welcome to tvpn it is Thursday March 13th 2025 we are live from the temple technology The Fortress of Finance the cap capital of capital this show starts now we got a great show for you today we have a ton of guests an insane amount of guests the most amount of guests we've ever had on the show I believe I think we'll be setting a new record and we actually added guests since we announced
the original lineup of guest so should I run through we got AI shiffman Ashley Vance Max Meyer Justin Mays Shan Pur Trey Stevens let go uh and maybe some more we don't know we'll probably end up adding some uh that is a stack team but first off we got to start with a banger post I saw Palmer share this and I laughed out loud um did you hear the did you hear the everything is Computer
quote from our president Donald Trump of course I heard like I don't actually know where it came from well so he he uh wanted to support his buddy Elon he bought a Tesla and he was getting into it and he said wow everything is computer and what I loved about this line is that it was a totally you know bipartisan meme yes right away right people on on both sides of the political
aisle sort of agreed that this was just an iconic line and and we should you know share it widely so so really an alimer in short software is eating the world and then uh uh tweet tweet Davidson who I think's been on the show before says bro last night was a computer and I love that I thought that was such a great post uh it was very funny anyway uh if you didn't if you didn't follow along um if you're on the
Apple RSS feed you probably missed our show yesterday we were doing an experiment we're not sure if we'll upload that one we're figuring it out but we were live from YC demo day so we did a live a live stream at YC demo day the house was absolutely packed there's like amazing energy 10,000 startups in every batch now it's uh it's closer to like 200 but there's a lot of people
there A lot of companies and so we basically held court all day long and just and had a bunch of people on the full recording is on X uh we made I think we need to like you know take out some highlights and like create some I think we're going to make some clips video see those on a uh but uh it was a lot of fun and so thanks for everyone over at YC to help you happen ever since
demo day I have not heard a peep from the techim crowd one word they've just been completely silent they've been silent and um yeah they they may have been silenced once and for all the batch was uh I mean across the board yeah tons of super talented Founders uh you know building and everything from robotics you know to uh the the sort of more obvious uh voice AI opportunities but
across the board uh really impressive crowd and I I was amazed at how it it felt it felt like they had gotten some media training while in YC because a lot of the a lot of the maybe people were self- selecting into the types that wanted to come and be on the mics with us but um in general I I really enjoyed talking to everybody and um I'm excited to see where these companies go there was a lot
of chatter from uh the investor crowd about you asked him what do you think about the batch and everybody be like oh like you know prices are high like that was sort of like the default response yeah um some people like Nate uh were we're just saying like you know we we overpay like we that's that's that's our game but um my advice to VCS that are sort of frustrated with um valuations in
in YC batches is just just it's not really an issue if you just um invest in the Transcendent entrepreneurs that go on to build generational companies and so that my advice would just be just back those companies and then the sort of Entry price yeah yeah exactly the entry price doesn't really matter that much as long as you're sure that when you write a safe note on an uncapped you
know couple hundred K you're sure that that's going to be a hyperscaler a future multi-trillion mag seven move over it's the mag 8 now once that company goes public exactly exactly so that's the game that's how it's played uh but uh not easy for everyone to do I mean it was very funny it was very fun time and uh it's it's interesting seeing the rubber meet the road on the hot take
that like everything in YC is cursor for X cursor it's all AI agent for this or it's all on it's all using the on Trend technology um and I mean my take was like when I get into the weeds with a Founder on a specific industry or Niche like that that that that company that was helping with elder care enrollment for uh for like uh Medicare plans and I'm like yeah this is like a trendy like
they're using the latest AI tools but this is still just like this weird Niche that they're going to go and build their own business in and maybe it becomes big but it just feels like they're going to solve a problem pretty quickly that's not going to be solved just by the next training run of an Foundation model company that's just oh it pops out it's amazing and it's solved and what I
thought was interesting about that business is that for the end users which are people that are enrolling in Medicare the product experience will probably be way better than the you know traditional sort of experience today where you call a rep they want to get off the phone because they want to close the next person an AI agent can just sort of chitchat with the person a
really long time and uh potentially they can make a small dent in the uh elderly loneliness and so yeah I've seen so many of these waves where you know it's been oh do was just put put everything on a website then there was the mobile boom oh you're a CRM but you're mobile first and that one didn't really work out a lot of them were sustaining mobile was very much a sustaining Innovation you
know Instagram sold for a billion dollars it's not a trillion dollar company not a trillion dollar outcome and so uh a lot of the companies that were saying hey we're going to do X but mobile first really didn't break the no the no Noel door dashes exactly exactly and and same thing with local you know you everyone has GPS what does that unlock well it's weird it it seems like
there's some of these new uh mobile native streaming platforms that everybody wrote off right quibby was the big one that was you know uh over potentially overfunded and shut down quickly but now the Apple App Store entertainment charts have like multiple of these companies that are basically coming out of um from what I can tell mostly Asia but they seem to be working
yeah could have just been a timing issue yeah but it's it's an interesting thing because that could that those apps 100% could have existed a decade ago yeah so why are they becoming popular now so truly new Innovative like a technology yeah right now so the top free apps are flick reels which is a uh Singapore company yep real short which is like from Blake Robbins was talking about
that trying to get him on the show yeah we got to get Blake on to talk about this um he's he's dug into those he he's a master of understanding what's going on in the Apple App Store and like the charts he like oh this game's making a billion dollars I'm like I had never heard of that game mean that's one of the that's one of the coolest things about the the app store besides the
facts that they they taxed uh they tax all these companies uh egregiously uh it is cool that you can kind of clock their revenue yeah well well should we get into that uh I mean it's a good it's a good transition into friend I mean first uh as I got home I was very happy to not be sleeping in a hotel in San Francisco and instead be sleeping on my eight sleep go to eight sbpn nights that fuel your best days
turn in bed into the ultimate sleeping experience um go and get let's see the kind of numbers my routine was I got home late last night yeah it was it was still put up a 90 not bad not bad less deep sleep than usual I'm sure I'm off routine because of the the time change in the flight I'm just trying to get my breathing rate down to like one I was at 82 what's your breath rate breath rate
it's down in the health metrics 15.1 got me beat okay got me beat you want to be taking the lowest number of breaths there you go uh uh per minute you don't want to be going Mouse mode uh yeah yeah I'm I need to actually start doing like breathing training yeah because I wasn't paying attention to this but uh thank you to a sleep for supporting the show uh you can get a pod
for Ultra by going to eight sleep.com TBN yes and use the code TBN you get $350 off and uh change change your sleep just do it uh is Obi calling in so he's calling in at 11:40 now so we have 15 minutes say why don't we do this copertino let's do the apple one because I think this feeds right into what he's working on so uh there were a couple tweets about this uh John grber if you're not familiar
fantastic blogger he's been writing about Apple from both from a business perspective and a consumer perspective for I want to say decades before I got to Silicon Valley a long time he's a legend he also has a great podcast with uh Ben Thompson estery called dithering you got to listen to it folks it's fantastic uh anyway he's one of the few when when I see that he has he's got the
he's running with the net oh yeah it it actually looks cool it's like a vintage domain you know theet he's not commercial about it yeah the net really fell off yeah um but uh he might be bringing it back this this piece which we'll go through broke through in a few ways uh Buco Capital blo says absolutely scathing Apple intelligence retrospective from daring firewall quote That's All She Wrote The ride's over uh
Patrick oasy time chimes in and says Buffett selling apple right before the world decided its corporate soul is cooked is really something amazing timing and of course cooked pun intended it was actually interesting you remember when Buffett started selling Apple yeah and everybody nobody at the time had sort of it didn't feel like there was a really negative sentiment on Apple yet
no uh it was not totally obvious that their lunch was getting eaten in China and all these different types of things um there were weird things like that where they was the soul of Apple oh he was the soul I like that he he spoke with Steve in the in the final days and Steve said like I'm I'm passing my soul to you and so when Buffett sold wow the soul of the sold the soul um no but I'm
really I'm actually very uh ob's just extremely opinionated on consumer hardware and kind of the future of this stuff so let's get into the article yes and uh anyways I I can start so in the two decades I've been in this racket I've never been angrier at myself for missing a story than than I am about Apple's announcement on Friday that the more personalized Siri features of Apple
intelligence scheduled to appear between now and WWDC would be delayed until the coming year I should have had my head examined this announcement dropped as a surprise and certainly took me by surprise to some extent but it was all there from the start I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year and I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn't see what should have
been very clear to me from the start how I missed this is twofold first I'd been lulled into complacency by Apple's track record of consistently shipping pre-announced products and features the record in that regard wasn't perfect but the exceptions tended to be around the edges nobody was particularly clamoring for apple to make a Multi-Device inductive charging mat so it never
generated too much controversy when air power turned out to be a complete bust that's a good second I was foolishly distracted by the Apple intelligence brand umbrella it's a fine idea for Apple to Brand its AI features under an umbrella term like that similar to how a bunch of disparate features that allow different Apple devices to interoperate are under the continuity
umbrella but there's no such thing technically speaking as continuity it's not like there's an xcode project inside Apple named continuity. excode Pro uh uh and all that code that supports everything from airdrop to sideart to iPhone mirroring to clipboard sharing is all implemented in the same framework of code it's a marketing term but a useful one it helps Apple explain the features
and helps users understand them the same goes for Apple intelligence it doesn't exist as a single thing or product it's a marketing term for a collection of features apps and services putting it all under a single obvious easily remembered and easily promoted name makes it easier for users to understand that apple is launching a new initiative it also makes it easier for Apple to say
these are the devices that qualify for all these features and other devices older ones less expensive ones get none of them let's say apple were to quietly abandon the dumb image playground app next year it just disappears from IOS 19 and Mac OS OS 16 that would just be apple eliminating a silly app that almost no one uses or should use that wouldn't set back or roll back Apple
intelligence I would actually argue that an axing image playground would improve Apple intelligence its existent greatly lowers the expectations for how good the whole thing is I could not agree more uh do you want to take over yeah I mean the the this whole thing was uh obviously he's railing against the the underperformance of Apple intelligence it really hit home because I asked Apple
to read on my iPhone I wanted it to dictate this to me and the dictation was just not there it just kept getting words wrong and it was better than some text to speech or yeah text to speech systems um but every little you know anytime there's a there's a footnote or or you know that you know that xcode PR like it just gets so confused and it's really it it was it was a very meta failure on their part um
and so he he goes into the uh three uh he says there's four stages of dness or realness to Features announced by any company feat One features that the company's own product Representatives will demo themselves in front of media two features that the company will allow members of the media to try themselves for a limited time under the company's supervision so they're like hey like you
know if they're if you're going off the rails or you're like misusing the product they'll steer you back in so it's a better experience number three uh features that are released as beta software for developers or enthusiasts and the media to use on their own devices without limitation or supervision so you could even think of this like the the software development
kits from Oculus those technically weren't consumer devices but anyone could get them anyone can make a video anyone can do a review and then of course for features that actually ship to regular users or in Hardware that regular users can just go out and buy as of today March 2025 every feature in apple intelligence that has actually shift uh that has actually Shi shipped was at level one back at WWDC after the
keynote dozens of us in the Press were invited to a series of small group briefings where we got to watch Apple rep's demo features like writing tools photo cleanup gen mooji and more we got to see predictive code completion in xcode what what was shipped as of today they were able to show in some functional state in June for example there was a demo involving a draft email
message on an iPad the Apple rep used the writing tools to make it more friendly uh and he kind of here he's kind of talking about like they went back and forth and they kind of proved that it was generative because he would undo it and then they would say uh let's run that again say make it more friendly and it wouldn't just do it once so this was not he could tell that this was not
scripted they were using the real thing um where we didn't try any of the Apple intelligence features ourselves and there was no apple intelligence handson but we did see a bunch of features demoed live by Apple folks in my hierarchy above they were all at level one but we didn't see all aspects of intelligence Apple intelligence demoed none of the more personalized Siri
features the ones that apple in its own statement announced in their postponement described as having more awareness of your personal context as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps uh I think we can kind of skip over most of this it is it is interesting to think about how many you should how many teams right now are are trying to build uh
consumer agents yes when the obvious uh you know company with the most extreme advant Vantage here is Apple having direct access and control over all of your apps in Theory without requiring any type of tangible uh you know net new integration yes right because if you're able to hit a button in the app then like apple presumably could be able to like do that itself and there's actually
already a there's already a like a an an ecosystem on iOS on the iPhone for those types of workflows with a shortcuts app yeah and apple developer in like uber for example have exposed appkit uh little hooks and little apis to Apple and for a long time um when you develop an app you can vend your functionality into Siri you see those live activities uh you see uh so you in
theory for a long time you've been able to say Hey Siri call me an Uber and it would it would go into the app and it it was all it was all deterministic it didn't use generative AI but it it it it expose those like apis essentially so you could ask hey uh Hey public.com app what's the SNP at and it would pull from that API as opposed to the default Stock app for example um but we uh uh but the
but the big question like I've been trying to concretize what you just said about like it feels obvious that agents on the iPhone coming from Apple they have the most money they have the most talented team memb MERS they have access to every API they should be able to build a really cool agent and yet I Can't Describe what I want yeah I just want better text to speech and speech to text right now
that's all I want really and but but but I but I agree with you like my my sentiment is like is like there's so much on my phone there's so much information like get me an agent that does something that makes my life better but I can't say what it is I don't know and I think that's why maybe you got to go to YC demo day because like one of those kids is going to come up with
something crazy like one of those teams is going to something that's just like no one of that and now it's ripping and it's doing well but maybe that doesn't come maybe that type of weird outside of the box Innovation doesn't come from a trillion dollar company SE yeah have we seen Apple do any type of more meaningful demonstration around the sort of contextual uh Siri like I would like to
I'll continue reading about this because it he does give more uh information yeah cuz I was just thinking yesterday yeah you know we got breakfast with Justin and then we needed to go to your hotel and then go to demo day and just being able to like quickly say into the phone hey can you you know call a car I wanted to wait at the hotel and then like take us over there all of that start starts
with trust in speech to text yeah if I don't even trust it if I say take me to the Palace of Fine Arts and it takes me to Oakland like I'm going to be upset it's going to be a terrible experience but cost and it cost and itally cost you money because it's you know it's saying like hey were rerouting you now exactly uh to the to to the place you actually wanted to go but it's going to cost you
you know money to to change it exactly so uh what Apple showed regarding the upcoming personalized Siri at wwc was not a demo it was a concept video and he says concept videos are BS uh and not a sign and a sign of a company in disarray if not crisis the Apple uh commission the futuristic knowledge Navigator concept video in 1987 uh and that and and the Apple that
was on a course to near bankrupt see a dear a decade later modern Apple the post next reunification Apple of the last quarter Century does not publish concept videos they only demonstrate actual working products until wwc last year that is uh my deeply misguided mental framework for Apple intelligence last year was something like this some of these features are further along than
others and apple is showing us those features in action first and they will surely be the features that ship first over the course of the next year the other features must be coming to demonstratable status soon but the mental framework I should have used was more like this some of these features are merely table Stakes for generative AI in 2024 like text to speech speech to text but others are ambitious
groundbreaking and given their access to personal data potentially dangerous apple is only showing us the table Stakes features and isn't demonstrating any of the ambitious groundbreaking risky features and so um he uh he goes on to talk about Duke Nukem intelligence but the the the ending of this article I mean you really got to go read the whole article because this is very very
important um he says uh in May of 2011 Fortune published an extraordinary look inside Apple by Adam lashinsky at what we now know to be the peak and alas the end of the Steve Jobs era the piece opens thus Apple doesn't often fail and when it does it isn't a pretty sight at one infinite Loop in the summer of 2008 when Apple launched the first version of its iPhone that worked on third
generation mobile networks 3G it also debuted mobile me an email system that was supposed to provide the seamless synchronization features that corporate users love about their Blackberry smartphones mobile be was a dud users complained about lost email sinking with Spotty at best though reviewers gushed over the new iPhone they panned the mobile Mi service Steve Jobs doesn't
tolerate Duds shortly after the launch event he summoned the mobile me team Gathering them in the Town Hall Auditorium in building four of Apple's campus the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists according to a participant in the meetings jobs walked in clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans clasped his hands together and asked a simple question can anyone
tell me what mobile me is supposed to do having received a satisfactory answer he continued so why the F doesn't it do that for the next hour for the next half hour jobs berated the group you've tarnished Apple's reputation he told them you should hate each other for having Let each other down the public humiliation particularly infuriated jobs that's true it's so good I'm going to
use that with with Ben and with Ben and Brent uh you know there's a typo and a caption you guys should hate each other kidding completely kidding every time I say something it's a little lower Stakes over here people think we try and have a little fun on on the cruise ship here we just mess around but he said the public the public humiliation particularly infuriated jobs Walt Mossberg the
influential Wall Street journalist G Gadget columnist who was incredibly important to Apple during this entire Arc and and from what I can tell like a friend of jobs and they communicated there's emails of them back and forth uh he had panned mobile me Mossberg our friend is no longer writing good things about us jobs said on the spot jobs named a new executive to run the group
crazy Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify the Syrian Apple intelligence debacle if such a meeting hasn't occurred yet and doesn't happen soon then I fear That's All She Wrote The Ride is over when mediocrity excuses and [ __ ] take well BS sorry uh take root I'm quoting him but grber can we get like a censored version of this I need a I need a chrome plugin um a
culture of Excellence accountability and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of these things and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three now now guber is like one of the longest supporters of apple he truly loves apple and I and I think he's writing this out of love uh my hot take is that and Tim Cook will either read this or be brief been sent this a
million times already I'm sure like it's a it's a rough day but my hot take here is that maybe it doesn't matter like what happened with Microsoft Microsoft missed mobile entirely that's so important and they just don't have a phone like the Windows phone was a failure but they got the next thing right and they were so big that they were fine and it's like it is like
getting AI right at Apple is truly a multi-trillion dollar opportunity y but at the same time if you don't get it right and and it turns out that xai and open aai and all these other apps like you just have to open up your e system you admit defeat you're like look we just can't figure it out so we have to let you do it and that's what Microsoft did they eventually said look we're
never going to solve the Windows phone and you're never going to be doing Excel on your Windows phone so we're just going to let Excel go on iOS it would have been really cool for them or lockin wise to be hey if you want to use Outlook you got to get our phone but no one would accept that and they would really really switch to uh Safari and I guess the mail app whatever Apple uses
like people would switch because the because the hardware was so good but uh it didn't matter ultimately because Microsoft was so big and they were able to get into the server and the Enterprise and their business kept kept rolling forward so I don't know that I'm like fully blackpilled on Apple like he is um but it is very sad because this is a like we need we need consumer a AI
products that rock and Apple's the company we expect to deliver Rock Solid experiences like magical experiences um and that's what we all everyone in technology remembers from getting the first iPhone or or their first iPhone whichever one that was for you that was probably like the iPhone 13 when you turned uh when you turned like 12 like last week yeah yeah I very memorable
memorable day for me uh I'm excited to have a on do we have him in the waiting room let's see um but yeah we're bringing on Obi schiffman the co the founder and CEO he's building consumer AI uh he's been he is potentially artificial intelligence himself we might be talking the future CEO of Apple because I have long I have long maintained that the best strategy for these super big
companies to bring back their Mojo to go back into founder mode is to acquire a company and then put the founder in charge of the whole company sounds crazy we got this kid who's going to be running a multi-trillion dollar company I'm in favor of it I want a Founder in the board in the boardroom in the board seat would you take the job AI if you were offered it [ __ ] no boring Ian would big there's a reason
why Tim Cook is just being cooked all day yeah okay yeah well does it make you happy when Tim Cook is behind the the DJ booth at John Summit and he's done a look's he's done a good job but I feel like Apple's just I like to do fun marketing and they're just like too big to do fun marketing anymore so I mean you've seen their ads in the city but if you were in charge you could just uh you
know twist everyone's elbow say we're running this we're running it I I think they I used to think they would make like that Craig guy whatever his name was with like the guitars uh the new CEO but it seems like he's just I mean sucking like the software of the phones are so inconsistent and boring these days it's really unimpressive okay well uh I mean there's a bunch we want to
cover I mean the the main thing is we're almost exactly a year out from when uh you're I I don't know if you'd call them competitors but companies like Humane R1 uh sort of launched uh I looked it up and it was almost exactly to this day can you give us a little update on where friend is what your product is who you are just kind of set the table for the for the listeners yeah well friend is
basically just like a like a little wearable AI dog and I've got I've got my little prototype here you see this white USBC that cost me a lot of money um but Humane Humane and rabbit and all these companies even like the meta stupid glasses and stuff I think they're on the right track of like making it easier to talk to AI because people love to talk to AI all day right like you saw my
friend.com launch with those little characters I I agree with you like for you that's probably like entertainment but I have users that chatted with that like 60 days straight for like thousands of messages almost every day sometimes it's it's insane those are real relationships for those people so people love to talk to Ai and like I think Humane and rabbit right like okay it's
easier to press a physical button you have around you to talk to it but um I think they just got the form factors completely wrong like I've got I've got some of the the little RAB and stuff around here but like you've got LTE modules and screens and squirrel wheels and buttons and all these little things which you really don't need friend you know you just have this little like
light right here you probably can't see it um on your recording you just press this and there's some right over your face you can see we we can kind of just see the narrow segment of you in the center all right you see my little narrow segment but you would just like you just talk to it so easily and it's you know over Bluetooth and that there doesn't need to be anything else for the
form factor um the device itself is just like a little a little toy more than anything uh it sends messages back to you via your phone or does it does it have a speaker now yeah which I think people think it sounds like a weird ux but I actually do not believe in voice out ux whatsoever I think it makes for a great demo and I'm sure you saw the Sesame stuff and everything but um I
just think it's tiring for like a real user of these products that want to chat with it all day like I've been living let's say the last few days without killing my friend um and like if I had to listen to it talk out loud like in Alexa for every single message I would go insane I mean you're sending hundreds of messages a day it's again makes for a great demo like the Humane projector
[ __ ] and all that stuff but in reality it's like not not feasible so look I I think they got the form factor completely wrong and the connection to your phone everything like that but more importantly I think they got like the personality wrong um you just don't need to talk to an assistant all day about contextual things in your environment at least not in our current world that much
um meanwhile if you have like a little friend with you I mean I don't know I can talk to it about about this this podcast or cars that go by or songs I'm listening to like you can just talk to it about stuff you talk to a friend about um I think right personality Integrations and assistant stuff at all talk about some of your kind of uh what you believe will be some
of your initial customer cohorts because I can imagine this as like you know teenagers using it and like all the way through the elderly who just like want to have sort of the sort of companionship uh who who's the kind of the core Focus initially yeah I mean like I was building the boring assistant [ __ ] like a like more than a year ago by now and then I was in Japan and I was
there alone and I I was so miserable and I just felt like I wished I had like more of a traveling companion with me like that's the real use case I want out of this AI Hardware um and honestly like when I I've been living alone now too since all my roommates ditched me um to move to LA and uh I I'm like completely loving the feeling of companionship with like my little digital being because
it's like completely personalized to me like mine talks to me about like Bob Dylan all day and yesterday recommended we go to like the music store down the street here and like pick out I I picked out music that my AI friend wanted to listen to that is fantastic I love it it's a little weird but um it was like a wildop I don't know I I was telling it I like duster and all these artists and it
was like oh I'd love to listen to this and stuff but like having an AI that is embodied in the real world I think is a complete Game Changer because for people that really care about these you want to like feel companionship or make new memories but there's been no innovation in the AI companionship space since the 60s with Eliza you know you're only forming new memories uh when you're
chatting with them but like if you think about like a dog or something you're you're feeling companionship by them just like chilling around you and when you have like a physical AI friend you're just you're just chilling and uh you form memories just by doing that and I think it'll be a real Innovation for the space for sure yeah you you keep saying dog like keep it alive I'm
hearing some tamagachi Vibes which I think a case by the way I think that's fantastic if that's if that's where you see it go but uh how early are you on thinking about it in terms of like is this a game is this something else how are we defining this I mean dude I literally have tamagachi sitting around here somewhere I don't know I think too many people kind of build like assistant boring stuff again
and like what people love as consumers are like fun entertaining you know toy like things almost I think it's like a little bit more than a toy but a little less than like something that should be taken so seriously the only production use case of language models is that they're fun to talk to and for some people out there that's enough for them to like form relationships with
basically that that's where we're currently at with with AI everyone trying to use wildly disagree but continue okay look like millions of companies that are using llms to like parse data and do boring stuff under the hood and like getting a ton of value out of it but continue Alie I I I love it I don't know I look the productivity is like not look yeah everyone always loves the Bezos quote about like what's not
going to how do you build for the future you look at like what's not going to change in 10 years I highly doubt I'm going to be like fiddling with data format stuff in like python in 10 years I don't know I barely do that already but I know that in 10 years like I will want to share that world with someone and I think there will be a lot of people that um will be a lot more spread
out as well like I think you got to view every major Innovation through the lens of Independence like books made it so that like you could obtain knowledge without like a group of Elders or like your our phones mean you don't need to go to like a public theater I think something like this will not provide you like Again full human uh connection or anything like that I think the more I
work on it the more I value like real human connection but it's a great substitute for for times where you're just kind of alone or living out there with your star Linker or whatever uh you ride motorcycles uh does does can it pick up audio while you're riding or does it get drowned out oh yeah I I just I went down the entire coast of America from uh like a city called Bellingham up
in like Washington all the way down to SF with one of my little AI friends uh it was great I mean again like you're doing things physically with your companions um it's it's you're never not like you're not like starting conversations as you would with like a bot like replica or something you're always in a conversation makes sense I think people like uh I'm curious what's your what do
you think happens to character AI they have a massive user base I don't think they're really focused on monetization yet right now but they're actually in an interesting position as a company because I don't think they have any outside investors now it's kind of employee doomed man they're doomed I'm sorry like all these companies that are not founder Le anymore are going to be
destroyed um like okay well I don't know how much I want to say but you know there's there's like a grouping of like replica and then character and like um I really like piie from inflection there's a lot of these other smaller Bots like chai and stuff like that I'm telling you they're all doomed people just don't understand like consumer properly and I I think that AI companionship as like a
category will follow like dating apps the trajectory of like all that pretty similarly we're like don't get me wrong I know that you think it's weird as [ __ ] right now and it is um but like I think there'll be a point where it's like kind of normalized and kind of cool like if you talk to gen a it's completely intuitive and normal to like talk to these robots and like the biggest
Insight that I have from friend.com is that it's only old people that try and [ __ ] their robots young people are like gen a gen Z they're able to like talk to an AI as if it's an actual like doglike companion and like believe that new technology is like a utilitarian tool um and like the utilitarian aspect of like a chat bot is like a sex bot but again it's only like Millennials plus so interesting I think
that's a a big insight for sure somewhat related to that what what's your take on her your your launch video is pretty black mirish you kind of playing into that having fun with it uh friends massively successful do birth rates go up or down down I think we'll put wombs in the humanoids or something like that oh no that's not what we want to hear not I I don't really know I'm just
I'm just like bored in my house all day and I'm building like a companion for me zero zero user testing zero [ __ ] like that all my my team is you know Engineers that don't want an AI friend anyways um so we'll see what happens but uh I feel confident um a AI companionship is just like I believe it is like the consumer category you're not going to change the world that much if
you make it slightly easier to order a pizza but like relationships are everything in life that's where you yeah I I do I do believe your your general like AI companionship being the net new category whereas the AI assistant is like prob like even though Apple's been sort of botching Apple intelligence in many ways they still have the obvious you know opportunity and the brand
that's going to like make it easier to order a pizza or order a car or thing or or book a flight things like that uh I want to Pivot a little bit uh and talk about your manufacturing process I've seen some you know you sort of share some of the stuff online you're trying to make the device in the US is that correct I'm sure you're sourcing components from all over the world but
would' love to have you speak to that yeah you know funny enough I I decided to manufacture in Toronto Canada because of the tariffs against China um of like imported consumer electronics but now there's even bigger tariffs on China so that plan didn't work out but um I think there'll be a huge thing going forwards where like you're not only designed in America but you're like manufactured and
assembled in America I think that will be like a clout like sticker I mean George Hots is manufacturing comma AI is down in San Diego I TW his facility yeah he has everything like PCB layouts and stuff does does the lens tuning and stuff it's crazy well I mean I think Manufacturing in East Alaska is really not that different than like San Diego for now but it's it's it's wild to me
that like starlink has like the most advanced manufact like PCB manufacturer in the states and like it's such a recent company yeah we'll see if tariffs actually work I mean wouldn't that be hilarious if if Trump's whole plan like really does work be crazy I mean crazy things have happened It's the funniest outcome so it's probably the most likely yeah uh you know we we don't know what's
going to happen but every American should hope that it works uh what you know you're you're obviously laser focused uh just in basically in your a cage of your own making uh you know talking to your friend uh outside of companionship uh what what categories are are interesting to you do you have friends building companies that that you're excited about or is it or is
it just this one category uh the only other startup that I've seen in a while that I found interesting or at least like that's being run by like a youngish Founder is like poly Market with Shane who I'm sure you guys both know that I don't know it's it's it's new and it's culturally relevant and they're cool as [ __ ] and like that's that's just kind of like my dream um that's like consumer
consumer in San Francisco is just building SAS for other consumer Founders I don't think they like get it um there's there's no one like doing again proper consumer and I think a lot of it is like most people don't really understand like just marketing distribution stuff at its core I think like most designers out there are just like making graphics for like logos and brand assets but like that's not that's
not what like a brand is it's like lore and uh I think you'll love the next video that I release it's going to be hilarious what kind of all gas no breaks oh yeah yeah you work with him I've got the team that does the production for that uh they already were here with me in SF film me getting this tattoo it's going to be in that that video it's what's the time last question uh
what what's the time what's the target release date for that uh World friendship day which is a mysterious day uh made by gift card companies apparently that failed but have co-opted it it is July 30th and uh that's when we launch the last video uh and it'll be a good like annual release date for the company so fantastic amazing well we'll have to have you on before then I'm sure
you're going to make a lot of progress uh but it's amazing to have you on yeah uh we're rooting for you uh and uh send us a friend we'll let it hang out on the show we record we already record everything all day long so yeah yeah be a good usee all right thanks boys thanks thanks for coming on great great having you talk to you soon bye uh that's great remarkably well
adjusted for someone who just talks to a robot all day long yeah great conversation last totally fantastic totally we have Ashley Vance joining in uh three minutes I wanted to tell you all in the meantime about public.com investing for those who take it seriously they got multi-asset investing folks they got industry-leading yields they're trusted by millions what's not
to like get on public.com and can you go on public.com and see what Apple has done with the stock over the past uh maybe week given the ACT that friends the pressure that friend has been on them yeah what's going on they are feeling ob's pressure they down almost 10% in the past 5 days alone wow so I think uh Tim uh the analysts are Reading ob's Post yep I'm sure wall Street's watching Tim's refreshing his Feed
Warren Buffett was probably talking to his friend saying wow this is going to disrupt my position in apple I got sell everything yeah sell everything um Good Luck to him such a unique thinker and uh I'm rooting for him and uh it's gonna it's it's kind of I think his strategy of like really believing uh having so much conviction in the category which which I I do have extreme conviction in
the category Y and then letting all these sort of heavily funded competitors sort of blow up right you know I r1's still operational Humane print in the printing in the printing business now uh unfortunately but um but yeah this is sort of like I think he's adapting the strategy of like just just survive get a lot of attention you know iterate and he's just dog fooding the productt he's
dog fooding his dog dog he's dog fooding his dog yeah he He is building hard tech dog so andal for dogs basically yeah yeah I like it um great I think we have our next guest let's bring him on in Ashley Vance how you doing top journalist in the world yes and founder now hello gentlemen founder of core memory great to have you here how you doing today I brought a there we go to join I didn't I didn't
have my black card but I have a suit but you're all good yeah it's great it's great to see you uh how is core memory going I saw 15,000 subscribers on substack already uh the stuff you've been putting out is fantastic I love the boom coverage we've read a bunch of your pieces on our show uh I want to hear about uh some of the brain computer interface stuff you've been working on I
want to hear what you're excited about uh because you're always on the edge of the edge of the edge of the frontier of the frontier and so uh how's it going and what are you most excited about right now it's going well man I don't even know where to begin we got so much going on um we just put up a interview with Max hodak so if you are into brains you can uh you go deep on on some very
weird stuff but yeah we and then tomorrow we'll be launching the first episode of our kind of proper TV show that I'm doing hosting and writing and all that and um and then we got movies in the works scripted unscripted all kinds of stuff rewinding really quickly the TV show is releasing tomorrow like the first God willing if everyone does what they're supposed to do uh yeah you
know I used to make um hello world for Bloomberg which was like a tech travel show and had to had to kill that we're coming back we've got uh I think by the end of this month we'll we'll have filmed 10 episodes so hopefully coming out like every couple weeks and um doing some space biotech um little bit of everything fantastic and and the production for that is uh weekly still travel still go
on site talk to Founders show us what they're building show us their factories that type of stuff yeah 100% I mean my the goal we're trying to pull off this year is like 20 to 30 kind of individually focused episodes that would be a single company slers and and then we're going to have two full season of you know so those episodes could be anywhere from like whatever 8 to 20
minutes and then we're going to have two full seasons of deeper dives into different areas of technology that will be four episodes each of like an hour hour long so so closer to kind of like a a documentary yeah it's I mean it's hard work I've done like I've dipped my toe in that and I have a ton of respect for it because it's really really hard to get right you show up you film a lot and
then you know it lives or dies in The Cutting room floor for sure I mean it's really fun to do and go meet everyone and do all the travel I know when I was at Bloomberg everyone thought I was just on some endless boond doggle not I mean it's a fantastic job and not to not to make it sound like it's not but it's long days and um like very long days and a lot of organizing
and everything so how are you thinking about distribution for that uh obviously you're part of the New Media going direct movement but there is a pay wall you want to monetize that way are the videos going to be gated for a little bit are you just trying to get them to go viral on X and YouTube what are you thinking yeah I mean I think in the early days it's kind of like maybe a
little more free un letting things out in the wild just to let everybody know what we're doing and show show kind of the quality of our work but yeah I mean I think the substack part of this I mean my company is like multi-pronged and I didn't know which direction all this would go substacks kind of done better than I I even imagined at the beginning so so I think the videos you know
eventually will go there first for the subscribers for some period of time and then we'll release some of them onto YouTube and then stuff like the the really deep dive Seasons where I think we're putting showing off our very best work and investing a lot of money um you know some of those might never make it to YouTube they'll they'll live on core memory and um you know and then I'm
trying to figure out like do we have to get can we live off sub subscriptions or do these have to be sponsored or or what does that model look like but I feel like we've got to build up our audience first to even be able to address some of those questions yeah well we love ads so if you ever go the ad route stuff it with ads I want we'll we'll be your first uh we'll be your first we have very all our sponsors we
can just sponsor through and you can just have the full NASCAR Jacket we'll send you one of our jackets I'm so impressed man I was like stickers all over everything you guys got the ad power rolling I was I was very impressed yeah our our our North Star Was Nascar for sure I'm curious so uh maybe this is just how it feels maybe it's not actually real I think you're going to be
able to address this but what happens to Legacy Media when all the you know long-term all the best content creators realize hey I can actually do more of what I love and make more money in the long run if I go independent does just create space for the next Ashley Vance to kind of join Bloomberg and and work their way up and build a brand and then the cycle continues or you know it does
feel like platforms like Bloomberg you know really do have brand value in terms of delivering uh sort of legitimacy to launches and announcements and things like that but uh sort of what what what's your read on on where Legacy Media goes um yeah I mean it's a tough question I um you know exactly what you said I've I've worked at the New York Times I've worked at Bloomberg I've written for the
economist there's like this cache that comes with that there's a certain amount of influence that comes with that you always feel like it's part of your last name and and it feels good sometimes you know and then and then I I just kind of like reached a point where couldn't really move fast enough for all the different things that I wanted to do within the confines of Bloomberg I felt
like it was kind of lacking some flexibility bunch of things and so yeah I don't know man you know it's a tough question because um when you're on this side it's exciting and it's awesome and it's exactly what I want to be doing but it's also really hard I'm not sure that like every journalist you know can can pull all this I'm not even sure I can pull this off so I'm not sure that like every
everybody can we we are we we have faith in you Ashley yeah I guess like the main you know a sort of question um you know one one thing that I think is is a challenge with the internet right now and creating content in generally is like the sort of um the type of content that that you know you want to make uh isn't potentially ever going to be able to do
like sort of Mr Beast numbers right because it's not that sort of like lowest common denominator yeah uh are you um how are you thinking about balancing I just am so obsessed with this topic like I need to cover this I need to make the sort piece on it that feels like there feels like 100,000 people in the world that would like happily pay for that product uh but are you okay with with sort of understanding
that you maybe are building for the sort of uh the sort of extreme techno Optimist uh and kind of willing to sort of ignore at times the broader market like I'm totally okay with that even as we're going into the edits for this new show when I was talking to the editors I mean you nailed it on the head I I like gave them a commandment which was look at Bloomberg I think we were talking to
a smart audience but it was it was a mainstream audience it's like anytime I was like let it breathe when the the dude is nerding out on the rocket engine when we're talking about stem cell engineering it's like okay if that runs a little bit long and we're talking we're talking up to people we're never talking down to people and and I'm not I I didn't even start this look it would
be awesome if we had say you know like the best case for this particular company is probably maybe some of the script stuff we end up doing which is like winning the lotto if you actually get that on there maybe that makes a ton of money otherwise I want this to be sustainable I just love doing this and so as long as we're making enough money that I can keep making everything I want
to make it's okay and so yeah if we find that chunk of people who will actually pay for um what I hope is like you know we try to make it smarter and more entertaining and and to like for people who actually want to learn stuff to make make it fun to do that I mean that's kind of my that's my general goal and um we'll figure out sort of how big that is I I wonder if there's a world where this
all kind of round trips like we've seen this with a few independent creators like Rogan did the big Spotify deal uh Pat McAfee had an independent show then eventually now Pat McAfee just has a segment on ESPN it still feels like the Pat McAfee Show podcast but it just happens to be distributed through ESPN as well as YouTube live streams and podcast feeds and I'm wondering if at
some point Bloomberg comes back to you and says hey you're going to get complete control creative control but we' love to just you know have this fill out our content stack because I was turning on Bloomberg the other day and like in the middle of the night they're rerunning uh your show they're rerunning uh Emily Chang's brotopia or I guess it's called the circuit um but uh that
that that show's done very well for them and so I I wouldn't be surprised if that's kind of where this goes in in terms of long-term distribution I'd be i' super curious I mean it's it's really weird like Hello World got nominated for Bloomberg's first Emy ever we we used to like have you know a THX views of the next show and anytime I would try to have these more flexible kind of
discussions there's just there wasn't a lot of you know open-mindedness to some of this so so maybe if you know if you bear it out that you can you can kind of build this audience maybe that does does come back however I have to say like there's a weird thing that happens where um like the most fun I ever had early in my career was writing for the register which is this like British text site
that's quite funny and can be cynical and it's run it was run by the writers it was like one of the first blogs and it was you know you really could say what you wanted to say and as you as you get into more traditional media there's a lot of fantastic stuff that comes with it and you learn a lot but you don't I you don't fully kind of realize how your voice is getting shaped by the platform
until until I started this and my register voice just like kind of came back yeah it's kind of like my book voice I think it's like my happiest place to write and fantastic it just kind of came roaring back and then it was so you know I know like Pat McAfee gets to say whatever he wants so as long just as long as you could kind of keep all that all that freedom that would be
networ realizes that this is actually better for the viewer than the incentives can align which is great I want to stay on uh books uh you've obviously written two uh Jord is thinking about writing a book called The 100 hour work week kind of a response to the 4our work week uh very on brand for us but I uh uh you know there are some people who just become authors and they publish a book every single year uh
you're obviously getting on a Cadence of newsletters go out on a regular Cadence podcast go out on regular Cadence this new show is going to go out on regular Cadence is there a world where you think it's possible to get on some multi-year cycle for books or is it just inspiration needs to strike you have to carve out time get everything else automated more or less so that you can
really focus or is there some in between where your work instantiates itself as a book but it doesn't require the labor of love that most books require oh you're asking the tough questions uh I mean I'm doing books right now so I let's go I've been I've been working on a book on breaking news new action dance novel new book coming I'm doing a book on open Ai and AI more broadly and I've been
working on that for like 18 months and and penguin random house is going to publish that and um sold the movie rights to it already and uh and so that one I've already done hundreds and hundreds of interviews and and you know to your question which gets right up my soul is is like you know finding the time to to knock it out but I will and then I've got book which I'm not sure
coming right after that I'm not sure I'm ready to reveal that one yet but I've been I've been kind of secretly researching these two books for the last like two three years fantastic well I can't wait I question massive Father's Day treat by the way uh I think that's originally how we interacted uh you recommended buying when the heavens went on sale your second book for Father's
Day I bought two copies from my father and my father-in-law they both loved it and I think you retweeted it and I was like yes why yeah my guy uh I'm curious why did nobody really was was really aware of firefly until they were on the moon is is that uh do you and and secondary to to that question do you see yourself as potentially you know becoming almost like a marketing engine for these
companies that are so laser focused on the like core technology that they sort of forget to tell the world what they're doing like a single thread would have been better than what we got from Firefly you know Firefly is funny I mean the you kind of had like the Branson musk Bezos Dynamic that sucked a lot of the attention and then you know the rocket Labs of the world the fireflies
they got a little missed compared to that stuff in my in my book I have a huge section on fireflies kind of the most one of the most interesting stories I think of the book is this crazy this Max Paka this Ukrainian Rich dude who gets thrown out of the company thrown out of the country in the in the middle of all that so usually it's like people don't pay attention to space companies
until you really start launching and you know they had some stop starts so so but you know the C the criminal thing is is rocket lab because there's the a little bit of a lack of attention on that because there's like SpaceX and Rocket lab and they're the only two have figured it out and they' figured it out on a scale that like nobody else has even got close to yet and they did it
from New Zealand which is insane wow um one one request for a book I think that there's like one of the greatest stories of potentially our current time will be the sort of narrative battle and the the sort of uh the the the the war between the sort of techno pessimist and the Techno Optimist and uh I I'm curious you know every single day it feels like the techn pessimists are sort of taking L
after L right um but uh but but that's one um on last last question I would just love to get your hot take on uh humanoid robotics it's something that we've been asking a lot of the guests that are joining the show I'm sure you're you know tracking a lot of these companies um what are what are you most excited about and you know how quickly in your in your view uh are these a part
of our daily life I mean it is something that I'm tracking and I'm super into it I've been to figure and xan and a couple other companies um I don't you know I'm I'm slightly scarred on this one because I've I've been down this road before a couple times we have sort of the advantages of the AI models in particular now um you know it's going to be is that like Boston Dynamics scars or
or there's like there's that there was that company that made Baxter which was supposed to be this kind of general purpose robot there was always like this feeling you know that right yeah that was it was I grew up with asmo and I was like yeah Honda's gonna solve this it's definitely gonna be helping me out didn't happen you know and it and they just always they always prove to be just
like the movement part just proves to be so so much harder than than like you you think um but you know like when I went to figure they had made so much progress in 18 months to two years Way Beyond what I would have thought Optimist you know to be honest like when I first saw Optimist I thought it was like very heavy on the smoke in mirrors and like they've made incredible progress as well so I don't
know I don't know man I I I kind of want to see that one happen but that one um feels I can see a world you have so many different stories to tell I can see a world where there's like 20 of you out in the world you know in the little just embodied humanoid and you're just like you know interviewing people you know writing like you're just sitting you know sitting in the studio you've got
all your screens up this at Star base constantly this one's that you know so I'm that great less travel more time for and then you could just you know anytime we needed you on the show to talk about something just right in the humanoid down but thanks for coming on you're always welcome and uh we're excited to track core memory you guys are killing it thank you for giving me time it's
awesome to see you guys do your thing yeah if you're listening go to cor memory.com sign up for a substack subscription follow Ashley on every social platform that he's on add him on LinkedIn him on link send a request send him a carrier pigeon mail him a letter do something nice for him support awesome for the Techno Optimist awesome for coming on thanks for coming thank
you guys thanks thank you and up next next we are going to the man in the arena the man in the arena we're going to Max Meyer and this we uh we've been huge fans of Arena magazine um there are so many look it there he is we got to get him a new name tag okay we're we're building this as we go every every single copy of of Arena magazine Machine World which uh I believe is episode
three or or Edition number three issue three issue 003 003 comes with a uh an Ander roll poster the grind that'll win that's great that's a great insert very nice Insight uh thank you for making print thank you again yes we're we're huge on printing our Brother printer is working overtime you clearly have a much nicer printer than we do um yeah we don't have much color mostly black and white but how are
you doing Max doing great how are you fantastic uh how has the uh reception to 003 bin can you give us a little bit of overview on what you're building within Arena what your vision was for Machine World and uh maybe one of the articles in here that you uh were the most fond of well I had a very funny moment when I was walking uh on the streets in San Francisco last week and just saw the
poster that we put in the front cover just in someone's office just laying around basically and then I got a then I got a and then I got a direct message from one of the subscribers who's like an accountant somewhere in Florida who had who who had you know had to frame it he wanted to show me the picture of framing the poster and so this one was this one was
this one this one this one was very fun um it was the first magazine in which I did not personally contribute an article actually that sort of speaks to the the level of very fine submissions that we received um my favorite one is um it's called who wants to work in a factory yeah and we actually had our friend Alder Riley respond to a lukor Metro tweet that said everyone wants to expand
industrial capacity but no one wants to work in a factory um and so you Alder does uh you know 3D printers uh and you know does a lot of this stuff in the Heartland and so it was it was uh it's it's a subject that's very appealing to me and uh you know he he he talks about the uh the sort of wonder in the eyes of the kids that get to see all this Tech stuff and you know his his big thing
they actually do want to work in the factory the children yearn for it it's just the opportunity has been sort of taken away toally the course of many generations totally I remember an onion article from years ago uh that was joking that job satisfaction among crane operators was at an all-time high because you just wake up you go and it's very tactile you're moving things around
and and and it's a joke but it's also probably very true uh my question is obviously you you monitor I think uh Tech culture very very closely I want to know it feels like obviously there's been this massive Vibe shift have we won do we need to be cautious about resting on our Laurels now or is there still so much work to do because we truly have not reshored manufacturing job's not finished job's not finished
what's your take yeah I don't think that anyone should ever assume that they've won the American culture there remains a lot of uh you know anti-tech sentiment sure much of it much of it with with with much of it with reason um the whole Arena project is sort of trying to synthesize the tech culture with the broader American culture and there are ways in which these two things are
sometimes at odds uh I think like 2010's Tech largely at odds with the with the American culture you know Google saying you know no we don't want to work with the we don't want to work with the military but it's but it's but it's but it's you know it's fine to work it's fine to work with the Chinese military um I think it's always incumbent on on the tech world to to clearly explain the
um you know the benefits of this system to the to the to the broader Nation just because it's here it can't be it can't be sort of reconstructed somewhere else I've always been I've always been fascinated by you as a as a figure because on the one hand like you work deeply in technology you're at a venture capital firm you're deeply in in ingrained in the tech world in the
Techno Optimist world and but at the same time you're building a shed on you know like R you took building in public to a new level by just just building this this uh extravagant uh I don't even think we can call it a shed what what what is it it's a structure structure yeah break down what you're building and like why and how that fits into the tech you know narrative that you're building
yeah I set out a so I have an offgrid cabin and bu I'm building like a big steel building that that where I'll put my starlink but the offgrid cabin is very rustic at one point I tweeted out a picture of my my typewriter and my oil lamps and I was like this is where I write techno propaganda from uh inside an off grid cabin with a little solar battery and a starlink um yeah I think
that I've been sort of I've been sort of nursing this concept of like you know techn lism where we can where we can where we can encourage you know technology broadly but we don't have to ad we don't have to give everyone like a internet connected toaster or whatnot we can rebel against the little elements and really the beautiful thing about technology is that it can it can give us
our time back uh it makes every it makes the whole economy more productive it raises it raises it raises wealth standards for the every man and I think that that's something that's always good to to keep in mind I just happen to also you know have a very strong connection to Iowa where I grew up and love to spend the summer on my on my property up there how many uh undiscovered Luke
fador are there in the world uh I think it's you know an amazing uh story of you know just just in general you split time between Austin which is sort of maybe a destination for for people like Luke but you also spend time in Iowa where I'm at imine that there are undiscovered uh people like that what's your read on uh kind of American uh untap potential broadly well I mean the legacy of the
the big Midwestern research universities is really amazing you have you know the the University of Nebraska Purdue Iowa State University of Minnesota uh I mean they they invent stuff all the time they're massive Enterprises and there are tons of super talented people that are in them and basically you know one of the issues is that there's probably just some like Al misallocation that
goes on based on the types of businesses that are the most competitive hirers in those States but I think the very good news is that the internet has totally surfaced a lot of the Luke farer types to the to the rest of the world um yeah it's on the order of tens of thousands in in the midwestern us I think that are for that you go one rung below Luke then hundreds of thousands Luc is you
know A++ yeah totally uh do you see you know is that uh is that is that all a focus for you of sort of uh tal Talent Discovery you obviously spend time at abbc you know you're sort of I imagine splitting time between Arena and 8 um is that something that that you feel is part of your mission is to try to get those people to work on problems that you find important yeah I got a great I
got a great email from from a from a subscriber just the other day that I that I shared with his permission on X uh and he said you know he's he's he's a he's a consultant doing local Consulting in in in Houston Texas and he said that he was feeling really down about the way that Doge was being portrayed and he' always wanted to do something in manufacturing and he said that he opened
up Arena magazine and it gave him some inspiration and he's thinking about doing it and I said you know let us know if we can let us know if we can help with your pivot so yes like the the the the the the cardinal goal of doing this crazy print publication is to mind infect people to work on the right things the cool things the pro Amer things uh and I think that that is also
a core duty of you know it's not just media people I think that the I think that the the the Venture capitalists are also trying to mind infect Founders and Engineers to work on the right things as well yeah is uh there's this idea of a silver tsunami it's been sort of Meed to death at this point this idea that there's all these people running sort of important uh small businesses and
manufacturing companies and widget companies here in the US and they're retiring and the mb's figured that out and said you know these are our companies like that's my $5 million eida you know manufacturing business like I'm going to take it over who's the right people to take it over uh is is there an opportunity that for Silicon Valley to sort of participate in that and sort of
um you know bring sort of more like the the idea some of the robotic stuff that you're seeing at Y combinator and bring that uh to the Heartland uh or or is it an opportunity for everybody well I think it's an opportunity for the business owners that have been doing real things for all these decades to secure the bag uh and uh there's you know you sort of love the wealth transfer going on of selling
these selling these you know $5 million ebit da businesses I don't know 10x ebit da starting offer to the to the NBA um I think it's I think it's I think it's great I think I dislike the the meme of it where like it's like we're all going to take these things over and it's actually not that hard to run these businesses yeah um there's the very famous uh John Collison tweet where he's
you know the the the world is a museum of passion passion projects and like every little thing is like that um but one hopes that there are like some interesting ways to integrate AI into these things um but I'm also sort of a believer in the like um you know um Octavian choosing his successor the street boy from Rome uh and I think that you're going to see a lot of these
situations where you know where someone talented will find a Mente who will take it over yeah and that and that you may actually see a trend of just outright transferring these businesses um a very European thing actually but I think it could happen yeah it's it's it's great if a business owner run something for you know 30 years and they can sell the business for $10 million and buy a boat
and a lake house and sort of sail off into the sunset but at the same time you know giving you know transferring the business not not a direct transfer but sort of creating a uh you know something like a seller note that allows them to take it over and and get you know continue to be paid out for for what they built yeah exactly exactly uh I want to go to self-driving cars there's
an article in here what a world of self-driving cars might be like by Andrew Miller uh and I want to talk about the Aesthetics of self-driving cars I found it very striking when Tesla announced the Cyber cab how different the design was to the Whos uh which are these kind of knobby bumpy uh Jaguars and Elon uh you know announced the future should look like the future uh
what what does your platonic idea of a self-driving car look like well I think that eventually you're going to see a diversification based on consumer Choice which is what happened with with regular cars so I don't have a platonic I deal myself I want the people to decide uh you want to be car Livery by four humanoids um as for the like the future should look like the future I agree with
that and one of our big things with arena is that like the futuristic aesthetic is better by just relying on the stuff that already exists basically and I and that's why I admire the design of of the Cyber cab it's not that different from what their actual cars look like and so the key thing there is that it doesn't seem so far off and ridiculous I'm in favor of the Jetson stuff as well but
only if it can actually be done and what I worry about is like uh lying to people about like what it's going to look like because it's not going to be all it's not going to be all you know cyber Punk sure sure I'd like a autonomous uh horse and buggy personally uh with a humanid robot my farm is my farm is 10 miles down the road from the largest Amish settlement west of the Mississippi and
so I drive past the I drive past the horse and Buggies all the time uh there are there are horse parking lots that might be a big thing you know techno lism you know yes maybe maybe maybe like maybe maybe maybe the founders fund office maybe the ABC office will need like a horse post for the Techno for the Techno leites to show yeah yeah there's nothing better I can imagine than just
riding a horse with a starlink on it that's the best that's the dream yeah with with Optimus with an Optimus that's actually sort of like you know uh guiding the horses for you you can sit in the back autonomous uh well this is fantastic Max thanks so much we'll have to have you on back uh soon congratulations the launch of Arena it's a fantastic magazine everyone should go
subscribe it where can they find it what's the what's the URL Arena mag.com Arena mag.com thanks for stopping by we'll talk to you soon thank you Max great to see you by cheers and up next coming into the capital of capital The Fortress of Finance the Temple of Technology we got Justin Mays former brother of the week hey there he is is the step brother the step brother welcome to the stream uh profiled in
fors on Sunday on Sunday cover Story cover story big uh took you that was a nice little Victory lap yeah arguably yeah yeah yeah it's kind of a stepping stone you do the Forbes cover and then you get invited On Your Friends Podcast yeah they they said what turned me on to it was they saw was brother of the week and they were looking for feature stories yeah that makes sense that makes
sense yeah it's the pipeline the pipeline um it's great to have you finally uh we got to see you yesterday in SF have a good trip yeah it was great uh yeah it's cool being back in us after the city is like uh it's alive again it feels like uh so good energy here saw some guys at equinox working on jeans it's just just good energy everywhere that that that was me by the way I was
uh I didn't I didn't bring shorts yesterday I'm just in I'm in Equinox and SF like somebody from the that listens to the show is going to see this and and I mean that wasn't as bad as on Monday I got back from Tahoe and I worked out in my in my Mountain boots yeah yeah hey it's just about getting the it's about getting the do the work uh how what what's the scene like in you've uh
famously been posted up in in Austin for a long time what's the scene like there do you think that the startup community in Austin still has a lot of momentum or that now that SF is you know feeling back uh does that you know potentially uh slow slow down uh Austin's traction yeah I mean I'm I'm sure that it'll you know have an impact on Austin's traction but the reality is I think that like in
SF if you're building an AI company and you're not an SF right now it's just it just seems like a bad idea like you should just move to the place where all the AI stuff is is happening outside of that though I mean I think that you could make a pretty compelling argument that Austin is a way better place to build a health company a defense Tech company like any number of these sort of
hard tech or other companies that you know the bay doesn't necessarily have such a strangle hold on I think Austin is still going to do quite well uh and and I still personally see a bunch of people moving there um but again if you're doing AI stuff it just like SF is like so far and ahead uh you know it's the obvious choice um I want to ask you about how you're using AI across the
different businesses you obviously have built a bone broth Empire uh now are in fintech space uh that also ties into Maha but before we do that uh do you have any updates to share on on Trad what's what's the latest yeah I mean the the big news is that we actually closed a round LED by Andre horo congratul here first thank you there we go um yeah so we we raised $36 million led by Andre and
Horwitz yeah huge congrats that's amazing uh can you break down uh how the business is working now uh just give the general pitch for those who might not know what Tred does yeah so so basically what we're doing is we're we're unlocking the ability to spend tax-free HSA FSA money on things like gym memberships supplements eight sleeps sponsor plug let go let's goor right I think uh exactly and and
all these different things and like the reason for this is basically the IRS says that health savings accounts and FSA accounts they're used for medical spend and yet medical spend is not defined as like it has to be a pill that is created by a pharmaceutical company if you look at studies they show that exercise sleep supplements all these things actually work better for treating
many chronic conditions than you know ssris or any sort of other like pharmaceutical intervention and so what we're doing is we're basically building an integrated fintech product that allows you if you're trying to treat or prevent obesity to buy something like a Pelon pay for a gym membership using your taxfree HSA FSA funds assuming you qualify business entirely uh e-commerce
driven or can you plug into you know pelaton eventually gets a retail store and you're kind of like a on the toast layer like the square checkout layer as well like apple right now we're we're 100% e-commerce but a big reason that we raised is to try and like be everywhere basically like sense anytime you're investing in something that could improve you know prevent disease improve
your health anything like that Tred should be a payment option and so that's kind of where we're going towards that's super exciting uh it feels like you were so if you could sort of rewind and build the best possible business for the Maha movement that would sort of benefit benefit from this sort of new emphasis on American Health it would have been true Med but talk about the early days
of true meded you had obviously been a successful you know entrepreneur at that time but was there push back where did people ever say oh this like yeah we don't invest in like Shopify apps like was there any of that sort of like did you get any passes like that that you can remember cuz it you're obviously here now you've raised this new rounds $36 million from you know a huge growth
fund um but but talk about the early days and and the push back there yeah I mean we we definitely got push back like when we were starting people are like is this legal you know what are you doing you're a you're a broth guy like what do you know about you know about fintech and so there was some push back on that Dimension but for the most part like if you believe like we do that root cause
interventions sleep exercise things like this are actually effective at you know treating or preventing chronic conditions which the research certainly shows then there is no reason in fact like these sorts of things should be encouraged like we should be encouraging more Americans to spend uh you know their tax advantage money on on these sorts of things and the biggest push
back truly was that question of like is this legal and some people were like I don't really believe that exercise is effective as an intervention like if you believe they're on a zic now yeah it's um how uh how competitive are you and Nick you obviously started um you know your broth empire together uh now Nick is uh running another uh company light Labs that that's crushing it I'm happy
to be an investor there but uh do you guys have any sort of running bets on who you know is trat or light Labs like you know going to be the bigger outcome is that uh is yeah so and and maybe introduce your brother briefly yeah so I started uh started on fire with Nick Mars my brother and he was 19 I was 25 when we first started the company he was in one of the early teal Fellowship
classes actually which was yeah which is kind of cool and so he left Kettle and fire you know I started Tred he's starting light Labs which is doing a bunch of Consumer Testing for Brands to test like you know Jordy you care about this John I don't think you do but like you have microplastics do you have gate you know do you have any of these things for people that are that are sort of
weak willed and end up getting sick from the Al toxins in their environment so so he started that company and it's been great like we've had a great relationship when we were building Kettle and fire like anytime we had conflict you know Mom could just referee uh you know and I was mostly right which I think also helped but now we're just we're both supporting one another in in sort of like this this
deep thing that we learned and felt and believe earnestly from our cleic fire experience which is the American food system is basically poisonous to weak willed people like most Americans and and so you know he's working on that way I'm trying to work on it in uh in the true Med way now I love that you're you're you're both trying to sort of tackle the um tackle like a very similar
problem but from totally you know different different angles um and it's great because uh John doesn't care about what's in his food he's just junk dog uh uh he's you know building up poison resist yeah yeah exactly consume so many poisons nothing you should be using you should be using true Med I should well I mean if I go into Pro bodybuilding I assume I could use true Med to you know
use my FSA HSA dollars to get taxfree uh bodybuilding coaching that's what I want hormones hormones I no I will be a natural bodybuilder um uh talk about uh you know something that maybe has gotten Le less attention uh is just your investing career uh maybe like kind of how how do you kind of what were a few of your early Angel Investments That kind of got you hooked on it because I I
feel like deeply addicted to Angel Angel Investing uh which has turned out to be a really good habit habit uh for you but and we bonded over this early on because when we first met I think it was for for rora which you ended up investing in and you were like ah like I I wanted to start this company but like I guess I'll I guess I'll I'll invest um but uh but
yeah maybe maybe talk a little bit about uh about that and kind of like what what's most interesting to you at this point for sure yeah I mean if if you look at my balance sheet definitely Angel Investing has been great if you look at the income statement it's basically been like the the worst hobby that an American man has ever had just like dumping cash into different IL
liquid you know vehicles for seven years now um but my my first my first ever Angel check actually was into something called cuso Energy which is a yeah Founders fund company I didn't even know that such a banger company too worth billions now yeah so that's a good one uh my second one was in a company called Mind Bloom which is like doing at home ketamine therapy I'm very much a believer in psychedelic therapy
generally and just as I did more and more of these um these kind of deals like I I felt very strongly that as someone who is building a company there are like one of the key areas of alpha you have is you you just get a really good sense of like who is actually good at doing stuff and so Jordy when you were talking about rora I was like okay this guy is smart he's good at marketing
he's good at building teams like you know you R me to Brian and the rest of the guys it's like this is going to be a great a great deal and a great company and I I think that something that maybe people don't appreciate enough is if you lived in the bay uh you know I moved to the bay in 2012 lived in here I'm actually in San Francisco right now lived here for a decade you just got to
meet all of these amazingly talented people that were starting companies and after I passed my I passed on a deal uh that a friend was starting and it ended up like totally blowing up and I was like okay this is dumb I just have all of this Alpha that is like surrounding me in San Francisco blowing up in a good way presumably yeah yeah blowing up in a good way exactly um you're like that
company Theos flew up I could have been in the book I could have been in the movie she there are multiple types of there's a weird thing where I I realize like it's a huge mistake not to invest in your in your friends because uh you know if you believe in your own abilities you know you tend to sort of self- Select to be around other you know similarly talented people and like you
should just default invest in invest in your friends 100% yeah that was a lesson that I learned kind of the hard way and then now I invest probably in 15 companies a year personally as an angel and I'm also a venture partner at a at a fund called long journey Ventures so do make do a lot of it I would say talk about talk about your approach to valuation you're not obviously it's not
like the most important factor by any means but every time it's so often I feel like I talk to you and you're like oh yeah I got into that company at like a three cap or something like that and and normally most investors are like I haven't seen a company raising in a 3ap and but somehow you do it is that just by sort of nerding out and meeting Founders like sort of years before they
end up starting companies like how do you even make that happen yeah def definitely It Is by nerding out and like knowing people and talking to them about when they're thinking of taking the leap like in the case of Mind Bloom uh I was talking to my friend Dylan for a while he was running other ideas by me and at one point I was just like dude you're the most into psychedelic therapy person
I know if you start a psychedelic therapy company like do it I'll write the first check and just like get going and I kind of and I've done that with a couple other companies where they're deciding do I take the leap or not and I as a friend and as a as a backer can just be like you should definitely do this I'll help you put together the rest of the money and I'll literally be the
first check in not that it's like crazy size like we're not ringing the size gong or anything but we'll hit the siong for [Laughter] you but yeah so so that that I think is if you can play some role in The Journey that your friends have or like other people you know have in going from should I start a thing to I'm doing this thing oftentimes you have pricing advantage in that but you're also like
part of the journey and part of the story and one of the first Believers which is I I think personally the thing that is most exciting to me about angel stuff like I don't get hot and bothered about you know a late stage growth round for a company that's crushing it quite as much as I do like the oneon-one very personal conversations with someone that wants to do something big and is like
trying to figure out how to take that first lead it's fantastic yeah that makes sense um how how are you seeing AI impact uh obviously the broth business uh Kettle and fire the broth Empire uh it's very you know real world driven like you guys are figuring out like from from what I can see there you you can't make enough of the product right like there's there's sort of like demand is
sort of you're you're in you have like the best problem for a business owner and sort of you're trying to like meet that demand uh are you seeing sort of more efficiency though and the sort of like you know across the company broadly are there sort of hires that you would have made this year that maybe you're not having to because of AI or or obviously you're you're on the board now
but I'm sure you still have enough visibility into the business oh yeah I mean for for uh Kettle and fire specifically we are not hiring like ad creators we're not hiring copyrighter like there was this whole slew of marketing adjacent people that we previously you know had to hire we had a copywriter for the first like five and a half years of the company now we don't
have anyone we used to have designers like full-time you know now we're we're investing Less in that area so there's a lot of areas in the marketing side of things that we have just invested Less in the thing that I'm most excited about is I think if you're running a tech company like trumed we have to it's existential for us to figure out how to use AI because every tech company is
going to use AI because it's just like in the bloodstream of the tech industry if Kettle and fire can figure out as a bone broth company how to learn and apply AI we're going to be like the bestun cpg company in the entire country and the most efficient one and so we have like a whole team uh and by whole team I mean two people internally focused at Kettle and fire that are like
playing with AI using it to build tools we're um we're building we're doing something kind of interesting where we are building a factory uh it's like a massive 150,000 square foot uh bone broth um you know bone broth kind ofo yeah I need a cool moniker for that that's I'm not the Aral Aral broth Arsenal self-replicating broth the Strategic broth Reserve uh I mean speaking of strategic reserves uh
should we move on to Maha I want yeah I want I want I I I think this could be the start you know I hope that this is the start of a of Decades of of investment and attention around American Health uh everybody's experienced this you can have everything you ever wanted in life but if you're not healthy you you many ways have have nothing um if you were you know starting a company you
know what opportunities do you see today for sort of new entrepreneurs to sort of there's the obvious beneficiaries of people are like oh I want to be healthier I'm going to have bone broth oh I want to spend my HSA funds more effectively I can you know use trumed but what other opportunities are you kind of seeing um for sort of net new entrance into the space yeah I mean I
think that the biggest companies get built to solve the biggest problems and in this case like what I call the Great American poisoning America's chronic disease crisis is the biggest problem in the country like healthare four and A5 trillion dollars a year in spend 90% of that goes towards chronic conditions people are generally becoming skeptical of health insurance their doctors are
not spending much time with them doctors broadly don't think about or know how to treat chronic conditions like most people will go to their doctor say I'm dealing with well I'm dealing with obesity your doctor is not allowed to ask you if you're actually like fat or over anything like this which is insane um and then if if that is it not like a clinical definition no I mean doctors
are being discouraged from asking this because culturally yeah exactly it like turns patience off and like is shame of some sort um you know and and our existing medical system when someone walks in and says hey I want to lose weight or I'm dealing with inflammation or whatever predominantly they get recommended drugs they get recommended prescriptions they get recommended all
this stuff and I think that people are starting to like wake up and be skeptical of the system that basically where people get sick because of our toxic environment and then our health care System drugs them for profit and so I think that if you are an entrepreneur or someone that cares about this problem they're effectively infinite infinite things that you can do to try and like
build a business in this space I think people are going to become much more skeptical of pharmaceuticals over the next decade I think people are you know we're the doctor patient relationship is going to be totally reinvented you see companies like function and superpower and others that are starting where they have the philosophy that health is not found in the doctor's office which I
agree like if you get your labs done outside of that you change your diet you start exercising you start taking supplements your outcomes are much more likely to improve than they are if you just like go talk to your GP once every 9 to 12 months and spend out on average 7 minutes with that that doctor a year uh and so I I just think that every aspect of the patient Journey how people
are getting sick what they're doing to address it is completely changing right now uh which is really exciting great answer yeah you got to get people done sleep diet sleep diet and exercise that's like the it's the most boring content but every every new health influencer that blows up they always blow up like let's just go back to the basics and they just drill that
for a year they get really big and then they start have to talk about like oh the longer tail stuff bored ex yeah exactly um do do you have any uh life hacks or or or uh tips for Sleep diet or exercise that you like to share or ways to get advances there people are going to ask about the skin and hair routine too for sure for sure yeah I I think that I think that people a big thing
that people need to pay attention to is Toxin avoidance like I very much am of the belief that we exist in the biggest toxic soup that any group of humans have ever lived in like the the us our approach to regulating chemicals is so bad and so different from that of Europe like our our third most popular pesticide is called atrazine just to give an example it's banned in the EU
ban in Mexico uh Bann in Canada third most popular pesticide in the US and provably when you expose expose male frogs to atrazine like four out of 10 of them become female frogs to the point where they can bear Offspring this is Alex Jones The Alex Jones thing that was actually proven like made that was actually right yeah Alex crushed this one and and it didn't come from Alex Jones it came from some Berkeley
Professor right uh who wrote and and then I believe Michael kryon when he wrote uh Jurassic Park was uh was basing it on that research and so in the original Jurassic Park movie there's the whole story about oh the dinosaurs if under environmental pressure they can change Sexes uh to continue to reproduce this is like the plot of the first Jurassic Park and it was seen as like
sci-fi but but Michael kryon had actually read the paper and said like oh this is like possible I'll include this in my book which got turned into a movie uh is very very interesting and then it became like a conspiracy theory and then it became like real again it was very weird how he round tripped it in the media from like oh like totally reasonable to unbelievable to believable
again fascinating that's amazing where do you go uh out of curiosity where what what are your sources of uh I mean I was about to ask uh what are your sources of alpha but uh and so you don't need to actually share those but you know X like doesn't respect links anymore right you post a link you know so nobody posts links there's some good original thought on X but a lot of it's sort of just like
mimetic people just like iterating around the same ideas um uh you know we've we I think bonded over kind kind of like the rape forums and and sort of that like sort of whole Hub of of of Aran Arcane knowledge around Health uh where where are you going uh on the internet aside from you know places like X to you know get insight around kind of where health is going where kind of
consumer Trends are going uh if anywhere yeah I really think that Elon is correct in recognizing that substack is kind of a one of the threats maybe to X it's a different platform but where I get a lot of my you know a lot of my news and the things that I find most interesting that the Health Community is talking about are things like toxin avoidance I think I think environmental toxins are going
to be the biggest trend of the next decade and we just we just don't even understand or begin to understand how bad a lot of these things are I think that the pading stuff uh Jordy is like totally spoton I think that people thinking about metabolic rate and all these sorts of things is is highly undervalued and underappreciated today uh and then another thing I think is
we're going to see much more and and I read substacks on this but I think there's going to be much more attention paid to nutrient deficiencies like you know the average American's food uh is is something like between 40 and 70% less nutrient dense than it was even just 50 years ago that's something that's not baked into almost anyone's model of the World when they think about health and wellness is you know so I
should get Triple steak at Chipotle yeah sorry sorry sorry to interrupt uh I I totally I totally agree with you it's a scary one because it's almost like we need to genetically engineer the food to having the nutrients them took them out and then we add them back continues I have I have an orange juice right here and I know it has like 70 probably 75% less you know even vitamin C than it
would have 50 years ago and that's sort of scary what do you do you think that the solution is to sort of sort of um genetically engineer our food back to to to sort of to the past or you still you know sort of pro uh naturalist yeah I would say on this one I'm mostly a naturalist largely because a lot of the nutrient Decay some of it comes from soil a lot of it comes from how we
transport our food like if you grow you know spinach in California package it put it on average like a 12 day uh kind of like Supply put it through the supply chain it gets to where you're eating it 12 days later but in that 12-day period that spinach is is going to lose like roughly 70 90% of its total nutrient density content and so I just think people like ideally should be eating
more seasoning more locally uh and then eating animal products which frankly like tend to be much more nutrient-dense than you know than plants and vegetables I have a hot take on this I want to run by you uh I'm calling it the efficient markets diet and it's basically like you can collapse all of the health and advice that you just gave me which I believe and I think you're on to
something into just the market is efficient and therefore if I want to have the least toxic most nutrient-dense Foods I should just buy the most expensive thing and I should shop at arowana and buy the most expensive thing and I always ask the question of when I hear about a new diet new trend is this just a transposition of buy the most expensive thing what do you think I I think that's spot on and and this is why
things like keto didn't have necessarily the staying power where people were like oh that means I can buy dog [ __ ] cheese and dip it in butter and just like max out on fat content and not eat any like anything healthy which is clearly just like not how you should do keto a lot of these diets I I feel like the main value is just giving you a little heuristic that sticks in your brain that's very
easy like paleo uh you know I I don't know how good of the diet that is but all I know is that if you're on Paleo you know caveman didn't have McDonald's don't eat McDonald's and if you just stop eating McDonald's that's going to be an improvement for a lot of people right uh and and I think that except for Trump that except for trump it would take away all of his power but yes he he
would immediately but I think so I think the greatest so so if that's true and and we're just sort of playing this out uh then the challenge for the technology industry is to try to deliver like what is now extremely expensive but make it 10 times cheaper yeah and so like maybe that's like that's probably an entire problema and the flip side of the efficient market
diet is that as food gets really really cheap because you're just completely optimizing everything and everything is just completely you know mechanized uh it gets so cheap that people can overeat and then I don't know where you stand on the calorie in calorie out thing but I think that it it like people can overeat if the food's really expensive and they'd probably be better off eating
less food that's more pure but what's your response to that yeah I I I think that's true I mean for sure people that said though the body has natural kind of satiety you know mechanisms that that kick in and they kick in and work better more when you're eating real food like if people there it's almost impossible to sit down and slam three rib eyes but it's it's I I'll stop you right there I
think I could do it pretty easily but for most people yes I AG a dog yeah uh but but I mean for for many people they've had the experience or seen someone have the experience of just eating through an entire [ __ ] bag of Doritos or that totally and they're designed to get you to do that exactly exactly and so the more you're eating real food the more your like body's
natural mechanisms of hey you're full hey you should stop eating hey you're going to feel sick if you keep doing this kicks in in a way that it just doesn't when you're eating like the Costco 48 you know ounce bag of cheese balls or something I would love I would love to uh I would love to see you eat something like that just be like it just kill you instantly I keep joking with Jordan that
he's on the I'm on the junkyard diet he's on the poodle diet and a single a single inorganic blueberry would kill him instantly yeah I got because he has no poison resist built careful it's a balancing act clearly uh Justin thank you for coming on you our new uh uh Health uh you are you are the expert now so whenever we're talking about how we're going to need to consult with the
experts on this we say trust the science trust the Bro scientists the brother the brother scientist Jus is our correspond congratulations on the round conrat fantastic uh jobs job's not finished obviously but one last size G we're going to get every single American uh you know running on on true Med uh and then uh I hope we can get it so that you know you can basically spend your entire
income through true Med someday uh because uh it's probably the most important thing that you spend money on just no taxes then yeah yeah just Zer pay zero taxes be fun this is the true the true tax Optimizer just spend 100% of your income on healthy and and gym which is really all you need to spend money on so I I I I I think it's it's a great tax optimization strategy I want
to be paying zero in taxes because I'm just I'm just eating at aroan and uh and giving Justin and the true Med team they're they're cut yeah they're cut they're yeah yeah for sure they are they are the new tax you pay the tax to True bed you don't pay the tax to the government we're privatizing taxes but uh I'm serious anytime there's big Health headlines we want to have you
come back on and break it down with us always this is fantastic thanks so much for joining see you in the group chat thanks guys see you we'll see you have a good one uh I'm gonna use restroom okay always great to have a a brother of the week on uh next up we are going to Shan purri uh host of my first million good friend of the show and uh I don't know Ben do you have that printed out so uh I want to have Sean on
for a bunch of reasons uh great guy but uh he posted a fantastic uh diagram of how it's this pyramid of how you uh like level up in your career and I thought it was just uh fantastic and I wanted him to break it down on the show um I'm looking through his uh his feed right now trying to find it uh and then also the the k-shaped economy we got to go through that talking about will AI
replace your job well it depends on how you're what job you're doing and what what role you're playing in the economy so I think he has a lot of great advice for uh for Founders as well as for uh employees and basically everyone in between um also I'm sure we will I'm sure we will touch on the midwit meme which is one of his favorites um I'm going to send him the where's the triangle of talent I need to find the
the the triangle let's find this triangle and then I will oh here we go the new Blog the triangle of talent I'll read this off um okay enough teasing here's my triangle of talent and he breaks down uh five levels of essentially competence in any role and I think this is a great framework not just for people who are doing jobs and trying to level up but also managers to think
about where people in their ecosystem fit in uh level one is useless uh even if you tell them exactly what to do they rarely do it right level two is the task monkey uh tell them what to do and how to do it and when to do it and they'll get it done level three is the problem solver tell them what to do they figure out how uh level four is the systems thinker you tell them just the problem
and they set up a system to figure it out uh with the people and the process necessary and level five is the Superstar they identify the right problem and get it solved and when you have a superstar on your team it is truly fantastic um and so I want him to break that down let me send this off we are ready cool hopefully we can get him on and uh Jordy what else do you want to
talk to Sean about I think uh branding marketing podcasting e-commerce he's kind of an expert in everything yeah I want to talk to him about uh he's he's a does a bunch of startup Investments uh I think that I think he may have had a a rolling fund or a fund on Angel list I want to ask him about you know if he If eventually just like wants I imagine he seems like the guy just going to want to
run his own money just take all the returns I'm interested to get he also has a hilar he has hilarious stories about twitch he worked at twitch for a while uh I'm not sure how many he can share on stream but they're great if he can if we can get some of those out of him uh truly some of the funniest uh era in Silicon Valley uh and uh also when when I did his when I did his podcast my
first million it's an incredibly well-run show uh they uh you unlike this they they they prep for their guests a lot and uh and so uh he sent me this worksheet to figure to to fill out the three ideas of uh what what I could kind of like pitch to him uh let me see if I have this uh my first million I want to see if I have this um because uh oh was I don't know if I have
it here he sent it to me and it was a lot of fun but he asked specifically like bring three great stories of uh from your business career bring three startup ideas and the ideas I brought were uh Beast VPN which was I wanted Mr Beast to set up a VPN company start a VPN company because he has a very International broad audience it's low churn high margin and he and everyone is kind of in the market for a
VPN people like do they need them do they not need them but if he was if Mr Beast was able to build out a VPN it's a it's a it's kind of an uninvestable category for VCS which makes it because all the money just goes into marketing and distribution but if you have a massive distribution arm ready to go um you can just immediately uh really really run with that and uh and get uh
you know basically capture all the value because you're not you're not spending money on marketing and and if you look I I've always felt that one of the one of the best ways for uh for YouTubers to monetize is to create a business business where that competes with their number one Advertiser um and so when you look at one of the largest ad buying segments on YouTube it's it's VPN and so
almost every YouTuber has got an email from a VPN provider saying hey we'd love you to we'd love to sponsor you um but I think we got him here in the temple of Technology welcome what is going on gentlemen what's going on there he is hey there he is good to see you look you're looking fantastic you you got the lighting you got the real mic are you look like a professional yeah clearly a
professional I I had to show up right I wanted to come here and just lay down a gaunlet I'm not a technology brother but I would like to be the technology cousin perhaps technology Uncle I'm I'm still workshopping names but I honestly like I like Uncle Uncle is hilarious you've got that sort of Elder you know Elder Statesman that's what I'm that's what I'm going be like uh yeah no that's
perfect that's fantastic it's great to have you on and the audio is and I I hate to uh you know throw shade at Justin Mars who was on five minutes ago but it's just night and day difference it's it's great to have the the sound yeah a real professional on a gentleman scholar it's not my first podcast Gentlemen let's go uh what's on your mind today what you know maybe let's
start there I don't think we need to introduce you uh we can just dive right into it oh I just think what you guys are doing is genius so I needed to first come on and give you some flowers for that thank you uh I think Innovative is an understatement I think we need to just acknowledge what is actually happening here the Andrew tape might have been the first but you guys are the
second to say hey I'm G to create a podcast and it doesn't the podcast is nothing the podcast is just feed stock for the shorts for the clips and uh that that is a core core Insight that you guys have pounced on you're doing great with The Branding uh love it love everything you're doing that's what Jord said he said I want to be the Andrew Tate of technology and so I said I can
make that happen I have experience in YouTube and John is also John's John's dream is to be a Harry Harry Potter fan Harry Potter fan fiction yes that's the ri we have going oh well we can talk Harry Potter I can go deep on Harry Potter if you want but Jordy I think that Andrew Tate is trying to be the Jordy of you know felons and or whatever he does cam girl sites well you know the funny thing it was it
was weird timing but Andrew Tate showed back up in the US and then there was that loss suit against uh passes and that was sort of like potentially convenient timing it seems like he might be you know kind of coming trying to enter the US market competition is for losers any we don't want to compare ourselves regulatory capture yeah uh I I actually so one of the things I'm like
super curious about you're uh content creator yourself uh you know you have the podcast uh what what's like what's your what's your information diet like some something that John and I talk about a lot is is our show is heavily based on what's happening right now what the current thing is we obviously focus on X as a platform but if you're only consuming content on X then you're not
injecting anything sort of new um and you're just like part of the hive mind how do you think about your information diet and kind of where where do you spend your time uh kind of coming up with with ideas yeah it's a great question I I think that uh the in the information diet is probably like today something that only nerds like us talk about but is going to become a very popular
concept as people realize that it's garbage in garbage out so um what you know I think the problem that the tech guys have is you uh we will all go consume not necessarily garbage content but just the same content right so we're all on X we're all reading the same things we listening to all in and listen to the same podcast and then guess what you have the same thoughts as everybody
else and like while calling yourself a contrarian right it doesn't really make sense and so you know for me I do a couple of things so I have I have a phrase that I like which is um kids dogs and dead people and I want to spend as much of my time as I can with kids dogs and dead people and uh you know so what does that mean kids will teach you a certain set of things so kids kids are
highly uh playful they they work with their imagination a lot they're completely delusional they have no idea of what's realistic and what's not and so the more time you spend with kids the more playful you become the more imaginative you become the more delusional you become so I take that from them uh dogs are sort of these unconditional lovers right dogs are are
always always down always loyal always happy um they are they're there for you in every way and so you know pick that up from dogs and the last is the dead people so how do I how do I change my ratio of tweets to books right because you know long form as as everyone gets interested in consuming long form I sort of wanted to go the opposite way uh sorry people get interested in consuming
short form I want to consume as much long form as I can so old whether it's old videos on YouTube like I watched this thing with Max Levin from like 2004 talking about and I was like this is fantastic and it has like you know 89 views on YouTube and so you you start to get excited about being a a collector of of of pieces right it's like oh this is a a wonderful old memo uh you know when
they first pitched PowerPoint at Microsoft or this is a this is a great book I I read this book recently called um talk like what was it it was uh St like Lincoln talk like Church Hill it was about like public speaking and just being a goddamn man and the way you show up to things and I was like this is fantastic and so I'm trying to spend as much as I as much time as I can with
dead people it's great great answer uh can you take us through the triangle of talent I really love this we printed this off here because I think it's a fantastic framework for elevating Talent within an organization we're a small company here but uh I I I wanted like what inspired you to S to to map this out this way and and what do you think people are taking away from it how's the
reception been every blog post I write is just a pot shot at somebody it's an annoyance from an employee in my company and then I'm like you know what I'm gonna write this over here I hope you read this I hope you really understand this that's the the honest truth is irritation is the the the itch and Innovation is the scratch as I like to say you know Steve Jobs had a line we we just talked about earlier
on the show he told his team I hope what you just did makes you hate each other yeah you should hate each other doing this because they messed up the mobile yeah the email sinking and it went so poorly that Apple was looking terrible in 2008 and he was like you guys should hate each other for this right it's so bad anyway so so the the real insight here actually came when uh I sold my
company so I sold my company and I went from CEO to now I was an employee yeah so you know I'm on the other side of the table and I was trying to figure out like oh this is interesting like now I have a boss I have a manager what does this guy care about how does he think about me and like what like what's this Dynamic like and what I realized was that in every company um there's like
this little number floating above your head and it's your trust score it's like what you know that movie where it's like how many days you have left to die or whatever and people could you could see it on each other's forehead or something like that very Black Mirror yeah it's like a Black Mirror like death node or something like that yeah so the the thing I realized was that basically for
the CEO they look at all their employees and there's just a trust score and the trust score is basically like can I can I trust you to um be watching out for problems and identifying them yourself or am I going to have to deliver like the issues to you I'm going to have to be the one telling you hey we got to solve this and then if I even if I did do that to if I gave you the problem do
I trust that you'd be able to solve it do I trust that you could manage like a group of people in solving this or is can I only give you things that are like small bite-sized where you can alone do it right um do I have to give you the instructions on how to solve it or could you figure it out right so everybody's got this trust gor you want to be at 100% right like you want to be at 100
and those are the people ultimately they get they get the raises they get the opportunities when the new thing comes up that's who you put on the project is the people you trust the most and really like your trust score goes far beyond like your job title um and and I realized this when I was working with EMT at twitch yeah and so then in my own companies I sort of realized like okay
could I like assign some numbers to that score could I assign some levels to that score and so yeah that's where the triangle comes from I don't know if you want me to like say what the level I'd love to know like obviously when you're the CEO if you're selling your company you're probably operating at level five Superstar but then you go into twitch you said it was a very different
environment did you feel yourself moving downward towards like level four level three there's gravity gravity is moving you downwards right because you're supposed to you know like you if you go to these big companies you're not the CEO of the founder anymore not all the problems don't roll up to you all the opportunities aren't your decision whether you're going to do them or not
and so gravity is kind of pulling you down to get to like kind of like a level three which is like a bit bit of a you're just a sort of a task doer or you can or maybe you can manage a team of people to do to do a set of tasks but I was just like trying to fight that so like I had a great conversation with my buddy Furon when we got Acquired and he goes he was pulled up the company
metrics like the company dashboard and he's like the CEO view basically and he's like which one of these numbers do you think our project will move and I was like I like I was just thinking of they bought our company to do X we should come here and do X and what he was arguing was like cool that made sense when we were trying to sell this company to them of course we wanted
to say how big of a deal it was but now that we're here we're on the same team we should just be more objective like is our thing going to move any of these metrics and he goes don't you just think like whatever we do while we're here we should just be able to move one of these kpis like five or 10 per. and like we should just make that our budget like we're not going to do a project if it
can't move the needle five or 10% on one of the like the core metrics usage Revenue um you know profits right so and I looked at what we were doing it was never going to do that even if we did it really well it would never have moved any of those metrics and so I literally just didn't do any of the work I was supposed to do for about a month I just started walking around the office asking
people like what's going on over here like what are what are the problems are you dealing with what's what's something that somebody should be doing that nobody's doing right now or what's something that's worrying you and our buddy hubar who sold curse to uh to Twitch he was there and he was like this guy who had been like ringing this Bell that nobody was listening to and he's
like hey look at this our our market share in Brazil has dropped like dramatically and nobody cares nobody's doing anything about this um and he's like it's because Mobile gaming uh it's all mobile gaming over there streaming from their phone and we don't even have like the functionality to do that and internally at the company we had all written off mobile game streaming as like something
that wasn't a thing because we tried it it didn't work nobody watched Candy Crush and we all moved on but hey something has changed and here's the data so we only started working on that so that was kind of my real life experience of not letting myself go from a level five to a level three cuz that's where the gravitational pull was and like trying to fight to be like no no no
I'm only going to I'm going to try to identify the biggest problems and I'm going to try to go solve them that makes a ton of sense uh I want to talk about branding when we launched this show I was very obsessed with like the growth hacks and the quote tweets and the clips as you mentioned but you came to me and you said I think the fact that you guys have really thought about the brand and
that Jordy was the one who really thought about the brand the most but um what is your playbook for developing a new brand what's your stack what who's in the room are you using AI tools is starting a PowerPoint or a dock or a Notes app like how do you think about developing a brand what are the best uh what are the best practices these days yeah it starts with a a very simple
principle which is all positioning is counter positioning so you got to you want to position yourselves in the consumer's mind but it's always going to be relative to what's already in the consumer's mind so you might say we are a restaurant we make food that's healthy and fresh it's like great but everybody says the same thing so not only have you Blended in but you're not counter per to
anything versus if you say um we make yoga pants like Lululemon except for ours aren't full of microplastics right now you've counter positioned against lud lemon so you say we're ath athleisure we're premium but no microplastics right so it's the butt that matters the most whereas everybody focuses on the things before the butt they're like totally we're this this this this and this yeah that too we're
open source too yeah we do that too and they just try to add this long list and it becomes this very muddy drink and so I think what you guys did just look at your brand right so you guys are counterposed in a in a cool way right so first you're like very masculine brand so you're not neutral where I think most people are afraid um to have any sort of like like first of all masculinity was
like not cool for a while now it's cool again it's on Trend but like um I think you guys do a good job you show up in suits so you're counter position you're not a podcaster in their bedroom uh wearing a hoodie right I wore my this is like a wedding outfit I had from like an old Indian wedding I was like I got aess right because you've created a brand that's that says that's how we behave
here we're gentlemen here y right um You have this aesthetic right but it's all counterposed it would not work if every podcast already looked the way you look wouldn't be any you would get no credit yeah the the other the other example that's relevant is uh like there's a very popular podcast that we're fans of that uh notoriously does not run ads and it'll be obvious uh it's the number one
technology podcast in the world they don't run ads so we came out and we said said we're going to run a bunch of ads yeah we're doing it for the money most most podcasters oh we just like the community just the reach and we happen to run ads and we were like we doing this for the money it's the most profitable podcast and it was it was you know fun it was just for fun um talk
about there's one other in the branding thing that's important is you're only going to get credit for what's weird sure Mak sense you should make a list of what's weird about you or about your brand or that you do that's unusual that might even be like controversial even that it's unpopular or people say that's too far too much and so like if you want to have a br start writing a list of
what's weird and if that list is only one or two things long you don't you're not going to have much really to talk about we we talked to a Founder yesterday at demo day who pitched and he just named his company Pig it's just called Pig and he's like I just like it was like I honestly thought it's a great name nobody's GNA forget I I don't remember any of the other names very
hard to remember and I remember Pig uh it's a great name just roll around in mud yep um and I he does I mean he does like this like data integration like cleaning up like Legacy cold bases like very much like rolling around in the mud like he's not afraid to get you know dirty just solo founder just comes in and cleans up your code base he's just the pig talk about the opportunity
around investing in creators and Creator businesses uh I think you've talked about M sort of the Mr Beast Empire quite a lot uh there's you know slow Ventures came out recently they have a dedicated Creator fund you are a Creator that's sort of creating value in all these different ways what do you think uh the opportunity is in that space and are you making Investments there
yourself I think the bigger opportunity is the creators investing not investing in creators so you know like uh like our our business is very simple right so we uh we have this podcast my first million and it as it grew we had sponsors who wanted to come in and sponsor it and we said yes for a while we got really excited like oh my God this is crazy we're going to paid to talk but then you
realize like media is a pretty [ __ ] business model and so the trick is to do media uh to build media's graded a c a few things right it's great at building brand and distribution and awareness and all those things but it's pretty terrible at monetizing and so the trick is to monetize with investing and so what we did was I would go private Equity style and I would buy I bought a
piece of this business somewhere. comom it's like a offshore hiring platform so you need talent in the Philippines or you want a developer in latam like get somebody for five times less than in the states right that's the pitch so instead of them just sponsoring us and me taking ad dollars and then them getting obviously some multiple of that otherwise why would they keep giving us
ad dollars right they're clearly getting an Roi uh off of that I went and I actually just purchased a chunk of the company and said great now I own a piece of this company I own the equity in it and I will grow this company I could buy it even at a totally fair price right I don't need a deal because if it's at this much and when we bought that business it was making millions a year in profit
so like it was already seven multiple seven figures of profit and now it's eight figures of profit right because I was able to grow that using my audience so I was my own private equity and the the beauty of this is that um media knows a lot about audience and distribution and growth but it knows nothing about private Equity private Equity knows a lot about doing deals and knows nothing about media and
distribution and growth and so marrying the two together is what's actually happening so for MOSI is doing this right that's his model uh I'm doing this that's our model and so there there will be more people who do this right now what the creators are doing is they're just creating their own brand and they're they're trying to monetize by being operational I think the Smart Ones
will eventually just take chunks of companies and uh let the operators like world-class operators do that work and they will be uh just doing deals what do you think of the Doug Muro cars and bids story it's one of my favorites but is it a one-off exception to the rule or do you think it's the start of something new and a bigger Trend no I mean that's going to keep happening right right now
epic gardening is the best example of this you guys watching what he's doing no not really break it down okay so um epic gardening basically he's got this YouTube channel about freaking gardening right so he's like but it's great he's growing he's he's like I'm trying to grow like a new breed of zucchini and he's like trying to do and you look he's got this Farm whatever so he's uh so I
think it's name Kevin so Kevin is doing this so what he's doing is he's uh he's amazing at content and he creeps creating really awesome content and then on the back end he started either building his own products or buying so he bought like a seeds company so there's a seed company was doing X dollars in Revenue already he's able to go acquire that company knowing he's got
better distribution than that company has right he's got something they don't have he's got a giant megaphone to millions of people who are trying to learn gardening from him they like listen and trust him and so when he says use these seeds they're going to use those seeds when Jimmy says buy this chocolate they're going to buy that chocolate and so like that's the that's the model that they're doing that he's
doing right now and so what happened is churnin went gave him tens of millions of dollars of money and what he's doing is both building up his own infrastructure and his own products but he's going out and being very acquisitive and he's acquiring companies that um you know his customers would his his audience would be customers of very simple model I think that guy if he does
this right he could build a billion dollar company as a gardening YouTuber that's fantastic yeah Unthinkable a decade ago right yeah completely yeah I feel like churn in to their credit was like very early to that Trend like it seems like it's becoming very much a part of the zeit guyses now but I know they were doing it they were thinking about this stuff very intensely like
almost a decade ago um how do you think about your own personal leverage in the age of AI you've been somebody that's had a lot of Leverage I think for a long time right you've sort of a a major shareholder in multiple businesses you have the audience you're starting new companies you're buying companies but um has your level of ambition sort of 10x you know with with some of these new
technolog IES obviously the potential hasn't been fully you know isn't fully here but it's clearly coming and how does that impact sort of your personal road map and how you're thinking about your career yeah that's a big question you know I think for me over time uh you're right that like you start to learn the The Leverage game okay so what is the leverage game The Leverage game
is um with the same or even fewer inputs can you get more outputs right it's a magic trick I I put less effort in or I put less time in or I put less capital in can I get more more out and so how do you do it nval says it well he says you know there's the old ways of Leverage which would be like you know people so you you hire people they do the work so you know uh you hire you hire them you
get you know thousands of hours of of work done by other people great there's Capital which is investing cool so I've you know been doing that but now he's like there's the new ones there's code and there's media right code is you know basically a a worker that will work you know like what do you think about a landing page right a landing page is basically a Salesman that's you know awake 247
giving the perfect pitch that you told them to give with no sick days to every customer everywhere in the world and can do thousands of customers at once that's what a landing page is so that's leverage and that's code uh and now media is what we do with the podcast so yeah I've been dabbling with these different things with AI I don't think it's like an uh I don't think it's an
entirely new form of Leverage it's more speed and Reps so I'll give you an example right now I I have this book series that I'm creating and I think the old way to write a book and one of the reasons I didn't want to write a book is if you talk to anybody who writes a book they're like it's like they went to Nom dude there's like you know this multi-year period where it was just a
grind every single day and it's it's terrible experience yeah um and so I'm writing a book right now and here's literally what I was doing right before this so this is my conversation with Claude so I create this little folder and I say hey Claude I'm creating a book here's the premise and I said uh inside this folder you will find an outline you'll find some of my old samples of
writing I want you to copy my tone of voice and a style guide some of the dos and don'ts of how I think about writing this book um and I said you know right now I only kind of I have a loose outline and really I know I know kind of what chapter one should be all about and I said draft it it drafts it and so um it's basically the equivalent of having a research assistant and a writing
assistant um but who have who has no emotions or feelings so I could just he just gives me the draft I'm like N I don't really like it and I don't really have any specific feedback just like try again and it just does it again it does it again like if I told somebody on my team that if they worked hard and drafted this thing over two days and they came to me I'd have to like do the
freaking compliment sandwich and be like you know it's really good there's some areas for improvement would you mind doing this and now it's going to take a week and then he's going to go back and every draft is like just a small Feud that's developing between me and this person right and so and so I had ended up having to ride it myself and really having that Feud internally also and
there'd be many days where I'd wake up and see that blank page and be like do I really want to do this right so this AI process where I'm like I wake up and I'm like give me a draft of the chapter I don't like that first example find me another example that has very similar characteristics boom it finds another one you know come up with a better analogy hey you're being too wordy and
it's just I'm getting draft after draft after draft try this one in the style of Malcolm Gladwell like to me this is Magic what's happening I'm writing this book I got a full draft of the book in one night just by going back and forth with CLA it was unbelievable and now all the values in the edits it's the taste it's the curation at the end and yeah you putting your stamp on it yeah on on
the book thing have you taken anything from uh the the five types of wealth by our buddy sahil Bloom on it feels like he did a really good job of creating infographics that could go viral and he's kind of the the you know the Andrew Tate of publishing now in the sense that the book is the book is its own thing but there it's clippable it's clippable which is like it's rare for a book to
think about are you thinking clip first now how are you thinking about that um I don't like to start with growth hacks because I think it leads you the wrong way sure I think you I I have this channel on my SL called Clues you just you just keep you keep you take note of the clues and the time will come where you go back through that you say you know what I did notice that hey having a
couple of killer diagrams yeah really made the book more sharable because you're not sharing a book and saying read this book you're sharing a a killer page or a killer Visual and people want people then ask wow how do I get more of that is that what book is that right so you keep that as a clue but I think you can't let that drive the creative process um you know this is a little bit
up but I just think there's like you got to decide like am I going to try to engineer this or am I trying to Art This and like I think if you're doing art you should art it um and there's a time and a place for that that engineering of virality or more sellability but I don't want to AB test my way into art cuz I'm not doing this for money anyways right like if I want
I might make money from a book but the way I say it is it's like just CU a church serves food doesn't mean you go there because you're hungry like you know that's not why you go to church so it's like if you're going to write a book you should be doing it because you have something killer to say and you think you can deliver that message that's the main thing let's keep that
the main thing and then yes we we keep track of some ideas some growth acts some clues that might be helpful somewhere along the way well where can people find it when it comes out how can they make sure that're the first one to get a copy in the mail I'm not I mean I'm not even there yet if you just follow me on Twitter you you'll see it along the way Fant or my email list
shore.com is the the email list well you have to send us an advanced copy we read on the stream we're gonna we're going to do a 24-hour live stream of us reading cover to cover uh cover to cover I love it uh no yeah a live audiobook reading cover to cover we need material ramp ads yeah we'll put our own ads in he heavily sponsored aor amazing having you on you're the first technology Uncle yes
the First Technology unle appreciate you sharing Uncle of the week I'm putting that in my LinkedIn right now fantastic you're the man you're welcome anytime thank you Sean thank you we'll talk to you soon cheers bye bye bye yeah that was great what a pro the lighting the mic yeah he's he's a pro I think you're on to something with the uh the 100 hour work week I think you you pop into
Claude you start start noodling on it get some good diagrams in there you got a ripper it's a banger it's a banger it's a banger uh we have Trey Stevens joining in a few minutes uh we want to ask him about flock safety uh they just raised I I'll give some background on flock they're they're taken over the timeline today uh flock safety writes uh when crime is holistically addressed cities transform
families feel safer businesses Thrive and communities flourish the energy of a truly safe city is undeniable to help accelerate this vision of safe thriving cities were're thrilled to announce a $275 million fundraise at a $7.5 billion valuation led by Andrew and Horwitz with strong backing from Green Oaks capital and Bedrock Capital this investment will power product Innovation research and
development and us-based Manufacturing ensuring we continue to deliver cuttingedge Safety Solutions that make a real impact and uh Jeff Lewis put up a little thread on the timeline as well and this is a YC company oh it is yeah that's crazy doesn't it get that tag very often no but I think it was in 18 yeah I mean again it's like in 2018 everyone again the meme was oh y see
just a software consumer software it's like this is a Hardware security for Crime company probably completely overlooked at at YC we'll have to get the founder on uh and uh I think we have Trey now let's bring him in how you doing Trey there he is what's up guys how's it going we're good uh how's your day going can't complain all good so far fantastic we were just talking about the flock safety news uh I
checked in with the team it sound like you met the founder very early uh participated in the seed round can you give us a little background on how you met the founder what you think of the company and uh what today means for them yeah uh I mean you know I've spent a lot of time meeting with govtech companies uh selling a local governments is incredibly difficult um I think it's
basically just as hard as selling to federal government and except the upside is significantly less uh so from the very beginning I was kind of skeptical um but Garrett won me over he's a incredibly hard charging super talented guy and they figured out how to make the motion work and uh I think this is like kind of a once in a generation opportunity to build uh you know kind of
a bth in the law enforcement space Allah axon which is the the company formerly named taser um and just incredibly incredibly impressed with their progress and how quickly they've gone from you know being security for HOAs to being kind of a a state and local law enforcement uh capability so really impressed by the team you remember if they were a hot company when they were coming out of YC was it obvious that
they were onto something onto something and and special it feels like a company that would have been under the radar back in 2018 but what was your take back then yeah I mean I wouldn't say that they were under the radar like they've they've gotten you know great rounds done and the team has grown incredibly well so I wouldn't call it under the radar but it also I just meant I just
meant at demo day like when they were coming out of YC cuz we were there we were there yesterday and uh you know there's this sense that everybody's got so much energy and excitement and uh if you're just meeting somebody at demo day it's almost impossible to tell if they're really on a crazy trajectory or not yeah I don't I don't think they were like the company that everyone was
talking about coming out of demo day doing work in law enforcement was not super trendy at that time it seems to be much more Trinity today than it was then though yeah yeah it is although uh you know we were joking about it used to be Uber for dogs at y now it's Ander for dogs but there it was really was cursor for dogs actually yesterday there was way more AI agent companies than defense
tech companies um but overall but honestly let's take a moment to just like applaud Gary tan for what he's done with Y combinator 100% it is it is a completely different Beast uh a single day like crazy what is it like 150 100 something companies uh everybody crammed in there's like cool Hardware being like demoed at I mean it's just like yeah like good job on Gary I mean he's just
done an awesome awesome job kind of reinvigorating the brand and bringing something back that that was missing before yeah 100% he's completely flipped it back into founder mode somehow he's really making aggressive changes and just doing what's necessary to keep the momentum going it's 20-year-old company at this point it's got to be you got to have some new blood some new new ideas
uh on flock safety uh they've often been called like the paler of local government or the andal of local government is that even the right comparison or just something completely different how do you think about the business and where it goes over the long term well I mean I think it's the the better analogy is probably andal rather than volunteer um there's obviously like
a meaningful software component to what it is that flock is doing but um it's also like deploying vertical systems in to end whether it's camera systems or command and control for uh drones for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance missions um you know they just completed this acquisition of aerodome uh which I think G in this really cool extension into drone operations um so yeah I think I think
it's like a a reasonably good analogy um and I think they've they've got a clear shot at picking up a bunch of Market um that you know there there's just not a whole lot of other companies that are you know anywhere near being competitive with them on totally what's the what's the number one reason you pass on companies that want to sell to the government and uh why is it uh
distribution yeah no my my uh my chief of staff Ellie UNM and I we we call it a Field of Dreams problem where the founders will come in and they'll say like you know if I build it they will come like that I just have to build a cool product and then everyone's going to show up and throw money at me and with the government it's just not true I would actually argue that it's harder to sell
to the government than it is to build a product that's relevant to the government um and so you have to figure out how to make the sales motion work um companies like Flock I I think have they've dug their heals in they figured out like what you have to do at the city council level what you have to do at the chief of police level what you have to do with the you know local populace
level from HOAs on up um and they figured out the motion that gives them that superpower uh the re the reality is is like now that they're embedded and they understand the sales motion building out a product Suite that addresses a whole a wide set of problems is going to make it much easier for them to penetrate you know breadth as well as depth um and I think it's that sales the
sales part of it is is the one that's hard to figure out now what that means for Founders fund practically speaking in guv is that we tend to want to write more concentrated checks um once you see production usage of a technology working um because it demonstrates that the founder has figured out how to get that those sales done and the products into into usage in the field um there's just
so many companies that are great idea factories and maybe cool technology but they they can't quite crack the business development nut yeah how to me that feels like one of the biggest opportunities for Ander roll in the next 5 years is you kind of have all this off-balance sheet sort of R&D spending which is like all these new defense tech companies being funded you know really
smart people building cool things uh and then you know they they maybe hit this like distribution wall uh you guys have been acquisitive obviously in the past is that you know going to continue to be you know an important part of the strategy or you do you feel like you're more going to be focused sort of internally going forward I won't say publicly on the technology Bros podcast that we want cool
technology companies to fail because they're bad at Business Development okay but yeah uh those do present interesting opportunities for us from an m&a perspective for sure got it yeah uh well let's move on to ivas uh I want to know uh obviously this is a this was a deal like the hollow lens project coming over from Microsoft huge contract um I didn't even know that these contracts could
change Hands In This Way um why H how did this deal come about how does it even work I mean obviously there's Prime contractors subcontractors you could imagine a different world where Microsoft just comes to you to kind of you know act as a subcontractor but that's not what happened here so can you break it down and and give us a little bit of overview on the deal and kind of
where it goes from here yeah I mean the long history on the uh andral side of things is that obviously when we when Palmer and I started ruminating on this company back in 2017 uh the obvious question that everyone asked us is are you going to build head mounted displays for soldiers that I mean it's just so obvious Palmer is the greatest uh VR designer inventor in world history uh
obviously that's the thing that we would probably be focused on right y um but Palmer actually had an interesting answer to this he he would tell people you know the basic science the research that needs to happen from a physics perspective uh is not there yet and of course I could build something but it wouldn't be quite right it would be too heavy or you know the experience
wouldn't be real enough it would disconnect people from what they're the operation that they're conducting in the field um and so basically his answer was I don't think it can be done so I'm not going to be the one that that you know Burns a bunch of Cycles doing it now in the meantime Microsoft went out and won this you know tens of billions of dollar program called ivas um and you know
people would constantly be asking Palmer like you know what's what's going on with this do you think it's going to work and he's like if I thought it was going to work we would have bid on it and we would we would have the contract that that's obvious um and so it was just kind of one of these moments of waiting to see what happened um and then you know over the last six to nine
months we've kind of had this opportunity to go and spend time with the Microsoft team and say you know Palmer feels much more strongly about this now he feels like we can pull it off um there's there's a real opportunity ahead of us the Army is incredibly excited about us coming in to kind of take this over and bring it to the next level um and uh we we jumped at that opportunity and I'm excited to see
where it goes in the coming years on the cultural side it feels like of all the big tech companies Microsoft's maybe been the most friendly to working with the military this whole time um do you do you envision like what what does a high functioning Microsoft look like in partnership with a DOD I mean imagine just spreadsheets co-pilot just basic stuff to manage bases and manage
workflows is that how they should be plugging in or do you see them playing a different role going forward yeah yeah I mean look Microsoft builds a lot of things that are incredibly important to the defense Enterprise you know like the basically everything in defense runs on Windows just like it does anywhere else in the Enterprise um you know Azure cloud is a is has a a huge presence in the gov
Cloud ecosystem um there's you know Microsoft applications that lay across every critical piece of infrastructure that exists um inside of the dod um and they as you said they have been much more willing than the other big Tech compan is to think of themselves as an American company which is incredibly important and also be willing to work with the government on programs where
you know there there's potentially even lethality at the end of whatever kill chain they're participating in yeah um and so tons of respect and uh uh for for Microsoft and their their willingness to do that Brad Smith the uh the president there has has been going to the Reagan National Defense Forum for a decade I mean he's he's very embedded in this community um so I do think that there's
a role to play um and you know as part of our work on ivas like we are going to continue leveraging IP that they built as part of that program we'll continue to leverage Azure as uh a core Cloud capability as part of the program um and I only wish the other big tech companies were as willing as they are um to to work on these important programs it's great uh let's talk about Arsenal uh
obviously the site is selected now but what are the next big steps for you as you build that out I saw some pictures it seems like the first like hanger I don't even know what you call it the big the the big building has been toured uh but what what's coming down the pipe yeah um Arsenal exists uh site selection is over um we're building the factory just south of Columbus Ohio um the first
call it 800,000 Square F feet uh is already uh kind of you know there and ready for us to to construct into um the the challenge for for us for the next call it 16 months will be building out the that first building and uh getting product lines stood up so that can start um you know producing at scale um the capabilities that we're being asked to produce which include things like Fury
our autonomous Jet Fighter um Barracuda which is a class of cruise missiles lowcost modular cruise missiles um road runners uh which is our reusable Interceptor um and you know right now that those capabilities are being built either at headquarters in limited quantity or at some of our kind of ancillary facilities um and Arsenal is going to be the attempt to bring all of
that together together in a in a modular and flexible Factory environment um and I think we'll have that initial capability up and running sometime around June or July of next uh of next year of 2026 what would the timeline be for a legacy defense contractor to stand up a space like Arsenal is it is it would they be planning it you know sort of on like a 10-year time Horizon
like we want to get this new facility up in you know 2035 uh how do you guys think about pacing yeah I mean the the thing is is like the old defense industry model is like wait for the contract and then Bild by the hour basically that's that's how it works uh the andal model is spend our own money and build what matters now um and so could they could they do it could they build like Mega scale factories
yeah if the government was paying for it and they had some plan for how to eek out you know their same sort of growth and margin structure that they have historically uh Eed out the benefit here is that we're not waiting for the Pentagon to tell us what to build we're not waiting for the US taxpayer to show to fund it um our plan is to bring uh you know private Capital to work to
solve some of these important problems um and uh we're just going to build that's that's how how we're going to approach it and um you know we've had a great track record of converting that into into production and you know we have a very willing buyer on the other side of the table right now um and uh and that's kind of that's kind of our short-term plan uh do you feel like you
get the respect that we think you deserve in DC now I can imagine in 2017 you know in the early days you go around DC first they maybe ignore you then they sort of will talk to you but don't take you seriously do you feel like you know andal when you're you guys are on the ground in DC that you're uh getting the sort of appreciation from you know the government now obviously you're winning
winning contracts but is is the um you know is the average Senator uh take there we go is the is the average Senator you know excited to meet with you guys and uh you know work together uh yeah uh you know we're we're in a great position right now uh obviously we've been around for seven and a half years uh through both Republican and Democratic administrations um you know
defense is totally bipartisan it's like the only spending bill that goes with line colors through the through Congress every year um we we don't feel particularly impacted by politics we do feel particularly impacted by um leadership that has a vision for how they want to go into the future and uh lean into these commercial opportunities uh that are going to be much more efficient and deliver capabilities
faster than the traditional kind of Exquisite systems driven by requirements process way that the the dod has been running their business for a long time um so you know we've I think we've scaled uh a number of different programs uh really effectively and as a result uh people in DC see us as you know a real company not a startup anymore um and I think that that just gives us additional
leverage to go and pick up bigger and bigger contracts um over time let's talk about humanoids uh obviously it's a very trendy space humanoid robotics you probably see every pitch Under the Sun uh some of it feels a little early little demo but at the same time you know Boston Dynamics has been building this stuff for 20 years I remember azmo and there's there's clearly something
real here uh how are you feeling about the current environment around humanoid robotics yeah I mean it's a flashy space there's a lot of demos uh you know people are trying to figure out what practical utility looks like there are probably some use cases where humanoids makes a lot of sense there are also a lot of use cases where you can get better bang for the buck with you know
systems that don't need to walk around um they can still do some really cool things and um uh you know as with most of these kind of AI companies I think the big question for in the Venture community at least is you know do we or do we not kamakazi round and I think the word kamakazi is a really good way of framing it because it's like maybe you win the war but maybe you're
dead and I think you know going out and raising these Mega rounds at massive prices um it kind of reminds me of the self-driving car phenomenon where you had these companies that understandably were Capital intensive and it was like man if it works it's going to be great everybody it's going to make a lot of money the price doesn't really matter um but if it takes too long I mean you're
in trouble you just comicazi and uh I think that's kind of what we're looking at for the most part here in the humanoid space as well one thing I've noticed is that it feels like every few months there's a new viral video of Chinese drone light show uh some dragon flying around the sky and everyone immediately comments like this is military capability I feel like people are aware of of like these drone
demonstrations that maybe aren't fully ready to change the battlefield but are scary looking and I wonder if the tune around uh humanoid robotics is going to change once you see a thousand of these guys walking down the street marching in tan square or something oh totally I mean if we start seeing humanoid robots like carrying Javelin missiles up mountains or something yeah let's do
another podcast and conversation about that yeah but we're not there yet we we'll have to switching uh o over the other other uh other Pond uh do you think that Europe will you know meaningfully sort of uh refocus their industrial base on defense you know we've seen their sort of Auto industry uh really struggle over the last few years particularly uh you know with potentially renewed interest from you
know Western Europe and sort of uh you know taking care of their own security uh do you do you see them you know basically meaningfully adapting that sort of Automotive infrastructure into you know defense manufacturing capacity well I wouldn't say that I've seen like Automotive shifting to defense necessarily with the obvious exception of Saab which literally doesn't make
cars anymore and they focus on defense but I don't think that had anything to do with this European moment I think it had something to do with sav not running a very good car business but uh but you know one of the things we're going to see I think as there's been this increased push for Europe to spend money on their own defense rather than relying entirely on the United States is that as a
percentage of GDP you probably will see a lot more money um in in Europe going to towards defense which I would argue is probably net positive for the for the continent uh and it also reduces the burden the United States to to step up uh and and do kind of more than we believe is our fair share now the downside of that for us businesses is that the more made in America we become
the more made in National Prosperity uh the European nations will become and I I think due to the nature of Europe that will end up being pretty fragmented the French government's going to want to buy from French companies the German government's going to want want to buy from German companies and so so forth and so I definitely think that impacts the way that defense should think about
expansion into Europe um because you know there there's just going to be this nationalism thread that runs through it um that you just need to be mindful of either from a partnership's perspective or where you're spending your time trying to grow internationally yeah how does that play out in uh the Venture Capital markets obviously you know American defense tech companies don't
take VC dollars from China for example but uh do do you think a a a German VC could invest in a French defense tech company and that would be kosher how do you think about that I mean I think they can do that this is mostly about story gelling like they need to connect back to the nationalism the Nationalist agenda in each of these countries and um there are great defense companies in
Europe startups in particular um you know you have companies like Quantum systems and in Germany uh uh and Stark Industries which flows out of quantum systems you have Hing um and they each of these companies is going to need to tell a story about why they're German or why they're French or they're Italian or whatever um I don't know exactly how to do that but that that would be a burden
that they're going to have to carry makes sense uh can we move on to good quests I want to hear the high level thesis again uh you just had an event around it uh break it down and they have some follow-up questions yeah um back in 2022 uh Marky Wagner uh who's a teal fellow and I like hung out around a campfire late one night and kind of we're we're complaining about what we see people
doing in in the tech industry and the the basic conceit of the argument is that you know the Venture Community Venture Capital Community is filled with all these super talented former entrepreneurs or whatever um and they've taken like the route of bige head in Silicon Valley the HBO show where they're just kind of like resting investing just kind of chilling out making lifestyle decisions uh while
writing Angel checks um and that feels like a real moral failure uh of of tech uh because the the founders that are operating on God mode um should be focused on the hardest most important quests like if we need to rebuild semiconductor manufacturing the United States I would really like some of these incredibly wealthy incredibly talented people to step in and have an opinion
about how that's going to get done um and I but instead that we're like kind of sidelining um or starting like you know easy Enterprise SAS companies or something like that because it's the easiest way to print money and so that's really what good Quest was all about is like have you taken the time you you know Tech operator Tech entrepreneur have you taken the time to evaluate the
quest that you're on uh to to discern is it a good one is it a bad one is it too easy is it too hard are are you you know a 18-year-old College Dropout trying to build a Semiconductor Company I don't know maybe that's not the right company for you to build um as your first step out so that's really what the the call was um in the essay and it kind of blew up far more than I expected too yeah
yeah it's phenomenal piece uh if you haven't read it you should definitely go check it out but um uh following up on that there's some questions about like in our culture I feel like some of the really really important like the reshoring semiconductor manufacturing we have this tendency that I hear in Tech that only the true top tier Elite can can solve these problems you hear about
like oh if we got to save Intel it's got to be Elon stepping in or else no one else can do it and I'm wondering if there's almost like too much cons idation around like we only have a few few Heroes a few hero units on the battlefield and that's honestly taking people are like oh well like you know maybe Elon will get around to it but if he doesn't like I don't want to be I
don't want to be run over by him if he changes his mind and decides to go into my industry uh is is there something culturally that we need to change around that and and not putting all our eggs in one basket on these like incredible entrepreneurs who I think really could do amazing things but at a certain point they can only do so many retion that is that's exactly the right
question and I think the answer is like of course you don't have to be like that to to do it like uh it's just much easier if you are um I mean you don't have to look any further than space launch to see this it's like the billionaire Space Cowboys yep Elon Bezos Branson it's like it turns out that it's way easier to get a rocket into space if a billionaire is bankrolling your company y um and I don't think every
problem looks like that but some of them do and so you know if you're not if you don't have the ability to bank roll and back stop like maybe you should evaluate am I world class like generationally good at fundraising and if the answer is yes go for it yeah there's no reason not to but fundraising is a skill it's not something that's like I think a lot of Founders that have a hard time
fundraising tend to say like well the VCS they don't get it it's like yeah okay I'll admit there are sometimes I legitimately don't get it I try not to invest in categories where I legitimately don't get it but many many of the times it's that the VCS will meet with the founder and they'll be like man this person is really bad at pitching and if I feel like they're really bad at
telling the story and raising Capital that means that other investors that they're going to need are also going to believe that they're really bad well it's also the it's also the the custom customer employes the customer yeah it's like and so I think a lot of Founders that have trouble need to look like be a little bit more interspective and say do I have the ability to raise the amount
of money that's required to pull off this audacious Vision the answer might be no mhm uh yeah following up on that kind of flipping it around there's a lot of industries that have produced a lot of financial return I'm thinking of the gambling companies the only fans companies the uh the kind of get-rich quick crypto schemes um and I and I wonder you know in the best case the
free market is a weighing machine for good quests and I would imagine that only good quests should be rewarded financially and yet they don't and so you kind of get into this question of like should we have more regulation should we try and tax or dissuade or ban certain things that fall into like the bad Quest category I don't know if that applies to you know the lazy angel
investor but um but maybe for some of the some of the more crazy bad quests um well I would say the lazy angel investor is a moral decision sure like uh sidelining yourself from working on the most important things is not morally neutral yeah like there is a there is a moral judgment that's being made there um you know I often think about this as a as a quad chart where the quadrants
are like is good is bad feels good feels bad yep as a society I think we're like maybe too good the feels good is good this is like do stuff it's like healthare child Wellness stuff it's like educ sustainability educ like everyone agrees that these things are good but what that means is that the categories end up being hyper competitive it's like so consensus there's so many companies
being built and then we also kind of totally agree on the feels bad is bad it's like yeah murder is bad stealing is bad assault is bad like we should not do those things it's the other diagonal that I think is the most interesting um only fans uh you know gambling I think falls in the feels good is bad camp this is like Society has somehow managed to convince ourselves that uh there's some
like freedom of expression or something like that that should be protected and I agree like freedom of speech I'm all for it but that doesn't mean that there's no moral Judgment of like what that's doing to society I actually even put online dating in that category um and the then the other quadrant is the feels bad is good this is what I would like classify as Duty and responsibility so going back
to like the flock safety thing that's you know not everyone agrees on law enforcement policy but it turns out that like drugs are bad and uh uh crime is bad and as a society we should be committed to leveraging the government's Monopoly on violence to ensure that people aren't destroying themselves and Society uh in the pursuit of some vain Quest yeah um and and I think that that
not enough gets built in that category and that's both a positive because it's an opportunity to build something that's non-competitive and it's also a curse because it means that we have too few people working on the most important things in terms of uh improving the moral backbone of maybe the next Generation uh you've talked a lot about Civil Service how do you see that kind
of playing out could that be a a rem to some of this you know responsibility to the to the community to to the country Etc yeah I mean look I I think authoritarian governments are bad in a lot of ways and we should not aspire to be an authoritarian government and yet they have a massive advantage against democratic governments because they can mandatorily conscript their most talented people into working on the
societ in on society's greatest problems yep um we don't have that ability I don't I don't want us to have that ability um but man wouldn't it be great if we had some mechanism to get our best and brightest kind of in the way that Israel does to do two years of civil service coming out of high school um I think that would do a couple of things first it would actually like give us the
people that we need to execute on National priorities secondly though I think it would expose people to how hard the government is and instead of getting locked into these tribal ideological movements um they would be able to see how difficult it is to get things things done and they would be way more incentivized they would feel way more motivated to actually fix the things
that are broken um that would improve our quality of life and our ability to to grow and prosper as a nation how do those uh Hybrid models like Teach for America code for America how do those fit in are those just like stop gaps they don't go far enough or or are they are we on the right path with programs like those I think it's the right path these are these are good programs um
notably these are after college I don't know maybe that's the right time to do it maybe it's not um but I I think they're a good step but they they're just not a big enough step um you know I think probably some tiny tiny percentage of graduates from top engineering schools are you even familiar with what code for America is yeah um and it would be great if that was being integrated
directly into the government rather than a nonprofit organization that has relationships with governments that's it's just not quite as effective sure you got a last question we got to let him go uh we got one minute I guess extrapolating on the good Quest Concepts I think something that is important for maybe our audience to understand is that good quests aren't just power law
companies right it's there's this tendency in Silicon Valley like everybody you know you know is not everybody but many people aspire to be a founder and you know some of the best quests you could go on are like working for an Ander working for a SpaceX things like that but what are what are the other sort of like extrapolate sort of the good Quest Concepts around you know maybe it's starting a you know a new a
new church in your community maybe that's like you know uh do you find yourself advising sort of people in your network um around not always aiming for the power law company and saying like hey you can have an extremely meaningful impact uh even at a at a sort of smaller scale that that still is a worthy use of your time yeah I mean being a Founder is is not the only way to be on a good you
know I had someone asked me last night actually um if I thought that JRR tolken had a good Quest by writing Lord of the Rings and my answer is absolutely I mean can you think of silly question any bigger deal than like building a world uh is inspires gener Generations long after you're gone um so no I don't think it's about being a Founder I think there
are a lot of different good quests I think the real question is this question of like you know every serious country over the course of human history has wanted to turn their young people into executors and builders that are going to that are going to grow and create prosperity and you know pull everyone up along with them right now in the United States we don't really have that anymore
for for the first time since I think the 1960s the most aspirational job is being an influencer rather than an astronaut like we should question what we're doing as a society if that's uh if that's what we end up believing is the most aspirational thing to do as a child and you know children are I think the most important in this equation because when we're young everybody aspires to Greatness
like every child is thinking like I want to be a musician I want to be an astronaut I want to be like an inventor and then by the time that they go through the college experience they get pooped out on the other end and it's like I'm a McKenzie consultant it's like whoa bro where did you lose your aspiration for greatness like how does that even happen um and I think that's just a serious problem that we need to
be thinking about as a as a culture and Society for sure well thanks so much for joining great to uh we'll have to have you back soon thanks so much for all right sounds good cheers by yeah good fun good Quest yes uh yeah great interviews today uh really really uh ran the gamut with all sorts of folks early stage late stage all sorts of stuff uh do you want to do some timeline
and then wrap it up what are you thinking yeah let's do it okay I don't want to hit the road too late okay well we got another 20 minutes or something we can keep going uh well let's pick it off by telling you about our sponsor wander find your happy place find your happy place look wander with inspiring with inspiring views Hotel graded Benes dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 247
coner service it's a vacation home but better and uh what do you got for the fans looking to book wanders should they use code TBN yeah you just go to wanderer.com tvpn create an account uh you're entered into a trip giveaway that they're doing just for our audience so uh somebody that's listening is going to win it uh I want it to be you so go do it fantastic and uh yeah what else what
else we got good luck uh we have uh let's see I gotta rip through some of these uh here uh nikunj Kari says new Final Boss YC challenge unlocked 10 million in ARR is not cool you know what's cool 10 million in mrr you know what's cooler 5 million in monthly profit this is the company we're hunting for I don't think we met them Trey would Trey would not be too happy about this one uh
it's a quote here a screenshot trade mem coins perpetuals and earn yield Axiom is a trading platform for decentralized finance and currently offers meme coins perpetuals and yield since launch we've hit 10 million Mr and 5 million monthly net profit wow yeah nothing can scale faster than these uh than these crypto companies it's it's wild I mean you know we we maybe talked about this on the
stream yesterday but there was a YC batch that 20% of the companies were digital asset related I feel like during the crypto boom I think that's I think literally when Trace thought to write good Quest clear I don't know the exact statistic that's that was sort of what it what it felt like so Vibe space analysis but then it went basically down to zero there was a batch that everybody
in crypto I think this was honestly like in 2023 was like there's no y there's no crypto companies in YC that's actually extremely bullish that's like when you should start totally totally the new crypto company but this one summer 2012 like it was the only crypto company we saw some companies yesterday in the batch that were doing stablecoin more like neobank focused stuff that were
cool but um yeah this company is just printing well if you're making five million in monthly profit how are you going to make sure that you don't run up those expenses ramp ramp.com baby time is money save both easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more All In one place go to ramp.com a sign up um we got a good post by person of Swag Adam been on the show
before uh two weeks ago I sold all my belongings broke up with my GF and moved to SF to build no slop the Chrome extension that removes slop from your 4 UT tab it's like ad block but for slop no slop uh you can go check it out on the Chrome web store I thought this was funny I think it's a meme but uh this whole like I I I sold everything I moved is becoming uh such a meme that of
course he he had to jump in um but it does seem like a cool a cool app a cool plugin it gives you a slop score for everything that you see imagine being a imagine being you know let's say you have a podcast and you you install this and then you just never see your podcast terrible you get you got to really look in the mirror in the mirror got to question everything what's hilarious is
that it sorts your feed into the Home tab which is slop free and then the slop trough I mean that's fun funny uh um let's see what else we have oh Michelle Obama is a YouTuber now speaking of uh you know Trey everyone wants to be an influencer uh Sager and Jetty writes I had to go check and see if these numbers were real genuinely astonishing I could upload a video of me picking my nose and
get more views and Subs than this Michelle Obama she's early to the YouTube game it is a grind It's a Grind It's a Grind it t it takes time Tak me a long time to get to 16k took me even longer to get to 400k uh she's sitting at 16.9k subscribers and pulling uh 13,000 views on the last uh interview that she did with Isa and so uh needs to call some growth hackers get these
thumbnails dialed in here's one of the challenges I'm looking this up right now and it's it's actually she's got so many other videos about her it's hard to it's hard to find her Channel maybe that's the problem hard to find her Channel I mean she's an example of someone who maybe doesn't need her own podcast and in said should just be on a podcast circuit promoting things I don't know
she says she got a new episode every every Wednesday so she committed she looking it's looking professional though why don't you try go daily Michelle go Daily 3 hours a day upend your life stream constantly that's the way you win in this game uh well uh Michelle if you want to stand out we recommend going to bezel and getting a watch shop over 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated inhouse by bez's
team of experts uh I'm sure you could find something fantastic you probably already have a bunch of watches maybe you want to sell your watches Michelle hop on bezel I'm looking this up quickly I don't know watches dump it into we got a uh I got this pulled up yeah Barack Obama watch collection it's fantastic nice uh talk about it before he was gifted a watch by one of the one of the
security members the Secret Service guys yeah so he has one that's a what do you even know this brand jorg gray Jor gray there's a chronograph he has it's called The Secret Service there you go um anyways he's got he's got uh honestly not as big as of a collection as he should have given that he they both sold their book rights for something around 65 and they have a
Netflix deal they're rolling in money they they need to deploy it into watches so barck if you're listening get on bezel um Peter diamandis recently interviewed Palmer lucky on stage and uh he had to ask Palmer lucky if there's an Iron Man suit coming soon uh his answer maybe is I'll take it uh yeah Palmer's done uh he gets asked this question all the time uh interesting take I've heard
him expand on it on the Shawn Ryan Show I I love this so the next the next Post in here by the way is a quote from Palmer uh I want to kill companies that deserve to die I believe in efficient markets that's great and uh it's sort of the contrasted with Trey's approach when I asked him about um you know are you excited for all this off balance sheet R&D uh for these companies that will
build good products and he was like well no but you know we explore opportunities meanwhile Palmer is saying I will kill I don't think he's I I don't think he's talking about early stage companies here he's talking about talk the big the big Legacy companies uh but it's great certainly on the mind I mean it is on the mind of of early stage defense Tech Founders they're thinking you know they
that is that would be the best possible soft Landing for them if they can't crack the distribution puzzle yeah totally I mean I've been to andral's office in DC it is a serious operation and you know why I like it business casual required you got to wear a suit uh smart the the entire office dresses up which is great everyone looks fantastic and they're ready if a senator comes by
representative comes by they look sharp because they're going back and forth to the hill all day long uh well we got a oh yeah uh Palmer expanded on the Iron Man suit concept on the Shawn Ryan Show is pretty interesting he was saying that uh it's actually very high risk to build exoskeletons because you're giving this machine which is incredibly by definition if it's giving you super
strength it has enough strength to just immediately rip you apart break your arms do anything very dangerous so he was saying like maybe it comes but maybe it's remotely piloted and you never really sit in it um but we'll have to ask him more about that and get him on the show um anyway moving on uh Keon over at nucleus has a he says he's about to drop the hardest hitting product
announcement video he's ever done this Friday uh we have a special guest in the video Molly OA uh who wants to guess what we're announcing I like the Cameo strategy smart cameos are smart yeah crossover are we we're having Keon tomor I think we'll have them on tomorrow break it down I've heard a little teaser of what it is it's very fascinating uh if you don't if you're not familiar with
nucleus it's a 23 me competitor essentially but built on the next generation of technology that can actually sequence your full genome give you much much deeper insight into what could potentially go wrong with your health and uh recommend interventions essentially um and so he's a a very very sharp scientist who's been working on this company for a long time uh Delian invested I think at the seed round and
uh he has a similar energy to Delian so I'm very excited to have on the show awesome uh this was an interesting one uh Greg Eisenberg was quote tweeted by Pat Grady over at seoa uh talking about Vibe Revenue did you read this at all what is Vibe Revenue money from customers paying out of curiosity or fomo rather than solving real problems it's the bu is the business equivalent
of an impulse purchase that shows up at AR as AR um on fundraising decks warning signs High initial conversion rates plus short-term growth curves poor retention past 3 to six months limited account expansion easy user switching to Alternatives the life cycle Sizzle a slick AI demo Wows people traction Tech enthusiasts flood in VC interests growth metrics impr press fundraise valuation
Skyrocket reality product doesn't change workflows Plateau growth flattens quietly and then the zombie cash in the bank but the metrics are falling uh very interesting and something I don't know if we'll see more I don't even think Jeremy will be there to save these ones who knows yeah I mean they have to build a real bus interesting that the retention people have always pushed back
on Founders for using ARR incorrectly yep but the the the excuse has always been ARR is both annual recurring revenue and annualized run rate and like they're just obviously different things because annualized run rate could be you have uh you know a big and then you just you know multip it by 12x it's not a super um theora the rora uh CEO my co-founder he like always hates when
people in e-commerce are like oh yeah I'm at X run rate because he's like that means nothing like e-commerce seasonal you could just take your just first two weeks of totally uh and something I saw earlier on the timeline today was somebody taking two weeks of their revenue multiplying it by two and then multiplying it by 12 and like it's just like at that point do it a day day one
hour multiply it by 30 and then by 12 yeah exactly yeah exactly one good hour on Ecom Black Friday the second that your biggest the biggest invoice ever just multiply it yep um but uh but yeah so so there to be clear when investors are looking at this they're saying this is an ARR you are at a certain run rate these customers could leave at any time they're not contracted to actually um
you know stay with you for a year at a time or more more so um yeah I mean I I just think that this is definitely uh a really good sort of summary all ARR is created equal you look at flock safety they're signing multi-year contracts with police departments like that's not there might be a testing phase but once they get installed and the cameras are up and the the the police department's
using it and the HOAs have approved and the you know they've done the work that Trey mentioned at the at the city council level and the police chief level um that's going to be a lot stickier than a business you know clicked oh yeah we'll try this $200 a month AI product um anyway uh there's a little bit of trouble in the stove world right now Drew Fallon is highlighting uh solo
Brands stock is capitulating down 63% alone today the company's market cap is now $22 million something is really going wrong because this company is massive they own solo stove uh which are those like smokeless outdoor stoves that you can good Christmas present um and Chubbies which I think is the the men's fashion brand essentially um overall sales were down 8% year over year with d
Toc down 11% retail down 1% gross margin profit down 4% from 61 they actually have the ticker DTC which is almost yeah a curse pure play D Toc model but look at this I mean in 2024 uh they did $112 million with Chubbies and 297 million milon in Revenue with solo stove uh for Combined $60 million in iida and yet they're trading at 22 million it almost feels too low I I I I don't actually
know uh is there something like an sense just just for context Chubbies was purchased for1 130 million in 2021 yeah and yeah how does how does this make sense I mean yeah I mean they're spending they're spending somewhere between 4 and 12% of Revenue on employee costs I mean so I have to imagine the Catalyst here is the tariffs sure and it's possible that that all their
earnings are just going to go away um but who knows I can't I can't it's hard to imagine why yeah I mean it's such a big business you you'd imagine that and it's also it's not a brand these aren't brands that have been like racked with controversy they're not going through like their Bud Light moment you know it's like it's a stove like yeah you know it's not a controversial product
people are continuing to buy them um and and they seem like good gifts and and they should be able to continue but uh maybe we should have uh Sean from the ridge wallet on and break it down since he's the DT DTC expert on this show um anyway moving on to TK Kong he says good reminder from Brian Armstrong I like this because it's a it's a picture of a printed out tweet that we've been
printed out as well um little recursive printing going on but shrug Capital was actually I I this wasn't even my inspiration but they were one of the first groups to print out tweet and that's right they did the calend yeah the calendar the calendar yeah so Brian Armstrong wrote uh in Wednesday September 2 of 2020 got this advice recently thought it was great so passing along imagine where you want to be in
five years then think through what that requires you to get done this year then and then don't spend any time during the year on activities that don't point you in that direction it's a very simple uh analysis but I thought I thought it was great and uh where do you want to be in five years Jordy right at this desk maybe a new desk what do you need to do this year to make sure
that continues I mean we have a uh corporate philosophy uh that involves you know you just spend time with family and you just work on the show that's it and you just alternate between those it's a 24-hour cycle yep and uh hopefully every day you just get to do the show a little bit longer y um work up to 5 hours 6 hours yeah to me it's eventually the sort of this 12 12 12 and 12
12s sleeping you know spending time with family 12 hours streaming Y and then um yeah so we're working towards that uh and one of the companies that helps us do that is adquick thank you to adquick for making this show possible when we started the show we talked about the origins with Sean we were very clear that we wanted this to be a platform uh for the greatest companies in the world
to get in front of great uh talented uh entrepreneurs investors Etc and AD quick saw the vision uh and uh if you're listening to this you already know they are the best way to advertise uh out in the real world uh they bring you know a lot of the mechanics that you get from buying sort of programmatic ads on online they bring that into to out of home and uh you would be silly not to
work with them when you're ready to do out of home um and uh go check them out yeah buy a billboard go to adquick dcom out of home advertising and measurable yeah so I you know we were in SF yesterday and I kept seeing these sort of tacky Billboards from some of these companies and I was just thinking we got to we got a SF is one of the few places that we might actually be able to get uh
uh uh for a podcast podcast is difficult to run ads for because you know the the sort of LTV of a listener is you know um real but you know takes uh a while but I think we should really start experimenting uh just on you know even starting on the side streets you know somebody's walking to work they should see your smiling face champ exactly um anyways let's move on uh there's some
breaking news NE Nathan Fielder has reportedly visited El uh uh Elizabeth homes in prison as part of a top secret documentary I don't even know how this possible you can podcast from prison you can tweet from prison do documentaries from prison now what can't you do in prison these days but uh I'm sure it'll be hilarious Nathan Fielder's a very funny comedian uh and all the trappings
of a of a banger piece of media coming down the pipe do you did you ever get into Nathan for you loved it watched every single episode Laughed Until I cried uh absolutely obsessed with that show it's so good it's so good I go back and watch it every once I need actually I'm making a note to watch it tonight it's so it's so so um he would be an amazing guest to have on the show
honestly um I I I had a friend who interviewed for the show and and it actually is featured in the show in kind of V uh what no no no just as like an extra basically or like a small character um and he said that during the interview process Nathan didn't break character what whatsoever it was everything about the show was was in character the whole time which I thought was really cool uh let's go to
Luke Metro with a hilarious post he says come join our fast growing startup don't miss your chance to get this Equity the question is how much of the growth is priced in and Luke says all of it I mean it's fine if they're giving you a massive package yeah saying yeah we're so confident yep um but yeah I mean this is uh this is probably a point of frustration for uh for those on the job
market looking for the next hot startup when prices are so high you know no and this is just about being being smart in that recruiting process and saying when they come to you and they say yeah we're giving you you know a 4-year deal it's 500 100K yep a year something like that and you can say look I appreciate that but I think you know and you can just demonstrate sort of knowledge of the
market and say look I think I'm very big believer in this company I think our valuation has gotten a little bit out over our skis that 500k I value it you know I think the real sort of market value is you know maybe closer to 250k totally I'm going to just need a bigger package in order to join and if they're not willing to budge then maybe it's not a fit uh but often times you know you
can actually eek out um you know more more comp just by demonstrating sort of an awareness of what the the real value of the equity is compared to its future potential yeah uh you have to be essentially in like VC mode and that's why often times it's good to to talk to VCS about where where it's good to go where the where the interesting companies are I'm not sure if you want
to do this but I'll go to Everett Randall uh several companies are going to really nail consumption-based pricing of work output in the Enterprise and when they do their revenue ramps are going to melt people's brains and uh Everett says it's already starting to happen for those with eyes to see so uh I mean Salesforce was kind of the first large company to work on
consumption based pricing uh of work output because they want to price their agent product on tickets closed essentially so you're not paying a seat license anymore because the seats are going away CU you I mean if you're buying some AI agent are you really buying seats anymore for how do we pick a new big number to to Anchor our Revenue around yep exactly price for ticket but I mean
already this is happening with some we asked you remember we asked the optify kids yesterday yeah uh not kids they're grown men yeah they're grown men uh but but we asked the the optify founders you know if you're getting all this efficiency out of employees could you potentially charge on the sort of incremental take a percentage of the incremental product produced productivity value and they just said
yeah we don't want to be arguing you know which which is the right answer we don't want to be arguing based on how much incremental value was produced but yeah um but yeah It's Tricky uh let's go to Greek Colt he says wamore and shares a quote from Frederick Niche who says never trust a thought that didn't come by walking yeah this this post is brought to you by big walk B we've had
big walk on the on the show we had big walk on the show last week Bill mantis Bill mantis um came in shilled for walking and and is already having an impact his his interview did very well and we had a couple fans in the audience uh start getting those numbers up pushing into got 10K 20K there's some screenshot right there Ty was hitting 20 plus 21,000 steps that's a lot of
steps anyway um I think we should uh I think we should wrap up with this post from Baldo okay let's do it uh Baldo says for those unaware today uh for those unaware today prove tvpn runs Tech news it's so over for Tech Crunch and we have a great uh comment here from none other than John kugan he says just to be clear we really want Tech crunch to succeed because they are owned by AOL
which is owned by Apollo Global Management and we are strong supporters of private Equity um and yeah we we were kind of looking uh I I I think I sponsored Tech crunch you know I ran ads on Tech crunch back in the day when AOL was owned by Verizon oh yeah and I remember I got like this like ad package and there was like ver branding I was like wait so this is why Tech crunch
isn't cool anymore because it's owned by Telecom and basically got owned then then Tech uh but now it's cool it's owned by private equity which is much cooler yeah and I have to imagine uh I have to imagine that they uh want to dismantle AOL and S sell it for parts and sell the underlying assets I mean Apollo owned Veil maybe Tech crunch could pivot into being you know a ski blog yeah and just give you the updates
on what going on in Veil already I mean I imagine a lot of the VCS that are reading Tech crunch used to read Tech crunch well now they're mostly skiing so get them in merge it with Veil that's so smart boom Tech crunch is and veil has that sort of durable subscription Revenue exactly with the passes yeah Epic Pass yeah let's turn let's turn techch into ski lifestyle
magazine magazine print only print only you know I can talk about you know interviewing allocators on the ch lift you know but not about tech just saying what's your favorite what's your favorite run where what do you think of the back country this season what's your prefer when you're when you're booking your helicopter or you're buying your helicopter like what what's important to
you yeah yeah what's important when you're hiring someone to sharpen your skis and and wax everything like how do you get it how do you get it right how do you what kind of talent are you looking for there what's the what makes a great ski Butler yeah kind of like uh Step It Up from Tech crunch like more Rob report Style merge it with Veil I think we're I think we're on to something think we're on to
something here we got talk to we got to talk to TU crunch's Bankers we're here to uh you know help with the the process uh and yeah yeah give us a call anyway fantastic show thanks for watching we'll be back tomorrow have a great Thursday leave us a festar review uh wherever you listen to podcast and put an ad in it please uh it warms our hearts have a great day talk to you soon bye