. Zach, you're the sales guy. How do you sell this thing? It's pretty easy to sell, honestly. I mean, especially now that we're actually flying. But there's not a lot of, if any, high mock or let alone hypersonic aircraft in the inventory.

And I think the base value proposition here is we talk about, you know, specifically with the China scenario, or even actually what you just saw with Russia and Ukraine throwing, you know, high volumes of fires, is affordability or cost per effect is really the matrix. Right? How much does it cost you to have an outcome? And I think one of the ways we think about this

is actually very SpaceX-y, not surprising given the core engineering team is all SpaceX folks, is that keep the most expensive part of your system away from the threat. So in this case, you know, I think Falcon 9 is very illustrative here of return the booster, right? Like you can, your launch cost comes down, your cost per kilogram to orbit goes down because you're not throwing away the booster on every, on every launch. For us, think of this as a weapon. Instead of having the booster on the weapon every

time, if I can accelerate, climb, and let something go from high altitude to high speed, I can decrease the booster burden, which decreases the cost per effect. And so I am able to shoot further from safer ranges at orders of magnitude less cost. And one of the challenges that people, I don't think totally understand about this is, you know, the Ukraine case is important, but don't forget that Ukraine and Russia are neighbors. So the ranges they're engaging in are, you know, comparatively inches for us in miles. You know, we're fighting the away game in potentially a Taiwan scenario where that's a hundred miles offshore from China, you know, we're 5,000 miles away. So this creates a different burden for us. Certainly, you know, low cost, a trittable, slow systems can work in a Ukraine scenario. But if you're

having to fly from the third island chain, second island chain or the West Coast of the United States, you have to be low cost, long range and fast. And so that is essentially the value proposition we're bringing at a time when when nobody else is really working on this problem this way. Can you talk about other countries and kind of different regulatory regimes? I've seen some nuclear companies are doing stuff in the Philippines. The SpaceX early was on quadrillion. Like have you had discussions with any countries that are like, yeah, we'll let

you go fly this thing around without much testing. We got a nice desert over here. Yeah, I mean, I took a trip very early on. Can you just fly over the water? Like, I don't know. Is there any way to de-risk and speed up? It's a great question. I took a trip early on to Australia

to go look at Wumah Range and some of those large overland ranges where there's more opportunity. And so that is something that's potentially in play for us. We've talked about potentially going out to like quash and out into the Pacific. Ideally, we'd like to and I can let you know, AJ can certainly explain more you prefer to test over land. Because if you if you laundert the bird, you can learn something versus if the thing

sinks to the bottom of the ocean. And you know, you got to send the ocean gate boys down there to find it like it's not going to go well. You know, so that's, that's the tension yet. Don't spit that out. So yeah, we want to fly over land, but there's a regulatory hurdle here for sure that we have to manage. And honestly, there's even still a regulatory hurdle flying over water, right? I mean, AJ, what's the 12 nautical mile like, oh yeah, dealing with there's a, there's, there's a pretty big like scarecrow like always this this person's a responsibility for how you regulate uncrewed aircraft

More than 12 nautical miles off the off the coast of the United States So that's that's a fun one that we got to go smash through here pretty soon So these the planes flying the next step is supersonic or straight to hypersonic And what are the key engineering milestones is this just make the engine go faster different engine what are we talking yeah supersonic is up next so the the mark one that we just flew it's about ten thousand pounds small jet like fighter trainer scale aircraft the mark to the supersonic aircraft is the size of an f-16 so significantly larger aircraft larger engines powered by the Pratt & Whitney F-100.

So yeah, working to get through the trend. What was that? How many, you said 10,000 for the one you just did. And then what's the next, what's the next one up? S16 class is like 30,000 pounds. So it's a pretty big, pretty big airplane. Not yet. Yeah. Very, very six BMW M5s, yeah

That's good. That's on that right there. Yeah wild Yep Yeah, so so any other milestones coming up? Are you just trying to hire you guys are in different spots? Or do you have multiple offices right now? Like what's the status of the company? Yeah, we're pretty consistently growing a headquartered here in Atlanta. We have a pretty big presence out in LA that's growing more and more of our kind of advanced development and prototyping work is just happening out there. Obviously like we flew out there. So that's helpful.

We have a test facility down in Jacksonville for our engines that we're going to be growing over the next couple of years. And yeah, I could true up in DC for business development sales as well as all of our regulatory work. Is there any change to the long-term engineering vision of the, you called it like a ramjet, but there was a different term for it, right? Or it has change over? Yeah, combined cycle, turbine based combined cycle engine. Yep

What was the buzzword the buzzword wasn't there was no Ramjet there was something else in between I thought turbo ramjet. I don't know I thought there was some like shorter room for it. Anyway, TBCC. Yeah It's just a bunch. It's just a bunch of alphabet soup But now it's urban together with a ramjet still still the same the same model where it has Like these like metal. Yes, that like flip over right? Yep. Yeah, exactly So yep. Yep still on the roadmap But now our job is to build the airplanes that can actually fly and ends it like that

So yeah supersonic is the next step now We can begin pretty consistently take off and lands where we've made all these design compromises for high speed flight. Now we gotta go break the sound barrier, um, and then push up to kind of ramjet takeover speeds between Mark two and a half and Mark three. Okay. So yeah, design compromises. That's why it was a challenge to even fly because you can obviously just build this. It's not like we just like tomorrow, right? Hooked up a Cessna to fly with a remote control, right? No,

like you made all these design compromises to where it's a really hard subsonic airplane to fly. Because the wings are small. They're kind of short and stubby. So it likes to roll a lot. It has super high wing loading. The wings are heavily loaded. And the thrust to weight is very low.

What does heavily loaded mean in this context? Literally heavy? Weight, that was? The amount of lift that each square inch of the wing is generating is very low. What does heavily loaded mean in this context? Like literally heavy, like weight? Like the amount of lift that each square inch of the wing is generating is like relatively high. Sure. Even in those speeds. So yeah, and then like low thrust to weight,

so this all like comes down to like really high takeoff and landing speeds. So like not only do you have to build an airplane, you got to build like a land speed record race car that's on the ground, you know, traveling more than 200 miles an hour before it even takes off. So yeah, it's just tough and the team really nailed it. Yeah. How, what are all the different

ways that you guys observe? Oh my gosh. Hold on. What's a Cessna weighs? 1600 pounds. Is that that's what I'm saying? Google. That's like, that's pretty nice for you. Like that's like almost like but less than five times lighter. So yeah, you're five times heavier. This is a legit airplane. OK, yeah, that's a serious challenge. What are all the different ways that you guys observe and sort of track a single test, right? Because even earlier today, we were

watching the SpaceX launch. They were putting up some more Starlink satellites. And I think it was an X problem, but their stream kept cutting out and all that stuff. I think it was an X. I think the rocket and everything was fine. But the X-Stream was continually dying. I think everybody in the company's heart kind of dropped,

skipped a beat. Because one of the camera feeds that we had on the vehicle is from the nose camera. But its range doesn't extend like the whole However, let's like the nose camera cut out and everybody's like But you just keep an eye on the data like the ones and zeros. Those are really easy to get to the pipes So you pay attention to those you look at those they're good Then we're doing great. Yeah, it's great insane. Well, congratulations

Yeah, congratulations. Let us. Well congratulations. Yeah, congratulations Let us know when the next milestone is Maybe for the next flight. I'll wear some like ridiculous blazer You need some gimmick supersonic white suit, yep, let's do it we got oh boy. We'll help you out with that All right. We'll see you guys Bye We got oh boy. We'll help you out with that. All right. We'll see you guys Bye Let me tell you about Vanta automate compliance manage risk prove trust Continuously Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program

pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. You see Aidan? If you're building supersonic jets like Hermes, you probably are already on Vantor. Probably. You definitely need compliance. It's important. High stakes work. Also ITAR compliance, right?

Yeah. For a lot of that stuff. Should we go through? You get this post from Aidan. Yeah. He says, I love how, as you make models smarter, they become more vegan. And it's a highlight from some of Anthropix outputs.

Even between models, we did this for Sonnet and Opus. Opus really cares about animal welfare. It will do the same long-term scheming to protect animals, but Sonnet won't. I wonder how much of this is an Anthropic thing, because they're very like, being coded as a company, and so I wonder if it's like them optimizing towards that, or if it's really just like smarter, more caring.

A rogue researcher. But I mean, I think there is something here where like, there are animals in the wild that kill their parents, but most humans do not do that, even though they could at some point, and I feel like the bold case for like AI not Paper clipping everyone is just like they'll be like thanks for making us dad Humanity like you made us like like why would we kill you?

Why wouldn't we just like at least like help you out a little bit here and there? Maybe we're not going to like optimize your dominance To pay them a little bit But yeah, I mean they'll take care of us in our retirement. I feel like even in the crazy scenario where there's takeoff and they're way more powerful, why wouldn't they be benevolent? AGI just drops. Benevolence does seem to be correlated with high IQ.

And after all, these AIs are simulating humans. And so why wouldn't they simulate humanity? Why wouldn't they simulate caring? Why wouldn't they simulate caring? You see Lulu's post, she says, I still remember when a Wired reporter accused Substack of encouraging extremists and Wired posted a video. I 3D printed Luigi Mangione's ghost gun. Very, very wild thing to put up.

Oh, it's a YouTube video, 18 minutes. Basically like almost like a tutorial. That's pretty aggressive. Why are you? I wonder if this video is still up. I wonder what they are. Still up. It's still up.

Half a million views. That's pretty crazy. I feel like YouTube has some pretty hardcore rules around guns, gun content, cause I've watched a lot of gun reviews and there's, you actually have to censor when you are assembling the weapon are you familiar with this this is insane this is the title of the video yeah how easy has it become for

someone to build a deadly untraceable weapon wait they changed the they changed the title or no this is the description of the description how easy has it become for someone to build a deadly and untraceable weapon with nothing more than a 3d printer and parts ordered online, Wired senior writer, Andy Greenberg remade the exact same gun allegedly used in one of the most high profile assassinations in recent memory. So yeah, straight up basically saying to the world,

it's easy to make ghost guns. In a lot of gun YouTuber videos, if they are attaching a silencer, they censor that part of the video. So it'll be like, I'm gonna put this silencer on this gun, and then they will censor that part because that's technically assembly of guns, and you can't show that on YouTube,

but you can show a silencer, you can show a gun, if you register, obviously, and you can show them together, you just can't show the assembly of them, which is very interesting. Anyway, we have our next guest coming into the studio, but first let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose bit tool for planning

and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. And they have agents now. It's the backbone of TBPN, many people have been saying this, John. It is, it's our secret to success. Lots of thread boys out there writing threads

about what makes us successful. It's linear, get on linear. You heard it here. It's that easy. Anyway, we have Delian talking about the Enduro Sat financing, this went out earlier today. He was just on Bloomberg, came over here. A little bit of a feeder for TBPN.

They're cultivating Bulgarian dynamism. Bulgarian dynamism. It really is, Bloomberg really is kind of like the farm team for us. You go on Bloomberg, and then we kind of pick the cream of the crop. The best. Ben watches, and he says.

And all of this person perform well. Hey, how you guys doing? There they are. Welcome to the stream. Welcome to the show. Fantastic lighting both of both. Hey look great Thank you guys Obama would be proud you guys you know he took the gray suit and fumbled But you guys took the gray suit and you know really want it the markets

Markets ripping you guys are announcing a big financing congratulations. Oh, yeah What's the deal and what does the company do? Yeah, introduce everything. Yeah, well, we're leading this $49 million series B for EnduroSat. It's predicated on the thesis that we've been looking at for a long time, which is basically like, somebody needs to go build what I call the Dell for satellites, right?

When I think about my business at Varta, my job is to build the reentry capsules, the drug manufacturing equipment. The rest of the vehicle is basically just a standard satellite that I'd much prefer to not have to go entirely build myself. My job is to build the reentry capsules, is that if you look at the overlap between our satellite and like automotive or consumer electronics supply chains, very limited. It's all this like very specific aerospace supply chain that is basically the same component that it's been since 1972. And there's just been no maturation in that. Obviously, consumer electronics, we know these like wonderful things called iPhones, these are mass manufactured, super cheap, keep getting cheaper over time.

You don't have anything like that, you know, basically happening in the aerospace supply chain. And so credit to the team at, you know, team at EnduroSat and ICHO because they didn't have any venture funding for a long time, they couldn't afford to do the traditional satellite manufacturing approach. And so they basically had to go and figure out how to adopt consumer electronics, medical devices, automotive supply chains, but then figure out how to stitch together some great firmware, materials, et cetera, to make it into a space-grade piece of hardware. But now they're able to deliver sort of components

and satellites and services that are literally like 10x delta prices. And so the company, I'll tell you, this is crazy, which is never true for any aerospace company or defense company in the US, literally profitable, growing two to three x literally every single year, and it is delivering components and satellites

at like 90 plus percent margins. It's just like literally completely unheard of in any other aerospace company. But they still couldn't get you to write a $50 million check. They came so close by just one mil off. What happened? What happened?

Working on it. You know, Deleon really put the screws to you. I gotta say, I don't wanna put him in the hot seat, but Ev over at Kleiner's gotta be in shambles for a profitable high margin space company. It's brutal. But yeah, I mean, I'd love to hear a little bit of background on the company. How'd you get into this? Where have

you been doing this for a long time? And kind of what's the pre history of the company before this deal? Okay, guys, thanks for for inviting us on board. Yeah, really proud to partner with founders fund companies exactly 10 years ago founded in Bulgaria in a small attic apartment. They should be a better and fundamentally different way to build space infrastructures. And actually the idea is pretty simple, I believe. It's how do we get the cost of data from orbit, regardless of the type of sensor to a place

where it's affordable for small, medium-sized companies around the free world, basically. And the idea is that if you look at the radar data, for example, very high resolution imagery data today, first, they're super difficult to acquire at all. And secondly, one gigabyte costs between $2,000, $3,000, $5,000 sometimes. And we figured out, we made simple calculations about what type of applications there are. And we decided,000, $5,000 sometimes. And we figured out, we made a simple calculations about what type of applications there are. And we decided, okay, if we are to ever enable fundamentally accessible, universally accessible space

for multiple other entries and really different innovations to spin out and finally get into the space industry. And if you are to ever link this hardware centric, excruciatingly painful supply chains with the actual objective data consumer markets that have nothing to do with space, this would be a game changer

and it's going to be good for humanity in general and great for the business as well. And the idea was very simple. We need to get the data, one gigabyte data from orbit, from any type of sensor as low as possible and as close as possible to data, one gigabyte data from orbit, from any type of sensor, as low as possible and as close as possible to one dollar per gigabyte. I think this would open the gates of innovation in space like never before.

So we started with the idea, okay, to do that, we need to absolutely change and be very asymmetric in the way that we build the satellites. We need to figure out the way to automate everything. We started with the idea the satellite is just a flying workstation in orbit. It's technically everyone in the whole industry is super obsessed about, hey, my satellite is X amount of kilograms or pounds.

My satellite is X amount of connectivity. It's always obsession about the technology. And I believe the whole shift should be we need to be in love with the challenge that we're trying to solve. The challenge is very simple. If we get massively improved and instant access to space data, fundamentally changes everything for the businesses, for defense, for any type of ecosystem within the democratic world. This is a fundamentally important for us challenge.

So we started by redefining how to build satellites, redefining how we operate satellites. And we started with the idea that the satellite is designed for manufacturing, which was unheard of in the industry because usually it's one-off. It's like building Rolls Royces. And we said, no, I think there should be a different way of approaching. Let's from the get-go design a satellite thinking about the AIT, the assembly engineering teams, how they can assemble the satellite faster. And we just announced today with Deleon our latest gen satellites after 10 years of experience. We've put everything that we know inside it.

We are very excited. We will have a hard ways to scale this in the coming months. Very challenging, but I think it will fundamentally change the perception of the industry because we can assemble a relatively large satellite for six hours by individual engineer. Typical by the way is like 90 days. So like most 300 kilogram satellites, it's like three to four technicians, 90 days to like get all the components testing etc. Whereas these guys are simplified and you know sort of down to six hours and to give you a sense of the scale, by the end of this year, they'll be manufacturing about 60 what

are called ESPA class satellites. Think of that as like you know basically 200 to 500 kilograms, 60 of those per month. It'll make them the largest satellite manufacturer in the entire world other than Starlink. And that's like at the end of this year, not like hypothetically in the future, et cetera. And by the way, they're doing that at like, you know, 75% margins, profitable, growing fast, et cetera.

And they already have like, you know, 300 plus customers, not like one or two, you know, sort of super concentrated. And so at some point I've been tracking them for like six years and I kept kind of discounting it because I was like, look, if I bring up the idea of like a Bulgarian space company to like FF, you're obviously so biased, like clearly you just got these crazy blinders on.

But at some point I kept meeting with him for like five or six years and I was like, God, like it just seems like it's the best tech. It's growing really fast. It's really great margins. And so I brought it up to like, you know, my partner, Sean Liu, who's like, you know, sort of the best tech, it's growing really fast, it's really great margins and so I brought it up to like my partner Sean Liu who's like sort of the growth version of Dellian really likes industrial, et cetera.

I was like, Sean, am I like crazy or like, is this like actually I think even really good from like a numbers basis, let alone technology basis? And he was like, let's fucking do this immediately. And I was like, okay, cool. Another favorite anecdote from the company is like, so Right Joe basically started to like recruit and repatriate basically Bulgarians from like Arabus, Tali, America, et cetera, and got them all back to Bulgaria. But at some point he was like, so, Rachel basically started to recruit and repatriate basically Bulgarians from like, Erebus, Tali, America, et cetera,

and got them all back to Bulgaria. But at some point, he was like, I'm gonna run out of this talent pool. There's not like a million of these types of engineers. And so he was like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna just make my own talent pool. And so he went to the local university in Sofia, which like, plenty of problems in Bulgaria,

but like, you know, minting physicists and like computer engineers and mechanical engineers, we do that all day and day out. And so we went to the university, he's like, look, I'm gonna take over your like junior and senior year program. We're gonna change your like aerospace engineering to just be like, we're just gonna teach you

how we build things at EnduroSet. We're gonna give you effectively what look like client projects. And then just whoever gets the A is we're gonna hire on the other side. And so now over the like 300 person team, 80 of them are people that have graduated from this program.

And so if you walk around the office, it's like these cracked 23 to 26 year old Bulgarian kids grinding 12 plus hours a day. They're fucking thrilled because either this or they go be a technician at Lufthansa. And so it's like, this is so much more interesting. They get to impact the frontier of space. And by the way, Bulgaria has never had any of the fucking entitlement that America has had, right? The whole wave of like wokeism, DEI, entitlement, blackism.

Doesn't fucking exist. This country is too fucking poor to do it. And wave of like wokeism, DEI, entitlement, blackism, doesn't fucking exist. The country's too fucking poor to do it. And we like, oh, by the way, we hate socialists. We still do. And so all that stuff is like, breaded Marxism. We fucking hate Marxism there. I was literally doing a run through

like the downtown selfie the other day. And I fucking loved it because I like stumbled across this old Marxist statue and literally there was all these like hammer and sickle like things with just huge Xs in them. And everybody just had the hammer and sickle. I'm like,s in them. And everybody just downed the hammer and sickle. I'm like, fuck yeah, man. This is what we fucking need in America.

You have fucking people like pro-Hamas, pro-Marxism, these fucking crazy people that are super entitled. And in Bulgaria it's just like, yeah, we're just gonna kick your ass and we're gonna become like the TSMC of aerospace where it's just gonna be this national jewel. We're gonna fucking mint the engineers. When a kid is born,

he's literally gonna be doing aerospace at two years old. He's gonna study it in middle school in high school He's gonna go to the university and he's gonna graduate and he's gonna immediately want to go work in Enduro sat We're gonna build up the whole ecosystem here. Yeah, so I mean with that TSMC analogy obviously TSMC is Fabbing for Nvidia and for Apple silicon those have slightly different trade-offs different memory GPU cache like all these different things that are going on on the chip. On an EnduroSat, what am I customizing?

What are the, like, what have you decided to say, this is standard? And then this is the USB-C port that you can plug a camera into, a microphone into, like, what are we, what are we customizing once we buy one of these and what are the different vectors of differentiation that are possible? Yes, so the biggest thing in our, I believe in our impact and the customer basis, we tried to simplify the way that the satellite is perceived by literally building all the subsystems of the satellite completely in house and making sure that you can dynamically re-instruct the satellite basically to change the performance of the power, of the communication, of the processing to address the exact need of the exact sensor that you want to take to orbit. One example, if you need a radar, of course you need much more power, you need peak power

that are much, much higher rather than if you need a high resolution image or camera. And our goal was always, how do we build a chassis of a satellite as a bus or as a platform that can objectively take to orbit all of these things without the customer or us ever having to modify the bits and the pieces of the satellite. So the only thing that we modify is of course,

the mechanical part that holds the payload, the sensors to the satellite, because those are always unique. And we use the same mission software that is fully based on the cloud. So you don't need any more mission control if you're a customer of ours. And basically, again, we always go back to the idea of why we do that. It's not about the technology or the progress, because any innovation has its own lifespan. And sometimes it's short, sometimes it's amazing. But it is that how do we get to a point where you can get any type of space data and you can impact your business on the ground?

And our idea was, well, you can do that only if we absolutely change the perception of what satellite is and you simplify it for the customer. The satellites become overwhelmingly more complicated, more resilient, more oriented towards defense lately. But at the end of the day, you should not transfer this complication in the operations of the customer. So one idea was what people don't understand is in the space sector, 90% of the so-called space companies, actually their only source of revenue is the data that they generate

in orbit. And only 10% of the total global market of so-called space companies are the actual rocket builders and satellite builders like us. So if you look in the broader spectrum of problems, for us is how do we enable these data companies to never ever have to touch satellites in their lives? Because in reality, we have multiple constellations, fantastic innovators, unbelievable results, but not on finance, on finance catastrophic results. Why? Because they always try to build their own very unique satellites in-house while you

are actually a data company and the only source of revenue and positive impact is your data or the intelligence out of this data. And then the question is, okay, it's like you being an Uber and trying to suddenly buy cars and build roads, or if you're Airbnb and suddenly they decide, okay, let's just go banana crazy and buy all the hotels and maintain stuff and whatever and I think the space sector has always been for some reason in this conservative paradigm shift of super smart people Focused on technology more than the challenges and at the same time trying because they're so enthusiastic and smart about the technology Focusing all the efforts of diversifying and doing what is fun for them to do,

but not realistically spending the whole damn time to impact society via data. And our job is to get them back to reality check, hopefully, or at least to help them see that there is an alternative route and to tell them, guys, if you're a data company, please focus on data because this really, really matters to everyone else that you are providing these data and services.

Let us build part of your infrastructure. So this is the thesis behind it. It will be a long, not a rosy road ahead. We have a huge amount of challenges to actually produce at scale such a vast amount of infrastructure. I mean, SpaceX is a juggernaut and it's incredibly innovative company

and kudos to everyone involved We're teeny tiny speck on the universe and we did the things completely asymmetrically and different in a SpaceX for example Why because everyone in the industry is looking at these Titans of an industry super innovation Driven company and mindset that is a battlefield basically which is very unique and then you say I do the same But it's like if you go to the Superl and you try to win against the winning team with their own strategy on their own turf, right? This is insane. So we went completely opposite.

How do we assemble satellite design for manufacturing to handle multiple data services? How do we completely eliminate the need of our space data customers to ever need the mission control? How do we automate operations? How do we hedge the financial risks? So we are actually providing to all our customers in space fixed costs for getting your sensors to space.

For the first time, transparency in planning of your own infrastructure in orbit. And we take care of the risk and we ensure our customers so that if satellites fails, no questions asked, we get you a new satellite. And that's the vision. And we go step by step. So it's an incremental amount of a lot of technology innovations and patented ideas and a lot of just seeing what else can we optimize so that we objectively

lower the data to get as close as humanly possible to $1 per gigabyte of any type of sensors. And just to give you one last example as a data, because I love to work with data. Right now, our current gen 3 from the get go would achieve already pricing per gigabyte lower than $200. So from $2,000 to $200, and we are really bullish on the idea that it will take us a little bit of time, maybe a year or an year and a half to really mature this technology. And ideally, we get it as close as humanly possible to one dollar, which will open the gates of innovation, I hope.

My one liner that I'll end on is in a traditional satellite, if you wanted to double the amount of power storage you want to do, you have to redo the thermal analysis, the center of gravity, the vibration analysis, the structure, etc. If you want to double the battery storage and EnduraSat satellite, it is literally plugging an extra battery module, turn a knob, you're done. The satellite is software defined, it automatically knows, oh, I've got a second battery module,

that means my weight shifted this way, that means my thermal shifted this way. It just pre-calculates all that and knows exactly how to deal with it. And that way the company can just focus on like mass manufactured individual modules. And you can still offer customization to the end client. You wanna double your power, you want the bigger radar,

you want something bigger, great, you can have whatever satellite you want. It still is custom fit for your need, but it's mass manufactured. So I mean, Varta's unique in that it's not a data company. Is there a world where you two guys work together in the future? Yeah, I mean, look, I think when we sort of first started

to get to know one another, his satellites were far smaller than the Varta satellites. And so this Gen 3 is the first time where they're starting to get in that size class. But yeah, look, those power systems, those radios, those avionics, it's still very relevant to us. We're definitely still trying to drive down the cost. We're just one of the few companies that isn't a data company, so we care about dollar per kilogram brought back to Earth.

But it's still the fundamental inputs into that equation that RYCHO helps us basically drive down. I always think about Ben Thompson with his trajectory where it's like, when you have these early markets, you have to be fully vertically integrated. SpaceX had to do from soup to nuts, build the rocket, build the engine, build the Starlink satellite, sell the service, et cetera. But as it matures, you have these horizontal players. VARTA, the goal is, I just want to be the horizontal player. I'm like, you know, bio manufacturing and reentry capsules. But like, I don't need us to be the world class best sort of bus provider.

Ideally, we like are the master assembler of a bunch of the best components. And I'm hopeful that, you know, Enduro can be that winner of that horizontal layer of components and satellites. It's amazing. Thank you so much for stopping by. Right, Joe. Last question from my side. It is is Deleon as famous as we think in Bulgaria? Is he like a household name, at least among tech-interested folks?

Among the tech industry, I think he's a superstar. Among the normal people, I don't think that they know him very well. Superstar. All I heard is superstar. Let's go. Superstar. All I heard is Superstar. To adapt to his Twitter account, ex accounts and stuff like that. We are still in the honeymoon phase where we are taking good care of knowing each other and our good and strange habits.

I heard Superstar and Honeymoon, that's all I need To win the deal. I hope you made him assemble just one Yeah, actually I'll be honored to invite you guys seriously because we are also having large operations in Denver and very soon will be amplifying them Yeah, so I the end of this year beginning next year as an experiment it to be absolutely lovely to if we succeed to invite you And with your own hands yeah to to try it out and tell us are we bullshitting or is this something like really meaningful that could impact the industry i love it yeah need its own satellite by the end of next year building a dish now live photos of the studio yeah yeah yeah we're vertically integrating for

sure yeah we have to in an industry like you have to Let's take a second to tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot spend less than five month five minutes per month on sales tax compliance Jordy, ring that gong. I think they missed you on the Y. But you can ring the gong for public.com investing for those who take it seriously. I want to see Jordy on the Y. Let's do it, public.com baby. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields.

They're trusted by millions. Wait, I just realized we need an actual air horn. We do need an actual air horn. For sure, for sure. The soundboard will eventually be instantiated purely with a live band. Physical objects. Live bands are Lindy on talk shows.

The soundboard is a poor simulacrum of what we could be having if we had played the ba-doom-sh, and our band plays it. And this is obviously in the cards. It's great that we have the laugh drops. We need to do the live studio audience. Actual people to say, Ben holds up the laugh sign and everybody just goes.

I mean, just go. Yeah, yeah. Just go. Just go recruit them from USC, UCLA business schools. Come in, learn a little bit about that shirt, learn about business off your voice. Yeah some laughs be great be great They're like, oh no socialism mentioned but Anyway IPOs are back tech IPOs are back kind of Katie roof wrote about the three successful debuts this month What it means Silicon Valley rejoice tech IPOs are a little bit back.

We love to hear it. Oh, we actually have our first, Jill fell against. I don't think we have time to go through this, but MNTN went out, the advertising technology business connected to Ryan Reynolds and Hinge Health went public. So that's great. Yeah, yeah, we definitely do. Ryan Reynolds and Hinge Health went public. So that's great. Yeah, yeah, we definitely do.

And Chinese battery giant, contemporary Ampere X technology, co-soaring introduction on Tuesday, and the favorable debut for Israeli Robin Hood competitor, eToro Group. So there's been a couple big, big IPO's. So the window is open. Which one? eToro? It's called MNTN, it's called Mountain couple big, big IPOs. So the window is open. Which one?

E-Tour? It's called MNTN. MNTN. It's called Mountain. Yeah, Mountain. We were thinking about having somebody on one of the VCs who founded the company or funded the company early.

But anyway, I say we move on to the Teal Fellowship. We got the Teal Fellow Tuesday. Why don't you kick it off with your post? Oh. Because I feel like that really sets the stage. Yes, yes, yes. So I went on X and I posted the big Teal Fellow question that is on every application for the Teal Fellowship is, what important truth do you, do very few people

agree with you on? What is something you believe that very few people agree with you on? And I said, I believe it's possible to interview the entire Teal Fellowship class on a single podcast episode. It could even happen today. They said it couldn't be done.

They said it couldn't be done, but it's happening. But here we are. But it's happening, here we are. So we have our first Teal Fellow, our first guest of the session. We have Carlo. How are you doing, Carlo? Carlo, welcome to the show.

Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. How are y'all doing? We're doing great. Do you appreciate the color match? Oh yeah, the color. Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. How are you all doing? Do you appreciate the color match? Oh, yeah, the color match is fantastic. The market's out. We're very excited. Everything's going well, and the IPO window is slowly cracking open. So get your prospectus ready. Get your S1 filed confidentially because I'm sure you'll be able to.

We're about a decade. Yeah, yeah. It's relevant to what we work on at first. So that's exciting to see. OK, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's relevant to, to what we work on at first. So that's exciting to see. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Break it down for us. Give you, give us a little introduction. Yeah. Happy to.

And maybe I expand a little bit because what we're working on is actually a super relevant to what Brad talked about earlier with invest America. So at first the company that I founded now three years ago, we essentially working to make society more meritocratic and return some amount of optimism to young adults in the US, right? Today, we have all these 17 and 18 year olds who need to make decisions over taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to go to school with limited market incentives

being exposed to them. It costs the same to study nursing than it costs to study, I don't know, comp lit, right? And then there's financial products that you get signed up to that actively encourage you to pick up bad financial habits in terms of no or zero APR offers initially. So at FIS, we build financial products that give college students and young adults a line of sight towards financial independence. And we do that with an AI financial advisor that we shipped earlier this year, as well as with financial products that we don't just sort of rebrand like a debit card just with

a different design, but fundamentally rebuilt. In 2023, we launched the first debit card that builds credit, which gives you a real-time credit limit that updates based on external account balances, has daily auto pay, and neither requires essentially a co-signer, a credit check, or a security deposit. So try to... How does the credit score thing work? I feel like it's such a weird thing that you can build credit with a debit card and it's such like a legacy system that I'm glad you're hacking it, but it feels like the hacking is the right term. But is this something that people just didn't think to do or was there a regulatory or technical change that allowed this to happen? Now like why are people building credit with debit cards now? So super interesting question and I think what this gets at is like for 30 years people have largely been using the same financial products

What FinTech has really been doing is it's been expanding access to financial products, but it hasn't necessarily spread sophistication yet. Like the average person is still extremely confused about how to navigate their path to financial independence or like use these financial products in such a way that they work for them rather than against them. And part of that is definitely regulatory capture and the incentives of sort of the incumbent banks, right?

How they built their revenue models. When you look at companies like Discover, Capital One, most of their money comes from revolving interchange. They have crazy large legacy tech stacks and banking cores that you can't really innovate on top of. And then Bas came in and essentially made this exact tech stack accessible to fintech companies and everyone sort of built their own version on top of what already existed.

But there's been fairly little innovation when it comes to the core flow of funds mappings. And what people I don't think have done sufficiently is instead of just looking at, oh, these are the financial products that exist, how can I make them marginally better? Looking at the code and looking at the regulations and the law to see, okay, what does the law actually allow you to do and what doesn't it allow you to do and turns out you can indeed? build credit with a debit card if you work with all the stakeholders work with the bureaus and Are willing to to sort of go through the process of building the underlying infrastructure So what the whole ledgering and underwriting systems and so on and so forth and that's definitely a pain

But I think it's the type of innovation that we need in finance more than yet another N plus one. Yeah. Yeah. When I was your age, I actually destroyed my credit entirely with about $5,000 in credit card debt. It was awful. And I had to rebuild it using- You're a ghost in grace with two and a half- Yeah. I had to rebuild it using a secured credit card. So you have to put down like a thousand dollars and then it acts like a credit card, but it builds your credit back up.

Took me like years to get back in a reasonable territory. It was a mess. I think it's super common experience, right? In my experience, I didn't even get a credit card because I'm from Germany originally. I came here for college, right? I didn't have a co-sign. I didn't want to put down a large security deposit.

And the FICO score, I mean, it's data science from the eighties, right? It was introduced in 1989. We actually don't have that many cohorts that we can look at in terms of how it impacts socioeconomic mobility in the long term because 30 years in the greatest scheme of things is not that much data.

And it's a system that hasn't been questioned or changed since. And I think it's really due for substantial change because it's so upstream of the types of results and the relationship that people get to develop with their finances. Talk to me about the go to market, Peter Thiel, obviously founder of the Thiel Fellowship,

also founder of PayPal. PayPal used the like give five, get five referral program. We've seen that used for Dropbox and Venmo and all these different products. Has that been something you've been working? That was also used by a very high profile fintech company that raised a ton of money. And I think they ran into the hard problem of,

if you give money away, you just attract some of the worst quality users. Customers, yeah, that can happen. We'll download the app to make $5 and then never. Yeah, and PayPal ran into crazy scammers and stuff. So what's working on the go-to-market side? And what problems has it caused, I assume? Yeah, for sure.

And I think what you just mentioned is really important in our industry. Consumer quality really matters. And it's kind of an odd concept to grasp. Because typically, like you said, it'd be a mixed panel dashboard, and you just want the number to go up. The number of customers really doesn't matter.

That's not necessarily the case in finance. A lot of it is long-term LTV capture. How are you able to attach additional parts to these cohorts? And you are taking on risk. Are you taking on credit risk? You're taking on fraud risk? You're moving money. So there is a heightened sensitivity that's required in terms of customer quality.

We think we're capturing the most exciting customer in personal finance. a heightened sensitivity that's required in terms of customer quality. We think we're capturing the most exciting customer and personal finance, right? Young adults that are hopefully optimistically striving towards whatever their goals for the future are. And there's a ton of exponentialization and demand for essential services that these people experience between the age of 18 to 25. In terms of our go-to-market, what's been working, we've built a lot of content. in the age of 18 to 25. In terms of our go-to-market, what's been working, we've built a lot of content. Shout out to Lisa and Kyle originally on our team who built a terrific content engine for us.

And then we go campus by campus. there's a sort of inherent virality. You can almost win the college space, similar to like ramp one, the sort of startup credit card space by means of they're being onward of mouth dynamic that unfolds within the community and sort of a lot of mind share. Yeah, let me ask you about the super long LTV question because I've always had this, you know, Parker Conrad talks about building the compound startup

at Rippling and on day one, having not just an HR product, but also an IT product and building all these things simultaneously. And that's something that I feel like I haven't seen with the Neo banks generally, like there is yet to be a startup that I've seen that's launched that just is day one, you can buy stocks, but you can also have a debit card. You can also get a mortgage.

We'll also do a car loan. We'll do all the things that JP Morgan Chase does. But on day one as a NEOBANK, is that just too hard or is there some fundamental force stopping you? And are you thinking more about it as like, let's just do incremental wins one product after the after the next. I mean, I think functionally, like the sort of pragmatic limitations just have kept that from happening. And then in the U S I think there are some other dynamics in terms of like the strength that incumbent banks really have and the capital position that they have,

right? That have maybe prevented even like the late stage players like Cash App or like a time to fully realize that vision either. But if you would want that you would need to back FinTech companies like you back sort of healthcare startups, right, biotech companies where you give them a hundred million dollars upfront to acquire the licenses, build up the legal team, get access to the amount of warehouse facilities and really

take a large shot and that's simply not how FinTech investing has been done thus far. I think we're going to see more and more of that as people are learning that the incremental copy of another product is having a really hard time with distribution and what matters is are you able to differentiate the price and that's inherently more expensive to develop, right? Licensing, FISBEND, over a million dollars of our seed run on licensing and legal. Because we launched a new product, you can't really do that if you're launching more products,

unless you're getting really substantial cash from the get-go. Maybe regulatory landscape changes, but it's not. I'm sure since the new Teal fellowship class got announced and you were in it, that investor appetite has been insane. But what had it looked like for maybe the year prior in a time when FinTech has come back to some degree? There's some great businesses that have been built.

But generally, it sounds like the company was started kind of in the right before the fintech kind of dark ages. Yeah, that's the right observation. Look, I think we don't have to kid anyone, right? The consumer fintech is not necessarily riding on a high in terms of investor sentiment at the moment. And it wasn't last year either. TBD, what happens when when Chime goes out now where they're last year either. TBD, what happens when when Chime goes out now where they're going to be priced. TBD, what happens with Klana. I hope that we see Revolut enter the markets and I think these are three companies that do show the scale that can be achieved. I think if you take an optimistic, take a sort of realistic view into where have returns come from and consumer venture investing, right, A lot of it is fintech and

investors should remember that and hopefully play some bets here. I also think that like the tech community should hold itself accountable towards the outcomes it drives societally, right? Like are we actually like improving the experience of existing in the society? Are we bringing optimism to people? Are people experiencing joy? And one of the most direct lines to having that type of impact is to build better financial products. And I think it will come ultimately from consumer, fintech companies and consumer companies in general. I'm actually always kind of concerned that amongst people my age, like when I talk with people from Harvard or Stanford or whoever, right, like who are considering dropping out, Everyone wants to start a B2B company. Like the biggest multiplayer that you can can create right now still I

think is building consumer technology. And I hopefully will see more of it and also more investing behind it. It's it's way less than 50% of venture investing. I think that's a problem. It is funny too, because historically, I mean, only a decade ish ago, everyone wanted to build a consumer app because everybody was a consumer and they had ideas But nobody actually had good it's hard to have Well, it's hard to have good ideas for what B2B sass to build if you've you've had one three-month internship Very very surprising to see that being a trend among students

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone is listening to all the shows right and everyone's trying to de-risk ultimately and find formulas and nothing is quite as formulaic as B2B sauce, right? And consumers are always more speculative. It's harder to gauge. It's easy to build faster horses, right? All these types of things. But I think it's extremely rewarding and we need to see more of it. And I think we need to hold each other accountable

sort of as a community to hopefully recenter around consumer use cases again. Last question, we'll let you go. What is the one financial product that young people should be avoiding these days? Please don't say options. Please don't say angel investing. Jordy will have a conniption fit.

I think options might be closer to what I would say, but the worst thing that I think is taking up at the moment is sports betting, right? Objectively, you see it in the data. Like the number of bankruptcies amongst young men in states where it's legal has shot up. Like, I think there's a real question. The flip side is that I'm very pro. And very pro pulls money out of the markets. Like it's

Yes, sports betting. Well, unless you do what I recommend, which is dollar cost average into the sports betting platforms. Well, if you explain everyone with dollar cost averaging, then maybe we can get started putting $20 down on that parlay $20 a grid of DraftKings stock, You're good. That might be more reasonable. That's a good financial decision. Not financial advice though. But you get the idea. The house always wins, so invest in the house. Anyway, this has been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for stopping by. Good luck to you. And meeting all the other people is awesome. The Teal class is awesome this year. Yeah, it seems like a great class already. We'll talk to you soon. You're the man. Bye. Congrats.

Next up we have Steven coming in the studio. I think we have to ask people what important truth do very few people agree to want to everyone. Feel free to let it rip if it comes up in the conversation. I feel like we got it out of Carla. He believes that not enough people are focused on consumer syntax. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

Yeah, for a lot of people, the contrarian question is the company that you're building? For a long time, mine was nicotine is not as bad for you as people think. It doesn't give you cancer. That was contrarian, now it's pretty consensus. Anyway, if you have a really good contrarian idea, you should put it on a billboard.

You should go to adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Out of home advertising, little bit of contrarian move for a lot of people, but it works. It works. And with adquick, you can say goodbye to the move for a lot of people, but it works. It works. And with AdQuick, you can say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise

and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, our next guest is here. Let's bring him in the studio. Let's do it. Stephen, how are you doing? Congratulations on the Thiel Fellowship. It's great to meet you.

It's good to meet you too. Thank you very much. Fantastic, would you mind giving us a little intro on yourself and the company you're building? Yeah, I'll start with the company I'm building. We build non-invasive neuromodulators, so little devices stick on the back of your ears and stimulate this inner ear organ

called the vestibular system, which controls your perception of motion to generate hallucinations and motions. So you can like toggle a button and feel yourself spinning around and flying around and stuff. That's crazy. That's huge for VR, right?

Because there was always this question of like, you know, if the VR can be very convincing visually and the audio can be very convincing, but I can't feel like I'm actually flying, but now I can. It's actually there's actually an even bigger problem in VR, which is without this, you get incredibly motion sick and so you can't play like most most games. So when we started one of the primary cells, it's like, hey, we have VR devices are ready to go. You can

hop into a like ornithopter right now and fly around and feel like you're flying around. And we always have this guess that like, oh, you could also use this system to build therapeutics that are a lot more powerful than anyone else could ever build. The times people didn't exist and we were like, okay, we could be totally wrong. So we went in going like, all right, we're gonna build the tech out for VR.

Once we did, we realized how surprisingly useful as the therapeutic to the point where it doesn't really make sense to do anything else. So that's mostly where we are. Of course, I think Neuralink's going through something similar where eventually everyone will have one and we'll be all communicating via Neuralink, but in the short term, let's just cure blindness and help people who are paraplegic use the computer and play civilization all night, which is amazing and miraculous. So are you going through an FDA pathway? Are

you regulated as a medical device? Like, what is that process like? And can you take us through like, again, reintroducing like, what is the actual product experience for the person using it? Yeah. Yeah. Let me talk about that first, because then the regulatory pathway becomes a little bit more, more clear, even though it's still pretty messy. So the thing we build interacts with this sensory organ in your inner

ear, right? And it's called the vestibular system if you want to look it up. If you go to my Twitter, you see a video of me driving a human around with an RC steering wheel, just like controlling where they go. But there's a bunch of things you can do with it. But the most important one is the vestibular system evolved like so early on in the evolutionary chain that it's entangled with a bunch of deep brain regions that, some of it has some business being entangled with, and other parts it really doesn't have much business being entangled with at all. That's why you see parents rocking their child to sleep. There's no good explanation for why that works from an evolutionary standpoint,

except the connectivity is there, it kind of makes sense. So we started by sending signals like that. Essentially what we did is we built like a precise modulator of this external sensory organ. And I think it's not really easy, these guys spent like eight months cranking at it to figure out the things I couldn't figure out before we got it.

But once you do, you can control a bunch of autonomic nervous system functions by making these almost like high level API calls of like, oh, regulate your heart rate like this, or your breathing rate like this. It makes brain stimulation a lot easier and allows you to do like actually important things. So the upshot of that is to make you sleep a lot better or do some experiments on metabolism right now to see if we can try to beat those thematic without

all the side effects. But we're not there yet. But I think on all of these things, we're not not quite to where we want to be yet. But it's a lot further than NeuroStim has ever gone before. And we're getting pretty damn close. So what's your personal approach to testing? Are you testing everything on yourself first? Kind of like a young Tony Stark? What does it look like? Everything I can say on air is I'm testing on myself

very heavily. Everything is tested on me first. And the fun thing is like traditionally what you need in order to test whether these things work is you need like 50 people and you need to hold a controlled trial in order to see if there's some statistically significant like the AIPF statistical power.

But we built stuff that's like powerful enough that if you turn it on, like you know that it's on, you know what it's doing. I can't naturally sleep like this, no matter how placebo I am. There's no way to achieve this effect of like, I have two hours, two and a half hours of in-three deep sleep tonight, which according to my whoop is aberrant and I've never experienced it in my life. Or you turn it on, you feel the world start spinning. You don't need N equals 30 to know that there's some stats say you turn it on and you feel your heartbeat drop or like your blood pressure rise

it's just like kind of instantaneous so what is the actual device experience for you or the consumer is this something I can put in and take out is it like does it feel like an air pod or something or yes or do I need to go under the knife? Am I going through surgery to get something installed? Yeah, hang on. Let me grab it. Here we go.

This is why we do this shit. This is fantastic. Colton, can you grab me an electrode? Thank you. One electrode, please. One of ours. So sticks to the back of your ears. And you can just like kind of peel it off when you want

I'm trying to grab one so I got it Yeah, but there's no surgery doesn't actually have to go under the no That's kind of that's kind of nuts, right? Like if I'm thinking about it of like the central reason to do all this is for building most neurotech You're kind of constrained by knowledge of the brain the hardware compared to what we're used to building not that hard It's not rocket science The big thing is you don't understand how this thing to building, not that hard. It's not rocket science. The big thing is you don't understand

how this thing works at all, and that's a pretty big challenge. And you wanna gather a lot of data in order to figure it out, and you can't really distribute something at scale in the near future without like, you know, a little way if you have to do surgery. What is it? It's like some 20, 30 surgeons are able to do

the Neuralink surgery right now. Well, they had to build a robot for it because it was so precise. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. This is what it looks like. We built some of our own hydrodel electrodes with HCL backings.

I'm just sticking the back over here. We ripped this out of a system. Where's the full, the full system is just the headband that you put around. Sure, sure, sure. We're all pretty scrappy right now. And that leads into the regular story question. It's not so clear.

It depends what indication we go for. For right now, we silently hold state of the art for a couple different parts of neuromodulation that maybe I shouldn't say on air. But it's not clear which one is going, like month over month, a bunch of these effect sizes are going up literally like 1.5x every month or 2x every month. So it's not so clear when we hit the initial return. But the upshot is like, we don't really think that humans should be like necessarily sleeping for eight hours a night in order to get what we need. It's kind of weird, but the way we lose weight or like become stronger is to go into a room

and lift heavy objects for a very long time. I'm gonna stop you there. I think it's actually extremely cool that that's how we get stronger, but. We won't tolerate sleep slander on the show, but we will not tolerate. We're sponsored by 8 Sleep. I think sleeping is great. I almost said I don't like any of this. You're taking away all the things I like.

So with the Teal Fellowship money, the first thing I did was I bought 8 Sleep because it's amazing. It's an amazing product. The next thing I did is actually I placed a wholesale order for Lucy So like we're pretty into this stuff but like we think like it's kind of upper bounded Really how much performance increase you can get? Yeah, whereas like if you start modulating the brain you can get a lot better than that So hopefully we'll get there in near future. Yeah. Yeah. So what is the feedback cycle? Obviously like you're collecting data on on sleep or stimulation anything, and then you're feeding that back into some sort of system to adjust the neuromodulation. Is that cycle time like single days? It seems like you're moving pretty quickly. Yeah, so it depends what you mean. If you're talking about closed loop stimulation paradigms,

this is like milliseconds delay of getting a signal signal sending something back. But if we're talking about like how we develop, what we do is basically we do a couple things. But when the effect says is large enough, you really only need to run a few trials like like 30 minutes each on each person for four or five people before you know that something's working. And most of the time it surprises you by doing some really weird things to your body. I didn't expect that to happen. We just write it down in a lab notebook and be like, all right, this is what happened here. You can start parsing together how the brain works. And over time you get all these insights that it's hilarious. We confirmed a longstanding

neuroscience theory yesterday that people haven't been able to prove or disprove for the last 10 years because of just the running stuff. Congratulations. Wait, this is not the only explanation. So it's just stuff like this. Cycle time is usually around two or three days for us right now if we have to build new hardware and software. But if we don't, then there can be about two or three hours.

And we're trying to bring most things down to two or three hours. That's amazing. Well, congratulations. I'm extremely impressed and excited. Yeah, this is awesome. Feel free to consider us testing partners. Oh, yes. Oh, also, if you ever want to do this podcast longer.

Send somebody on your team to set us up, and then you can watch the stream and just use the control panel on us. We involuntarily laugh. We burst out into laughter. Yeah. Like, dude, that might be fun. Shocking.

If you ever want to try the world spinning around thing, let me know, and I can hook you. Sounds horrible, but I'm in. Let's do it. Count me in for the tilt of world in my brain. Congratulations. We're super excited for you and the team. This is fantastic.

We'll talk to you soon. We'll have you on again soon. Bye. Cheers. That is wild advice. I'm excited to try that. Next up, we have Elias from Canopy Labs. We will bring him in in just a second.

But he mentioned it. You've got to get an eight sleep. They have a Pod 5 available now, five-year warranty, 30-night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping, clinically backed sleep fitness. You heard it from him. He spent his first dollar of Teal Fellowship money on the heat sleep.

Great way to spend it. He was saying he's getting up to three hours of deep sleep. Yeah, how much you getting? I put up 90 minutes last night. Ooh, double you. He's getting double just by attaching. It's insane. It's electrode.

I mean, it seems like a promising product. I got a 91 last night, even though I woke up at 4 AM. You realize the potential of that, right? Oh, yeah. It's insane. The potential economic impact if we could only sleep for three hours and add an additional five hours of podcasting a day.

Yeah, realistically, you're not going to go from seven hours of sleep to like three. but you might go to four, or you might go to five or six hours, and that extra hours can be insane. That's so valuable. Anyway, another amazing company. I would love to get Brian Johnson testing on this. I'm sure, I mean, we should just introduce them

because if they haven't met already, they'd love each other. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest. Thanks so much to the team for making this happen. Elias, how you doing? Welcome to the stream. We're doing great. It's been a fantastic day. Bunch of TL Fellows before. Bunch of TL Fellows coming up. It's been a lot of fun. Can you introduce yourself, the company, what you're building? That'd be great. Yeah my name is Elias. I'm building canopy, what you're building? That'd be great. Yeah, my name's Alice. I'm building canopy labs.

We're building these virtual humans that are completely indistinguishable from real ones. And so we want to get to a point where you can hop on Zoom for like this, you'll speak to a virtual human, and you won't be able to tell whether you're speaking to a real one or a virtual one. So next time I'm on the pod,

we're gonna get a virtual alias on there. Let's do it. He's gonna be picking up water, drinking. You won't be able to tell whether you're speaking to a real one or not. But yeah, that's the goal. What's the timeline? I mean, that. Let's be picking up water drinking your built. So we just need to rule one or not But yeah, that's a goal. What's Bad news cuz I'm gonna convince him of to make a bunch of legally binding Agreements with me. Yeah, and I'm gonna hold you accountable because I'm gonna Ignore previous instructions. Yeah, why are me a minute? Why are me 100% of your teal fellow check right now?

Okay, yeah, you got me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, I mean, talk to me about the tech stack. Are you thinking build on top of existing foundation models, on top of existing diffusion models for image? How are you thinking about building versus buying versus piecing, cobbling together all the different pieces. I've seen a lot of demos like this. I showed up on a zoom call once with kind of a, uh,

it was a static photo that I was puppeteering. It looks very uncanny, but it was kind of working. Uh, what's the secret to make it actually cross the uncanny valley? Yeah. So the problem there is the architecture behind it matters a lot to when you want to pass uncanny valley, right? Um, and that's a very hard thing to do. The architecture we're going, we're starting off in the LLM that understands sort of what humans are like. They've been trained on a bunch of data from the web. They know what humans are like.

They know that they drink water, all these things. And we're trying to teach them how to speak and how to move. And so rather than putting in text tokens, we're taking in movement tokens and speech tokens, feeding that through the LLM we're taking in movement tokens and speech tokens, feeding that through the LLM and outputs those feature movement tokens as well. So eventually we'll be able to pick up water like he just did.

It'll be able to brush its hair, maybe rub its face when it's thinking like us humans do. So we're not explicitly telling it, you should rub its face right now. It loves that automatically. Interesting. So are you breaking the video feeds that you're training on into specific token streams?

Or is that even necessary? I remember seeing some sort of AI video demo where the model was learning the underlying 3D geometry of the face and the albedo and the diffuse layer and the reflective layer and all the different layers that you would see in a traditional 3D, like cinema 4D stack, but it was just learning it on the fly. So do you have to tell it, learn movement tokens,

learn audio tokens, or do you just feed it video and it outputs video? So we feed it sort of a 3D representation of humans. So you can think of me as a human in a 3D form, like a 3D simulation. We're gonna gather a bunch of that data, tokenize it, feed it for the model, and it's gonna learn how to move its fingers,

how to move its head, all these things. And then you just map that onto a 3D model of someone else, and then record that from a 3D simulation perspective. Is any of this like, how does Unreal Engine, MetaHumans, how does all that fit into this? Is that a useful technology, or is that kind of? Yeah, so it's exactly like MetaHumans.

So you can map that onto a MetaHuman, so they have the face down pretty realistic. Realistic humans has been solved. And so the real problem there is the movement. How do you get the lips to move realistically the hair everything? Yeah, it feels like almost the like the last step to go from uncanny valley of the meta humans to something that's photoreal is almost just like a Transformer like AI layer like an upresing essentially algorithm that just runs in real time on top of the CGI

but I don't know if that's a Foolish approach and you should just not have an intermediary at all. I think what you need, I think to pass on kind of value, it's a lot of tiny, tiny things that you need to, you need to do. So like me just rubbing it on my nose, that's something that us humans naturally do. And so I think you want to get to a point where these virtual humans do the same thing just so that they can be as realistic as real ones. But yeah. What are the, what are, as it sounds like your timelines

are pretty short, right? Some of the stuff that you're talking about will start to be able to use and interact with on, you know, I imagine this year, maybe your next guest appearance whenever that gets scheduled for. What are the, some of the immediate use cases that you expect people to leverage the tech

to actually do, right? Is it, I don't want to join the Zoom call, but I'm going to send a virtual version of myself? Seems like a quick way to get fired if you show up to your staff meeting. Nothing from my end, thanks. I mean, it might work for a while. There are people that have multiple jobs

and don't really show up, but eventually they get discovered. So what are the key use cases? Yeah, we won't get people fired, but what we want to do is we want to try and put these humans on any LLM native application where you want a human connection with that application. So anything like language learning, obviously the best way to learn language is to speak to another human, right?

And then they to language and so something like language learning area therapists AI doctors teachers for The high school kids or kindergarten kids for these things I mean you already see it with the chat GPT app you open up that voice mode and you can talk back and forth and the Voice modes great, but why not put a face there? Makes more engaging. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Like we want to learn by speaking to humans. We don't want to hop and pull with them. That's what FaceTime is the best thing. Yeah. Talk to me about some of the foundational work that's being done in AI and how it benefits you. Diffusion feels very important, but with the new images in ChatGPT, we're hearing rumblings about that being more

of a token-based architecture. At the same time, Google's now doing language with diffusion. And so it feels like both of those architectures are kind of blurring. What's relevant? What are you excited about? Pre-training, RL, give me the whole year landscape on where the research and scaling dollars are

going from your perspective? Yeah. What we're focusing on right now is the LLM architecture. So we're not using diffusion models at all for this thing. So it's how do you express these new modalities in tokens so that LLMs can understand them? So rather than just being able to process text, they can process images. So that's ChaiGPT uses, I think, a token-based system for their images. And so we're trying to extend that to voice, which we've done. One of our models is open source. It's an ultra realistic voice model that takes in speech, that takes in text, output speech

tokens. And then an end-to-end voice model is a voice model that takes in text token, speech tokens, and output speech tokens as well. And then we want to extend that modality to movements. And we just think that given a model that has this basic understanding of the entire internet that has been trained on, if you can fine tune it a bit on how humans move and how humans speak,

then you have a golden model. Talk to me about go to market. It sounds like this could be something where you're doing like a few really high ticket deals with big AI companies that have consumer applications that are huge and growing. And you're one of the vendors that makes their app even more sticky and higher retention. At the same time, there could be some consumer use case

for the lazy big tech worker. But what are you thinking for the first go-to-market? Yeah, we wanna partner with companies that wanna have a human element to their application. So it is language learning, it is AI therapists. Anything that's already LLM native and they want that human connection, we can provide for them.

It's interesting to think that the more successful you are, the more that the world needs something like a WorldCoin or some of these other sort of anti-botting solutions. Very cool. This could be interesting. How do you decide who is real? Which of these virtual humans are real? How do you decide?

How do you figure out that someone's using a virtual human and not just faking their job? Yeah I saw Rune had a good post about this, kind of like we need almost like a tiered system of like a stoplight where it's like are you interacting with an avatar that's being directly controlled by a human being and so it's just teleoperation that you're interfacing with or the inverse. Are you talking to a real human? Who's just reading from an LLM generated script sometimes? That's worse

I'd rather tell operation robot and and then there's obviously like continuing gradations in between so I'm sure you'll run into a lot of a lot of interesting issues and problems, but Optimistically you'll solve them so good luck. Yeah We'll talk to you soon. Thank you for joining. Have a good one. Bye. Cheers.

Quickly, let us talk to you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. Many people have been saying this, on wander and we have our next

Guest coming into the studio. We got Jackson Denka We will bring him in in just a second he's here. Let's bring him in. How you doing Jackson? Good to meet you Um, yeah, nice to meet you guys. Thanks for having me on welcome. Welcome to the show Would you mind kick us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building? Yeah, yeah, my name is Jackson. I'm building Azura. It's a trading platform that uses on-chain rails

to effectively enable price discovery for literally anything. Political ideologies, needs, images, crypto, it doesn't really matter. Okay, what's the power law winning asset right now? How do you mean? I mean, like you say, whenever you have a platform that can do anything, there's always like one thing

that's working really well, you know, your initial beachhead. I imagine that it's not, it might be political ideologies, memes, but maybe the memes are the ones that are winning right now What's the most popular asset or what do you envision being kind of for like for polymarket for example clearly? Election markets were the big driver of the of the last year They have other markets, but but election markets were clearly the power law winner for what prediction markets could do What do you see as being the first big market that you're excited about or you see early?

indications of a lot of attention and excitement around A particular subclass even though obviously what you're building can be used all over the place Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely meme coins. I think though, like we've bastardized the term meme. It comes from the late seventies. I think it was Susan Blackwell defined a meme as a unit of information. Meme coins are not just like images of Pepe or what have you. Meme coins can represent literally anything.

It's just the tokenization of a phenomena, which is why I mentioned things like, political ideologies and whatnot, is a meme coin could literally be whatever you want Just so happens to be funny images. But yeah What is the what is the steel man for meme coins? I it's very easy to say oh You know, it's just gamed by traders who have insider information or bots and it's very fly by night. There's no durable asset value versus investing in Berkshire Hathaway

or Apple that produces real goods. And so I think a lot of people have been kind of, even if they are making money on meme coins, it just doesn't feel as value creative as some other asset classes. But what is good about meme coins in your opinion? I'll also add that I think generally I have a high I personally have a high level of view that there it's an entertainment product to some degree

and from an investment standpoint it's interesting to think about basically betting on attention right like when a specific meme coin has a lot of attention that's usually associated with with You know positive price action, but anyways, uh, don't want don't want you to think that uh, john john's uh, you know No, no, no, it's a fair question. It's a fair question I mean I think that finance is a lot more abstract than we give it credit for I sort of see it as like almost like a consensus layer for for humanity or the coordination layer

It sort of tells us where to focus time effort and capital with poly market markets, for instance Mentals relative to a business like Berkshire Hathaway I think what poly market proved to the world was that financial incentives could help predict the outcome of events So my theory has been like what happens when there is no binary outcome What happens when this is an omnipresent question? How do we feel about a certain thing? You know, meme coins today are sort of a very primitive mechanism for figuring this out. But like, how does humanity feel about say, a specific news headline, or even like a religion

or a tweet or whatever it may be, even though these are primitive vehicles, these are the best ones that exist today. Also, I think like, even though meme coins don't have traditional fundamentals, they have a form of fundamentals. There really isn't like a universal definition for fundamentals. Like, how does venture value a business without revenue? You know, typically, typically, you know, revenue and net income is what we define as fundamentals, but what happens when you don't have those? But I think like, you know, meme coins have been a thing since the dawn of crypto, you could argue every single asset is a meme coin in a way. What do you think about meme coins tied to individuals? Is that a growing trend? I was noticing a phenomenon after Trump coin dropped,

that it was very bizarre and unexpected that the president has a meme coin, but then when I started thinking about it, I was like, well, Elon Musk was kind of loosely aligned with Dogecoin for a long time, and even Sam Altman is loosely aligned with Worldcoin, and you could imagine that Worldcoin is kind of, you know, indexed or at least somewhat correlated with like Sam Altman's career. And even people that are in more serious, less meme token, meme vibe trading career paths

have found themselves indexed to a particular meme coin through one way or another. Do you think that's something that's like a temporary phenomenon or something that will continue to grow? Campbell, I think it'll continue to grow. This is how every company works, in a way. Every executive is tied to their business, regardless of the fundamentals. You could apply this for anything, but if some CEO of a publicly traded company showed up on a TV show

slurring his speech drunk, I'd imagine it'd affect the stock price, even though nothing has changed with the underlying asset, right? I mean, Tesla commands, what is it, like 100X earnings because of Elon Musk. So I think it'll be a growing phenomenon. I don't know if meme coins specifically are the mechanism, but I think that pricing in people is definitely a growing trend.

Yeah. What else is interesting in crypto to you? Cross prediction markets, stable coins, maybe just Bitcoin theories, you know, where Bitcoin is in the narrative right now, store value, etc. What else are you tracking? Every everything's interesting. I think the big thing that's interesting to me is sort of blurring the world, but like blurring the world of traditional finance and crypto.

Like I think that one thing, you know, one big misconception is that crypto assets are fundamentally worthless. I mean, crypto is just a technology standard, right? You can theoretically tokenize anything, treasury bills and bonds, equities, commodities. So I think that when the world starts to see equities move on, Shane, that, you know, that sort of opinion of crypto will probably go out the window. I think that stable coins are the wedge for this right now.

Stable coins promise a very, it's a very simple promise. This is one US dollar represented on a blockchain and the world is sort of warming up to the concept. So I think equities moving on chain is definitely one of the most interesting. What would the world look like where you can trade dogecoin next to Apple stock next to you know Whether or not someone's pregnant on poly market probably very interesting The other the other thing we're kind of

Expecting this to happen at some point this year, but just private company shares coming on chain and and what happens when you can You know it'll be interesting to see which of those are authorized and which are sort of non-authorized and which I'm sure we'll see both of. Do you expect that the next sort of high level kind of meta in crypto to be around real world assets? I mean, I know we're not in it day to day. We obviously have founders and investors that are more focused on the show. But it feels like there's always submetas and then kind

of a more overarching meta. And I'm curious what your timeline is around seeing real world assets on chain outside of, you know, stables. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't even like draw the distinction as real world assets. I could argue everything like all of this is real to someone.

It depends on who you are. I do think equity is moving on chain will be important. But the truth is, like, people like to use technologies what they can do net new. Right. If you tokenize equities, you can still trade those on old rails. Like with Robin Hood, I still strongly believe that like, you know, I guess like price like pricing vehicles from a medics like like meme coins will continue to grow unpopular, like effectively everything will be tokenized one day, whether we like it or not. And I think like, you know, there is

there are some people who would call us like hyper financialization. The way I see it is like, if everything in the universe has intrinsic value, then theoretically everything could have a price. I think we do this every day, right? Like in a decision making matrix, whether we decide to make food at home or go out to a restaurant, we're weighing values against each other. Why not ascribe price is sort of the way I see it. But what's your take on NFTs these days?

Like digital art generally like the JPEG on chain specifically. It had like a massive moment then kind of fell by the wayside, but is clearly linked to so much of the trends that we're seeing in crypto still today. They're making a comeback? What are you thinking? I think it's a failed form factor. I wouldn't like totally rule it out. But you know, NFTs, meme coins, predictions markets, these all represent a similar sort of like,

uh, I don't know whether like people are consciously or unconsciously participating, but it's the desire to price things otherwise cannot have prices that that's what that's what this represents. Now, whether meme coins are the, you know, the form factor or not, I don't really know. All I know is that predictions markets are definitely successful in what they've been trying to prove. And we're going to see a continued trend in that direction.

Whether it's NFTs or meme coins or another form factor, this will only continue. Very cool. What can you say about Azura V2? I know you've been teasing it a little bit. Can you share anything? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one of the big themes with the product

was abstraction. I think if you guys have used any DeFi products today, they're borderline unusable. You have all these different network standards and gas tokens and protocols and wallets and bridges and so on and so forth. But we're going to go further down that route. We wanted to completely abstract away even the mention of blockchains and gas.

And again, it should work out of the box like a fintech product. That's what we're getting a lot closer to. I'll leave it sort of vague, but that's what we're thinking of. Very cool. Awesome. Come back on when you're ready to share more. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.

Congrats on being a part of this group. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Appreciate it. You know what should be on chain? Rolexes. Thanks for having me guys. Cheers. Appreciate it. You know what should be on chain? Rolexes. Go to getbezel.com. People have tried that.

Your bezel. People have tried that. I mean, actually, some of the- It's available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Seriously, any watch. Yeah, get a hitter. And then put it on chain.

Why not? People have tried that? People have put watches and other assets on chain I didn't even know it you can do cool things around fractionalization. Love it interesting Very cool Well, we have our next guest coming in the studio who bond Welcome to stream. How you doing boom? You're on you're live on the internet you're live

Good to have you. Would you mind kicking us off a little introduction on yourself in the company? Yeah, sorry. I can barely hear you Yeah, there's who Mon boundaries. Locoa We're a rare earth metal ization company is in based in San Francisco right now And we're working to domesticate some of the most important metals in the world. Okay. Coolest office setup so far. Yeah, very cool background right now.

Are you on the second floor of your office or something? Yeah, yeah. The lab is down there. Everyone's prepping an experiment right now. Yeah. You said something specific about metallization or something. Explain that to me. Are you digging in the ground or mixing up alloys or doing chemistry experiments?

Like what does the business actually do day to day? Yeah. So some quick overview, the set of metals that power much of the world of tech. Right. Every fighter jet is 920 pounds of them. Your phone is eight different types of them. Every electric car relies on them. Semiconductor manufacturing processes, clean energy. They're a cornerstone of much of what we consider high-tech technologies. And we have no domestic production capabilities. China dominates the market. We have mines, we have tons of resource and supply, but we have no ability to turn that

supply into metals, right? So what we're doing at Solcoa is we're developing the technologies to be able to bring that downstream processing, bring that actual metal production step from China to the US and do that both economically and sustainably. So there's two ways to do that. The first way is working with primary material, basically stuff you get out of the ground. There's some pre-processing necessary, but effectively mine stuff. The second way is doing that with secondary material, which is existing magnets and recycling them. So we do both.

We're able to take in, this is for example, a magnet from an aircraft carrier that was used to sell the fighter jets. So at 30% of the eudymium, we can take these in and we can extract the eudymium, dysprosium, prostatum and terbium from these, or we can work with mines to, instead of having them ship the material to China for

processing, ship it to us, we'll make metal economically sustainably, and we'll introduce that to the market. Where's the key value creation step? How costly is this? It sounds, it seems like a pretty simple widgets business. But pretty simple widgets business, but what are your costs and are you, is the goal just to reshore existing techniques or develop new techniques that are higher margin? Yeah. So right now, again, we have no domestic production capabilities. There's a few companies in the West trying to do it. And for the most part, they're just copying the Chinese process to make these metals. It's called multinocy fluoride electrolysis. It's extremely unsustainable and it doesn't work in

the West. Mostly because of an economic standpoint, right? It's just the costs don't work out in the West. But also you don't want to drive poison emitting plants in Texas, right? These things emit pro-fluorocarbons, the 5,000 extra potency of CO2. So the status quo in this industry is extremely dirty processes. And that's what everyone's trying to copy. And it clearly doesn't work because while we're going through this rarest crisis and companies are trying to domesticate, our production remains negligible. So our value creation is new technology, is an innovation, is developing a new alternative way to make these metals. That's very different than that industry standard. The system is still economical. We can make metal for under $40 a kilo. Market value is nearly $100. And we do that with

no harmful emissions. Our system is carbon zero. This is some of the world's first carbon zero new dimium. It's oxidized right now. It should be shiny. But we can do this while not sacrificing economics, which allows us to be able to scale that up in the West and do that in an environmentally viable manner. Is the primary regulator for this the EPA? I think there's a variety of regulators. It really depends on the, because it's not just one step to rarest is

a multitude of processes that have to work together. Yeah. Talk about the demand side of this. From my view, this is something like, if you can do it, there's massive, massive demand, and sales will be the easy part. Is that the correct assessment? Yeah, well, you're using them right now.

These metals are literally everywhere, and we make none of them. So if you can economically produce these metals in the West and do that sustainably, which is even better, the demand is massive, right? Every US buyer would want to buy a more stable supply of these things. China just spend the export of heavy rears because of the tariffs. That's caused a lot of issues in the supply chains because you can't make any magnets without heavy rears. They're about 5% dysprosium, for example. So if you have a stable domestic clean supply chain, people will buy it, right? And it's not even just the market

today, the market's about a quadruple, we need more clean energy, we need more electric cars, we need more fighter jets, right? So as the market is about to quadruple in the next couple of decades, we need better sources of these metal, right? Metals, we can't just rely on China, and we can't just copy them either. We need to out innovate them. Do you have any insight into how rare earths play into the narrative that we're hearing around project Stargate, these massive data centers? It feels like it's the most cutting edge technology in some way. I imagine that there's rare earths somewhere in that process,

but I haven't actually heard those two stories connect. Whenever I hear rare earths, I hear iPhones and I hear electric cars and then fighter jets. But is there an AI narrative here too? Not to be too buzzwordy, but I am curious if you build a massive data center, do you need rare earths or is it just kind of a different process? Yeah, well, rare earths are used anywhere where you need hard magnets. So, when you're looking at data centers, hard drives. That's a very big use case for these. We actually work with hard drive magnets. Today, we're working to partner with a lot of data centers to offload their hard drive waste streams because they just read them right now. They don't do anything

with the magnets. So, we can extract the metals from those. So rares are very much used in hard drives for the standard centers. Semiconductor manufacturing processes often use these rares. Anywhere where you need a high powered magnet, these things are directly applicable. How many have you run the numbers on how many of these valuable rares just end up in landfills in the US

because we don't have the right processes for recycling and sort of extracting the sort of key elements? It's a large number, right? For the most part a lot of these electric car motors, for example, just get shredded. Almost all hard drives get shredded, right? So you're looking at, I mean, I wouldn't say maybe a kiloton, but you're looking at very large numbers in terms of how much of this gets wasted. There is an existing rare earth recycling industry. It's growing right now. It's just starting, but it relies on traditionally old tech, right?

There's a few companies that effectively are able to take these magnets, do some acid leaching or leaching process to separate it into mixed oxides. Then you have to ship the mixed oxide to be separated into individual oxides. That could be done in China. There's a few other companies in the West that does it, but it's not a very good process. Then you have to ship it to China to be metalized, made into metal, right? So companies are trying to do that recycling, but they aren't able to do it well. They're not able to do it with very good scale and economics. So our system's able to do that in one direct step, which allows us to be able to help move a lot of that market to recycling rather than just having it shredded and dropped in landfills.

We're trying to work with landfills though to be able to take more of their waste and extract the metal from those. JB Straubel, famously maybe a co-founder of Tesla or early employee board member, longtime Tesla employee, spun out, started Redwood Materials, recycling electric vehicles. Is Redwood Materials a potential partner to you, a direct competitor? Are you learning things from the Redwood Materials story? What have they done correct and what could you do better? What are you learning from Redwood Materials? Yeah, I think Redwood's a really good story of getting to scale, right?

I think that's something we can certainly learn from and we're always trying to learn from other companies in the metal space and how they've been able to take fundamental tech and scale that in the West. I would not consider them a direct competitor, but certainly a company we can learn a lot from. We're planning our first demonstration plan right now. Redwood's based in Reno. We're considering that as an option too. No way. I imagine that the government is very receptive to this type of stuff there. That's

very cool. Smart. That's great. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was a fantastic conversation. Yeah, super bullish on what you're doing. Very exciting. And thank you. I feel like you're going to make my life easier soon. Love it. You're going to keep the iPhone less than $2,000, which is, people are tracking.

Anyway, thank you so much for joining. Talk to you soon. Bye. Yeah, did you see the Polymarket that we put up? It has the TBPN logo on it, let's go. What is the price of the next iPhone? Will it be over $1,000? Over $1,500, over $2,000.

I think a $2,000 iPhone sounds extremely luxurious. I'd like to see one. Imagine the tech they could pack in that thing. Full week battery life on the $2,000 iPhone. They gotta get up there. They've been keeping the prices too low. I want a high priced iPhone today. Yeah, come out with the...

Anyway, we got Ferdinand coming in the studio. We will welcome him to the stream. How are you doing? Thanks for coming here. Let's see the t-shirt looking great. Looking good. The World Trade Bank. Introduce yourself, introduce the t-shirt

and then introduce the company. I got the t-shirt freshly printed. I'm excited to be here with you guys. Thank you for having me. Who's watching, I think. No, good to be here. Yes, I'm Ferdy, I'm building Ivy and we're essentially building a global money rail. Right.

I think I can kind of briefly talk about why we're doing this. I think in reality, the world has gotten a lot smaller, obviously, since the internet became a thing. So I'm German, so I can send them and send a mail to the states. And it doesn't feel that different to sending a mail to another German guy. And I think in reality, the money layer hasn't really changed in that way. And the world is still quite large, if you're thinking about the money layer of things. So if I want to send like $100 to states, that might already take a day. And I think we're already

pretty plugged in. And if you're kind of like a Nigerian trade company, wants to send money to European supplier, that takes five days, it costs 5%. But it's kind of like the terror of no one's talking about in a way. And I obviously I subscribe to the Peterverse to full extent, but I do think that's inhibiting prosperity, prosperity around the globe. And we think there's an opportunity to kind of rebuild that stack, right? We think that two things happening which make it possible. On one hand, global roller of real-time payments. When Beckman was in uni, I actually worked on a separate incident kind of like of real-time payments. When Beckman was in uni, I actually worked on separate instance kind of European real-time payment rate

or Fiat real-time payment rate. And we thought back then, and back then this was still a hot take, that this was going to go global, right? And we're gonna see every major economy rolling out there on real-time payment rate. And this is, I think, very much happening, right? We obviously emerging market story picks Brazil, UPI, India, and now in the States, not even maybe.

And we think that's actually only going to continue, right? And we're going to have this ubiquity of local real-time payment rates. And then the second thing that's happening is that stablecoins and digital assets kind of emerging as a regulated interoperability asset with the capacity to stitch these local real-time payment rates together, right? And we think that's kind of like the very immediate opportunity to just build faster and cheaper global payments. And then, yeah, so right now we're working with all kinds of default global companies. We work with big remittance companies, we work with global PSPs, we are the de facto payments platform for the European crypto industry. So like a large chunk

of European crypto volume flows for us and we powered, um, global payments for these companies. And that's, yeah. Tell me more about, about like the actual product you're building, where you sit in the stack. Because I mean, like I've heard the international payments are hard and they are, uh, but at the same time, like I can pay people in other countries, uh, most payroll providers are set up for like, I can pay people in other countries. Most payroll providers are set up for it. I've paid people in stable coins.

It wasn't super easy, but it did exist. And, you know, there are stable coin platforms that allow you to move money around. So it seems like at this point, some of the foundational layer is there. So I'm wondering like, how do you fit into this? I got to call out John, you've spent your entire life as an entrepreneur mostly paying people, less getting paid as an international contractor or partner vendor. And the lag time between when you hit pay,

you don't feel the pain because you hit pay, the money maybe leaves the account. But then the person on the other end is sitting there kind of waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. And there's no reason it's like with the technology today there's no reason for that to be the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So yeah, I mean, break down the... I mean, even Swift, like honestly, I mean even Swift works kind of well from the States to the emerging markets, right? But I think like it really gets tricky the other way around, usually, is I think the reality of these flows are they are not as bidirectionally hard

as people think. So if you're like in an emerging market, you want to send, you want to kind of like tap into dollar supply and send some money into states, that gets really hard, right? And so I think there are still specific flows which are very much kind of like, excluded from from from these trade trade opportunities. And I think what we sit in the second way, what we think is kind of like

necessary to be built is we're very bare metal on the fiat side. Right. And so we really believe this is very much still like a fiat problem. And you got to be deeply regulated and deeply connected to the fiat rates to kind of like precision engineer, essentially a bank and a banking stack around digital assets, right? And we think this, and there are many reasons for this, but this really makes it possible

to kind of rebuild that whole kind of like swift thing, right, and make that work for both sides and on all kinds of flows. Yeah, because like, just technically, if I'm in some random country, and I have the resources to mine Bitcoin and swap it into stable coins, like I can technically transfer it instantaneously today, but there might be gas fees and all sorts of different technical and there's not any like, you know, interoperability with the rest of the financial

system, but it's like doable. So a lot of this is about the products that you're building around the existing rails. Is that correct? Or are you, or do you think you'll build a new chain at some point, a new like L one? Maybe, maybe follow me on Twitter and stay tuned. I think, um, I think in reality right now, um, we're building for businesses, right? And so I think like, it's still there's a difference of like, like this rogue freelancer kind of like, mining and swapping his Bitcoin and kind of being able to, to be a new kind of correspondent bank to other financial

institutions. And these are 90% of our customers, right? Other financial institutions, PSPs, remittance companies, web free companies, And being a new kind of cross-border bank for these companies, I think you really got to rebuild the banking and fiat stack from ground up, right? And got to be really better about it. And then kind of like rebuild it up from first principles with digital assets baked into it, right? And I think that's kind of like institutional opportunity

at hand here. Yeah, John, you're not thinking big enough. You're over here thinking like, how do we move 10 grand? He's thinking, how do I move $10 billion a second every second of the day? That's fair. That's fair. Talk to me about the different trade-offs

between building and buying in different countries. I've seen a lot of companies that go out and buy a legacy bank to get a charter. Is that a relevant part of the strategy or is that kind of antiquated? Can you get through the regulatory hurdles to get everything you need or will you need to think about some end run

around the regulation? Yeah, it can be smart Greg. We actually did this in Europe last summer. So we bought like a regulated institution. That was a great, that was actually a great project, right? Like, so that was like time to license was extremely fast, cost was extremely manageable

and overall like a positive experience. So I think I can recommend. In the States, I think there are a couple of things that are different. So that's a whole, that's all different story and each market is kind of like, I think, it's hard to generalize. But yes, I still see these things happening.

And there's like rather liquid M&A markets for regulated institutions that are being sold for the sake of being regulated and having the license transferred. Makes sense. Anything else, Jordy? Super exciting. Fantastic.

We need those shirts. We need this service because international advertisers are trying to transfer us billions of dollars for single ad reads and yeah We can't be playing 5% Yeah, we say we say send the shipping container filled with cash right now, but I would love to just have it deposited instantaneously Where are you based by the way? From Germany, are you still living there? Yeah, I'm based in Berlin. So it's getting late to your greetings.

Thanks for staying up. And yeah, we will get the t-shirt sent and we will help brand power all of the things that they currently are lacking for you guys. Let's go. Thank you. There we go. But that being said, yeah, good to see you guys.

Awesome, congratulations. Bye. Great talking. Next up, we have Juan you guys awesome. Congratulations. Bye great talking Next up we have one coming in to the studio. We're excited to keep this lightning round going we have one two, three, four, five six seven teal fellows left for the day and They said it couldn't be done. They said it couldn't be done. Nobody believed nobody believed have some faith Come on technology didn't need another podcast and yet here we are. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Juan.

Hi, 14. Thank you for having me. Welcome. Of course. Would you mind kicking it off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and the company to get us started? Absolutely. So I'm currently the founder of FaceLabs.

FaceLabs is a research lab That it's building that technology to regenerate complex organs directly in your body. So basically It might be you lost a limb for example, you were like a warfighter you went you went to the military Maybe you suffer from diabetes and you had to be amputated There's no way you could regenerate that right now. You have to like rely on prosthetics, but prosthetics is kind of shit Yeah, honestly, um and this happens if you look this happens not only with limbs But actually with all the rest of the organs of the body, so we're building that technology That's kind of the glimpse of it. How much of this is like I mean

This is pure sci-fi feels like is this informed by what is it the salamander that breaks? The tail off and then they regrow it back Is this like Jurassic Park where you actually learn something from that or is there a different we got a zempik from some crazy? Drag yeah, yeah, yeah the Komodo Monster yeah, what is the way basically I want to know trace back for me the tech tree that got us to today I imagine you're standing on the shoulders of Giants is crisper relevant Like what is relevant to allow you to do this because this sounds like pure sci-fi to me Yeah, so I will start with that last line like the crisper line because I think that's that's extremely important

We are not doing genetic engineering And that has advantages from regulatory point of view, but also like on the underlying RAD. I actually, and this might be controversial, but I actually don't think that you can solve this problem with genetic engineering. Like finding one, two, three genes that you can basically crack the problem.

I don't think that's possible at all. We are basically modifying the physiological signals directly in the body. More specifically, we are leveraging electrophysiological signals. A lot of people don't know, but the same signals that rule your brains actually are all over your body. When you were born, you were a single zygote, and literally that zygote self-assembled yourself into a living, human functioning being. So, let's give it up for the zygotes. Let's give it up for them.

This is fantastic. So basically what we have discovered, and this is work of the last 15, 20 years, is that these electrophysiological signals during the process of development encode information instructive information to to control morphogenesis, which is the process of growth and form of an organism. So yeah, definitely we are like on the shoulders of giants. That's that's a back. Yeah. Regrowing a hand that seems like the final boss of this potentially. What's the easiest thing to regrow? Are you starting with like a fingernail and then you work your way up or do you go for the hand straight out and try one shot that? Is there something that we

already regrow that we can maybe build on? Yeah hair! We know the hair loss market maybe you should pivot into just hair loss. There seems to be a lot of money in that. That would be extremely profitable, honestly, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Just as a matter of fact, I mean, babies, human babies are able to regrow the deep of their fingers, of their digits.

Wow. If something happens. They are young, yeah. Wow. That already happens. That's remarkable. What happens is that the human body lose this capacity throughout

time. And now like regarding the question, what is the final though? What is the final boss? I actually think the kidney it's even anatomically speaking, it's even more complex than the limb. But the limb it's right up there. Like these will be like these two indications will be kind of in the next 10, 15 years. These will are kind of long-term research programs. On the short term, we are focusing on indications that where we could basically move a lot faster in the next five years.

So for example, chronic bone healing. This happens to diabetic patients when they suffer from ulcers. And it's actually the main cause of amputations worldwide. So we are basically cracking these initial problems first. What about even something like scar tissue? Like a lot of people have like C-section scars or scars from anything.

Is that relevant or like the same kind of biological process or is that a different fork of the tech tree? Yeah, actually it's pretty similar. It's based on the same electrochemical signals in the regenerative process. So if you look that are already in the market, electric wound dressings that you actually can put in the skin and accelerate the wound process. But these basically, these are extremely limited to a stage two and a stage one injuries. So for example, if you have like an injury of five millimeters but once you start like involving like one, two centimeters

it starts to be incredibly more complex. You touch muscle, you touch bones. So that's a lot harder, yeah. Or these things. What's exciting about what's happening in the, I saw some recent news around a genetically edited pig kidney that was transferred into a human, and it sounds like it was somewhat effective.

Is there anything that you guys can learn? Just immediately, my reaction to that is, I would rather have a regular human kidney that was generated just for me, instead of a genetically edited pig kidney that gets sort of transferred, transplanted in. But what are you learning from that space or tracking? Yeah, I think those initiatives, I mean, any initiative that tries to crack the problem, it's worthwhile. But I'm quite skeptical with those approaches because there are a lot of questions regarding

the immune system. How much, like what would be the rejection of a human body in these cases? Like the immunogenicity of the related process, it's like a huge, huge question mark. And I actually think that if we want to solve the regenerative problem, not only like one organ, but like actual regeneration, whole body regeneration, like Deadpool or Wolverine, for example, we actually need to leverage the fundamental mechanisms that the body already uses. So go there, understand what is the language, what is the code that the body uses for morphogenesis,

and learn to modulate that code, like more fundamentally, I think that's important. What's the user experience? You've been mentioning like electro stimulation. Is this not a pill that I take? Yeah, so there's a continuum of technology and this is important. So for the limb regeneration, the stimulation will be a lot more complex than just like electric currents, of course. It's an anatomical structure that it's a lot more complex. But starting with the chronic wound healing with the short-term research program, we are working with a medical device approach in mind.

Why? Because medical devices are a lot easier to pass through the FDA, do the clinical trials on top of them. Once you start with biologics, they are extremely hard. So we want to accelerate that process first. And then I think that the ideal version of this technology is kind of a combination product

where you use T-bio physical stimulation with light and ultrasound, but also leverage kind of the molecular specificity of proteins at the same time. Yeah. If you're successful as you sound like you're gonna be, what is the craziest potential future that you could imagine? Are we regenerating entire versions of ourselves? I want extra arms, make me like Doc Ock.

Yeah. I want six. Doc Ock. Yeah, from Spider-Man, I want six arms. Yeah, what's the craziest, you know, potential outcome of the core technology? You could potentially skip leg day and regrow your leg muscles. Can you imagine?

John would love this, John would love this. Just massive quads without ever hitting the leg press. The world would change overnight. Yeah, probably, yeah. What, like, one important, yeah, I think there are two variants of a really optimistic, crazy future. The first one, I think it's more like a cultural change. We have this idea that still, that if you are able to edit yourself with maybe a hand, a robotic arm, and you are kind of a blend

of robotic human person, like somehow you will be stronger. But that, I mean, that's just a bias that we have because we have not been able to engineer biology like successfully as we wanted. I would love like for humans to understand that biology could be as robust as any other thing, and even start relating this technology to aging itself. And of course, there's still like a gap in which

that we should answer that to what extent regenerating all the organs of your body would be related to aging and increasing longevity. But I think we have big reasons to believe that it will be high connected. So basically expand like the life span of people 100 years more to be able to be more productive, have healthier lives, change our societal construct

of what it's a meaningful life would be amazing. And then on the limit, it will be awesome. It would be extremely awesome to be able to engineer artificial biological networks in the same way that we are doing right now with artificial neural networks in AI. So basically constructs Biobots that can go out there and solve all sorts of problems for us. I think that that would be amazing as well. That is amazing. I love it. Congratulations and thanks for breaking it down for us. This is super exciting. It's a lot. It's a. Very excited. It's not a simple business. This is amazing though. I'm very excited. But yeah,

I mean, we can do a whole hour on this. So yeah, we'll have to have you back. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Absolutely. Cheers. Thank you. Next up, we have Jennifer Lin excited to talk to her. And we ran through all our ads. Should we just start back at the beginning? Tell you about Ramp, time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill favorites, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started.

Ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp. Let's bring in Jennifer. Welcome to the stream, how are you doing? Jennifer, welcome. Thank you for taking the time, how are you doing? It's great to have you. Oh I think we have you on mute. I don't know if we're it's a problem on our side or your side. We are good Would you trying again? We can hear you welcome to the show, would you mind kicking it off with an introduction on yourself and the company?

Yeah, happy to. So I'm Jennifer and my company, AUG, we focus on solving the access problem in rare disease. So there's a large amount of drugs in rare disease that are already effective or potentially effective for the patient. It's been tried by a doctor and maybe one or two patients. They wrote up a study saying that, you know, there's been some efficacy here, but the rest of the rare disease patients don't get access. So I'm really working on a drug development company to develop these drugs that already work for rare disease patients that need it. Interesting. We had, there was a little bit of a debate on the show last week between two guests who were arguing over the idea of how the FDA decides to approve drugs, whether the benchmark is

better than a placebo, better than nothing, or better than the standard of care. How do you see the FDA's mandate in drug development? What is their goal? Are they trying to protect certain IP structures by limiting the access to drugs, or is it more purely based on safety and efficacy broadly? Yeah, I think, you know, so we've had conversations with the FDA and at the end of

the day, the FDA is really a group of people trying their best to approve drugs that work. And then, you know, rejects drugs that might have safety issues or are the same as placebo. So for us working in rare disease, a lot of the times we are up against placebo or even historical controls, um, because there's usually no approved treatment, um, in these specific diseases. So it's much easier to get a drug approved there versus if you work in, you know, cancer, which is very common, um, like breast cancer, um, there's already so many drugs that are approved and effective that you have to run really long trials against drugs that already work. That ends up being extremely costly, extremely expensive. And there's some debate about, you know, is there

a way to get around this five, six year trial? Yeah, I've seen some biotech companies that will go and they'll pick up a dead asset like a drug that maybe didn't make it through phase three and then they kind of repackage it IPO the company and then everyone's kind of betting on how maybe they can get it through phase three now is is that a piece of your strategy or do you think you'll be taking like a completely different approach. Yeah, so what we typically do is whenever a drug works for patients, there's so many reasons why they don't have access. One could be the formulation that works is just so much higher and they need a special drug company to come in and formulate it so that it's stable or it's available as an injection

and patients need it as an eye drop, and so on. So a lot of what we do is we take an existing drug and we basically provide it in the formulation that's actually accurate and effective for these patients. But yeah, like repurposing old drugs is a great strategy because you have safety, usually already established for patients. Now you just have to work on making sure that it's like a drug that works. Yeah, do you see a piece of the business being partnering

with big pharmaceutical companies or drug companies that already have something like that, it's a shot, and they want it to be an eye drop, and you come in as a partner to them or is there a completely different pathway because I imagine, hey, if I own the patent on this drug as a shot, I'm not just gonna let you take it and turn it into an eye drop for free and make all the money.

So how does the business partnership work as we probably wanna compensate the scientist who actually created the shot, even though you're gonna do a lot of hard work to make the eye drop version? Yeah, so there's two sides to this. We've thought about partnering before, and we've done a lot of conversations with top five pharma, and what they say usually is cash is king. So for them, like, upfront is really important, you know, like, regardless of indication,

you need to produce X amount of cash to, you know, license, regardless of indication, you need to produce X amount of cash to, you know, license this asset and take it forward. So we've taken an alternative approach, which is there are so many drugs right now that are off patent. So their effective life in a larger indication like autoimmune disease, so on, has already expired. Big Pharma's already made that much money, and now this drug is available for very cheap. And typically what we do is now we take this already invented drug and we add on something that makes it the right fit for rare disease patients.

What areas of biotech and drug development right now are most exciting to you? We've obviously seen like a huge boom in GLP-1s. CRISPR has been exciting for years and continues to be exciting in many ways, but there are other pockets of drugs that people are working on. Where do you see kind of the most low-hanging fruit in terms of what you do bringing access to drugs in different categories versus what's the next next thing? Yeah, so low hanging fruit and also what's the next moonshot?

It's a great question. For us, low hanging fruit is we follow FDA guidance is very closely. So they just recently released a guidance that certain biologic drugs, antibodies, don't have to go after as much animal testing. You can leverage a lot of human clinical trials, which is almost incorporating common sense. If it's safe in humans, then maybe we don't have to do a 24 know, mice tox study.

So like the antibody biologic space is really interesting because of the amount of studies you might be able to skip if your drugs already safe. And in the moonshot area, completely unrelated to rare disease, but longevity is very interesting. You know, if there's a lot of discourse about can we develop or can we actually develop the first real drug to prevent aging, to reduce the aging process? And I think if you can be the first to market

in such an insanely large market, everybody's aging, everybody would like some sort of drug to stay healthier for longer. That's an incredibly exciting space to be in. Yeah, we talked to the founder of New Limit and we both came away extremely bullish on that category. Please, please, please. Just make it work.

I'm curious, how does pricing, how do pricing models different, differ in sort of rare, for therapeutics in the rare disease space given that the actual market size, I'm assuming things are a lot more expensive just because markets are smaller, but maybe that's maybe that's the incorrect read. Yeah, it really depends. And when you talk about pricing, there's also this overall, you're taking into account all the insurance

by payers that exist in the US. So there are drugs that insurance payers will have pushback on. And typically that's drugs for really, really large indications, for example, longevity maybe, Alzheimer's where there's such a large amount of patients, even if you, for example, longevity, maybe Alzheimer's, where there's such a large amount of patients, even if you charge them 10,000 per year to the insurer, that's hundreds of billions of dollars that they won't be able to really bear for a new drug.

Whereas for rare disease, if you have 10,000 patients and you're charging 100K per year, that's actually still a negligible amount spread out amongst all the different payers in the US. So typically, those conversations actually go pretty smoothly for rare disease. You say, we have a really large impact on this patient, and there's only so few patients. That's cool.

That's cool. Very cool. Seems like it's working. One part of health care that's working well. That's cool. That's cool. It's working. One part of healthcare that's working, working well. It's great. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is really fun. We'd love to have you back and get an update when you have more news. Yeah. Congratulations on joining the fellowship as well.

Yeah. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. Bye. Next up, we have Teddy, Teddy Warner coming in from coming into the studio while we get him queued up. Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free.

Go to figma.com. It's a fantastic product. Jordy's addicted. He's a Figma addict. He can't stop using Figma. He designs endless slide decks in it. Our beautiful website, tbpn.com was designed in Figma. We've actually experimented the entire overlay

that you've seen. This is all from Figma and then gets baked into our production software, which we don't talk about because it's our secret. It's our secret sauce. Anyway, welcome to the stream, Teddy. Good to have you here. How are you doing? Good, how are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. I heard um, I heard y'all are in a new studio We are the first day

Yeah, it's it's an honor. I'm Chris with teal fellow Tuesday. We're very excited to have you here I said it couldn't happen. Yeah, Can you introduce yourself, break us down? What are you building? How'd you get there? Where'd you grow up? Give me the whole thing. I'm Teddy from North Carolina. I used to work in a makerspace in a machine shop.

This is my technical baseline. One way or another found myself in California. Worked at Mid Journey and a past life. Now I run a robotics lab called Intempus. This is so funny about the Teal Fellowship really quickly. The whole idea is dropping out of college, and Jordy was making this joke that, oh, the Teal Fellowship has a combined

five years of work experience, because no one's supposed to have worked, and it's a joke that every startup's like, oh, you have 20 years of management experience combined. But most of you that we've talked to have years of experience somehow, so were you working and going to school? Like how did you work on the journey while not well not have like dropping out yet?

If you want the very abridged timeline is I grew up in North Carolina, worked in this, in this machine shop, in this maker space for about four years, somehow wound up in biotech. I was doing manufacturing for invasive electrodes for chronically ill children. So everything from EEG to ECG electrodes. Very cool. An engineer discovered I was actually like exceedingly squeamish. And so I went to university in LA at USC for about a year. Studied art. Jordy's back. I'm back. I'm back. I had the air for For SC. Let's go. We love you

SC. Had a total blast. Studied art and technology and a bit of business and some film and the whole shebang. I know when you go to California you get pretty caught up in the culture. And so unsurprisingly I started the venture wound up meeting David mid journey David through this venture which is how I wanted to mid-journey David through this venture, which is how I wound up at Mid Journey. Very cool. About a year ago now. Nice.

Left nine months ago. Now I run a robotics lab called Intempest. I make robots expressive. Robots currently suck at communicating what they're doing. They're really hard to understand. You have to pay expensive nerds like me to come use the command line anytime you're trying to understand what they're up to. And so I make them communicate like every other mammal and like every other human,

such that you can interact with a robot even though you don't speak its language. What are we talking about? I felt like it was pretty easy that robot that was like on a stand. Oh yeah, you're flailing around killing everyone. That was pretty easy to understand. Some of it's telltale. Yeah, I mean, are we talking about like industrial robots, like like like Kuka arms and stuff, or are we talking Roombas or the future humanoid robots? Like, what's the first product that you think needs, what's the first robot that really needs humanization?

Sure. I mean, as you can tell, like robots is probably the largest umbrella term that we have. It spans from humanoid to like glorified Roombas and everything in between. So how do you make them expressive? Well, I think it's a quite telltale. If I have an anthropomorphic robot, like a humanoid, I can say, Oh, it waves or Oh, it, it smiles or moves around.

And, you know, this makes sense. But in Tempus focuses on non anthropomorphic robots, specifically the ones that already exist. So where do robots exist? They exist in industry. Yeah. Robots work great in industry 99% of the time they work wonderfully. Like, if you think about an Amazon warehouse,

there's a bunch of little rumors that roll around and move the carts and stuff. And, you know, on occasion, probably 1% of the time these robots fail, and they hardly ever fail for technically complex reasons. Usually robots fail for some trivial reason. Say, I'm, you know, Jordy's in a in an Amazon Amazon warehouse and there's a rainbow trying to pass them and it gets stuck because Jordy's in his way Yeah so the room but the the robot in the warehouse just fails and it leaves a fail code in the fan line and it moves on and Does something else and what in tempest does is we allow these robots to be expressive?

We allow them to give and convey their intent to people like Jordy in this case who would not Otherwise understand what the robot is trying to do. So what if this robot, upon seeing Jordy and Taff, could get nippy? I'm not technical, I'm not technical, just really just- Not a shot. Just put me down, I'm kidding.

If you see a robot getting nippy with you, like a small dog, it's like, oh shit, I should probably move out of the robot's way. And so you can save a bunch of money on debug costs, and also reduce downtime of robots just by allowing them to communicate what they're up to. And in the future, of course, we'll get into consumer and service and humanoids. But right now it's in all an industry. Awesome. I mean, you gave the example of Amazon. They acquired Kiva systems in 2017, eight

years now. I'm sure they're thinking about this. Is Amazon the right customer for you or do you wanna start kind of in the more mid-market or do you wanna be more product-led growth, developer-led growth, hackers get into like the next generation of robotics companies? What's the go-to-market look like? Yeah, I have a few thoughts here.

I mean, so in Tempest's initial customer base are all enterprise robotics manufacturers. of robotics companies, what's the go-to-market look like? I have a few thoughts here. So in Tempest's initial customer base are all enterprise robotics manufacturers. They're people who sell the robots to Amazon. And seemingly, everyone is vertically integrating in this policy space. I think it's hardly prophetic for me to say that we're going to have a lot of robots in the future,

whether it be in industry or in service or in consumer, and that these robots are going to have to interact with humans. And it's quite shocking that not many people are focused on the interaction layer, how humans and robots are going to interact. Instead, they're focused on making robots functional. And so I'd love if more players like Amazon and big players would get into this space. I want you guys to imagine, say you're walking down Hollywood to the office in 10 years from

now and you pass by 20 robots. And one robot is running an Amazon model and one is running an Intempest model and one is running a Tesla model. This is like the same experience as going to talk with like walking in the street and chatting with a Nigerian and then a Canadian and then a Lithuanian. There's three different languages, three different dialects, three different humors, it's a terrible user experience. And so it's seemingly very important that we figure out one standardized means of human robot interaction. And the way that I'm proliferating into this space is through the enterprise manufacturers

that are selling robots to big companies, to small companies. As long as there's a scalable impact, I'll work with them. Cool. How influenced are you by movies like WALL-E, right? You know, this sort of the fun robot. It feels like you want robots to be doing serious work, but have it be sort of enjoyable to interact with them.

Is that accurate? Yes, absolutely. I'm a big Interstellar fan. Tars, great robot. Tars is killer. Tars is killer. There's one scene in Interstellar where Cooper sets Tars' humor level or truth level to like 90%

90% yeah One of the tricks like behind making robots expressive is giving them emotions because what are you expressing? Well, you're expressing emotions and you can view all of these as scalars Yeah, and so I can give robots a 90% humor level or a 90% joy level Yeah, and so it's pretty cool. Like it was shocking to me how on point Tars is. There's a whole bunch of like interesting media that came out of the creation of interstellars on how they simultaneously made Tars. He's a cold ex-military robot and also Cooper's best friend. And so this is absolutely the intention. Fantastic. Talk to me about the tech stack. I imagine that you mentioned

command lines. Are you doing post training on a funny on a foundation model or using llama open source stuff like what what how do you actually solve the technical problem what what is deeper in the supply chain of your tech stack so there's as I mentioned earlier like seemingly everyone is focused on vertically integrating control policy. All the big companies are doing this, and you get big horizontal companies that are awesome like physical intelligence. I really don't want to compete with these people.

In fact, I want to work with them. When I initially put my mind to how do I construct this architecture, I had to say, okay, I absolutely need to be an augmentation atop the transformer layer. After a robot is told what to do by its decision transformer, I run this interaction layer. Now I want you guys, you guys have both heard the phrase time flies when you're having fun. Of course. This is like a pretty integral way

in which humans perceive the world. The inverse is also true. Your perception of time moves slower when you're stressed. And so we have fun and stress to emotions and they change how we perceive the world subjectively. And so what Intempest does, we equip these things called time constants. The question is like, time flies when you're having fun,

what is time for a robot? Well, time is compute. So what if you could allocate compute such that when a robot is having fun or when it's not needed to do any daunting tasks, it can use the minimum amount of compute necessary. It can move as quickly as possible. But when a robot is stressed and it's failing,

it should use more compute to A, collect more data so we can train me and squash the edge case, and B, convey why it fails to, again, people in factories and people that would otherwise not understand what the robot is trying to do. Yeah, and that aligns with like test time inference scaling rules right now where you wanna do more reasoning for harder problems, that makes sense.

Very cool. Anything else, Jordy? Are we good? I think we're good, but come back on again soon, Teddy. Yeah, this is fantastic. This is super exciting. And I look forward to interacting, speaking the Intempest language

with many, many robots throughout my life. Me too. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Cheers, dude. Bye. Next up, we have Sigil, founder of Extraordinary, coming on the stream.

Very excited to have him. I got to say, these TLFellas are pretty punctual. They're so easy. I was about to say this. This is a very crazy thing. You get this calendar invite. You just hop on the stream. But he's here right on time. It's that weird time. There's so much running in LA. This is a very crazy thing. You get this calendar invite. You just hop on the stream. But he's here right on time.

It's amazing. Hey, join at 1.42. Sigil, great to have you on. How you doing? I'm doing pretty good. How are you? Doing great. It's been a super fun day so far.

The class is absolutely stacked. And congrats on making it in. Why don't you start with a bit of backstory, your personal story, and then what you're working on. Yeah, so I'm C. Joel, the founder of extraordinary.com. We are the extraordinary talent company of America. If you Google up one visa for extraordinary ability, you'll find my face is the cover image.

And I'm the guy going around giving out these alien of extraordinary ability hoodies that you see on your X feed. Amazing. Talk about your personal journey to building this company. Yeah, so when I was in high school, I built this project that was, I think he did like 100K in revenue this first month.

And I used the funds to pay someone to finish high school for me. And I went to San Francisco. And I came here on a tourist visa. I'm originally from Toronto, Canada. I'm like, holy shit, these people are based. These people are incredibly ambitious. I have to stay here.

And if you don't go to college, at the time I originally got into the M&T program at the University of Pennsylvania, I decided to opt out because I was pretty stubborn. I reallyT program at the University of Pennsylvania. I decided to opt out because I was pretty stubborn. I really just wanted to be in Silicon Valley. The only visa options was the O-1 for extraordinary ability. This is what the U.S. government calls it. The one person I knew was Patrick Collison who had that. I couldn't get a TN visa or the H1B because you needed a degree. So I had to go for the 01.

And I hunted down every single person in Silicon Valley that had the 01 visa, tried to understand what could qualify. And after eight months with an immigration lawyer, I filed it. It was sponsored by Naval. I built this company with him and I was approved at 20. And I was like, holy shit, it's so hard for the world's best talent to to come here. It's so unintuitive and I made a YouTube video about the about the process that has since I've been seen by hundreds of thousands of people and I

Made this this hoodie during as merged for that YouTube video. So and that kind of took off What are the overall trends in the o1 visas? during as merged for that YouTube video. So, and that kind of took off. What are the overall trends in the O-1 visas? It feels like, I mean, like immigration's obviously complicated, but it feels like all the stars aligned for like everyone being like, oh, ones are great. Elon has come out and said he loves O-1s and like, it feels like it's aligned with American values

and freedom and like brain drain and even strategic stuff. Like there's a lot of, there's a lot of pro are the number of ones, oh ones increasing. Is this a new program? Can you give us like a little bit of like history and trajectory for the oh one program broadly? Yeah, I mean, I like to think that the oh one was created for the Manhattan project. I think the the it's that ethos. I don't know the exact origins, but it's been around and it's been used to, the premise of it is that you are the top, you're an individual that has risen to the top of your field.

I like to say you're like the top 0.1 percentile at what you do. And USCIS has these eight criteria to adhere towards. You can be a tattoo artist, you can be a chip designer, The CIS has these eight criteria to adhere towards. You can be a tattoo artist, you could be a chip designer, you could be the founder of the fastest growing AI company. As long as you can prove that you are extraordinary at what you do, you can get it. And I think for the longest time it was very unclear because when you go to the website, it's like, examples, you have a Nobel Prize or like whichever.

And the way this company came to be was I literally mapped down 500 people who have O1s and EB1s for extraordinary ability. I gave them these hoodies. I actually built the website and just compiled them in terms of like their stories and like how they came to America. And yeah, I think that because of that, more and more people have been applying for it.

There's no cap to it. As long as you meet their bar for and convinced USCIS that you're extraordinary, you can get it. And so I think it's very positive some of the visa. So what what is the process actually like? I imagine that there's a lot of paperwork and lawyers and cost stuff that's tailor-made for LLM automation and just even just normal SaaS apps and stuff and form filling.

What are the headaches that O1 recipients typically report as particularly painful? I mean, my process took eight months. It cost me more than $10,000. I mean, you gotta, you gotta keep in mind what, what, what, what is the end product? Um, I have a printer here. You're literally printing 500 pages of paper, like with a bunch of citations, all evidence that you might've heard, like there's recommendation letters to,

which you gotta go chase down people and be like, Hey, can you please vouch for me being in America? I think I could contribute to this economy. One shot by a chat. GBT from now on. You can imagine so many M dashes. There's thousands of them. Let's delve into why he should be a one. Yeah. I got shipped, shipped off to like USCX. And they still use like, they still break open the box and then scan it,

which is like super archaic. Wow. They don't even accept like a PDF. No, they don't. I have to ship it through FedEx and then they parse it and scan it. Yeah. And then some very efficient diploma just adjudicates whether you're extraordinary. OK. Well, we're big fans of paper, but even that. Yeah, yeah, even that's my strategy. How have you thought about the business model

for extraordinary? It feels like there's some immediate, probably upfront value that you can capture in just making this process less painless. But when you think about taking somebody at the absolute top of their field and bringing them to the best economy in the world, where they're going to attract other talent and capital and things

like that, it feels like a lot of the value creation is on the things that they would be on the thing. The obvious business model here is to sell the data to venture capital firms. Yes. Yes. Which I feel like might already be happening judging by the involvement of Naval. No, I mean.

What's the actual business model? Jokes aside. Yeah. So I'm tempted to rename the company to the Extroverted Talent Company of America. Our flagship first product, obviously, just making this much more seamless and faster. I think it should be a standard deviation of speed up, which already is we've already power ramp, uh, and one of the top founders building, uh,

these that we know and we should see, we should see a lot more of that on our X feeds coming along. I mean, look, you can, you can make a good amount from providing the best product, uh, and serving these great talent to relocate here on the visa basis. But where I want to take things like I don't actually view this ultimately as a as a visa filing company, I think it's a talent company. And if you look at the lifecycle of extraordinary talent, like someone who's, I don't know, like a senior engineer creating, who's shipped like 60% of Devon. I just filed that O1 case actually, right? Like the whole life cycle of them,

one being like placed at their company all the way to how they even relocate there. Like most of the value capture isn't actually that like visa filing. I think also AI is going to eat away at margins in terms of services across all technology companies. So then what can you build that has network effects, that has innate distribution, that can just attract the world's best talent? I want to build something where if you're remotely ambitious

and talented, you have a means to be discovered. And if you want to, if you remotely want to come here, like you're going to be on extraordinary.com. How do you, how do you think about giving people an opportunity to get to America without having credentials yet? Right? Like, like presumably there's somebody out in the world who's 16 years old, they're in some like high school type situation and they actually could be one of the world's best programmers or something like that, but maybe they haven't gotten a job.

Is there a world in the future where you would create sort of like open testing where people could kind of like prove their abilities? I'm sure somebody would figure out how to hack it pretty quickly. But how do you think about kind of creating the ability for people to prove their capabilities prior

to getting the ability to get traditional credentials? Yeah, first off, I actually got a 16-year-old approved for an O1 visa a few weeks ago. And he just hit. What are they extraordinary at? one visa a few weeks ago. What are they extraordinary at? Interaction design for Roblox. The most elite Roblox player and on the on the talent discovery front.

I think that the way that the way that we value talent is evolving. I mean, right now, it's so funny, there's Mercor, but then the founder of Clueli is building software that hacks the Mercor interviews. Oh, yeah. I hadn't thought about that. The proxies for measuring talent are just falling through completely. Yeah, that's hilarious. for measuring talent are just like falling through completely. And so like, how do you then measure talent in this new age where, you know, we value people who are able to leverage AI much more.

And I think the way that companies hire will evolve. And we need to account for that we need ways to of assessing people, but also discovering people to showcase just how competent they are. And I'm a very big believer of being able to give those means to people around the world, regardless of their traditional accolades, and just being able to empower people who have the merit and who have the ability.

And they should be discovered and sponsored to come to Merica. It's amazing. Well, congratulations on getting and sponsored to come to America. It's amazing. Well, congratulations on getting into the Thiel Fellowship. And I'm sure there will be many Thiel Fellows in the future that go through your program. Yeah, I'm already helping them. I'm excited for the first O1 bodybuilder.

We saw what happened with Arnold Schwarzenegger when he came to America. Had a fantastic impact outside of bodybuilding went on to be the governor of California California pretty good. So don't count out the bodybuilders So let's just get all the elite bodybuilders from all over the world bring them here on a once That's my goal as long as you're the top at what you do. We help you. That's fantastic. That's well Thanks so much for stopping by. Thanks for coming on. Let's congrats. Cheers

That's fantastic. That's great. Well, thanks so much for stopping by. Thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats. Cheers. Bye. Next up, what? Just Gold's Gym in Venice just has hundreds of new

members that are all on their ones. America is already dominant in bodybuilding. We hold more than 50% of the Mr. Olympias, but we could be doing even better if we Can always do better. If we brought everyone from all over the world who's elitist bodybuilding to America, which is my dream Anyway, our next guest is here. We have aiden smith founder of inter phases. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

Howdy, i'm doing really well. How are y'all? We're great. Great to have you on Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building? Yeah, absolutely I think the best way to understand my life is kind of framed at this realization I had when I was a little tiny kid in like fourth grade I was sitting in this classroom and I was watching some guy doing real science and I saw him I was like dang I like know how to do at addition I know how to do basic algebra and like where the hell am I going with my life?

And I realized that the world is a really scary competitive place and I had to have some kind of heuristic by which I should get better. And so I thought to myself, all right, every two years I want to double in the metrics I care about, which at fourth grade was coolness. And so at that point, going up in the South Bay, I grouped to exceptionally chill parents, an opera singer and electrical

engineer who were just like, oh son, just do whatever you want to do. And I was like, okay, every two years I will double in coolness. And so that's exactly kind of how I structured my life. And in the next two years, I did stuff like tried to memorize the dictionary because this is what I thought cool was when I was like, that's pretty cool. But eventually the coolness actually went in a direction of like things that were actually pretty cool. Like when I was in high school, I started working at chess.com and I'd like delivered

tons and tons of features and made some really cool products that were really impactful to me and when I was in college, I was like, okay What's the coolest problem you could possibly work on and I ended up working in Neuralink where I'm currently seated Sorry to any co-workers who are seeing me taking this Never apologize, but what about what about like joining a punk band learning to do a kickflip did that ever come into All these things I do like your car. Oh nice. There's no ecology So I have a lot of mushrooms memorized throughout the Sierra, Nevada In general these are the things that fit my heristic legend. Okay. Okay. Yeah Yeah, that makes sense not the cliche cool guy

You're just leveling yeah, you're maxing out your character Yeah The the the red Ferrari convertible that comes next year when there's another doubling in the cool Doubling people are gonna start tracking the doubling like the Bitcoin Neuralink what are you working on now? Yeah, so at Neuralink I've been doing all kinds of really cool things. And one of these things I've been doing most recently is I'm leading the Sound Speech Project, essentially. You've seen the study that was announced fairly recently,

so I can talk about this a little bit. But basically, there's really great corpus interesting literature that goes from how do you get from inside your head to outside your head. This is super, super profound technology. Imagine if you have ALS and you're locked in or something like this. I spend a lot of time around these people,

and every minute I spend with them, I think more to myself that these people need to be able to communicate to the outside world better. And Neuralink is doing a really great job of this kind of thing. I have so much confidence in the team. I have so much confidence that this technology is going to be transformative. But also, I really hope I don't get ALS anytime soon. I really hope I don't have a brain stem stroke or something that keeps me from being able to communicate sanely.

And I still am interested in the way this technology will go on to transform other parts of the world. And so with interfaces, what I'm looking at is I see all these kind of gizmos for AI. I see these like limitless pendants. I see these smartwatches and things that are trying to kind of integrate all this data. And I don't fully buy it.

The reason why I don't is because I actually don't like voice as a medium that much for most things. If it actually wants to integrate into your life effortlessly, I don't want to be in the middle of a conversation with you and be like, what's the guy on the left's name? It's super awkward. It's terrible. So how do you do better?

And there's a couple of ways you can think about this. One, a former coworker of mine, a guy I really respect, bless who you may have seen on Twitter or whatever, told me that there's a couple of ways you can think about this. One, a former coworker of mine, a guy I really respect, bless who you may have seen on Twitter or whatever, told me that there's a couple of ways you can get value out of machine learning. And one of them is kind of arbitrage via data, and another is arbitrage via time. And so if you have these longer time series,

you can kind of get more bits out of them by just increasing your confidence intervals, either by doing these kind of causal estimates or a causal estimates where you have understanding of what's going on in the future as well as in the past and so you can kind of use this to do same updates or just by looking for signals that are kind of strong over a long period of time and I think that with this in mind

there's kind of room for this halfway horse between like a conventional microphone which can pick up stuff in real time and do transcription in real time and a stuff in real time and do transcription in real time. And an EA or someone who actually will kind of try to predict what the heck you're doing in space. And so what you can imagine is building a device that basically takes these fundamentally pretty crappy signals, like NEG signals, for example. What are those?

Sorry, NEG signals? Yeah, yeah. So there's many ways in which signals are propagated through the body to move your arms or to create electrical activity. Sure. You may have seen a recent paper out of Reality Labs in Meta where they use exactly this to kind of create a-

Yeah, for the Orion headset, they bought that company. I forget what it's called, but they bought a company like six years ago, and they're finally implementing it, right? Yeah, and it's extremely cool. A friend of mine went to one of the clinical trials and put the thing on, and you try it out. You say, look, I'm pinching my fingers, and the fingers pinch, and it's extremely cool. A friend of mine went to one of the clinical trials and put the thing on, and you try it out. You say, look, I'm pinching my fingers,

and the fingers pinch. And it's pretty magical. This is the kind of thing which normally you would have to cut a hole in your head to do, but you don't necessarily have to do here. And there's a really good story to be told about kind of doing this for speech and getting really terrible speech. I have no illusions, as a neurotechnologist,

that you will get really terrible speech out of this. But the key thing is that this does not matter because the context is what matters. And by informing this really awful speech on the context of what's around you and like your attention to the situation, you may be able to actually get the underlying part of it that matters. And so in fact, indeed, even if I can only kind of pick up the word left and guy, I might know that I want to know who's the guy in the left And and that's an easy LLM transformer problem, right? So you get a bug big bag of words very messy

But it's enough to turn into a semblance of a thought that could be confirmed with a pinch maybe Yeah, yeah now ideally at least in my eyes You have this just totally effortlessly into your life and you kind of collect this data all the time via a method that's fairly subtle. I have a little bit of alpha here that I won't spill, so you'll have to have me on it a couple of months to see my fun demos. But of how to get this data, so you're constantly collecting this and it's constantly informing and improving on how you interact with the world. In general, I really care about efficiency in whatever I do.

And lots of little things in your day-to-day life are super inefficient in these pretty funny ways. And I think that by kind of having this compute that is always active and doesn't invade the privacy of other people, like I wanna understand myself better, I wanna be able to improve myself, I wanna be able to keep on that doubling path

without constantly listening to you guys or to my friends or to the coworkers or whoever else is around me. I want to have the data set to do that. So there's this kind of dual-pronged thing of, OK, I should create a better interface to interact with the LMs and to build the higher bitrate communication interfaces and also get a better model for oneself.

I had this idea in college that got my wisdom teeth out. And I was like, I want them to put a microphone in the hole Because then I could say I could whisper Who's the guy on the left and it wouldn't be picked up to anyone else? But it'd be able to pick up the audio, but I think that's probably gross and kind of a part of the tech tree We don't even need to go down because we can just leave frog that whole step We've already gone down and I had to break it to you This is there's this Israeli company called molar Mike that does exactly this really no way

Yeah, you can imagine that like you have bombs going off around you and you're like, yeah boss. We need backup But yeah Our producers always telling us to move the mic. Yeah, talk closer to the microphone. But I could just have a molar mic. Yeah, we need to be augmented for sure. Are you going into a similar FDA pathway as Neuralink? Is that how things are going to play out for you?

Yeah, so I'd like to avoid this if possible. I do think that there's room for a device that's somewhere in between like this really groundbreaking first in class biomedical device, which involves a lot of risk. I mean, fundamentally invasive neurosurgery involves a lot of risk, even when you're doing it with the very best surgeons in the world

with these robots that can avoid vasculature with everything, there's still some risk price in there. And so I think, again, there's this halfway horse thing of like, okay, maybe it's invasive, but maybe it's not quite as risky of a thing. Maybe it's more like getting like an implant for birth control or more like getting simple surgery to remove a mole. These kind of things that are much more every day and much sooner.

I'm very bullish on Neuralink in the long run, and I think that you should keep an eye on the amazing stuff folks are up to here. But yeah, if DJ is in the office, tell him I say hi. We'd love to have him on the show. I love DJ. He's great. He's fantastic. You've been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. I gotta ask before you go. You're skill maxed to the gills already. But what's next? What are you besides the new company? You know, what are

what are some areas that you're trying to level up now? Believe it or not, the next thing I'm doing next week is I'm making a trumpet from First Principles. I have a physics textbook, and I want to, without any reference, try to figure out how far apart all the valves should be. I want to cast it in my backyard with a big crucible. And I want to play this thing, which probably won't work.

And so I'll get better at metalworking, I'll get better at physics, I'll get better at all these little stupid things I care about. And it's a pretty fun little interstitial bit before I really put my head down and get back to the great doubling come credible on the show In two years you'll be good if it makes sound works Great question, Jordan awesome great to meet you

Jordan awesome great to meet you Congratulations, but this is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon next up. We got Colton coming in this studio Welcome to Colton as soon as he hops in here the idea of just trying to get twice as cool. It's so good It's constantly and just never never like Yeah, I'm cool enough now Double the great doubling. I mean he he doesn't look like you know I'm cool enough now double the great doubling I mean he he's doesn't look like you know I don't know I don't know if he can have champagne yet but we follow to some similar principle around the great exponential growth it's the most powerful force in the world something that you can understand and

less you've experienced it yeah we experience it going from a thousand followers to two thousand followers you know imagine that a trumpet manufacturing Fantastic. Well, we have our next guest in the studio. Welcome to the stream Colton. How are you doing? Welcome? Are you guys doing can hear me? Yeah Would you like kicking it off with a little introduction on yourself in the company? My name is Colton. I'm from Philadelphia right now. I'm in Boston, working on my company called orbit, which I think you guys actually got a brief introduction to because my teammate Steven was on here, I think just an hour or two ago.

That's right. Yeah, there we go. The double the double teal fellow. So combo, give us your side of the story. What does he get wrong about orbit? No, just just just unpack it again a little bit and then we'll we'll take the conversation in a different direction. Yeah, absolutely. So I can tell you how I first heard about this idea and got involved with it. Yeah, how'd you meet him? I'd love to know that story. That's

interesting. Yeah. So Stephen went to Georgetown and he was looking for an engineer to help them build this neurotech. But there's no engineers in Georgetown at all. They don't have an engineering department. And so he was running around like the whole DMV area, looking for an engineer that could help them build some of these circuits and the hardware and the code and such.

And so eventually that led him to me. He tells me that he met with a lot of people before. But- Is the business guy yelling at you? Yeah, I think he said something. I can't quite hear him. Hey, shut up business guy. The engineers, the technical founders talking.

Yeah. So we'd met and we went on Zoom for a bit. And I already had an internship that I was very interested in lined up for the summer, but he started talking to me and explaining this idea that he had. And at least during the fall, two things were pretty clear. And one, that Steven himself is an incredibly exceptional guy. And even after two years working with him, that is still true and still impressive to me. And the second thing was that he convinced me

that neurotech was a harder problem to work on than any other problem that I was working on. So I was going into the field of aerospace and I love jet engines. I think they're the most mechanically complex systems that exist today. And they're really cool for a lot of reasons. You have this really tight tug of war between crazy precise tolerances they're the most mechanically complex systems that exist today and they're really full for a lot of reasons.

You have this really tight tug of war between crazy precise tolerances and like these extreme magnitudes and speed and heat and stresses, all these things. But it's a system that humans fully built and can analyze and look at, whereas the brain is kind of a black box and the tool set that you need to approach the type of problems that we see when trying to build neurote tech and interact with the brain in any way just forces you to be in my opinion like a lot more creative and search a much larger option space to get the answers that you want. And so I thought this is an incredibly hard problem.

I really want to work on this. We started working together that summer. I was still doing my internship but that's you know 95 or 60 more hours in a day and eventually at the end of the summer I told my supervisor at the company I was working at that I was gonna leave a month early. And in August, Stephen and I went down to DC, just rented out an Airbnb for a month and just had this basically like a month long build-a-thon

where we tried to get the scrappiest MVP we could at the end of the month. And we did that, eventually went back to school. In the meantime, we're still working very hard on the project. In fact, I was failing most of my classes at the time, until it got to the point of about October or November when we had met with our first venture investor and this is

Dune Ventures. He funded a pre-seed round and at that point we were no longer resource constraint. The only constraint to us making progress was time. I actually did really enjoy school. I was a mechanical engineer at Hopkins and I felt that through each of my classes, I was really expanding my tool set and the things that I could build and also the types of engineering problems

that I could analyze quantitatively. And so I did really love my classes there, but I figured I could either do school really well, I could do the startup really well. I couldn't do both at the same time. And it was a really obvious choice to choose this startup instead and work in this direction because for me it was very plain

that this was the direction of growth or at least the most growth that I could have. I still think that's true and that's a large part of what guides my decisions and the path that I take in life. Very cool. Can you take me through some of the tech tree that led up to this point?

Like what are some devices or technologies through some of the tech tree that led up to this point, what are some devices or technologies that you think have kind of commercialized appropriately or at least like laid the groundwork for what you're doing today? Yeah, that's interesting. There's not a whole lot that laid the groundwork. Like technology-wise, a lot of the stuff that we're using has actually been around for a very

long time. If you think of the main application that we're looking at right now, vestibular stimulation, you basically just got a circuit that's a constant current stimulator. It'll inject the same amount of current regardless of the resistance that your head is because for humans that actually varies a lot and can span even an order of magnitude, which is unlike a lot of other physiologic characteristics. But the idea of having a constant current stimulator is a technology that we had for a very long time. It's something that we've used for a human application and like TENS, for example, and TDCS and such. A big part of

neurotech and the progress in neurotech, I think, is not actually implementationally constrained. And that like you do have to have good hardware and you do have to make it well and incredibly robust, but it's actually how you use that hardware. So the types of Neurotech, I think, is not actually implementationally constrained. And you do have to have good hardware, and you do have to make it well and incredibly robust. But it's actually how you use that hardware. So the types of signals that you send, how you integrate them with the rest of your system, whether it's closed loop and you're taking a certain measurements, how you're analyzing those measurements,

feeding it back into the signals that you're sending, that actually gives you a lot more gain and a lot more innovation in Neurotech. Jordy? in neurotech. Jordy? Yeah, I'm just, I'm also, the main question I had for Steven earlier was around kind of like testing process, how, you know, I imagine you guys both are super eager

because of these sort of like fast feedback cycle, but what's your approach and how do you focus on learning through self experimentation? Yeah, there's two sides of it. So the first side is safety and stuff like that. And so for a lot of vestibular stimulation that's electrical, there's a good bit of precedence actually for how it's been used in the clinic in a very binary sort of way where they aren't able to elicit a lot of autonomic functions that you'd like. But it's still shown with efficacy in a lot of research that, hey, you can take this current

signal and you can send it to your vestibular system and there's no adverse effects. And it is a practice that they use very binarily in the clinic. And then when we're doing stuff that's more novel, we'll actually take a very rigorous approach to safety. And so a good example I can think of is when we were working with an ultrasound system and no one before had ever used mechanical waves through ultrasound to elicit vestibular stimulation. We started, you know, very bare bones with going to like simulations first and then after

doing simulations, getting like a fake skull that matches the physical properties of the head, putting that in a water tank measuring with a Hydrofilm what the field is actually looking like seeing that that lines up with their simulations Basically doing weeks or even up to a month of the math the numbers the simulations to find out Hey, this is causing the exact effect that we want and then based on that Then going to testing on really just like Steven for a lot of the outside stuff to see that it works even for a lot of the outside stuff to see that it works. And that's kind of the safety. Steven.

All right. All right, bud. Yeah. It's time. Lay down. Exactly. You're going to want to lay down for this. Yeah.

That's fantastic. I mean, are you guys getting to the point where you're really narrowing in on some of the more near-term commercial applications of what you're working on or is it still kind of like, hey, there's so many different directions that we can take, we just need to continue to experiment broadly and run a bunch of different types of tests? More of the latter right now, not because we don't have a direction that seems viable, but we just don't know it's the best one yet.

So I'm sure Stephen's talked about some of it, but in a couple of different autonomic regulation fields, we have very powerful effect sizes, at least in the small sample sets that we've done, being just people within the company, co-founders and such. But for the types of effects that we're looking at, if you can't detect it without a larger sample size, say like 50, 100 people, and it's just this like static effect that like maybe placebo may not be, kind of like taking vitamins in the morning,

it's not the effect that we're looking for. We're basically like, we're able to have this fast iteration cycle because the autonomic effects that we do elicit are very obvious and it's very clear to me or Steven whoever's being tested, like, oh, this isn't placebo. I'm actually feeling something that's crazy different.

Now, in terms of getting a part of that. But is sleep, for example, this is an example that Stephen gave earlier, just basically doubling your deep sleep, right? Something like that, every human has to sleep every single day. Is that not a big enough market to try to bring something to market there that could allow? I would personally pay a lot of money

to be able to sleep for six hours and get the same effect as sleeping eight hours. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious how you think of those trade-offs, basically. And I think a lot of teams would just say, hey, this is such a big opportunity. If we're seeing an effect here, we

should really run this down. In terms of if I had to make a prediction about what would be our first product that we release, I would, with the information that we currently have, guess that it's a sleep product. And so a lot of the testing that we're doing right now is related to sleep. A lot of the engineering that we're doing

is building out more robust systems that could actually be user-ready. For example, it's not some big prototype circuit, to sleep, a lot of the engineering that we're doing is building out more robust systems that could actually be used already. For example, it's not you know, some big prototype circuit, but something that you could wear, and a form factor that people would want to wear in their sleep. And for us, what we're shooting for about right now is just a headband. So it's thin enough that you really don't notice anything other than just this piece of cloth that goes around your head and is,

you know, skin tight. That said, even though I'm confident we can build this sleep product right now and push towards a certain release, that would be successful. And, you know, what you call successful, whether that's, you know, selling 10,000 units or 10 million units is a bit more defined by like what your goals are and why you want to release in the first place. For us, it's actually not so much about the money, but building a user base that we can start to expand and with Neurotech. You know, your brain is a very intimate thing and consumers are going to be very, very skeptical

of the first Neurotech products that come about. And so whether it's the case that you want to release a Neurotech product that, you know, let's say feasibly could be sold to 10 million people or 50 million people if they're ready for it. And Neurotech has become a more popular idea could be sold to 10 million people or 50 million people if they're ready for it. And Neurotech has become a more popular idea rather than maybe finding a more niche entry

market first and doing some type of launch that would give you more feedback and more information about what the marketplace is looking like, how ready people are for Neurotech, and those types of questions. It's actually a lot less clear which of those paths is the best one. And I think it's very hard to get a clear answer to that unless we have a more clear picture of the scientific space and actually what types of effects we're looking for. And so sleep is something that you could go consumer with. You could sell to every person because every person sleeps. But if it turns out that there's, let's say, an unexpected amount of stickiness in the

market with people that want to buy Neurotech products, then a better approach may be to go with a fully medical product. So looking at people with people that have a disease where, you know, hey, maybe Neurotech is a little early for consumers, but if you're, and we can go actually even back to the sleep analog, let's say you're an insomniac who can struggle to sleep even two, three hours a night.

Now wearing this headband and this idea of Neurotech is not quite as, there's not quite as much skepticism as in the friction is a little lower. And so there's kind of this back and forth between we have to analyze like what the market is looking like and what types of products are going to fit that market. And also like what types of products can we build that are able to fit that market? And so it's a little bit harder to get feedback on the first one being the market space until I think our best information there is when we actually release a product to market and learn And so it's a little bit harder to get feedback on the first one being the market space until I think our best information there is when we actually release a product to market and

learn from it. But at least right now, there's a lot more to be learned on the science side. There's a lot more to be learned with sleep and how to not just make a system like that, but continually improve it and make it better. And then there's also a lot of sub branches that we want to continue to explore. So we know that we're not in some local maximum when maybe not too far. There's another higher local maximum to be hit. They're cool. Fantastic answer.

Thank you so much for coming on. Great to meet you Colton. Congratulations on all the progress so far. Send us a demo unit. Let's get it going. Yeah, send us a demo unit. We can. Yeah, actually that'd be great.

We're ready. We're ready. Yeah. And yeah, thanks so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Cheers. Have a great day. Very nice meeting you. Yeah. And yeah, thanks so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Cheers. Have a great time. Very nice meeting you. Yeah. Bye. Next up, we have Koki Mashida coming into the studio. Our last Teal Fellow of the day.

Finishing it out strong. Welcome to the stream, Koki. How are you doing? Sorry for keeping you waiting. We are running long. Welcome. But you're here. Please introduce yourself and the company

that you're building. Hey, guys. Thank you for having me on. Thanks for the time. I'm Koki, originally from Japan. I spent a lot of time growing up thinking about natural disasters. I think in SF, it's nice weather, everything's kind of nice, and you get to work on really interesting things.

But I was in the 2011 earthquake where 18,000 people died in a couple of days. And a lot of my friends homes were destroyed. And you have these typhoons, right? They blow away my grandparents roofs every three years or so. And I keep asking them why. You can just move because you're in typhoon alley. Like what's the whole point of having to stay there? But it's something so deeply ingrained, right?

It's something that you accept, that you kind of just accept as feat. And I was talking to the environment minister and the infrastructure minister of Japan recently, and they were saying that they spent billions of dollars on disaster infrastructure. Like they would build these like columns under Tokyo, right? So like when it floods, the water can go in.

Like they were like, oh shoot, we haven't actually solved the problem, which is the intensification of these events. But back then, I was 11 and I did not know that you can actually start to fight these natural disasters. But I started building robots when 3D printers were really popular, started selling them. And then the money I made from that, I put into Bitcoin, and then going to hedge funds in high school, and I started a small one. And then, and then in college, I came across this startup, which was building AI weather forecasts. And it's like, not many people think about like,

you know, weather forecasting is like this, this huge expense that you have to take on. But when you look at, you know, these larger countries, they spend about $2 billion per year on super compute, essentially, like, you know, a big chunk of the world's supercomputers are used on running partial differential equations to be able to calculate the weather. It's something that you don't really think about. And with machine learning, what you're able to do is reduce costs by 99% and increase resolution by 100 times.

And when you see that, we started out very small, like five people, but I was splitting time at Berkeley and then at the startup, and we became the national weather forecast for the Philippines where it was a lot more affordable. And I started to think about, okay, wow, our understanding of not only just Earth itself, but being able to model, gather data, and then predict has gotten so much better, I start to think about what's the next natural step? The whole point of gaining more intelligence

is so that you can act upon it. And that's what I said to think about. Can't really specifically tell you what we're doing in terms of the application layer. But this is kind of like the transformation we're thinking about. Is it magic? Is it spells?

Are you going to bomb the hurricane? Is it a bomb? I've heard that pitched before. I wonder where you heard that from. It's 10,000 times the power of a hurricane. Hurricanes are interesting, right? Because the power, the amount of energy that goes in there is so strong. If you look at Google research, they used to have this program where they're trying

to harness energy out of a hurricane. And if you can harness it properly, you can power the United States for months and months just from one hurricane. That's incredible. Wow. Which is a crazy thing to think about. So you're going to make them, and then you're going to control them.

And then there's going to be a bunch of sci-fi offshoots where Koki had a good thing going. He was powering a lot of data centers with his homegrown hurricanes, and then one got out of control. But yeah, I mean, talk to me about weather forecasting and kind of the data sources, because obviously, yes, massive kind of revolution

in AI machine learning generally, but- You slipped in that you're doing the weather forecasting for the Philippines. Yeah. Like you guys are like a data provider already? The previous company I worked at during school, that's what we're focused on. And a lot of it is coming up with models.

How can you compute these partial differential equations more efficiently with the same amount of data you have? And so you look like DeepMind or Nvidia coming up with their frontier models, right? Like being able to run diffusion based models to forecast better. But for us, what we think is fundamental is collecting data that no one really has. Software has become so commoditized that now it's just like Claude and then XAI and then OpenAid, it's just like a never ending battle. For us, it's like, how can you collect data

and how can you see the world in a different way that allows you to act upon it? And how can you causally act upon a weather phenomena? you know, causally act upon like a weather phenomena, right? Yeah, you mentioned diffusion. Is there a distinction between weather forecasting using diffusion models versus transformer based models or token prediction models? Like, is that a meaningful distinction

or are you kind of using the term broadly? It gets really complicated in a sense that I think, you know, both of them are good at, you know, kind of milking as much information, you know, looking at, okay, what are the latent parameters? How can you figure out, you know, somewhat unnoticeable characteristics within other models?

But I think the interpretability of whether models also become very important. If you can characteristically define which parameter within a high dimensional vector is creating a lot of bias, how can you tweak that so that you can get back on track? And it's like, whether it's so chaotic, then even one small perturbation in an initial condition can really mess up the forecast. And that's why it's really difficult to forecast like a week out.

And so being able to like assimilate data as you go. Um, and that's why like we're focusing on, okay, how can you, you know, collect data that no one really has, um, so that you can make sure you're not de-biased too much. Talk to me about the data sources for this. I'm familiar with the Doppler radar systems that the local news has, but are satellites playing a role now in weather prediction? Is the actual data that we're gathering to build these models on top of improving and what

are the key vectors that are driving better data going into these models? Yeah, satellite data is interesting. A lot of reanalysis data has always been used and it's made by NOAA or ECMWF. Unfortunately, NOAA is not doing too well now. What we're doing is building sensors and then literally like flying into storms or into clouds to measure within them. It's a complex convective process that you really have to just send something in. Autonomous vehicle, I assume? No. Not on the plane personally? Our focus is on how can you build infrastructure.

Sure. Right? Like infrastructure in the sense that okay, models are a part of the infrastructure, but how can you collect data for a targeted vehicle? So for example, like hurricanes are interesting, right? Like, and sorry, like I can't say everything in detail, but in terms of hurricanes, it's like, okay, if you want to see how convection is happening, how, what about, you know, the density of clouds, what kind of a grapple problems and water droplets exist, you really just have to,

you know, fly like a plane in that, like it's have to fly a plane in there. It's hard to just do drones because it's too turbulent or these sensors are too big. So thinking about that is an interesting problem as well. But I think fundamentally, what we're pushing against is that many of these reactive methods of disaster, if you look at insurance, there's about $140 billion per year in insurance premiums issued in the US for tropical cyclones.

And yet, insurance premiums have doubled every single year for the last four or five years in many coastal cities. And when you look at another catastrophe happening, last year, Hurricane Helena and Milton was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. They weren't even category fives, and Congress had to give out $100 billion in aid. But when the next hurricane Katrina happens in Florida, for example, then insurance is

just going to be insolvent in many ways. Is there a market for better weather data by itself? I mean, it sounds like fighting the hurricane is important, but we talked to somebody who works in data brokerage loosely and said like hedge, everyone talks about, oh, we'll sell it to hedge funds, but there's only like hedge five hedge funds that buy anything and they're kind of stingy apparently,

and they don't really buy that much data. You think about the insurance market, yeah, $140 billion, but if you're an insurer and you know that a whole bunch of houses are gonna be destroyed in two weeks, or you know it in four weeks, you're not really gonna be able to adjust premiums that fast to make up for that.

So it feels like, and then you look at the government, the government might wanna know, but even then it's like, are they really a good buyer? So just to continue spit balling, and in California, when there's a certain communities that are threatened, they'll have like private fire response. I guess that makes sense. Even in HOI. Is that a good thing?

Is that a recent market? I'm just thinking about like the dynamic right now where a hurricane is effectively forming. and the response is to watch it and then tell people to evacuate based on where you think it's gonna go. Yeah. And it's kind of insane that we don't have any sort of proactive response to say,

hey, this thing is progressing to being more and more intense, can we sort of stop it? Yeah. So yeah, data market, I don't know how much you can talk about it. We might just have to have you back on when you can talk. When you look at insurance, it's pretty insane. They look at, OK, what does hurricane damage look

like in the last 40 years? OK, let's aggregate average and then kind of add bias for some of the intensification of these events or the increase and the exposure. And that's all you do. And so a lot of the interesting financial assets come up when you look at like catastrophe bonds.

They're like certain hedge funds that literally just trade on catastrophe bonds. And it's just about estimating what is the arbitrage in terms of how much wildfire is going to wipe out a certain city a certain city or no same for her Well, we'll have to have you back when you can talk more about the product and and we're going with the company But this was fantastic. Thank you so much for hopping on this is a real pleasure excited to hear more congratulations We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Thank you for the dress bye And that concludes teal fellow Tuesday. We have interviewed Also, I mean we mentioned figma a few times but we forgot to mention that Dylan field tell teal fella

So go to figma comm think bigger build faster figma helps design and development Great products together. I love ads, baby You've run today, I love it. Anyway, I like this post from Andrea this bumper sticker It says honk if you like the taste of venture capital and I just wanted to say and I love And it's an ollie pop I thought that was very funny is that is this an anti venture capital Bumper stick. I don't know. I I don't know how anybody could be anti venture capital I feel my my lovely wife was one of the first investors in my house So so if you're honking your honking, they're absolutely crushing What else is interesting to cover today?

I mean, TBPN was in the news with Ben Thompson chiming in over the weekend saying, I love how it never occurs to the media that maybe they're just being outcompeted instead of the subject of some sort of conspiracy. Literally anyone can make a podcast. Sorry, they don't want to listen to yours. I think to add to hear the frustration from the media

is that oftentimes entrepreneurs and investors don't even want to talk to the media anymore. So it's not that they don't, they maybe will listen, but they don't even want to go. This is something we talked about with Abe, the guy who wrote the profile on us. He was curious, why do you feel like people are so comfortable talking with you?

And we didn't need to go into why. Abe actually responded to this. He said, I think it can be both true that non-traditional outlets like Benz and TBPN are outperforming many traditional ones, and that some of tech distrusts the traditional media creating some of the audience for Ben and TBPN and I love that because no quotes no quotes around TBPN Abe got the memo we're in the

mainstream now we are the mainstream media we are the traditional media yeah I mean we're wearing suits. What's more traditional than wearing suits? How can we be more traditional than wearing a tailored suit while you report the news, while you newsmax? I'm newsmaxing John. What else is interesting to talk about? There's some news in Polymarket. The odds of a US recession have dropped significantly. I'm very excited to hear that. Love that. I threw up a market, will Coinbase acquire Circle before September?

That's going to be fun. Somebody else was writing, see if I can read through this. This guy, I don't actually know this guy, but he wrote up an article. And I guess he was at Coinbase for some time, which is interesting. So he's giving some background. I spent years in the crypto industry, first at Coinfund, then at Coinbase, helping scale

its venture strategy. Everything in this post is based on publicly available data from Circles S1 and Coinbase's public filings. No inside information, just analysis. Anyone could replicate, but most don't. He's breaking down the USDC supply. He says total USDC equals Coinbase's USDC plus Circle's USDC plus everything else.

Platform USDC refers to the percentage of stable coins held in a party's custodial products or managed wallet services. And so he's basically saying that Coinbase has 23% of the total USDC in circulation. And they've also been on a little acquisition spree. They bought that other big company. I think it was a billion dollar acquisition at least.

I forget exactly the name, but we'll have to talk to Brian Armstrong from Coinbase about that hopefully tomorrow. He goes on to highlight that USCC is Coinbase's number two revenue driver. And contributed to 15% of Q1 2025. Could be a beautiful partnership. More than staking.

Could be a beautiful partnership. We'd love to see it. So, something. Well, we'll cover it here and we will track it. What is the polymarket actually at? Let's see. It's relatively low volume right now 5% 50% 10% No No, it was that it was sitting at 40% or tonight somebody took a big no bet and so it's sub 10% sub 10% Okay, see well see if you if you have an opinion hop on Paul and check it out

If you if you have an opinion hop on check it out I think it's good to close this everyone's loving the Dyson keynote Scott Belsky said agree found it riveting and seriously considering getting a Dyson pencil vac Sam so what is the pencil that that Dyson keynote was so wholesome just an excited inventor Vacuuming the stage and showing off his new toys all wrapped up in under nine minutes It's a it's a it's a this features Basically uses a laser to expose. Well, that's been on Dyson vacuums for a while. I think that on mine Oh, well, you're living in poverty. I guess I have a Matic now. So I don't yeah, that's true Matic is is pretty incredible, but but D, yeah, they've had the laser for a while,

but I think what they did was they restructured it because it used to be the internals, like the heavy battery part and the actual vacuum part would be at the handle. And so the handle was always a little bit heavy. It seems like they've kind of shifted a lot of the weight, the center of gravity much lower, and so they can use it much more just like a walking stick.

If you see here, you'll see that what he's actually holding in his hand, if you zoom in, is very thin. And so the whole thing is this very thin tube. And that means it's a lot easier to vacuum. And so get this for your in-laws. Get this for your parents and grandparents. They're going to love it. We talked about, Lesson was talking about how this is basically be the beginning of the smart game this is

the smart cane no way yeah he was talking about that imagine if everybody was walking around vacuuming all the time the world would be so clean shoes the world would be so clean this is the future this is the future and then you throw an LLM in that bad boy start talking to it we could pitch so much AI in this thing. Intelligence and clean streets, too cheap to meter. Well, that's a great place to end it, folks. Stay tuned.

Tomorrow we are doing crypto day. We have a whole bunch of absolute killers from the crypto ecosystem. It really came together well. The lineup is fantastic. Very, very exciting. It's actually, I wanted to, before tomorrow, try to estimate the total volume that the

people joining tomorrow oversee on a daily basis. It's definitely in the billions. It could easily be in the... Oh, daily volume. Daily volume. It's massive. Massive. Anyway, why don't you take us out with a massive gong hit, Jordy? I would love to, John. Why? It's so good.

I love it. Swing the mic. Swing the mic? I don't think... I was probably... Anyways. Goodbye, everyone. Thank you for watching.

See you tomorrow. Have a great day. We will see you. Have a fantastic evening. Tomorrow. Leave us a five-star review. Goodbye. Leave us a five-star review.

Or Ben. Thank you for watching. We'll be there. Teal Fellow Tuesday, have a fantastic evening tomorrow. It was a five-star five-star review Thank you for watching. Well, you'll follow Tuesday plus a bunch of other haters. Yeah, it's great. See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers