The Pomp Podcast - 327: Cameron Porter On Apple Becoming A Healthcare Company

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

Cameron Porter is a Venture Architect at Alley Corp, an organization in New York that originates a startup idea, hires the team, funds the initial 6-12 months and launches the company. Occasionally, they invest in very early stage companies as the first seed investors as well. In this conversation, we discuss Apple as a services company, the rise of the quantitative self, why Apple will need to get into healthcare, how switching costs get higher over time, and why Cameron thinks Apple may prescribe you LSD one day. =============================== BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. https://www.blockfi.com/pomp =============================== Our second sponsor is choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp  =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Cameron Porter is a venture architect at Alicorp, an organization in New York that originates a startup idea, hires the team, funds the initial six to 12 months, and launches the company. Occasionally, they invest in very early stage companies as the first seed investors as well. In this conversation, we discuss Apple as a services company, the rise of the quantitative self, why Apple will need to get into healthcare, how switching costs get higher over time, and why Cameron thinks Apple may prescribe you LSD one day. I really enjoyed this conversation with Cameron, and I hope you guys do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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So go check them out at BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp and tell me what you think. Our next sponsor is Choice. Their new self-directed IRA product I'm really excited about. If you're listening to this, you're likely part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. I was in that situation too, but not any longer thanks to Choice. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account.

I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax advantage dollars to do it too. It's an absolute game changer. Remember, a new self-directed IRA product that allows you to buy Bitcoin, hold your private keys, and use tax advantage dollars to do it. Go check them out at retirewithchoice.com slash POM. Again, retirewithchoice.com slash POM. And then also, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand

language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Cameron. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, everyone. Bang, bang. We've got Cameron here. I'm super excited about

this conversation. Thanks for doing this, man. Yeah, no problem. I'm excited to be chiming in from a nicer setting than where I'm usually at in New York. Absolutely. We were just talking, Cameron is on a month-long road trip and is currently with some friends in North Carolina, and they took all of the prime real estate to do real work. So him and I are going to chat while he sits outside with a beautiful backdrop there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they're deceived in terms of what prime real estate is, but that's okay. Absolutely. Let's start with just your background. For those that don't know you, kind of what uh what'd you do before you got to alley alley corp yeah so i guess a little bit of

a divergent background in terms of the traditional path if there is one into the venture capital side of things studied studied computer science in school um thought i was going to go down the entrepreneurial path i'd worked on kind of launching a consulting firm in college uh ended up dropping out though my senior year and got drafted into the mls so played for a couple years in Montreal, and then in Kansas City, working on the side as an engineer with actually MLS front office at the same time doing some of the data engineering stuff there. Had my body just completely fall apart, blew out a knee, broke a leg. And once you kind of break both of your legs, you really need to find something to do sitting down. So decided VC was a natural fit. So ended

up back in New York, met Kevin Ryan, the founder of Alley Corp, and kind of have helped him and Windy build this institution and venture studio slash capital fund in New York City. Cool. And so how does Alicorp actually work? I think people here, they fund, they found, you know, there's all these terminology that's thrown around, but just kind of like what goes on there every day? Yeah, so it's definitely a unique institution, especially in terms of how it operates now as an evergreen fund. So we don't have LPs anymore. But a bit of the backstory can help contextualize it. So it was started by Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman after DoubleClick was sold to Google. And they started it initially as a way for them to gain what they called

entrepreneurial leverage. So they wanted to be able to start a series of companies without committing to any one of them. And this was around 2007, 2008. And I think they were probably at the cutting edge of what would be called the venture studio movement. So over the course of those first few years, they started what have now become fairly brand name companies, the MongoDBs, Gilt Groups, Business Insiders, Zolas are part of that earlier batch. And as those companies have exited the the fund has grown and expanded from just being a place where we start two to three companies every year to one where we also are doing seed and series a investing primarily in the new york ecosystem our real goal is to kind of continue to grow and foster that that environment

and hopefully get to the point where it's it's really competitive with san francisco but it's a it's definitely a unique place where we we try to develop concepts across verticals we have no specific area we want to be doing a lot of it's curiosity driven um and we come up with the idea And if we can develop a narrative that's compelling enough, bring on a founding team and fund it for the first year or two to really get it going. It's very cool. And any specific projects that you're more excited than than others or was you've been spending more time on in terms of what you guys are building? Yeah, yeah. So I can give you kind of a sneak peek and some of the stuff that's coming out of the pipeline. I mean, we've been it's been fascinating to see over the last especially quarantine being kind of isolated. I think this like deep thinking has actually been much more productive for us and not being distracted by the whole city.

But some of the areas where we're really excited to start launching companies in is, one, we're getting involved in the digital therapeutics movement. I think that people who are familiar with the FDA and what they're doing in terms of software-only medical devices, some of the canonical examples being the Omadas, the Livongos, the paratherapeutics, we think there's kind of a lot of regulatory arbitrage there and also a lot of opportunities to help in behavioral management, especially for various types of addiction therapy. So we're going to start pushing that forward. We're also doing stuff, and like I said, we're incredibly generalist in what we do. We're working on a concept essentially in the mobile food space. We're trying to take what we think works in cloud kitchens and bring it to a platform that is cheaper and more flexible and is capable of moving where demand is, essentially using a version of food trucks and creating essentially a platform for companies, large food brands, to launch fleets of them, manage them, integrate them with online order systems. So we're really all over the place, hardware and software, and are incredibly opportunistic. And what makes it so fun is kind of applying horizontal thinking to different areas and saying, where are crossovers? Where can we cross-pollinate? And when we can't get to an idea ourselves, who are the right founders to be backing and helping build it out?

It's super cool. And it feels like once you have people who have done it once or twice, I mean, that's really is what made Silicon Valley Silicon Valley, right? It was kind of the institutional knowledge and the ability for everyone not to have to solve every problem for the first time. And just, hey, look, I've done this six times. Here's what you should do. Here's what you should avoid. Keep going. And it sounds like you guys have kind of tried to institutionalize that or at least kind of wrap yourselves around these companies. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a great way to put it. I mean, a lot of the ways in which I like to think about venture studios and why I think maybe some of them go into certain failure modes I think

one of the common ones is right around this institutional knowledge and that the key problem you're solving as a venture studio is one finding an idea that's a compelling enough narrative that you attract talented people but then also making sure you're attracting talented people whose skill set you can complement I think that it's very common for venture studios to go after go after people who are experienced entrepreneurs or just post MBAs as opposed to someone who's been operating in an industry for the last 10 years has never hired an engineering team never raised venture capital never been exposed to it and when you go after those people and say look like bring your knowledge bring your relationships bring your expertise we'll complement with that

institutional called quote-unquote silicon valley s knowledge of fundraising hiring technical talent all of these things i think you end up in a place that's incredibly symbiotic and you're really capable of like one pulling new talent who may have been more risk averse into an area where they can really thrive, and you provide the capital and expertise to help them grow. And so it's really exciting, because I think it's still an underrated opportunity. And I think venture studios, once they start to build this muscle, are going to be able to do more and more of it. For sure. A lot of people don't know this, but I think it was Sequoia's very first fund. I think they had like nine investments. So don't hold me to the exact

numbers, but this is directionally correct. They had like nine investments in it, two of which they incubated internally. And it was like 80% of the returns that they drove in that first fund, which had like a, you know, 50% IRR or whatever it was, came from the two companies that they incubated internally. And so everyone knows them as kind of, hey, we go find companies and invest capital. But actually, I think it was Sequoia, their start was all around really, they had the two big hits were things that they had incubated internally, along with funding. Yeah, I mean, I think people, they underestimate just how much value there is in the creation phase, even though it's so obvious that when a founder owns a large amount of equity up front and

they're able to scale a company, almost regardless of where it exits post the 100 million phase, they're making reasonable amounts. If you're able to conceptualize the idea, capture some of that common stock, the returns are incredible and you're not dealing with some of the challenges of operating as a traditional VC investor. You're not dealing with the challenges of operating in auction mechanisms where if it's a really good idea, you're kind of competing on price with any other fund out there. And I think that like one of the it's interesting, because I think this is something that another thing that

people haven't really internalized as much in terms of cap tables. But traditionally, when you look at a cap table, there's a huge difference between founder equity positions and first employees. And I think that people intuitively understand that there's diminishing marginal returns to the value of like the marginal dollar or wealth. That actually happens on a cap table too. And I think people don't realize that you could have a founder with 40%, you could bring them down to 20% and they still feel fully incentivized and a part of that company. If you bring it down to 10%, that's actually a bigger change, even though the percentage of equity change is less. And so that leaves room and opportunity for funds or people who are building

these types of venture studios to capture some of that equity that is undervalued by the founders and not going to the first employees and still create room for top quality people to build really incredible companies. And I think this is the stuff where venture capitalists figured out a lot of the funding side of things. And this knowledge will sort of start getting out there

on the venture studio side as more and more founders exit. They start doing their own versions of this, want to scale their entrepreneurial leverage, have diversified vets, moving from concentrated wealth building to diversified wealth preservation in a skill that they know how to do.

For sure, makes a ton of sense. So we got connected because you were tweeting all kinds of things that when I first saw it sounded ridiculous. And then I read kind of your explanation behind it. And I said, wait a minute, that guy's actually got a ton of really interesting ideas and maybe onto something here. It sounds like you read Nathan Bashaw's health OS write-up, which was talking about kind of the intersection of Apple, the technology company, and all the things that they could do in healthcare, et cetera. And then you had this thread about like Apple's going to basically solve the longevity problem, right? So again,

kind of at the onset, it's like, well, that sounds crazy. But then you got into it. So maybe let's just start with like Apple as a business and kind of what some of the, it's weird calling them structural issues given how successful Apple is, but just the things that are kind of on the horizon in terms of why they would be incentivized to pursue other things than what they're doing today. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess to start kind of laying the groundwork, we can, we'll go to like the highest level and look at Apple kind of over the last 20 years in terms of how they've developed from a hardware company, services company, and then get into the Tim Cook health company thesis. So early on, Apple was developing incredible hardware, first in PCs and now in mobile phones,

and they were able to kind of create this solution that was successful both in the U.S. and then iteratively in market after market after market. And if you watch their growth, essentially it was incredibly predictable over a very long period of time where each quarter they're breaking record after record after record. And that essentially that cadence was they were expanding to country after country after country. And if you've looked at the earth, you quickly realize that the earth is in fact finite and they're going to run out of countries at some point. And once you've saturated all those countries and the people in those countries have all bought iPhones, all of a sudden you have to think, okay, where are we going next? And the next place to naturally monetize

that is like, okay, we're not just a hardware company, we're a services company. So you have our devices, now we're going to monetize you ever more and more and more and more on those devices. Now, I think like, I don't think I put this in the thread, but the way I conceptualize what's kind of been going on in terms of like the broad tech ecosystem is that Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, every other social media company, TikTok, every product is essentially going after what I'm going to call like vertical time so there's 24 hours in a day how much of that can your company capture and monetize and that's like a really finite game that they're playing and this is the whole apple services narrative is that we provide you with the hardware we're going to be most

effective at providing you with high quality services and products that you want to spend money on and pay your attention to okay there's only a finite amount of that again how do you kind of get out of this trap once you've locked people into the services and into your hardware products there's another axis which is horizontal which is every single day you have 24 hours to monetize people's attention and have them pay for services and as it gets ever harder to compete for the marginal service or marginal amount of attention there's room to say okay if our customers are really locked in which they feel like they are i'm i'm looking at an ipad a mac product airpods i have an apple watch on i don't think i'm going anywhere anytime soon um then

you're like, okay, is it easier to compete for the marginal attention within the day or to extend the number of days that we can monetize this customer for? Now, how do you do that? Well, this is kind of like the whole crux of Apple solving the human longevity problem is that if they are the ones that are building out the ecosystem of products, like the Apple Watches, the health apps, all these things that are collecting data from ancillary devices, your Peloton bike, your Oura ring, your eight-seat mattress, all the things that the quote-unquote tech bro is using nowadays, then all of a sudden you have a country, or sorry, a company that is capable of kind of collecting the data that is necessary for being a very

effective R&D biotech company. And I think you naturally start getting to the conclusion that if they do have all this data, if they are the company that's best positioned to flex a massive R&D budget, and a massive amount of like short term assets, I think they have $100 billion as of today. What would you do with it? What is the biggest bet you can make? And I think Amazon is saying go to space. And I think Apple is saying extend life. And I think this is like the incredibly interesting high level narrative of the massive tech companies at this point. Yeah, what's super interesting about this is, I completely agree that at some point, you kind of run out of countries to expand to your point about you've got to extend that ltv

you're basically chasing growth right and i think that they've uh although they may not have explicitly said it they understand that the hard word the hardware game is going to be very hard and also going to get commoditized over time so that's been kind of the shift into into services so they do less talking about the like what we're not going to do and they do much more talking about like hey look at this new shiny thing that we're presenting um and if you look in the health space there's two key things that i think are really interesting so i've got apple watch uh absolute game changer in terms of you start caring about things that you never cared about like all of a sudden i started looking at like damn i only slept seven hours and 30 minutes i didn't sleep eight

hours right like you know stupid that uh i think everyone before you are actually tracking it you don't care you don't know why i would care but then you do start to realize like wait a minute i feel a little bit more you know cranky today right or i'm a little bit more on edge like oh i only slept seven hours and 10 minutes last night i probably should sleep more and so i think that's like uh just by having the piece of hardware on your wrist uh there's the like tracking so you get sleep you get a heart rate you get steps you know all that kind of stuff but then the first time that i started to think of apple as potentially being like a real player in the healthcare space is when i started to see that you can go in and actually change one of the settings

to uh give you notifications i think it's for like a heart uh for like um uh uh your regular arrhythmia yeah exactly yeah and there was like somebody who turned it on and next you know they got the alert right they went to the hospital and they're like basically if you hadn't had this alert go off like you could have died right and you start to realize like i think the the uh kind of over generalized tech bro world like everybody just wants to count their steps know what their heart rate is you know maybe brag to their friends who slept more hours you know whatever but if you start to actually use that data to your point and actually create true health care benefit. That is a whole other sector of a business that I think previously people just

didn't even realize was possible to access for a hardware company like Apple. Is that fair? Yeah, no, it's absolutely fair. And I think like what's incredibly interesting about Apple is just like, you just you start to see from a strategic level, the value of their whole privacy, safety and security narrative and that healthcare data is the most sensitive data. And sitting at the center of this kind of integration layer with your Apple Watch, your Oura Ring, even like the 23andMe's like genetic data. All of these things are going to get started funneled into this kind of centralized repository. And just because you have it there, Apple's going to be able to surface these insights to you. They're going to be able to nudge you in the right direction. And it's kind

of like, it reminds me of like language is like once you learn a new word, all of a sudden you see it everywhere and you start using it everywhere. And right now we're getting a new language for healthcare. And it's called, it's like the quantitative self. And it's not something that is just limited to the biohackers. This is something that we're all going to be able to use. You're not going to go to your doctor's appointment if you're doing it at all in person, but you're maybe virtually, you're not going to say, I feel this way. I think I have an ache in my knee. You're going to say, I did 1000 steps this Monday. That was abnormal. I had a slight heart arrhythmia that was at this rate. What's going on? And they're going to look at your past

history. They're going to contextualize it based on your genetics. You may be wearing a glucose monitor and saying, okay, your dietary consumption was a little bit off. You've moved out of ketosis or whatever it is. And all of a sudden it's a, it's a very different place. And I think Apple is one of the few, if not the only large, large tech company that we trust enough to give all this information to because they keep on telling us this is going nowhere. And that's incredibly powerful. And I think that, I mean, I, I just, I think it's, it's really interesting when you just think about how much stagnation it feels like there's been in human longevity. And I think it's because we've maxed out the point at which our just pure knowledge of health can go. And now we

need to help bring people and bring just more information and data to bear so that you can take this knowledge and understanding and actually apply it. Because we don't have to sit in a hospital or a lab or a sleep center in order to gather the necessary information for any individual able to get the insights to improve their life. Yeah, this idea of the quantitative self is super interesting to me because I think there's a piece of this that is definitely like the obsessive person, right? They want to know everything about everything. But when you put it in the context of, hey, you're a machine, if you're able to give the doctor the diagnosis, right? But the diagnosis isn't kind of a point in time and it depends on what's your blood pressure today and did you have

coffee beforehand or did you eat a donut or you know whatever instead they could say listen over the last six months when i didn't see you here is your average resting heart rate here is you know the uh the kind of variability to that hey when you work out your you know sleep improves like all of those things now just become a math equation right and kind of a data problem on top of that though it there's actually a mindset shift because now all of a sudden if my doctor says to me hey you need an apple watch because your apple watch is going to give me the information i need to be able to take care of you, everyone's going to go buy Apple Watches, right?

Or, you know, if you kind of go a step further and whatever other diagnostic type thing, it just feels like the healthcare kind of perspective. People are much more willing to make consumer decisions if their doctor tells them to do it versus if they see a cool ad on television. Yeah. I mean, like if you think Apple lock-in is big now

because you want to have the blue bubbles on iMessage. Now imagine you want to be able to live longer and like, you're like, oh yeah, I think I'm probably going to keep on buying the Apple product and I'm not going to midlife give up all my data to switch to another system. It's like, and I think like, this is the crazy part is that I think that we're going to get to the point where you don't, you don't choose Android or iOS or between any of these kinds of like dichotomies of systems. You're just going to be born into it. My mom was an iPhone user. I need her genetic information. I need her health stuff because

that's relevant to me. Therefore I'm going to continue using it. And there's no reason for Apple to not integrate all these things. Now, Apple's notoriously bad at figuring out that people have more than one kind of significant other and things like that on their products but maybe they can sort that out and all of a sudden you see like okay yeah there's actually even values in like a lineage of people using ios or apple for their health information because what do your doctors say like the first time you go in and fill out the intake form did your grandpa have diabetes does he have alzheimer's apple's going to know all of that for the entire history of your family and that is like incredibly important because you essentially have the

blueprint for what's going to happen to you. They're going to be able to overlay what's going on in any individual incident with what's happened to people in your kind of past. Also people kind of across their data set using differential privacy to see like, oh yeah, you're similar to this person. They took these actions. You should do this. And because they can do it in the privacy preserving nature, I think that is like incredibly profound. And I think this is like where, I mean, the Tim Cook quote that like what Apple is going to be remembered for, for mankind as a health company starts to really, really make sense. Yeah. They obviously have a ton of cash. Does this mean that they start to deploy that cash in acquisitions and go get the,

you know, aura ring or eight sleep mattress or something like that? Or is it more the Apple way to look at those products, say we can do it better and try to do everything internally? Yeah. So it's interesting because I think, I think this is potentially where Nathan's and eyes opinion diverge in terms of the piece he wrote is that he kind of explores the idea that apple is only going to sit at this this data layer and that people are going to be developing the ancillary hardware products and feeding data into it or the primary care physician all these things um and that's where they're just really going to play and sit i think that's that's largely true but in terms of the cash deployment i don't think they ultimately get into developing all of the

ancillary hardware i think they actually go into the hard biotech questions so like okay how how do I make a glucose monitor that doesn't have to penetrate the epidermal layer so it doesn't have to go through your skin? If you look at the structure of an Apple versus a Google, Google's incredibly good at taking data and doing incremental development cycles. What Apple's incredibly good at is taking information and intuition, putting a bunch of money into it, and producing the thing people need and want. That sounds much more similar to how biotech companies operate or drug development companies, you have to pour tons of R&D data in or money in, you have to kind of use data. And there's no incremental progress, really, like you just need to get to the step

function change. And so I think where Apple is going to spend that money potentially is on those hard healthcare challenges of like, how do you develop these sensors and devices that are really doing the challenging monitoring that is impossible now? How do you kind of deliver those insights and do the analytics and correlate that data to help people live longer. I think that's where they're going to start deploying it. I think that you may see them, like, I don't know why there wouldn't be Apple healthcare clinics. Like if you're going in there, you have all your data, you want to trust them. You don't want Apple giving it to a third party. They already make it abundantly clear they don't want you doing that given all the terms and services, things you have to do with

an application now. I think that's only going to increase. And we all love the experience of what apple provides and we trust them uh so i think that they are going to build out the care delivery and hard kind of tech research or biotech research um that'd be my guess in in terms of where a lot of this capital may go because those are the harder problems and the big step function changes in value that i think they can then uniquely have a muscle to flex against yeah and i guess uh what apple bought nest if i remember correctly right yeah yeah it was them right yeah it might have on google yeah yeah you might be right i have no idea yeah i actually don't know either um i should have looked that up beforehand uh but let's just say that they had done that i guess part of it

then becomes do you as you go through these acquisitions so eight sleep or a ring whatever there's also this question of like the apple culture right may may be in uh contrast to some of these companies especially companies that are using physical hardware to also gather data And so I wonder if integration is one of the most important aspects of a acquisition. Do you get in a world where Apple basically says, hey, I'm going to buy these companies, I'm going to take their products, and I'm going to install like a leader from Apple to run them moving forward? Or do you actually start to acquire these companies and say, we're going to help these CEOs continue to run the companies as divisions of Apple, but we're going to instill, you know, kind of the nuances of Apple's culture around data privacy and things like that. I don't know if you have any thoughts there. yeah it's interesting because it's kind of the question of what like what is on the inside versus the outside of of the apple world and like what is the line and i think i think there's like a very interesting kind of train of thought there in terms of how how can they how can they play

in this hardware game without necessarily needing to to acquire and integrate companies which definitely hasn't been clearly something they're good at or they've done a lot of obviously because they're sitting on so much cash but i think like what's interesting and this is this is a totally raw thought that i'm just kind of thinking about but they're now going into the whole apple silicon movement right and could there be a world where as opposed to just using apple silicon to only power apple devices whether that's your apple watch your ipad or your your macbook could they start allowing companies to use apple silicon in their products and that apple silicon would run in a certain way it would have all the privacy preserving properties it would do all

these things. They could have the sensing mechanisms that do certain things and those become commoditized. And they're essentially enabling a hardware ecosystem using some of their knowledge and doing what I guess Intel was doing for the last kind of 30 years, but in a way that integrates directly into the Apple ecosystem in a way that they control. I think that's potentially interesting. But yeah, I think I still, my gut lies with the idea that they're going to be going after the things that are that take billions of dollars to invest in and pull off and it's not clear that like like the aura ring is something that is a very cool product but you don't need billions of dollars to figure out how to put those sensors on it's largely a design

problem of making it look good whereas like if they're going to build glasses like that that's an incredibly hard problem these these new bluetooth headphones with spatial audio i think that those are the areas where apple's going to focus um and i think it's like honestly to bring it back to, I guess, one of my favorite kind of VC-isms from Josh Wolf, but I think Apple is going to play really seriously on the kind of the idea of like the half-life of technological intimacy. So I think they are going to be the ones that try and bring the technology closer and closer and closer to you. And anything that is doing that is something that's in Apple's purview, especially as it relates to health. So I don't see the Oura Ring as being any closer to you than the Apple

watch or the AirPods. They're going to cover like your senses with your eyes and Apple glasses. Do they get to the point where they're measuring things internally, like glucose monitoring? That seems like a natural next step in terms of technological intimacy. But that's, that's where I'd imagine that they go next. And I think that's where the most value is and the hardest problems are. To avoid any confusion, I looked it up, Google bought Nest. So anyone listening, just completely forget that we thought that maybe Apple had done that. So you're talking a lot about technology becoming more intimate i think that's a foregone conclusion at this point we're watching it happen in real time uh that then leads to uh two questions one do we get embeddables uh from

apple whether it's like the neural link style that the super sexy like let's put something in our brains uh does it look maybe something more like i know google's got like the glucose monitoring and the contact lens uh that they can put yeah do we get something in the bloodstream whatever And I'm thinking more of like actual silicon or hardware technology. But then also, do you look at something like biotech, right, is where it's like a drug? Yes, technically, that is technology is a different type of technology, but do they ever enter into that field? So kind of how do you think about things actually go in the body and what Apple could do there? Yeah, I think that's like the next big barrier. And I think it's what surprised me as I would have said yes, but seeing kind of companies like Control Labs kind of being able to pull off some kind of direct brain interface just through your arm is pretty promising. And I think there will always be a reticence to install technology directly in an area where you can't remove it without a third party being involved. I think that's like a new level of trust that we haven't necessarily got to. Obviously, going back to biohackers, there's some people doing things like this.

I consider myself kind of someone who definitely is super into the quantified self. I would be pretty reticent to put something into my brain at this point. It would have to be very proven out. And it's just like, it's, it's one of those things where we haven't done, done enough of it for, for me to necessarily feel confident in it. Um, now I think that like, I think that in terms of where Apple will go is I think they'll stay on the periphery of the senses and kind of covering with like the Apple glasses. I think that, I think that we'll get better and better at providing sensing mechanisms

that can, can sit above the skin. And I think that, I think that we still have so far to go in that. that it's not necessary at this point to think that you need to be able to do something embeddable. Now, I think what people often think about embeddable stuff, they go directly to the brain and the brain-computer interface. I think if I were to say where is it most likely that that'll go first is actually in the microbiome and the gut. I think it's incredible just what a lack of knowledge we have in terms of how food affects us. Glucose monitoring is like kind of step one in that. But we have no idea, like you and I could eat an apple and respond entirely differently.

you could eat an apple after an avocado, and I do it after an orange, and it's just like totally different results. And we have what I think are kind of poor heuristics for optimal diet, which is like, I'm going to follow keto, I'm going to follow paleo, I'm going to follow whatever. And to me, that's just people saying, I don't know what works, I need something to follow. And I'm going to pick one that's kind of good. You would, I think like, to kind of give it a comparison, you would never say like, I'm going to pick like this theme for my room and use only the pre picked out things for my room, because those, it just doesn't make sense. You're going of pick the things that you'd enjoy because you know this is what you like and you walk in there

and you like this picture and that lamp and you kind of pick this customized experience that makes you feel good and i think people kind of are intuitively doing with that that with food they want to correlate it to health so then they're going to a proximal solution of just let's like apply like a bucket heuristic of keto or whatever but ultimately like these sensing devices or things you could like ingest as a pill that can measure what's in your microbiome i think are going to allow you to say, what are the things you like taste-wise that make you feel good? What are the things you respond well to? And then using the data you gather from the ancillary devices, how does it actually make you feel and perform and all those things? So I'd say the

blood, the brain aspect, I think is very far off. Microbiome aspect, I think is much, much closer and potentially where it would go first if you're internally ingesting things. Out of all of the major tech companies, is Apple the leader in terms of who you would trust first to put something inside your body i think so i think so i think i would trust apple more than anyone uh definitely not netflix because i don't want to get addicted to tv um and and for sure not facebook google google is uh google is great i mean maybe they give me a free thing and i i might fall for the trick uh but uh but yeah i think apple would definitely be the one i'd trust um and then i think there's an argument for like i don't think they're there yet but i mean spacex in my mind

has the opportunity to be like the biggest company ever and I think they have a clear intention and invest and ability to invest in really hard problems and as they explore space and figure out what's necessary to keep and monitor a human body in that environment I think they also have some incentives to do like deep investing in research here and so I think it's possible that they also produce products that are in this vein and that might be someone I would I would trust too because they essentially have to design high performance devices for people who aren't going to be able to access traditional systems. So that would be maybe the other one that's not traditionally a FANG company, but in my mind could potentially produce something interesting.

Yeah. It's also really interesting to think about similar to what we're seeing with predictive analytics, if Apple could get into that world, right? So this whole idea of you're talking about food and how it affects us, like I almost imagine this weird, feels somewhat kind of big brotherish world. But if you trust Apple to make your life better, if Apple was able to, uh, essentially when you go to sleep, it wakes you up when you're ready based on your calendar and the sleep you need. It tells you, Hey, here are certain types of food that you should eat today based on, you know, all these different metrics they've looked at. They tell you what to do from an exercise standpoint, whether it's, um, you know, Hey, look, go for a two mile walk, or it's something where

it's like, Hey, look, do an exercise that keeps your heart rate above a hundred for 30 minutes or more today like that type of stuff and if you can almost get in this world where uh not so much like apple's running your life but they are doing things that move towards the optimization for what you've chosen so some people may say hey look i want to lose weight apple can help you some people may want to say hey i want to uh extend my life right or some people may literally say hey i want to uh optimize for efficiency and so tell me the least amount of things i need to do to hit some bare minimum from a food and exercise standpoint to like not make myself worse by the end of the day right but like that feels like it's not short term but it's definitely could be on the roadmap

far enough out yeah and I honestly I think you saw this at the most recent WWDC conference that they are they're starting to really touch on that I mean the activity app was was kind of the closest but like if you kind of like go and try and zoom out squint the eyes a little bit they're doing these kind of now the widgets they're now embeddable they have smart widgets that show you information that is contextual to where you are in the day, the news in the morning, the calendar at lunch, and your fitness stuff at the end of the day to say, oh, maybe you should work out. Then you have their movement into sleep where they're going to start silencing your notifications, dimming things. I think naturally, it would make sense for them to do what you're saying and say,

here's when you should wake up. Don't even set an alarm. You have both my calendar and everything else. Why do I need to set the alarm to say I need to wake up at this time? Apple could very clearly be doing that. And, and I think this is where you kind of get into, like, we're talking a lot about the quantitative stuff, but the there's so many soft metrics and data points that they have, like, I think the calendar is something that's totally under leveraged. Like, theoretically, you could look at my calendar and be like, what are the days Cameron reads, meditates, hangs out with friends, sees family travels, has a bunch of work meetings, all these things. And how do those correlate to like, how I end up feeling how I end up sleeping. And I think I think this has been like

the impossible layer that we've had to drive, like, are you just use our intuition and feeling to judge, that Apple may be able to delve into is like, look, like when you have a full work calendar and you don't work out, you're in an incredibly worse place. And I think that is really exciting and interesting to me. And I wish I was enough of a data scientist to do that on my own right now, but I'm just not. Yeah. One of the other pieces of this that we're seeing other companies do, so Twitter, for example, now is doing this thing where like, if you're going to send some, you know, crazy tweet that they detect, whether it's through language or kind of intention, they will basically put an interstitial that says, Hey, like, Hey, are you sure you want to

send this? Like, you know, basically be nice to people. Uh, and it just, again, you can click through and send it, but it just makes people stop and think for a second. Uh, I almost wonder if Apple could get to the place where it doesn't have to like proactively tell me what to put on my calendar, but if it knows that I'm about to schedule the ninth meeting for the day, and there's no workout planned on the calendar, it says like, are you sure you want to schedule this on days where you don't work out and you have, you know, more than X number of hours or meetings, then, uh, you feel like shit and don't sleep well, you know, maybe you want to switch this meeting out for a workout like that type of, um, again, it's somewhat predictive, but also

somewhat like the experience, uh, the user experience that feels like that is a, uh, inflection point on the individual's life. They may not create, you know, billions of dollars in market cap for Apple in the short term, but it just feels like that would change my relationship with Apple and further deepen it because I just can't get that anywhere else. Yeah, and this goes into like another broader thing that I've been thinking about. But like when you start going into these softer things,

like should you work or should you relax? Should you see your family? Should you go to sleep? Should you work out? There is like the health component of that, but there's also like a value system component of like what should Apple be telling you to do? What should Twitter be telling you to say?

And I think this is where you get into the, this is partially where my thinking had gone after the apple stuff but like what gets what happens when you start having these companies that look like countries in terms of your choosing to be a part of them for your lifetime um and and how are if you're opting into their value system and apple chooses to prefer that you should be spending more time with family than than working that's a value system choice more than than anything else and i think we start ending up in a really really interesting and weird place um i forget who wrote the piece but someone came out with something it was an important policy review about about it was really focused on zoom

but the idea that when you have companies that operate uh internationally and across especially like china and the u.s they're essentially one company that has to deal with two value systems and that expression of the two value systems is oftentimes in massive conflict i don't know where it goes but like apple's going to have to if they're going to play this game they're going to have to choose and codify their value system they're essentially going to have to have a constitution for what it means to be a citizen of apple is the citizen of apple someone who only maximizes gdp are they purely like a protestant type person is it someone that is purely focused like a sweden on on happiness or something like that those are these are like these are more value

choices and that's where you see like oh my gosh like these companies like like i guess we'll stick with apple but like apple i think did 260 billion dollars in revenue i'm i'm pretty sure if you look at like the OECD countries, the only ones like above, I think Sweden is just on the barrier, honestly, of like they did $260 billion in tax revenue last year. And like that, that is the scale at which Apple is operating. And so you're just starting to like blur the line of what is possible, what goods should they be providing? What value should they be pushing? Um, and which of these are you're going to opt into as an individual? Cause it really is a lifetime decision. what is your biggest uh what seems like the least obvious thing that apple will do

uh but you believe they will in the next 10 years but like what's that one thing where you're like people aren't thinking about this enough but you think it's a foregone conclusion um i think i think it's a a foregone conclusion i mean man i i guess like i mean it's honestly the health thing i think it's a foregone conclusion that your primary care provider will be apple at some point in the future i think like pre-covid there was a big narrative that i think people have forgotten about where apple was moving their stores from stores to town squares like they were literally calling that like if this is this is like apple's colonialism of like the u.s like every city is going to have like an apple town square and if you're telling me what do you

put in a town square you have a store for buying the things you also have a place for getting the health things and you have a place for educating yourself like this was their whole narrative i think a year ago in their like big announcements was like we are manifesting google in the physical world beyond just a transactional place we're a place where you get educated we're a place where you get the things you need and if i think about the stuff that government provides in a system like that or a country it's it's it's education health care and then protection and i think they are clearly doing education and providing the products i think health care is next and the question is like do they actually get into the the game of violence like do you protect these

values that you created. That's the ultimate government move. They definitely have a monopoly on violence right now. Last question for you before we get into a rapid fire round to finish up is competition. Do you think that maybe Google and Amazon are the only two who even have the balance sheet and are crazy and ambitious enough to even try to compete down this path? Do you think anyone's got a shot or is it pretty much Apple or we won't see consolidation like this? yeah so i think i i'd write off google and and a lot of my write-off is based on like short-term data i just think they've done such a poor job with fitbit like if you told me like oh what would be a signal that apple's gonna or google's gonna do this well it'd be like oh they bought

fitbit they have like probably the top wearable at this point in time other than the apple watch like have they been able to do anything meaningful that feels like a no um then i think the the the amazon question i think is is more interesting because i think that amazon kind of has this ability to sneak underneath the surface and you see what they're doing with berkshire hathaway in terms of working to create a health care system and i think they're slowly gonna they're they're the like best bundler like they're gonna start bundling things into prime like once a year you get to build our health care system for free great i get a free checkup you can buy our knock off app amazon wearable that's 20 and we'll give it to you free if you sign up your kids for your

new prime subscription all of a sudden you start seeing like if the technology becomes commoditized and you don't need to get the high-end apple watch you could just opt for the amazon basic they're going to provide a lot of those things as long as you're using the amazon basic you walk into their stores which already just recognize you facially handle the transactions they're incredibly good at creating a seamless experience around things and so i think it's possible this they're probably the ones that i would guess could compete on next that being said it seems like Bezos, he wants to play in the space game and not as much in the healthcare game, at least from outward narratives. And I think those, those are the two big things is like, it's like space and

health. And those are the big problems these companies should be going after. So this is a whole nother episode. So I don't want to even go down this, down the rabbit hole. But one of the things that's really amazed me by Amazon is they're basically taking Costco's model. So if you look at Costco and Costco basically sells everything at cost and they've got a $60 a year membership fee. And if you look at their bottom line, like basically if you take the number of members they have, multiply it by 60, that's how much profit they make, right? And it's just, it's this incredible business that's built on $60 a year per customer. Amazon obviously has many profitable lines of business, but Prime looks and feels very similar, right? It's basically you

pay a hundred bucks a year or whatever it is now, and you get everything else kind of behind the wall and they keep building out value. And at what point do you get, you know, 80% penetration in the US of members of Prime. We're not there yet. But like, you know, that doesn't seem like it's impossible. No, no, by no means at all. And I think like, this whole bundling narrative is set to continue. Right now, we assume you bundle certain things with government. And just given the size of these companies, I think a lot of that will shift to the companies, the Apples, the Amazons of the worlds. And because they have such a clear KPI, which is shareholder returns, they're going to be able to more be more efficient at delivering those those bundles i think in a lot

of ways i mean this is some of the argument for for capitalism but that's like a more that's a bigger conversation absolutely uh i've finished up each episode asking two questions the first one is what is the most important book that you've ever read so most important book um so the one that i think that i've read that is definitely important to me that i don't think many other people have read would be why greatness cannot be planned the myth of the objective by uh joel lehman and kenneth stanley they're computer scientists and essentially they did they did a project exploring like what what happens when you give people a set of pictures just randomly generated pictures and you let them kind of choose this one that kind of looks like a circle with like a square thing and

you click that and then it generates off of that some permutations that look similar and what they found is that through this random exploration, people would take seemingly random permutations and without intending to do something, turn it into an image of a car. They would then try and say like, hey, someone go build an image of a car from like clicking random things and no one could ever get there. And they said, okay, what if intelligence as opposed to being some like explicit search for with a certain heuristic, it's actually something that is a search for novelty. Like all you do is try and do things that others haven't done before. And that's actually the only way to end up somewhere quote-unquote great because if there were a heuristic for

greatness then you or I would just be like oh yeah great like follow the heuristics but if we both follow the same heuristic and we end up in the same place then it's not great and so they kind of have I think this kind of goes back to the Keith Raboy like personal monopoly thinking all this stuff is like how are you going through life kind of jumping from stone to stone in a way that puts you in a place that others aren't aren't at because those are the places where you at least have the potential to end up somewhere quote-unquote great however you want to define that Um, and I think it does a really good job of exploring it. I'm not sure if their applications or algorithms actually work in any real way. But the concept itself is something that's that's

really stuck with me. I've never even heard of that book. That's an awesome suggestion. Second question is a little bit more fun. Aliens believer or non believer? Believer or non believer? I guess like there's, I guess there's the whole like, fair me like approximation answer this question, which I'm sure there's people who can articulate that much better but i'll try and go one thing i've been thinking a lot about recently more on the spiritual side of things is is the idea and i forget who was it who was popular is popularized by i believe it was like someone a french person but um that that consciousness is not something emergent from our minds but rather consciousness exists outside of us and that our minds are just

something that experiences consciousness or is a receiver of it kind of like your fingers feel like they're separate but they're all connected to something bigger and if you say like okay like let's take that as true that i am just touching in or tapping into the same consciousness that you're tapping into then why does it feel does it feel intuitive that there should be other places in the universe that also tap into this like consciousness in some form even if we individually feel separate like our fingers but are in fact connected in some larger way i find something kind of like intellectually attractive about that and i'll say that's a reason to to believe believe aliens and i'll i'll define aliens as people that also are things that also experience

consciousness may exist beyond earth i uh i tend to think that the consciousness debate is uh is one of these things that once you go down that rabbit hole there's all kinds of things that uh that you start thinking about they're like look i gotta take a break and i had a professor in college that uh kind of led in with somewhat structured exploration of like what is consciousness uh in a class and i remember kids were literally like you know half the class like this guy's literally nuts and then the other half the class is like wow you know you changed my life type stuff and you're like look i think that everyone's gonna uh there's a guy came on the podcast um named bruce fenton um and he's like an ancient alien uh researcher and he

basically said uh every human will ask the same two questions at some point in their life they'll ask uh what happens after death and the second question they'll ask is are we here alone and i thought that that was like he nailed it right like like yes those two questions will absolutely enter everyone's mind could happen different times in their life but uh but those are the two questions man yeah yeah no i totally agree and i love the the distillations like that it's yeah just really really cool and it's fun to think about that's the whole game absolutely uh to wrap up you could ask me one question what is the one question you have for me um one question uh let's see let's go for one that i've been asking people right or more recently but feeling on the the

psychedelic movement and the potential for it to go mainstream what do i oh how do i feel about it yeah yeah how do you feel about it do you think like we're going to be in another 60s 70s type movement? Or do you think it's going to be relegated to the large drug companies trying to figure out how to kind of produce monetary returns with it? Will it lead to kind of a spiritual revolution of any kind? Basically very open-ended, but curious for your heads up. Yeah. So first of all, I'll caveat the whole thing. I'm not an expert on this at all. I've done what I'll call kind of very elementary research, both in Googling around and things like that. I've got two or three friends that are like much more into it. So I've kind of been fortunate

enough to hear them talk about it, but not really contributed to myself. Uh, and then, um, my wife got me to, uh, to watch, uh, this Gwyneth Paltrow goop, uh, documentary thing, uh, where they literally send, uh, some of their employees. I can't, I don't think it was ayahuasca. I think it was something else that they did. Uh, I forget what it was, but they did some kind of psychedelic, um, and they kind of filmed it in a, you know, the way you would expect a Netflix type documentary ready to be filmed. Um, and so that was interesting to kind of see what I'll say is, uh, I think that there is no doubt that it will happen and happen being like, there will be an industry there. Um, it seems like it's pretty, uh, obvious that like any medical, um, kind of applications that are

run through like traditional, uh, processes, you know, in terms of testing and approvals and all that kind of stuff, like that's pretty much table stakes. You just got to actually do the test and and get it approved. Um, but that, that seems pretty, uh, viable in terms of like what I'll call the more recreational stuff. Uh, I personally am of the belief that like, look, if you do things in your life and you don't hurt other people, like knock yourself out, right. If that makes you happy, like literally knock yourself out. Um, and this feels like, uh, it kind of falls into the debate of like, Hey, I've never heard of anyone overdosing on marijuana, but like, there's a lot of people who die from drinking too much right and so like yeah it's a little bit of

over generalization and and the kind of a quip when people want to talk about drugs but it's like coffee's a drug alcohol is a drug right like so don't tell me that we can't have drugs in our life and then when you think about it like from a psychedelic standpoint like there's a lot of things that you could put in your body that change your mental state uh that aren't called psychedelics right and and so i think that when you get into that world um it's just the uh kind of open-mindedness as a society to some of this uh takes time and so actually one of the things that uh i personally look at for in areas like this is like how does culture change around it so if for example do we start to see more people uh putting it in rap songs or music do we see more of it on television

or in movies like those types of things almost then uh it's kind of like marijuana at this point like everyone knows it's going to be legal on the federal level at some point i can't tell you if that's you know this year five years or literally takes 20 years to happen but like you have cities decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana like okay like that's going to continue that's a trend that's going to be hard to fight it feels like we're at the very very early stages of the psychedelic stuff. The part that I don't think I understand enough is from an outsider looking in with just a very elementary understanding, there's a lot of words that get thrown around that are super scary. You start talking about the names of things or what they

do, and people are just like, oh, this sounds crazy. But then when you actually understand it a little bit deeper, you're like, oh, this actually could be one, beneficial from a medical standpoint and two uh is no different than other things so i do think that there's like this um i i don't know the cultural piece is one and the other piece is uh you kind of got to make a concerted effort to like explain why to people who who aren't necessarily like the self-starters to go check it out but but i i would say that i definitely think it's something that is a foregone conclusion i'm probably just a little bit more muddy on uh how do we get from where we are today to that like what do you think it sounds like you probably thought about a little

bit more yeah so i'll i'll give you my my ultimate hot take to tie in all the things we talked about but i know i gave you the answer that the inevitability that people don't believe is that apple is going to build out the the primary care facilities but we'll all throw it out there that in the next 30 years apple will be the one prescribing you lsd and it's the ultimate manifestation of steve jobs having started the company after doing lsd in college and building this whole thing so we'll leave it at that you got to give us like another minute on how we get there i mean basically the general idea being like if if a lot of these things coming out of maps and johns hopkins and the various research institutions prove true and it's an incredibly

profound way to affect addiction and mental health and all these other things and you have a company that's capable of providing health care and services and if mental health is a core part of longevity then it seems inevitable that your main health care provider will provide you with these psychedelics at some point and they'll go down the path of marijuana from um from illegal to legal to recognizing the health benefits potentially i don't know um but if those things are true then if everything we've talked about in this podcast is something we really believe then then if you kind of caveat with we believe psychedelics have the potential to do good for certain people then it seems inevitable that apple or could be the one prescribing them to you in some form in

the next 30 years. When you say it that way, it didn't sound too crazy. And that's the fun of really amorphous ideas. I love it, man. All right. Where can people find you on the internet and find out more about AlleyCorp? So simple things. I'm at Cam39Porter on Twitter and then it's just AlleyCorp.com. So real easy. What's the 39 in Cam39Porter? So I had the pleasure of getting verified while I was playing professional soccer in the MLS. And if you change your name and remove the 39, then you lose your verification. And so for the rest of my life, I am forever number 39 in all endeavors. And it's a very philosophical number in no way, just randomly chosen and assigned to me as a rookie on a team. So yeah, it's very important, but I can't talk about it.

I love that. I love that. All right, man, listen, thank you so much for doing this. And we'll have to do it again in the future. Awesome. Really enjoyed it.