what so proud we we're live we're live we're live welcome to tvpn it is Tuesday March 11th 2025 we are live from the Temple of Technology The Fortress of Finance the capital of capital this show starts now we got a great show for you today uh even though the Market's down we are making the best of it we are up it's a it's a golden era for short sellers yes that's what bull
market it's a bull market in put options yes uh so rough times out there but no matter what you're doing you got to do it on public go to public.com investing for those that take it seriously multi-asset investing industry leading yields trusted by millions uh get on public move your money around do whatever you think is best do your own
research and you know what we're a fan of yeah buying when others are scared yeah that's good that's what we do yeah when other are blood in the streets yeah when others are fearful when others are fearful we get greedy yeah greedy greedy when others are fearful anyway uh moving on we're talking about the market crash here's what happened the Wall Street
Journal is breaking it down the stock market yesterday uh trade threatens sent the Dow down more than 600 points the DOW Industrials dropped after president Trump said he would ramp up tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada 50% shares of industrial and Financial firms were among the biggest decliners in the S&P 500 all 11 sectors in the broad
index were trading lower fears about a recession sparked a sell-off Monday with sliding Tech shares spurring the nasdaq's biggest loss since 2022 president Trump declined to rule out a recession on Sunday and said his economic shakeup would result in a period of transition it's re it was a really emotionally charged decline said Katie Stockton founder and managing
partner of fair lead strategies but she added that this is more than just a brief pullback that we're going through new Labor Department data showed that the US had 7.74 million job openings in January up from 7.51 million in December slightly above the consensus uh for 6 uh 7.6 million openings so unemployment ticking up too many job openings not enough people
getting placed in their roles uh big tech stocks recovered they started to recover from some of their loss says Tesla shares regained some ground after the EV maker shed 15% of its market value on Monday I saw an account I saw an account post you know there's that iconic shot of uh what's the uh Chris Paul is the basketball player where he's
like uh Chris Paul drills a three to close the lead close the the Gap to 40 points like that that's that's Tesla going up 3% today after being down it's it's rough out there but we've said it before naturally ASP naturally aspirated V12 with a gated manual shifter in the next Tesla Roadster and it's a $10 trillion stock you heard it here first there you go uh Verizon stock not
Financial ADV not Financial advice but if you see them deliver a naturally aspirated V12 with a gated manual shifter uh we know that we will be going turbo long we will be going turbo long um Verizon stock dropped more than 7% was the weakest performer of the DOW Industrials Tuesday Morning a company executive flagged heightened industry competition at an investor conference so
monopolists complains about competition yes yes yes uh so a lot of lot of reactions on the timeline aot Gil here he says quote he puts in quotesmost things are not as serious as they feel in the moment I don't know if that was about the market crashing but it seems like it was right Market it's all priced in I think so um but yes I I I was just
workshopping a post uh which was being GRE is lowkey goated when others are fearful extremely stupid but s it I love it what was the original format of that I don't know it was something funny uh I like that yeah just send it okay anyway this is just for the record it's a Warren Buffett quote it says Be Be fearful when others greedy and be greedy
when others are fearful uh and so Buy Low sell High uh anyway the kobs letter uh has a thread here on the real reason that markets are crashing and I thought we could maybe take a tour through this over the last two months the S&P 500 and crypto have erased combined five A5 trillion dollars of market cap I think we need a moment of silence for that Yep
this moment of silence is brought to you by public.com fantastic multi- invest multi-asset investing products trusted by millions back to the show enough silence uh we have we have just witnessed one of the most sudden shifts in sentiment since 2020 what's happening let us explain uh let's begin with the timeline markets have known the trade war was
coming since as early as mid 2024 in December tariff threats ramped up we saw many all-time highs in the S&P 500 after that even after the trade War Began February 1 we saw more all-time highs uh since February 20th the S&P 500 has erased a whopping four and a half trillion in market cap yeah just I guess quick comment here yeah saying markets
have known the trade war was coming is not exactly yeah not exactly like it's hard to say or it's hard to basically position that as fact this is stated as a fact but this is clearly their opinion right many people thought Trump would run but many people Al also thought Trump was not actually serious about tariffs Y and still in many ways the market isn't fully pricing
in tariffs because there's sort of this back and forth uh he announces something he just announced 50% tariffs on Canadian alum umum prodcts this but who knows if that's real right there was like a day last week I think it was Wednesday where if you paid some big tariff Bill like you know at the end of the day like it was like you shouldn't
have paid it like you know very uh chaotic so I think the markets when when you look at the last Trump presidency and and and what the stock market did then I think the markets to date the sentiment has just been Trump presidency generally good for the economy because he's a guy that cherishes the economy yeah um I mean the whole thing has become very oddly
political I mean we covered it during the Trump pump post Trump presidency becomes political it's not that it's that is that for the first time in in my life at least I feel like like small 2% moves in the market are driven by executive level like the narrative is this is the this is the problem of the president like yeah like during the
housing crash you know there's like a multi multi-month sell down and a big recession and way over leverage and then people start asking questions and they start asking questions about well who's responsible and in in part the banks and part in deregulation they go back and they find different different pieces of legislation that might have led to this
uh some of it came from the Bush Administration some of it came from the Obama Administration and and then um and so uh it becomes like this bigger narrative but this is a time where like crypto pops and people will be like oh this is because of trump and then and then and then you know S&P goes down to you know a couple percent and people this is because of trump it's the worst
thing ever uh and and it all just uh my takeaway is that we need a president who is just hyperfocused on the short-term stock market returns and that's all they're doing every day they're not thinking long-term at all like a high frequency Trader type it's a crypto protocol founder posting exactly feedback into the market Trump is the closest president we've had very
very close but he's not doing enough even he's put out statements like okay I don't really I'm not worried about the short-term performance of the stock market I'm trying to make America great again over some long period of time no I want him to say yes I do care if the stock market went two two two two% down interest rates are negative the next day
there's some angle here where he says in the first quarter of my presidency the S&P 500 was XYZ yeah by the fourth it ited you know more than 3x you know so he he's maybe he's positioning positioning he's really playing the long game maybe the President should have some sort of you know how Elon had that pay package that was like if he can get
the if he can get the Tesla stock up to a certain amount he gets more of it he gets rewarded for high share prices effectively the President should have that where like if the S&P goes up by by a certain amount then they get to stay in power longer but if it drops then they get fired and then we get a new president and we get new hyper financialized
it's already kind of like that right you see these Senators that are just running up these crazy basically operating hedge funds uh and you know the more the more the better they do in the in the public markets the more they can invest into their campaigns which the more inside information they can get investors this is a great virtuous
cycle is what they call it One hand washes the other yeah that's what we're going for here yeah all right let's get let's get back into this anyway uh the NASDAQ is sadly just 8% away from entering a bare Market for the first time since 2022 uh what changed so quickly the trade the the kobs letter is arguing the trade war is simply the scapegoat the real reason behind the
Market's decline is a sudden shift in Risk appetite we've gone from extreme greed to extreme fear in a matter of days positioning was so polarized that we have swung in the complete opposite direction um and long mag 7 is the most crowded trade everyone agrees that Tech is great in the AI narrative and so everyone's pumped into that uh where it
gets even more interesting is that institutional Capital exited before this decline in tech stocks heading into 2025 hedge fund exposure to mag 7 stocks fell to a 22-month low um let's take a look at the Divergence between the NASDAQ and fund positioning on February 9th institutional investors built the largest ethereum short position in history this came as retail investors
piled into crypto on the hopes of a US strategic Reserve crypto is down one one Institution went turbo long and that was World Liberty fi which eth yeah oh really yeah yeah uh what is it Eric Trump was was basically ethereum bull posting you know saying like now if it's my opinion but now is a really good time to be stacking in there uh unfortunately
another moment of silence well not if they didn't sell yet but they they're down like hundreds you know there whole like oh not Financial advice I'm responsible you could get rid of that a centralized blockchain that could fix do price fixing yeah would be would be cool Step One is BAS rat to negative 10% and then the fund rates the FED funds rate needs
to legally be negative 10% forever yeah and then yeah and then and then maybe permanently you could just legally mandate that the S&P grows at 10% a year forever yeah there's something the prices yeah there's something there exactly we we should Workshop this maybe throw it into a blog post yeah uh crypto is even more supportive of our
thesis take a look at the bullish crypto developments that have happened over the last two months even the even the US Bitcoin Reserve became a sell the news event so what changed in December many and and to be clear many people said Trump launching a token is so obviously the top because there's nothing there's really nothing the US government can't launch a token right it
would just be competing I mean nothing's off the table anymore but you know competing with your own currency is every time someone like oh this is the this is the end of the road for the craziness in crypto they've been Pro anyway very clearly felt like a massive you know sort of dying breath of a of a bull market and Retail just gotten hosed
again and again and again throughout 2024 so all of the all the meme tokens a lot of people wanted to blame it on milania oh yeah uh cuz it sort of pulled the wind out of trumpcoin and everybody you know felt like they were losing a bunch of money or were losing money but anyway uh so so they go to this uh Apollo uh risk list Apollo was predicting a 90% chance of tariffs
coming in 2025 while they were also predicting a 0% chance of a US recession uh fear and greed indices in crypto and stocks have hit their lowest since the 2022 bare Market this month last year crypto saw extreme greed levels of 92 plus but now it's at a polar opposite of 17 sentiment is the ultimate driver of price in any Market regardless of
fundamentals when sentiment shifts so quickly outflows hit record highs and cause flash crashes as we have seen how do you how do you put the probability of a US recession at 0% if you're Apollo that is crazy when the president is actively threatening tra massive trade Wars and things that uh I think I think uh Buck Capital yeah bucko Capital had a really
good post which was basically like the president told me he was going to destroy the economy So I listened and sold everything yeah and you know it's obviously um an exaggeration but there's some there's some truth to that yeah like the the Trump Trum ripping a bandaid off right it's not it's not oh this is going to be all all sunshine and rainbows although
people were certainly talking like it was going to be uh so small cap funds saw 3.5 billion in outflows midcap funds saw outflows of 2.1 billion sectorial funds saw 4.5 billion in outflows once again shift in positioning this means that getting ahead of shifts in sentiment will be the most profitable strategy in 2025 they argue uh vix surges over 70% in one
month the swings are going to broaden this is something that a lot of people have been talking about uh even I think Jeff Lewis you know markets are getting more aggressive the there will be more swings more volatility probably sentiment spreads faster is you imagine a world where now you know historically you have a your college friend group you know guys that you just
talk about random business stocks Etc you might get together with them yeah once yeah once every six month and they're like oh yeah I'm like pretty short the market right now and everybody like goes and they go short now it's it's a group chat and you know it's just sort of that sentiment spreads really quickly we had a friend who went super
long Tesla you know basically a month ago exactly down uh 40% since then um rip yeah yeah the idea of going to something like what happened in like the 70s where there's like languishing stagflation for like a decade or even even post uh housing crash where the economy was in the doldrums for like years seems Unthinkable because the
swings are just so fast now with Co down and up and then same thing with the with the the the interest rate RIS like down and up so fast um through technical and fundamental analysis uh they've been trading these swings stocks Commodities bonds and crypto are highly tradable and they're arguing that you should sign up for their stuff but anyway uh kind of an
kind of an interesting post but py McCormick had one of the best jokes of the day he says he says uh now would be the perfect time to go to to hit go on the Strategic NASDAQ Reserve I love it what a banger yeah and and who was saying that uh if the US government needed them to manage oh it was it was Keith on the show he said if if we started a US Sovereign
wealth fund and you knowa was asked to manage some of the funds he would do he would oblige as a patriot yeah yeah yeah uh here Keith go go to play 10 trillion dollar become the next MSA great be great um I I mean the uh the the the the Steelman on the Strategic NASDAQ Reserve is like the original Peter teal thesis on like uh a cryptocurrency that's backed by hard
hard assets kind of like the maker Dow idea but for like you know non- crypto companies and the idea that you could you could have like something that looks like a tradable bond or tradable ETF slice and when I go to pay you I'm paying you not just a dollar piece of paper that's maybe backed by gold maybe backed by nothing it's backed by the cash flows of Apple Google Amazon and
every American Business um feels very stable feels very hard to implement but uh was always like an interesting totally you know turbo libertarian dream of the late 90s um liquidity says uh PE funds are the Chad meme uh watching public markets plummet while keeping their portfolio marks flat always nice to be in privates when the Market's down
um power bottom dad says Elon is down almost 21 billion today that puts him at only checks notes $13 billion richer than the next richest person alive we did it Reddit I love it uh so yeah everybody's losing everybody all the billionaires what are they called the super billionaires wasn't that the the phrase The Wall Street Journal tried to coin
Giga beire G Giga would have been way better but you know they didn't use that gire gigir between trillionaire and yeah CTI billionaire is is confusing because people use it for C millionaire y so it needs I think Giga is the right one giga Giga billionaires over 100 yeah you heard it here for first folks um Garcia Capital says I can tell the
bottom is close because Traders are starting to share Bible verses I haven't seen this yet but maybe I'm not following enough uh I don't follow enough traders to really see this but but certainly sharing Warren Buffett quotes yes like he he said you know he's known for saying Being Greedy is lowkey goated when others are fearful did you post that already yeah great and and a
lot of people were saying uh yeah like uh oh like you know now's a good day to learn about dollar cost averaging and it's like you were't dollar cost averaging the last month like now you're going to start the most the most memorable moment for me as as an investor where I really thought it was entirely over MH like things were never going to come back
with seeing ethereum at $800 and thinking where's the bottom on this yeah like what is the CU with with cryptocurrencies like yeah there's there's some Network value and activity and all that stuff and fees and stuff like that but I was like we got no cash flows here and and I don't know if this this um you know protocol is is even going to exist in in two years with with
this was when when FTX had collapsed and there was just so much contagion very dark and then of course it was like right when I thought that was the absolute best time to buy um so yeah what were the darkest moments I remember the svv crisis was pretty crazy I remember like just looking at my phone like all night and just being and then
the other one was the Sam Alman open AI drama over the weekend that was like when when he got fired and then back that was like wow I can't believe this is happening this is like history in the M you were calling your second secondaries broker being like sell everything no uh that was less like a shock to the market uh yeah but the svb
thing was clearly like okay like the market is bad like rough um anyway if you're losing sleep over the markets why don't you improve your sleep by getting an e sleep go to 8sleep.com tvpn they're nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience it's a fantastic it's a fantastic product we highly recommend it uh family loves it what are
you thinking if we didn't have eight sleeps our wives would be pissed it'd be rough they uh love them almost as much as we do um it's a it's a cover that you put over your bed yep and it automatically adjusts the temperature uh minute by minute basically to give you better deeper sleep I'm going to check my sleep score really quick I put up uh mostly because
I know nominal numbers you got good numbers today you got good numbers uh let's see I I put up a 97 o I think you beat me 94 but I'm back a good night for you it was good you're getting dialed in it was a good night it was a weird you know the last 30 days been hectic yeah um but it really is fantastic people don't realize like you get into bed and you're
typically hotter because you've just been moving around Y and it cools you and then it will raise the temperature throughout the night so that you wake up uh warm ready to go it is is so crazy how fast you fall asleep and how fast you wake up with this thing it's it's amazing /pn uh there's a discount there if you use our code uh come compete with us yeah yes
send us your sleep scores uh anyway let's move on to some historical analysis from The Wall Street Journal uh they write today Rolf Winkler writes uh what the do com bus can tell us about today's AI boom uh this week marks the 25th anniversary of the NASDAQ Peak but it was I just got to say Rolf Winkler over at the journal This Time It's
Different buddy This Time It's Different yeah uh no we don't know yet if it feels different because you know we got companies like cursor and you know surf doing you know uh millions of dollars of Revenue per month when their do counterparties were doing you know Millions a year thousands they were doing we're in the go back find all these like emails of them like being
like look at this chart I went from zero to $100,000 in Revenue in 6 months of course I'm worth 10 billion of course and everyone's like I'm going to do it even faster 0 to 100,000 Revenue then I go public we have plumbing.com yeah how it's worth at least a billion dollars by itself yeah I mean the multiple is uh is all the difference here um anyway
there's some good history in the Wall Street Journal today 25 years ago this week the NASDAQ Composite hit its.com era Peak after soring more than 500% in 5 years imagine that ride you're just sitting in the NASDAQ 5x in your money um Mary maker just going off going off uh its subsequent collapse was Swift and brutal small investors lured by a
promising new technology called The Internet's lost called called the internet lost fortunes um the economy stumbled high-flying companies like pets.com the globe.com and web van collapsed today some investors are worried the same cycle might be playing out when it comes to artificial intelligence now the interesting thing I don't know about the globe.com but web
van was basically instacart very successful company now pets.com chewy.com pet delivery stuff yeah 10 billion dollar company for a while I'm not sure exactly where it trades now but big company um lots of good ideas mp3.com went public with just a domain business plan no Revenue obviously Spotify is a be Beast of a business now so the story of the Doom to me is not
like wrong ideas directionally correct just bad timing that bad execution yeah uh today some investors are worried the same cycle might be playing out when it comes to artificial intelligence even if that is the case a big if there's an important lesson for investors from the dot collapse ultimately the early internet hype proved correct it's easy
to understand the fear and echo of the do com boom leading AI companies are valued in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars some of them with little Prospect of generating meaningful sales that's not I mean I don't know who exactly they're talking about a lot of these companies have plenty of prospects for generating meaningful sales um there
there's obviously a ton of questions but yeah um investors are RAC to give the companies still more money at ever having a Founder on in 45 minutes that's putting up insane numbers in his first month yep um uh so they're they're buying AI chips to fill out new cavernous data centers I like that term cavernous data centers uh yet the dotom boom and bus showed that
big bets on ambitious Technologies can pay off in the long run the five most valuable listed companies globally and six of the top seven AR tech companies from that era or ones That Grew From seeds planted then in other words the Doom bubble had elements of what some investors call good bubbles that fuel rapid adoption of revolutionary technology I want to make a statement
for the record that we have been Pro bubble proble we Pro bubble in the first episode of this show yes and we're going to be Pro bubble in the last yes and we're certainly not going to fold now that Tesla's down 40% a month it's going to take a lot more than that yeah um so the the journals separating out the idea of good bubbles versus bad
bubbles which uh I I I think it's a good a good distinction to make bad bubbles are things that where people speculate on assets that don't make the economy more productive tulip bulbs Beanie Babies houses in the Arizona desert um boom to bust and they have some charts here uh it's very difficult to be a radical innovator s says Carlota Perez
author of technological revolutions and financial Capital the Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages uh to create a world that doesn't exist such innovators convince suppliers workers and financiers that they should March simultaneously toward an imagined future of clamoring consumers while people race to cash in ideas are are tried and infrastructure is built many
fail who nevertheless lay important ground work famously the the fiber optic lines of 2000 were the equivalent to the electrical grids of the early 1900s the railroad tracks of the 1800s the canals of the late 1700s says Perez busts followed those booms yet the networks fertilized new markets and so you know even if we build these massive uh data
centers we don't know what to do with them eventually we'll figure it out which is uh why this is potentially even if it is a bubble it's a good bubble we love Bubbles AI innovators are making their own gargantuan Capital Investments primarily in specialized semiconductors known as Graphics processing units gpus made by Nvidia today Nvidia is the most valuable
company in the world or among them with a market cap of 2.7 trillion the question of whether those investments will lead to productivity advantages that power the economy or elements of a good bubble the jury will be out for some time but there are tangible advances already search is smarter AI Bots can write software code cover letters and more AI agents are booking
flights filing taxes scheduling meetings and acting as smart assistants that could boost Pro productivity in years to come not that there won't be losers some AI companies are already melting down sooya capitals David Khan has written of the massive Revenue hole that AI companies need to fill to justify their data center spending which could lead to
a speculative ShakeOut yet he's optimistic that's a great article by the way oh yeah it's probably worth revisiting at some point the massive Revenue hole is the is the one the the journal linked yeah it's basically this idea of like if you're spending I mean it's simple idea you're spending all this money you have to actually make it back at some point yeah but I mean as we
say you know 99% of AI companies quit right before they close the massive Revenue Hall yes before they hit many have said that yeah yeah um yet he's optimistic that a huge amount of economic value will be created as am I uh to distinguish bad bubbles from good bubbles look at the assets the people are betting on says Bill Janeway former
Vice chairman of warberg pinkis who has studied speculative eras the world banking system collapsed in 2008 when houses couldn't people couldn't afford were financed with risky Mor mortgages sliced into highly lever I just study speculative errors John I participated in them who are you gonna trust more Bill Janeway yeah has he ever had speculative
eras has he ever had an nft profile picture yeah if you haven't been in the trenches of the speculative erors bill I don't want to hear from you yeah where were you in 2021 in contrast Jane way points to Tesla some investors think its Shares are overvalued but Tesla is using its windfall to deliver a future of electric vehicles solar power as well as
self-driving cars and robots P powered by AI many overhyped AI uh startups May FL out yet some will have had brilliant ideas that get picked up by others anyway fun article Good Times uh they talk more about uh the smartphone Revolution by the time Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007 wireless phones and the internet were already widely used flash memory was
cheap computer chips were smaller and faster responsive touch screens had already been invented and when the smartphone Revolution came it was General magic alums Tony Fidel and Andy Rubin who helped deliver it Fidel helped develop the iPod and iPhone and Apple and Ruben founded android the world the the startup behind the world's largest
mobile operating system and so are you familiar with the story of General magic uh pre it's fascinating it was basically this like dream team of like you know all the Venture capitalists came together all the top technologists came together and they were going to build an iPhone essentially in the mid 90s I believe and they uh so an early version of the smartphone was released
in 1994 by a company called General magic co-founder Mark parat envisioned digital touch touchcreen phones but his device arrived years earlier uh there were no digital cellular networks pup recalls to retrieve digital content of which there was little it had to be plugged into a dialup modem so they were just too early company doesn't work but
the team goes out and works at Apple and ultimately Google post android acquisition um and so as hundreds of billions of dollars pour into AI some are calling it another bubble true or not Perez forecast that AI will boost productivity as the first electrical lines did when they replac steam power General magic went bankrupt in 2002 its
devices were so far ahead of their time that few customers bought them another prei idea it was working on would also have to wait AI agents to build AI agents built to complete tasks for people the engineer working on that uh project John Gian G Andrea now heads Apple for AI for Apple o um interesting maybe they need some new blood maybe he's uh needs to
hang his Jersey and the rafters he's been C certainly early to this stuff but not rolling things out faster my biggest complaint recently we talked about the Gen Emoji thing which is terrible playground which is bad um they still haven't replaced the voice dictation like I'm I'm used decent voice dictation now you use it a lot I use I use it a lot for chat PT I go to chat PT and I
click the voice thing and it and it records it and it Nails it every single time no matter what and then every once in a while I'll accidentally hit the button on the Apple keyboard and it's just terrible and it's like apple that's not a security thing that's not it's not some crazy it's it's it's so easy to implement whisper it's like there open
source Frameworks there's like they could buy a company there's a million ways to just upgrade that and just make the existing stuff better I was thinking about like how funny it is that their their apple intelligence you've seen like the like like their rewriting thing where like you you highlight stuff and then you have writing tools now have you
seen this writing tools writing tools Des cribe your change this is an apple intelligence so if you highlight some text you can go to writing tools you can say like proofread it rewrite it make it friendly professional concise like turn it into key points turn it into a bullet list turn it into turn turn it into a table like it's cool but it's but it's weird
because like there's already spell check and grammar check like running and so instead of like replacing that with one system that runs over your text now there's just two systems that are talking to it and they're like kind of fighting one's like the old school like hey we're just checking spell check here it's like the the metaphor is like
there's a robot over your shoulder who's just kind of looking and say oh You misspelled this like let's underline it with the blue line you can click and you can change right um but then there's a separate robot over here saying hey actually you want to turn this into a list of bullet points like I could do that for you and it's like I kind of just want one system that I'm
interacting with that I'm like really comfortable with instead of like when I want this problem I go over here it's very like fragmented anyway well time is money save both go to ramp.com easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place folks you got to get on ramp.com uh we launched our season two of the show our version two
today uh we are now officially supported by ramp presented by ramp and we had talked about ramp uh but we had never we never shown a hand hint that we were we were in partnership with them little little teasers but we never actually really told everyone that we were you know partnered up we had never had a shot of us me grabbing a briefcase
out of an unmarked black van and pulling it into a yellow Ferrari and driving away that's really what makes it sort of official now it's clear that yeah we're we're we're in the great car too underrated we're in the pocket of big ramp yeah big ramp big ramp it's a lot of a lot of people have been talking about um you know the the potential Monopoly you
know positioning of ramp and and big ramp but uh we're conflicted out of that we are we are anyway uh let's move on to another big deal uh open aai signs A1 billion deal with cor weave they'll get an equity stake uh cor weave an Nvidia backed cloud provider which we talked about on the show last week they're filing to go public we had Nick Carter
one of the first Angel Investors in the company on the show which is very cool um they just signed a five-year deal to rent AI servers to open AI according to a reuter's report as part of the cloud deal open AI will also get a stake in core weave expected to be worth around 350 million when the company goes public now core weave already has a big
partnership with Microsoft and they've signed deals to spend more than 10 billion doll renting AI servers through 2030 and so this is the satch nadela I you know I own I also like to lease I like to rent I like to do everything I you know I'm a COR customer it all just depends on what the flavor of the week is for me I'm good for billion so uh I have another article pulled up here in
2024 Microsoft accounted for 62% of cor weave's Revenue uh which is wild um wow yeah yeah that that's one of the main things that people are kind of pounding on S1 is revenue concentration are they too concentrated because if if Microsoft says hey we're out then the company's worth what a 10th or something or fifth um but uh you know we'll see yeah yeah
and so in many ways open AI could have continued to access cor weave's underlying products through Microsoft yep but now they're not now they're they're becoming their own company they're they're leaving the nest spreading their wings y becoming uh all grown up yeah they're even going you do have to credit you got to credit SAA and Sam for publicly you know right after
everybody was like oh they're beefing they're they're they're they're not on the same team anymore they they like went and took a picture together oh this was this was probably 3 months ago at this point um but SW no Jersey swap okay yeah so it do barely counts yeah barely counts you got to do the Jersey swap if you're serious about you know uh healing
wounds EXA uh you know Zuck and Zuck and Jensen seem like they're just really aligned they're not playing in each other's backyards at all it's like pure customer Nvidia never build doesn't meta have a chip they're like talking about but it's clear there's still clearly still a huge Nvidia buyer Nvidia is not trying to do any you know Nvidia does
have Cloud offering so with the other hyperscalers they're there's in some competition sometimes um yeah I think today actually meta announced that they're testing a new AI chip with tsmc so you were correct that they were respectfully just letting each other you know do their own thing but uh now Zuck is kind of doing the same thing was there a Morris Chang Zuck Jersey swap
maybe that should be the thing they must have even if there's no photo they probably did it Jersey swap Jersey swap uh the financial times they say they're testing it so okay uh the financial times reported that Microsoft cut back on some plans spending with cor cor weave due to delivery issues and Miss deadlines core denied the report and
said there have been no contract cancellations or walking away from commitments and uh so that's the story of opening cor we and I feel like um this IPO is going to be pretty crazy because there's all these deals that are going to get papered like right before and the the future in the future revenues and cash flows and contracts of these businesses like the entire AI
industry is kind of deciding like like hey like we're going to spend like you know what I mean the base case is like 250 billion in capex in in one year right yeah and so like where does that pie get sliced up and so if you're core weave and a couple billion dollars will materially move your you know market cap then yeah you're going to do a deal with
open aai for 12 billion over iseni stock away and stuff so there's all these kind of like one hand washes the other type deals love to see they're just to reiterate so cor weave open AI doing this deal but then cor we is passing them back $350 million in stock yeah and it's very conveniently timed with cor weaves IPO where the number one risk factor like you said is that the
revenue con contion with Microsoft people will my sense is that analysts will switch from revenue concentration which is still going to be a focal point to okay you're less you have less concentration going forward but open AI is losing all this money and you know it's not the most reliable customer and then they're going to still you know
continue to have to fight a similar fight I I do like this trend of if you spend a lot of money with a company you get equity in it I feel like with how much you spend at arow on you should they should give you a size they should cut you in they should give you some Equity you're telling me you're telling me that's I go to their customer support
daily cold email hey here's how much I spent in the last week think about a little little preo yeah Little preo Slice slice me off I wouldn't even need I don't even need the shares just let me let me get an allocation in airan I mean lvma should should cut us in with all the Dom we're buying too you know every company if you're a good customer let us get a let us get a taste
anyway exactly uh speaking of stuff you can buy at arow on there's a uh a tour of food and drinks startups in the information today taken through some D Toc some uh some consumer some cpg Brands I thought this was kind of interesting uh strategic acquirers are starve for growth they're cash-rich and they need to innovate says John Levert a
managing director for Consumer retail at Investment Bank Solomon Partners most conflicted possible position the guy who wants to sell all the consumer the upstart consumer brands for the most amount of money to the to the Strategic they have to do this conglomerates like Coca-Cola PepsiCo and Mars you guys have so much cash you got to innovate why not buy you
got to do it why not buy some some of my brand why some of my clients uh so they've long used Acquisitions to add trendier Brands popular with new sets of Shoppers and over the past few years new food and drink brands have been able to grow sales quicker than ever using social media to reach Shoppers cheaply and leaning into viral health and
wellness trends still big acquirers will likely be selective uh to be a good candidate for an acquisition Brands need to have over 100 million in annual sales and gross margins of between 30 and 50% Levert said they should be nicely profitable on earn on ibah and if they're growing quickly buyers typically are okay with a lower IA um some potential sellers are holding
off on seeking buyers until later this year amid uncertainty around the impact of tariffs and supply chain disruptions selling or offloading a big stake to private Equity firms could be another alternative for brands that aren't able to find a strategic buyer and so here are the eight food and beverage startups that uh might get acquired in the next
year or two banza bonsa they've raised 31 million they were foundo Bean it's garbanzo bean based pasta cool uh I I used to eat a lot of this yeah um I still have it from time to time it's pretty good uh there is the pitch low carb lower carb than pasta no it's just uh no gluten oh no gluten gluten-free okay sort of high protein yeah in in 2014 when they
launched this was this was Ultra trendy as they say uh more recently it has added products including high protein waffles uh they raised $20 million in 2019 from investors including private Equity Firm Prelude growth partners and Danny mayor's investment firm huh smart uh they sell their products in 23,000 locations uh Chomps the line of meat not
a big Chomps guy I mean if I'm in a if I'm in like a random store maybe I'll grab one but think they're Fant a daily driver yeah no I I like the idea almost a daily driver uh my son is an absolute Chomp fiend if I ever pull one out he'll just come over and and he'll just take it from me and just eat the entire thing I mean they're looking really strong
it's been a long road 2012 so I mean they're going on 13 14 years old uh but in 2024 they did over half a billion dollars in sales and the last disclosed value ation was 200 to 300 million and they raised 80 million they're well well yeah they are in the money stride consumer Partners looks great on this deal they got meat stack meat sticks
other snacks founded by personal trainer Pete Maldonado that's that's John had John had an idea this morning while we were working out to just have I know leak this it's such a good idea preut Stakes like imagine if you could buy like steak that was cooked in sort of more of like a bacon style like pre-sliced form factors just instead of going for a Chomp just grab you know a
little bit of feton which is uh I'd like somebody in the audience to build that we'll we'll definitely trial it well my idea was specifically like Chick-fil-A but steak based so you go to the drive-thru and instead of getting some chicken nuggets you get a bunch of steak and it's like 50 bucks because it's a steak it's expensive there no other items and
there's no other items on the menu yeah it's like I mean maybe like you get a whole steak or you get half a steak or you get little slices of steak but like it basically the restaurant just cook steaks all day and then you drive up and you buy steaks economies of steak steak it's great anyway Chomps has proven it can scale up it's on its own the brand has
already expanded to most major grocery chains Whole Foods Target Kroger Trader Joe's as well as many convenience stores and Maldonado expects it to hit a billion in retail sales this year wow that is big uh could include a strategic exit in IPO or or we could continue to hold it for cash flow uh good culture I I don't know this company uh they did
over 200 million they're founded in 2014 they've raised 85 million uh good culture has been the Forefront of a Resurgence in populated cheese it's like a yogurt dairy uh Health better for you kind of dairy esque brand okay cool do you know lesser evil are you familiar with this 200 poporn four wow popcorn that's an old company $165 million in
sales uh they raised 45.9 million ARA growth Partners Valor Equity Partners in there that's amazing because valor's in like SpaceX um but uh yeah good team around the around the board looking good raised money in 2023 around $19 million um and apparently they are exploring a potential sale but also seeking a valuation of around a billion dollars that would be a relatively Rich
number compared to a recent to recent snack deals in January flowers food said it would pay 795 million for simple Mills which sells gluten-free versions of snacks like goldfish and Wheat Thins but had higher net sales the trade the basically trade of the early 2010s was just to go into a 7-Eleven or a gas station and make it better for you
version of every product every single product from meat sticks to uh Wheat Thins to goldfish you know all these categories it is kind of crazy that no one said like let's just do that they everyone it was always like some random entrepreneur focusing on one single category there was no one who said like our business is we are going to create a
better for you product in every single category yeah some people focus yeah some people tried to do that but you can't remember any of their names no I agree they didn't nail it's also that's that's the thing cpg we talked about this on the show yesterday cpg is so tangible that people assume that it's very easy oh I'm a CER I'm going to make this drink and then you realize you
actually have to the best cpg companies either got super lucky just unreliable or they iterated across 30 plus production runs to like dial in a product and make it truly truly great and then they had to like reinvent it when they scaled up again and it's just really difficult it's basically Blue Collar entrepreneurship and that you know you have to go sit in grocery
stores early on and just like get people to tr your product it seems crazy crazy but um it's kind of what it takes uh liquid death I mean this is another good example like liquid Death Super unique go to market super unique branding like that's not going to come out of some hold code that's just like we need better for you in every category because
yeah liquid death is a very bespoke like liquid death is not a brand that goldfish right it's like it doesn't translate it's a very different thing liquid death had perfect marketing Market fit in a mass Market product that they could sell everywhere and they've executed that very well they've they've also been very aggressive in terms of
raising Capital science which is an LA based sort of incubator that incubated it yep they were also in Dollar Shave Club that was like their first big outcome I think in the in the DDC world uh I was getting pitched yeah I was getting pitched uh liquid death uh you know preo round uh I didn't sign any type of NDA I think it was at like I think it was at close to2
billion uh I think that's completely um unrealistic unless it was trading like a meme stock well they did get some private credit money in they got a $55 million working capital line from Aries management let's go let's go some of the best in the game they got we got to get a private credit fund as a partner for sure uh for the show it's great um and so we'll see we'll see
where that goes Olli pop also very uh very popular they're doing 400 to 450 million in sales they've raised 90 and the last disclosed valuation was 1.85 billion so wow pulling a 45x revenue multiple not bad they got JP Morgan's private Capital Growth Equity Fund monogram Rana Ventures low calorie low sugar sodas with added fiber it's long
been seen as a candid candidate for buyout by a big beverage company and they're in kind of a race against poppy which was launched in 2020 uh just 3 years after ollipop started Poppy's doing more than 500 million in sales and has raised 30 million in funding yeah so poy directly they were also making sort of better for yoush sodas but then ollipop was working
so well that Poppy completely cloned their product down to the font wow like it was just a complete uh copycat but they to their credit they executed well and have grown sales pretty impressively a buddy of mine is uh the head of growth I actually don't know what his title is now but he was the head of growth for ollipop back around their seed round and
he he's super well-connected smart guy and basically I kept back then I would I would honestly ask him I didn't really understand how hard oop was was ripping uh this was like 20120 and I was like are you going to look and do other things like do you want to be ahead of growth for like a cpg company like your whole life cuz he had all like I said he
had all these opportunities and he had been there for a while already he's like no like we're doing well I'm gonna stay and like I'm sure he's going to do like really really well from this so Cav consumer Partners is in is in poppy which is Rohan OAS fund you might have seen him on Shark Tank um good good guy I ran into him in Beverly Hills the
other day uh anyway if you're building a uh consumer product a food product a beverage you're going to need to advertise it and where should you advertise it Jordy out of the home out of the home on adquick go to adquick dcom it's out of home advertising Made Easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only ad quii combines technology out of
home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe and so start a cpg company and throw it on a billboard step obvious obviously we partnered with adquick and uh right after we launched the video this morning uh with ramp uh we started going back and forth with uh Chris and Adam on the adquick team about uh our
video with them so there's lots in the works excited very excited for that one um iconic memes will be created recreated definitely to celebrate out of home advertising yeah uh and we wanted to celebrate some great out of home advertising uh Duren uh put put up a billboard that says you can't have rocket science without Rock science Duran's a new mining company very cool
uh and Jackson Moses here says ads the go hard I love it right outside the SpaceX headquarters uh so beautiful B we love we love some Billboards out here that's actually insane Alpha that you can get a billboard right in front of SpaceX and then just take the photo and SpaceX is right there it's really good anyway we gotta move we got to move on
we got 15 minutes till our first guest is joining uh have you seen Megan markle's new Netflix show Jordy I haven't but everybody's been saying the show is one of a kind it's the best ever nobody I don't know about the second part it's definitely one of a kind but I don't know people are saying it might be the show of the Year well I don't know
I'm not really equipped to judge this I don't want watch a lot of cooking shows but I watched like five minutes of it and it was atrocious oh it was really really rough really really rough but you know I me dring it is nothing compared to what the economist did it was one of the roughest articles I was laughing out loud and I so I want to read some of it
here because uh The Economist is one of those one of those journalism outfits that has just an incredible command over the English language and can body someone in the most Bas ponm or notonly basically anonymously yeah it's it's an anonymous writer and uh it's it's hilarious so so I'll read some of this um one scene is magical another is so pretty another delightful welcome to
with love with Megan Megan markle's new cookery and lifestyle show in which she smiles at things in montedo in episode one she smiles at raspberries on a cake in another episode she smiles at hydrangeas she also Smiles at bees whose hives she keeps on her property quote when I think of honey I think of bees she says in one of the many insights
with which the show brims just like wow when I think of honey I think of bees just like these are the type of insights you're getting from this show uh there have been doubts about whether Netflix was right we talked about Bees and Honey on the show before we did and John didn't believe that she's more of an expert than I am John didn't believe that bees ate their
own honey do turns out they do they do there have been doubts about whether Netflix was right to Fork out a reported 100 million in a deal with Miss Markle and her husband Prince Harry for this show and other content such doubts must now be dispelled however Miss margle is not just smiling she's on a mission as she explains she wishes to share some little
tips and tricks for entertaining friends and elevating one's life such as perhaps make sure to member little tips and tricks such as perhaps make sure to marry a member of the British royal family wow we've been saying this we've marry into royalty yes hot tip uh that that tends to help to no end or ensure you get Netflix to pay you
a vast sum to show off an immense property complete with a vegetable garden beehives and chickens to lay fresh eggs EGS that helps too uh this new 8 episode Netflix show released on March 4th is more or less Martha Stewart for the 0.01% but aimed at the other 99.99% in it she offers indp indispensable tips such as how to make candles with your own beeswax or how to
boil noodles with tomatoes apparently first you put the noodles in a pan then you put in water then you take off the lid then the water will evaporate then they are done at last everyone had been wondering destroyed destroyed like it's just this is such good right I love I love it so much um it it's just it's just so funny anyway uh it's it's a lot
of fun go read the cre a lot of fans over the last no decade Miss marle says that she is not in the pursuit of perfection but in the pursuit of Joy this is charming if not precisely the wording that some inside the palace use their descriptions of her tend to go a little heavier on words like abrasive bullying difficult and rude but then
perhaps those Palace workers did not step to did not stop to smell and smile at the hydrangeas that's so funny uh they just uh we're not far from yeah mono we'll come up we'll come up we will stay we show you how we drink uh Dom yeah proper etiquette if you're celebrating a podcast Milestone yes she had a podcast uh on Spotify big deal and I heard
through the grapevine that her one request was that there was quote unquote No Homework no way yeah she just wanted to show up and do it I mean this is unsubstantiated rumor but uh the rumor was that at at a certain point she wasn't David cenro will will love this we got to send this clip to him uh she wasn't even doing the interviews so imagine it's like we're going to have
someone on we're going to have uh like a like an assistant ask them the questions record their answers and then I will come in once a month and record all the questions so I come in and I say Barack Obama what was it like being president uh Tony Blair what was it like being prime minister and then I come say Co you know like you know whoever else like
is is on this week uh you know Martha Stewart uh what's your favorite recipe I come in I record those lines and then they cut it together with the answers where that person got interviewed by someone else insane it's like the lowest effort podcasting uh and that's why he's no longer a podcaster that's crazy David cenra rolling over just ripping his hair out
thinking about the the lowest effort podcasting you could possibly do brutal anyway uh the one my my main takeaway from the show is that monasa is beautiful we should spend more time there and there's no better way to do that than on wander that's right find your happy place find your happy place go to .c book a wander with inspiring views Hotel grade amenities dreamy beds
top tier cleaning and 247 coner service it's a vacation home but better Jordy do you have a code for folks at home I got a code for us it's wanderer.com tvpn you can use the code TBN to get a discount if you're booking a trip and just by creating an account you can uh get uh entered into a giveaway that they're just doing for tvpn listeners Co so
you're only competing with other brothers which is kind of win-win situation so either you win a free trip or another one of your brothers wins uh so there's zero downside fantastic uh enter now and uh you know take a take a crack at it I love it um let's uh let's do some timeline we have 10 minutes until our first guest um and I want to kick off with a post from
bezel uh we're going back toback with the advertisements today uh but this is a great post uh sold and authenticated by bezel allong and Son long one time zone reference 13629 two time zones day night indicators zero guesswork if you're Crossing continents this longa ensures you never call the wrong person at 3:00 a.m. beautiful watch flip it over and
things intensify its manually wound l411 movement is pure German engineering Flex visible through a sapphire caseback hand engrave balance 72 out our power Reserve you hesitated there slightly because that sounds vulgar but it's just no that's just terminology 72 hour power reserve and enough finishing to make any watch nerd emotional uh fancy elanga of your own good taste
better news we've got more hit the link in BIO to shop bezel full selection this is screaming Zuck to me I think you might have snapped this up you might have yeah they have a lot of private you know clients they can't you know share but uh this seems like up his Alle anyway go to Bez go to get bezel.set hallucination yeah get one of those
going couple packs yeah how much would it cost to just get a graph diamonds hallucination for depends on what the market you buy it and then you sell it at a higher price you made money that's smart yeah look at you possible course coming soon course coming soon uh K's code anyway Lulu uh mury posts just went to the DMV they've replaced the take a
number ticket dispenser with a person at a booth and you get a ticket you have to line and to get a ticket you have to line up and wi into your your turn ask the person to give you a ticket this is so funny mogging mogging computers and artific artificial intelligence you know I mean when when mid Journey came out and everyone was like oh this is going to destroy artists
I was like there's still courtroom illustrators who like draw pictures of like s SPF sitting there and like we have cameras they could just take a photo and yet like somehow that job like did not get destroyed by technology and so there are plenty of jobs that are super resistant I didn't I didn't understand third-party DMV services until I was probably 22 break those down
well pretty much there's only a handful of things that you need to actually go to the DMV for and then the vast majority of them you can pay a third party DMV $50 to do it with just over text and they just send it to you that's great um I bought a car recently and the title like you know got registered under my name but then the title uh never got
sent to me and uh I just texted my DMB person and they're like oh yeah just like send me a 100 bucks and it'll be there in like two weeks that's great and I don't have to touch it at all so huge Alpha my dad was a very uh practical uh is a very practical pragmatic guy he he goes and sits in the line but he's retired now yeah so I always think of
the DMV as a good example of uh Gilman Amnesia which we talked about in the last thing is like is very very ridiculous over the top like mental model but uh Gilman Amnesia I I like it because the whole thesis is like once you realize that one thing is incorrect like you're reading you're reading an article in in like you're listening to the show and you hear us talking about
your your point of expertise and you realize we don't know what we're talking about and then you assume that we don't know what we're talking about about anything and you're probably right um uh the DMV is a great insight into like how the government works in the sense that like everyone's like oh man the DMV is so bad and so inefficient uh but I'm
sure the NIH is fine or I'm sure the dod works great I'm sure the you know the other arms of the government are fantastic and it's like no actually like the DMV is par for the course like your experience with the DMV is the exact same experience you'll have doing business with the FDA doing business with the D doing D business with like
any any arm of the government it's kind of all the same um but it but the DMV is the one that you know the average citizen inter interfaces with the most yeah um and so yeah anyway uh big news Robinson helicopter company has released a new helicopter we've been waiting for this they haven't released a new helicopter for a very long time uh the
r88 reveal trailer is now available to watch on YouTube go check it out very cool video we pull it up we wanted flying cars we got new helicopters from Robinson Helicopter Company we wanted flying cars we already had helicopters I mean really skill issue why don't we just put wheels on the helicopters yes it seems pretty easy to do yeah with little electric motors in each wheel
yeah be fine probably get up to like 30 40 I I really really if can you play this let's see um yeah I mean I really feel like uh the whole flying car thing a lot of those a lot of those companies like we were talking about Kittyhawk the Google Founders had trouble they couldn't get through all the regulatory uh it'd be very interesting to see
someone try and take like a much more iterative iterative approach and just take a helicopter modify it and do just the minimum I mean this is what we saw with the seag glider thing where you got to find the regulatory hack anyway Aussie hex says nice machine I like it nice machine 53 views just showing up I mean the Robinson Helicopter Company
they have a check mark so they are verified on X but they still posted a link got 3,000 views fortunately we're featuring it here we'll try and get you some amplification and uh yeah send us more footage Robin we'll check it out we'll review it on the show yeah we got to give them a master class in the vi re yes exactly this should have been this
should have been native you should have posted it native could it could have had a banger could have had a banger could have gone viral I don't know I don't know how we're doing on this but let's see who we got [Music] um uh okay we got a bunch of stuff here uh let's move on to uh Jack Reigns Let's Do It Jack Reigns went on the adquick podcast we love adquick we love Jack go
uh very funny he was previously joking that only fans is the best way to get your message out but now he's advocating for LinkedIn he says with revenues higher than Pinterest Reddit and Snapchat combined LinkedIn is still ultimately number one for cringe number one number one for cringe uh we've been getting active on LinkedIn we are go follow us if you go
to tbn.com you can follow our LinkedIn account yeah and uh we're starting to share we're we're we're we're staying true to our X Roots by posting the LinkedIn content like two weeks later yep you know standing uh you know honoring X you know being where you know the everything app where where the most important conversations happen but
LinkedIn you know you can it's more like a greatest hits I don't want to like I don't want to Pat ourselves in the back too much but um we do that often and it's actually part of the brand so um but but but but I I do I do like the strategy of of just posting interview Clips on our L it feels like the least cringe thing to do like we tried to take
I tried to take one of my like like sound bites from the show and turn it into text and put on LinkedIn and be like serious and like it's just like didn't feel right to me for some reason um yeah I remember when we did our first launch video yeah uh the thing LinkedIn doesn't understand is is humor and satire so we did our first launch video and people's reaction when they would
talk to me about it is they were like super cool video dude like looked very serious yeah yeah yeah everyone on X got it everyone on X got it it was ironic anyway uh let's let's get away from the irony get away from the jokes we have to talk about this story this has been shaking up Tech Lamborghini just announced a $5,000 baby stroller uh this
is huge for the pronatalist crowd huge for the uh yeah this was a lot of people's final excuse they were like you know I want to have children I've been planning for this for a while but all the strollers are so cringe that baby are surprisingly heavy it's like carrying around once they you know get few months old it's like carrying around a 25 lb dumbbell you
know everywhere but you know it's it's not even as easy to carry as a dumbbell I mean I got to say like Lamborghini really did not bring their design Aesthetics to this at all it's super disappointing it just looks like a normal stroller to me the only thing is maybe it's it's it feels super like something I don't like about strollers is because they're made of a lot of
plastic they don't feel always this looks like there's some metal in there I see some shine on there um if they have carbon fiber accents it needs carbon fiber I would even I would even like imagine if they had the the re rear view mirrors on it that could be cool too yeah yeah yeah yeah but I'm thinking like sharp angles I'm thinking like you
know Reventon like the one where they take the Aventador and they make it even crazier like even more aggressive yeah so I'm going to give this a four out of 10 four out of 10 okay well it is 12:45 we should have our first call in Ben make sure sure we have pulled up the uh the zoom and see if we can have our guest join us um how we doing hey can you guys hear
me I can hear you awesome you do video on too but fantastic yeah we can see you no this great too yeah we can see you cool so uh kenin Davidson is here uh from icon uh big announcement today can you break it down for us what are you announcing and give us a little back story on your product uh what you're building how it's going just yeah from
the top sounds good um yeah so we we just announced a second round from Founders fund um I'm the founder of Icon and basically what we're doing is we're helping Brands make uh much much better ads with uh this thing we're calling the the AI ad maker and high level what we do is we we take someone's like big Content Library and then we turn it into
hundreds of ads cool uh uh do you have any good like case studies or examples from companies that Ridge wasn't Ridge Sean Frank was on the show less than two weeks ago uh and I think he was one of your guys' super early Partners yeah yeah we we built a lot of um icon with with Shan and then Ron and oby and a lot of other folks in the community um basically what we're doing is we're
tackling like nine different problems at once so we help with script writing um in that script writing we're we're helping you like Target a specific audience sure um and then once you have that script where we're taking your library and then matching it with that script scpt so you don't have to do that by hand um on top of that we also do
analytics we help you like keep an eye on competitors like um we help you even like launch ads on on many different channels there's there's all these pieces to the ad making puzzle that we're we're taking on and it's very manual today so we're we're solving that do you like competitive markets previously you started skio subscription management within Ecom is deeply
competitive uh I'm actually a co-founder of this company rora and uh rora was running on some other subscription management platform but I actually messaged the CEO just before this Brian Keller and he said we're switching over SK is just a far superior platform than the others let go so great great review for SK but my my big question is is you
clearly love competition because to go into subscription management Dominate and then and then come in and do icon which is a very obvious idea and many people are you know trying to tackle it but it's very difficult to do well uh is competition something that you're sort of seeking out in some way because you just know you can do it better yeah definitely I as you said skio was a
really competitive space there's there's at least 10 subscription ups and yeah we we tackled it with one like a really like engineering first culture um but to also just like a really like playful personality I think we we really like try to be real um with our customer um rather than corporate and I think that resonates really well with the community
and um we're we're bringing a similar approach too to tyom we we're working seven days a week we're really like pouring our heart into this and I think it resonates really well with um with the type of customer we're going for can uh can you break down uh in terms of where AI lives within the the ad stack there's so many places from generate a
script generate an AI voice over generate a deep fake of a ugc customer or even the CEO or something like that to AI assembly and picking which Clips go where a lot of these could be done uh programmatically or deterministically a lot of them could be done with AI approaches what do you see working well where's the highest leverage point to
inject AI yeah so I think a really common mistake is is thinking AI is just going to generate the ad and then you're not going to have to do anything at all really the way I see us is um basically cursor for ads where we're trying to like take the editor the creative strategist anyone involved in the ad making process and just make them a lot
faster like remove the work they don't want to do right so um with the script writing previously right um I'm sure everyone knows this but um you can you can get some writers block when you're trying to like pump out 100 ads a week right so um one of the things we're doing is we're looking at your previously ran ads we're we're looking at trending like Concepts on the
internet and then we're like doing all of that behind the scenes and helping you steer that like you're able to write in first or third person you're able to like say don't talk don't make a medical claim or something like really it's up to the user and as as a result you're just a lot quicker is there some sort of concept of like temperature I remember
in like the early gpts like you can kind of turn up the temperature get a little bit crazier because I feel like I could I could immediately imagine any of the llms kind of just like rep paraphrasing the same value prop again and again again but maybe some of the value is actually hey let's let's think of new ideas that then we can test and and and
that's where like the real Alpha is going to come hey we never thought to make this type of claim it's not a medical claim we didn't cross any lines but we never really knew that that was what the customer wanted do you have some sort of way to dial that in yeah yeah so it you're able to use our thing called ad gbt um very similar to chat gbt but but for ads and um the key thing
with it is you can really like just steer it in the direction you want to go um there are people who want like 100 permutations of their winning ad that's a really common use case we also have people who want to like just like do 100 different concepts at once right so it's really like pick your own adventure sort of thing and we we just help you do that
a lot quicker got it uh I have a question so for the Last 5 Years The Meta on The Meta ads platform has just been meta is really good at like finding you the right customers so you should focus on Creative that's part of the opportunity that you have with icon is there a world you do you imagine a future where meta tries to almost like
move up the stack and and get into the area that you're in obviously you're no you're you're not afraid of of competition uh but you know how do how do you think about sort of meta getting into this game uh yeah yeah there's definitely some stuff that's more uh in the pocket but what I can say here is that we're we're going to be like platform agnostic right so um you you
can run ads on meta you can run run ads on Tik Tok like like imagine 10 different platforms right like I don't think meta is going to like want you to like run a Tik Tok at or or different platforms at of course we can't roll that out right but there are like five of those like misalignments I'd say um for meta to to be doing something like
this and the other four I have to keep in the pocket but I'm pretty excited to to partner with them and yeah just see where this goes awesome well you have to come back on when you can share on that I yeah yeah I I mean any anytime I have an AI founder on I have just a bunch of questions like uh you know what's hot what's trending like mCP does that mean
anything is that legit and real um what other like uh what other kind of like foundational developments are you watching for the the give me a deep seek take give me a scaling take give me whatever you got yeah I wanted to bring this up in a few of other trends of thoughts earlier um one of the things that we're really like approaching this
with is like we want to like pick the best like like uh model for the the problem right so one of the things we do is like ugc like ugc lip syncing right sure I'll be really candid it's not quite there yet um in terms of replacing like normal ugc that's why we're taking existing content and repurposing it right but we've definitely got our eyes on it I'd say hey Jen um Tavis there's
like 10 players in this space and we're just going to like partner with the best one and we we use a combination of them today already so um that that's kind of the way to like think about icon we're we're taking like the best voice vendor we're taking the best um like video like ugc vendor um the best like writing right like we're we're using a lot of
like claw underneath but like with like a lot of code on top right so yeah it's really pick yeah how do you think about you know cost uh reduction at uh at kind of the infr Slayer you yeah you said you've gone from Z to 5 million in AR in 30 days you're extremely profitable uh sounds like you know costs aren't a big issue at the moment you know you guys
are running pretty efficiently but uh presumably it will only get better so it sounds like you're in a good spot yeah yeah I think another thing um that's that's really fun about this is there's a lot of people in the space that are are uh basically like operating on like 90% margin and they're they're really charging a lot for what they're doing
and part of the reason we're we're being so disruptive here is we're charging like 10% of what they're charging right and I want to like pass the savings to um the customers as the the costs get better underneath right I think companies either going to have to like adapt with their pricing or they're going to die that makes sense uh what What's the
actual you're you're going for the record uh to beat every company ever on the one to 100 million AR record which is less than 12 months do you know the actual day are you just are you just going to do it in 12 months 12 I'd like to hit it in in nine months um like not leave it too close but I we'll have to see is there a scenario where at the last on the last day you have to bump
prices like 30% just to hit the mark or you or you think there's enough customers out there at the the current pricing that that you can get in front of because I feel like e-commerce is very uh the top e-commerce Founders and CMOS are all talking to each other there's almost like you know uh Sean Frank and and Conor McDonnell have their podcast I think I think like you know
probably uh an important acquisition channel for you guys but um yeah you seem pretty confident uh we we love to you know do a check-in call in maybe six months uh you know and see where we're at throw the gauntlet down I want to see let's do it yeah part of the reason I'm doing this is it really like pressures me in the the team in a good
way I think like I I don't want to like let everyone down so keeps me working pretty hard um but yeah if you think about it right like we we've got a business plan that's a th000 a month it's only 8,300 customers we need to get to 100 million right and like that keeping the numbers a bit more private but we're more than a thousand already so I yeah we see six to nine months from
now yeah 8,300 customers these are businesses I mean meta has what like a million businesses probably advertising at a significant level yeah it's it's not insane insane penetration to get there so good luck I I love that amazing well we'll let you get to your next meeting I know you got to jump uh but thanks so much for calling in please let
me know when you have uh news or announcements next and we'll bring you back on yeah congrats on the progress in the new round talk to you soon bye cheers by bye cool should we move on with more timeline Jordy let's do it let's run through a couple well elad Gil has reported the Dropbox has converted from Delaware to a Nevada corporation uh
lots of people talking about the risks of being in Delaware uh interestingly I I don't know exactly what triggered this we should get the Drew hon the Dropbox founder on to talk about like how he's thinking about his business because Dropbox was one of those companies came out of YC I believe yeah yeah YC company got to unicorn almost decorn status was
super legit goes public really big but then just kind of stays they hired 300,000 people right no that's docy side that's a different company they they they the the name uh yeah wait did you conf it no no no no do Dropbox no no no no it's Dropbox uh I mean Dropbox has a fascinating engineering culture they hired Guido van rossom for a while do you know who Guido van rossom
is creator of the Python programing language be clear Dropbox still has I think more employees than x really uh yeah I mean they were they were one of the hottest startups then have been kind of a a what do they call it like a store value type company or you know if you bought you bought $1,000 a Dropbox 5 years ago it's still $ thousand today or
something the stocks been kind of flat but yeah uh but I mean it's a it's it's it's a fascinating founder story of you know building a multi-billion dollar company and not many people can say that they've done it so I wrong I was wrong X has 2,800 employees drop Dropbox has 2200 okay uh they've been uh getting 22 2200 and what do sign have because
Dropbox acquired hello sign which is a docu sign competitor has 6,000 let's go hit the size gong for that head Count's still cool a lot of people says hey you shouldn't you shouldn't celebrate head count you know it's not a real metric I'm a job Creator I'm a job Creator job creation Doc is going to get the craziest uh corrupt bargain from Trump be like well you're
employing half of America like what do you want docu sign's going to decide whether or not there's tariffs or taxes they're just going to write the policy and it's going to get ironed in because they're creating so many jobs every every politici there should be a Founder that comes out and and says my entire mission is to create jobs I if if we have
0.001% uh you know profit margins that and we can add you know I will just keep you know dividing that 0.01% as many times as possible to just get each incremental employee um Dropbox fantastic story you you know the story of their viral growth too they were very very early at at being very intentional about distribution baked into the product so
uh when you would sign up for Dropbox they would give you like you know one gig of space to store files in the cloud but then if I referred you you would get an extra gig of space and I would get an extra gig of space and so it went super viral on college campuses and and they really did a good job of that like that like you know viral uh viral marketing
model that so many companies tried to copy in like after Dropbox was successful but uh it it gets harder and harder over time but it makes a ton of sense it's the same Gmail model that worked um anyway uh speaking of legendary uh Silicon Valley startups changing uh things around uh Asana CEO Dustin moskovitz is retiring what did the stock do and I
mean young guy down down 24% really oh but I mean but it was like a crazy day in the market still no no no but that's it was very clearly because of him because of him it's tough but I mean what an interesting as a CEO you want your stop to stock to drop tremendously when you announce your retirement because that is your market value I
wonder I I wonder how much of his net worth was in a versus Facebook because he was a Facebook co-founder and so you're looking at a trillion dollar company even if you got 1% you know you're in the multi-billions I'm sure there's delution and sales and stuff but still it's like there's so many there's so many things where you know it's it's a it's a big big shoes to
fill yeah when you're on your second company and your first one's Facebook but uh I don't know I used this SAA for a while nice product and uh you know Dustin come on the show now that you're on retired let's talk about what you want to do with all that money now that you're retired we'll get you we'll get you a nice watch on bezel we'll get you
an a sleep we'll get you a nice wander vacation every once a while in the chat uh there was some Rolex leaks around their new 2025 model allegedly introducing a land dweller Trey says it's perfect watch for VCS really why yeah well obviously they just mostly dwell on land um if you're enough of a size Lord you start to be more of a sky dweller that's great but uh takes a
little bit okay um do we have our next call in for the this stream I know we are going uh we're supposed to be going live at 100 p.m. I I I don't like doxing the the guests too frequently hey there we go hey hey good to see you guys welcome to the show yeah welcome to the show uh it's great to have you Chrisman uh I I don't know why I messaged you
yesterday or it was maybe the day before but I was just like you you got to come on uh John and I are dad's You're Building Products that uh our children will imately use I don't know if they're quite old enough yet but um I've got a bunch of buddies that that are on synthesis uh for their kids and have said great things so I wanted to have
you on let's start with just a high level intro who you are what your company does uh set us up for the viewers and then we'll just ask a bunch of questions yeah yeah I think by the way it was like 9 or 10 pm uh La last night that you messaged me so yeah definitely thanks for the advance notice um but yeah H happy to come on um I was maybe you know in in a similar uh position
uh to you guys like five years ago my oldest son was two I went down to visit the uh school at SpaceX that Elon had created uh for his own kids um he hired a teacher out of the fancy private school in LA and started his own school at SpaceX and the guy he hired Josh Dawn is uh you know became a friend of mine and um we ended up starting a company
together to kind of scale up the best uh parts of that school uh so we started during covid uh the initial product was um this this thing that really captured my imagination I went to the school which you know I was at a company education company called Class Dojo uh which went from you know zero to a billion dollars I was the first employee there and um you know the the
what they did at the SpaceX School looked a lot like what we were doing to build that company uh the kids were just working together to solve problems in the form of games and so we took that approach uh put that on the internet we signed up kids from all around the world you know it kind of took off uh so that was was our initial product and uh now
you know I we're we have built an AI math tutor that uh I think is uh is taken off pretty well and I think it's going to be a major part of of every kid's education in the future um yeah companies Sy and yeah that's where we are yeah so right now you have the subscription what what does synthesis look like longterm starting digital makes a lot of sense but over time is
their you know desire to kind of almost verticalized and and go into the real world or what does that look like I I don't know about going into the real world I think it's there've been some you know Silicon Valley startups that have been really well funded that tried to do the software piece and the real world piece at the same time I
think it's really hard to pull off both like if you're going into the real world for schools you're doing like a real estate play essentially um and and you know I think when it comes to learning you know math science engineering the fundamentals these are this is information and so information can be transmitted uh through computers um in
in a lot of ways you know better than than a human can do it and so I think if we want to reach a billion kids then you know it makes sense to go vertical but within you know software like things that can be delivered purely software Never Say Never because it is attractive to uh you know the idea of like opening up physical Anders schools if we did
something like that we'd probably do something like an academy uh like the iire the European soccer clubs what they do is they'll have an academy attached to all their professional teams and they'll bring kids in at like age six or eight there's a guy who's a star now for barcel Luna that they brought in at eight years old and now he's like 18 and
he's just he's amazing I think if you really want like incredible performance then you should do that kind of like focus on the elite so we might do one of those in like every city the kids with the most um potential yeah we talked about a teal Fellowship for middle schoolers you know just like you just go further further Downstream get the middle like you you could basically be
that guy getting the middle schooler to like drop out of their like regular you know or Elementary School and be like come to the synthesis uh institution Academy and that's exactly uh what if we if we do go in person that's what we're going to do I think it's it's uh that that'll just make a lot of people uh upset but I think it's actually the
right thing to do like I think you can identify kids who have potential like engineering Talent pretty early and if you develop that this is it's like this is what they do for sports and so like if if we're looking at people can actually Advance civilization you know we should have something that's at least as serious as what we do for sports yeah um what is what is 10 years from now
what is sort of K through 12 going to look like my my sort of personal experience with School uh was interesting I I started at Waldorf School that was like my earliest memories of school I think I benefited a lot from it uh but they didn't really teach me to read until I was in the third grade and I was like conscious enough to tell complain to my parents
and be like Mom and Dad like I want to learn to read like the other kids like you know so I ended up going to a regular elementary school and then by High School my my father was actually a math teacher at my high school um and I hated high school so much that I like graduated early so like my my and then and then by college I was just like
focused on Startup stuff so my I didn't feel like I had a great experience um with my education uh how much better can it be and and sort of what's your broader Vision obviously since is can be a big part of uh a child uh and a kid's education but you know what does the full stack look like in the future yeah yeah that's funny I I also
had a bad experience with my education and it's uh you know it's I got like scoped into uh you know devoting the rest of my life to changing the whole system because I hated it uh so much uh so so so maybe similar to you in that regard I I think the big problem is you you start with this original Elite Education is is with one-on-one tutors and I I don't
know but I don't think it was like eight hours a day plus homework with with one-on-one tutors I think you can learn a lot more efficiently than that uh then you had like the one room School houses which again like kids are like working on the farm and then they come to the schoolhouse you know a couple hours a day maybe a couple times a week and
that's it and then all the parents go to work and the the school day expands and instead of just sticking to that like well we'll teach a little bit and then we'll kind of have fun for the rest of the day they just expanded the teaching to make it it somehow Encompass all the hours from like 8: to 3: 8:00 a.m. to 3 p.m. and homework and I think what we're
going to see I think AI tutors are going to drive this um I think you could actually learn 20 to 30X faster I don't think there's going to be need a need for any homework I think kids are just going to use AI tutors to learn the fundamentals and hopefully you know a lot beyond that what their interests are my hope is the rest of the day is spent in ways that we can't imagine like
there's just like in your life there's an infinite number of things you can do and ways you can spend your time and and the same is true of kids so we should spend a little bit of time teaching them the fundamentals so that they can have good ideas and find what they're interested in and then I don't know what they should be doing my my kids go to
like a charter school two days a week where they they build Bridges they do school plays they do all these kind of things that you're not going to do with it's not just software and like it's not just reading and so I'd love to see a lot more of that our goal is like be the partner with every in-person school that does that and you know hopefully there's
a lot of just local creativity um in exploration right because kids have a tough job you know they have to figure out what they want to do in life and that that's it's a hard problem in the modern world you it's hard to say like I just I want to be a doctor or I want to be you know something specific like that because careers get more and more
creative and so uh I think it's important for kids to have that time to explore can you take me on a little tour of of where the government's doing things that are great for education of the Next Generation where things could be improved um how Charter Schools fit into that how Public Funding fits into that just kind of like what's your world model for um
you know public private partnership in educating the Next Generation there's some really exciting stuff going on now which um I don't know if you guys had Ryan Del from primary on but he's done some work in like kind of lobbying uh governments in Florida for increased school choice which just like so I think a lot of people don't know um in California for example it costs like
$20,000 a year uh to put a kid through through the public school system which is just like an extreme amount of money and uh that's a little bit higher than the national average but not by much and so what a lot of states are trying to do is say you can take that money with you and go choose a different school and so that creates like the government whether
usually like a local government collecting taxes paying for the education but then there's this Fierce competition right like somebody can open up a school right next door bad schools can fail Bad Teachers bad principles can go out of business and there's going to be a lot more uh creativity in in that regard um I I think that's maybe one of
the most exciting things that government can do because I think you know then then you would be as well served by education as people are served by like grocery stores and they'll just be you know kind of wild like Cutthroat competition and people trying to do interesting things to to attract students and and get results uh so I think that's that's one place where the
government can do something really great just by letting the you know bringing this like kind of consumer mentality into what's typically been a Government monopoly so schools could get you know you'd be as well served as grocery stores as opposed to what it is now which is like the DMV right sure yeah makes sense uh does all uh K through 12
education over time start to look more and more uh like a video game because like one one concern I have right now is that uh kids when they're out of school they're doing Roblox they're watching Tik toks and then you put them in a classroom or you give them homework that's sort of built around that sort of uh old style philosophy around learning
which is like you know writing things down and and you know here's this you know textbook and and we're going to read a chapter out of it or things like that to me it seems like kind of an impossible uphill battle to try to get a kid to pay attention to that when outside of class or even on their phone in the classroom they have this sort of consistent really intense stimulation so
in order to compete does education need to start looking more like what's on their phone in their sort of leisure time or how do you think about that I think those are I I know this like on people's minds I think they're less related uh than people think I think you know Tik Tok and these things are addicting um but also school is just terrible like it was terrible when we
were kids and we didn't have Tik Tok uh right so I I think I think regardless of what's going on in the rest of the world um you want to make the tools for learning as effective and as engaging as possible it's a really tight balance that you have to strike When You're Building Products like for us there's you know there's things like du lingo which
famously you know it's may be really good at getting their early retention and engagement but but you know hardly anybody knows someone who's learned a language from du lingo so they kind of focus all the way on the engagement and gamification and and not so much on the effectiveness and then you know you you can go the other way where it's like
well theoretically if if kids would spend a lot of time on this they would learn but they won't do it and I think the right products is going to be you know just just a balance uh of those kind of things and I think if you get it right you know something a lot of people missed is kids they want to learn when you really learn something you you rock
a new idea it makes you more powerful and you can feel that and I think it's especially true in math but I think it's true in all subjects if you want them to learn something it's because you're trying to make them more powerful I think what a lot of teachers do is say well this will become you know useful to get to the next level of school and
that's not terribly motivating what we try to do is just show you these ideas make you a more powerful thinker in the moment and I think kids are pretty motivated uh they're pretty motivated by that um so yeah yeah that makes sense uh last question I really have today and would love to have you back on in the future uh just as you know this sort of
uh industry uh develops but uh we had talked before when the Humane AI pin came out I think everybody that was intelligent in the tech industry generally looked at it and said this is not going to replace my phone because it does a lot of the same things it doesn't necessarily do them better but our reaction at the time was that this is not going to replace my phone but maybe
this is a solution that my kid would use where like I want like location tracking and I want you know them to be able to easily call me but I don't want them to be on a screen have you thought and so as like all these AI pins sort of involved there was the rabbit there was Humane there was some others my immediate thought was maybe they're
focused on the wrong user type maybe there's a market for this with kids who if you gave them something that they could ask any question in the world to and was sort of like this sort of companion maybe that could be cool uh have you guys thought at all about sort of Hardware experiences I know you're very focused on delivering these sort of
digital experiences but is that you know ever been even a conversation we we haven't talked about it at all I mean like my my kids have like the um it's not Apple watch but it's like a knockoff like watch brand that like tracks it yeah they can talk to you and that kind of stuff and I I assume you know they'll be able to connect to the internet and use the use
AI for for questions and that kind of thing I think um I I I think that for learning screens are like extraordinarily powerful like you can simulate almost anything on a screen and uh that's like underrated you know I think people like don't realize how amazing that is there's a lot of Lites and who are like you know there's just something about learning on paper like
reading a book on paper and like I just don't agree with any of that at all I just think it's like information um the information kind of flows you know you can kind of do anything on a screen so yeah you know we we haven't uh we haven't talked about doing uh doing anything in in Hardware yet one one kind of crazy idea I have is because a lot of
a lot of people do homeschooling now a lot of uh you know uh have become uh you know close with some people who are you know fairly prominent who who do homeschooling and uh I like the idea for my kids as well having like a booth with like a screen and speakers and just something to like isolate the outside world where you've got the computer in
it and you're going to go in there you're GNA go in this booth which seems kind of dystopian it's gonna be for like an hour and a half a day right like turn everything else yeah yeah yeah it should have like a time lock on it of course um yeah you have to complete the lesson to get get out well well last last question for me let me flip that around um I I I
know a lot of parents are obviously you know they want their kids to be accelerated in in stem and math but uh there is the other side of like socialization and there's a big question like you know Tyler cow's written about this how maybe in the future intelligence is too cheap to meet or the real values and connections being we like to joke that we're we're we're
trying to be golden retrievers be very friendly uh attractive and dumb because intelligence is going to be too cheap to met her the AI can do the rocket science for me but you know if I'm a friend that you want to hang out with and you want to you know chop it up with we're going to have a great time so I me but I mean seriously as a as a parent like I think
a lot of parents do even worry even more about their kids like like hey it's okay if you're falling behind in math just a little bit as long as you're getting socialized and and becoming like an upstanding member of society and so do you see AI Tutors or AI calibration being able to communicate with a child and understand hey they're being a
little antisocial or something like that in a way that a teacher could or maybe just an augmented or an additional layer there to to see hey this this kid is you know actually engaging at a very you know mature level which is great these are good signs we want to continue this pattern of behavior yeah I mean that that's a great question I think parents are correct to
uh worry more about social skills especially from a young age how how old are you guys kids or they they're like uh 24 and then I have I have twin boys who are six months yeah oh okay three and eight months yep okay cool so yeah you're in that age now where like the social skills matter I think up up to like age seven uh it's like close relationships with the the family and
just try to spend as much time with them as you can makes sense and be around and like reading faces I actually think it's a mistake we we don't like actively recruit customers below age seven uh because if you think about how much processing it takes to um you know learn how to operate in the social world and read faces I think you just want to
leave kids brains like open into basically spending all their resources doing that because if you get it it's like speaking a language you get that by like age you know four to seven uh then then in some ways you know you're set for life because you're you're going to be able to like fit in with groups and I think that's that's extraordinarily important uh we kind of and when it
comes to education I I think it's I I I don't see that the AI are going to be able to do our thinking for us I mean that's like a totally different world it doesn't look to me like we're on the path uh to getting that I think LMS are really cool I think you're going to want your kids to be smart and knowledgeable and and able to think as an individual
and also have those social skills to work with other people and solve problems together which is which is human Humanity's way of super intelligence right is like being able to work together in groups so this is actually mirrors the structure of the company now the AI tutor is like the Leading Edge of the product but then we have synthesis teams where we put kids
and teams uh small groups to work together in solving problems they're like video games but they're not shooters or race games they're like complex problems where you have to argue and decide what action you want to take under conditions of uncertainty figure out what you got wrong and make the course Corrections and it's like meta
problem solving skills so it's I think if you you want like these uh outgoing uh like uh you know sociable Engineers people who can do both sides of their brain I think we can do that right I think of course people lean one way or the other but I think we can get people up to like a really good standard on both of those and then that's just going
to make us able to solve more problems and Advance the civilization so that's how i' look at it if I was a parent anyway work social SK first that's a fantastic uh vision for the future I'm very optimistic I have one last last question uh Miss Rachel on YouTube very popular little controversial uh do you have any under the radar creators on YouTube that just
make uh I my wife is very good about having like extremely limited just like TV screen time we don't do iPads in public or at home uh planes are are maybe the one condition so if I'm taking uh my kids on a plane is there is there a YouTube creator that you recommend or you just like now put them on put them on uh give them their AI tutor and uh
that's that no I mean at your kids's age I think uh the Daniel the Tiger like PBS series is is really good you guys know that one um Alpha I I don't know this is Alpha yeah this is the real Al that one's great that it like teaches them little it's like I think it's like the uh successor to Rogers thing is like made made by like the same people so
they got like little lessons and it's animated it's okay for them to watch your kids watch bluee oh yeah have you ever seen blue BL is great so that's what we would do when they were on planes and little kids like that I would I haven't se I've got four of my own and just having seen the um I I think YouTube YouTube is quite bad and it
seems to push them into the YouTube shorts which are just terrible even my like 5-year-old recognizes like this is bad I shouldn't be watching this what's up yeah short form is like slop and you know you should avoid it at all cost no matter what age you are basically except ours except ours you should definitely watch clips of this because we will be
clipping this interview and posting it out and you should definitely watch these shorts because they're educational but short clips on on on X are are great yeah different different yeah um but I'm sure if you swipe up on this on X you're gonna get some really stuff anyway this was an awesome interview thank you so much we'll have to have you this is fantastic very
helpful thanks thanks for having me appreciate have a great rest of your day we'll talk to you soon talk soon all right cheers guys that's hilarious um uh the uh the how much screen time thing is a great question I don't know if you saw Peter teal got in asked this at like Sun Valley and really yeah because they were say oh you're the found you're the board
member of uh you know Facebook like how much Facebook do you think kids should use or basically screen time and he was like 90 minutes a week and so I was just like yeah that seems like a good number to Benchmark against but then I was I was trying to think like how can I make this got to get your 90s son get your 90 in Mr Mr teal yeah said said
get get your 90 yeah you got to get those numbers up uh but no but then I wanted to make it like you know can I can I make it even easier to keep that number lower because you want to basically keep the number as low as possible uh and I realized you just have to create a really brutal economy in your house so we have a whole economy going now where you get stars for
brushing your teeth doing all these different things and all of a sudden it turned something the sticker economy is big and so all of a sudden it turned from like oh yeah like it's a Friday I can watch this to like I am grinding for like weeks for like a movie night which was like it was just free before but he doesn't mind it that all of a sudden
I've just created this you know Kafkaesque economy around it that he has to work like weeks to get like a single episode a single like eight8 minute episode blue but but it's worked fantastically the new econ he feels the reward it's fantastic I highly recommend it create a really a really Arcane economy in your household for whatever your kids want to do it's
great anyway uh speaking of Arcane Kafkaesque economies let's move over to venture capital uh will manius posts Paul Ferry founder of M Matrix Partners there's a little interview in this book uh question do we have 20 minutes what do we have and he says no I'm done I have to quit but again if you want to call me next week or continue on we can
do it by phone let me just finish the point so why is this the best business one you can make a lot of money if you're in it for a long time it's not a business that you can get rich next year or the following year or five years it's changed a little bit with some of these mango solo GP funds it may be 10 years it may be 15 years but if you continue
to be successful at it it's amazingly rewarding but more importantly you're dealing with interesting people all the time they're innovators that are people that are changing lifestyles in the world you're dealing for the most part with people who have no net worth and you're helpful to them in building net worth for themselves and net worth for
their employees and you can be in the venture your business and be relevant for a very long period of time if you're good at it more so than if you start a tech company the people who started strata super computer or Apollo computer were relevant and important people in the 80s but nobody knows who they are today whereas people that were in the Venture business to be relevant for 40
30 35 years later you're at the Leading Edge of product development or technology or capability there's no other business like that you're not collecting the receivables for the hundredth time you're not laying off employees you're dealing with interesting personel so it's the best business sorry we had to cut it short but something came up and I have to
attend this I love it great uh fantastic quote the only the only the only push back here that some GPS would give you is the uh downside of having you know uh 20 to 100 LPS who are your customers in many ways and can call you at any hour of the day 365 days a year uh to uh you know well that's the most interesting thing is that like there's this bifurcation
right now where a lot of funds are trying to do less LPS higher GP commits yeah and then simultaneously there's the opposite which is like let's go public let's have any retailer retail investor be able to yell at us when the stock goes down because we had a Miss yeah uh but you know yeah I've got a I've got a buddy who raises first fund it's $20
million fund 100K is like the average check size so that means there's people that are way less than that there people that are way more than that but you do the math it's a lot of people I wonder how I I mean if if if General Catalyst and Andre and Horwitz get out in the public markets I wonder what the smallest fund to go public would be in
like five years you think someone would take like a hundred million doll fund public are there are there any just raise just raise a fund spack it sell your entire GP stake deploy it all yeah I mean I don't know stranger things have happened who knows uh silly anyway there's not let's move on to near cyan Big Friend of the show uh they're hiring for a social
media influencer marketing lead this seems like a dream job seems really fun uh we released V1 of RN last week and the response has been amazing if you'd like to lead our marketing team for the uh for an app that has already been redefining the relationship between humanity and AI please apply DM near is super smart I got early access to the
app I've used it and uh it's very cool it's built on uh built on Claude uh but but uh near is super opinionated and uh the the little a little lore here we talked about this before but for anybody that doesn't know near developed some notoriety for creating an Nvidia only fund that's right I think two years ago at this point turned out uh you just can't sell it yeah for 10 years whole
point is that it's a 10e lockup that's really fun and cool thing far so far so good and uh yeah I mean we we've featured New Year's posts many times a lot of bangers yeah and this is just an underrated role in Tech because there's the historical social media manager role that was like you have your little SAS tools and you know your scheduling posts
out weeks in advance and that's just not the way that social media we talked about this with the PF die guys yeah it's it's like it's like can you make a crazy Vibe re can you post a banger can you be truly in the conversation get a bunch of fans be doing Frontline customer support almost getting you know uh executive communication from the
founders get the founders posting more you know it's just it's just 360 now anyway I wanted to move on to a little historical size gong uh because I want to have uh Connor zwick on the show from uh from speak do we have our guest in here okay we'll we we'll do this one after let's bring in Michael he's here I I I got so excited with the seis gong I
was going to I was going to hit it but I can't hit the size gong for Michael welcome to the show Welcome Michael uh we don't have you up on hit it a little harder hit the gong little harder a little harder all right there we go that works can you guys hear me right every time broke it that was that's what I was going for I was hoping we would break it welcome to the show uh
what's going on uh you made it to Boston he uh Michael messaged me like maybe two hours ago and says I might uh be in the air but you made it and you're at uh where are you right now so this is Theo Studio cool very cool um this is where I guess they have like artists roll through and stuff when they're in town nice yeah is Boston a major is Boston a
major music Market or is it more so they're bringing in musicians that are helping improve the models that they're making and the app in general I I think it is market right it is a it is a major Market but no it's not like in LA or in New York but this is where sun was founded right uh the founders came out of MIT Harvard there's obviously as you guys know there's a lot of machine
learning research going on in Boston and Cambridge so that's where the company got started but you know I think what they had a really smart idea which was when our artists start going through Boston which you know most major artists do that can use this studio it's a place to Qui can you introduce yourself stre yeah yeah yeah and give us back your man
the man who needs no introduction but you may as well do it but you're not at that level yet of course of course no I mean I I appreciate you guys bringing me out sorry I introducing myself yes yes yes introduce yourself tell us what you do now and then I I have a bunch of questions about your career we we'll dive into all right let's do it uh
what's up everyone uh my name is Michael mcnano I'm a partner at light speed uh I was the co-founder of anchor podcasting platform now Spotify I also recently co-founded a company called OBO which is an AI education platform awesome yeah big big fan of the Pod happy to be uh one of the early guests thanks for I'm a huge fan of anchor I we we I used it for
some podcast test I did like must have been right when it came out and I just remember thinking like man this is this takes so much of the headache out of podcasting you just you could upload it on your phone I I don't think was the original Vision uh you wanted people to be producing and and producing podcasts on their phone and uploading because
that was a button you could just kind of hit record and then boom it goes out to the RSS feed but it seemed like it almost became like a prosumer tool pretty quickly because the podcasting Market it's pretty bifurcated between like people start taking it seriously once they get any sort of traction right yeah no the the original vision for
anchor actually was not to be a podcast platform it was it was very very idealistic we wanted to be a social media platform like audio social media yep like think Clubhouse but a couple years earlier sure and what we what we learned is that social audio is really really freaking hard yeah um you know we we we took a crack at a certain format
uh take on it that we had which did like fairly well I mean there was like you know there were spikes of growth here and there but overall wasn't working after a year we like completely pivoted to another iteration of social audio gave that a year didn't work and then what we were hearing from all of our users is hey we just want to use these tools to publish podcasts to Apple and
Spotify yeah and when we did that it was just like instant pmf from that moment so yeah take us through the story of the of the company how big did you get you raised money I'm sure eventually exit I want to hear that yeah yeah and for for a little little bit of lore uh when I was this was 2018 I just maybe I was still in college I hit up Michael and he did a call with
me uh didn't need to had no real re I mean it was much more beneficial for me I was doing I was and you know doing a bunch of podcast advertising stuff at the time but uh thank you thank you to Michael you always remember the people that like give you you know 30 minutes of their day uh however long it takes but uh but yeah I would love to hear the
the the story again yeah I so so so my co-founder and I uh near zerman we we built product at this company called Aviary and this was around the time that um like Instagram was taking off and people were realizing that you could take and edit photos on your phone and actually look good obviously you know now that's that's just a given like the
camera is the phone and you know we sold that that business to Adobe and while we were there we got really into podcasts yeah and we we were sort of like sitting around asking ourselves like how come nobody has done for photos uh how come nobody's done for podcast what has just been done for photos and so that was like the original idea like and of
course at this time it was like 2016 everything was a social network back then like Snap was exploding and we're like oh of course this should be a social network right we should have a feed we should have a button right at the bottom of the app in the middle and and and so that was the original Vision we raised a couple million bucks for
folks like uh beta works and SV Angel and eniac and all these all these guys and um and yeah like I said we you know we we we had to go through a couple of different pivots we raised I think to answer your question John we ended up raising just under 15 million total sure uh we were about 25 people when we exited we sold to Spotify in 2019 actually two Acquisitions on the same
day anchor and gimlet I remember that yeah I remember that which is like the cardinal sin of of launches is like if you have two very interesting launches you should just do them like space them out like you know get the full benefit of each but uh I think I I I mean you can probably speak to it more than I can but it seemed like Spotify really wanted
to plant the flag and be like we are in podcasting now so not just one acquisition we're taking this seriously uh wait quick question did you ever run into Archie archibong at Avary yeah of course I hope he's listening this clip that's awesome yeah yeah he was out in Japan a bunch uh yeah good guy big in Japan huge in Japan honestly uh I wanted to ask you about uh where
you know as somebody who sold your company to Spotify worked there for a while and then now you have a much more sort of uh now you're venture capitalist um I'm C but but still you know I'm sure very opinionated on the Spotify product how do you you know where where do you think Spotify is going you know we we we had talked about this a little bit
offline I'd said uh and I had even posted about this of spotify and YouTube have sort of always been on a Collision Course Long Ultra long form became very important to YouTube and then they became the biggest podcast platform uh and in many ways like podcasts aren't just replacing radio they're replacing TV yeah right which is so it's super
important to YouTube uh and it it feels like a sort of critical Battleground for Spotify but I'd be curious to get kind of your point of view on the on the overall uh battle between these you know tech tech Giants right Spotify feels like a small company but it's $140 billion market cap it's a big business probably would be well beyond that if
Apple music uh wasn't you know rammed down everybody's throat but uh yeah love would love to get like a kind of General market perspective on on that yeah so taking a step back and I should caveat all this by saying that I haven't been at the company in like three years so this is this is a pure Outsider perspective um but you know I think the big thing that Spotify has always done
well and they've always believed in is this notion of bundling right like taking taking these products and these business lines that they have strengths in and then bundling them with other new new products product lines and product and business lines and that's honestly why podcasts were so successful for Spotify you know if you think back back
in the day when it was like Spotify head-to-head with apple apple had two separate apps for these things right they had music and they had podcast two separate apps and that was a that was a total gift to Spotify yeah because Spotify could take the podcasts and put them right next to the music so you never had to leave the experience and that's really what kickstarted the whole
thing it's like they had a built-in audience of hundreds of millions of people that were One Tap Away from podcasts and I think you know maybe to start getting to the the question you're asking I think that's that's how they've probably thought about video as well it's like hey we have people listening to music now we have them listening to
podcasts what if we bundle in video now and that opens up a whole new market for us so the obvious place for them to start was with podcasts right like they have every podcast in the world already now let's get these people to add videos to these podcasts but you know again as an outsider you have to imagine the next step is you start to see other types
video content on the platform and even if they can start chipping away a few market share percentage points here in there YouTube's catalog that's a big deal for Spotify so um I think it's I think it's a pretty smart how do you think about the Relentless March of the algorithmically curated feeds uh in the podcasting world I think a lot of podcasters are super super
happy that they're in the RSS feeds and they feel like it's almost as strong as having someone's email address there's a very high open rate if you have that RSS feed you're a weekly show you're dropping a weekly thing right at the top of their apple podcast app but and Spotify has a similar feel right now but you could imagine them going to
something that that's more algorithmically generated more variance in the in the total views you see this on YouTube where uh you know Mr Beast can be can be reliable but for most other creators it's like a banger and then a flop and then a banger and then a flop and we all feel this on X when we post um you know it's very high variance
but you can go really really big because it's an algorithmic feed uh you know your your podcaster who's built on RSS pretty hard to all of a sudden have one episode go 10x bigger but the downside is very protected uh do you think my my question is basically like if I'm an RSS podcaster and I'm thinking hey I want to go to Spotify this a little dangerous
because I could see them going more algo feed in the future and then that introduces more volatility to my business maybe that's good maybe that's bad what's your read on that yeah yeah I mean I think the RSS feed is a very very controversial thing in podcast land you have the podcast purists yep that will live and die by the RSS feed I mean they
will fight you to the death if you tell them that RSS is going to go away y um but but on flip side like it has lots of limitations the RSS feed like it's there it's not like a two-way channel right it's like very limited in terms of the functionality it can ultimately provide and you know I think there's probably no coincidence two biggest platforms now
for podcast Spotify and YouTube are not really RSS based anymore right they're they're all doing things that layer on top of the format that have nothing to do with RSS and so again I know like the RSS purists are you know probably want to want to murder me right now but I just don't I I don't know if the the format uh is is viable long term as
a solution I think because like you said you can you can get massive massive Distribution on YouTube that you can't get through just like a plain old rssp totally yeah the the two things as a Creator now uh the analytics on the RSS feed are just obviously a joke you basically get no analytics and then with Spotify is a lot better but then the the distribution which we're already seeing
this with Spotify um you know we're we're we're growing our audience just by nature of being on Spotify versus like that's not really happening on Apple it's sort of us driving uh other sort of top of funnel um growth um but anyways it's the classic centralization versus decentralization argument right like yeah and in most cases I I know people
don't want to hear this but centralization often wins yeah yeah uh what's your take on the the pivot video for most podcasters we saw a big one today invest like the best now have video uh i' I started on video with YouTube basically I never really had a pure audio product uh I think the first episode we did was video uh we very much enjoy video but uh is there is there any
hope for a creator that just wants to stay audio only for the future I I don't think so because again we're talking about Spotify and YouTube being the predominant platforms right now and we know that those alos they need the video they they crave the video crave I think users got got got wise to this actually it was during Co people don't realize it was during Co when
before Co people were recording podcasts in studios in Boots right similar to how you guys are now y um but they weren't video boots right it was just like a microphone on a table and then Co everyone went home and the the way that these shows kept going was through zoom in Riverside so you get video for fre so all these podcasters got video for free
and they were like oh if I upload this video to YouTube I get all this distribution yeah and now you can't go back the algo craves craves the video craves the video the AI guys um talk to us about uh I'm going to butcher the name O OBO I've only read OBO OBO uh so this is a company you basically incubated you're a co-founder but obviously you're you're still a
full-time investor maybe talk about that Dynamic and then what what you guys are working on yeah recently co-founded this new company with my former anchor co-founder near stickerman he's the CEO he's you know he's running it full-time uh I am not full-time on as you mentioned I'm a full-time partner at light speed um basically the the premise
behind OBO is very very simple um we we the humans you guys me everyone we have invested many many billions of dollars over the past couple of years in making machines uh very very smart right through through Ai and we believe with OBO that it's time for the machines to make the humans smarter and so this is a company the premise of AI making humans
smarter you guys have all heard a lot of the talk about you know a hyped up use case of chat gbt has been oh it's going to be a personalized tutor it's going to help people learn chat gbt is not really built for that yes yes it's helpful for like oneoff asks hey tell me about this thing tell me about this thing but John it doesn't know everything you've ever
learned and it doesn't know what your interests are and it doesn't know what your goals are and you know maybe learning a new language or learning about I don't know some theory around Finance or something and so that's the basic premise of what what OBO is solving um we have a a beta coming very soon if people want to be the first to check it out just go to our I guess our ex OBO
Labs at OBO Labs um but I'm very very excited for it and uh yeah I think I think people are going to really like this product awesome yeah and you uh you dropped by the pmf for die cage to support the players recently and they're working on a problem that's that's sort of adjacent um uh but but yeah maybe you know and funny enough we we just before
this we had the founder of synthesis which is an AI tutor and so feels like it feels like we're maybe I'm sure maybe people have already done it but sort of a broader Market map around you know Ai and learning maybe they we're in the App Store moment where there's a bunch of we need to build products around this stuff we have the new technology but you know
what is the dominant product Factor product form factor for each of these uh use cases and so it's a knockout drag out fight good luck out there yeah yeah what I mean that's it's usually a good sign right couple things going consumers benefit I mean everyone benefits like you know you you you pace of iterations very fast you get to test a bunch of
things you get try new stuff all the time everyone and then you know at the end a bunch of people make money which is great exactly how do you exactly how do you think about the pressure so you're sitting on both sides of the table right you're an investor at light speed getting an opportunity to look at and invest in some of the fastest growing most exciting companies in the
world you're on the founder side now uh meanwhile the average founder is being inundated with content around companies going from0 to 10 or Z to100 million in this super short period of time meanwhile you at Anor you know pivoted multiple times and iterated towards this idea and eventually had a fantastic outcome but it wasn't this sort of
straight shot linear as a Founder now and from the founders that you talked to is there just sort of this extreme pressure around I need to deliver faster results than ever and do you think that could have a negative impact on outcomes because when I think of OBO I think okay massive Tam massive opportunity this be A1 billion plus company if you look at
you know companies like dualingo and things like that in the public markets but I could imagine that you're going to have to sort of iterate in the same way so what does success look like for you and what advice do you give Founders that are kind of facing that pressure to you know put up ridiculous numbers in a in a really short period of time or be
um you know relegated to the like you know a sort of not top tier uh company yeah we we actually talked about this in the in the pmf for die cage in the cage the cage with the guys cage as one does there there are a lot of startups right now that are experiencing explosive Revenue growth right it seems like every week there that chart has a new line on it like you know zero to
what you know the chart I'm talking 100 million ARR yeah six months two months one day Zero days yeah uh something we talk a lot about at light speed is is like high calorie ARR and low calorie ARR right there's a lot of like cheap ARR growth out there and I a lot of it has to do with the fact that AI is very magical people see these products
they're kind of like Blown Away by them and they're like uh here take my credit card like I'm happy to pay um yeah but that doesn't necessarily say something about how sticky these products are or how good they are or whether or not these users will actually retain and so you know with a lot of these explosive High ARR companies uh that we've seen
over the past couple of years with with AI it's not really a secret you guys have probably heard of this as well many of them are very very churny right they they they they turn very quickly a lot of trialing a lot of like who I want to experience This Magic Moment take my credit card but then I'm never coming back and so you know the advice I gave
to the um the page was I think we got to remember to continue to pay attention to like the metrics that have always mattered right things like consistent user growth and retention and making sure like the retention corts flatten out they don't just like Drop to zero because I think people are getting like very very hung up on this AR metric which is great I
mean it's a business that can go from Z to 100 in six months phenomenal but you can't ignore the traditional metrics that tell you whether or not a product is good and I think I think that's gonna be really yeah so on your side are you are you ready to uh you obviously started this with your former co-founder are you guys ready for uh you know I think you
have like good instincts here but you you must be sort of ready to you know do as many uh hopefully it's a one shot you just nail it out the gates but I it sounds like you guys are ready to uh pivot as as many times or or sort of adjust the strategy as many times as as necessary because it is such a big problem space there has to be a there's
definitely a billion dollar business in here somewhere but you know still takes work to um yeah find that spot absolutely I think I think you got to be willing to Pivot and by the way that's what we see like you know in places like YC these companies pivot sometimes like five times over the course of two weeks the pivot is so and um you know the other thing I would
say is not only do you have to Pivot but you have to move faster than ever I mean the thing that I felt when I went in the cage with the guys was I've never seen people move this fast these guys have been in there two weeks they showed me what they're working on and I'm not going to reveal it they told me not to reveal it but the the amount of progress
they've made in two weeks I've never seen anything like it yeah like they literally went from not having a line of code to having a very fully featured app IOS app that they're about to ship to the the App Store yeah there's just never been competition like this before yeah it's insane uh I interviewed this this guy Josh Mo on my podcast he he
started this app um called wave you guys seen this app wave I it's kind of like kind of like Rola it's like a note-taking thing with a it cool it's doing like five million ARR he built it by himself just like he had never coded before in his life that's amazing and he us his AI to not only teach him how to code but to write the code and to generate marketing and it's just the
level of intensity in competition right now is unlike anything we've ever seen that's fantastic uh switching over to uh putting on your your investor hat uh wanted to give you an opportunity you know light speeds big investor in xai um uh you know and has been just one of the most active investors across the foundation model landscape I'd love to
uh you know besides the obvious you know you just sort of invest in Elon companies and you know you tend to do well what was like sort of more of um you know without going into you know go into however much detail you want but like break break down kind of the memo on um on the xai thesis yeah I mean a lot of a lot of what has been reported
publicly you know aligns with with our our thinking and our thes uh thesis and that yes betting on Elon is a pretty smart thing but but more than that it's it's the level of intens I mean to again bring up back the speed and intensity that that he and the people that he hires uh brings to the team and so you know the first time we talked to that
team and they were telling us about the data center that that they were going to build and again it's been very publicized at this point yeah um we were like wow like if if you could actually do this you would you would go from basically the starting gun to you know being at the same level or possibly exceeding open AI in in a matter of months in terms of model performance and
and then they went and did it like they literally did it in like three or four months um and I think that type of intensity and speed and scale that that that you know only Elon and El Elon like companies can actually do combined with the fact that they've got obviously this incredible distribution channel right out of the gate through X um and not
just a distribution Channel but a really unique content set to feed off of the model right this model unlike most other models it it has realtime information that they don't really have and and that realtime information also serves as a surface to trigger you know usage of the product Analyze This post tell me more about this um so I think those are some
of the factors that that got us excited and the team has has far beyond delivered uh on what they said they would so it's been really exciting that's yeah what um uh you know obviously you can't share any details here but uh should the should the broader Market expect more Foundation models or is it kind of getting to the point you remember in
crypto it was like okay we don't need another like Foundation level we don't need another L1 like like and then you'd see one and you'd be like really you know like this one this one built different um or or or do you think that uh you know the five or six major players thinking machines xai open AI SSI are those like the labs that you know you know we're sort of betting on
uh or do you think there's room for for more teams The Way We Were framing this was like if it is commoditizing well ities are valuable oil is a commodity and everyone wants to drill for a well and more Wells you have the better get a bunch Wells yeah it's Capital intensive but if you put together a really great team you can just start a new oil
company and being worth something you know but yeah what are you thinking about it yeah I mean I think you know I think a few weeks ago a lot of people wanted to have the debate about whether or not you know deep seek meant that models were Commodities and nobody should ever train Foundation models again I actually feel like that was the
wrong conversation to be having you know the way we think about it at light speed is these these companies are not just models they are companies they have distribution they have customers they have data right they have security safety like things that enterprises actually care about and so you know I think should there be more models trained maybe but I don't think a model
by itself is necessarily interesting I think there needs to be a product um and a team behind it and so I think if you were starting a model you know if you're starting a company today that was training a foundation model I think you need to either bring something very very unique to the table in terms of what that model can do or you you better have
some other advantage in terms of distribution or uh or some sort of data that other players don't have access to uh that lets you jump up ahead and and I think like that's an example of something Elon and the xai team were able to do they were able to to build this data center in a way that no no one else was willing to do yeah to jump ahead right yeah so um yeah that that's
a little bit of the way that that we think about it talk about it yeah that's fantastic you have any other questions uh I think we covered everything it's been great having you uh we'd love to have you on you know when you have news with OBO uh new Investments things like that come on uh we're all about you know conflict right so we want people coming
on that have have positions in the companies discussed on this show highly conflicted yeah so it's uh no conflict no interest right exactly that's uh that's our we'll have you come on pump your bags then we'll have your direct competitor come on pump yeah yeah why not why not have you both on shout out to the guys in the cage by
the way yeah yeah yeah um than thank you for uh thank you for coming on thank you for supporting the players and uh we'll have you back on here soon have fun are you gonna go play some music right now I I don't know maybe why notate around with that that Gibson in the background yeah generate some music honestly skip the skip the Gibson you're in Boston are you staying
through St Patty's Day no unfortunately oh you got to go to S get get hammered on guinnesses and throw up in the street like you're a Boston College student yell about your stripe second yeah exactly yeah be fun in in in in another another timeline maybe in another life yeah yeah I don't know if the my my wife hey I decided to stay five day's B
there's gonna be green beer there's gonna be green beer I have to drink it I have to do a keg stand in southeast I'm sorry exactly anyway understand she'll understand she'll understand great hanging out with you have a great rest of your day great to see you Michael we'll talk to you soon later guys talk soon cool Michael's a man we're we're
like informally doing a full like deep dive on AI education today yeah we we got that we got OBO now I want to go to Conor Wick over at speak this is for language learning kind of a we already did a siis Gong whole segment on this by the way we did so I think we should skip this one yeah let's skip it but we but I do want to have want to have him on at
some point um but yeah little little historical size gong you know you got to do it you got to do it any any excuse to hit the g really take well let's go over to Sager and Jetty uh good friend of the show uh he's reporting he's getting a little political but it's fashion based politics and so we'll cover it here on the show uh denied entrance to the
chamber to the Senate chamber for Senator Jim Banks for wearing cloudrunner running shoes with a full suit and tie he wasn't wearing proper footw Footwear and Sager says the way I feel reading this must be what it's like to get high on heroin because Sager has been beating the drum on we need our politicians to be well-dressed they need to be wearing suits no more sweatpants
no more hey dress is at least as nice as we do this show yes which John sometimes gets upset yes because I'm not wearing a jacket but I just like to wear a college shirt sometimes do a little business casual it's it's too casual for too casual unless it's casual Friday in which case we should be in Jeff Lewis tank tops anyway uh love love Sager
highlighting that speaking of Jeff Lewis he's the next Post in here there we go uh he says uh Jeff Lewis over at Bedrock says things that go up only over 10year time Horizons uh select individual companies led by Transcendent entrepreneurs private and public tasteful ultr luxury real estate I like where he's going with this land in select locations select cryptocurrencies
select precious metals and select artwork he says that is all I love it ominous what a great Post Yeah so if you're in the mag seven y rotate to select precious metals well if your mag s company isn't led by a Transcendent entrepreneur because if you are led by a Transcendent entrepreneur it doesn't matter if you're public or private you can still go up a 10 time
Horizon but otherwise get out and get into some Ultra Luxury real estate some cryptocurrency some precious metals and some artwork I I I think we're we're getting up to speed with the Ultra Luxury real estate we're getting up to speed with the crypto and the precious metals uh I think we're behind on the artwork so we should have them on to
talk about that where's where's the bull market there's always a bull market somewhere what artart great you can find an artist that you like buy up all of their available you know works and then just start uh you know putting them up in auction buying them yourself you know sort of Market chandelier bidding are you familiar with chandelier bidding uh
think so it's a phrase for when you are essentially bidding on your own yeah Ju Just to like kind of raise the reserve on a on a piece of on something that you're you're auctioning off and of course if you win your own win your own auction then you have to uh then you have to pay the fee but the fee for the risk of pumping up the price demand I think that's just called Market
manipulation sh chandelier bidding I just looked it up oh yeah is that where the auction the auction house tends to see a non-existent to see a bid from a non-existent part of the room so you go oh okay and and we're going up the auction house trying to their you're talking about is even more real where you know I I know people that let's say
you own 30 pieces of an artist work and one of their pieces that's comparable to yours goes up for auction if it doesn't sell well then your entire collection just get sure so you might as well just buy might as buy Mark yeah mark it up Mark it up VCS do this yeah they're like they're like all of the all of the foundation model companies are worth so much because
every time one comes to Market it's worth billions and so you know the the first one I invested in certainly has to be worth a trillion yeah who knows uh anyway uh speaking of a company that sorely needs to acquire one of these Foundation model companies D Apple uh plans one of the biggest software overhauls in its history for iOS 19 iPad iio iPad os9 and Mac OS 16 FKS if you
love the photos app you're going to love this looking to revamp its operating systems for new generation of users and Raj Vier says I don't trust 2025 Apple to pull this off they might just incinerate the greatest business ever created uh and Chris Oren says yeah I'm taking the under on this I don't know I don't know if they can incinerate the
greatest business ever created but uh they definitely need to try something new they definitely need to get some fresh blood in there take some risks they could really make the software much worse and it would still take a lot to actually compete with them on the hardware people don't like green bubbles and yeah the hardware is hard to make
it's a very reliable product it connects to the wireless network reliably people forget that like you know a lot of the beauty of the Apple ecosystem is just yeah like it finds the 5G Tower or the LTE tower or it doesn't drop drop phone calls that often like that those are considered table Stakes but they could go away if you if you get lost in something else anyway um Jared Rosner
says huge opportunities for AI startups that no one is talking about AI native Brokers when broker transactions can be fully automated those markets for context Jared hey really quickly we got Delan on the show oh bring in hey how you doing Delan what up M congratulations on laun Mak great again yes thank you thank you uh what's new with you how did you uh how did you
enjoy the weekend uh you know um Tahoe terrible place to ski great place to hang out with friends always you know sort of happy to uh you know sort of be there and uh you know God bless you know sort of Cogan's wife for being willing to carry two big cgans inside of her once upon a time really hard would want to do that myself well I mean she got she got
a relaxing weekend it was good uh all worth it you have twins you have twins if you have twins twin boys give me a third son yeah I'll take you to Tahoe I actually didn't get to ski with you Delan are you good can you do back flips in 360s or um you know I think I was the best skier on the trip but um you know I'm not quite at the level of doing
backflips but I do have many friends from high school because I went to high school in Utah that are very backflip capable um including my little brother Pav's co-founder Jeff melli he's a sort of CEO out of New York not skiing very much but here so this where are you on the where are you on the skiing rist curve uh do you ever SK scare yourself
skiing John and I were talking yesterday if you're getting to the point where you're just genuinely scaring yourself consistently just probably too far but at the same time skiing I was telling a story in December I was in the Alps and having the best run of the trip you know got distracted for a second and fell like 200 feet got a yard sale did a yard
sale then fell like another 200 feet but you know that that happened once on the trip that's maybe the most that I'm comfortable with where where are you on the rist curve um you know I think I'm uh very bad at the risk curve and I should be better at that given that I have a wife and you sort of child um but weirdly somehow in skiing is not the
place where it shows up like I've had probably more near-death incidents in like the first quarter of this year than like you the prior decade basically combined um and so it's made me think a lot about maybe I need to adjust my wrist curve but somehow skiing because I've just skied for so long that I know the downside of like I did all the crazy
shoots and cliffs and all that stuff when I was younger so like I don't feel the need to like quite go that crazy but then again earlier this year I found myself in this place where I was just like I kept powder hunting uh where was I oh yeah in Deer Valley and I just kept going slightly more off piece and slightly more off piece and slightly more off piece until at some point I
found myself going a little too fast off a cliff that I didn't know was there I managed to catch myself but unfortunately like halfway down the cliff where I no longer had an option of like climbing up I just had like the Rocks below me but not enough speed to clear them and so I was like well there is only one way out of this that doesn't involve like you know waiting an hour
for ski Patrol to like you know come and grab me and it's like it's time to go rock skiing rocking launch myself skied across the Rocks a little bit went off and I was like I think I'm done for the day so you know like think I've gotten better at my wrist curve but um yeah I purposely only grabbed super thin uh racing carving skis CU not even
tempted to go off piece the only thing that these things are capable of is carving are you uh are you having those near-death experiences as a pilot you fly small planes the pilots I know will tell me these stories where that are just like the most harrowing stories about a single landing on just like what was supposed to be a casual trip and
they're like yeah it was raining and we lost connection with the tower and it was like completely pitch black and there was no lights on the runway so we had to land and the plane was like going backwards there was so much wind and I'm like how does your wife let you do that uh where are you having near-death experiences other than skiing um you
know every motorized vehicle that I found myself behind you know whether it's in the air or not I I I somehow have found myself in a bad situation over the past quarter so I'm so deep in the dogghouse that um I I'm putting myself through a remedial uh you know program of you know I'm very good at the technical nature of the operation of the vehicle but it's the higher level risk
calculus of what situations I put myself into that is very poor um so my uh remedial program is I went uh and uh back to all my uh flight trainers and I went and found the oldest one um because as they like to say um there are bold pilots and there are old pilots but there are not bold and old pilots I think it's important for me to become an
old pilot rather than a bold one and I think right now sometimes I'm a little too bold so that's great Mr Keith out from South South La which Speaking of you know excited to be you know in LA with you guys a little more often lately yeah yeah yeah we're we're happy to have you uh well stay safe we I wanted to run something by you obviously there's
turmoil in the financial markets uh we were pitching something called the yard sale theory of financial markets where uh basically every ski season the capital allocators go they're speaking freely on the ski lifts together they know no one else is listening they share stock tips and then the market crashes and so if you look at like Theos it
happened during ski season FTX happened during ski season Enron was discovered during ski season uh what do you think of that or why do you think the Market's going down right now what what's gone wrong um um you know there is a like uh historical seasonality to like the stock market I remember you know sort of seeing something similar where it was
basically the past like you know sort of 50 years of the steepest dry Downs of the S&P 500 something like 80% of them happened between like October and February there's a component of that that I'm sure is also like tax season related where like people want to lock in you know sort of gains versus losses at the end of the year but not too closely you know sort of couple to it
I'm sure there's a component of it is you know people sharing stock tips and Aspen there is also the presidential transfer whether it's you know sort of this year or any prior year always happens at this time of year which also introduces volatility and people don't like volatility the one bull sign that I'll say is I was just looking at this I
don't know if you guys know this website true inflation uh which basically tries to do like a week to week um analysis of inflation just tracking grocery store prices Etc it has it is actually showing like a pretty steep drop over the past 15 month so I'm I'm a little bit of a believer of like the Scott bessent um you know there is going to be a detox
period sure now I think some of the moves that the administration are making feel like a little um blind and they clearly are sometimes pulling things backward it's like you do the tariffs you roll them back you do a bunch of layoffs and then some of those layoffs like in Noah I was just reading today where like they laid off a bunch of like
the Noah commercial s remote commercial sensing team and then there was a huge you know sort of backlash and so some of those people got rehired like a week after getting fired by you know sort of Doge and crew so there is a little bit of like I feel like they're taking you know sort of a chainsaw which is not unreasonable when you need scalpel
because it's just like the scalpel may take too long and the you know admin only has two years before like Congress potentially flips and so it's probably a reasonable you know sort of approach but I think that's what you're seeing in the market is dear God like the you know sort of President and Elon are taking a chainsaw of the federal government and
uh that's you know introducing some level of volatility I like this um you know you've I'm sure heard you know Peter say this a bunch but I love his um you know analogy on what is the US president and it's you know they're the mayor of the United States but the dictator of the world um in that you know they basically have infinite power over foreign policy um but actually
pretty limited power domestically and so there's so much of like the S&P 500 that's been propped up over the past couple years by just like insane amounts of foreign inflows that starts to become you know sort of very uh um aggressive to some of our you know sort of Partners and allies and especially in Europe you'll start to see some of that you
know sort of flow out into like their own domestic stock market which again you know I'm not saying like I'm somebody that you know obviously comes from Eastern Europe and I'm you know sort of crazy anti you know sort of Russia um and so I you know don't necessarily you know want us to totally concede to Putin but at the same time I also think it's important for Alish to
finally like you know get their you s together now rearming of Germany we've seen how that's gone the past couple times so you know we got to be a little cautious there you never know uh you know afd you know Elon being very Pro afd probably good if afd gets too powerful you know maybe we're back to Leen and so that's maybe a little you know sort of tricky um but you know the
Germans probably you could stand to be a little more you know prideful speaking on uh Starship uh you a theory for how long it for why it's taking so long real quick before that because it sort of leads into this right as the Doge stuff started to get very intense and was sort of top of Mind NASA just happened to come out and they said oh by the way
there's asteroid that's it's basically it it was like doubling every day hat on yeah yeah I got to I got to throw this on we keep this nearby for incidents like we discuss conspiracy the yeah um it was like almost every day it was like doubling that the the chances that an asteroid was going to hit in 10 years and I was like this is just like it's 10
years out it's particularly convenient conveniently timed now we finally need NASA yeah yeah yeah that that that was that was kind of the joke but H how to do you have any insight into how um into why they they could have had some an event that's far enough out that we have probably quite a lot of data on that then there could be that amount of
variance in such a short period of time around something as catastrophic as impact um I'm going to you know bring up a totally unrelated point and then answer your question uh the totally unrelated point is uh uh China has now confirmed that they're going to fly Pakistani astronauts to the Chinese space station um so for the first time now I'm not saying that Pakistan is like
a huge you know sort of lover of the US or anything like that but I actually don't know too much about like the you know General foreign policy history with them do they like us versus China more I mean China did basically invade you know their next door neighbor India but I know they hate the Indian so maybe because of that you know the enemy of my
enemy is my friend and so maybe Pakistan likes China but I think the interesting thing to think about there is that China is exerting soft power not just VI like the belt and Road initiative and like investing into infrastructure but it's like you know come visit our infrastructure and starting to build up a coalition around that because you can imagine that eventually turning into you
know Pakistani astronauts visiting the Chinese lunar station and you know I don't know if Pakistan's good at a lot of things but like maybe they're good at having you know s of some of their folks go up there and be you know sort of lunar miners that may have a very high death rate early on but you know maybe they're willing to you know sort of push
for that so thinking about some of our you know sort of enemies you know coalescing around you know sort of stations in space you know potentially scary thing we got to think about what we do as America on the like asteroid tracking I I kind of buy it in that man it's so hard to track even our satellite and we know where SpaceX dropped us off
and like where things are going and that's like so close to Earth the idea that like we have perfect track on these like asteroids super far out out you know there is I think a lot of statistical you know variability and then you have to like you know the reason that there was you know increasing increasing and then set and drop is I'm sure what was happening is
we have a bunch of these like you know sort of deep space radar Etc different assets one of them starts to pick up hey this thing is starting to get close and then it may take some time for us to like spool up a bunch of resources you probably need the Earth to spin around a couple times you have like the Australian radar Etc pointing at it and
then we just get better and better and then all of a sudden you drops down to zero yeah every time that because is it really felt like every day it was a sort of doubling effect so uh and it's very possible that it was like the Earth was just spinning around we were getting another look at it yeah that makes sense uh but yeah going back we know though
that we did a like um a test run on this so NASA actually about two and a half years ago did a test run on what we would do if we had to deflect an asteroid um and so they basically slammed a satellite into an asteroid going crazy fast and then measured that they were able to adjust um the course of the asteroid so how does that work exactly is that like there's there's
already an there's already a satellite up there and they just task it to move a little bit to intercept or is this like we're going to launch a new rocket with a new satellite on it specifically for this like what's the trade-off there I think one of the things that helps with SpaceX and this is both true for like um space Bas like even stuff that V you
know sort of works on on the defense side because you know falcon9 are basically going up like every 24 hours now you don't have to think about this stuff as much as like fixed assets in orbit needing to be ready to go because the difficulty with that is like now you have to think about like the longevity the maintenance of that asset you have
to you know sort of replace it CU people don't realiz is like if you're up in low earth orbit it's not like you get to be up there infinitely cuz like there still is a little bit of atmosphere up there and so you have a little bit of drag and so if you're like 500 kmers in the size of a Vara satellite you'll still deorbit over the course of five years and
basically come back down sure and so with something like that we could actually just like you know have the satellite basically ready to go in a storage facility down here on Earth the moment we know the asteroid is starting to head towards us then you know basically go launch it and so um they've demonstrated that you know sort of now you know in terms of the like go launch
the custom satellite and go send it directly at an asteroid and go hit it and then space even though the satellite is like so so so so so small relative to the asteroid the speeds are just so insane that like you're going at such a speed that it's like basically like a th nuclear weapon getting like you know detonated on the asteroid at those
speeds and you can actually like adjust this thing's course and if you're like if you hit it when it's like seven years out even like a 1% adjustment is like a th000 kilometer you know basically like you know going off course in which case you like totally missed the Earth and so yeah I don't think we need to be too worried about the astroid itself we've
gotone pretty good at you know detecting that and uh you know now showing that we can deflect it unless read the um what's it called Neil Stevenson book Seven EES oh yeah do that goes through the moon yeah then we're well so so every guy you know thinks they could land a commercial airliner like if if required right is sort of like oh I could do it
like you probably actually could given your experience as a pilot but if we had an asteroid coming here it you'd probably secretly get a little bit excited cuz you're like all right yeah it's my time like I'm the guy I'm going to Def the asid speaking of needing to you know land an airliner as a pilot if one were to ask me what's your favorite situation if you
had if you put me behind the cockpit of 747 you're like d you got to land this thing I would say I would want to be in the northern latitudes at daytime on a very cold day in the winter with super clear skies why because that's basically like the highest air pressure that you can basically get so the atmosphere is very um and at sea level so the
atmosphere is very giving basically you have like a you know sort a ton of you know both lift but then also when you you know sort of put your you know sort of Flaps in a ton of drag it's basically almost like you know flying like the equivalent of like if you've ever seen XKCD comic of like if we had humans on Titan which is one of the moons of
Jupiter um you could actually just go out there with like wings and the atmosphere is thick enough that basically like we can just you clap our wings as humans and fly um and so it's pretty surprising that you know a Delta pilot Landing in Toronto in the middle of winter on a cold clear day with super high air pressure somehow flip that thing upside down that is literally like
should be the easiest situation to you know sort of land in so well we need to give you the the tinfoil hat and you can tell us what really happened you got I mean you know there's a lot of like you know Dei accusations going up there maybe it's you know the Canadians are starting to try to uh you know fight back against the trade Wars by you know
making our planes flip upside down UFOs or something who knows uh talk to us about SpaceX last week uh the haters the space haters were taking a Victory lap uh what what's your take on the situation as as as an entrepreneur who's building on top of SpaceX infrastructure uh obviously a big believer why is why is Starship so much harder than Falcon 9 on this like walk
us through some of the complexity there yeah I mean you have to remember Falcon 9 was in the early days ultimately based off of technologies that had like a ton of Heritage there wasn't really anything that was that totally net new other than as they started to you know sort of do the landing lags and the grid fins right um and those were obvious very you know
that new and as we saw it took them like you know basically on the order of remember like the first landing was like 2014 when it really got operational I would argue it was like sort of like end of 2019 so it was still like a five five and a half year and by the way they were trying to land for like two years before that so call it like two years of lots
of failed tests five years even from when the first test succeeded to when it became operational that was obviously in some ways a much simpler vehicle it was smaller it was based off of like you know technology that had a lot of Heritage everything from the metals they were using the way that the rocket engines were you know designed there was
a lot that already had a ton of Heritage as we flip over to Starship those Technologies just do not scale to the size of you know s Starship um especially as they started to think about like distributed engine architecture they wanted to be able to reenter Etc so like Starship is you know both a huge leap in size but you're also like discarding this whole history of
Aerospace that you can you previously you're building on top of and so the fact that they've even made it this far this quickly is I still think astounding obviously the company's a lot bigger they have more resources you want to push for like hey they should be able to make you know sort of faster progress um but I I don't see it as any sort of like
existential you know sort of risk I think it's just that the company's way more high-profile like in 2013 and 14 when all these Rockets were like landing and blowing up I don't feel like there was like huge news Cycles around each one because Elon was like a loved lib you know that you know the media you know treated as like a darling versus
like you know he's you know seen as a Nazi and so anytime anything ever so slightly you know goes wrong they're trying to you know sort of attack him I mean SpaceX even turned the all the crashes into this like Vibe Reel with like in the Hall of the Mountain King playing and it was like celebrated by everyone it was like oh yeah they blew up so many Rockets this is how progress
happens it's awesome it was great yeah and now it's like there's also I don't know if you guys saw actually Kiko dunf who's the uh VP of launch at SpaceX actually just uh wrote um you know maybe it can be one of the tweets you guys discuss at some point but uh he just earlier today like two hours ago wrote this like super long tweet to like a
random um SpaceX um uh fan Twitter account basically asking like what's going on why are things are taking you know should longer Etc um and if you want I can even text it to you I don't know if it's something you guys yeah we should pull it up right now and maybe walk through it yeah let me let me text you the uh I I got it here I found it oh
you got it don't yeah cool it's like this long you know sort of super long reply but it basically like look like you know they are just flying a lot so because like Falcon 9 has also had more issues over the past you sort of six months than like the prior like five years you combined and I think you get it from his point it's like you know sort of look some of these boosters are
getting you know s of a lot older also just like the sea conditions you know off of you know Florida have actually been you know sort of pretty crazy and so that's been more refurbishment um we're now starting to learn what happens when something flies 12 13 14 times in a row and so we still have a long ways to go until like Falcon 9's are at the
level of safety of like a 747 but remember with commercial Aviation from when like the first jet tube you know sort of airliner came on to when we basically stopped having deaths other than Let's ignore the DC thing you know which you know more has to do with like air traffic control than it does with like the jet it took us on the order of
like 50 years for those things to become very very safe right like we basically had lots and lots of airliner crashes in the United States until 2012 and then in 2012 they basically stopped or maybe was like 2010 and we didn't have them for like 15 years other than this like DC thing and so I'm sure Falcon 9s will get to that point but like it may be like
you know 30 years of finding all the weird edge cases atmosphere this C condition this thing before these things are like as reliable as commercial Jets and they're more you know complicated than commercial jets are oh one analogy that I like to you know s to bring up that you know some of the viewers might like people think about like how expensive is it to go to space Etc um if
you think about it on like a unit of fuel of like how much fuel you need to get up there the amount of fuel that it would take for uh somebody to transport us from like London um to New York on a 747 that's basically the same amount of fuel like hydrocarbon energy that you would need to get up to orbit uh so it gives you a sense of like once you on a
per person basis yeah on a per person basis Bic so at this point if you think about your like tickets to you know from London New York it's actually mostly the fuel cost right like they've largely advertised the airframes over so many passengers and so many flights you're barely paying for that and so to give you a sense of like what is the terminal
cost of going to orbit it's going to be roughly like a cross-atlantic flight is basically like how much it should cost like on the order of like 500 to 700 bucks for like an economy ticket interesting yeah great uh that probably unlocks point to point as well then like the SpaceX point to point just like using the Rockets to get from New York to Japan as well
similar cost yeah yeah I mean obviously that's where it's like okay the Rockets now have to be probably as safe as because the people that're going to pay for that are going to be like the richest people in the world they're also the most safety conscious which is what I always think about when people are talking to these like faster Jets Etc
I'm like man people are definitely willing to pay for some speed but like rich people also really care about being safe too so there is a little bit of this like you know people claim hey I'm going to build the like you know the Tesla style you know what what was their first vehicle called the expensive one and then you know on the Roadster the Roadster of planes approach
is like a little harder to do like the the crazy people are more the like you know small you know sort of Pilots like me that are a little crazyer but like you know I don't know that like you know Mr Peter is uh you know hopping on jet anytime soon yeah talk about Eric Schmid going to relativity space he's obviously been a big backer of the company uh
you've you have some of your own opinions uh and then would love to maybe extrap have you extrapolate a little bit on for context we don't we don't we cover a lot of posts on X here but we we don't cover uh deleted posts so yeah that's probably great deleted post performing quite well um but you know the team here is all about not making enemies so I've got to
play it a deep State the Deep State came for you there's the problem with two jobs is you have twice the number of people that are trying to get you to delete tweets and so yeah I think I should have zero jobs that way I have zero X the number of people trying to get me to delete tweets I can't wait for that moment when you're just running
your family when he's running his family office from Mars and he can just say whatever he wants no but just talk 30 minute delay so even if people ask me to it's so late it's like d it's been up there for an hour already you know sorry uh talk about relativity as a company that presumably would want your business you know should it you know
continue to make progress yeah I mean you have to look at it from our perspective right we have to sign launch contracts basically on the order of like two years out because that's basically how long it takes us to like supply chain plan things build Vehicles Etc that's how far out our customer contracts are um you know we plan on you know call roughly that two-year cycle
and so if I'm signing a launch contract two years from now I better have that you know vehicle ready to go otherwise like my customer is going to be disappointed and all of a sudden I'm like holding up revenue and so from a commercial basis it's like really hard to sign contracts with anyone but SpaceX right now because no one's showing any level of repeatability like even though
you know s of blue origin has gotten into space Firefly rocket lab Etc have nobody's matched like the consistency or the price of SpaceX and nowhere close to it right it's like um yeah there's just there's not even like um an obvious number two even anytime soon it's like for me to feel confident in you know let's say relativity they would both
have to launch like this year they' have to probably do it multiple times and multiple times next year and then mightbe maybe at the end of 2026 I would consider signing a contract for 2028 and so man that's like a really tough business to take over you know I think in 2017 the sort of consensus Viewpoint in Silicon Valley was that launch was
this commodity there was going to be like you know four or five players there was going to be very you know sort of low margins um and it wasn't going to be a place where you could generate many you know sort of venture returns and it turned out that it's actually quite the opposite there's basically one player SpaceX effectively represents 99% of the
market and has like insane profit margins on their launch business it's something on the order of like you know sort of 50% you know sort of gross margin is like the rough report numbers that I've seen publicly and so man stepping in as Eric Schmidt into relativity it's like one my understanding is he's basically funding the company payroll to payroll that I
always think is a really hard um cultural place to to be as a company because you're both on the brink of death but then also you don't have an obvious death date yeah the emotional sort of you know you might feel great about the company one week and the next week and the CEO is like ah should I should I time whereas funding you're like at
least I'm funding for 24 months of Runway and the EXP have good weeks and bad weeks Etc yeah exactly like this is why I think all a lot of these billionaire funded projects where the billionaire has made clear that they will back stop the company somewhat indefinitely without a clear end date have never really worked because you don't have this clear like I think
what's become the magic of venture and how it's been staged out is like you have this very clear window you have 24 months you have to accomplish a lot if you don't you're dead and if you do you get to march on to like the next window and like there's a reason why Larry Ellison has a farm on he spent like almost like a billion dollar F he's
like half a billion into it and it doesn't seem like it's going too well yeah and it's like I I think when people try to avoid this and sell fund like I tell billionaires when it's like when you're going to start a company don't do the back stopping thing still raise the M participate alongside the Venture rounds and make it clear that you'd like
to invest in the company but predicated on like again hitting you know sort of these milestones and growth and so the thing that I think is really hard about this a situation is like you're both totally decoupled from the like we need to hit milestones in XYZ period of time but also it's not like you know Eric has indicated I'm going to fund this thing
for multiple years you're sort of like you know on some indefinite you know time period which is like the worst parts of Both Worlds and then also SpaceX just continue to succeed and there's other players like you know at this point relativity was thought of in 201 21 let's say relativity was thought of as like the number two just because they had so much funding momentum Etc
it's like you're not even number three anymore right like number two is obviously very much a rocket lab number three at this point is Firefly right Firefly is actually getting to space a regular basis they just landed on the moon um you know I'm sure it's going to generate a ton of investor interest for them like even though their prior you
know CEO twiddled some ddles and had to get you know booted from the Biddle um you know the new CEO is uh you know hopefully not gonna twiddle some Bing Rockets instead let's keep it Focus Rockets are there are there any uh how closely do you track you know China's progress do they have anything that could be competitive with Falcon 9 in the next 15 years I'm assuming they're
stealing all of our sort of Trade Secrets actively uh but it still takes even if you have the master plan and you know even the schematics it's takes quite a lot is there a Chinese V yet uh there's an Indian v as of yesterday yeah um it's actually in the latest white combinator batch um props to them um it was a very cool launch video okay that
was awesome um you know look forward to hopefully they being Chinese vaa and you know uh African vaa and you know I just want every continent Azie V you know Russ it would actually be very bearish if you weren't getting copied right you want them that's always my perspective if you're not getting copied then your idea is probably not very good there are
plenty of SpaceX copycats even today of course um on the Chinese side they don't have anything that is anywhere close to Landing but they're clearly just willing to throw manufacturing and bodies at the problem where I think it's something like SpaceX has launched 27 times so far this year um China has basically launched 19 so it's I mean in the grand
SCH of things it's like pretty close I believe um they just you know are you know very good at manufacturing these things very rapidly and then just pumping it off the line and just not dealing with you reusability and so it's some been like there's a couple of Indian launcher companies that have taken that approach too was like we're not even going to try and do reusability
anytime soon we're just going to make these things super super super cheap and then at some point we'll think about reusability down the line and so the Chinese are definitely like if it weren't for SpaceX man there would be like red Panic Bells all over the place um you know sort of God bless that SpaceX has actually succeeded the level
they have otherwise we would be like very far behind the chines um is there is what what's the chatter within the space industry of uh you know we've seen plenty of you know undersea cables being cut uh how worried is the average space founder generally like how worried are they about sort of sabotage is that something that that's sort of like a risk factor
in a in a series C deck where they're where they're like you know you know is is that is that even the right question to ask I would say like not too worried and it's not to say that it could happen or anything and we should underwrite this but it's like the the the thing that would be really bad is if like Russia basically you know nuked lower orbit you
know that a three nuclear weapon and you had a bunch of like highly charged ion particles you know basically orbiting around Earth at a much lower level than where like the Van Allen belt is so it basically destroy everybody's Leo business right now part of why starlink works is they're low enough um in orbit that the Earth's magnetosphere basically
deflects the solar winds um so you're you still relatively protected if that all of a sudden becomes a very unprotected Zone you have a ton of radiation man everybody's economics basically just blow up actually one of the few that probably doesn't blow up is vaa because radiation basically screws you on a day-by-day basis and we don't need to be up there for very long but
anybody whose business case is built off of like being in space for a longer period of time man if the Russians launch a nuke up there they'd be really hard and I haven't seen any like how one would fix that problem if they did like I I don't think that like there's even like a hypothesis for how to do that like you maybe some like really big
magnets or something but I don't even know there have to be massive magnets up there so I don't know like the Russians detonated nuke and I can see them doing it where like they just keep falling behind they see starlink helping Ukraine they see that like you know the United States is like winning this like you know new space race you know sort of 3.0
and like you know us and China are leaving them in the dust and Putin is like dying you know breath to just like screw it nuke space cuz it's like you're not killing anybody but you're just tanking all the commercial space economies that'd be tough like it yeah it feels like most of the opportunities in space should be pursued by private companies that said stuff like
thermonuclear radiation clean up and low earth orbit and like asteroid deflection are probably better suited for NASA Andor sort of NASA private Partnerships just because vaarda yeah you'd be a good candidate to potentially you know save us from an asteroid but it's not a good business model where you're like okay we have to like develop technology maintain
it like carry this team but then maybe you never have to use it across 30 years it's not going to be necessarily a huge profit Center yeah I mean I don't think we're so religiously libertarian at Founders fund that we believe the government has no use whatsoever um so you know there is the occasional need for something that is you know of the public good and
asteroid deflection and thermonuclear cleaning is probably you know should up there with that uh but yeah I mean hopefully you diplomacy is more effective than having to do the cleanup you know sort of part of it yeah makes sense well this is awesome I think we got to wrap up but uh thanks for coming it out coming out oh yeah thanks so much
for having me boys and congratulations on a phenomenal launch day look forward to see success of TV hey we expect a cameo on the next video it's already in the works came in this one post iconic oh yeah oh yeah I mean look everybody needs an island vacation but you know read off really needs one you had a face C because because we used a clip from your
Callin I wasn't talking about the Tweet you had two cameos I guess technically yeah oh I had two came two cameos cuz at at 37 seconds 38 seconds you pop up for a second as an example of one of the guests that we've had double Cameo I like my first better your first Cameo is good but yeah a little bit of an Easter egg uh fantastic having you on goodbye
boys we'll talk to you soon that was great we we we legitimately have to get off because we have to we got to go get a flight I know you have the biggest podcasters High because you had four guest today when we promised the fans three and we did four that's the TV promise that's the TV promise thank you everybody for watching it's been fantastic having you we got a big
day tomorrow we are going to be live streaming for six plus hours from YC demo day we're going to probably have more guests in one episode true probably 20 30 guests throughout the day Founders that are presenting investors that are looking at uh deals and uh it's going to be very fun great we will see you tomorrow morning stay tuned cheers see you later bye