TBPN - The $1B One-Person Company, China’s Pork Crisis, America’s New Weapon | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with ea...ch episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.Follow 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

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 How was your weekend, Jordy? Good. I saw a lot of egg hunting. Oh, you did? Yeah, I did. I finally saw it. Did you see it, Tyler? I did not see it.
Starting point is 00:00:08 You haven't seen it? Ben, you saw it, right? What was your review? It was great. I was telling you, I think it was fresh, it was fun. People put it on the house. He didn't like it. He didn't like it.
Starting point is 00:00:17 He said it was interstellar for Chuds, right? Isn't that what he said? You liked it, right? I thought it was great. It was very enjoyable watch. I don't know. Should I see it? Yes, I think you should see it.
Starting point is 00:00:27 In theater. In theater, for sure. It's definitely a good movie. That's a high bar. It's not too long. It's like two and a half hours. But it's an Andy Weir. Have you seen The Martian?
Starting point is 00:00:36 It's brutal. It's basically just like endless stream of problems and then like quick solutions. So there's some sort of problem they need to figure it out. Problem they need to figure it out. All of its, I don't know, like loosely like hard sci-fi, like somewhat believable. It does have aliens in it and stuff, but it's a fun time. Anyway. Well, speaking of real space, what's going on with Artemis II?
Starting point is 00:00:57 Yes. is live streaming right now to almost a million people on YouTube on the NASA YouTube channel. I believe it's also on Netflix. The stream title is just, we are about to fly around the moon with authority from NASA. We can actually pull this up and see. I would love to hear what is going on right now because I think it's happening as we speak. One minute ago NASA posted that the crew are now the farthest any human has ever traveled. 250,000 miles from the Earth.
Starting point is 00:01:28 Matthew Gallagher, he's the founder of Medvi. And we were supposed to have him on the show today. He unfortunately cannot make it. We do have John Slotkin coming on, the chief medical officer from Gelsinger to or Geisinger to talk about claims around oral GLP1 drugs. We read the New York Times story on Thursday and then over the weekend there was a whole bunch more analysis about the company. And there were later- It's so interesting because you would think that someone someone else would write the one person one billion dollar company totally and then the
Starting point is 00:02:02 New York Times would take it down yep but in this case it happened in reverse so last week the New York Times broke down the story of Medvi a telehealth provider of g.lp.1 weight loss drugs and the framing was basically that this was the first time in history a single person had built quote a billion dollar company and that's what went viral digging in there were some small caveats and some big caveats. The small caveats were that, you know, the founder, Matthew Gallagher, had hired his younger brother, so technically it was a two-person startup. Most people were like, yeah, okay, we'll count that, it doesn't matter. It's a family member, right? And then also the other
Starting point is 00:02:42 one. It's only twice as many people is the original challenge. But they had almost twice the revenue, 1.8 billion. So, but the question was the valuation. So the headline stat in the article was that they are on track to do 1.8 billion in sales this year. year and that the on track is doing a lot of work of course because that's clearly an ARR number that's that's extrapolated out and the g lp-o-1 market's moving very quickly it's not like row and hymns and all the other providers are going to be you know just sitting down and letting this company run away with whatever secret sauce they've discovered around customer acquisition although they might not go into this which we'll go into and it was insane
Starting point is 00:03:21 scale but companies don't unilaterally trade at one-x revenue like that's that that's sort of a given in this article, it's sort of presuppose that if you're doing 1.8 billion in revenue, you would trade above a billion dollars. And so this counts as a billion dollar company. I always thought that the billion dollar company would be on market cap. Yeah, valuation. Not on revenue. Because you could do, you know, if you're going to say, you know, okay, any, any, just try and say the biggest number, you would want to set up some sort of like payment network where basically you could report GMV really, really high. And you actually have a very, very small business because you're taking like 1%. as your true net revenue.
Starting point is 00:03:59 So there was always a question about the margins, and then also revenue durability matters. Like the ongoing question around building these, one-person, high-growth companies, is their durability? Because if you can do it, and then I can do it, and then Tyler can do it, and then anyone with access to a coding model can build it, very quickly, we're going to erode each other's markets
Starting point is 00:04:23 and trade market cap very quickly. And I think any VC that would look at this, they might get to a point where they're like, yeah, this is a unicorn company, look at the growth, I think there's something here. But at the same time, you could see someone like a private equity valuing this and saying, well, I need to see-
Starting point is 00:04:39 A lot of risk. I need to see durability. There's some lawsuits. Exactly. And we'll get into that. So Medby uses two companies, care validate and open loop health to handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping, and compliance,
Starting point is 00:04:52 and we'll get into the compliance thing. But that's a lot of outsourcing. And of course, that outsourcing takes a toll on margin because you have to pay the doctors, you have to pay the pharmacies, you have to pay the shipping, you have to pay the compliance. And they're paying care, validate,
Starting point is 00:05:05 and open loop health to flow that value through to those individual stakeholders. So it's still, it's still. Yeah, I started asking, what does this company actually do itself? Just marketing, and maybe they're too aggressive about it. We'll get it to do it. So these GLP1 drugs are so also aren't cheap.
Starting point is 00:05:24 And when you sell them, even when you sell them legally, even as a telehealth wrapper, a lot of the value is going to accrue to the pharmaceutical companies that own the intellectual property. At least that's how it should flow when things are functioning properly. So you can effectively build a telehealth company on top of a pharmaceutical company like NOVA, that you, where you are taking a thin margin on top, you can get to big numbers, but the pharmaceutical companies are going to want to be paid because they did all of the expensive FDA trials, all the expensive R&D, and they need to recoup that.
Starting point is 00:05:58 So then the other question is you add in the CAQ from digital ads. They were apparently spending a lot on Facebook to acquire customers. And you quickly get, you quickly wind up an estimate of pretty thin margins. I think the estimate, Sheal shared, Sheal Monot shared was like 15% or something like that. It's totally possible to get to a valuation that's lower than a billion dollars, depending on how everything flows through the same time. though, if they're outsourcing all of the kind of key areas of the business to these other players, open loop, et cetera, it's possible that of that, those very thin margins, right, the 15-ish percent,
Starting point is 00:06:37 the margins on that are very, very extreme, right? Sure. Yeah. So you could still get to a number that was in the hundreds of millions of dollars of, of, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the 15% margin looks like 150 million, maybe 200 million in like basically profit. that is crazy. But we'll see what the FDA has to say long term about that, whether there will be
Starting point is 00:06:59 lawsuits or settlements. There was already a warning letter. And this turned into a big drama about the company. The drama... And was there any mention of this in the original story? I don't think so. And so there were a lot of people that were... And I believe I pulled up the New York Times piece and there was no like correction or anything yet. Maybe there will be more follow on. I feel like the founder does need to, you know, respond and have their opportunity. to kind of correct the record because these things can kind of run away in either direction. Even with all the drama, there were a ton of, you know, super legitimate questions about how valuable the company really is and how long they'll be able to continue their current business
Starting point is 00:07:36 model without pretty serious changes. And that's around the marketing stuff. So, Edvi received an FDA warning letter just two months ago for misbranding violations. So warning letter, if you're not familiar with the FDA's language, it can be pretty wide-ranging. Like sometimes it requires just a small change to market. materials to remain compliant and sometimes it's basically like a shutdown the company moment this happened a lot with the nicotine category with illegal vapor products right and sometimes like the warning letter would be you are
Starting point is 00:08:08 warned in that if you continue to sell these like we will put you out of business and some of them are okay we're warning you about this particular claim on your website you need to change this language and it's pretty pretty minimal I went through this ten years ago we started Lucy 2016 And while I was there, we were extremely nervous about warning letters because if we got a warning letter, we thought it would mess up the FDA applications that we had in progress. It would mess up distributors, like anyone who you're partnering with would say, well, I don't want to work with somebody that has a warning letter. Have you dealt with this? We were able to avoid all this, but one kind of concrete example is that we, like Lucy cannot make quick claims about the nicotine gum product.
Starting point is 00:08:49 So even though most people think, oh, this is like Nicorette. it's actually regulated in a different category. It's regulated as tobacco product, not as a pharmaceutical product. And so you can't run a digital ad that says, like, hey, you're a smoker, quit smoking with Lucy. That's a violation because it's not regulated as a pharmaceutical, as a smoking cessation aid is the term. And so in the nicotine category, you would have companies create a product.
Starting point is 00:09:14 Usually there would be no founder associated with said products because people didn't want to put their face on it. And they would do a lot of things. that would make sales grow incredibly quickly. Like, you know, making marketing claims, just where and how they decided to sell, et cetera, et cetera, that ad channels that they use. And so they would go from zero to hundreds of millions
Starting point is 00:09:35 or billions of revenue very, very quickly. But the enterprise value of the company would be near zero, right? Because nobody would want to buy a company that had all that kind of baggage. And so if you were going to value it, it would be like, what is the very, very, very near-term sort of like revenue opportunity?
Starting point is 00:09:55 Yeah, yeah. I mean, the famous comparison is Jewel versus Puff Bar. So Jewel went, you know, raised a bunch of money, got very big, put in FDA applications, got those applications denied marketing denial orders, then got them stayed in the courts. They set up a, I think their whole headquarters was in D.C. They were working very closely with the FDA, truly engaging to sort of clean up all of the problems around marketing and sales and formulation just really try and get to a clean bill of health with regard to the government relations they were successful and they got
Starting point is 00:10:29 approved as not as a smoking cessation aid so they still can't make the claim that Jewel will help you quit smoking but they did get approved as a tobacco product you know which I think the FDA says it has to be suitable for the protection of public health which is a very vague way of saying like it's a net benefit net good that that it's on the market which is you know people can debate that back in the Jewel days they also could not say quit smoking with Jewel they wanted to say they wanted like a lot of people that were you know were smoking cigarettes did switch to jewel and they were pushing for that but they couldn't actually make quick claim so they use the
Starting point is 00:11:07 word switch they said switch to Jewel instead of quit with Jewel and that seemed fine for a long time I think they they eventually trademarked it and then I think they had to pull away from it at a at various points of time. But there's clearly like this gray area in your marketing. Can you say you want smokers to upgrade to nicotine gum? You know, all of these things need to be sort of litigated with the FDA. And what has Medvi been up to? We wound up playing it very safe. And that probably kept us from mooning in revenue to $1.8 billion overnight. But I still think it was the right decision for Lucy. Now Medvi appears to have taken a much more aggressive approach. They are apparently running 800 fake doctor accounts on Facebook to sell compounded GLP1.
Starting point is 00:11:50 Sheel Monot verified that the accounts are not actually doctors. Some even have cartoonishly fake names. Dr. Tucker Carl Zinn, MD. If you, like, this is one of those things where I feel bad for someone who clicked on an ad that was deceptive. From Dr. Tucker Carlson, MD. But if you're getting your GOP-1s from Dr. Carl Tucker's in, you probably are in on the joke to some extent.
Starting point is 00:12:21 I don't know. It's clearly not above board, and they have to clean this up and deal with this. They were also sued in a class action lawsuit last month for violating California's anti-spam law. That stuff can be crazy expensive because a lot of the fines are on like a per instance basis. So it'll be like, okay, yeah, $10 fine for every text message you sent. And it could be like you sent like, you know, 50 million text messages or something. So you could have some massive, massive liability. Of course, that will be litigated in the court of law.
Starting point is 00:12:50 And there might be a settlement and they can figure out what the right damage is. If they are even guilty, they're still early in the process. And so the end result is more of a story of pushing over aggressive marketing tactics. Yeah, I mean, so pull up the actual picture of Shields Post because I think that you can just see how confused. using this would be to somebody maybe a little bit older. You want to zoom in? Yeah, zoom in. You can just see.
Starting point is 00:13:17 You see somebody that looks like a doctor. Oh, yeah. And if you're 70 years old on Facebook, you're not necessarily putting it together. It's Dr. Tucker, Carlson, MD. So my co-founder, Lucy, is, he has a PhD from Caltech, but it's in biophysics. And so he's not a medical doctor.
Starting point is 00:13:36 But he is a doctor of science from Caltech. He has a really good background, but he's not a medical doctor. And I would always joke with him, like, we got to put you in a stethoscope. We got to take some photos of you in a stethoscope. Like, the aura is so high. And he was like, no, that's such bad practice. Like, we can't do that. Like, a doctor is associated with medical doctor, even if you have a doctorate in something.
Starting point is 00:14:00 It's like the famous, like, I'm dying. Does anyone have a doctorate? Yeah, I have a doctor in a jurist doctor or whatever. The other interesting thing, Medvi uses the dot-or-org. What? Domain? Isn't that for nonprofits, typically? I would think so.
Starting point is 00:14:14 I mean, I don't know that it's technically illegal to use it as a for-profit, but certainly when you add that to all the other things. Yeah, because you land on that site and then you think, it looks like, oh, a doctor advertised this to me, and now I'm on a nonprofit medical website. Yeah, in general, I think the story is pushing over aggressive marketing tactics to the limit more than AI allowing low headcount scaling. And this has happened for a long time.
Starting point is 00:14:39 Back in the old days, I want to say like 2014 Facebook era, but the early days of online marketing, there were countless stories of questionable supplement sales or telehealth operations scaling on the back of insane ads. The classic formula for like mega scale was if you could get an ad approved, if you could get it like sort of like white listed or through the approval process, it wouldn't automatically get reviewed that often. So once you were approved, you could spend a thousand. or you could spend $50 million.
Starting point is 00:15:10 And there wasn't, early on, there wasn't a natural trigger to, like, re-fact check. It was like, if you could get approved for a small ad, you could scale it up. And so people would do all these crazy things to try and get the ads approved. There were all these tricky things where they would route to one website. And then after the ad was approved, they changed the website. And then, you know, all the ad platforms had to eventually figure out, like, okay, we need to be scraping a layer deeper, like consistently. or like every day. But the canonical example of the health supplement
Starting point is 00:15:41 or telehealth operation that would always go viral and always just print was if you could get an ad approved that had Harvard scientists, brain pill, and Johnny Depp all in one call to action. I'm not kidding about this. This is real. So it was like always this picture of Johnny Depp coming out of the ocean.
Starting point is 00:16:00 That was the one that was like really scroll-stopping. Pirates of the car. No, no. It was like a paparazzi photo, which they didn't have the rights to use. would not partner with Johnny Depp. They should not be running that ad at all. And then something about brain boosting or like making like limitless pill, make you a genius, that type of marketing would like, it's very general, like, who doesn't want to be smarter? So everyone would click on that.
Starting point is 00:16:21 And then like Harvard scientists would like lend its like credibility. Because oh, if it's from Harvard, like it's good. And so if you could get those three terms approved, there were a whole bunch of like sketchy operations that would get ads approved and then just pump like a hundred million dollars of sales behind them. And it seems like maybe there's a little bit of that going here where a lot of these ads should not have been approved. Maybe there needs to be a validation. I know that a lot of companies that partner with doctors, even just to sell like skin care, supplements, sunscreens, really anything, the rate to advertise with an influencer who's a, who actually has some sort of medical credential is like way higher. Yeah, because it's way more effective.
Starting point is 00:17:00 And that, yeah, it's way more effective. But if you can just like fake that, then you're basically arbitraging that, but you shouldn't be. We have, we have two employees. but 800 fake doctors on Facebook. Not great. Yeah, maybe I want to be the one person, one billion dollar company, but I want to win more. So if adding incremental people
Starting point is 00:17:17 helps me build a better company. Yeah, there's Ryan Pizance at this point. Yeah, why would I not add at least a handful of people? Yeah, yeah, totally. So, yeah, I mean, I think software is an interesting category, especially if it was open source software somehow, where there was some sort of flywheel where you could verify what was actually built, and then you could verify what the sales were
Starting point is 00:17:38 because it was done on some sort of open platform or some sort of thing where the actual reporting and the analytics. I mean, apparently the New York Times did verify the run rate that they used, so their money was flowing through the business. But having a much cleaner representation of what the financial picture is, I think, would help. I was personally excited about the prospect of a video game
Starting point is 00:18:01 and just more video game developers, seeing breakout success. So a couple years ago, in the olden days when I had free time, I got woefully addicted to a poker-themed rogue-like deck-building game called Balatro, which I don't think anyone here is played. But this game is amazing. So much fun. So you're basically playing poker, but there's no financial stakes, there's no money, there's no micro-transactions at all. Interestingly, the game actually got banned, I think in Japan or some other country, for being like poker and being gambling. Ban for being anti-gambling.
Starting point is 00:18:37 No, no. No, no. Ban for being like gambling aesthetics. Because you are playing with cards. There's no real money. You pay like $10, $15 for the game and then you can just play unlimited. But it's done extremely well.
Starting point is 00:18:51 So it sold over 5 million units. I saw some reporting there might be 7 million and maybe even more now because they've gone multi-platform. And I think at $15, $20 a download that might be close to $100 million in revenue, And it was made by a solo developer who goes by local thunk. Over a two and a half year period,
Starting point is 00:19:09 he originally wanted the game to be a side project that he could put on his resume, but it wound up being a massive success. And so depending on your valuation methodology, you could probably underwrite Bellatro close to a billion dollars if it's generated $100 million of basically free cash flow. You know, there was obviously two and a half years of R&D,
Starting point is 00:19:27 but that was just this developer's time, the future revenue streams, the offshoots, the merch, You get to a number that's close, and you have to imagine that his two-and-a-half-year development life cycle would have been pulled forward by the help of AI. So he basically developed the game entirely in the pre-AI period. Does it still have momentum? I think it's probably trailed off a little bit because people sort of, you get to the end of the game after, I don't know, 10, 20, 50 hours or something.
Starting point is 00:19:57 And then there are some people on YouTube that will do, like, like tons and tons of like try and break the game because you can get really, really crazy with like combinations of different things. But at a certain point, like you do kind of finish the game and then you're like, okay, I'm moving on. Yeah, I mean, some of the stuff that I've seen internally at TPN, it's like going to blow. Already vague posting. Are you the vague post king? Have you stared into the abyss yet? Because everyone talks about at the AI labs, they all have abysses. And I feel like, I feel like Abyss 101 is like, do not stare into it.
Starting point is 00:20:31 Yeah. Like maybe glancing. Like, first and onboarding. Yeah. I think a glance is okay. Or maybe like saddling up to the abyss and just kind of peeking your head in is fine. But I would not stare into it. I think that's something you know. Let's go over to the App Store.
Starting point is 00:20:45 Yeah. The App Store saw an 85% increase in new apps this past quarter. That's pour one out for the App Store review team. Yeah. Most recent quarters, new app count has grown less than 10%. So it was just ticking up. quarter over quarter and then jumped massively. No surprises here. Everybody that I know outside of tech has an app now. They're unconstrained. They have an app, but at the same time, I have yet
Starting point is 00:21:15 to find an app that's on my home screen that was solo developer vibe coded, something like that. So I'm waiting for the Flappy Bird moment or the Bellatro moment, this like solo thing. even if it's like a productivity tool, there's clearly more apps, but actually going viral. Like what is the Harry Potter Balenciaga moment? What is the, you know, the viral moment that breaks through and actually makes it to the top of the app charts? Because right now it just feels like the long tail of the app store is getting potentially fatter because there's more single-use apps. There's more small apps. But will we see one of those break out and become, you know, fantastically successful. That's sort of like the next, you know, critical moment that I'm,
Starting point is 00:22:02 I'm, you know, eagerly awaiting, but we'll see. What's going on in China, John? The pork industry is a victim of its own success. This story is incredible. They got swine scrapers over there. Skyscraper's filled with swine. I'm not kidding about this. So, this is from The Economist, and I read this yesterday and really enjoyed it. Pork holds a unique place in the Chinese diet. It was once a symbol of the good life, the Chinese for home is a pictogram of a pig under a roof. It is so important that the government has a strategic frozen pork reserve and the news media are always full of the ups and downs of the pork industry. It's like they got to cover it like it's a horse race. Like what's going on?
Starting point is 00:22:43 It's the pork race. No, it's serious. TBPN for the pork industry in China. That's the real opportunity. There have been plenty of peaks and troughs in the past decade. The trough is active over there, literally. In 2018 to 2019, when African swine fever ravaged pig herds, many smaller backyard farms were wiped out. Prices went through the roof before long. The industry came trotting back. The big worry now is that it is doing too well. More efficient farming methods producing ever more pork are colliding with slow consumption of the meat. Now all the news is about overcapacity.
Starting point is 00:23:18 She who sells cuts of pork at a market in Beijing says she only got to eat the meat on special occasions of the child. These days, she says it's so cheap, people can have it whenever they fancy. The oversupply pushed live pig prices to a 15-year low in March. Some farmers are losing over $40 per animal. Part of the problem is that some pig farmers have been aggressively expanded production in an attempt to gain a bigger share of a shrinking market. On top of that, big companies saved their bacon in the downturn by concentrating their pigs into mechanized modern facilities where they could be kept isolated from the swine fever.
Starting point is 00:23:52 Modern farms are marveled at industrial agriculture, though not of animal welfare. Tens of thousands of pigs are packed into multi-story concrete buildings. One in Hubei province has 26 floors. It's a swine scraper. It's 26 floors of pigs. Do we know why consumption is declining? Just oversupply. So they got hit with this, they got hit with the swine flu, and they were worried about all the pigs getting sick and dying.
Starting point is 00:24:19 And so they, instead of having them cross-pollinate and like open fields, they push them into these literal skyscrapers that are 26 floors tall. But I would assume over-production, you have oversupply prices come down. Yeah. But they're saying that just overall consumption is dropping too. Well, yes. So people are moving to chicken and seafood. Increasingly middle class, the middle-class Chinese see pork is less healthy than chicken and seafood. But it's really like a supply side story. That may be more pork than even China can eat. The average Chinese person
Starting point is 00:24:55 guzzled 28 kilograms of it in 2024, but that was two kilograms less than in 2023. To boost prices. Officials have slashed subsidies ordered farms to coal droves and told the pork reserve to buy more meat to little effect. Some big firms are looking elsewhere. That is wild. China's biggest pig producer hopes to export its business model. Instead, last year it said it would bring the first high rise. It would build the first high rise in Vietnam, capable of rearing 1.6 million swine a year. Pig farms are going vertical as profits flatline. And so they are moving the pigs inside, which is winding up with like increased yields because the pigs aren't getting sick.
Starting point is 00:25:39 America's best new weapon in Iran is a drone inspired by Iran. You had asked about this on one interview we did with someone. Yeah, I forget who it was with. But I was, you know, I was surprised to see the U.S. copying the Shahed because it feels like... You were surprised to see them copying it or not copying it? No, it feels like entirely the smart move. It's battle tested. They're cheap.
Starting point is 00:26:05 We have a good understanding of their capability because American allies have faced off against them. So there's a lot of reason that it makes sense. But I feel like America had to swallow its pride to some degree to come. to copy something that the enemy made. Yeah, they're calling it the Toyota Corolla of drones. The powerful, low-cost attack drone the U.S. is using, and its war with Iran doesn't come from one of America's more than 400 venture-backed drone startups,
Starting point is 00:26:36 and it isn't the product of Silicon Valley ingenuity. Instead, the drone having its moment in the Middle East conflict, was designed by the U.S. military itself using reverse-engineered Iranian technology From the earliest days of the war, the FLM 136, or Lucas, as it is known, has been wiping out Iranian military targets, while better funded hardware systems and drones from defense startups have had little involvement. It is a victory for the U.S. military, which went from blueprint to battle-ready drone in less than two years, jettisoning its tradition of slowly buying very expensive equipment.
Starting point is 00:27:09 The creation of Lucas is an early proof point of a new strategy of making good. cheap drones quickly and a sign that the Pentagon can change the way it does business to better prepare for modern conflict. So I want to know so much more about like, so they're not subcontracting this at all? This is all like is the entire supply chain? The U.S. military itself, are they milling the parts and factories that they've built? During the Biden administration, a small group in the Defense Department seized on the idea of America building its own version of the Iranian Shahed, a fearsome attract drone that militaries and proxy militias across the globe have sought to duplicate Russia, which is lobbying about 4,000 modified Shaheds at Ukraine every month,
Starting point is 00:27:49 according to Ukrainian government data, did more than any other country to demonstrate the drone's capabilities. A small team in the U.S. military's research and engineering office put together plans to build an attack drone. Based on deconstructing a Shahed, the military had recovered from Ukraine. It was the first known occasion in around half a century that the U.S. had reverse engineered another country's military technology for its own use. The last time, it was a Soviet-made pontoon bridge.
Starting point is 00:28:11 That's interesting. A former senior defense official described Lucas, which stands for low-cost unmanned combat attack system as the Toyota Corolla of drones. It may not have all the features or top-end components, but it was built to be affordable and plentiful. The cost of Lucas ranges from 10,000 to 55,000. That's a big range, according to a Pentagon spokesman. There's also still a worrisome lack of cheap U.S. counter-dron technology, which has allowed Iranian-backed militias to continue using small drones to menace U.S. military. bases in the Middle East. The small number of unmanned surface vessels in the region are still years away from being the autonomous fighting machines their manufacturers have promised.
Starting point is 00:28:51 Satrini analyst number three got picked up by the CID, the Gulf CIA, because of the tweets about him. So I think everyone needs to be careful talking about Satrini analyst number three, based 16Z says Hunter S. Satrini number three. Last post from Francis, he says, I think the next LinkedIn post I read about the TBPN acquisition might finally reveal the future of media. Just need to find one more. That's true. There was one more post.
Starting point is 00:29:19 There were so many good posts. It was a lot of fun. And Nate, Nate, you with an absolute banger at a place that we will end it. He says, hear me out. TBPN for sports. They're very well, could be something here.
Starting point is 00:29:34 And I liked it, and I got screenshoted because it's official. There very well could be something there. Well, get out there. something, maybe go treat yourself to the largest buzzball that has ever been built. It weighs 3,000 pounds. It opens up as a lemonade stand capable of holding 17,000 drinks, which will be served around the United States. That's a good way to. TbPN, the only place you can get technology coverage and a hard-hitting buzzball analysis. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. Leave us by high
Starting point is 00:30:07 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at tbPN.com. And we'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Goodbye.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.