TBPN - Meta Poaches Apple's Top AI Executive, Replit Partners with Microsoft, Unilever Goes Viral with AI | Alex Roy, Ryan Petersen, Jonathon Barkl, Jonathan Ross, Craig Piggott, Jacob Glanville

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

(02:49) - Meta Poaches Apple AI Exec (07:26) - Jane Street Update (11:11) - Shaun Maguire Under Fire (13:21) - Replit Teams Up with Microsoft (15:58) - TSA Drops Shoe Rule (18:18) - Unilever Uses AI For Viral Soap Ads (19:27) - Gemini Nano Ships (21:20) - Alex Roy, a renowned automotive journalist and former Cannonball Run record holder, discusses his transition from illegal cross-country racing to investing in autonomous vehicle technology. He highlights how his experience in planning and executing high-speed, long-distance drives provided valuable insights into mapping, radar detection, and vehicle autonomy, which he later applied as an executive at Argo AI, Ford and VW's self-driving car unit. Roy also reflects on the evolution of the Cannonball Run, noting the impact of technological advancements and the potential for autonomous vehicles to set future records. (46:06) - Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport, a leading logistics and supply chain management company, discusses the challenges posed by recent U.S. tariffs on global trade. He highlights the complexities businesses face due to rapidly changing tariff policies, making supply chain planning difficult. Petersen also notes that while some companies have shifted production to countries like Vietnam to avoid tariffs, these regions have also been affected, leading to further uncertainty. (01:13:59) - Jonathon Barkl, co-founder and CEO of AirGarage, discusses how his company partners with real estate owners to modernize parking facilities by implementing technology-driven solutions that enhance user experience and increase revenue. He highlights AirGarage's growth to over 300 locations across 38 states, emphasizing their ability to boost net operating income for property owners by 20 to 50% through services like payments, advertising, enforcement, and data analytics. Barkl also addresses the challenges posed by traditional parking systems and competitors, underscoring AirGarage's commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction. (01:30:03) - Timeline Reactions (01:39:16) - Jacob Glanville, PhD, is a computational immunoengineer and serial entrepreneur, known for founding Distributed Bio and Centivax, where he serves as CEO. In the conversation, he discusses Centivax's development of a universal flu vaccine aiming for 80-95% efficacy, supported by nearly $100 million in funding, and a universal antivenom derived from antibodies of Tim Friede, who self-immunized against multiple snake species. (01:51:53) - Craig Piggott, founder and CEO of Halter, discusses how his company is revolutionizing livestock management by replacing traditional fencing with solar-powered collars that guide cattle using sound and vibration cues, allowing farmers to control and monitor their herds remotely via a mobile app. This innovation addresses labor shortages in farming by automating tasks, enabling more precise operations, and freeing up time for farmers to focus on other essential activities. Piggott also highlights Halter's significant growth, with operations in New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S., managing hundreds of thousands of cows across over a thousand farms, and achieving a valuation of $1.65 billion following a recent $165 million Series D funding round. (02:00:19) - Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Groq, discusses the company's development of Language Processing Units (LPUs) designed to accelerate AI inference tasks with greater speed and efficiency compared to traditional GPUs. He highlights Groq's unique chip architecture, which eliminates external memory to reduce latency and energy consumption, and emphasizes the importance of software optimization in achieving competitive performance. Ross also shares insights into Groq's rapid deployment of data centers, strategic partnerships, and the company's vision to capture a significant share of the global AI inference market by deploying over a million processors. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. We started 11 a.m. sharp with this show. No technical difficulties. No one can stop us from streaming. No one can stop us from podcast. Bad day if you didn't want us to podcast. Yeah. They said we couldn't do it.

They said we couldn't get through some minor technical difficulties. But we did. And we're live, baby. We're not sure exactly the cause could have been a sophisticated state actor. Could have been super intelligence. Gone rogue. They know that we're the last thing standing between. Humanity.

People say this. The last jobs would be live streamer. AI thumbnail artist. Thumbail artist. Those are actually the only two things. Eventually, the AI research will just be automated as well. Yeah, exactly. Anyways, speaking of AI research, we have a ton of stories in the AI, in the AI trade deal world.

The biggest one is that Zuckerberg continues to be in a tear. Meta snatches Apple's AI chief. They went and poached from Open AI. Mark is poaching from Apple, 10 million plus pay packages of the rumor as super intelligence hires mount. Röming Pang, who led Apple's 100-person foundation models team, is leaving for meta-superintelligence group amid growing internal turmoil at Apple over its AI strategy. We've talked about this a bunch.

Pong or Pang, I'm not exactly sure to pronounce that, joins a wave of top-tier hires from Mark Zuckerberg, including Alexander Wang, Nat Friedman, ex-anthropic, and Open AI researchers lured by multi-million dollar compensation and personal recruiting pitches from Zuckerberg himself. Phone calls. And we talked about this with, uh, with Dworkesh yesterday. He's still, he's still like, they're underpaying them. Like, it's so valuable. And so, yeah, the numbers are staggering. But if you're a multi-trillion dollar company, how are you, how is the board, how are the shareholders not okay with you, or like, okay with you not offering like top dollar to actually get the best talent. Maybe we should pull up the chart of the mag seven, see how the different companies are

doing. The big tech companies doing it. And yeah, the other thing here, remember. Second to last. And Zuck is in founder mode. He's, he's acting like he's on top of that chart. He's acting like he wants to be on the top of that chart. That's right. So I think that's what he's doing. And if you remember Apple's MLX team, a group of people almost left only that's right. A little bit ago and Apple had to renegotiate their contract. I remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Weren't able to retain Pang, Pong. Yeah. But.

And yeah, this team was once central to Apple Intelligence, now faces a major Reorg under Z Fang Chen as more engineers eye the exits. They got to figure out the comp structure at Apple. I bet that they're thinking about this now. Well, Mark German has a post here. We're back to printing posts, folks. He says, this is one of the most significant AI job changes since the beginning of the generative AI era.

Started a few years ago. Ruming is Apple's most respected AI researcher and engineer, and his departure amid Apple's AI turmoil could have a reverberating impact breaking Apple's top executive and distinguishing engineer. And of course, there was a jokey post from Gabe, who says Apple's top executive in charge of AI is leaving for Meadows Group. And Gabe says, bearish for both companies. Very rude.

This is obviously a very talented individual. Well, really quickly, let me tell you about. Ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com. And then speaking of OpenAI, D.D. D.D. D.D. D.D.D.D.A.A. Pade. A. Pade. Payed an average of $733,000 per year across 6,000 employees in stock, nearly three times every single other public company. That means stock compensation. Yes. was at 119% of revenue.

Yes. So this is non-cash compensation. So it's not putting them in, you know, disastrous financial condition. But there is a lot of dilution there. And I'm sure investors are thinking about that. And what's interesting is that the information is an article that comps how the stock-based compensation at Open AI tracks with other major companies. So at OpenAI, they're making, they spent $4.4 billion.

on stock-based compensation. That's 119% of total revenue. At Google, before the IPO, Google was spending 16% of revenue on stock-based compensation. Facebook was only spending 6% of revenue. So the delta between how much more R&D they have to do, how much more salary do they have to pay before the revenue

catches up? It's not just stock-based comp, too. It's everything going into training. It's very expensive. Yeah. I mean, everyone posts that, like, here are the Google financials, every VC, Ev Randall's posted this before from Kleiner, saying like, oh, I just want just one Google in my portfolio because the company was incredibly financially stable, even pre-IPO, like within the first few years. It was like everything looked great, like amazing revenue growth, all the costs were under control, cash flow, like everything was great. The meme was that they were spending on crazy food and perks.

massages because they wanted to be. We're like, hey, we don't want people to think we're too much of a monopoly. The thing here that does make sense is, you know, Open AI is the first real credible threat to Google search monopoly. And it makes sense that in order to compete with a multi-trillion dollar company, you're going to have to not necessarily act like a five-year-old company. You're going to have to spend in a bunch of these different, you know, categories. well beyond what a traditional stuff.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. It's like it's a new category like LLM chat interface, but every Mag 7 company is threatened by you. And so they're all like, I'm going to pay so much to fight. And even if that's, even if the like the aggregation theory and the default app of open AI and chat GPT on the home row,

like even if that's not really that much at risk, it's just distorting the hiring market and you've got to hire people. Yeah, and some people were calling it too, that Open AI, while it serves as a functional tool for a lot of people, it's also serving as this social product as well. And people are spending many hours in the app on a daily basis, and that becomes a threat to meta. So purely from meta wanting to, they're competing for consumer attention, right? And so. Yeah. And I mean, the same dynamic plays out in the GPU market. If there's a massive capital war for GPUs,

and Vidiya's supply constraint, the price goes up, and that's what's driving the cost of all these GPUs way up. Open AI is forecasted to spend $6 billion this year with compute costs and talent retention has become expensive. As inference itself, investors now face mounting dilution risks, plus the wildcard of potential Elon Musk settlement.

So there's a lot going on over there. Anyway, let me tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free. Figma.com. If you're not on Figma already, what are you doing?

What are you doing? What are you doing? Well, you're probably not working at Jane Street. Jane Street is $4.3 billion India Options Trade Triggers Market Ban and Crackdown. Jane Street was like, you know what? We need another PR crisis. We got the apology form here. You got the apology form to Jane Street Capital.

Why were you hating on Jane Street? I thought Indian regulators were like, good. I never actually looked at the Indian options market. Look, that South Sudan thing kind of shook me, and I had a moment of weakness. I have a poor understanding of what counts as arbitrage. Wait, what are options again? I just like dunking on prop trading firms. And then at the end, you sign, I hereby respect Jane Street Capital and will not talk down

on the future first ballot Hall of Famer. Great post from Hallis at Just Plan. Yes, fantastic. And so, Matt Levine has the breakdown here. Matt Levine broke it down, but also was getting tremendous pushback on his post. People were accusing him of being in the pocket of big Jane Street. High frequency trading, big high frequency trading. Well, here's the high level in the story.

So a secretive arbitrage strategy that netted Jane Street, $4.3 billion in India's booming options market, has now led to a trading ban and a $570 million seizure order by India's security regulator, S-EBI. the firm allegedly manipulated the Nifty Bank Index by moving thinly traded underlying stocks to profit off of a far larger options positions, trading up to more up to 7.3 times more in derivatives than cash, while SEB frames it as extending marking the close. Jane Street calls it textbook arbitrage, exploiting a massive price gap between overhyped options and underpriced stocks. SEBI launched the probe after Jane Street's lawsuit with Millennium exposed the strategy's existence, the Indian markets imbalance where options trading volume can exceed underlying stocks, cash stocks,

353 to 1 left retail traders vulnerable and regulators on edge. I had no idea that options were so popular in India. I had no idea. Yeah. James Street did not want anyone to know about this. Basically what happened was there was a few traders at Jane Street that discovered this strategy. They were studying the Indian market. They realized that there was this massive, massive options market relative to the underlying stocks.

And so there's an opportunity to arbitrage by buying certain, buying the derivatives and selling the stocks or vice versa. And so getting tricky at the close. Yeah. So they were. And what happened, at least some of that initial group that discovered this trade and were executing it went to millennium. Then Jane Street sued millennium for trade secrets. And through the lawsuit, everybody was being very vague about the details. No, no, not everyone.

Just Jane Street was. Jane Street was like, we were operating a unique strategy. which we won't tell you about in redacted market. They didn't even want to say India. Then Millennium gets in the courtroom and is like, oh, our India strategy where we do exactly this. And the Millennium lawyers are like, we, this here's exactly what we did.

And then the Indian regulators are like, wait, both of these firms are trying to do this over here. Like, get out of here. It is interesting that the regulators had to discover this through the courts. Yeah. In America. Yeah, yeah. Not their own.

You wouldn't really notice it because it's just like, oh, okay. These two assets are, you know, pushing closer to alignment in terms of value. Basically saying, Your Honor, it's called finesse. It's called finesse. Well, speaking of finesse, nothing has more finesse than Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vantor'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. It's time to SOC too. It's time to sock too. In other news, Sean McGuire, friend of the show, multiple-time guest, is in hot water with, I don't know, the left, I guess. He is being attacked for attacking Mamdani, the Democrat nominee for mayor of New York City. Pavel Asperuhov, also a friend of the show, has a case study here. Let's pull up the polymarket, by the way. Oh, yeah, yeah, I want to see that.

So people are calling for Sean McGuire. to either be disciplined or step down or leave Sequoia. But the polymarket has it at 17%. It seems unlikely. And there is a website that people are signing calling for that. It's like Sean McGuire. X, Y, Z or something like that. And yeah, anyways, if you want to kind of cover it.

So Pavel says, this is an interesting case study in media being clearly disconnected from the cultural pendulum. This is obviously not going to result in any sort of action from Sequoia. And if you had any pulse on things, you would know that. And so Sean McGuire rides on and is continuing. Yeah, I don't see anything happening here. It's not been a few times. He probably regrets the way in which he phrased the initial post yet.

He made a 30-minute video explaining it. I'm sure way more people saw the original post than saw the video. Yep. But, yeah, hoping everybody can resolve. their differences. And yeah, I don't see him. I don't see him going anywhere. I think he, um, there was a similar call to, to push him out of Sequoia during the Trump stuff. Because he was like the first major Sequoia partner to really be vocal about supporting Trump. And there was some backlash to that. There's some questions about whether or not

Sequoia would have his back there. And they did. And so we'll see how it goes. But, um, seems like he's, he's, he's, I think he's enjoying the fight online. He likes a good, he likes a good fight online. He enjoys it. Wrestling in the mud. He's wrestling in the mud for sure. Anyway, let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. In other news, Replit and Microsoft are bringing vibe coding to Azure. This is an exciting deal. Bringing it to the enterprise low-code platform, Replit will integrate directly with Azure container apps and neon serverless Postgres, letting Enterprise employees build tests and ship software

by simply describing it in natural language. Microsoft customers can soon buy Replit seats through the Azure Marketplace and deploy to manage Azure infrastructure, marrying Replitt's Agenda Code Generator with Microsoft's compliance and governance stack. Replit already counts 500,000 business owners and says the deal makes anyone in the org a developer.

So Amjad has been on an absolute tear, tons of bottoms-up adoption from business owners. And I'm excited to see. He's also been really good at working with, with the hyperscalers. Like he had an early Google deal. Now he's got a Microsoft deal. Somehow he's made both of those deals work,

which is interesting because typically, they're like, if we go with you, we want you to stick with us only. But Microsoft's taken this very agnostic approach to they serve everything from OpenAI to GROC and then they'll also serve Lama and they'll also serve Deepseek. Microsoft really wants to provide every possible model, every possible endpoint for AI so that you stay on Azure

and you can use everything you want. So very excited for Amjad to be teaming up with Microsoft. Very exciting stuff. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, back in the mix. He is watching a new- BIT chat, a Bluetooth-only WhatsApp rival. Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey spent the holiday weekend coding BitChat

and an open source messenger that passes end-to-end encrypted text over Bluetooth or local Wi-Fi. No SIM card. data plan or account required. The test flight beta and white paper promise off-grid comms at concerts, protests, or disaster zones, and cites Apple's airdrop bands as motivation. Although early, the peer-to-peer architecture taps the same Noster Protocol, Dorsey, Champions, and its decentralized social vision.

So good to see one of the all-time grates back coding on a weekend shipping. People are also, you can, I'm sure it would guess this, but leveraging BitChats, Bitcoin support, sending Bitcoin back and forth. So it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, excited to have them back in the game. Well, if you're selling stuff on the internet, you've got to head over numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

In other news, TSA has begun letting travelers keep their shoes on. You had a good take on this, Jordi. Yeah, what is the ROI on precheck? I think it's very low. It was the shoes line. Yeah. There was the shoe line. Well, it was, you didn't have to take off your shoes, but you waited for a longer

line like 80% of the time. Because so many people had pre-checked that the line would often be longer. It felt like that's only been in the last like year and a half. Sure, sure. But now it's like you pay, you wait in a longer line, and you still take off your, you still leave your shoes on just like every other line. So, but it's crazy. It's been 18 years.

I remember when they rolled this out. It was not because of 9-11, actually. It was because post-9-11, there was a, a shoe bomber who tried a guy who puts explosives in his shoes and tried to light it on a plane and then everyone got freaked out about shoes but it was like this freak thing it didn't actually result that he wasn't successful but it was still very like visceral and scary and crazy it was like oh if there could be a bomb in your shoe you have to check the shoes but throwing the shoes through the x-ray doesn't really detect I think like the bomb material I think that's why they swipe now

so the the the residue is actually more important but they're replacing this with a bunch of CT scanners, AI threat detection software. There's a whole bunch of stuff that can screen footwell with footwear without unclasping it. So it's a phase policy. It's already live at airports from LAX to Baltimore should reach all standard lines nationwide by late July. I'm excited to see TSAs go to market on this. I want to see their efficiency.

It's great to see they're already in testing in some markets. Here is the here is the value prop for precheck. Precheck is now pushing a more like clear experience where it's touchless and you don't need your ID or your boarding pass. So you just scan your biometrics, either your fingerprint or your eyes, something like that. Interesting. I'm sure the schizophrenia will love that.

Yeah, the CEO of Clear is on Invest, like the best as of I think this morning. And a cool story, I guess she bought it out of bankruptcy for like $6 million. I haven't had a chance to listen to the full episode yet and turned it into a monster. That's very cool. Well, let me tell you about Adio.

Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. In other news, Unilever partnered with Nvidia to generate a ton of AI ads and actually worked pretty well. They got 3.5 billion social impressions and they did some sort of collab with crumble cookies and then they generated a ton of images. Is it crumble flavored soap? I don't know. It's scented. But basically they were able to send every influencer that they work with a ton of different variations. Just say like here's here's a thousand assets and a thousand taglines pick whatever you want. None of these overlap with anyone else.

Interesting. And so for someone like Unilever that's just like trying to just like blanket TikTok with stuff, it like worked really, really well. I had a funny incident with a portfolio company once where I was I said they were doing a launch or a fundraise announcement. And I was like, try drafting some tax for your investors. so they know how to position the product and things like that, right? Because oftentimes one of the things that will just hold an investor back from sharing is not knowing just like the work to draft the post that makes sense. And they made like 20 or 30 different lines, but they gave them to everybody.

So a lot of people use the same line. So bad. Rookie mistake. Yeah, it happens. Rookie mistake. Don't do it. And in other news, SWIC says a story here that the new version of Chrome, Google Chrome, They're on version 138.

You've got to ring the gong for the Chrome team. They are now shipping Gemini Nano for every user, so you'll have a local LLM in the web browser that in theory, web apps will be able to interact with. So you'll be able to go to a web app, and if they're in Chrome, they will assume that there's an LLM available, which is very cool. Have you noticed AI mode on Google?

That's rolling out, yeah. I haven't used it in the U.S., but it's going to be the default in India. Interesting. So Sundar announced that today. Basically, I think that's because the ARPU in India is lower and so that they can risk. Yeah, they can risk losing a little bit of AdSense revenue while they adjust and figure out how they monetize the AI search.

How to put some ads in that bad boy. They're going to put a lot of ads. They already are, but I'm sure that the monetization rate is lower in AI search mode, in AI mode. And so they need to roll it out to a really big audience. India has a billion people, right? Tons of them use Google. It's an interesting ad unit.

I don't think this will be something that's permanent, but you can imagine in a free LLM, it takes a little bit longer to inference the query. And you could imagine that's an ad, just put an ad basically while you're waiting. That's a good idea. And then it's like, hey, if you want it faster or instantly, you can pay effectively.

Well, speaking of AI, fin. com.A.I. is the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. You can start a free trial. We've said this. Before, we'll say it again.

Don't get, don't even try to get in a bakeoff with Finn. It's going to be a disaster for you. Well, our first guest is here. We've been keeping him waiting because of our technical difficulties, but we have Alex Roy, someone that I'm very excited to talk to. Welcome to the stream.

How are you doing? What's going on? Welcome. Thanks for having me. Huge fan of the show. I really appreciate. You brought me howls of the light when you booked Sohan last week.

24 hours after the story broke. I'm like, you guys are next gen media. It's fantastic. That's amazing. That's amazing. For those who don't know you, can you introduce yourself a little bit of your history, but also I want to talk about what you're up to now. And then I'm sure we'll have a bunch of questions all over the place.

I'm excited for this intro too because we had another friend of the show last week. He said, I had a non-traditional background for venture, venture. And then he goes on to say that he was like a product, product manager and big tech. which is fairly traditional yeah certainly more traditional but i feel like you did have a non-traditional background so so take us through it uh 20 years ago i was really into street racing and i was obsessed with the history of the cannonball run this illegal race cross country in the 70s and uh and so but as a startup guy i decided if i was going to break the record i had to approach like a startup so i wrote like a business plan as if it was a startup the competitive landscape was 18 000 700 launch

enforcement agencies and the terrain and the road conditions. The SWAT analysis. Yeah. But you're actually worried about SWAT. And so I ended up using everything off the shelf. One could use in 05 for mapping. So you know, Google maps didn't exist. Google Earth had just gone public.

So I was using Google Earth and its back end tools to figure out, you know, how to plan the drive. Drove cross country a couple of times at a practice had a, had a. thermal camera, I salvage from a old Cadillac, and, you know, laser jammers, radar detectors, everything one could have. And then created a map of the police locations, dropped it into a Garmin, and then inserted it into Google Earth to play on the drive. Because of Google Earth, so we stay time, but in the practice run, it's two-thirds at night. And so plotted latitude, longitude of every potential police trap. And spotter plane, triple redundant communications, the whole thing broke the record. Wrote a book about it. And, and, you know,

And turns out, and I didn't know this, the DARPA challenges were happening at that time. And so I got when, as soon as Wired Magazine did a story about our Cannonball Drive, I got outreach from all these DARPA teams. And it was all the same thing. And so, Roy, you're using radar, lidar jamming, mapping, everything we use. You're just selfish and only not trying to help anyone but yourself. And we're trying to make roads safer. And so I became out of that an angel investor in like autonomy and mapping.

And then I watched a podcast about AVs and EVs, because that's the future. And eventually I got recruited to join Argo AI, which was Ford and VW's self-driving car unit, where I was an executive for four years. And so little did I know that everything I was doing to try to drive cross-country as fast as possible was directly relevant to investing in the future of road safety makes no sense. That's amazing. Yeah. For those who might not be super familiar with the cannonball run, can you explain Red Ball

Portafino, the history, and kind of where it went now and kind of the current status of the, I mean, it's still illegal, but people are doing it. There's these, there's these like delays. I see Vinwiki videos like, oh yeah, a year ago I did this run. Like what's the current culture and and like status of the cannonball? So, you know, the unknown, forgotten history of the cannonball is that a hundred years ago, car companies didn't have to market, you know, internal combustion cars. So they hired this guy named Erwin Baker, who was a motorcycle racer.

to drive from New York, California as fast as possible, no gas stations, no highways. And every few months, a car would come out with a slightly larger gas tank or slightly better fuel economy, and he would go again. And so he went from the record, his first record, I think, was weeks, and eventually cut it down to, you know, something, I don't even remember it. He did 141 records across country. But that's how you marketed internal combustion back then to prove that it was more efficient than trains and cleaner than horses.

And as the interstate highway system was built out and, you know, speed limits arrived, the cannibal culture just evaporated. But what is largely unknown is that it was Coca-Cola that underwrote the creation of local and eventually regional gas stations and which unlocked iterations in better speeds for Baker. And so if you go forward 100 years, you could kind of look at electric cars today. as more Tesla supercharges were built, it unlocked electric cannonball records and in the future we'll have other records. Today, there are maybe 100 or so people in a Facebook group, the Cannonballers group,

myself, Ed Bowling from Vin Wiki, who broke my record, Arnie Toman, who said it during COVID. And, you know, people go on solo runs and occasionally there's a multi-car run. But the modern history is almost entirely based on the legacy of Brock Yates. He was a very libertarian editor for car and driver.

And from 71 or 79, he operated a full-on illegal multi-car race. And when it got covered in Time Magazine in 75 or 76, it got a lot of attention in the last one in 79 then led to the movie. And that was the end of cannonballing in an organized fashion. It lives on today at the Cannonballers Group. Yeah, what is the, what do you think is next for Cannonball? Do you think people are going to try?

try and get creative with the EV challenges because that feels like almost an entirely new dynamic. But then also, if you could explain kind of the idea of like a COVID run and how that might make it kind of impossible to ever reset the record. I don't know what your take is on that, but just giving a little bit of that history because it is fascinating. So, you know, the traditionalist group is, you know, multiple cars and thermal combustion as fast as you can. Yeah.

And I did it in 31 hours. in 2006. And then I was the, our team was the first team to break it like 25 years. And then eight years later, Ed Boling did it in 2850. And then Arnie Tollman arrived during COVID with his team and did it in like 2530ish. Yeah. So, you know, it is since the COVID record. What, what were they driving?

Arnie was in an Audi RS6 disguised as a four tourist police car. Ed Bowling was in a Mercedes C.F. 55 I think I was in a BNWW M5 disguised as a storm chaser tornado research vehicle it's a lot of S63s E 63s that type of car I mean there aren't many American cars that could do it today would be like a Cadillac CET5 Black Wing Oh that's what John drives I have one great great car fantastic perfect if they could just lift the speed restriction of the wait are you in New York right now I'm in Scots I'm in Scotts I'm in Scots oh okay okay well I'll see it in like two hours then

You could. So the So, you know, I looked at the history of Cannibal, but as an investor, I was studying the history of the Cannibal because understanding how gas station networks were financed and built and monetized and eventually made profitable, I was like looking at EV charging network business. I'm like, well, how does that, have they learned anything from 100 years ago? And the answer is no, they didn't.

And so, you know, the lack of infrastructure and the lack of infrastructure and the lack of of reliable infrastructure with uptime. It was a huge Achilles heel for the EV industry. And only Tesla figured this out early. And so looking at Cannibal Baker, I'm like, well, why couldn't I be the Cannibal Baker of EVs? And Aves eventually. So in 2014-15, started doing electric records.

Tesla was the only vehicle at the time capable of setting these records because of the charging network. And recently, I began looking at, you know, Lucids and Porsche Tycons and those are the only vehicles that could break the Tesla record and recently a Porsche Tycon second generation became the first car to break the Tesla electric record in 39 something and what and and what goes into a great EV for breaking a cannonball record is it just total capacity of the battery or ability to sustain high speeds for a long time and battery swapping battery swapping seems like logical but none of the cars have that stock, so I don't know how you do that.

Like a fuel cell is common in a gas car, but is there an equivalent in? Yeah, I'm also curious, what other tech would you use today? Would you use a network of drones? I can imagine you could potentially have thousands of drones spread out. Well, this is where cannonball history and record breaking overlaps with investing in defense.

Because if you understand the history of like radar detection and laser, speed measurement and laser jamming, it's all analogous and they are literally parallel tech in defense. And so the electric records up until recently, because the power density of the batteries is less than a fuel tank full of gas, your speeds were basically limited to the optimal cruising speed of an EV, which is in the 70s. And then you have the issue of the charging networks. So there's nothing you can really do to a pure EV today. There's not much you can do to increase their efficiency and you certainly can't increase their speed without eating into your battery state of

charge. But everything comes down to the charging networks. So when Tesla, you know, when their network was 150 kilowatt across the board, your maximum time cross country with an X. When they went to 250, you cut a little time off that. What's so fascinating about the recent portion Tycon record is the Tycon's EPA range is less than a Model S long range, which is what I drive. However, the Electrovi America network, which was a terrible charge network for years, went through upgrades recently. And if you buy the cheapest Porsche of Tycoon with a big battery option in its lightest weight configuration, rear wheel drive only, and you can charge at Electrify America at speeds that

or faster than any Tesla, the cliff in the Porsche battery will let you go at the max charge rate all slightly beyond 50%. Whereas at Tesla, the first cliff is at 20%. So that's how the Tycon did it. Less battery range, faster charging deeper into the battery. That's the trick. Alucid today is the longest range EV you can buy, but it does not, its battery chemistry is not designed for what the Porsche is. And so for the time being, Porsche will hold the record. I think the next generation, Tesla or Lucid, could take it. Talk about EV, the state of EV charging networks today, coverage, you know, our networks holding back EVs at all. We live in California. There seems to be plenty of EV chargers around. Doesn't seem to be any type of bottleneck, but I'm curious nationally.

Well, I think that the non-Tusla charging network, regardless of its ubiquity, has a lot of issues with handshaking and seamless payments and just hook up to your car. Tesla figured this out, you know, out of the gate. Like, it has to be frictionless or people are not going to want to do it. And so the American EV charge industry still has a lot of work to do. And even if they do, the non-Tesslas is on the road. I mean, we have Rivian, Lucid, and the Porsche of Tycon. Those are all great, great models. But other than that, there isn't like an amazing EVE product from any other American

OEM. I mean, some of the Hyundai's are good. And so you need both half the equation. This is where the Chinese is so strong because the vehicle hardware and software and infrastructure is all very good, dangerously good for us. Can you talk about, it's kind of surprising to meet someone who's taken, you know, traditional combustion engine car so serious. to the limit and then be interested in EVs.

I feel like a lot of the traditional car guys, I would never. They're purest. So what excites you about EVs broadly? And then what do you think about the current state, the change to the EV incentives that are going on right now? How does the outlook look, you know, with Elon, like the Tesla sales are kind of dropping, but that's for a variety of reasons from everything from like political to exports to China

to, you know, their late last. refresh cycle. There's so many different things going on. So what excites you about EVs and where do you see it going? Well, I'm, you know, I'm, I think I'm very American in that. Like, I'm totally agnostic in technology. Like, what is the coolest, best, newest thing? Are we making it? Let's try it. And if someone else is making it, we should make it. Like, that's just, that's it. This country became great by innovating and exporting. So I don't care how something works as long as it's really great product. Yeah. So, you know, the EV tax credit expiring, I think it's September.

Yep, September 30. It's going to, it's not, it's not awesome if you're an American car company selling EVs. And it's going to certainly slow rate of adoption because prices will go up. But the real question is, you know, how do we depoliticize technologies from our internal American discourse such that the United States, long term can compete in export markets. I don't really care about the political opinions of who developed a certain technology, because we need to create jobs here and be exporting stuff outside the U.S. And the Chinese are going to kill us long term in the EV market if we don't get on board.

So the EV tax credit expiring sucks, but it's a minor piece in the holistic system that we need to be debating and executing on. And I recently met a woman, Elaine Zizinski, from the foundation for American democracy. She said, we need a Pentagon for industrial policy. There doesn't need to be, you know, verticalized, monolithic, you know, command economy, but it needs to be a little less chaotic

and more focused than we've been. And I think that's really essential, really, really essential. How do we solve the depreciation problem with EVs? I think it's for the consumer frustration of, like, let's say you buy a model Y, drive it for nine months, and suddenly it's worth half of what you paid. I don't know if there is a solution to that. Probably the best solution is we need to be investing in EVs and supply chain

such that we can bring cost down such that there isn't such a huge delta between the new cost and the depreciation. And it's, I mean, all cars depreciate to some extent. EVs more so. I mean, the great news for a lot of Americans is that use EVs are really cheap. A lot of them are great. I mean, you Tesas are fantastic. I mean, assuming you, well, don't buy an old Model S,

but everything else is fantastic. Yeah. Where are you seeing opportunities to invest in or alongside the EV trend? There's so many different parts in the supply chain. There's so many different adjacent products that an EV buyer, if you're not going and funding like the next Rivian or the next Lucid, where do you see opportunities for founders? Well, you know, I, you know, automotive,

is a very small part of my fund, new industry, venture capital. I mean, a lot of the, the biggest bets mostly had been taken. And they're very expensive. You know, I think most of the opportunities are in manufacturing and in energy. However, there is,

I mean, we only do deep tech, but outside deep tech, there are a lot of opportunities adjacent to transportation and EVs and especially AVs. When people talk about job loss, you know, due to driverless vehicles, I think they,

are missing the big long-term picture. There is a universe of startups that don't exist yet, not even barely in conversation over dinner, for providing services for passengers in autonomous vehicles. You know, my mother, you know, she's older and she has some issues with shopping. She would love to have an attendant or someone just to go with her on trips to go shopping. Like where is the Uber for elder elder care? That would, it's a startup that's adjacent to Uber and Waymo that figures out how to connect them and has a supply of people who can do that. Most people who are driving Uber probably shouldn't be just from a safety standpoint, but they'd probably be very good at helping people.

And there's a much better long-term opportunity, an employment opportunity for that role than there was for driving cars. Now, I'd also add that the fear and concern and the politicization of driverless tech doesn't track with the history of automation and other other verticals. You know, we used to have 100% penetration of elevator operators in this country. And we went from 100% in 1946 to 1% in like about 1970. But the total number of people employed by the elevator industry is bigger today than it was ever. Interesting. Because elevators will always be a business, but there's other roles around the elevator industry. That's true of transportation. So I just don't buy any of the panic and doom

that company's new tech at all. What about go-to-markets, the race between Waymo and Tesla, obviously very different, you know, approaches in terms of, you know, fleet development. But I'm curious how you're seeing that race. So the race, I mean, I used to like to say there isn't a race in AV because there'll be multiple winners. No one can name an elevator company other than Otis. But there are the big five elevator companies on Earth. They are all big. So in AV, Waymo and Tesla are both going to have products.

And the people who claim one will win that is destroyed, it's absurd. But the real race is, you know, can Waymo develop a business model outside of Robotaxies before Tesla can generate a business at scale in Robotaxies? Because Waymo is not in the personal ownership business. And Tesla is barely in Robotaxi at all. So Waymo needs to get into the licensing business and probably miniaturize their hardware such that it can conform to and become invisible on passenger cars. If Ford or anyone else had Waymo Tech inside, if they could do that now, I mean, Tesla's in a tight spot. But Tesla's got the opposite problem.

They've got to deploy a perceptibly safe system because no one knows what safety means. And get to the Robotaxi business at scale with all the friction unique to their business model. before Waymo can invade their space. But ultimately, you're going to have three, four, five companies competing in AV tech. We're just seeing growing pains in both companies executing on different business models. And that's going to play out. They'll both have their place. Last question for me, at least.

I'm interested in you compared the cannonball run to building a startup business plan. What do you think about the actual activity of racing in a cannonball, that idea of risk taking of the stress on your body and founding a company. Have you found any analogies between the two? Well, you know, the can't, when you actually years of planning going to a cannonball drive and then it's over in, you know, sub 30 hours. I don't know of anything in, except maybe like an emergency product deployment. That's stressful, physically stressful. But every other component of it is similar. And in that way, the cannonball is more similar to, say, a deployment of a prototype in a defense scenario for the first time.

And you have, you got to deploy it. It may not be ready. You don't know. You spend years developing it. It's go time. That's the closest analog. And I spent a lot of time with law enforcement and defense folks today. And I'm constantly amazed that they find what I did so interesting because to me, it's,

nowhere near as interesting as what they do. But then when you start talking about laser jamming and communications and mapping, you know, you know, aircraft transponders to mask your location, and then I'm like, yes, conceptually it is all the same thing. I would also remark that there's something profoundly American about the cannonball, which I think points to like the spirit of innovation. It is unique to the United States, but that drives American dynamism, which is that whatever the rules are, how far beyond them can we go successfully without hurting anyone?

Let's go, let's find out. And that is the opposite mindset of a lot of founders from other countries and sadly Europe. Yep. No, that makes sense. Last question for me, the CEO of Ford was recently making some comments. One, basically talking about white collar work broadly, which felt more like he was just parroting, you know, maybe. V. Dario or something like that. But on the other side, he's been very outspoken about how innovative, you know, Chinese EV manufacturers have been at multiple different kind of touch points. Do you think that American car manufacturers outside of Tesla have the will to start to innovate at the level of some of these Chinese EVs? Well, I know Farley. And to his credit, after I set my last electric cannibal record,

And at Tesla, he invited me to dinner. He sat next to me and grilled me on everything about Tesla Model 3. So he's good leader. He's on it. And the Machi reflects some of those lessons. Yeah, the Machi, my buddy, my neighbor has a mocky rally. And it's a great wild car. Good.

Look, you know, the Chinese car market has been, There for anyone to see who wanted to go over there and do competitive intelligence for years. And the same thing's happening now as happened in the 70s when the Japanese arrived in the United States. People weren't paying attention because like, oh, they can't innovate. They don't know what they're doing. That's Y and Z. Well, guess what? They did.

And the cars are great. And friends of mine, Kevin Williamson's a journalist who went to China and has driven everything. He's like the cars are better than anything sold here, even Tesla, because they're built better than Tesla's. So we've got a problem. The only companies that are really have an opportunity in the near to midterm are, you know, Lucid and Rivian and Tesla from the United States. The other, the legacy OEMs have individual models that are okay, Mackey, you know, okay. I don't know what's coming, what GM's got, but the real question is what could be exported to any other country to compete with a Chinese car in that market. And the answer right now is, other than Tesla, basically nothing.

Lucid stands alone because it's a luxury model. It's really good. And Rivians are very cool because the products are great. But we are in a tight spot. And we need to, whatever your politics are, the United States needs to have national champions that are exporting. We should be talking about Tesla versus Waymo. We should be talking about Tesla and Waymo

and exporting the hell of anything we can that employs Americans here that are great products that then support the American soft power narrative for the rest of the century. Yeah, that's great. Great answer. I completely agree. Thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah, we got to do this again soon.

This is super fun. Anytime, guys. Love you. Thanks so much for hopping on. Cheers, Alex. Well, if you have an opinion about a public car company, get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields.

I still remember the day when figure was allegedly getting valued north of Ford Motors. Well, yeah. If you want to rotate into Ford, you can do it on. public if you want to rotate out of Ford you can also do that on public this isn't financial advice here on the show we just never you the facts and the next fact is that Ryan Peterson for Flexport is joining the stream in any minute now Ryan how you doing I just threw me in here I'm eating food I didn't realize it's okay surprise what are you having for lunch we've been under attack today so the stream's been late

it looks like Chinese food but it's a fancy salad who nice is that Blue Barn yes Oh, Blue Byrne's fantastic. Great spot. Anyway, what is new in your world? Can you give us the update? We live through the tariffs. We checked in with you a few times. Give us the temperature check on where we are with tariffs, global trade broadly in your business. There's no strategy with the tariffs. They're purely to torture Ryan Peterson. All caps. We're learning how to read and write in all caps all over again. And someone said the art of letter writing was dead. And then Trump just proved us all wrong. You know, he's writing letters to national, to countries with really amazing capitalization standards.

Yeah. But he's dictated. He would just call you Mr. Flexport. The best part is that he's dictating because he doesn't type himself. So he's telling them, no, like capitalized tariff and capitalized country. Yeah. And old caps for trade. Certainly has a certain aesthetic to it.

It's a yeah, whether there's a strategy to it or not is a really good open question because we got new tariffs that are above like on our allies, Japan and 25% tariff. I don't know. I couldn't tell you what the plan is there, but it's everyday new things basically. Yeah, what about what about just the general mood of customers, the flow of shipments? I mean, initially, it was like, you know, the boats are sitting at the port not moving because people are just terrified. We heard about, you know, iPhones going in the bellies of 747s on rush flights to get out of the airport, like minutes before the tariffs went into effect. Has there been any more clarity?

Are we in some sort of return to normalcy where at least CEOs can feel like they can plan ahead for what's coming? Or is it just as much uncertainty? It's, you know, today's the day. So the terrorists are the 90-day reciprocal tariffs came out and they were paused for 90 days, 90 days ago today. So they are going, unless something is announced, which he announced like six or eight countries yesterday with their new tariff rate. But everybody else, that's happening today. They'll go back to the 90-day, to the original rates from April 2nd that freaked everybody out. tonight at midnight.

Now, then I believe he tweeted earlier today, or True Social, that it'll be on August 1st that those new duties are due. So there probably will be a bit of a race here for the next three weeks to try to get stuff in at the 10% rate instead of the higher rates that's coming back. The thing that freaked everybody out 90 days ago was more the China rate, which was 145%. And that's come back down to 30 and people are kind of like okay with it. I don't know. We'll take the temperature here and we'll see what happens with freight bookings.

But things seem kind of normal, the customer base. But we haven't got enough data yet. I mean, there's brand new information, the new rates that came out yesterday that are going to go into effect in the next couple weeks. Just as a little extra data. Right now, the S&P and NASDAQ are basically flat. But copper prices have hit all time high on this plan 50% tariff. I am interested in China. I remember when you were explaining the native.

the tariff, there were a few different elements. You were talking about the energy prices into China, basically being passed through. I believe that was a tariff on oil that then was getting passed through to the cost of goods in some way. How are you thinking about the, you said 35 percent, is that all in or is that just a piece of the overall tariff picture if you're considering doing business in China going forward? It'll depend on your product. Tariffs are driven by three things. One is the country of origin, and that is something that actually Trump is changing the rules around in real time with this idea of transshipment that he said of goods that are trans shipped through Vietnam will pay a higher duty. But like, very odd. I mean, those of us in the industry think of transshipments has no effect on duty rate whatsoever because it's still the original country.

If you ship from goods from China to Vietnam and then from Vietnam to the U.S., unless you did what's called substantial transformation, you changed them into a product of Vietnam. They still pay the Chinese duty rate. Yeah. Whereas he's kind of changing those rules in real time and have not yet published something in the code of federal regulations that we can actually understand what he means. So remind everybody that true social is not how laws get and regulations get published. Yeah. Yeah. We're waiting to see what really comes out. Yeah.

So, okay, so you have the country of origin. You have the classification. which is, okay, what type of goods are they that drives? And do they have the components of steel and aluminum that sets a different duty rate? Or what does the thing actually classified as? And then the third one is valuation. How are they valued? And those are the three kind of key drivers of what your duty rate is.

And right now, there's just a lot of uncertainty that we're waiting to see what this transshipment thing means. The world will find ways to minimize their duty rate. hopefully illegal ways. Don't make sure you work with an attorney and don't just go do this. But it'll be very interesting to see, can you actually save duty

by shipping from China to Vietnam somehow in this world? I don't know what the definition of transshipment's going to be. The other interesting thing here is that from a trade perspective, logistics and customs companies are kind of happy about this stuff

because it adds complexity. You need leadership from experts more. And you're doubling the amount of trade. Because there's gonna be, if there's incentive now to move goods from one country to another, transform them and ship them onward, that's two shipments,

one from China to Vietnam and one from Vietnam to the US. Or like, you know, one of the sad ones that came about here is we have a customer, long-time customer that makes bicycles in the United States and they import components and assemble them in the US and sell them. Well, bicycles got an exemption. They're duty-free.

but the components did not. Oh, interesting. So these guys are actually better off shipping their manufacturing offshore now, and that's what this is going to happen. That's very odd. Yeah, you feel like it feels like there's a little bit of this like game theoretic dynamic where Trump puts these blanket tariffs all over the place, but there's potentially an incentive for some country to just jump head first and say,

hey, we're playing ball. Give us the lowest rate possible because we want to grab as much manufacturing capacity over. and be as friendly as possible. Have there been any, like, I mean, I know that the, the situation with Japan has been more difficult than expected. Have there been any countries that have popped out as, like, new favorite trading partners of American companies in your feeling? Well, the companies-wise is different from the government probably.

Sure, yeah, yeah. The government, it looks like the UK so far, but the UK's got a 10% duty rate and some nice exemptions that they got on auto, which I guess is like Land Rover's and Bentley's, maybe Asin Martin. Yeah. They don't make a lot of those, but Jaguar is that how they have. I don't think they've been making any cars. No, no, Jaguar.

Jaguar actually took a year off. They skipped a year producing cars. They were taking a year off business. We're just going to sell down our inventory. Oh, okay. It wasn't just because the commercials were that bad. No, no. But then they launched the rebrand after they had announced that, hey, we're not producing any new cars, which was like your job is a car company to make cars.

You belong in a Jaguar commercial. Look at you, too. Belong in the north of England. I actually, I didn't understand that. I didn't understand the hate on the actual silhouette of the new Jaguar. It was beautiful. I thought it was cool. It was very cool.

I mean, it was one of those prototype cars that didn't have like mirrors or anything. So they clearly needed a lot to do to make it a real one. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, a lot of... But so come back to your question. The UK is interesting because they actually have a trade... We have a trade surplus with the UK, and they still got a 10% duty rate.

So that told everyone, the best you could possibly do is 10%. Even if you have a trade... Even if we may attain a trade surplus. Vietnam is probably the best example of someone that tried to play ball. And they said, hey, we're going to do everything duty-free on American products being imported. And they ended up with, what was it, 20%,

and then this weird transshipment thing that I already got to that we don't understand yet. So that's probably the thing that Trump would like to get is that trans shipment, what he would like to have is that these countries

put duties on China. And Chinese goods coming into Vietnam, they want them to get hit with high duties so that you're not effectively laundering, washing Chinese goods through that country, doing some minimal transformation and then shipping them to the U.S. They want to make it so like,

it's a, you know, like, create this coalition of the willing against China. That's my that's my read on it. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of hard for them to do. Yeah. There's kind of two narratives. One's like Trump likes tariffs. He wants to throw tariffs all over the place, make us a high tariff country. On the flip side, there's like, this is about a trade war with a rising near peer competitor. And the entire narrative is really just US versus China. And everything else is in service of that. Is that a reasonable narrative that you think people should? It's one of those two probably. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe some balance and I'm not sure they know and there might be different factions within the U.S. government that want different ones of those.

And it's it's pretty hard to get a read on it. But from a company perspective, data's looking for whoever makes the cheapest stuff that's high quality that they could sell. I mean, I don't think these countries, there's not that many companies. They might on the surface claim to be patriotic or have some views or something. but that's not what companies are meant to do. They're meant to make money. And so they're going to, they're going to route, you know, their way to the rules get set,

and then they're going to water flows downstream. They're going to, downhill. They're going to go through the route where the best place to make stuff is. Yeah, we saw this within video where there were chip bans. And in video, it is, hey, the speed limit 65, I'm going 64 miles an hour. And so I'm going to make a specific chip that is as good as possible while not breaking that regulation. And it's like, that's not the spirit of the law.

And it's like, yeah, I'm a $3 trillion company. my job's not to adhere to the spirit of the law. I got to adhere to the letter of the law. You got to make as much money as possible. And so that is what companies are supposed to do. The government needs to set the rules, and then we all figure out how to make money giving those rules.

The problem right now is that the rules change. So you can't make any decisions in the next. I advise people wait. Yeah. At least tomorrow. I mean, we'll see what new trade deals drop tonight. But I think every few weeks. No, no, if any, if history is a guide,

as soon as you leave this Zoom, there will be news. Yeah, someone checked Twitter right now. What, what's the, what's the, how cooked our Timo and Sheen right now? There have been some reporting last week around, you know, people based, you know, U.S. shoppers ditching them because of the loophole. I didn't know how real that was. I haven't seen the latest data. I think they're both back live.

You can buy stuff on their apps again. So I think they're set up in a way that lets them transact and just pay the customs duties. And I think they're, I don't know how the consumer. responding to it all. It's already so cheap. They had to stop selling for a couple weeks, so that probably hurts you pretty significantly. But if it's a $30 couch,

and then you're paying $90 or whatever, it's like... Well, it's only 30% on their wholesale price, not on the price that you pay. Oh, right, right, right. So I think they may be fine. It's all... But I have heard that apparel companies

who is who most directly competes with Sheen, at least. Actually, sales are up quite a bit despite the tariffs and having to raise prices, and that's probably in part because Sheen's volumes have come down, and the consumer is shifting their spend onto other brands. So we've seen that a little bit in our customer data, in our fulfillment business, where customers are exceeding their forecasts. So the world is not all doom and gloom from an econ perspective, which it's a big departure from 90 days ago where I was screaming, everyone's going to go bankrupt, and companies were screaming that to me. I think that relaxing the Chinese tariffs made a big difference.

But again, we're going to figure out what happens in the next 24 hours with these new duties and how people respond to that over the next few weeks. It's going to be exciting. What about some of the smaller players in the market, like just the broad like drop shaping economy? Jordi and I were talking about this this morning, how it feels like and Sean Frank from Ridge was talking about how like the default road to entrepreneurship a few weeks. years ago was like spin up a Shopify store like white label some stuff like you know get get a business up and running and then it shifted to like courses and influencer stuff and AI and info products and now it's it's WAP and cluelie and these other things that they're kind of talking about like

the modern you know first-time entrepreneur track is are are these like you know small lean drop shipping operations still going do you think do you do you ever run into any of these people do you ever see them kind of like you used to hear about like oh someone just found this really interesting niche on on ads and they scaled this like very simple business to like tens of millions of dollars are you still seeing that or do you think that's kind of like i think you mostly see it in china and vietnam but selling into the u. yeah okay and they're entrepreneurs their entrepreneurs are figured out how to do marketing and branding and the more that that was something that was something I predicted what happened 20 years ago that it would take,

but that it would take a generation because that they have to speak English, they have to know enough about, they have to have enough humility to go, I speak English, but not that well. I should probably hire an American to do the writing. Instead of like, I'll do the writing myself and have it be English, but terrible.

On Sunday, I wanted to get a new hose, not a spigot, but one of those things that you can control the flow. Nozzle or whatever. So go on Amazon, I search hose nozzle and I went five pages without finding a legacy U.S. brand that would sell me one. And there are all these names that are basically some five, six letter combination of English letters that doesn't even read well.

Amazon has a real problem in that regard. Yeah. And I would happily, like I want to check a box that's just only buy from brands that have been around for 50 years. And I would just happily, like, those are the products that I want to buy. I don't want to buy the $6 product that's going to break in a year and I got to buy another one. I just want to buy the thing that, you know, it's not. And the thing to watch on this front, those companies don't, 60% of all the sellers on Amazon don't even have a U.S. entity. They're like, the goods are actually imported from abroad.

Interesting. And there's a, there's a bipartisan movement in D.C. to block this policy. to block this law to make it so that you have to have a U.S. entity. You can't just import as a Chinese company or whatever country company. You can't just import stuff into the U.S. Like without someone here who could be held accountable to following the customs law, to whatever other child safety laws, you know, other stuff that's downstream that can happen. And I think Amazon has business exposure there that people like you are going to, at some point,

I started gravitating towards Shopify. the shop app where you're like, I don't know, there's something higher quality about people trying to build a brand on shop bifi today anyways. And then they have political exposure. I mean, what did Trump call them a treasonous? I forget what the... It was for passing through the tariffs. Yeah, you called them a treason. Yeah, for me as a consumer, it's not like I want my hose nozzle. It's not like I need an American-made hose nozzle. It's just like this, this commitment to like this relationship that you have when you're buying a product, which is I want to trust that this company put in a real effort to

design a product that is going to be effective and durable. And I'm happy to pay four or five times what the entry ticket price is. So Lindy is, I like it. Yeah, I mean, people are clamoring for this on Pinterest. Like they want to search Pinterest from like any image that's posted on Pinterest before 2023, like before the AI images came. You search for anything and it's just a lot of like sneaky AI stuff stuck in there. If you're looking for something very specific, you're like, I don't necessarily want an AI image and there's no real good filter other than just like is it in the Pinterest database with date created before 2023. Like that is the provenance of that image. It's kind of the same thing like on Amazon being able to filter for did this company exist, you know, 10 years ago.

What was the postmortem on the conflict in the Middle East from a trade standpoint? I remember there was one night. Straight to her moves. Well, it looked like two tankers had been blown up, and I was seeing that open source intel on it being like, oh, like, I just was feeling bad for you. I didn't send you a message or anything, but I was like, oh, this is the last thing that the global trade needs right now, but we seem to get out of it. Yeah, the Strait of Ormoos is much more important for the wider economy than just for, certainly not for containerized trade.

It's pretty small. Like only about 2% of containers go in and out of the Strait of Burmuse. And that's basically going to Dubai, Jabilali port it's called. It's a top 10 port in the world, but it's mostly a transshipment port, meaning cargo comes in there, gets unloaded. Think of it like a packet switcher. The cargo comes on and gets rerouted. It's not that important of a port in the wider scheme of things. The big thing, obviously, is oil.

It's like 20 something, 5% of the oil in the world flows out of there. And it's fascinating. Look, if you look at the oil prices, look at the price of diesel. There's no sign that anything ever happened in the Middle East at all. Like, you don't even see a blip upward. Wow. And when Iran threatened to close the straight of our moves, the oil price went down 6%. Instead of spiking.

Yeah, weird. Why? My read is like no one thinks that's a credible threat. because if they close it, China gets all their oil out of there. Yeah. And China is like kind of necessary to keep if Iran stops, you know, if Iran screws with China, like what's left? Like you're going to be against China and the U.S.?

Like this is probably bad strategy. Yeah. I thought that would maybe, when I saw that they might do that, I was like, this is kind of some 4D chess by Trump. If he gets Iran to shut down the Strait of Ormoos, we don't need it in the United States. We got, we produce our own oil basically. Sure. It's an overstatement, but. Yeah.

When the oil price goes up, America does better now, right? We're the number one oil producer in the world. Like, that might be good for us as a country. That is a crazy story. Like, there's the idea of us. I mean, I grew up with the idea of, like, energy independence and the idea of America needs oil, and we've got to go to these wars to get the oil. And the oil drives everything.

And now, you know, we're a net exporter. Yeah, yeah. There is, it's not, like, purely that we produce it. We can just keep it here and be self-sufficient, right? Isn't it that we're producing? It has to be... There's different grades of oil in our refinery capacity is like different. Yeah, sure.

There's some of that. But that's nonetheless, a higher price of oil would benefit American companies. Yeah, like normal people, you and me, you know, our energy bills will go up and it'd be bad. But on that for this, for the country, probably income inequality goes up or something. But high price of oil is good for that number one oil producer in the world. How do you think retailers broadly are thinking about... interest rates in the next 12 months you know there's certainly pressure on that front on Powell it would be you know retailers have had to get used to high rates and

if you're financing inventory and things like that it is meaningful cost I've heard rumors of aggregators you know shutting down that were heavily debt fueled probably can't sustain in this type of environment so I assume like everybody else. I don't think that that's, I don't think we're that sophisticated in our business. Like, but cheaper interest rates would definitely help consumers buy more stuff.

And, and drive a lot of growth. And I think most of us would realize, like, hey, we, we kind of took it for granted for too long. We probably should have borrowed more money when it was 2% and bought more stuff and done capital investments. And the next time around, I think it'll be a massive spending splurge or investment splurge

if they drop interest rates back down. People won't take it for granted. Totally. You're up in SF. There's been a bunch of massive trade deals in SF AI engineers going to meta. What's been the mood on the ground? Do you have any advice for the folks picking up nine figure checks?

I just, well, first of all, I love asking people because if you didn't get an offer, what's wrong with you? No, and if you're not, if people aren't pote, if there's not like whispers that that people from your company are being post, you're probably not at the right lab. Oh man, maybe I should make some posts about this getting angry at Zoc for taking my best people. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, the siops need to continue. The rumors are true. He's been personally dialing the entire engineering team. The advice would be it's, you should go read the most important business book ever written. It's called The Prince by Machiavelli. Oh, sure. And Machiavelli's rule number one is never hire mercenaries.

He says it over and over against the whole theme of the book. Mercenaries are useless. They will run away when the time, they'll take your money and then run away when it actually comes to fight. And that is really dangerous out here. in this world of AI poaching people paying this much money, you know, I'd be very worried if I was, how do you build a culture out of that? It's going to be challenging. They should all go read the book and figure out what are they going to do about that. How do you think about the sports

analogy? A lot of people are kind of comparing the current trade deals to sports. No one thinks about Otani as a mercenary, you know? Yeah, it's an interesting question. Sports, you have a fixed size of your team, so you can only have so many players. So maybe there's something to be said for that. I'm like, okay, you've got, therefore it bids up the price of the, also if you look at the, you know, we know nothing about sports, but I'm growing up in the Bay Area, watching the Warriors go on this very dominant run, I'm sure at any point many of those players could have increased their.

Well, not at any point because they have contracts. Sure, sure, sure. And so it's like, they're, it's a good point. You know, the ultimate is Tom Brady. Yeah. Because Tom Brady, his secret was marrying a supermodel wife who made so much money that he could work below market price and they could build out a great team. So maybe you need to hire engineers who have rich spouses. There we go.

There we go. It's a good take. Yeah. Yeah, that's going to be the next bull signal. Yeah, I don't do it for the money. Wait, you bring to the holiday party? Okay. You're getting poached.

You're going to the top team. The holiday party was popping. But it's, yeah, it's, I, I don't. I don't know. I'm fascinated by seeing how this plays out. And it is, you know, at the end of the day, you got to hire the best out. And Zuck's kind of smart.

He's got the war chest. And Open AI did this before. I mean, they hired, they were hired everybody. I love seeing them whine about it because all my friends have had their engineers poached by Open AI who were overpaying by 2X. Yeah.

A front-end engineer was making 350K just to, you know, HTML and CSS. Yeah. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, 350. and then, you know, tens of millions of dollars and probably stock options. Hopefully not for the front-end engineers. This isn't even people who are doing anything.

Hey, hey, no slander for front-end engineers. I mean, it depends on when they got in, right? If they got in a couple years ago, it could have 10xed in terms of, you know, net value. It's, you know, it's one of those, it's like trying to be the toughest fighter or something. At some point, you know, you can beat up everyone on your block, but you eventually run into Mike Tyson and you're going to lose. That's exactly what's happened. Yeah. I mean, it's maybe better not to try to fight.

Yeah, it's so interesting because like the last, the last like big like the, I mean, we've had it, we've had a few like big hyper scale like really fast growing, super hot, like ordained as like winner companies like SpaceX, Tesla, Uber. And those companies were not seen as a direct threat to Google or Microsoft or Apple. And so it's not like there was ever, I mean, Google was kind of thinking about Waymo as a counter to Uber, but it was never like, our core business might disappear. So we have to spend, you know, unlimited money to protect that, you know, what we have. People are starting to talk about how the competitive dynamic between meta and Open AI being that if you're spending three hours a day

talking with chat, that's three hours a day that you're not scrolling, putting comments on your friend's Instagram posts or hitting reels or things like that. So there's, you know, we all have 24 hours of the day. We're making more humans, but, you know. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely. I want to see what ideas they have because, you know, the way to compete with Google was not make a better search engine, like 10 years ago, 20 years ago. You know, that a lot of people tried that and you couldn't do it. So I don't know that the way to compete with open AI is to make a better chatbot. I completely agree. Like they got to come up with some new ideas here and I don't know what they are. I don't know what they have in mind. Maybe that maybe that I want a new I want a new thing at the bottom of the

Instagram app that's just dopamine and it's just a perpetual loop you know have to scroll yeah yeah yeah something there the whole app might be that eventually just surfacing content you want to see it would be a win yeah anyway this has been fantastic Ryan thanks so much for hopping on and send us a note when when when when new truce hit the timeline would love your reaction I don't know that you guys can handle the speed it was this going to happen every day. I mean, we might need you back on the show tomorrow. Who knows? Yeah, yeah. I don't think you need that. Well, good.

All right. Take care guys. We'll talk to you later. I'll see you, Ryan. Cheers. Bye. Let me talk about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. It's billboard time. And we have our next guest in the studio already. Jonathan from Air Garage talking about parking. How you doing, Jonathan? It's time to talk about parking. Everybody's favorite topic, parking. I'm just glad I finished my lunch before I got let in on like that. So I'm a little more, more prepared than he is. It's a bit of a random stream

today. Great hearth. Great hearth. Is that a TV? That looks like a TV. Yeah, I wish it was a real hearth. I, you know, it's San Francisco. It's June, or it's July now, I guess, but it's pretty much always cold, so we've got to try to stay warm however you can. I think the real hearth comes after the next round. Once there's some major liquidity in the business maybe, then you can upgrade. But give us the news. What's the latest from you? Yeah, very exciting news today. We just announced that we raised our series B from and was led by headline growth and participation from some of our existing investors and customers and all that jazz. So very exciting, $23 million series B and hit that gong. Let's go.

Great contact. Great contact. Great contact. Sounded, sounded very, very full from this end. Yes, yeah. It's fantastic. So give us, give us an update on where the business is today, kind of introduce the business and yourself, and then we'll kind of dig into some questions. Yeah, definitely. So air garage for people that haven't heard of us before, basically, we work with real estate owners that own parking lots and parking garages, and we help them manage and monetize their parking assets. So, you know, if you've ever parked your car in the United States or really just anywhere, you know that it's a pretty terrible experience. There's signs that are confusing. It's like a five paragraph essay on a sign.

The machines are broken. They eat your credit card. They eat your ticket. All that sort of stuff. And I think a lot of people, when they first experienced that, or if they've thought about it at all, it's kind of like one of those schlep blindness problems that most people, you experience it. But you just kind of ignore it when it happens in your daily life. If you've thought about it, you're kind of like thinking, okay, maybe it's like this because, you know, that's how real estate owners like it. They want to scam me.

They want to, like, rob me blind. A lot of people, you know, they have it out for real estate owners. But it's not that way at all. Real estate owners hate it too. And so we work with those real estate owners. We've built this basically vertically integrated operating system for parking real estate. It combines everything involved in taking it from being a piece of asphaltless stripes on it to a full-fledged parking operation that generates income using technology.

So it's the technology you would expect in any other industry, but it's just completely new to the parking industry. So we do payments, we do advertising, enforcement, we build hardware, we build software. Basically, what we're trying to do is bring as much done. to invisibility to these assets as possible, to generate more income for real estate owners to create a better experience for driver at the same time. And so, you know, the net result is we can increase net operating income by 20 to 50% for real estate owners and for a real estate owner that's huge because your asset is valued on NOI and you want to make as much as possible.

So that is how we've managed to grow as much as we have. So we've grown 10x since we raised our Series A. We're actually cash flow positive as business, which is awesome. Congratulations. You know, just trying to get as many locations across the country as possible. So now we have 300 plus locations in 38 states across the United States. Fantastic. I have two funny stories about parking.

One once was I started, I stopped carrying a wallet because I was like Apple Pay is so good. I'm fine. I don't need a wallet. And I got locked in a parking garage that didn't take Apple Pay once. And I had to talk my way out of it and hit the security guard and be like, sorry. I literally have no money. of any kind. I can't do anything. And then the other time, I was parking in a garage,

going to a restaurant. And it's very confusing how to pay for this garage because there's no like, there's no gate. So you just go in, there's ticket attendant. And the guy comes up to me in like a, like a security vest or whatever and says like here, yeah, you pay me. And I pay them and I go into the restaurant

and the restaurant owner is like, yeah, that guy doesn't work there. And it was just like an enterprising homeless man, I think. And so, you know, good on him, but not the best user experience. So yeah, I have a ton of questions. I want to know. I mean, so hardware, like that seems actually pretty hard to solve. I mean, taking cash, credit cards, Apple pay, like the demands are pretty wild. Do you, do you white label stuff? Do you actually develop everything? Do you have manufacturers for this stuff? Is it commoditized? Like, what is that, what is the shape of that side of your business?

Yeah, so the hardware that we do is all basically cameras and sensors. So it's mostly license-played-in cameras that sit at the entrance and exit of the garage, and they track every vehicle that goes in and goes out. It gives us real-time occupancy data, gives us enforcement data. But then it also can actually enable these magical experiences where I park in our down near our headquarters in downtown San Francisco. We have a garage right near there. My account, because I'm already registered with their garage, when I drive into that garage, it automatically starts a session for me. when I drive out, it automatically ends my session.

I never have to touch my phone. So to your point, you wouldn't have to carry a wallet anymore. And it bills me for exactly the time I use, right? And it's like, when you think about it, like, that's just how parking should be. Yeah. It's not that way, right? It's like so old school. And that's because basically real estate owners, they hire a parking operator, which is basically

a property manager to run their property. Those parking operators, they're 50 to 100 years old. They've been doing things the same way since the 1980s. They use cash and machines and attendance. And, yeah, they all use basically. basically parking machines in their locations. And it turns out the parking machines are just kind of the wrong way to run a parking facility. You have those gate arms.

People more often than you would think, people drive through those gate arms. A lot of owners, when they're switching to air garage, they're telling us about, you know, 15 times a month. Somebody breaks their gate arm and it's like $4,000 to fix it every single time. And that's on top of you spent $100,000, $200,000 to buy the gate arm in the first place. And then you just need an attendant to sit there and babysit it. So one of the things we do differently at air garages is we're in entirely a gateless system. which means you remove that entire huge sort of headache and expense of maintaining and keeping these gate arms in your facility. And so when you're a driver, that's also a better experience.

You drive in, you drive out, the license for you and cameras track your car. We get real-time data. You get a better experience. And you have a lot less expense and sort of maintenance issues to deal with the gate arm. Because I think a lot of people can relate to the experience as well, like, especially after a big, you know, sporting event or event that you've been to, you're trying to get out of a parking garage. You're sitting there for an hour because people are taking so long to go through that gate one at the time. You get rid of those, you entirely get rid of the bottleneck, and it's a way better driver experience. So our hardware, the way we build hardware, we build it all actually in-house, which is very unique for any parking company.

Most parking companies, they don't even build their software in-house. We build software and hardware in-house to give us the best control and visibility. But the critical thing is you don't make the hardware a dependency, right? If a camera goes down for some reason, people can still drive in, still drive out, they can. still pay, we still have a functioning system through the software, so you remove that dependency and it makes it a way better experience. And also, you just get a better experience as a driver and as an owner. Okay, I got to ask two VC coded questions. I'm sure you got in the raise, but I'm curious. So we had the CEO of Metropolis on. I'm sure you guys were competing

in maybe at some point in a more intense way. They've taken the more roll-up approach in terms of Asset heavy? At very asset heavy, they raised $1.7 billion to buy. And not technically asset heavy because they're not like purchasing the assets themselves, but they did basically just go acquire operators. So they just took, yeah, to your point, they took an inorganic growth strategy, which, yeah, I certainly have lots of thoughts on, but finish your question. Sorry. Yeah, no.

And I'm just curious, like, I'm sure every, you know, investor meeting leading to this B, people were like, have you thought about raising a billion and doing this strategy? and you did not. So I'm curious kind of the, how you evaluate those two approaches. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of different ways to build a company. And, you know, basically the thesis

that they're working on is actually the same thesis that there's another company called Reef Parking. I don't know if you've heard of them, but they took the same approach. And what they did is they raised about a billion dollars from SoftBank in 2018, 2019. That was right as we were raising our seed ground.

So a lot of people were looking that saying like, oh, they beat you to it. Sorry, you're out of luck. But the thesis is basically, okay, we have this technology, we have this platform. We're going to raise a bunch of money. We're going to acquire this old school operator that has all of these locations and contracts already. And of course, we're going to, you know, it's going to look beautiful in a spreadsheet. We're going to replace all of this G&A or this overhead or this cost of good sold of human labor. We're going to replace it with this technology and our margins are going to look great. And there's going to be a bunch of upside. It's kind of like classic private equity playbook.

you know, it's a very like investor-obsessed spreadsheet-driven way of building a business. And the critical ingredient that has to be true in that is like we have the technology. And that's what wasn't true really for reef parking. And that's why that whole thing sort of went sideways. And they're no longer really a business. I mean, they're working through restructuring Mubidala has like taken over that business and is trying to sell it last I heard. And, you know, that's the question for Metropolis is like, do they have that technology?

And we're taking a very at air garage from day one, we started by taking over one parking lot, working from first principles, figuring out how do you run this parking lot using the technology that we have available to us. We didn't know what a parking company was. We didn't know what a parking operator was. We knew nothing. We were just completely making it up from the scratch, which is a huge advantage compared to doing things as a way they've always been done.

And so we've built the platform as we've gone along to actually truly do what we say it does, right? And that's the question for them is, as they're going through their portfolio and trying to transition people, are those people actually going to transition to the platform? Does the platform actually work? And the thing is, real estate owners have been burned so many times in the last 20, 30 years by vaporware software and people saying, like, oh, we have technology and you real estate people are so old school and you don't get it. And like, we're going to change your life and make things, everything great with this technology. And it hasn't played out many times. And so it's very hard to earn that trust with real estate owners. And so if you start taking over locations and you

don't have that technology and it doesn't work out, then you sort of quickly fall out of favor. And so they're making that bet. And that's the question is, do they have it remains to be seen? I have an opinion on that, of course. I won't comment directly on that. But yeah, it's just a different vision for how to build that end state. And then, you know, do we go and do roll-ups in the future as well, potentially? Because we do actually have the technology.

George, you have a second question. Second VC-coded question. We had Alex Roy on famous Cannonball Driver, wrote the driver. And we were talking a lot about autonomous vehicles. I'm curious how you think AVs will impact the parking industry. Interesting. People have had the sense of, oh, there's so much parking in cities, and when we have AVs, we won't need them.

That's never fully tracked for me because... Got to charge them. You have to maintain them. You have to store them. There's way more demand during rush hour than there is, you know, during... And I don't want to send my... my AV, you know, if I have an AV that I personally own, I don't want to put a bunch of miles on it, driving it way out of the city to then circle back. So it's never fully tracked to me that

some people just like parking lots more than parks. Like public parks, you can't really do a lot of car spotting in them. That's right. That's right. It's right. One's around hunting for the Lamborghini. Can't do cars and coffees in a public park. You got to have a parking park. No way. That would be fun though. On the grass. You know what's funny is this was a question I got all the time in our series, like our seed rays, and that was like at the peak of the autonomous vehicle hype wave, like the classic hype wave that autonomous vehicles has followed. And this was every VC in the seed round was, of course, asking about this. And that was actually like, why we...

What you're saying? I'm six years behind. You're six years behind. Well, and yeah, the funny thing to me was that during this most recent fundraise, basically nobody asked us about that. And that's while at the same time, I'm in San Francisco riding in Waymo's and cruise cars, constantly. And so it's like actually real now versus six years ago. It wasn't actually real. And you know, I think I have a lot of thoughts on this. One of the one of the reasons we chose

floodgate actually to lead our seed round at the time was because they saw without us, they independently came to the same conclusion that we did that, you know, basically parking is going to be this really interesting asset class over the next 10 to 15 years at the time based on what they were seeing because Anne, the partner at floodgate is on the board of lift or was on the board of lift at the time. And so she was seeing the changes even before autonomous vehicles with just the Uber and Lyft trend over the last 10 years. And so what they saw was somebody's going to need to basically figure out what to do with all this space in our cities. Like 26% of the median urban core by land area, median urban core over 500,000 people, 26% by land area is dedicated to parking.

So that doesn't even account for garages under a building. That is dedicated surface area in the urban core of our cities, not looking at the suburbs, which is even more parking, that's a massive amount of space in our cities. There's eight parking spaces for every car in the United States. I think the stat is there's enough parking surface area in the United States. And eight is the low end. The estimate is actually eight to 11 parking spaces for every car. There's, I think, one stat that I saw that basically there's enough parking space in the United States to cover the entire state of West Virginia with asphalt. And so regardless of how you look at it, there's going to be some repurposing that needs to happen. And in order to,

do that over time, you first need to understand how that space is being used today. And that's the thing is like that just doesn't exist. Like the parking operators that are running these facilities right now, they're so old school. They're doing things manually with paper. And like they don't have any real time visibility about like how many spaces are actually filled right now and like what's our busiest day of the week? These like basic insights that, you know, if you were a real estate owner and you called your hotel general manager and said, hey, what's our busiest day this month? And your hotel general manager couldn't tell you to answer that question. Like you would fire them on the spot because that's like basic information you need to run an asset. But that's the state of the parking industry.

It's like literally we took over an asset actually last week, massive garage, very large asset in a sort of tier two market. But, you know, the way they were tracking validations is literally a paper spreadsheet in a binder, you know, tracking who gets a validation for going to the retail shops on site. That's the state of the parking industry. And so our mindset has always been, you know, if someone's going to bring this online, we're going to bring it online and be able to more flexibly use this space in our cities. Maybe that's autonomous vehicles in the future where they're parking in our facilities and they need to be able to pay for their parking in an API-driven way. That doesn't exist right now.

There is no default online way to purchase parking or no operating system or no sort of system of record for where the space is used in our cities. And then the other thing that's really interesting from our perspective, too, is we've taken a lot of things in the parking industry that traditionally were fixed cost parts of your business and turn them into variable costs because we're a software company, we're a technology company, instead of a, basically a staffing company, which is what these traditional companies are. So if, like, parking revenue starts to trend downward, that actually squeezes all of our competitors in a really helpful way for us, where, like, our cost to goods sold is entirely

marginal instead of being this fixed cost, which then means that we can survive and thrive in an environment where parking supply continues to decrease because parking demand is decreasing, and actually parking supply being constrained is great for our business, because that's the time when you actually can charge for parking. Yeah, I mean, I can see how this becomes a major catalyst for you guys. If I drive into a city center in an autonomous vehicle, it drops me off, and then I want my vehicle to park nearby. Imagine imagining the interaction right now between the average city center parking garage

and an autonomous vehicle, just not going to work. Yeah. Anyway, so great, great. Congratulations again. Thank you so much for stopping by. Looking forward to the next 10x. Yeah. Get on it.

Get on it. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you both. Awesome. Have a good one. Cheers. Bye. Next time, we have Jonathan from Grok.

We actually are going to reschedule that one. So we can jump into some timeline. Okay, cool. Yeah. Okay, we're pushing him to 155. Great. Cool. Yeah, let's do some timeline.

Well, Aliano over at Palantir, received an air drop of Matayina, our favorite energy drink that I drink for. of every show basically delicious congratulations that is that is 480 milligrams of caffeine it's an adult amount it's an adult amount it's a horse amount it's great um love to see it shout out to rob for dropping those off at pallioteer wonderful and uh i think he's enjoying them uh let's tell you about wander find your happy place find your happy place book of wander with inspiring views hotel grade amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning in 24 7

concierge service it's a vacation home but better and so much better.com to go everybody thought our ad was AI and I think that's a great compliment to wander it the the property that we were at and the wander property we were at in Malibu it looks almost too good to be true but it's very real and you can go stay there today yeah let's see here a mod had the post that I was referencing earlier he said why is meta scared of open AI? This graph says chat chvd is not just a productivity app. People are spending hours on it to talk to AI, write poetry, etc.

Meta needs attention to drive ads. If this trend line continues, AI will eat social app time. So this is mobile minutes per daily active users per day. And chat GPT is at 29 minutes. Now, the question is like we're not seeing a drop off from any of the other apps. So it might be that chat GPT is cannibalizing something else. in people's life maybe like talking to other people but but it could also be books it could be you know time spent reading the newspaper researching or doing anything

else it's not exactly showing up in the Instagram data there that would be really really if you like when you see you know chat GPT going up and Instagram going down then you get really worried but still chat GPT is on a generational run pretty crazy going from five minutes what a year ago to 29 minutes today so six-x growth in a year people people love it I spend a lot of time on it I'm always doing stuff it's fun you know it's just yeah super interactive just dictate something get the response read it out it's just like so much more efficient way to learn for so many different things totally I would love to see what what these other like

actual proper AI companion apps like replica yeah what their usage per DA you looks like because I would expect that probably really really hard users it's it's significantly higher than that well let's tell you about getbezzle.com your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet seriously any watch go check them out we love missed opportunity to ask Alex Roy about the right watch for the for the cannonball oh yeah he'd probably say an Apple watch today yeah he's very technology pilled very is a very modern answer we have a trade deal Trade deal, Summer, you.

She says, today is my first day at meta, superintelligence labs. I'll be focusing on alignment and safety, building on my time at scale research and seal. Grateful to keep working with Alexander Wang. No one more committed, clear-eyed or mission-driven, excited for what's ahead. Congratulations to Summer. I would imagine this was a maxed-out contract. Yeah. Good to keep the team together.

It's interesting because Alex was moved over to Meta, but scale is still an independent entity, but it seems like some folks from scale are now moving over to meta, and meta is probably looking through, seeing who makes sense where, and the businesses will kind of diverge. It feels like the true, like, super intelligence research

and the hardcore AI research of training new models that Lama V5, I guess, is going to be happening over at meta, but scale obviously still has a business in data generation. And so if you were kind of on the research side at scale, you're probably going to be moving over at some point. But this is probably the first of a few of announcements.

Totally. So she was the VP of Research at Scale AI. Prior to that, was in research at Google DeepMind for almost six years. Got it. An absolute killer. Yep. Who do we have?

We have a few people in the waiting room. Fun. I don't know, Jacob. We'll have to figure that. People might just be joining. The link might have leaked. It just leaked. This is the thing.

We shouldn't leave this. We can highlight so WAP announced. Oh yeah. They had an ad yesterday. Can we pull this ad up? Is that possible? Yeah, let's pull it up. Let's play it.

Wop ad. It's in the Pangers tab. Riley at LAMX and T says, first off, banger, second off this video means as soon as V-O-3 slash insert new AI video generation model drop, WAP immediately assigned hands to diving headfirst into it, seeing what they can do. This is the biggest bowl signal for new companies, having the human resources capital to be able to actively chase staying on the bleeding.

edge of new tech that innovation is the second it drops massive massive massive you simply cannot beat a team that is hell bent on being first so i thought this ad was very cool yeah we yeah we should watch it it's really it's really crazy because it's they like the heart they're really doing a great job of solving all the key problems with generative AI which is like character consistency uh it's not bully photo reel and so very clearly in the prompt they said make it look like grand theft auto and and then all of a sudden it's like a Ghibli moment. And I feel like this is kind of the first video that we've seen that's really dominated

like a new style that I think you'll see a lot more people be making them. Well, it's perfect too because WAP can make a GTA themed ad whereas like very few brands can do that. Yep. But yeah, I mean, I imagine that this will be as simple as giblify this image pretty soon. Just, hey, take the trailer for F1 and make it GTA style, and it'll look amazing, and people will do that for all sorts of videos.

It'll be very slow and expensive first, but then it'll be very cool. Let's play the Wop ad. Our parents told us to get real jobs, get off our phones, go to college. No! It took a completely different route. There's something different about kids who make money online. God's see. They don't give a fuck.

They're taking a foot? Sounds like heaven, bro. Huge influx in kids dropping out of school. Shot, like a more to see. Dude, we gotta grow faster. Just use Wop, bro. Y'all were printing. The super trim.

Here in my garage. College enrollment numbers are on the decline. Do you see that? A bunch of great cameoes in here. And once you taste that freedom. There's no going back. Was that Blake Averson there? No, I think that's another guy, but it does look like Blake.

How much of that do you think was AI? I think it felt close to 100%. I think some of it might have been actual game footage. I'm not exactly sure, but some of that could have been just generated in GTA 5. Yeah, it's possible. Yeah, it's possible just to actually go shoot some of those. Yeah, the interesting thing here is it feels like WAP is, you know, 10 years ago, we talked about this earlier with Ryan.

10 years ago, the like online entrepreneur meta was drop shipping. and Shopify had kind of a crazy flywheel of different types of influencers online, promising mostly young men that they could make millions of dollars selling products online. And by the time people, I think, were making a bunch of courses about it, I think it had become incredibly difficult to actually ARB and buy a product from a traditional U.S. brand and sell it on Amazon and make any kind of money. And so that whole industry, like, effectively has shifted over the last, over the last, I want to call it, five years into what are now, like, info products.

And so WAP has this effectively an economy of people selling info products and then armies of young people that basically do, like, bounty style work for them. So clipping for a musician or clipping for a live show. stream or things like that. It is a cool way for somebody in high school to make their first money online. And I think that is like a formative moment to have real dollars hit your stripe account. But, you know, this, this, you know, that kind of meta is constantly evolving. I think they have over a billion dollars in transaction volume. So we got to have the founder on again. He was had some interesting takes. Are we ready for our next guest or should we keep doing? Extremely tapped in. We have.

Jake, who's at, we're flipping the schedule a little bit. Let's bring in Jake and then we'll go to Craig. Nice to meet you, Jake. How you doing? Jake, welcome. Thanks for having us on, lads. Yeah, thanks so much. Good to have you. We're dealing with a bunch of different scheduling stuff today. Would you mind kick us off with the introduction on yourself and your company? Sure. Yeah. So my name's Jacob Glenville. I'm the founder and CEO of Cinevax. Previously at Pfizer, I also founded a company called Distributed Bio. At Cinevacs, we focus on universal immunity technologies. That's a universal flu shot that we recently closed a series A to be in humans in eight months. And then some of you may also have seen some of the news

around our universal anti-venom program that says a single anti-venom that can treat all snakes. That's amazing. I hate snakes. I actually am like it's the one thing I'm terrified of. John always checks his boots for snakes. I do. Indiana Jones is my hero growing up. You raised a series A and you're going to have a drug in market in eight months. Yeah. Is that how much, how much did you have to raise prior to get to that point? You know, usually we hear about bio companies having to raise,

farmer companies having to raise a billion dollars to even have a shot at getting something in market. We're going to be in humans in eight months. So that's the first human trials. So there'll be more, we've raised prior to the Series A, we brought in about $50 million. Half of that was non-dilutive from like the Gates Foundation, Sepi, the Navy, the Army. the Naval Medical Research Command and rare and a number of other places because what we work on is a it's a bio-threats problem. It's also a global collective goods problem. If you think about

how much money's been spent on 90 billion dollars of productivity loss just on flu alone in this country every year. And so in addition to that, we had NFX and the Global Health Investment Corporation that were our backers and then now we're raising, we've just raised another 45 million. So nearly 100 million raised gets us into humans, which is a really a really big deal because we show it's safe, but then we also show it's effective. And so we have, we can establish the first universal vaccine and a platform technology that we can make more universal vaccines out of. I definitely feel the productivity loss. Every time, every time I feel myself getting sick, I'm like, this time I'm going to power through it. I'm going to be just as effective. I'm not going to

let it like let my email pile up because I just feel terrible and it's very difficult to how how different is, is this path from the traditional biotech path? I feel like a lot of biotech companies, they go public really early. It's just a completely different path from like what we typically see in venture. Are you taking more of like a Silicon Valley venture path? Or do you see yourself that there's the same kind of strategy as the biotech companies that we've seen like the other companies that have just kind of gone through the normal like IPO early than the stocks trading based on the FDA results and that type of stuff?

I historically have always tried to ignore the normal path and go, what's the best path for this company? So my last company, I actually never raised any venture capital. I built a series of profitable verticals, and we exited to Charles River Laboratories without taking venture. Here, I need venture because we're going to go through these very expensive phase trials. And even there, we have accelerated approval and some other tactics that make it much less expensive than some of the ones you describe. So what's going to happen for us is human trials. After that, there are sources of potential non-diluted funding that could give us really big checks once you're in phase one. It could potentially cover the phase two and phase three.

Or we do a series B and then maybe a series C to get the first product out. And the whole idea is to prime the pump. Once you're profitable, then it's a rounding error to run your other programs, which is like so torturously expensive for the first product. Once you've got something commercialized, then you can go build the other ones. It's also possible that we get kind of some foam up. going because the current $7 billion flu market, there's four companies that are all competing over that. And all of their vaccines are like 10 to 60 percent effective, like one in three people

who got a flu shot last season actually benefited from it. And so I'm imagining those groups are going to be like, I want to work with these guys, otherwise I might lose market share. And so there might be an opportunity there for an acquisition or partnership earlier. Yeah. On the non-deluded funding side, what has been your take on the NIH discussion publicly? We had Andrew Huberman on the show and he was talking about some of the risks of cutting some of that early stage funding. The number that was being thrown around was around 40% cuts. I don't know if that affects you directly because you're kind of already running the company. But what's your take on the NIH situation?

Well, look, I'm in biotech in general. I think we've benefited and we're able to bring this technology forward because of non-dilutive sources out there. So more is better. Our anti-Venum program has been supported by an NIH. award. That said, you know, I'm working on a fundamentally new technology and sometimes we've had a hard time convincing grant agencies to go in at the NIH in particular. I think some people just didn't get it because it was too different and new. That changes as we have more data, but also I think a little shakeup sometimes is helpful to be able to have them invest and try

new things rather than just reinvesting in the past because the past technologies just weren't working. I think we need new stuff. So obviously I think the United States needs to maintain its preeminence and biotechnology. It's one of the 21st century sectors where we have dominance. And you don't want to lose that because, you know, there's China and other organizations out there that are countries that are very happy to try to feel those shoes. And once you lose that, the brain drain goes the opposite direction. And that's part of the reason why we maintain the preeminence is that we have the institutions that are propped up partially by government money to be able to go make all these breakthroughs and have your genentex and so forth. So I think for those

reasons, I think the United States should remain the global epicenter of biotechnology because of macroeconomic reasons. Yeah, Genentech, the original VC, what, 100-bagger or something like that? Fantastic return. What are your kind of goals on the efficacy side? Obviously, the goal would be 100%, but if this typical flu vaccine is 10 to 60% effective, what are you aiming for? Yeah, we're looking at, like we'd like to see somewhere between 80 and 95%. It's hard to get that last 5% for any vaccine because you have people that have significant, you know, immunosuppression or some sort of deficiency. But what we're seeing in the animals and all the work so far, I think probably 85, 90%, maybe 95 is sort of what we're aiming for. And that's a big deal, right?

That's suddenly changes the, not just like you get a shot in that Pavlovian thing. I mean, that's a big problem with vaccine skepticism is people like, I got the shot and I still got sick, right? And so you can solve that. People, I took the shot, I didn't get sick for two years. That's a better outcome. But the more profound thing that happens is that when you start distributing a vaccine like this around the world, the pandemic era is over. Because you don't go, oh, God, there's an H5 and 1.

It's getting in cows. It's getting in people. There's just like, hey, guys, there's a reminder. We're seeing some H5N1 in people. If you haven't had your Sinty flu shot in last two years, go get a booster. And then you don't have a pandemic anymore. And so that's a crazy transition compared to how humanity's been operating since the beginning of time.

What is the key unlock for the universal anti-venom? Yeah, so it's the same biology. It's the idea that there are these little Achilles heels on these proteins that the, like the viruses, they can change just about anywhere, but they can't mutate a couple key sites. Snake venoms, there's 650 species of venomous snakes around the world. And they all have different venom, but they share certain toxins. and those toxins have conserved sites. The origins of this anti-venom was,

I found a guy named Tim Fridi who had, for 18 years, he'd injected himself with escalating. Yeah, I was about to ask, we covered that story, and it was just all, like, it was such an example of dudes rock. This guy, what a hero.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell us the full story because it's like, it's an incredible story. This guy just, he decided he was going to make himself immune to snake venom, but like all of them. And so he started collecting a menagerie, of snakes in his basement, like all the gnarliest snakes around the world. And he started off

with tiny little doses. I don't know if you guys saw Princess Bride, but it was like the Iocaine powder of Princess Bride. It starts with tiny little doses, and he would slowly increase the dose until he would be able to tolerate a full dose. Normally, he would kill a person easily. And then he started letting the snakes bite him. And so he had 202 bites and 654 immunizations over 18 years of 16 of the most deadly species from around the world. And so I heard about him, and I'm working on universal flu vaccines. And I was like, if anybody has beating through their veins right now a universal anti-venom, it's going to be this guy. And so I contacted him. We started doing a research project together and it was phenomenally successful. So it just speaks again to the power of universal immunity

to be able to completely change the face of 21st century medicine. What is the, what is the distribution of that anti-venom going to look like? I imagine we should put it everywhere, right? It should be in like every first-age kid or something. Growing up, I mean, growing up in California, like being in the country a lot, it was always in the back of my mind as a kid of this fear because I'd come across snakes all the time. You know, this fear of, you know, you don't necessarily know what bit you. And then you don't necessarily, you know, first of all, is it venomous or not? Hopefully you're not getting bit by snakes a lot.

But then, you know, if a person is getting treatment, are they even going to have the right, you know, So I'm curious what that kind of go-to-market looks like. How do you get this distributed as widely as possible? So, I mean, the way you described it, that's right. And it's worse in the developing world. So there's a lot more people who die and get permanently messed up by snakes than you might think. It's 140,000 people who die every year and another 300 to 400,000 that lose a limb, which

really sucks if you're in a village because then your family's having to take care of an invalid when really they need everybody to be able-bodied. And so, yeah, right now there's 650. venomous species of snake and they make one anti-venom for each snake or sometimes a couple snakes in one bottle but so you get bit and first off they have to bring you probably multiple hours sometimes to get to a hospital has IVs and then they go oh I'm sorry bro were you bit by like a super venomous snake did you happen to have the presence of mind while you were being bit to ruffle through the grass and grab the snake and bring it in doggy bag so we can take a look at it so we can check

yeah did you bring the killer snake that just bit you did you bring it with you otherwise we don't know If we stock the antics, if it even exists, and we don't want to give it to you because it's made out of horse antibodies and it can cause a whole bunch of gnarly side effects. And so that's the world that we're trying to replace. What this is now is a single, we're halfway through. We've got half the 300 species of neurotoxic snakes and we're working on the other half. That was what the cell paper was. But the idea is to have a single product. It's fully human antibodies.

So they don't have all the side effects of the horse antibodies. You can lyophilize them, freeze dry them. And so the idea is like an epipen for snake antivenom. You have some solution and you have some dry powder. You just, you get bit. You turn a little crank, shuky shuki, and then you stab it into your leg and you get the anti-venom immediately.

And that means it can be in backpacks. It can be out in villages outside of refrigeration. There's no multiple hours of waiting and they don't need to know what kind of snake bit you. And that will change, change a lot of people's lives. That's amazing. Very cool. I'm glad you guys found each other.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for stopping by. We have a slam schedule today, but this is fantastic. And thank you for fighting the good fight against snakes. There's nothing I truly hate more. So I really appreciate it, making the world.

One man versus 600 snakes. My literal only phobia. So thank you. I have no problem with spiders, no problem with anything else. I hate snakes. So thank you so much for doing what you do. There's a party of brain that actually is networked so that if you're shown a bunch of pictures, you'll spot the snake picture first.

So there's something deep in our brains that has taught us, recognize in fear snakes from primordial times. And so what you're experiencing is not unusual. We've been built to tell these things. And I'll pass on your thanks to Tim, because he's the one of really just credit for this. Yeah, I'm also Irish. So there's probably something about the Pied Piper

and wanting to rid the world of snakes. It's in my blood. But we'll get to the snake eradication project second. Thank you for making the world's safer. And congrats on the race. And congrats on the race. Good luck. We'll talk to you.

Cheers. Bye. Next up, we have Craig Piggott from Halter. I was very excited for this company. They raised money. This is the most excited you've ever been about a startup. Well, it's an extremely bullish story, and we'll hear it from him. It's about running your ranch the way you've always wanted.

Yes. Thank you so much for joining, Craig. How are you doing? I'm doing good. How are you guys done? You're overseas, correct? I'm in New Zealand. Yes.

Awesome. Thank you. I think it's early your time, I guess. Is that right? Oh, it's like 8.30. It's not too bad. Well, thank you so much for joining. Why don't you kick us off in the introduction on yourself and the company?

Cool. Yeah, Craig, founded and CEO of a company called Holter, originally from a farm, engineered by training. I did a stunt at Rocket Lab working for Peter Beck, which was kind of my intro to startups. And then, yeah, founded Holter. We effectively are operating system for ag or for farmers and ranches. We built a collar that goes on the cow that collar is solar powered and runs a bunch of email on the edge to train the animal to respond to cues so we can then virtually fence and shift these animals from the phone or from the farm's phone, which means we can run more productive farms. Ag covers about half the planet's had little landmass, so that's like the goal, I guess, is to lift the productivity of that land. Interesting. So, yeah.

What was the state of the art beforehand? Fences. Just cowboys? Yeah. Barbed wire. It is literally barbed wire. Fences for hundreds of years have lifted the productivity of land, but obviously they're pretty expensive and hard to move and a lot of shortcomings.

And so how do you actually steer animals with just a collar? The collar has cues on it, like sound cues out of each side. And if you imagine maybe like parking your car and as you like back into a wall it beeps and so it gives you like feedback on how close you are to a virtual fence. So we use sound and vibration and then we train the animals with a low energy pulse. It's like a hundred times less than an electric fence that say most cows in New Zealand would be used to. And yeah, the collar does all that training and kind of animal guidance. What has been the story around cowboy,

in the context of adoption of tech. I imagine this is the kind of thing where I'm using cowboy sort of as a joke, but I imagine by introducing this technology, you can free up, you know, ranch workers to do more important things. Like, for example, taking care of a sick cow or something like that. Has that been the case? Yeah, like there's been massive labor shortages on farms and ranches for a long, a long time. It's obviously not glamorous work. And so I think our tool like Holter does automate a

bunch of work. But really it also enables you to just be more precise, kind of run a more productive operation. And then you can, any extra time you do have, you spend on the never-ending kind of to-do list of running a ranch or a farm. Yeah. Can you give us the state of the business? I mean, yeah, I want to know about scale. I imagine how many, how many cows are we tracking at this point? I think people don't understand the scale of your business, so I just want to hear from you. Yeah, we're live in New Zealand, which is where we started, Australia and the US.

I think we're across like 18-ish states in the US. We're on over 1,000 farms, hundreds of thousands of cows, which we fence and shift and track and monitor their health every day. And growing over like 2x, year on year at the moment. So it is like, and these.

Well, you got a lot of room to run. I looked it up. There's one and a half billion cows in the world, according to some survey. And I'm sure some percentage of that are just relatively wild and not. Billion cows? Cows are expensive. I feel like it's like a trillion dollar market then. It must be.

Yeah. I have no idea. The, the funny thing about the TAM is it's like, it's very different to most businesses. it's kind of a function of land mass, not like population. So you do end up with like a very distributed tam through South America and Europe, like everywhere. But the market is huge. So we're trying to remain focused on, yeah, NZ, Australia and the US.

Like even within that is just a multi-billion dollar opportunity for us. Would you guys ever do health tracking for the animals? Is that something that you already do? I imagine farmers would love to understand like metrics around stuff like heart rate, HRV, things like that, steps, et cetera. Yeah, to do the guidance well, you need to understand each cow's like behavior and how they respond to the cues and how best to train them. And so kind of a byproducts may be underselling it,

but as a function of that, you then can also do health and fertility and things like that very well as well. So we already, that's already part of the product. Whether a cows, you're sick or not healthy for any reason or if they're fertile, which is important for breeding and things like that. So, yeah, if you've got the hardware there, you know, that is just a over there update to the collar. And then we kind of turned it on as like an additional SaaS product. So, I mean, is the business model mostly like subscription SaaS? structured or is there a hardware component and a fixed cost as well to kind of onboard?

It is, the hardware is bundled in the software. So it's purely a per. It is like very SaaS. Like there is tears. You can start on core and upgrade to pro or unlimited. And there's a small kind of upfront installation fee. We have to put up towers on these farms to like run the network to talk to the colors. so but predominantly it's just an ongoing subscription you don't buy the collars or anything like that

yeah take us through the raise and kind of what the plan is going forward yeah so we just closed a 100 mil series d from uh led by bond um very meaker there we go yeah love it awesome awesome firm um and probably two things really like um more expansion in terms of new markets and and even just harder into the market that we're currently in and then a huge amount of product and R&D work. Like we've kind of for the first time taken a very analog operation and converted it into this digital farm like farmers spend two hours a day and the product and they're doing everything from animal health to the fencing and shifting to like measuring their grass and all that. So and there's just so much kind of room to run on new product and shipping new products.

So that's the other kind of half of the of the raise is just doing more kind of building our product and engineering teams and doing more R&D on that side. Will we see will we see cow BCIs in the next 20 years? BCIs. Um, good good question. Don't know. Don't know. Yeah, maybe maybe unnecessary. It's, uh, but you know, if you can do something, you know, a call, a caller's,

potentially more elegant solution than a chip. Probably pretty costly to implant the brain chip. But who knows? Anything's possible? If anybody's going to do it, it'd be you guys. Well, thanks for much for stopping by. There's definitely some benefits to being on the outside. Yeah, for sure.

It's a little bit easier to change it out and clean it off if you need to. Awesome. Well, congrats on the raise and yeah, come back on when you have more news. Yeah, thanks so much for stopping on. Cheers. Thank you both. Up next, we have Jonathan from Grock coming into the studio talking about chips. Hopefully we can get him in.

We've been juggling things. How do you sleep last night, Jordan? Go to 8Sleep.com. Absolutely terribly. My 8Sleep couldn't save me. You can get a pod 5 at 8Sleep.com slash TBPN. One of the issue. We got somebody?

Yeah, we have Jonathan here. It's good. How are you? Welcome. Thanks so much for stopping by. Sorry about the little mix up with the street. scheduling. Glad you can make it though. Great to meet you. Thanks for having me. Would you mind introducing the company and the current state of the products that you sell just for anyone that

might not be familiar? Sure. So the company is GROQ and we sell tokens as a service. So very much like you use OpenAI's API or Anthropics API, except we serve mostly open source models. And we've built our own AI chips that allow us to do this much faster than anyone else. Yeah, I remember the initial demos. I believe it was on an early version of Lama and the inference rate was just so much, so much higher. What were the key decisions that you made to enable faster inference?

One of the key ones was we don't use any external memory. Every time you read from memory, the chip just has to wait for it and it's very slow and it's like drinking a drink through a martini straw. And so what we've uniquely been able to do is keep the cost down while all the chip. also being very fast. You can actually get speed off of a GPU, but then it just becomes completely uneconomical to use because you have one user using that at a time. So what are the tradeoffs of not having off-chip memory? I imagine, you know, there's a big discussion over how important are large context windows. Is that an important factor to kind of how LMs are scaling? And ultimately,

you're somewhat beholden to the decisions that are made by AI researchers at big labs, right? Well, interestingly, we actually support very often the largest context or the largest context that's practically offered by anyone else. And this is a little counterintuitive to most people. The trade-off we have is memory capacity, but GPUs have a memory bandwidth issue. So what the researchers do to improve the memory bandwidth issues always improve the memory capacity issues for us. So we can run all the same models with the same context length. The trade-off is actually something else. You could think of us a little more as a nuclear reactor

instead of thinking of us as a diesel generator. Whereas GPUs, you can take just eight GPUs and use them for a model. We need a lot more of our LPUs. But when we're running that model, very much like a nuclear reactor, we get much better cost and it's better for the environment because in our case, we use less energy. Interesting. What does the shifting landscape around different custom silicon look like right now. I feel like every hyperscaler is taking it more seriously. We've heard stories of Microsoft wanting to pull back from Nvidia chips. It seems like Amazon's kind of doing the same thing with Traneum and Inferentia. What is, are we going to be just be in a world where every hyperscaler has their own chip?

Or do you think that the market will fragment in kind of a different way? On my background, I'm actually the person who came up with Google's TPU chip. So I started that's 20%. No way. Wait, it actually started as a 20% project? It did. It was unfunded. That's amazing.

Yeah, so there are 30%, that's a real thing. But what most people don't realize is that there were actually three different AI chip efforts at Google, and that was the only one that actually survived and was competitive with GPUs. The other two ended up getting canceled. And so when you start looking at the broader and broader world of chips being done, you're built, a very small number of them are actually going to be competitive with GPUs. So most of those are going to be canceled. But I think where people get really confused is they keep talking about the chips. And so it's not about the chips. It's about the software. There are all these

little features like prefix caching, speculative decode, and all sorts of things like that. If you didn't have one of those features, you wouldn't actually be able to be competitive with the latest GPU, no matter how good your chip was. Sure. So the thing is you have to first catch up in software, and only then do you get to compete on the chip. And so one of the things that we did that was very unusual is we spent the first six months working on a compiler,

which makes our software work very easily, so we can actually compete on the software level with Invidia. We have the same models running, and only then do we get to compete on the chip. So are you talking about at Google that was like the push to break out of like the Kuda ecosystem essentially? Actually, this was at GROC. So at Google, we had these handwritten kernels, which are these sort of assembly routines. And it's the same as with GPUs.

Okay. GPUs are actually more similar than what we've built here at GROC. Yeah. How do you think about the current AI paradigm and how long, like the current algorithmic regime will last or where how it will change because I feel like the narrative around companies that bet on a particular you know okay we're going really long on the transformer or something like that then there's always this question of like will the transformer stick around well it's been around for a long time it seems really good maybe it'll be around

forever maybe it won't um how do you think about those is that is that the right question to be asking yeah i remember when we're at google um we hired this really senior person right before we were done designing the TPU. And he came in and he said, you cannot build a generally programmable chip that will out-compete GPUs. It's impossible. Instead, we need to stop what we're doing and just create a chip for a particular model. Sure.

And we had to walk him through the whiteboard and show them, but we actually ended up proving to him, we made a faster chip by making it general. And the counterintuitive part was if you're actually able to optimize some of the circuitry the chip to be reused for many different things, but you're only designing a couple of those circuits. You can make them much better than if you have a whole bunch of different stuff that's not as optimized. And when you look at one of these models, you can't fit one of these models on a single chip anyway. You have to use multiple chips. So are you going to design a different chip for each part of the model? And it starts to become ridiculous and doesn't make any sense.

There's actually been people recently who've been trying to revive that idea. But But in the time when they started, since they started, M-O-E's became a thing, mixture of experts. So if they had already started designing their chip, the chip would be obsolete. And then now we're seeing other sorts of things emerge that are very interesting. And if any of those win, those chips will be obsolete. So we always focus on as general of a programmable chip as we can. Switching gears a little bit. I believe you're in Europe right now.

It looks dark outside. And it looks like you're... Thank you for staying up. Yeah, thanks for staying up to hang with us. Talk about the decision to put the first European Data Center in Helsinki and kind of everything that went into that. So we were at an event here, an AI event, and about a month ago, we decided it would probably be great if we unveiled a European data center while at this event. And literally, we now have it up and running, actually running models. So I think that's a record for time to decide to deploy.

and getting it up and running. We actually... Congratulations. Well, we actually weren't expecting to have it until the end of this week, which would have been insane in and of itself, but it's actually up and running now. So kudos to the team.

The team is probably sweating because they're like, okay, this is the bar now. We actually have to be faster than this. The previous bar was 51 days. When we deployed about 20,000 chips in Saudi Arabia, it was 51 days from signing before we set it up. Oh, I remember that deal, yeah. Now it's like a month in three days or something.

So what makes that possible? Is it just the energy efficiency? Is that a huge part of it? You're best friends with Morris Chang. I don't use TSM to make our chips. Okay. In our case, we've actually simplified the architecture pretty significantly. We don't use any external switches as part of our core interconnect, only to move data in and out from the system.

It's pretty simple cabling. Air cooled still, we're not liquid cooled. liquid cooled. We like to stay a generation behind on all of the technology and just compete on the architecture and the software. And so that allows us to use these highly proven technologies where everyone's already debugged them and we're not debugging them as we deploy. But also because we don't use that external memory. So that external memory tends to lead to a lot of chips that fail and field. And so as you're bringing them up, a lot of them fail, you have to fix them.

And there was a recent model that we ran that required 4,000 chips. The first time we ran that model on the 4,000 chips, it worked. And we would have never been able to do that if it was 4,000 GPUs. The first time you run something in 4,000 GPUs, you have to replace a bunch of them. There's been some rumors that you've operated the token business, the API at a loss. that feels like a completely rational strategy in many ways. Nothing wrong with that. But can you comment on that as a strategy?

Is that just a misconception? Is that deliberate? How do you think about just investing for adoption broadly? Because it's really important as a business to grow, and there's a whole bunch of different strategies and tools in the tool chest. What do you think is valuable? What's been the strategy to date and how's it evolving? Let's get even more specific than at a loss because when you're running a service, you can claim you're not at a loss because you have an infinite amortization time on your CAPEX and your chips.

And that's how a lot of the neoclouds are doing. So we actually aim for a more aggressive payback period than anyone does with GPUs. And part of the way we can get away with this is first of all, our electricity cost is about one-third per token versus a GPU. So our OPEX is already lower. And that's sort of the flat, you have to beat your OPEX, otherwise you are losing money, period. There's no accounting tricks you can do. And then on top of that, the question is how quickly can you pay back? For us, everything we run is above our OPEX costs.

So we're not losing money. But different models have different payback periods. Some of them as quick as two years on our V1 silicon. Some take four years, and it's a blend, right? and that overall blend is what we're happy with. Makes sense. Yeah. On that note, there's one world where, you know, the models are getting better.

Everyone just wants the best model for every single task, and they're just willing to pay for the latest and greatest constantly. There's this other interesting model where I feel like we get a new capability, whether it's just the ability to convert, you know, CSV to JSON or something really, or like raw text to JSON or data extraction or, you know, censoring. you know, bad words and a whole huge transcript. And like the problem is completely solved by the LLM. And you don't need to throw a more advanced model at it in the future,

even if one comes down the pipe. You just need speed and reliability and eventually cost. And so do you see, is there an important part of your business where you can be the baseline provider for a current capability that will continue for decades potentially, even as a newer model comes online, or do you want to try and shift the business towards being constantly on the most aggressive side of the frontier? And is there actually a tradeoff there? Can you just do both? So a very common usage pattern we see is that people will develop their systems on the latest and greatest model. And they will optimize it for two things.

One is they'll optimize it for speed and the others they'll optimize it for cost. Very often, the most successful AI startups are spending almost as much per month on token as a service as their total revenue, right? They'll lose money on paying employees and things like that, but they're trying to keep those balanced. We can bring the cost per token down. Interestingly enough, the general inclination is that they want to spend the same amount. They just want more tokens because those tokens can actually turn into more quality, if you

can iterate, if you can do more in parallel. The speed thing is super important because that's engagement. So if you think about it, every time you increase the performance of a model by about, or any service by about 100 milliseconds, your engagement rate or your conversion rate tends to improve about by 8%. That's on desktop. On mobile, it's over 30%. And so no patients on mobile whatsoever.

And so what we see is people get stuff working. They prove that it's possible in the most capable model. And then they'll try and find one of the models that we run, all the open source models. And then when they're able to find one that works for them because they have to try a couple, then they're very happy. And then they don't change things. And so there are a couple of models which are actually quite old, quite terrible that we would love to deprecate.

But there's a bunch of users because their system works and they don't want to touch it. The other thing is, and this one's interesting, so we had one of our engineers tried solving a bunch of math theorems, and they were using this thing called Lean, which is a formal theorem prover. And they would use different LLMs in the background to solve, and then they would use Lean to test. Every single time Claude Opus would actually solve it in the fewest iterations. However, Quen 332B running on our chips, because they're so fast, all of the way.

always solved the theorems faster. It may be more iterations, but it was able to go through them faster. And so you actually got the result faster with the less expensive model running on GROC. Interesting. It's been a crazy year so far. We're about halfway through what are you excited about in the next six months on the GROC side? And then what are you excited about in the broader open source ecosystem?

On the GROC side, we're continuing to scale up. We're going to add a bunch of new data centers and new comments. continents. After this, I'm going somewhere else in the world. I'm not going to tell you where, where we're working on getting another data center deal done. But also, there are some rumors that we might have some new improved systems or chips or something coming later this year. Allegations. Allegations of massive advancements. Denies the rumors of a major breakthrough. Yeah, I love that. Can you give me your retrospective, but also your current take on just Moore's Law broadly? Yeah, I think Moore's Law is true,

but I don't think it's the most important part, and people miss this. So Moore's Law, for those who don't know, every 18 to 24 months, the number of transistors on a chip doubles. That translates to the economics get better. That translates to the chips get faster, and you can trade that off. what's really been happening in the last five to ten years, and I don't know what to call this law, but when I left to start Grok, one of the observations was every 18 to 24 months, not only did the transistors double, but the number of chips doubled. The transistors doubled and the number of chips doubled. And so when we started, we actually asked ourselves the question, what would happen if we assume there were an infinite number of chips? How would you design the system differently?

And that's one of the reasons we decided to get rid of the memory altogether because the memory just hold bits that are doing nothing waiting for an active chip to do something with them. We're like, let's just make everything active and do everything all at once. And so that was a very important observation for us. And I think people are going to focus more on the number of chips doubling over the next couple of years than how much each chip improved. Can you, I know, we'll let you go. This is my last question, unless Jordy has something. Can you tell us a little bit about broadly what international leaders in other countries generally are thinking or what's driving their motivation to spin up token factories, these AI factories, new data centers, the sovereign AI efforts. And because I'm thinking back to, you know, the development of the original cloud computing revolution.

And it felt like there wasn't as much of an incentive or narrative around, well, we can't possibly just let AWS come over here and set up shop. This feels different. What are the motivations? Is it economic? Is it freedom of speech? Like, what are the shape of the conversations that you're having that get? an international leader excited about setting up an AI factory, a token factory, a data center? So it's a little bit less about fear and control, and it's actually more about they're not

getting enough compute. So think of it this way. GPUs are expensive, and there's only a finite number of them being built, not because they wouldn't build more GPUs, but because they rely on that external memory, which is a real bottleneck in the supply chain. And so, So, NVIDIA is going to build every single GPU that they can physically build this year. AMD is going to build every single GPU that they can physically build this year, and then they're going to sell every single one of them. If they could build more, they would sell more. That means that there's an allocation problem.

Countries aren't getting all of the chips that they need for what they're doing internally. So, for example, when we built that data center in Saudi Arabia, there were a bunch of people who'd been waiting over a year to get GPU orders filled, and they had no idea when it was going to happen. And so they switched over to us because they could immediately get access to compute. So what you're seeing is a lot of these sovereign plays are more about making sure they get the compute. It's as if we're entering the industrial age and all of a sudden everyone realizes if I plug something into an electric socket, I make all of my workers more efficient. Well, if everyone else in the world is getting that or it feels like that's the case and you're not getting that.

You're not getting the efficiency. You're not getting the compute to augment your workforce and make them more capable. you're at risk of falling behind. And so for them, it's as if all the power companies are focusing on some other really rich regions of the world and they want to get that power as well so that they can start running their AI models. So is that more like the 5G rollout,

the idea of just bringing mobile to your country versus Google search, I suppose? Is that the more accurate analogy maybe? That would be fair. That makes a lot of sense. George, do you have anything else? Any expectations around Open AIs' alleged new open source model? Is that something that you guys are going to be integrating heavily with?

If OpenAI open source is their model, we will immediately launch it. Amazing. Awesome. Well, that's great news. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate you staying up late. We'll talk you soon. And congrats on the new data center, new record.

Cheers. All right. Have a good idea. Bye. And let's tell you. about graphite.dev. Graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. The best teams in the world, including TBPN, of course. Use graphite. What else? You have some timeline. We have some timeline. We can go through.

We got to get out of here soon. Yoni Rickman says he wants to get long mold. Did you see this? Yeah. So I threw this in here. Request for I want to get long mold. Basically, he says mold is super hot right now. It's like the protein of environmental contaminants. It's in everything with no signs of going away. It's in the air. And this stood out to me because I once rented a house that ended up having mold in it.

It was a huge disaster. Took a lot of time, was making me sick. And I think a lot of people suffer from mold exposure or mold related illnesses and don't realize it at all. So there's a bunch of different ways that you can solve this. I don't necessarily know what they all look like. I mean, one of the biggest. Yeah, he mold testing, eight sleep of mold,

smart air purifiers and testing. That makes a lot of sense. Then he says mold insurance. Maybe that's genius. I don't know. That's not what I would have thought of. But yeah, and then mold resistant building materials. That's kind of cool.

Yeah. So there's a bunch of different categories. So I wanted to throw this in here. If you are long mold yourself and your business, go reach out to Yoni. I would love to see more solutions. here. In other news, tomorrow night, there will be a GROC 4 release live stream Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific. They're staying up late. I love how they always do their streams after everyone else left the office and gone home. They're like, we're still here. We're going to go into our tents, you know, come out of our tents and

do a stream. So I'm excited for this. I mean, this is going to say a lot about, about, you know, the new Memphis data long since GROC 3. So yeah, there will be a big question about where this hits. Also, you know, we hit this like pre-training while it feels like, you know, a lot of people are saying we need new algorithms, we need new ideas. And I'm sure they'll be able to, the question is not like can GROC can XAI build a big data center and get to the frontier? The question now is like, can they push past the frontier with some actual like completely

unthought of innovation? So that'll be interesting to track. But either way, there's a time of product improvement. I'm interested to see what they're doing on the image side, video side. The video side would be very interesting. I mean, Axe has a lot of video data because, you know, X has been uploading video, you know, certainly not as much as YouTube, but a lot of YouTube videos get uploaded to X in full.

Yeah, imagine if you can tag Grok under like a meme and say like animate this. Yeah, yeah. You turn this into a GTA. Yeah. 20-second GTA video. That'd probably be very expensive on the different side, but, you know, maybe worth it. I have a lot of GPUs. Should we close to this Audi ad?

Beautiful. Let's do it. Advantage Audi, beautiful ad. I couldn't tell if this was a real ad. 10.10. No notes. I couldn't tell if this was actually live. If it is, it's fantastic.

If it's not in the shape of the Audi logo. Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for tuning in today. We will be back tomorrow. A little bit chaotic start. That's the nature of building a startup. up and assembling between while you're flying.

They didn't want us a podcast, but they couldn't stop us. They couldn't stop us. They'll never stop us. So we will see you tomorrow. Have a great afternoon. Wednesday. Evening. See you soon.

Cheers. Bye.