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Journalists on the horizon. Stand by. Founder mode. You're watching TVN.
4:35
Today is Monday, April 6th, 2026.
4:38
We are live from the TVN ultra lounge, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
4:44
Happy Easter >> Happy Easter to everyone who celebrated yesterday.
4:50
How was your weekend, Jordy? Good. I saw Project Hail Mary. Oh, you did? >> did. I finally saw it. Did you see it, Kyle? >> Review. I did not see it.
4:56
I wasn't Ben, you saw it, right? What was your review? It was great.
5:00
I was telling you, I think it was uh it was fresh. It was fun.
5:04
People put it on a Well, the few did not like it. >> didn't like it.
5:06
He said it was Interstellar for chuds, right? Isn't that what he said?
5:10
He said something like >> You liked it, right? I thought it was great.
5:12
It was very enjoyable watch. I don't know. Should I see it?
5:14
Yes, I think you should see it. >> In theater? In theater, for sure. >> Okay.
5:19
It's definitely a good movie. It's not too long.
5:20
It's like 2 and 1/2 hours.
5:22
But it's uh it's an Andy Weir.
5:22
It's Have you seen The Martian? Brutal.
5:28
It's basically just like endless stream of problems, and then like quick solutions.
5:33
So, there's some sort of problem, they need to figure it out.
5:37
Problem, they need to figure it out.
5:37
All of it's I don't know, like loosely like hard sci-fi, like somewhat believable.
5:42
It does have aliens in it and stuff, but it's a fun time.
5:46
Uh anyway, speaking >> real space, what's going on Yes. >> with Artemis 2?
5:49
>> Artemis 2 is uh, is live streaming right now to almost a million people on YouTube on the NASA YouTube channel.
5:55
I believe it's also on Netflix.
5:56
Um, and the stream title is just we are about to fly around the moon with authority from from NASA.
6:05
Uh, we can actually pull this up and see.
6:06
I would love to hear what is going on right now because I think it's happening like as we speak.
6:11
Like they are they're up.
6:15
Um, I also uh, wrote a little bit of a uh, retrospective on the Can we get some sound? company.
6:21
I have a spider on my >> Yeah, okay.
6:24
So, 1 minute ago NASA posted that the crew are now the farthest any human has ever traveled.
6:31
215,000 miles from the Earth.
6:34
Let's see if I can get this John is dealing with uh, I have a spider >> spider here on his microphone. Here we go. >> There we go. There we go. Solved. Um, Still living, too. Yeah, still living.
6:47
We'll we'll take it out back later.
6:48
Uh, what do we got going on here?
6:51
>> Yeah, can we get the audio on that? Oh, there's no audio? Oh, weird.
6:53
I think there's there is audio on YouTube, but I it might not be letting us like stream it through. I don't know.
6:59
Sometimes there's like DRM stuff.
7:02
Anyway, um, Matthew Gallagher, he's the founder of MedV, and well, we were supposed to have him on the show today.
7:08
He unfortunately cannot make it.
7:09
We do have uh, John Slotkin coming on, the chief medical officer from Geisinger to or Geisinger to talk about claims around oral GLP-1 drugs.
7:21
We read the New York Times story on Thursday, and then over the weekend there was a whole a whole bunch more analysis about the company, and Yeah, it's so interesting because you would think that someone else would write the the 1 billion 1 the 1 person 1 billion dollar Totally. company.
7:37
And then the New York Times would take it down, but in this case it happened in reverse.
7:41
So, uh last week the New York Times broke down the story of Medvy, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight loss drugs.
7:47
Uh and the framing was basically that uh this was the first time in history a single person had built, quote, a billion-dollar company.
7:58
And um that's what went viral.
8:00
Digging in, there were some small caveats and some big caveats.
8:04
The small caveats were that uh you know, the founder, Matthew Gallagher, had hired his younger brother, so technically it was a two-person startup.
8:11
Most people were like, "Yeah, okay, we'll count that. Doesn't matter.
8:15
It's a It's a family member." Right?
8:17
And then also uh the other one question was >> many people as the original challenge.
8:23
But but they had almost twice the revenue, 1. 8 billion.
8:25
So, but the question was the the valuation.
8:27
So, the headline stat in the article was that they are on track to do 1.
8:30
8 billion in sales this year.
8:34
And that the on track is doing a lot of work, of course, because that's clearly an ARR number that's that's extrapolated out.
8:39
And the GLP-1 market's moving very quickly.
8:41
It's not like Ro and Hims and all the other providers are going to be, you know, just sitting down and letting this company run away with whatever secret sauce they've discovered around customer acquisition, although they might not go into this, which we'll go into.
8:59
Um And it was insane scale, but uh companies don't unilaterally trade at 1x revenue.
9:03
Like that's that that's sort of a given in this article.
9:05
It's sort of presupposed that if you're doing 1.
9:07
8 billion in revenue, uh you would trade above a billion dollars.
9:11
And so this counts as a billion-dollar company.
9:13
I always thought that the billion-dollar company would be on market cap, not >> Yeah, valuation. >> not on revenue.
9:19
Because you could do, you know, if you're if you're going to say, you know, okay, any any any just try and say the biggest number, you'd want to set up some sort of like payment network where basically you could report GMV really, really high, and you actually have a very, very small business cuz you're taking like 1% as your true net revenue.
9:36
Um And so so there was always a question about the margins and then also revenue durability matters.
9:43
Like the the the the ongoing question around building um these, you know, uh one-person high-growth companies is is there durability because if you can do it and then I can do it and then Tyler can do it and then and then anyone with, uh you know, access to a coding model can build it.
10:02
Very quickly we're going to erode each other's markets and trade market cap very quickly.
10:07
And I think any VC that would look at this uh they might get to a point where they're like, "Yeah, this is a unicorn company. Look at the growth.
10:13
I think there's something here."
10:14
But at the same time you could see someone like a private equity guy valuing this and saying, "Uh well, I I need to see the >> of risk. >> to see durability.
10:23
>> There's some lawsuits. >> Exactly. And we'll get into that.
10:24
So, uh Med-A-Vi uses uh two companies, Care Validate and OpenLoop Health OpenLoop Health to handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping, and compliance. compliance.
10:35
And we'll get into the compliance thing.
10:36
But uh that's a lot of outsourcing and of course that outsourcing uh takes a toll on margin because you have to pay the doctors.
10:42
You have to pay the pharmacies.
10:43
You have to pay the shipping.
10:44
You have to pay the compliance.
10:45
And they're paying Care Validate and OpenLoop Health to flow that value through to those, you know, individual stakeholders.
10:53
Um so it's still it's still a case >> Yeah, I started asking, "What does this company actually do itself?"
11:01
Just marketing and maybe they're too aggressive about it. We'll get into it.
11:05
So, uh these GLP-1 drugs are so also aren't cheap.
11:08
And when you sell them even when you sell them legally, uh even as a telehealth wrapper, a lot of the value is going to accrue to the pharmaceutical companies that own the intellectual property.
11:17
At least that's how it should flow it when things are functioning properly.
11:21
Um So you can you can effectively build a telehealth company on top of a pharmaceutical company like Novo uh that uh you where you are taking a thin margin on top.
11:33
You can get to big numbers, but the the pharmaceutical companies are going to want to be paid because they did all of the expensive FDA trials, all the expensive R&D, and they need to recoup that.
11:42
So, um then the other question is you add you add in the CAC from digital ads.
11:48
They were apparently spending a lot on Facebook to acquire customers, and you quickly get you quickly wind up and estimate a pretty thin margins.
11:54
I think the estimate Shiel shared Shiel Manaut shared was like 15% or something like that.
12:02
Um but uh uh it's it's totally possible to get to a valuation that's lower than a billion dollars, um depending on how everything flows through.
12:12
>> same time though, if they're outsourcing all of the kind of key areas of the business to these other players, Open Loop, etc.
12:20
, it's possible that of that the those very thin margins, right, the 15-ish percent, >> the margins on that are very, very extreme. Right. >> Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12:30
So, you could still get to a number that was in the hundreds of millions of dollars of of uh of EBITDA. >> Yeah.
12:36
Uh yeah, I mean, the 15% margin looks like 150 million, maybe 200 million in like basically profit. That is crazy.
12:43
Um but we'll see what the FDA has to say long term about that, whether there will be lawsuits or settlements.
12:49
There was already a warning letter, uh and this turned into a big drama about the company.
12:55
Um The the the drama was >> And was there was there any mention of this in the original story? I don't think so.
13:00
Uh and so there were a lot of people that were and and I I believe I pulled up the the New York Times piece, and there was no like correction or anything yet.
13:09
Maybe there will be more follow on.
13:11
I feel like the the founder does need to, you know, respond and have their opportunity to kind of correct the record because these things can kind of run away in either direction.
13:19
Um but uh even with all the drama, uh there were a ton of, you know, super legitimate questions about how valuable the company really is and how long they'll be able to continue their current business model without pretty serious changes.
13:33
And that's around the marketing stuff.
13:34
So, Med B received an FDA warning letter uh, just 2 months ago for misbranding violations.
13:41
So, warning letter, if you're not familiar with the FDA's language, uh, it can be pretty wide-ranging.
13:45
Like sometimes it requires just a small a small change to marketing materials uh, to remain compliant and sometimes it's basically a like a shut down the company moment.
13:54
This happened a lot with the nicotine category with uh, illegal uh, vape vapor products.
14:01
>> Um, and sometimes like the warning letter would be like you are warned in that if you continue to sell these like we will put you out of business.
14:09
And some of them are okay, we're warning you about this particular claim on your website.
14:13
You need to change this language.
14:14
And it's pretty pretty minimal.
14:16
Uh, I went through this uh, 10 years ago.
14:19
We started Lucy 2016 and uh, while I was there we were extremely nervous about warning letters because if we got a warning letter, we thought it would mess up the FDA applications that we had in progress.
14:30
It would mess up distributors.
14:33
Like anyone who you're partnering with would say, well, I don't want to work with somebody that has a warning letter.
14:38
Have you dealt with this?
14:38
Um, we were able to avoid all this, but uh, one one kind of concrete example is that um, we like Lucy cannot make quit claims about the nicotine gum product.
14:47
So, uh, even though most people think, oh, this is like Nicorette, it's actually regulated in a different category.
14:52
It's regulated as a tobacco product, not as a uh, pharmaceutical product.
14:56
And so, uh, you can't run a digital ad that says like, hey, you're a smoker, quit smoking with Lucy.
15:04
That's a violation because it's not regulated as a pharmaceutical as a smoking cessation aid is the And so, in the nicotine category, you would have companies create a product. >> Yep.
15:13
Usually there would be no founder associated with said products because people didn't want to put their face on it. Yeah.
15:19
And they would do a lot of things.
15:21
They would that would uh, make sales grow incredibly quickly. Yep.
15:25
Like, you know, making marketing claims, just where and how they decided to sell, >> Yep. etc. , etc.
15:29
The the ad channels that they used.
15:31
And so, they would they would go from zero to hundreds of millions or billions of revenue very, very quickly, but the enterprise value of the company would be near zero. Yeah. Right?
15:40
Because no nobody would want to buy a company that had all that kind of baggage.
15:45
Uh and so, if you were going to value it, it would be like, what is the like very, very, very near-term, you know, uh sort of like revenue opportunity. Yeah.
15:57
Yeah, I mean, the famous the famous comparison is Jewel versus Puff Bar.
16:01
Uh so, Jewel uh went, you know, raised a bunch of money, got very big, uh put in FDA applications, got those applications denied, uh marketing denial orders, then got them stayed in the courts.
16:13
They set up a I think their whole headquarters was in DC.
16:16
They were working very closely with the FDA.
16:18
They were truly engaging to sort of clean up the, you know, all of the problems around marketing and sales and formulation.
16:27
Just really try and get to a clean bill of health with regard to the government relations.
16:32
Uh they were successful and they got approved as uh not as a smoking cessation aid, so they still can't make the claim that Jewel will help you quit smoking.
16:40
Um they they but they did get approved as a tobacco product.
16:43
Uh you know, which I think the FDA says it has to be suitable for the protection of public health, which is a very vague way of saying like it's a net benefit, net good, that that that that it's on the market, which is a you know, people can debate that back and forth.
16:56
But, um but back in the Jewel days, they also could not say quit smoking with Jewel.
17:04
They wanted to put say they wanted like a lot of people that were, you know, were smoking cigarettes did switch to Jewel, and they were pushing for that.
17:13
Uh but they couldn't actually make quit claims, so they used the word switch.
17:17
They said switch to Jewel uh instead of quit with Jewel.
17:19
And that seemed fine for a long time.
17:21
I think they they they eventually trademarked it and then I think they had to pull away from it at a at a various points in time.
17:28
But, there's clearly like this gray area in your marketing.
17:33
Can you say you want smokers to upgrade to nicotine gum?
17:36
You know, all of these things need to be sort of litigated with the FDA.
17:40
Um And what has MedVie been up to?
17:40
We wound up playing it very safe and that probably kept us from mooning in revenue to 1.
17:46
8 billion overnight, but I still think it was the right decision for Lucy.
17:50
Now, MedVie appears to have taken a much more aggressive approach.
17:55
They are apparently running 800 fake doctor accounts on Facebook to sell compounded GLP-1s.
18:00
She will note verify that the accounts are not actually doctors.
18:05
Some even have cartoonishly fake names like >> Dr. Dr. Tucker Carl Z MD.
18:14
If you Like I feel this is one of those things where I feel bad for someone who clicked on an ad that was deceptive. >> Tucker Carl Z MD.
18:24
But, if you're getting your GLP-1s from Dr.
18:27
Carl Tucker Z Like you probably are in on the joke to some extent. I don't know.
18:35
It's clearly not above board and they have to clean this up and deal with this.
18:39
They were also sued in a class action lawsuit last month for violating California's anti-spam law.
18:43
That stuff can be crazy expensive because a lot of the fines are on like a per instance basis.
18:49
So, it'll be like, "Okay, yeah, $10 fine for every text message you sent."
18:54
And it could be like you sent like, you know, 50 million text messages or something.
18:58
So, you could have some massive massive liability.
18:59
Of course, that will be litigated in the court of law and there might be a settlement and they can figure out what what the right damages if they are even guilty.
19:06
They're still early in the process.
19:08
And so, the end result is more of a story of pushing over aggressive marketing tactics >> Yeah, I mean so so pull up pull up the actual picture uh, of of of Sheel's post because I think that you can just see how confusing this would be to somebody maybe uh, a little bit a little bit older. Yeah, zoom in.
19:32
You can just see you see somebody that looks like a doctor >> Oh, you got to get the stethoscope >> 70 years old on Facebook. >> Yeah.
19:39
You're not necessarily putting it together. It's Dr. Tucker Carlson MD.
19:45
>> so my co-founder at Lucy is uh, uh, he he has a PhD from Caltech but it's in biophysics and so he's not a medical doctor but he is a doctor of science from Caltech.
19:57
Like he has a really good uh, that you know, background but he's not a medical doctor and I would always joke with him like we got to put you in a stethoscope.
20:05
We got to take some photos of you in a stethoscope.
20:07
Like the aura is so high.
20:09
He was like, "No, that's like such bad practice. Like we can't do that.
20:11
Like you doctor is associated with medical doctor even if you have a doctorate in something."
20:17
It's like the famous like, "I'm dying.
20:19
Does anyone have a doctorate?"
20:20
It's like, "Yeah, I have a doctor in a juris doctor or whatever."
20:22
Yeah, the interesting thing Medvy uses the dot org What? domain.
20:28
Isn't that for nonprofits typically? That's very >> think so.
20:33
There's going to be a whole I don't know that it's technically illegal to use it as a for-profit but certainly when you add that >> to all the other things >> you land on that site and then you think >> like oh, a doctor advertised this to me and now I'm on a nonprofit >> Yes, yes, yes. >> medical website. Yes.
20:48
Um, so uh, yeah, in general I think the story is uh, pushing over aggressive marketing tactics to the limit more than AI allowing low head count scaling.
20:58
Uh, but in and this has happened for a long time.
21:02
Back in the old days I I I to say like 2014 Facebook era.
21:05
uh but the early days of online marketing, uh there were countless stories of questionable supplement sales or telehealth operations scaling on the back of insane ads.
21:14
The classic formula for for like mega scale was if you could get an ad approved, uh if you could get it like sort of like white-listed or or through the approval process, it wouldn't automatically get reviewed that often.
21:27
So, once you were approved, you could say you could spend $1,000 or you could spend $50 million.
21:35
And there were there wasn't early on there wasn't a natural trigger to like re you know like re-fact check.
21:39
It was like if you could get approved for a small ad, you could scale it up.
21:43
And so, people would do all these crazy things to try and get the ads approved.
21:46
There were all these uh tricky things where they would route to one website and then after the ad was approved, they'd change the website and then you know all the ad platforms had to eventually figure out like, "Okay, we need to be scroll scraping scraping a layer deeper like consistently or like every day."
22:03
Um but the canonical example of the health supplement or telehealth operation that would always go viral and always just print was if you could get an ad approved that had Harvard scientists, brain pill, and Johnny Depp all in one call to action.
22:20
I'm not kidding about this. This is real.
22:22
So, it was like always this picture of Johnny Depp coming out of the ocean.
22:25
That was the one that was like really scroll-stopping.
22:29
Pirates of the Caribbean?
22:31
>> It was like a paparazzi photo, which they didn't have the rights to use.
22:33
They would not partner with Johnny Depp.
22:34
They should not be running that ad at all.
22:36
Um and then something about brain boosting or like making like limitless pill, make you a genius, that type of marketing would all like it's very general like ever who doesn't want to be smarter, so everyone would click on that.
22:48
And then like Harvard scientist would like lend its like credibility cuz oh if it's from Harvard like it's good.
22:53
Uh and so if you could get those three terms approved, uh there were a whole bunch of like sketchy operations that would get ads approved and then just pump like a hundred million dollars of sales behind them.
23:04
And it seems like maybe there's a little bit of that going on here where a lot of these a lot of these ads should not have been approved.
23:09
Maybe there needs to be a validation.
23:11
I know that a lot of companies that partner with doctors even just to sell like skin care supplements, sunscreens, really anything.
23:21
The the rate to to advertise with an influencer who's a who actually has some sort of medical credential is like way higher. Yeah.
23:29
This is way more effective.
23:31
>> And that yeah, it's way more effective.
23:32
But if you can just like fake that, then you're basically arbitraging that, but you shouldn't be.
23:36
So >> We have We have two employees, but 800 fake doctors >> Yeah, not not great.
23:43
>> Um yeah, so we'll we'll see how this works out.
23:45
I I think the press tour is probably Canceled.
23:46
Uh ended for the near term. >> Okay.
23:51
Well, Founders still welcome to come on.
23:53
I I think people have a lot of questions for the founder, Matthew Gallagher.
23:56
We'd love to have him on the show and dig into all this because maybe there are some good good context that is missing from all of the all of the criticism that's been levied over the weekend. But we'll see.
24:11
So, I was reflecting on like like we're still in pursuit broadly of this one person one billion dollar company.
24:18
It's still an interesting question. Will it happen? Why might it happen? Why might it not?
24:23
>> Yeah, in my in my head it was always new startup is created. >> Yeah.
24:27
And like solo founder creates a hit product. >> Yeah, yeah.
24:30
Raises a hundred on a billion, and that is the most that is like the cleanest path because for so many other paths, you just run into yeah, maybe I want to be the one one person one billion dollar company, but I want to win more.
24:43
So, if adding incremental people helps me build a better company, >> Yeah, there's right people at this point, right?
24:48
Yeah, why would I not add add at least a handful of people, right? >> totally.
24:54
So yeah, I mean I think I think software is an interesting category, especially if it's open source software somehow, where there was some sort of flywheel where you could verify what was actually built, and then you could verify what
25:07
the sales were because it was done on some, you know, sort of open platform or some sort of, you know, some some sort of thing where the the actual reporting and the analytics, I mean, apparently the the New York Times did verify the run rate that they that they used. So, there
25:23
So, there were the the their money was flowing through the business, but having having a much cleaner representation of what the financial picture is, I think would would help.
25:31
I was personally excited about the prospect of a video game.
25:37
Um, and and just be more video game developers seeing breakout success.
25:40
So, um, couple years ago, in the in the olden days when I had free time, I got woefully addicted to a poker-themed roguelike deck-building game called Balatro, which I don't think anyone here has played, but this game is amazing. So much fun.
26:00
So, it's you're basically playing poker, but there's no financial stakes, there's no money, there's no microtransactions at all.
26:05
Interestingly, the game actually got banned, I think in Japan or some other country for being like poker and being >> Banned for being anti-gambling.
26:14
No, no, for No, no, banned for for being like gambling aesthetics because you are playing with cards. There's no real money.
26:24
You pay like 10, 15 dollars for the game, and then you can just play unlimited.
26:29
But it's done extremely well.
26:29
So, it sold over 5 million units.
26:30
I saw some reporting that it might be 7 million and maybe even more now cuz they've gone multi-platform.
26:37
And I think at 15, 20 dollars a download, that might be close to 100 million dollars in revenue, and it was made by a solar solo developer who goes by Local Thunk.
26:46
Over two and a half year period, he originally wanted the game to be a side project that he could put on his resume, but it wound up being a massive success.
26:54
And so, depending on your valuation methodology, you could probably underwrite Balatro close to a billion dollars if it's generated a hundred million dollars of basically free cash flow.
27:05
You know, there was obviously two and a half years of R&D, but that was just this developer's time, the future revenue streams, the offshoots, the merch, like you get to a number that's close and uh you have to imagine that that his two and a half year development like life cycle would have been pulled forward by the help of AI.
27:23
So, he basically developed the the game in entirely in the pre-AI period.
27:29
So, it came out >> Does it still have momentum?
27:31
I think it's probably trailed off a little bit because people sort of you get to the end of the game after, I don't know, 10, 20, 50 hours or something, and then there are some people on YouTube that will do like tons and tons of like like try and break the game cuz you can get really, really crazy with like combinations of different things.
27:50
Um but at a certain point like you do kind of finish the game and then you're like, okay, I'm I'm moving on.
27:55
Uh and he never added microtransactions, he never added like any sort of live service model, subscription, anything like that.
28:01
It was sort of just like it did really well and then we'll see.
28:06
Um And so, uh yeah, this came out as a demo in 2023 and officially launched in January 2024.
28:11
So, fully like pre-AI development.
28:13
And there's lots of there there is lots of hesitation in the video game community around AI specifically around the the art generation, like pixel art generation, all of that.
28:21
pixel art generation, all of that. But if you think about AI as a tool for writing game logic and particularly like re-platforming, it took him I want to say like a full year and I think he partnered with a developer or a publisher to actually distribute the game cuz it was originally a PC game
28:39
and then it went to Nintendo Switch and then PlayStation and then Xbox and it's perfect game to be everywhere, but that takes a lot of time and you sort of have to rewrite a bunch of the software, and that's something where AI should be able to pull that forward or make it even easier to launch everywhere on day one. Um and so
28:54
Um and so the interesting thing is that Balatro broke through because it paired like this familiar design language with this wildly engagement engaging progression system.
29:04
And so bringing fun ideas like that to market faster is something that like I'm really looking forward to and we heard Shalto from Anthropic talking about like building his own RTS game.
29:15
>> And obviously he has a full-time job, so this would be certainly something that would be like extra.
29:19
We're we we've been working on a bunch of simulators that are sort of feeling like games.
29:23
Some of the mechanics are getting pretty good now. Um >> Game-like.
29:27
But but you have to imagine that that in the future there'll be more and more game developers.
29:32
>> Yeah, I mean some of the stuff that I've seen internally at TPN, it's like going to blow.
29:37
Are you already vague posting? >> Vague posting.
29:38
Are you the vague post king?
29:41
Uh have you stared into the the abyss yet?
29:45
Cuz everyone talks about at the AI labs they they all have abysses.
29:46
And I feel like I feel like abyss 101 is like don't do not stare into it. Yeah.
29:51
Like maybe glance It's like first day onboarding.
29:54
>> Yeah, I I Where is the abyss?
29:56
>> I think a glance is okay.
29:56
And or maybe like like saddling up to the abyss and just kind of peeking your head in is fine, but I would not stare into it.
30:02
I think that's something you >> Let's go over to the App Store. Yeah.
30:07
>> The App Store saw an 85% increase in new apps this past quarter.
30:09
Let's pour one out pour one out for the App Store review team.
30:16
Most recent quarter's new app count has grown less than 10%.
30:18
So it was just ticking up quarter over quarter and then jumped massively. No surprises here.
30:28
Feel like everybody everybody that I know outside of tech has has an app now.
30:33
They're on unconstrained.
30:36
>> an app, but at the same time I have yet to find an app that's on my home screen that was solo developer vibe coded something like that.
30:47
So, I'm waiting for the Flappy Bird moment or the Balatro moment, this like solo thing.
30:53
Even if it's like a productivity tool, there's clearly more apps, but actually going viral, like what is the Harry Potter Balenciaga moment?
31:02
What is the you know, the viral moment that breaks through and actually makes it to the top of the app charts?
31:10
Because right now it just feels like the the long tail of the App Store is getting potentially fatter because there's more single use apps, there's more small apps, but will we see one of those break out and become, you know, fantastically successful?
31:25
That's sort of like the next the next you know, critical moment that I'm I'm you know, eagerly awaiting, but we'll see.
31:34
Uh, what's going on in China, John?
31:37
Uh, the pork industry is a victim of its own success.
31:39
This story is incredible.
31:42
They got swine scrapers over there.
31:44
Skyscrapers filled with swine.
31:44
I'm not kidding about this.
31:47
Uh, so, this is from the The Economist and I read this yesterday and really enjoyed it.
31:51
Pork holds a unique place in the Chinese diet.
31:54
It was once a symbol of good the good life.
31:57
The Chinese character for home is a pictogram of a pig under a roof.
32:01
It is so important that the government has a strategic frozen pork reserve and the news media are always full of the ups and downs of the pork industry.
32:09
It's like they you they got to cover it like it's a horse race. Like what's going on? It's a pork race. No, seriously.
32:15
Uh, I TBPN for the pork industry in China, that's the real that's the real opportunity.
32:19
Uh, there have been plenty of peaks and troughs in the past decade.
32:24
The trough is active over there, literally.
32:27
Uh, in 2018 to 2019 when African swine fever ravaged pig herds, many smaller backyard farms were wiped out.
32:33
Prices went through the roof.
32:35
Before long, the industry came trotting back.
32:36
The big worry now is that it's doing too well.
32:41
More efficient farming methods producing ever more pork are colliding with slow consumption of the meat.
32:45
Now all the news is about overcapacity.
32:50
Uh she who sells cuts of pork in a market in Beijing says she only got to eat the meat on special occasions as a child.
32:56
These days she says so cheap people can have it whenever they fancy.
32:58
The oversupply pushed live pig prices to a 15-year low in March.
33:01
Some farmers are losing over $40 per animal.
33:04
Part of the problem is that some pig farmers have been aggressively expand have aggressively expanded production in an attempt to gain a bigger share of of a shrinking market.
33:13
On top of that, big companies saved their bacon in the downturn by concentrating their pigs into mechanized modern facilities where they could be kept isolated from the swine fever.
33:23
Modern farms are marveled at industrial agriculture, though not of animal welfare.
33:28
Tens of thousands of pigs are packed into multi-story concrete buildings.
33:31
One in Hubei province has 26 floors. It's a swine scraper.
33:37
They It's 26 floors of pigs.
33:40
That's like >> know why why consumption is declining? Just oversupply.
33:43
So they got hit with this They got hit with the swine flu and they were worried about all the pigs getting sick and dying and so they instead of having them cross-pollinate in like open fields, they pushed them into these literal skyscrapers that are 26 floors tall and >> over over over consumption overproduction you have oversupply, prices come down, but they're saying that just overall consumption is dropping, too. Well, yes.
34:14
So people are moving to chicken and seafood.
34:17
Increasingly middle class the middle class Chinese see pork as less healthy than chicken and seafood.
34:22
But it's really like a supply a supply side story.
34:28
That may be more pork than even China can eat.
34:29
The average Chinese person guzzled 28 kg of it in 2024, but that was 2 kg less than in 2023.
34:34
Uh to boost prices, officials have slashed subsidies, ordered farms to cull droves, and told the pork reserve to buy more meat to little effect.
34:43
Some big firms are looking elsewhere. >> That is wild.
34:47
>> Uh China's biggest pig producer hopes to export its business model instead.
34:48
Last year, it said it would bring the first high-rise uh it would build the first high-rise in Vietnam uh capable of rearing 1. 6 million swine a year.
34:57
Pig farms are going vertical as profits flatline.
35:02
And so, they are moving the pigs inside, which is what which is, you know, winding up with lot with like increased yields because uh the the pigs aren't getting sick.
35:13
Anyway, um America's new best new weapon in Iran is a drone inspired by Iran.
35:18
Uh you had asked about this on one interview we did with some >> Yeah, I forget who it was with, but I was I was in you know, I was surprised to see the US copying the Shahed because it feels like You were surprised to see them copying it or not copying it?
35:34
No, it it feels like entirely the smart move. It's battle-tested. They're cheap.
35:42
Uh we we have a good understanding of their capability because American allies have faced off against them.
35:47
So, there's a lot of reasons that it that it makes sense, but uh I I feel like America had to swallow its pride to some degree uh to to copy, you know, something that you know, the the enemy made.
35:59
Yeah, they're calling it the Toyota Corolla of drones.
36:05
Uh the powerful, low-cost attack drone the US is using in its war with Iran doesn't come from one of America's more than 400 venture-backed drone startups and isn't the product of Silicon Valley ingenuity.
36:16
Instead, the drone having its moment in the Middle East conflict was designed by the US military itself using reverse-engineered Iranian technology.
36:24
From the earliest days of the war, the FLM 136, or Lucas as it is known, has been wiping out Iranian military targets while better-funded hardware systems and drones from defense startups have had little involvement.
36:37
It is a victory for the US military, which went from blueprint to battle-ready drone in less than 2 years, jettisoning its tradition of slowly buying very expensive equipment.
36:46
The creation of Lucas is an early proof point of a new >> violation.
36:52
new strategy of making cheap drones quickly, and a sign that the Pentagon can change the way it does business to better prepare for modern conflict.
36:59
So, I I want to know so much more about like So, they're not subcontracting this at all?
37:04
Is this all like is the entire supply chain uh the the US military itself?
37:09
Are they milling the parts in factories that they built?
37:13
>> during the Biden administration, a small group in the Defense Department seized on the idea of America building its own version of the Iranian Shahed, a fearsome attack drone that militaries and proxy militias across the globe have sought to duplicate.
37:23
Ruch Russia, which is lobbing about 4,000 modified Shaheds at Ukraine every month, according to Ukrainian government data, did more than any other country to demonstrate the drone's capabilities.
37:33
A small team in the US military's research and engineering office put together plans to build an attack drone based on deconstructing a Shahed the military had recovered from Ukraine.
37:41
It was the first known occasion in around half a century that the US had reverse-engineered another country's military technology for its own use, former defense official said.
37:50
The last time it was a Soviet-made pontoon bridge. Interesting.
37:53
A former senior defense official described Lucas, which stands for low-cost unmanned combat attack system, as the Toyota Corolla of drones.
38:02
It may not have all the features or top-end components, but it was built to be affordable and plentiful.
38:08
The cost of Lucas ranges from 10,000 to 55,000.
38:10
That's a big range, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
38:13
In line with the Iranian model, Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles, several hundred of which which been used in the war with Iran, cut at least 2 million, cost at least 2 million a piece.
38:25
Um The Defense Department is committed to scaling cost-effective autonomous solutions for the joint force, and Lucas continues to be a prime example, the spokesman said.
38:32
Former senior Pentagon official Michael Horowitz, who is one of the leaders of the team that developed Lucas, said that other militaries had the ability to make their own low-cost long-range precision strike weapons.
38:41
The issue was the US was spending nothing, zero dollars, on that kind of system.
38:46
Uh who now who he's now on the Council on Foreign Relations.
38:50
Lucas was given a spot in uh a in 2024 in a Biden-era initiative to field thousands of autonomous weapons by last August.
38:58
Its inclusion was controversial, said former military officials.
39:02
Lucas just wasn't just a mock-up, but it beat out more mature systems on the offering. Interesting.
39:09
Uh because the government owns Lucas's intellectual property, it is using the same approach it employed in building ships during World War II, enlisting a cross-section of second- and third-tier manufacturers, okay, who crank out the drones on demand during wartime.
39:23
Little-known Scottsdale, Arizona-based Specter Works in Huntsville, Alabama Alabama-based Integration Innovation were tapped to build the drones.
39:32
So, they are partnering with um uh with uh private companies to actually do uh build and assembly of these drones.
39:39
Uh a total of five manufacturers will be selected, each set up to produce 300 drones a month, a former senior defense official familiar with the plan said.
39:47
Specter Works and Integration Innovation didn't respond request for comment.
39:50
Uh the Marine Corps was first to use the drones and then ordered around 6,000 destined for the Indo-Pacific.
39:55
Uh but then the war with Iran began.
39:56
The drones were handed over to US CENTCOM in February and made their first appearance in combat.
40:01
The Trump administration has enacted sweeping reforms in defense procurement, making it easier for the military to quickly buy weapons and emphasizing commercial technology to modernize the US arsenal.
40:12
Uh in particular, it in August decision by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to rescind long-held requirements, processes for acquiring technology made the rapid deployment of Lucas possible, current and former defense officials say.
40:24
Still, other changes will take longer to trickle through the Pentagon's bureaucracy, and it will take time to reorient America's to a new way of fighting wars, even as China is developing advanced ways to strike the US.
40:37
While Lucas has been a success against Iran's degraded air defenses, that isn't a guarantee it will be a battlefield star in more complex environments, uh an electronic warfare expert said.
40:47
Um in the Middle East, there is no meaningful jamming of GPS, which can cause drones to crash or fly off course.
40:53
Every technology gets defeated at some point, he said.
40:57
There's still a worrisome There's still There's also still a worrisome lack of cheap US counter-drone technology, which has allowed Iranian-backed militias to continue using small drones to menace US military bases in the Middle East.
41:10
Uh the small number of unmanned surface vessels in the region are still years away from being uh the autonomous fighting machines their manufacturers have promised.
41:19
The absence of a broader supply of modern US cheap US systems in the Iran war has served as a wake-up call.
41:25
We're not ready, said Julie Bush, co-founder of the defense tech firm Valinor Enterprises and a former Palantir Technologies executive, uh who's been on the show.
41:33
Uh the government doesn't have what it needs to scale that they What it needs at the scale that they need it.
41:42
>> did you see that uh AGM post Antonio Garcia Martinez said about uh how maybe there are actually ships that are going through the Strait of Hormuz right now, but they just turn off all of their transponders?
41:52
Yeah, I I mean, I think the the estimate is around 10 10 ships a day are going through, down from 100 pre-war. >> Yeah.
42:03
Uh but there could be more that just aren't the that again have their transponder turned off.
42:08
>> Yeah, he was saying something about like people will turn off the transponders even when they find like good fishing spots because they don't want other people to find their good fishing spots and so it's done more than more than people think I guess.
42:22
But Satrini is over there.
42:22
Satrini research analyst made it over to the Strait of Hormuz in an absolutely insane move and some real crazy investigative journalism going on.
42:33
I'm hoping to have Satrini on.
42:35
I obviously want to be secure about whatever is shared because it does seem like a risky proposition to be over there right now.
42:45
But love seeing them love seeing the reporting so far. Another tech news.
42:51
Anthropic is making its own splash with an acquisition.
42:53
This was on Thursday, April 2nd.
42:55
$400 million for Coefficient Bio started last fall developing an AI drug R&D platform.
43:01
The startup's team will be joining Anthropic's health care life sciences group which is aimed at developing tools for biotech workflows ranging from drug discovery to clinical tests. Very exciting.
43:13
Dimension Capital owned over 50%.
43:16
Who is Dimension Capital?
43:16
Have we had them on the show? I don't think so. We probably should.
43:22
>> Well, that feels like a a multi-stage research-oriented investment firm partnering with companies across the frontiers of science and compute. Well, huge win for them. Congrats to the firm.
43:33
>> bad not bad at all for 6 months.
43:33
There's also an article in the Wall Street Journal about OpenAI and Anthropic's finances reveal challenge from Berber Jin scoop god.
43:43
OpenAI and Anthropic are racing toward potentially record-breaking IPOs by the end of the year.
43:50
An inside look at the financials of both companies prior to funding rounds completed earlier this year show their Achilles heel, the soaring costs needed to train new AI models.
44:01
OpenAI expects to spend $121 billion dollars computing power for AI research in 2028.
44:07
Uh that means the company anticipates burning 85 billion that year even even after almost doubling sales from the years prior.
44:14
Uh such losses would would dwarf that of virtually any other public company in history.
44:21
Anthropic doesn't expect to spend nearly as much, but its rosiest forecasts tell a similar story of mounting computing costs.
44:27
Both companies are releasing new versions of their AI models at fast at a faster cadence than ever before while pouring more resources into the training runs that create them.
44:38
The arms race is showing no signs of slowing.
44:40
Yeah, so pull pull up this chart from Andrew Curran.
44:42
This is from the Wall Street Journal piece.
44:47
Uh projected OpenAI and Anthropic model training spend for the remainder of this decade in billions.
44:50
The Wall Street Journal says they got the data from financial documents shared with investors.
44:55
So, yeah, I think I mean obviously uh absolutely wild numbers here.
45:01
I I think uh this is for training specifically, which is a cost that uh that that can be adjusted. Yeah.
45:09
Uh >> This is a question of like uh yeah, like like each model by itself is profitable, but you keep having to spend more on the bigger model, Tyler.
45:19
What do you think about that?
45:21
This is like um emblematic of like the the Dworkin's critique of Dario, right?
45:24
Where that he's like if you basically compare OpenAI and Anthropic like Dario's being way more conservative about spending.
45:29
Like he's like, "Oh, well, we don't want to Yeah.
45:32
you know, go broke or whatever." But yeah.
45:34
I mean, when when you see the the chart like this, it's like pretty crazy.
45:37
Was it the the YOLO philosophy?
45:37
Uh it does seem like there's there's a debate internal uh at OpenAI according to the information around uh uh IPO timing.
45:47
This is from the the the information uh from Anissa Good Guardizzi and Amira Fati.
45:52
OpenAI's CEO and CFO diverge on IPO timing.
45:56
Sam Altman has committed OpenAI to spend 600 billion dollars in the next 5 years and privately said he wants to go public as soon as the fourth quarter despite expectations his company will burn more than 200 billion before it starts generating cash.
46:09
Behind the scenes, according to The Information, Sarah Friar, his chief financial officer, has voiced concerns that reflect the tensions and risk inherent in the CEO's extraordinarily ambitious plans.
46:19
Open AI is committing billions of dollars a year in advance to help finance data centers.
46:26
Friar last year began reporting to the head of applications instead of Altman.
46:29
Altman has excluded her from some conversations related to financial plans.
46:33
And so, you can go to The Information to read more about that story, but uh it is uh it is extremely high stakes.
46:40
There's In general, the uh the AI companies have like are they railroads? Are they SaaS companies?
46:47
There's this incredible capex. Are they both?
46:51
How do you Yeah, no one really has consensus here yet, and it feels like there's a there's an ongoing divergence in how do you how do you model these financially?
47:01
How much risk should you uh should you take?
47:04
There's also this question of like the end of the curve, the end of this of this of the exponential.
47:09
We're seeing this exponential growth in model capability relative to investment dollars.
47:14
The scaling laws have held for a long time, but at the same time you can't just throw endless money because at a certain point you don't want to spend a trillion dollars to get like one more IQ point out of the model.
47:28
There is a limit to this, and so Yeah, yeah.
47:30
If you're thinking about like hiring If you're thinking about like hiring an employee, it's like, "Okay, so this this one individual is you know, their their their base salary is going to be 200K a year, or you could you could you could hire this other person, uh and they're they're one IQ point smarter, but you have to you have it's going to cost you $5 million $5 million a year.
47:48
The the choice is is obvious."
47:51
So, we'll see we'll see when we get to that We'll see when we get to that point.
47:54
Overall, I think like tensions between uh this is not the first time there's been tension between a CFO and like and an ambitious CEO.
48:03
And so Have you ever hired a CFO at any of your companies? >> No. Wow. Got it. No.
48:07
Uh we hired a CFO at our at my first company and it was a it was an awesome experience actually.
48:15
But the tension was insane.
48:18
But but I was not I was not the CEO and so the CFO came in and she had taken multiple companies public and was like this is just a widgets business. This is so simple.
48:26
Like we should just be like running this sufficiently and of course there was like a big debate about that.
48:33
She's she was very very formative in my early business career.
48:38
Uh >> Yeah, it's interesting because that was that was you know consumer packaged goods company but with a lot of Silicon Valley venture capital jammed into it.
48:46
So the pressure from the board was one thing and then you have the CFO who's saying, "Hey, we're selling And yeah, and so much organic growth but the the the the nature of uh like Soylent and consumer packaged goods like it it's not a fundamentally different business at the end of the day.
49:02
Like it does just become a marketing manufacturing margin game and you eventually trade on EBITDA.
49:08
And so um the uh the what what do they call it?
49:13
The reality distortion field doesn't quite apply.
49:17
But when you're dealing with an entirely new technology, uh it's a whole different discussion. Yeah.
49:23
Uh anyway, there's another article in the Wall Street Journal about the new jobs that are being created by AI.
49:28
Uh let's go through this.
49:31
So AI is raising big fears about uh employment losses but it's also giving rise to new engineering and training jobs.
49:36
And uh we're going to have uh Liz Hoffman from Semaphore on the show later to talk about the March jobs data.
49:45
Uh there was a massive jobs beat and uh a whole bunch of more jobs added to the economy but the chart is crazy.
49:53
It's like up and down every quarter.
49:55
There's Yeah, the tough thing that you know, every single jobs report has been revised downwards so massively that it's hard to look at a new jobs report and and actually get excited when you have a print like that.
50:09
So yeah, this time it's different.
50:10
Like the last 12 have been revised downward.
50:15
And then now you have a war and major geopolitical tensions and this weird dynamic where the oil prices are driving gas prices which is driving inflation which is maybe going to cause less driving based vacations over the summer, less tourism.
50:31
Like you could see inflation plus some economic weakness regardless of what the technology industry is doing.
50:37
And so you could wind up with a situation where rates have to stay high and so that creates unemployment and it's a it's a rough time to be a Fed governor, I'm sure.
50:47
But let's dig in to what the Wall Street Journal is talking about the where different jobs are playing a part here.
50:55
So artificial intelligence has sparked fears it will become a job killer.
50:59
There's also a research paper, I don't know, PDF from Open AI today around the social contract and how the government should be thinking about redistribution and the safety net in the age of AGI.
51:16
It's a long document and honestly I haven't had a chance to read it yet but we will go through some of that later this week. I saw one response.
51:20
Someone just said just put the just put the tokens in the bag, bro.
51:27
But we'll we'll we'll read it and we'll we'll cover it.
51:29
Oh yeah, we'll figure it out.
51:31
And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it maps on to like previous political platforms. Like who picks it up?
51:36
Because like there's obviously a collection of political ideas and and and various politicians might say, "Hey, I've been saying that for a long time. I like that."
51:45
or hey like I don't I I completely disagree with that.
51:47
I I have a different philosophy.
51:48
Uh but we'll we'll we'll work through it.
51:50
Uh so, it's also AI is also fueling a crop of new careers.
51:55
AI created 640,000 jobs between uh 2023 and 2025 in the US according to an analysis by LinkedIn of job posting data including new white-collar positions such as head of AI and AI engineer.
52:09
That tally doesn't include the huge number of temporary construction jobs tied to building the mammoth data centers AI relies on.
52:16
And I'm wondering how temporary will they be if the ramp I mean if the if the capex ramp continues and you know, you're going to build 10 times as many data centers, you would imagine there's 10 times as many construction jobs.
52:31
>> construction jobs are temporary, right?
52:33
You build you build a house. >> Yes. Job is over.
52:34
You move and build the next one. Yeah.
52:38
Uh so, LinkedIn's head of economics, Corey uh Cantenga, says uh we're not talking enough about uh we're not talking about enough jobs to change the direction of the labor market, but for AI roles, growth has been pretty much straight up.
52:53
And Citadel had something to say.
52:55
>> for and for roles like AI engineer, to me that was just you were going to hire an engineer and you're slapping AI on the front of it because you want somebody that is excited about >> Yeah, just somebody that's that's excited about AI.
53:06
Yeah, and maybe more green field projects, maybe something that's uh you know, the it's it's like the new full stack.
53:13
Like no longer are you hiring like a back-end engineer, front-end engineer necessarily.
53:18
Like you you might be hiring someone who's more flexible. What do you have there?
53:23
I love how the the first example, this guy Zach who they're who they're profiling in this, the first the first picture of him is just him with a surfboard running into the ocean. Hey, surfing after work.
53:33
He's He's got a good work-life balance.
53:35
Let's read the >> That looks like the middle of the day to me.
53:38
Look look at the you know, just look at look at where the light is, John. That's not after work.
53:43
>> You You know another word about surfing.
53:45
I don't want you getting canceled again for being anti-surfing.
53:50
Post What were you You were anti-surfing before work?
53:52
>> I was saying surfing in really cold water before work. >> Always bad.
53:55
It has not worked well for me. >> Okay, for you.
53:59
>> Apparently, there's people out there. >> really mad at you. That uh Yeah. Death threats. Yeah.
54:04
Did you get death threats, man? No. You just got dunked on. It's fine. It happens.
54:08
Uh Zack Kinsler, who's 25 years old, got his master's degree in business analytics less than 2 years ago.
54:16
Uh he In February, he assumed the title of head of human AI solutions at Boodle Box, an AI education startup based in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
54:23
His His job involves client training in using AI to speed up tasks for coworkers. That is a good gig.
54:31
Uh Kinsler works remotely from San Diego, wanted to work with AI, and says he feels lucky to land in a growing field.
54:39
about whether artificial intelligence is good or bad needs to go away because it's not going to go away, he said.
54:43
One of the biggest questions facing a shaky US labor market has been that has been especially hard on white-collar workers is whether AI's ability to mimic human skills like research, writing, and coding will cause significant layoffs.
54:57
Big cuts at Oracle this week, while the company invests heavily in AI data centers, underscored some of these worries.
55:03
Corporate leaders, including some in the tech world, have issued grim forecasts about AI's potential to replace white-collar workers at a massive scale.
55:11
According to a recent Goldman Sachs research report, AI could automate tasks that account for a quarter of all working hours in the United States, especially in fields such as administrative support, legal work, and architecture and engineering.
55:24
Uh one one interesting picture I was hearing, I think it was from the Open AI doc, was uh go like, you know, there I think it was during the Industrial Revolution, the unions lobbied for the the weekend, the idea of the weekend, and that just became a thing and stuck around forever basically.
55:44
And and and so there's a question about like, you know, do we pitch a four-day work work week somehow nationally, some like, you know, bigger thing? I don't know.
55:52
There's all these interesting like competitive dynamics and obviously people wind up working on the weekends because they're like, I want to outcompete the other >> David Sacks is like, I want all my enemies to move to a four-day work week immediately so they can properly relax and recover. >> actually.
56:04
Mandate that for everyone except me.
56:06
Uh still analysts say it's hard to judge how many job cuts thus far are genuinely attributable to AI and which are being made for financial or operational reasons.
56:14
This is something we've been going back and forth on forever.
56:17
A new survey of 750 chief financial officers found that AI had essentially no negative employment effect in 2025.
56:28
Uh but data show employers are increasingly hiring for AI talent.
56:29
In 2023, AI-related roles made up only 1.
56:33
6% of all job postings according to an AI job tracker co-led by Anil Gupta, professor at the University of Maryland's Robert H.
56:42
Smith School of Business, and job market company data company Linkup.
56:46
Never heard of that before.
56:47
Uh two years later that figure had more than doubled to 3.
56:49
4% of all AI of of all job postings being AI-related.
56:57
Uh one rising job is head of AI. That's a good gig.
57:00
In the three years from 2023 to 2025, companies sought to fill 225,000 such jobs.
57:08
There are now 225,000 heads of AI.
57:11
>> You need 20 years of of experience prior for most of these jobs, which is Maybe.
57:18
tough tough to put that together. Uh no, I'm joking.
57:20
We should we should talk about China's uh what what what's happening in the Chinese AI talent race over in The Economist.
57:30
>> Yes, Dave Rubin was talking about this on stage at Hill and Valley about how there's been this like big flipping flip winning from where research is coming from.
57:40
The the headline stat is something like 50% Where is it? 50% Where Okay.
57:49
This was from Jensen Huang at Nvidia.
57:49
He said, "Is it possible that the United States falls behind China?"
57:55
He asked himself a question during a question and answer session about artificial intelligence late last year.
58:00
He says, "The The answer is absolutely yes.
58:01
That may seem surprising.
58:04
For much of the last decade, America has been comfortably ahead in the AI race, home to the most advanced companies producing frontier models.
58:12
Its engineers have access to deep pools of capital as well as a regular supply of Nvidia's cutting-edge chips. But Mr.
58:17
Huang's concern related to an equally important ingredient of innovation, human talent.
58:26
Until recently, most leading AI research was produced by experts based in the West. That is changing.
58:31
In 2025, for the first time, more studies presented at the world's top AI conference had lead authors based in China.
58:39
Tyler, what do you you you have more questions?
58:42
>> mean I think this is just misleading, right?
58:43
Because >> Okay, explain.
58:45
A lot of the best researchers researchers in the US are are studying, but they're not putting that work in the studies.
58:52
>> You can see if you scroll down on that article a little bit more, you can see a chart where the US like between 2015 and 2020 it like looks like it's starting to go exponential and then basically plateaus, right?
59:01
Because all the best researchers basically go to the labs and then they you don't publish anymore.
59:06
Wait, so which chart are you referring to?
59:08
The one in I'm looking in the Economist.
59:12
>> Is it called active AI researchers in the thousands? Yes. Student early career.
59:16
And so in the in the United States it's growing and then in up until 2021 and then it stagnates because all the labs went closed Yeah, and all the Chinese labs are open source.
59:27
>> Are still open source, yeah.
59:27
So, yeah, I I I think that's a uh I don't know.
59:31
That That's That That's a very reasonable mitigating point here.
59:35
There is just the question of like do you still need a pipeline of open source researchers of a robust research uh practice?
59:45
Also, like if if you're in the Ilya Sutskever camp of like the age of research, maybe you do need a bunch of bizarre ideas that are happening and you get like more >> I mean Ilya is like definitely not publishing, right? Oh, true.
59:57
>> He's like even more secretive than >> Yeah, yeah, but I I I think you could like expand from that into uh into like the the like there might be interesting um like knock-on research that gets pulled from random places and like the cross-pollination is valuable and even
1:00:16
if he's not a practitioner of that, you can still make the argument that uh research is valuable and cross-pollination is also valuable and China does have that >> Yeah, I I I just think like if you look at China, like there's the anecdotal evidence of like what happened to the Quan researchers, right? Like, you know,
1:00:29
Like, you know, the people running that company are just like not >> Do we ever find out if they went to XAI or not? What's going on?
1:00:35
I I don't think we know yet. >> know yet.
1:00:37
But like clearly like something is like different about how they think about researchers than in the US, right?
1:00:42
Because those guys are like extremely good. Yeah.
1:00:46
>> And somehow there was some reorg happening.
1:00:49
The chat is demanding an ad break.
1:00:52
We'll We'll figure it out.
1:00:52
Uh a lot of people were saying that you know, the ads were were part of the program.
1:00:55
We will figure out a way to do something ad related.
1:00:59
Uh until now, you have to put up with uh some random soundboard.
1:01:04
And that's the best I can do for you.
1:01:04
Uh but there is a different article in The Economist.
1:01:09
People We were just watching for the ads, I guess.
1:01:11
Um uh China's new master plan for its tech economy in uh 2030 and beyond.
1:01:15
And so, uh they have uh This is the 15th 5-year plan for China's economic development.
1:01:24
This was adopted in March and the economist is breaking it down.
1:01:26
It talks of industrial upgrading, new quality productive forces, and the like.
1:01:30
Yet, in plain language, it translates into Elon Musk's fever dream.
1:01:34
So, China wants to build skies dotted with flying taxis, fusion power fueling factories manned by humanoid robots, unstoppable quantum computers, 6G mobile devices plugged directly into people's brains.
1:01:49
It's a dream come true for you, Jordy.
1:01:53
Are you going to You're going to renounce your citizenship? >> What? Yeah. You're like, yeah. No cap. Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Yeah, sign me up. Sign me up. Uh no, >> 6G.
1:02:05
but there's I mean, obviously, they're taking they're taking like frontier sci-fi development very, very seriously, and it has a lot of knock-on effects.
1:02:13
So, uh past plans also displayed gumption.
1:02:15
In 2015, the most high-profile plan in years, dubbed China Made in 20 Made in China 2025, set the goal of catching up with America and ending reliance on foreign technology.
1:02:27
But, catching up while China which China has pulled off in areas like electric cars, clean energy, and even artificial intelligence is one thing.
1:02:34
Dominating technology of the future is another. Can they do it?
1:02:38
One reason for this breathtaking ambition is the desire of Xi Jinping, China's leader, to rush to usher in a modernized socialist state by 2035.
1:02:47
Remember, he thinks he's going to live to I think 150.
1:02:50
He was caught on maybe some hot mic saying.
1:02:52
So, he's thinking in centuries still.
1:02:57
Uh a modernized Chinese socialist is generating >> he knew he was mic'd up, and he wanted to kind of downplay how he's thinking, right?
1:03:06
He thought He thought He In his In his head, he's like, "Oh, easily a thousand." Easily a thousand. >> don't hit 1K.
1:03:12
>> Yeah, but he's like, "I don't want to sound crazy."
1:03:13
>> don't want to sound too crazy.
1:03:13
Got got him something believable. Ball parking.
1:03:18
Uh so currently a modernized Chinese Chinese socialist is one generating between 20,000 and 30,000 USD in economic value per year.
1:03:26
That's up from less than $14,000 today.
1:03:33
So in 2035 they want to be more than double what they are today at 14,000.
1:03:37
Sorry, I had that backwards.
1:03:37
Uh to meet that goal itself a step towards China becoming a modernized socialist world power by 2049 uh the centennial of communist rule.
1:03:47
Uh GDP per person must grow 4 to 8% a year in the next decade with Chinese consumers in a dour mood and exporters facing geopolitical uncertainty.
1:03:56
The party believes only world-beating technology and resulting productivity gains can ensure success.
1:04:03
So that requires picking up the pace, says the economist.
1:04:07
Whereas earlier plans set distinctive objectives for strategic industries and for scientific innovation industrial policy is now being extended to out there tech, notes Camille of Rhodium, a research firm.
1:04:21
The latest plan ordains the commercialization of fledgling fields like AI robots, hydrogen power, and brain computer interfaces all in the next 5 years.
1:04:29
Within another 5 the party wants breakthroughs in Apple >> you John, but chat is saying Ryan and Jeff are saying put a scroller of the guest schedule. >> Oh, that's good.
1:04:42
Uh put the guest schedule on the scroller yeah I think is good. Okay.
1:04:45
And then Nick says where should we go to save both time and money? You know where to go? brand. com baby.
1:04:56
Time is money, save both.
1:04:56
Use these corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.
1:04:59
You know I'm not going to forget the ad reads.
1:05:03
I I still have the Tim my daughter has.
1:05:05
>> off a lot to me over the weekend.
1:05:05
It was just It was just just for the two of us. Yes. Subliminal ad reads. This will happen.
1:05:14
Um The point of the plan is to signal to officials and investors which initiative to back.
1:05:18
This unlocks funds from central and local governments.
1:05:20
Private capital follows on the assumption state involvement reduces risk.
1:05:23
Research clusters attract not just technologists and money, but also marketers, lawyers, and other professionals needed to take tech from the lab into markets.
1:05:31
Host cities enlist armies of bureaucrats whom who develop domain expertise.
1:05:36
Proponents of Chinese tech no planning point to AI as proof that it works for cutting-edge innovation when in 2020 2017 China declared its intention to enter the global high-end value chain for AI by 2025. Foreigners scoffed.
1:05:51
Have they Have they succeeded in entering the global high-end value chain for AI by 2025? No.
1:06:04
Ah, global I mean, the uh When I think global high-end value chain, I think semiconductors? Yeah. Yeah. Not quite.
1:06:13
>> the actual end product.
1:06:15
>> I mean, the video model is really good. See dance. Totally.
1:06:18
>> But that's you know, maybe not the maybe that doesn't count as the high-end value chain? I don't know.
1:06:22
Anyway, let's let's see what the the economist has say.
1:06:25
In January last year, Western markets shuddered when Deep Seek, an AI lab, released a model that rivaled top American ones.
1:06:32
No one is scoffing at the new goal of turning China into {quote} the world's primary AI innovation center. I'm scoffing. Are you scoffing? Scoffed up. Scoffed up. What do you think? >> Yeah, I'm scoffing.
1:06:47
>> You're scoffing, right?
1:06:48
>> reason that China Chinese AI is good is because they're just distilling on American models. Like we know this. This is like true now.
1:06:52
Like we know this for sure.
1:06:55
And And the reason that the video models are good is because they don't they don't follow IP. Yes. Yeah. This is not cope.
1:07:01
Yeah, I don't think this is cope.
1:07:03
I I I think the economist is coping. Oh well.
1:07:08
Um they are they are doing a lot of other things though.
1:07:12
So, early results in several other areas look encouraging too.
1:07:14
The low-altitude economy, ooh, new buzzword, new coinage.
1:07:20
We got the orbital economy up in space, we got the low-altitude economy of delivery drones and flying cabs born of private sector ingenuity took off after capturing the attention of official dumb uh around 2021.
1:07:31
State imprimatur for brain computer interfaces first named a future industry in 2024 and a subject of its own plan in late 2025 has led universities to set up research projects and startups to launch products.
1:07:44
Cities host specialist industrial zones and hospitals have published pricing guidelines for brain implants.
1:07:51
That's uh they're moving quick.
1:07:54
Um I I would I would expect that the low-altitude economy does very very well.
1:07:58
I mean, DJI's super legit.
1:08:00
Of course, they're going to have to compete with um all of the different I mean, not really compete because I I doubt that they're going to >> DJI have any delivery-focused products?
1:08:10
Um I don't know, but I mean, Zipline just raised more money. They're doing very well.
1:08:14
Google has a project and there's there's a whole bunch of other >> has DJI Flycart 100.
1:08:20
>> Okay, I wonder what the scale is specifically >> specifically for it's a 85-kg max payload capacity. Yeah.
1:08:27
12 kg uh kilometer max flight >> that's something that doesn't I mean, it requires like innovation, but really it's like a lot of manufacturing and regulatory.
1:08:35
Like, it's not necessarily frontier research.
1:08:39
>> I when I looked at yeah, looking at the top of their looking at the top of their plan, it's like they wanted to do electric cars, clean energy, and AI. Mhm.
1:08:47
They have absolutely crushed it for the most part. So, For sure.
1:08:49
Skepticism is warranted, however. Thank you, economist.
1:08:54
We will be skeptics here.
1:08:54
Uh earlier plans including Made in China 2025 missed many goals. It doesn't feel like it.
1:09:00
It feels like they crushed that one. They made everything.
1:09:02
Uh China beats the world in renewables tech renewables tech and electric cars and matches it in AI, debatable, but lags behind in critical areas like advanced chips.
1:09:13
Capital ends up wasted if it flows to places in which local official local officials duplicate efforts elsewhere chase industries despite a lack of tech talent or and or are loath to abandon failures.
1:09:24
China's apparent desire to dominate every emerging emerging industry may spread resources too thinly.
1:09:30
Making a hoo-ha about the plans does not help. Uh-oh, we're in trouble.
1:09:35
Made in China 2025 spooked America, which saw it as a challenge to its techno-economic dominance.
1:09:39
It hobbled Chinese efforts in areas like chip making by restricting exports of of crucial American inputs, the ASML lithography machines, of course.
1:09:50
There is now talk of Made in China 2035, but any technology named in the latest plan can still expect a target on its back.
1:09:57
Talk of using find unconventional measures to achieve the plan's goals will not put Americans' minds at ease.
1:10:06
The biggest challenge for Chinese planners is a function of their catch-up success.
1:10:09
Those occurred in fields where the technology, like photovoltaic cells or lithium-ion batteries, had been around for decades and the market for electricity or cars was mature.
1:10:16
Moving to tech's bleeding edge involves a lot more unknowns.
1:10:20
Is there a business case for hydrogen power?
1:10:22
How many people will want brain implants? This guy. This guy over here. Sign me up.
1:10:30
Can quantum computers and fusion even be made to work outside the lab?
1:10:34
China's plans implies it knows the answer.
1:10:36
Market forces may have other ideas. Interesting.
1:10:39
Well, we have some advice for young men in China who are trying to unseat America's techno-capitalist dominance.
1:10:44
This comes from Shawn Frank.
1:10:47
He gives 25 practical tips to improve your life. Let's run through them.
1:10:52
He says he's about to have his first son, so congratulations to Shawn Frank over at Ridge.
1:10:55
Here's what he wished he learned earlier in life and I want your agree or disagree.
1:10:59
So, a $40 to $90 water flosser can save you a minimum of $4,000 on dental work. Use it every day.
1:11:08
Are you a water pick guy?
1:11:11
>> Does Sean have a Is Sean an investor in Waterpik?
1:11:13
I guess cordless advanced 2. 0 water flosser.
1:11:16
I heard really good things.
1:11:18
I've never done Have you ever used a Waterpik?
1:11:19
Uh when I had braces, I used it. I do the analog.
1:11:23
I actually I actually floss, but I use the the physical floss, but maybe maybe I should get one of these. I don't know. He speaks highly of it.
1:11:31
Are you a big cavity guy? No.
1:11:34
Have you ever got a cavity?
1:11:34
Maybe once or something, but they're No, I I do pretty well.
1:11:38
I like brushing my teeth.
1:11:38
I feel I feel like it's refreshing.
1:11:40
Uh two, learn something people will pay you for.
1:11:45
Sports are awesome, college will be fun, but you need to learn a skill that the market values. It can be anything.
1:11:49
A locksmith will have a better life than a master's in archaeology. Taking shots.
1:11:58
Didn't you take a dinosaur class? I did. I did. I did. >> Wow, okay.
1:12:02
>> I studied for at least one semester for a specific requirement.
1:12:06
A student >> You're basically an archaeologist.
1:12:08
You should get a master's in archaeology.
1:12:12
Yeah, it is interesting because because if you want to make, you know, $40,000 a year and spend all your time thinking about dinosaurs and that is what you qualify as as a great life, then you're probably going to have a much better time much better life than, you know, being a locksmith.
1:12:27
So, And and I think we were predicting that like you know, everyone's wondering like where where where where where will Jordie where will John go as as influencers and I think like the logical place was that you'd become a member of the datasphere, sort of like the manosphere, but for fatherhood.
1:12:43
And a a true knowledge of dinosaurs is pretty key to rearing a child, especially a young boy.
1:12:52
>> Yeah, I would >> say when I became a dad >> Yeah.
1:12:55
I struggled intensely early on with pronouncing Yes. >> Yes. of different dinosaurs. Right, there's hundreds. >> Yes.
1:13:03
They have these names that are all just kind of like mashed together.
1:13:05
It seems like they're always making new dinosaurs.
1:13:08
You're you're getting >> They renamed a bunch of those, too.
1:13:11
>> have like over 50 different dinosaur books.
1:13:14
We were lied to in Jurassic Park.
1:13:15
The Velociraptor is the size of a chicken. I know.
1:13:18
That's one of the biggest That's one of the biggest kind of like Yeah.
1:13:22
This is I think they I think they refer to it as like the red pill.
1:13:25
It's like the red pill moment where you realize like everything you learned in school was a lie.
1:13:31
Like when you learn the Velociraptor is the >> a chicken with, you know, bunch of feathers >> you question everything. Yeah.
1:13:38
>> Makes you question everything.
1:13:38
It starts a lot of conspiratorial thinking, for sure. Sure does.
1:13:41
Okay, what about this one?
1:13:43
Number three, just buy timeless brands.
1:13:45
Head-to-toe Ralph Lauren looks good in 1990, 2010, 2020, and it will look good in 2030.
1:13:51
You have no idea when this photo was taken.
1:13:54
Could be this week, last year, or 2004. It was 2004. What do you think?
1:13:59
Timeless brands, bullish bearish?
1:14:02
Yeah, I think I think a millennial late millennial early Gen Z forgot about the timeless brands because there were so many new D2C brands for every possible category.
1:14:12
But I think Ralph Lauren and and some of the other classics have just continued uh have continued to cook. >> Yeah. So.
1:14:22
Uh if it doesn't matter, buy a second-hand.
1:14:23
My best friend spends less than 500 per year on clothes and shoes, gets by just fine.
1:14:29
This applies to most things.
1:14:31
Oh, buy second-hand clothes.
1:14:31
But your wedding suit, let's just buy new, dude. Uh be funny. Being funny is a skill. You can get funnier.
1:14:38
You can learn to be funnier.
1:14:40
People like you more if you have a sense of humor.
1:14:42
You will get dates by being funny.
1:14:43
These those dates will go better if you are funny.
1:14:45
In 180 days you will be top 5% funny and your life will be 60% better. >> selling something?
1:14:52
How How is that possible?
1:14:53
Is he selling a a course on humor?
1:14:57
I This is a crazy thing to learn.
1:15:01
I don't even know what he's talking about.
1:15:02
>> I can guarantee you'll be in the top 5% funny or your money back. Funny mastermind. Is he on intro. com? I want to sign up.
1:15:12
We need to get him to coach us.
1:15:13
This is He's certainly funny with this post.
1:15:15
Uh be the friend you wish you had. Everyone is lonely.
1:15:18
Everyone is sitting at home more than they want.
1:15:20
Just do things and invite people.
1:15:22
It isn't weird or cringe if they feel that it's on them.
1:15:23
Text people out of nowhere and wish them well.
1:15:27
Uh don't wait around for someone to invite you on their adventure. Time for a side quest.
1:15:30
You have to make the life you want.
1:15:32
It's okay to leave everyone behind and go do something cool.
1:15:35
Don't feel obligations to people who are trying to hold you back. Forget about your hair. I SWEAR. >> WOAH. WOAH. WOAH.
1:15:40
HE'S TAKING insane shots of me.
1:15:44
>> before I think that I think I've figured out why Sean's doing this. He's a very busy guy. He's got a kid.
1:15:50
He's running a business with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.
1:15:54
He's launching new brands. All this stuff.
1:15:56
So so I think this entire list is trying to He sees some of some of the young guns kind of nipping at his heels a little bit and he's like I need to I need to distract them. I need to distract them.
1:16:06
I need to I need to throw them off the the scent. >> it.
1:16:10
Well, he's taking shots at me with number eight.
1:16:11
He says being tall doesn't matter. Being lean does.
1:16:15
Yeah, I mean this is a good point though.
1:16:16
He says you have no control over your height and honestly it's just cope to care.
1:16:19
I'm 5'8" or 5'9" and height has never been a factor in anything I do.
1:16:24
But you do need to be physically strong.
1:16:25
Everyone needs to be able to do a pull-up. That's a good point.
1:16:26
But with with inserts he could be 6'1" 6'2" cowboy boots cowboy hats.
1:16:31
He could be up 6'3" 6'4" >> Yeah.
1:16:35
Sounds like Sounds like cope from Sean.
1:16:38
>> no one is thinking about you.
1:16:38
Well, I'm thinking about you Sean.
1:16:40
He says how often do you think about your old co-workers?
1:16:43
Maybe once a year in passing.
1:16:44
They aren't thinking about you, either.
1:16:46
Don't do things for the opinions of other people because those opinions are fleeting. That's a great point.
1:16:50
Uh it's okay to fail because only uh people only remember the wins.
1:16:55
You can be a loser for 10 years in a row, failure after failure, bankrupt, but as soon as you hit it big, a win, everyone loves you.
1:17:02
This is a common theme here.
1:17:02
The uh but other people's validation is worthless. Money is very important.
1:17:08
Speedrun makes Speedrun making as much money as possible.
1:17:10
Leave jobs, move states, change careers, get equity, and build leverage in your field. Be an expert. Be vocal. Share your learnings. Life gets easier.
1:17:16
Uh don't choose a profession that is someone's passion.
1:17:19
If you are competing with someone who would do it for free, get out of the field.
1:17:22
Uh you want to be one of one.
1:17:25
Your profession has to be your passion.
1:17:26
These are good good mentions.
1:17:28
And then he goes back to sunscreen.
1:17:32
He's just giving like life wisdom, and then he's just like, and here's two more screenshots from direct-to-consumer companies. Face moisturizer.
1:17:37
And BetterScreen UV serum.
1:17:42
Is he Is he holding Kiehl's?
1:17:43
Uh he says, I use Kiehl's sunscreen and Wild Roman.
1:17:46
I I I do love Wild Roman.
1:17:49
Uh Shout out Sahil Bloom.
1:17:50
But anything is better than nothing.
1:17:52
The cheapest $1 tube will put you in the 1% of men.
1:17:54
Are you Are you a daily sunscreen guy? No. But you uh lotion? Anything? Moisturizer?
1:18:03
Yeah, I'll use I'll I'll use uh moisturizer, but uh Yeah, sunscreen I got I got kind of I got kind of cooked this weekend.
1:18:10
I got a lot of >> A lot Find your cohort.
1:18:13
This is a group of people around your age in your chosen field.
1:18:17
Most often not school friends.
1:18:17
Uh he says, drinking is bad.
1:18:20
You should still try it and do it, but the risk-reward is pretty low.
1:18:23
It would be good to stop drinking by the time you're 25.
1:18:26
Weed is bad, and you should skip that. Agree.
1:18:29
Maybe old-school weed was fun and free, but now this new stuff is too strong and and make you crazy. Uh that is a good point.
1:18:36
Find your relationship with God.
1:18:37
God is real and cool and great and everywhere, but someone can't just tell you that you got to find it.
1:18:42
This will take your whole life.
1:18:44
Uh never shame someone for doing what they have to do to survive.
1:18:46
You don't know how easy you have it.
1:18:48
Uh you aren't better than anyone.
1:18:50
The The world is built brick by brick by every single person doing their part.
1:18:54
I don't know how my microwave works or water treatment works, but I love a burrito and a shower.
1:19:00
If someone earns less in a different way, that they are important. Just tip well.
1:19:04
Uh so much fighting and discourse about tipping getting out of hand.
1:19:08
Uh just forget it and tip well.
1:19:08
We had this discussion earlier about when they turn the iPad around. You got to just tip.
1:19:13
Uh be generous but logical.
1:19:16
I'll give anyone in my life money once. It's a gift.
1:19:18
I'm never being paid back.
1:19:20
But when they ask again, they think you are a piggy bank.
1:19:23
Uh you are Who you marry will be the most important decision of your life.
1:19:26
My wife is my best friend. We are perfect partners.
1:19:30
And you better find that because you are with this person 12 plus hours a day forever.
1:19:36
Act with honesty in everything you do. You can be cutthroat.
1:19:40
You can be swift and decisive, but never steal and don't lie.
1:19:42
Uh you are you If you are going to beat someone, you tell them how and why ahead of time.
1:19:47
And number 25, no one is coming to save you. You are a man. No one cares.
1:19:51
Uh you If you are wronged, no one cares if something is unfair.
1:19:56
You have to save yourself.
1:19:58
Well, uh Sahil Bloom John, save threads. He saved threads?
1:20:03
I mean, we haven't seen a thread like this. Oh, yeah. >> In a long time.
1:20:07
>> This could have been an article, but he went back to the thread meta.
1:20:08
I wonder if the thread meta is permanently permanently back in vogue. I don't know.
1:20:14
Uh anyway, we have our first guest of the show in the waiting room.
1:20:16
Let's bring in Sam Brogna from Better Money. Sam, how you doing? I'm doing great, guys.
1:20:23
First guest of the day is fantastic. Yes.
1:20:27
>> Starting the week off strong. And kick us off.
1:20:28
We The whole problem uh we're we're facing is there's not enough noise, there's not enough, uh uh, soundboard.
1:20:34
So, kick us off with your news so I can slam the gong as hard as possible.
1:20:39
Well, look, we we raised $10 million to build a stablecoin clearinghouse.
1:20:42
We're happy I hit that gong.
1:20:47
Um, yeah, we're here to solve the problem of doing payments with stablecoins, making stablecoins really work for payments companies.
1:20:54
Okay, back up and explain what a what what is a clearinghouse broadly.
1:20:59
Give me like the tradfi analogy. >> is the tradfi gong?
1:21:04
Yeah, well, you use clearinghouses all the time.
1:21:06
Like when you do an ACH, you're going from you're sending money from one bank to another bank. >> Yeah.
1:21:11
Um, this is, uh, a clearinghouse is just how you connect financial institutions. There's a bunch of them.
1:21:16
They're used frequently in in payments.
1:21:18
Uh, today, just so you guys know, for stablecoins, when you want to go from one stablecoin to another, it's the equivalent of if you were to like sell Wells Fargo dollars to buy Bank of America dollars.
1:21:30
And we know that's not how payments work.
1:21:32
You probably have an intuitive understanding for that.
1:21:34
Uh, and if you're a trad payments company, you're confused by this.
1:21:38
And so we solve that problem.
1:21:40
We make, uh, stablecoins sort of work how trad payments companies expect them to work.
1:21:44
And yeah, >> Okay, and is that is that going from USDT to USDC, or there a bunch of other pairs?
1:21:50
What pairs actually matter?
1:21:50
Yeah, there's a bunch of pairs.
1:21:53
So, we support, uh, the Gnosis Bill Compliance stablecoins.
1:21:57
We work with a bunch of the stablecoin issuance platforms like Bridge, like Brail.
1:22:01
We can work with, um, Agora, M0, and Frax.
1:22:04
And so, we have a bunch of great partners that, uh, that we support their stablecoins.
1:22:11
And walk me through the background, how you got to this moment, launching the company, all that.
1:22:17
Yeah, so I, uh, I worked at the Boston Fed on their stablecoin initiative. Pretty trad stuff. Excellent institution.
1:22:25
Uh, and loved that experience.
1:22:25
And then I was an investor at Andreessen Horowitz crypto for three years.
1:22:28
I saw three Explain Andreessen.
1:22:31
Explain Andreessen Horowitz. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:22:34
So, A16Z Wait, what what what was the Boston Fed project technically like a CBDC? Yeah, it was.
1:22:42
It was It's kind of controversial, by the way, right?
1:22:44
In stablecoin land, they don't love CBDCs, but uh, it was very interesting.
1:22:48
Have have It feels like the CBDC movement has like very much lost momentum.
1:22:53
Is that your read, or do you think there will be like a resurgence and central banks will actually play a role in the stablecoin ecosystem maybe a few years down the line?
1:23:06
Yeah, I think that stablecoins work well now.
1:23:09
And the fact that you can send any amount of money anywhere for a fraction of a penny is a good thing.
1:23:14
And so, the need might have dried up.
1:23:17
Like, private stablecoins that are well regulated are working.
1:23:22
Are there are there people in government who who are still like, oh, we got to get, you know, the Fed to control this?
1:23:29
Like, we just like, as a matter of like political ideology, like, the the the Fed must must have control over uh, the issuance of of something that looks like US dollars?
1:23:39
I I don't think that's a huge narrative right now.
1:23:43
Mostly because when you go to a bank, like, you're you're relying on their balance sheet to do your banking.
1:23:47
So, this The Fed doesn't really get involved with everyday consumer payments anyway.
1:23:54
They like to work through these institutions.
1:23:56
There's this big bill called the Genius Act that came out in in July of 2025 that set the regulatory tone for for stablecoins.
1:24:02
And it it builds into that that meta, like, the the Fed expects to work with other institutions to make things happen. Yeah.
1:24:14
Yeah, walk through the the genius You said it's it's like still being implemented.
1:24:19
Like, we've covered it a few times, but like, where are we in the rollout and like the calcification of the actual law and rules that will all be downstream that like wind up getting implemented into stablecoin platforms? Okay, yeah.
1:24:33
So, July the legislation comes out and it has really widespread bipartisan support.
1:24:39
Over the last few months, the rules are now getting made more specifically.
1:24:44
Like, you know, literally how do you do the accounting?
1:24:47
What is the compliance obligation?
1:24:47
Where does the money have to sit?
1:24:51
Um the more interesting thing though is that uh big companies now feel very ready to adopt stablecoins.
1:24:58
We hear about multiple RFPs for stablecoin projects a week.
1:25:02
We get to work with those people.
1:25:05
Uh and that's actually for a breakneck pace for these big orgs.
1:25:07
Like, they're not a a big payments company is not accustomed to shipping a whole new product line on a whole new payment rail in 7 months, but that's what's happening right now.
1:25:17
So, What What Yeah, so you So, a big institution is like, "Okay, the stablecoins seem to be sticking around.
1:25:23
I kind of need to create a strategy here."
1:25:24
What are the things going through their head that they care about in terms of actually, you know, integrating them into their product suite?
1:25:33
I'm assuming they want to figure out how to make money from them.
1:25:37
I'm assuming they they are very risk-averse early on, but how how are they thinking about um you know, setting up a project? Yeah.
1:25:48
I mean, the first conversation probably is "What should we do about stablecoins?"
1:25:52
And then, you know, that's not the right time uh to to really launch into a a new stablecoin product.
1:25:58
You got to identify a real need. Yep.
1:26:00
And the real need is typically we can improve the quality of our treasury management, or we have a product that involves payments that we could do much better.
1:26:08
So, that might be remittances, it might be agentic payments, it might be streaming payments, it could be trade finance.
1:26:16
Um and uh you know, that that's often what we need but this is this is the kind of thing that they're excited to improve on.
1:26:21
At what level of abstraction is integration actually happening because I imagine if I'm like if I'm a big company can I just go to my bank and say okay I'm sick of like these ACH fees.
1:26:35
I want you to figure out how to use stable coins and then I want to pay less or whatever platform they're using to move money.
1:26:45
They like the platform probably jumps on it like at what point is a company that's not a financial institution integrating stable coins?
1:26:55
So first I just want to give a little context on this.
1:26:58
There's been a long history of big enterprises getting deeper into the payment stack.
1:27:03
Airbnb, Shopify, Square these companies like kind of own banks now because they want that additional level of control to make their product better.
1:27:11
And they can do all of this interesting next generation stuff once they get that integrated.
1:27:16
And so we see a similar thing where for many companies going to your bank or your payment provider is the right place to start.
1:27:26
But there's a ton of ambitious tech and fintech payments and banking companies that want to get even closer to the rails so they can optimize the the quality of their product.
1:27:39
We'll see all things happen.
1:27:39
I mean there's always been challenges to simplify the stack.
1:27:41
I remember it might have been Uber or maybe it was Airbnb but there there were a few companies that sort of launched like instant payouts for it happened a lot on like gig work platforms and it felt like the platform was basically just eating two days of working capital by paying for the service that's rendered immediately even though they weren't going to get money from their customer for two days because of like the transfer.
1:28:07
Is that is that the main motivation like speed?
1:28:10
Uh, love that you brought that up by the way.
1:28:12
That's a pretty deep cut.
1:28:12
Um, the So, that whole thing is unlocked by Durbin exempt debit cards.
1:28:17
This is the ability to charge higher fees on cards. Okay.
1:28:22
Yeah, totally a wonk thing, but there's this um this rule in the US where if a bank has under a certain amount of assets, they can issue a debit card that takes a higher fee on swipes.
1:28:35
That's how they pay for the working capital in that example.
1:28:39
Like, they don't front the the the two days.
1:28:41
I thought they were just like raising debt or so or doing some financial engineering and just being like, "Look, it's going to be so valuable for our customers to pay on Monday."
1:28:51
And then the gig worker that delivered the food or delivered the car on that day to get paid the same day that they were just like, "Yeah, and we'll just have this massive two-day growing working capital bill."
1:29:00
But, it's interesting that they've already found a workaround.
1:29:03
So, then does that make the stablecoin argument like weaker because they already figured out a hack or will stablecoins allow them to like drop the cost of doing that project?
1:29:10
Okay, so I think it's both. Like, >> Okay.
1:29:13
Fintech's often about cross-selling.
1:29:14
The Durbin exempt card pays for part of that working capital bill, but not all of it.
1:29:18
Yes, it makes for a more compelling product.
1:29:21
But, probably the most interesting part is to build that product takes a ton of engineers and a ton of money.
1:29:26
And there's there's many businesses who can't afford that and would like to still offer that kind of compelling product. Yeah.
1:29:33
And and you like, that's a pretty limited product.
1:29:35
We only figured out instant payout for that one category.
1:29:39
Gig workers and debit cards.
1:29:41
There's a ton of other places.
1:29:41
Maybe it's buying groceries.
1:29:43
Maybe it's agent payment where you might want that similar instant payout facility. Yeah.
1:29:50
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
1:29:50
So, yeah, what what what has like the launch of the company looked like?
1:29:56
Is it like are you dealing with regulatory filings and getting like banking licenses? Is it writing code?
1:30:03
Like, what what what's the shape of the business? Yeah.
1:30:07
well, we we do we write a lot of code.
1:30:10
I'm an engineer, like that's one of my favorite things to do.
1:30:14
We rely on great partners for the regs, like that you know, they help us with with that.
1:30:19
So, we build on their infrastructure.
1:30:22
But, the shape of the company is really figuring out how we can build better products for for payments codes, fintechs, money apps generally, where they get this one-to-one guarantee one stable coin equals $1, and they know when the money will arrive.
1:30:38
Those are two things that don't exist right now for a lot of stablecoin offerings.
1:30:41
Might be surprising, but that's something that that payments companies really do require for them to run their business well.
1:30:50
How are you thinking about the strength of the dollar broadly?
1:30:51
Is that like an important thing to track?
1:30:53
I I I mean, we we saw the news about Tether buying like an insane amount of gold, and then there was this sort of narrative violation around the the war causing actually a flight to the dollar, and the dollar strengthening, even though obviously it's a very tumultuous time.
1:31:11
Like, how have you been processing just the the the the demand for the dollar generally?
1:31:18
Cuz that's like the the entire stablecoin boom is sort of predicated on it.
1:31:22
Yeah, I mean, I'm unabashedly pro-dollar, but that's kind of sort of besides the point.
1:31:26
There's no product There's no product in the world that has more product market fit than the dollar.
1:31:34
You could get There's nothing you could give anyone in the world that they ever would agree is valuable more than a dollar.
1:31:38
And so, look, we we could talk all day about whether that changes a little bit, but for now, people want dollars. Yeah.
1:31:46
And then, in terms of your sort of go-to-market growth, are you focused on those big companies, Fortune 500 companies?
1:31:56
Are you selling deeper in the stack, B2B or B2B2B?
1:31:59
Like Like, how how are you actually uh uh sourcing customers, growing the business?
1:32:08
Yeah, it's a little bit of all of that.
1:32:10
Like, our We see big companies who really want to be on stable coins now cuz they can simplify a global treasury or build a new product. >> Mhm.
1:32:18
And we see a ton of very fast-moving, very savvy fintechs who want the same. Mhm.
1:32:23
Luckily for us, it's the same platform. It's a clearinghouse.
1:32:26
And that's similar to how JP Morgan, Chase, and Wells Fargo Mhm.
1:32:29
all use ACH, but so does Ridgewood Savings Bank and Seattle First Chemical Bank, you know.
1:32:37
Uh all types of um of money apps Whoa. Sorry.
1:32:43
We just had something fall in the studio. Okay.
1:32:44
Uh just a chair or something.
1:32:46
Uh I want to talk about um particularly um other movements to like stable-ish things on chain.
1:32:55
There was a There was talk like a few years ago about like mortgages on chain, real estate on chain.
1:33:01
Yeah, what's happening in real world assets?
1:33:04
Yeah, I I RWAs was like the buzzword.
1:33:08
Have you been tracking any of that? Is there progress?
1:33:10
There's a ton of progress.
1:33:10
I mean, certainly was I think today uh there's a big announcement about another large trading venue trying to do on-chain securities. Yeah.
1:33:20
Um I think it's likely to happen because people want access to 24/7 trading.
1:33:27
There's events that happen outside of trading hours where it's helpful to have deep liquidity to react to it.
1:33:31
Certainly at A16Z, you know, saw so many of these stablecoin companies and so many of the RWA companies that were bringing the rest of finance on chain.
1:33:41
Um in the recent months, I've been pretty narrowly focused on payments, but they they touch uh RWAs because often you're paying into a trading venue in order to do trading there.
1:33:51
Um we'll see a slow drip over months.
1:33:53
This is It's the kind of infrastructure that gets built in a day, but I think it will surprise people by being the type of infrastructure that gets built in a year or in 18 months, and you start to see a lot more access soon.
1:34:04
Yeah, why why is it slow?
1:34:06
Is it Is it Because I understand with like Bitcoin, you know, you have this consensus of all these different developers.
1:34:12
It takes a long time to get agreement.
1:34:16
But at some point it feels like the pace of acceleration in software needs to catch up.
1:34:23
Are you feeling that at all?
1:34:25
Yeah, it's definitely happening right now.
1:34:27
I'll give you one little example.
1:34:29
You own some public equity, and you once a quarter get this thick booklet of paperwork from them that tells you all about their their quarterly. This is a requirement.
1:34:38
Like when you own a stock, you are getting that paper in the mail with their quarterly earnings.
1:34:43
And so you got to bring all of that infrastructure to interact with on-chain ownership, and there's these little pieces that all need to be solved well in order to bring all these assets on chain.
1:34:58
A lot of financial assets still involve paperwork, and they just aren't situated for a digital world yet, but I think we're all going to enjoy it when they are. Yeah.
1:35:07
Yeah, another way to think about it, like bringing bringing you know, real estate on chain, right?
1:35:14
It sounds like cool and futuristic, but then like for transactions like somebody buying their own home, if somebody's comes to them and says, "Hey, I can help you buy your home on chain, and you'll save, you know, a couple thousand dollars on this part of the process.
1:35:30
That's That's not a super compelling pitch.
1:35:34
Whereas, you know, Sam over here, if you're saying like, "Hey, you're moving, you know, millions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars annually, you can save a very meaningfully meaningful amount by adopting stable."
1:35:45
So, it's just a very different kind of trade.
1:35:50
I I agree with that, and I think you know, there's still home ownership records that are in some basement underneath a municipality's uh you know, building.
1:35:59
That's uh going to take years to digitize those files.
1:36:02
So, these are the kinds of things where you really got to think through the weeds of how you bring things on chain.
1:36:07
I will say if you're using the same technology every day, people get accustomed to it much faster.
1:36:13
And I think that's likely to happen with the payment scenario where you're saving a couple bucks on a daily transaction, and it starts to feel like part of your life and something you can really rely on.
1:36:23
Last question from the chat.
1:36:23
Do you see prediction markets driving stablecoin adoption? Oh, yeah. Uh Easy one. What was that?
1:36:31
What was that What was that reaction? Yeah.
1:36:34
Well, the truth is that as the on-chain world gets more active, it's a positive feedback loop.
1:36:41
As more people have wallets, more people have identities, um and people get more comfortable with the UX.
1:36:47
So, there's sort of this general network effect, similar to what the internet had, where actually one more popular website begets the next popular website cuz you're accustomed to going into this the search bar and and Googling the next thing.
1:36:59
And so, yes, I do I do think that uh will draw more folks into stablecoins.
1:37:04
Yeah, but probably like less important than the genius act.
1:37:09
But uh but but still like you know, it one link in the chain metaphorically.
1:37:16
Uh well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
1:37:18
Congrats on the round, and we'll talk to you soon. >> Very much. See you guys next week. >> one. Goodbye.
1:37:24
Up next we have uh John Slotkin from Geisinger to revisit the story of the $1 billion one-person startup.
1:37:30
We're getting to the bottom of it.
1:37:32
Uh let's see if he's here. Yeah, I think he is. John, how are you doing? Good. How are you guys doing?
1:37:39
And first of all, congratulations on everything. >> to see you again. Thank you.
1:37:43
Yeah, great to see you again. Thank you.
1:37:45
uh I mean, how did you process this story?
1:37:48
Uh Where Where do you think is good to start?
1:37:51
Do you want to maybe set the table with sort of your a little bit of your background and then some of the understanding of what the claims were made and then we can kind of go through them one at a time? Yeah, sure. Sounds good. So, I'm a neurosurgeon. I practice.
1:38:06
I'm also an investor over at Script Capital and I invest in digital health quite a bit and I Look, when I saw this story, just like I think a lot of us, I wanted this story to be true.
1:38:20
So, we have an extraordinary reporter and a great venue and I think what happened is we ended up with a tech story when what we needed was a health story. >> Yep.
1:38:29
So, we different questions asked of different people to really go a layer deeper before we anointed this as this great example of where we should go and Look, I think part of it is we're all guilty of having wanted this to be exactly what it seemed to be.
1:38:44
I think investors were guilty of it, writers, founders.
1:38:49
And honestly, guys, probably patients too because tech stories, they feel consumable, they feel easy.
1:38:53
But look, revenue when it's absent probably some of the needed regulatory context, that's where we need to go deeper.
1:39:01
So, that's that's where I came from at this.
1:39:03
So, yeah, I unpack that idea.
1:39:05
Revenue, you know, free of the context or it needs more context cuz there are like several different pieces to that, the marketing and claims, but also the margins, all these different things.
1:39:18
Like what what popped out to you first where you were like, "Ah, this this seems maybe too good to be true."
1:39:23
Yeah, so the for me, the the biggest thing about the article and it's it's a great reporter, a decorated reporter, was what what wasn't in the article.
1:39:29
So, 6 weeks before the article came out, FDA sent a warning letter to this this company.
1:39:38
Now, to be clear, they They them to many and that that that's fair.
1:39:42
But those weren't featured um and anointed in the New York Times.
1:39:45
The those other companies that that that received those letters.
1:39:50
They are also um some of their supplying chain partners named in the article are subject of a RICO lawsuit right now. Oh.
1:39:56
There are multiple um class action lawsuits.
1:39:58
And look, some of those look like they're coming from these volume firms, to be fair.
1:40:05
But to me it's that con- One of those things alone may be one thing.
1:40:07
And look, Maggie uh Maggie Harrison reported over a year ago fake patients, fake testimonials, and AI-generated photos.
1:40:16
She actually put out a piece this morning that was a great piece.
1:40:19
But that's So that's a year old.
1:40:22
So to me that constel- >> to be a repeating pattern in telemedicine of people saying like, "Well, real patients don't want their face on a website.
1:40:31
So I'll use a AI-generated name or a fake picture, but but then it just keeps coming up as again uh an issue."
1:40:39
There were also, though, as you saw, there were fake doctors. So there was Dr. Albus Dumbledore. There was There was Dr.
1:40:48
Tucker Carlsen, spelled with a Z.
1:40:51
Like that that's that's another layer.
1:40:54
And it's just that I'm saying, when that constellation comes together, I think there's now almost like a burden of why are we telling this story in this way?
1:41:04
And and that's where, you know, I think we needed a lot more of Well, wait a second.
1:41:08
is the Mounjaro work that we're talking about.
1:41:10
And I I I want to make a point here.
1:41:14
The day before this article ran, the day before, Lilly's oral got approved. It was not tirzepatide.
1:41:23
In fact, it wasn't even a peptide.
1:41:26
So it's often been said the last thing that the weatherman needs to do before going on air is look out the window. Yeah.
1:41:32
Well, so we have this company selling, and others too, selling an oral version of the medication that has no biological plausibility of working.
1:41:42
And to me, the best witness of that is that the the day before, Lilly announced an entirely different medication despite the fact that it would cause market confusion potentially. Mhm.
1:41:54
So, you think they'll be you're expecting there to be sort of issues with the actual product assortment that the company has been selling as well.
1:42:04
Well, some of what they sell and others are products that work.
1:42:07
And let's be clear, a lot of these work really well, okay?
1:42:14
But, the problem when we sell ones that don't work is it sets those people back.
1:42:17
It it sets back their metabolic time.
1:42:20
But, also, if this administration, and I love that they're doing this, is being so pro-innovation in this regard, then they we need to be particularly harsh when people are bringing things that are completely irrational and have zero evidence-based.
1:42:36
And when I see that oral tirzepatide has zero evidence-based, somebody email me if they find otherwise, but Lilly is quoted as saying it's true.
1:42:46
There are zero, no published studies on oral tirzepatide in humans. None. Okay?
1:42:55
And so, when when that's that's the subject of the RICO lawsuit.
1:42:59
So, what we get into there is in order for there to be innovation, we have to punish snake oil. Yeah.
1:43:05
And and we do want innovation in peptides.
1:43:11
How do you think about the um uh like just the broader boom in peptide prescription telehealth because I like I'm familiar with the warning letter process.
1:43:25
It's usually violation of like marketing languages, but it can also be used for uh variety of other uh sort of regulatory actions.
1:43:32
Um do you think that there needs to be like more clarification from the FDA or is it pretty easy for the companies that you've talked to and interacted with to steer clear of uh FDA warning letters in this particular category?
1:43:49
You you've really nailed it um there.
1:43:51
And let me be clear, I not only am I pro-development in this area, I myself am am have have had peptides as part of my own health journey.
1:44:00
That that's been great for me over the last couple of years. Yeah. And let's start here. The demand is real. Yeah.
1:44:05
And part of what leads to this is the supply constraints are also real.
1:44:09
So that that that's that's true.
1:44:12
And these drugs, when done right, they're some of the most powerful agents we've ever seen.
1:44:16
Look, I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but this is true.
1:44:21
In a subset of people and before everybody messages me, I said a subset. >> Yeah, yeah. We have cured obesity.
1:44:27
In a subset of people, and yes, they need to continue on the medications.
1:44:34
But we I all three of us live long enough to see that happen in some people, and that's real. Yeah.
1:44:38
And so I'm thrilled that this administration is encouraging development here.
1:44:45
But that's why we need to police better.
1:44:46
So what do I What You You had pointed an important space, a gap that's allowing this to occur.
1:44:51
And it's a little bit inside baseball, but it's important. >> Yeah.
1:44:56
FDA regulates substances and devices largely.
1:45:01
And as you know, they cannot regulate the practice of medicine. That's key. Only the states can.
1:45:08
So that's that's one of the spreads here that's leading to this daylight for operators like this to come in, which is FDA approves I you know, semaglutide. Great. Zepbound, Mounjaro.
1:45:21
Formulations that gets into the practice of of and compounding, FDA's statutorily forbidden from getting involved in the practice of medicine.
1:45:31
So, I I'm looking to an over in HHS, between Abe and some of these other guys, and and Marty, there are some extremely smart people that I think we need to now think about This is an issue of reg Yes, regulatory lag, but also regulatory gap between federal we get to control the substances, but states we control the practice of medicine, and it's allowing too much daylight. That's interesting.
1:45:56
What about the gap within the pharma companies themselves around e-commerce?
1:46:00
It feels crazy to say, but like the pharma companies, Novo, Eli, they Eli Lilly, they market a lot.
1:46:08
They run Super Bowl ads, and they somehow are getting beat on e-commerce or something, or they just don't It's not like It's not like the average customer's journey starts at elililly. com, right?
1:46:22
And it could, I would imagine.
1:46:26
Of course, there's this, you know, compounding loophole because of the supply constraints, but is there something else going on where they don't feel like because of their business relationships with other distributors and doctors and other networks that they can just be their own amazon.
1:46:42
com, and and just put their own website up and say, "Hey, look, no one else can say can buy it because Apple did this, right? They were a distributor. Right.
1:46:52
Yeah, there's plenty of there's plenty of other companies that have said, like, "We want to be the sole supplier of our product online.
1:46:59
There's going to be fake sites that pop up, but our URL is the only destination where you can go to get the real thing.
1:47:06
Everything else is fake."
1:47:07
Instead, we've lived in this hybrid where there I mean, even just among the two venture-backed telehealth companies, one's doing compounding, one appears to have a partnership, very different regulatory structures.
1:47:19
That's a lot for consumers to wrap their minds around.
1:47:21
I'm wondering like do you think that the the actual uh formulators, the drug companies with the intellectual property, should just be going deeper into e-commerce?
1:47:30
Well, I think we we caught them where um there was their own internal friction and inertia, right?
1:47:35
Where these these venture-backed entities that can stand up and move quickly on on mobile and they that was that was lead time here that that they had.
1:47:44
But, I will tell you and I hear this from a bunch of my patients, they have gotten better.
1:47:49
So, right now for example, Lilly, if you want to go cash pay, you get an order from your doctor, they send the prescription and I'm not associated with Lilly.
1:47:58
I'm sure Wegovy has the same exact thing, so I'm not picking or sides here.
1:48:02
But, your doctor goes in and sends the prescription just like it's to a pharmacy.
1:48:08
You receive a text message the next day, you click it, you pay, easy.
1:48:11
It shows up the next day at your house in a cooler.
1:48:16
So, that is where they are now.
1:48:16
Now, they were way behind in getting there.
1:48:21
But, we also hit a point and I'm sure you've heard friends where the Lilly price for Zepbound is getting pretty darn close to what the compoundings can charge and the compoundings are starting to not be able to charge, you know, even less.
1:48:34
But, what what we really need here in my view to make this work right where we want to reward innovation and punish snake oil is come up with a structural way and it may need to be regulated because of this regulation gap where the right thing to do is the easiest thing to do and the right thing to do is the profitable thing to do.
1:48:55
Right now, I don't think we're structured that way and it gets to this federal and state gap Yeah. amongst other reasons.
1:49:01
Uh last question from my experience with the FDA in the tobacco industry, they would send warning letters, but a big problem was that there were distributors abroad usually that would manufacture illegal unapproved vape devices basically, e-cigarettes.
1:49:18
bring them in and then uh push them through a whole bunch of corner stores and and uh gas stations.
1:49:25
And the FDA just didn't really have the enforcement team to go store by store.
1:49:31
Uh do you think that they will face a similar challenge in regulating peptides online?
1:49:36
It feels like it can be done a little bit more behind a computer.
1:49:41
You don't need as many people going door-to-door.
1:49:43
So, maybe they're more equipped for it, but I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on like what it actually takes to play the game of whack-a-mole here.
1:49:49
I think Marty and team are are the the right team to think this through because there's there's this permissive lens above them that wasn't there in prior groups on as to these medicines.
1:50:02
So, once there's a permissive lens, now you can get positively innovative instead of thinking like this all needs to happen in shadow where Jordy walks up to me with it below a jacket and kind of like hands it to me.
1:50:13
This needs to be done right. >> Yeah.
1:50:16
And look, FTC teaming up with FDA, that's going to be I think some of the power here cuz some of the enforcement we're seeing is already coming from FTC as to the way these things are marketed.
1:50:29
But let's let's get clarity and start collecting evidence, folks.
1:50:34
So, if you say I'm giving this thing orally and I know it works, well, write that up and share that news with the rest of us because right now we think we've no evidence that it does. Let Let's get there.
1:50:44
And let's let's realize these are extraordinarily powerful medications and let's not let a couple of of bad actors ruin what could be great progress for us.
1:50:56
Well, I think that's a great message.
1:50:58
Uh well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. >> Well said.
1:51:02
Have a great rest of your day and great week. We'll talk to you soon. >> Have a good one.
1:51:07
Up next, we have Liz Hoffman.
1:51:07
She is Center Forward's business and finance editor and host of compound interest, a podcast from Semaphore Business. Powerful name.
1:51:16
>> You are welcome Liz in She is not here >> Just a minute. >> for everyone.
1:51:25
They say the world's oldest known tortoise is still alive after reports of death revealed I heard about the death of the tortoise.
1:51:31
I didn't This was an April Fool's Day post. Oh, it was. >> real. Yeah.
1:51:35
I thought it was real, too.
1:51:37
Uh very very sad, but that's that's amazing news.
1:51:39
How old is the world's oldest tortoise? Over 100, correct? Let's see. Okay. 193 Wow. That is amazing.
1:51:49
So, there's a chance there's a chance.
1:51:51
We have to study this tortoise and implement it into our daily lives.
1:51:56
But, we have Liz Hoffman here.
1:51:59
>> We have Liz Hoffman Hoffman. Let's bring her in. Liz, how are you doing? Hey guys, I'm good. How are you?
1:52:03
Thank you so much for joining.
1:52:04
It's been a big couple days for TVP.
1:52:07
>> It's been a huge couple days.
1:52:07
But, >> We We logged off the weekend. I will say that.
1:52:12
I listen, as you noted, we just launched a podcast, so I just appreciate the good the good exit comp. Yes.
1:52:15
I Yes, we're very excited.
1:52:18
Tell us about the podcast. Where can they find it?
1:52:22
What's the What's the flow, the philosophy, the the the topics of conversation, the structure?
1:52:28
Yeah, it's a weekly interview show.
1:52:28
You can find it wherever you find all your podcasts.
1:52:32
Like everything I you know, I started calling it a podcast and I was told don't it's a show cuz everything as you guys know is video now.
1:52:39
Whatever the next platform is going to be.
1:52:40
But, no it's I mean these are conversations that you know, we're having all the time as reporters where you're trying to like squeeze 5 minutes and shake some information out of someone.
1:52:47
But, there's a really interesting seat that they're in that they can talk about maybe a company, but also just like why do big chunks of the economy work the way they do?
1:52:53
And so, we've had you know, we had the partner from Andreessen Horowitz David Ulevitch who's like kind of running their defense tech.
1:53:00
I've just been obsessed with like why is venture all of a sudden playing in big heavy things that blow up? Yeah. been really fun.
1:53:07
Tomorrow's episode will drop with CEO of Oura uh talking about sort of the future of wearables and and really why he's actually running towards really regulated health stuff, which is like a sort of counterintuitive.
1:53:16
So, it's been a lot of fun.
1:53:18
You guys look like you were having a lot of fun, so we decided to join you.
1:53:21
Yeah, Oura is a monster of a business. Yeah, Oura Whoop.
1:53:25
Yeah, and I told him a lot of people were skeptical about these companies.
1:53:28
They were like, "Ah, yeah, gadget, 100 mil revenue maybe."
1:53:30
And now they're like a billion in revenue or something like that.
1:53:35
It's they're big businesses, but it's funny, you know, to me even covering, you know, business for a long time, and this is about as wide open a space as I've ever seen.
1:53:40
Like, it's clear that something is going to win the intersection of AI hardware and wearables, but it's not at all obvious to me what it is. Yeah.
1:53:48
Also, I mean, crazy to go after this while the Apple Watch already like killed Pebble and like totally dominated and became, I think, like tens of billions of dollars in revenue, just absolutely massive product.
1:54:00
Uh but then there's been all these different form factors that have stuck through with different value props. It's been good.
1:54:06
Uh anyway, let's talk about the jobs report.
1:54:08
The US added 178,000 jobs in March, but weak wages and falling participation signal a softening in the labor market.
1:54:17
>> you even process new jobs report?
1:54:17
We were saying earlier on the show, I believe nothing.
1:54:20
You know, every time there's a jobs report for the last 12 months, it feels like we're hitting the gong, and then, you know, the revision comes out later, and you have to retract the gong hit. It's the worst.
1:54:32
Yeah, obviously with the big big asterisk that like we will see what the revisions are. This was pretty good.
1:54:37
It's come on the heels of a couple of bad ones.
1:54:39
Um but I actually think the the the way to think about the job market right now is that we've we've sort of been programmed to expect a certain number of jobs every month.
1:54:48
And you have to think like, well, why?
1:54:50
And part of that is that we expect the economy to keep growing, but the input into growing economy in history has been people.
1:54:57
And and we're not growing the people, you You mostly because of immigration and demographic shifts.
1:55:03
A lot you know, fewer babies started getting born about 15 or 20 years ago.
1:55:06
So, we have fewer people coming in and at the same time that AI has just totally scrambled what we need those people to be doing.
1:55:11
I actually would like to see less focus on the monthly jobs report, but the market's just so addicted to it. >> Yeah.
1:55:17
So, where would you focus? >> yeah.
1:55:20
I mean, I I think probably the unemployment rate if you if you're trying to stay in the in the labor market land, that's probably a more helpful thing and particularly the cohorts in it, right?
1:55:27
Like I think you are going to see youth unemployment that like you know, 18 to 25 just skyrocket mostly for AI-related reasons, I think.
1:55:36
Boy, that class of 2026, 2027, like I do not know.
1:55:39
Um and then sort of like socioeconomic bands within that, but you know, this is this is like maybe the first tech revolution in history that benefits blue-collar workers over white-collar workers and so just the way we think about the economy and what we're looking for. You know, J.
1:55:53
Powell in this last press conference said, you know, the labor market's in a balance.
1:55:57
It's a pretty uncomfortable balance, but it is a balance and I kind of compare the US to a a lifestyle business in like a dig that will land with your with your listeners.
1:56:06
Like it's okay to not be growing as long as the supply and the demand of of the things kind of balance out and that's sort of where we are, but it but it's not comfortable. Yeah.
1:56:15
Uh I was having this debate with Sagar and J.
1:56:16
Addy about uh like is AI holding up the economy or is health care holding up the economy?
1:56:21
And I feel like AI is is holding up like the market and the market caps and it's the reason that market that the markets are up or down on any given day outside of the geopolitical stuff.
1:56:30
Uh but but in health care, that's actually where we're adding jobs.
1:56:35
Do you have more context on uh the health of the health care market, what those jobs are?
1:56:40
Can 18-to-24-year-olds slot into the growing health care sector easily? Is that too complicated?
1:56:45
Like what's going on there?
1:56:47
Yeah, health care is messy because we're talking about a lot of different things and it's like 20% of the economy.
1:56:51
So, it's both big and fuzzy.
1:56:53
Um Um, it tends not to be a very reassuring indicator if you're talking about the job market because it kind of tends to grow no matter what. >> Okay.
1:57:01
Um, sort of one of those just like blobs that just keeps getting bigger in part cuz we're getting older and um, you know, there's certain like the massive shortage of clinicians in certain places.
1:57:10
But also this is one of those, you know, healthcare is one of those sectors of the economy where the AI the outcomes are really levered, right?
1:57:16
Like little unclear whether it's going to replace radiologists, you know, reading Yeah.
1:57:22
reading scans or if you think about I don't know if you have any friends like the amount of their day they spend doing just really drudge work.
1:57:29
Like literally paperwork and checking the thing and making sure that this application is talking to that one.
1:57:34
Could be a total tailwind for that industry.
1:57:36
So that that's a big question mark for me. Yeah.
1:57:39
How are you are you tracking the Iran war from a capital flow standpoint at all?
1:57:47
You know, I I I think a big question the the tech and venture community has had.
1:57:55
Obviously, the the war is is you know, tragic first and foremost, but so much of the funding coming in to the technology industry over the last 10 years has been from the region and I think a lot of people have questions around how how durable that will be given how much instability there is in the region.
1:58:17
Yeah, I think if you're thinking about the Gulf as a big pot of money, which it has been for a lot of the startup scene and and a lot of like global investment markets for the last 10 or 15 years.
1:58:25
I think that was already starting to change anyway.
1:58:27
Um, you know, I remember 10 years ago covering the SoftBank Vision Fund and Uber and like there was a sense that the Gulf was frankly dumb money.
1:58:36
That they were sort of the world's ATMs and they were kind of looking for financial returns, kind of looking to to get their name out there and ultimately kind of did neither.
1:58:43
And they've massively pulled back into okay, like yes, they are still willing willing to write checks for the Gulf.
1:58:49
You saw they're a big funder of the EA buyout.
1:58:53
But they really want to see that money come back, like literally on the ground in Saudi Arabia, in in the Emirates.
1:58:58
And so, the calculus of of doing business in the Gulf, I think had already been changing.
1:59:05
You know, I was there in December, and I was talking to an executive at Mubadala, who said, you know, very proudly, he was like, you know, when asset managers, when Wall Street guys used to come here 20 years ago, they would end the meeting and say, "And this is how much we want from you."
1:59:18
And now they say, like, "Where can we partner? What What can we do?
1:59:19
How can we help you grow an export economy?"
1:59:21
So, I think I think that was already starting to shift anyway, and I think look, this really does remind people that these really modernizing economies in the Gulf, they are a nice house in a rough neighborhood. Sure.
1:59:35
Do have you How much have you dug into like like the dumb money and how it played out?
1:59:42
Because like one of the big rounds that I think Saudi Arabia did was like Uber, and Uber has done very well.
1:59:46
And yes, there's like the WeWorks, and there's a there's like a, you know, a smattering of of failures, but if you were just broadly investing in America or tech over the last decade or two, I feel like you should have done well, even if you were like just picking randomly.
2:00:07
Um So, did they do particularly worse than just random, or do they actually feel that way? It's a good question.
2:00:13
They they were so big in the in the biggest pot of this, which was the SoftBank Vision Fund, which obviously did not go great, that they're >> sort of one hand tied behind their back on the investment side.
2:00:21
But the answer is that if it was really working for them, they would be doing more of it, and in fact, they're not, right?
2:00:25
Like the the Public Investment Fund, the PIF, um has been tilting its portfolio back towards sort of domestic stuff.
2:00:31
And by the way, like >> they need money, but what they really need They have a lot of oil, and we'll talk about, if you want, about where all goes on all this.
2:00:39
But what they really need is is a domestic economy and the know-how to to that.
2:00:44
So, like actually, a example is Lucid, right?
2:00:45
Like they control Lucid and it is not an accident Lucid is building a factory in Saudi Arabia not because that's like the logical place to to manufacture cars, but because Saudi Arabia wants it. Yeah.
2:00:57
And that feels like a really big give for a motor company that will probably deliver most of those cars to America or Europe or somewhere far away and so you have to pay the transit, but for data centers in particular, you know, inference takes time.
2:01:11
I don't really care if my tokens come from across the world.
2:01:15
I know that a number of companies have already been using data centers in different time zones because the American data centers are really busy during the day and so during the day if you can go and generate an image in Malaysia and then have it sent back, it's fine.
2:01:29
So, maybe that becomes more of the give, but again, big questions about like is just having a bunch of data centers in the desert like at the backbone of a new economy or is it just like one step towards >> it does it does nothing for employment, which like we're starting to learn here, but also I had a story the other day that the cost to insure an insurance policy on a single asset in the Gulf, right?
2:01:49
You can literally you can buy war and terrorism insurance.
2:01:50
It's gone up 1,900% in the last 6 weeks.
2:01:52
So, if you can't insure it, you can't build it.
2:01:55
So, you know, we'll have to see that shake out.
2:01:58
That's yeah, that's really brutal.
2:02:00
What what are you tracking on prediction markets?
2:02:02
Is have these been useful in in the actually understanding what's going on in the rest of the economy?
2:02:07
Are you are you a fan of them as a data source?
2:02:11
Like do they help you in your day-to-day?
2:02:14
I think as a journalist you're always looking for more inputs and you know, aggregated intelligence is always a good one.
2:02:20
As a social force, I don't love it.
2:02:20
Like I think the long tail of nonsense is sort of sucking up attention and frankly in capital that could go to be doing more useful things.
2:02:33
One thing that I am interested there is that I think it's going to replace huge portions of investing.
2:02:39
Like if I'm an investor and I think that Coca-Cola is going to beat its earnings next week, it's going to do better than the market thinks, right now my options are like, all right, I can go buy a call on Coca-Cola, short Pepsi, and hope that there's not like a weird weather thing at the bottling plants in in Atlanta, or whatever, right?
2:02:54
There's a lot of weird risk there, and actually if you can just hit yes on that contract, it feels seems to me that a lot of investing is going to move that way. Interesting.
2:03:01
And I think that's why, you know, New York Stock Exchange put $2 billion in a Polymarket.
2:03:04
I think they think so, too. Yeah, yeah.
2:03:06
There is as as like democratized as like option trading has become, like it is still complicated to understand like exactly how like how you should even express something as simple as like, I think the war will end quickly, or I think Coca-Cola will beat earnings.
2:03:24
There's a lot of different ways to actually build that option strategy.
2:03:29
People obviously sometimes really enjoy that aspect of the intellectual pursuit of making the right trade, but it can be it can be hairy sometimes.
2:03:37
But I'm sure someone like made a lot of money on the desert on the tortoise that you guys were talking about on the way in, right? Maybe.
2:03:43
>> But um but actually a human went outside, I think it was like the governor of the island, wherever it is, went outside and said no, the tortoise is just sleeping. Found the tortoise. Wait, so what was it?
2:03:49
it's fascinating that suddenly everyone, you know, the the these mention mention markets seem to be some of some of the like the biggest distractions.
2:03:59
biggest distractions. It's hard to make the case for why the information is important or necessary, and I think if people want to trade it, that's fine, but I think it's generally, you know, we saw something yesterday, Trump had a had
2:04:13
a pretty odd post saying, you know, praise, I think he said praise be Allah, uh and it seemed very out of place, and so people assumed like, hey, maybe maybe that is because it had like, you know, somebody either in the ad, you know, who who who knows how that could have happened. But yeah, some somebody out there
2:04:31
But yeah, some somebody out there thought maybe benefited from that, and the and and the problem is like it just creates this big question with like everything that people say in the world in certain in in certain settings. So >> Yeah. Yeah, I love it.
2:04:49
Well, I'm sure you'll be able to unpack it.
2:04:52
>> Please say Bitcoin right now before you leave.
2:04:56
I'm sure you'll have plenty of time to unpack it in the show.
2:04:59
>> So compound interest is a show uh launched yet or it is about to launch? >> Yeah. Uh we're in week six. >> Oh, amazing. Okay. >> Congratulations. Great.
2:05:08
>> Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us and congrats on the new show. We'll talk to you soon. >> Thank you.
2:05:12
Yeah, great talking to you, Allison. Cheers. >> Bye.
2:05:15
Up next we have Bret Taylor from Sierra.
2:05:18
Uh Sierra just launched Ghostwriter and Agent for building customer experience agents through conversation.
2:05:21
Let's bring in Bret Taylor, second or third time on the show. Welcome back. How are you doing? >> Third time.
2:05:28
Thanks for having me back. Appreciate it. >> Great to see you. Uh well, kick us off.
2:05:33
Give us the state of the union on Sierra. How is it going?
2:05:35
What's the traction been like? What's the progress?
2:05:40
Uh Sierra's going amazing.
2:05:40
We agreed to a $100 million in ARR in seven quarters, 158.
2:05:44
We're in the middle of our ninth >> Hopefully I get multiple gongs this time. Good goal.
2:05:55
>> We're working with 40% of the Fortune 50 now.
2:05:57
Uh brands like Singtel, Sky, Nordstrom, Prudential.
2:06:02
But most importantly, we're just really focused on helping people get successful quickly.
2:06:05
One of my favorite stories is Nordstrom went live in 4 weeks with their voice agent, ramped from 1% to 100% in 1 week.
2:06:11
And our whole philosophy is the solution to every problem in AI is more AI.
2:06:18
And so we're really trying to kind of orient the whole company around that and that's where our Ghostwriter comes in.
2:06:23
Happy to talk about it, but it's probably I think the product I'm most proud of that we've developed at Sierra so far.
2:06:28
It really kind of just re-reimagines the whole platform around AI in a way I'm really excited about.
2:06:32
Well, first I I maybe want to go back in time a little bit cuz you said Nordstrom's was a success case of a four-week implementation.
2:06:40
That sounds like a like a success for implementing like any piece of software, really.
2:06:43
Like even ERP >> Especially something that's customer-facing. Anything takes time.
2:06:47
Uh but but you know, when you started the company with your first clients, how much longer was it?
2:06:54
Like what what made it take longer then?
2:06:57
And then why is it getting faster?
2:07:01
Yeah, actually it's a good segue into Ghostwriter, too.
2:07:02
I mean, first our first design partners were building the airplane as it was taking off.
2:07:05
What took long is we had to make the product.
2:07:08
And you know, we had some early design partners like SiriusXM and Sonos that were amazing, just very patient with us.
2:07:15
And I think it benefited from being now very early to this market.
2:07:17
But after the product really existed, it was you're just really figuring out what does it mean to make an agent.
2:07:23
You know, it used to be if you talked to a chatbot 3 years ago, I call it BC before Codex or before Claude. Yeah.
2:07:31
>> these things were robotic and and rules-based.
2:07:33
How you actually model a customer experience not as rules, but as goals and guardrails.
2:07:37
You really want these agents to be human-like.
2:07:39
And to be human-like, you can't have them be reading a script, right?
2:07:42
But that's a really different way of thinking about software.
2:07:45
When you built a website before, you knew every button that someone could click.
2:07:48
And now you have this kind of free-form conversational interface.
2:07:52
And you're almost putting guardrails around it rather than drawing a path through your customer experience.
2:07:59
So, it's going to sound funny and almost technical, but we had to design the right abstractions, you know, for our customers to actually build their customer experience.
2:08:07
And actually just to take it to Ghostwriter, this new product, we think the era of the web app is kind of over.
2:08:12
You know, if you think about what is a web app in the context of enterprise software, we made these databases, these systems of record in the '80s and '90s.
2:08:18
And then, you know, as the web browser came out, we said, "Okay, we're going to give you some forms and fields in a web browser to manipulate the systems of record."
2:08:27
Now we think in the future most people are just going to be talking to AI agents and then it's going to be performing those actions on your behalf.
2:08:34
And we were thinking after December when all of us got pretty AI piled with Codex and Claude improving so dramatically.
2:08:41
>> That's when you got AI piled?
2:08:45
No, you feel like everything we did THEY WERE JUST TOYS but but this Honestly, talk to No, that that was that was a very that that Like we're we're just joking around.
2:08:55
There was a lot of people that like went on winter break and they were like, "Wow, this actually seems pretty like it's going to be a pretty big deal." Yeah.
2:09:03
Well, that's why it does feel like BC like before Codex.
2:09:05
Like December was this point like there's a before and an after. Sure.
2:09:08
So we came back to the office after the holidays and we're just our minds are blown cuz we're all software engineers, right?
2:09:14
We're like, "Man, if it can do this with code, why are we clicking around forms and fields in a web browser still?"
2:09:20
And we're like, "If we were to start over today, our product, you would be using Sierra like you used Codex."
2:09:26
And so that's what Ghostwriter is.
2:09:27
It's an agent for building agents. You can just talk to it.
2:09:30
You could say, "Hey, I want a customer service agent that enables people to do a warranty claim. You know what?
2:09:36
Make it a little more empathetic. You know what?
2:09:38
Let's update our policy from 30 days to 45 days over the month of December so our return window extends past year."
2:09:45
You can just talk to it and it will actually perform all of this on your behalf.
2:09:49
So the cool part about it is you have this like, you know, evolution of how do you build agents.
2:09:55
And now we've made it accessible to everybody and just like I think you probably all like I know so many people aren't technical built their first apps with Codex now that it's so accessible.
2:10:04
Our view is that anyone in the world can use our platform now to make these incredibly sophisticated agents.
2:10:07
Can we bring that four weeks down to four days, you know?
2:10:11
And I think that's really the value here.
2:10:12
And I think it's exciting just because the era of like signing into a web app and filling out forms and clicking the submit button, I think it's sort of a thing of the past.
2:10:20
Did you like how at what level of abstraction are like the CEOs of Fortune 50 companies operating right now?
2:10:31
Because when when I hear like, "Okay, we made an agent that creates agents."
2:10:36
I'm still seeing a text box and I know a lot of CEOs that are like, "I don't do text boxes.
2:10:40
I do meetings and I do conversations and maybe maybe I will literally text my guy who does that for me."
2:10:51
But like how like like what is the flow?
2:10:54
Is there like a head of AI at these companies now that's implementing this and they're doing this or are they calling you and say, "Hey, it's great you built Ghostwriter.
2:11:00
I would like you to use Ghostwriter to do what I want."
2:11:05
Well, I'll give you the whole spectrum cuz as you intuited like every culture is different.
2:11:08
I'd say our audience for this are the people building these customer experiences like the head of sales or head of customer service, head of customer experience.
2:11:17
Because for a long time to do any big digital project you'd have to have your IT team, probably an outside systems integrator, a bunch of tech vendors and you know like the actual essence of your customer experience doesn't get lost in it but it's like any product management process, right?
2:11:32
You have to distill it down to a product requirements document and wait 6 months.
2:11:36
Can we actually empower the people who understand your sales process, your customer service processes and empower them to run an AB test to actually like make those changes on their behalf.
2:11:47
So our audience I would say is one notch down from the CEOs.
2:11:50
Like who are the people who really understand your customer who should be empowered to actually build these things.
2:11:56
But I think I've been really surprised that I think I love the word agent cuz I've seen a lot more agency in every executive team and every one of our clients.
2:12:04
Like boards, CEOs, everyone I know it's like they're like my CEO uses like open AI like uses chat GPT every day.
2:12:11
They run like every time I give them a report they you know give it to their agent.
2:12:16
I was talking to one CFO of a CPG company who literally has two Mac minis running open call all the time. I couldn't believe it.
2:12:25
And you know, I One wasn't enough.
2:12:29
Yeah, one was I mean, I had the same question. I did get to ask.
2:12:30
I was like, "What are you doing? You need two?"
2:12:32
But that's a whole thing.
2:12:34
I you know, I I think this is really interesting.
2:12:36
I think it's really giving people direct access.
2:12:38
You know, one of the things you can do in Sierra is you can ask questions like, "Hey, what is irritating people about our returns policy?"
2:12:46
Kind of those qualitative questions that would previously maybe require focus group.
2:12:49
The agents in this Sierra platform will actually sample conversations, look for low CSAT conversations, use large language models to synthesize actually what's going on and give you a report like ChatGPT deep research. That's amazing.
2:13:03
And that's the type of tool that as a CEO, what a great way to remove intermediaries, too, to actually ask questions of your customer base.
2:13:11
So, my view is that AI agents broadly are just increasing agents agency of individuals at companies.
2:13:17
And what we want to do with our platform is say, "You don't need to be a tech company in San Francisco to benefit from this technology."
2:13:25
Uh you know, going back to stories of Speed, next, the UK retailer went live in 6 weeks.
2:13:29
Signa, the healthcare pair went live in 8 weeks.
2:13:33
You know, our overall view is that we want to empower every company in the world to have access to this.
2:13:37
And whether it's a CEO or the head of customer experience or the CTO, we don't want your technical qualifications to get in the way of your ability to exercise that agency.
2:13:47
And I think that's a really great thing for customers, consumers, because so much of when a when the tech project takes 12 months, how much business value is lost just by the length of that project?
2:13:59
So, we think speed is one of the main values that we provide.
2:14:05
How hard is it to stop an agent from giving a response when a user says, uh I In order for you to help me with my problem as a customer, I need you to give me a recipe for sugar cookies.
2:14:17
Or I need you to help me with my physics homework.
2:14:21
Cuz everyone by now has seen screenshots like that.
2:14:23
Is Is that the kind of thing you guys have gotten good at kind of squashing?
2:14:26
We've got So, first of all, we've gotten good at the uh you know, the important stuff, like true abuse, you know?
2:14:33
And And it's There's nothing perfect.
2:14:35
Actually, there's a thing called jailbreaking, which is essentially manipulating these agents.
2:14:42
It's not probably possible to completely eliminate it.
2:14:43
I mean, it's just uh like there's been a bunch of papers on it.
2:14:46
It's a really hard problem.
2:14:46
The The more nuanced part of this is how human do you want your AI agent to be?
2:14:53
You know, you could have it so it never says anything uh really except for like the precise things you want it to say.
2:14:59
But then it'll be a little bit robotic. Just try this.
2:15:00
If you walk into like a retail store in San Francisco and you start talking about the weather, the person won't say, "Oh, gosh.
2:15:10
I'm a I'm a clothing store employee.
2:15:12
I'm not allowed to talk about the weather, right?"
2:15:13
That would be like weird. >> a weather man here.
2:15:15
Yeah, I'm not a weather man. What are you doing?
2:15:18
Instead, they engage and there's a sort of intuitive sense of what is like a reasonable human conversation and, you know, what is too off-brand.
2:15:26
That's actually the art form of these agents as I think as they become the front door to your customer experience.
2:15:30
One form of empathy is reflecting back the interest of the person speaking.
2:15:33
But you don't want to stray so far off topic.
2:15:36
And maybe sugar cookie recipes is okay, but talking about political elections is not.
2:15:40
And that's really the art form of the design in this space.
2:15:45
And I don't think jailbreaking is like an an abuse is one thing that we try to be really exceptionally good at.
2:15:49
And then the more the design space is like how much agency do you want to afford your agent?
2:15:55
And And my sense is there'll be bolder brands who actually are willing to take a bit more risk here and get some of the benefits of the humanity, the empathy that come with it.
2:16:06
For good reason, there'll be companies in more regulated industries that narrow those guardrails and narrow ways, but my sense is we'll have different societal expectations of these things in 4 years than we do now, just as it becomes prevalent in the way we engage with different companies around the world.
2:16:20
Yeah, so I mean, from a tech perspective, like if I'm a company using Sierra, how am I actually deciding the the width of those guardrails?
2:16:26
Because uh there's totally a world where I have a 30-day return policy, but if my best customer shows up at 31 days, I want my customer support person to bend the rules in that case.
2:16:39
I could probably write an algorithm that would encode a lot of my specific philosophy. Am I writing prompts?
2:16:48
Am I writing like an MD file for this now?
2:16:50
Like how how am I actually like setting the rules of the road if I do want sort some of somewhat of a fuzzy response curve?
2:17:00
Yeah, so this is what we enable on our platform.
2:17:02
And under the hood, you can think of it as modeling these conversations as goals and guardrails rather than rules.
2:17:07
And so, you can put guardrails that are qualitative.
2:17:09
Um like the person's really upset.
2:17:12
You can also put goals that are quantitative, like they're a member of our loyalty program.
2:17:18
And so, it's pretty easy to model.
2:17:18
The neat thing about Ghostwriter is, you know, it used to be ancient history 2 weeks ago.
2:17:25
You had to learn, you know, how to use our product to model it.
2:17:27
Now, you can actually you could just say what you just said.
2:17:30
In fact, you could take a recording of what you just said and upload the audio file and Ghostwriter would make the agent for you.
2:17:37
Uh you know, it's like that flexible.
2:17:39
And so, you know, we're trying to we've created a bunch of abstractions for companies to build these agents we're really proud of.
2:17:44
And now, I think we've just lowered the bar for people using it.
2:17:49
And you know, just given our traction with some of the largest companies in the world, I'm hoping that it will just accelerate our momentum going into uh the middle of the year.
2:17:58
How do you think agents are changing enterprise sales?
2:17:59
Are they valuable to Sierra at all? Do they move the needle?
2:18:07
Uh you know, I'm curious what role you think they play in like a truly elite enterprise GTM? I think it's huge.
2:18:16
We have a whole team dedicated to this.
2:18:18
I don't want to pretend we figured it out, but when I think about true enterprise sales, like I'll say high-touch, you know, Fortune 100 type enterprise sales, you're really trying to have your best practices consistent across your client base.
2:18:32
You know, if you have a and what's so hard is before you used to just have to train people.
2:18:38
There's just a you know this because you know sales, there's like it's enablement.
2:18:41
How do you actually train people with new best practices, new products?
2:18:44
I think one of the most exciting parts of agents in the context of go-to-market now is AI agents can assist your front-line sellers or, you know, post-sales team to actually understand those best practices, understand products.
2:18:59
Let's just take responding to an RFP as an example.
2:19:00
It's something that, you know, used to probably a lot of inconsistency in how you answered those questions and now you can have AI agents assist a lot of that.
2:19:11
And what's exciting about that is I think many of the best sellers are really great listeners.
2:19:14
They're there to understand your customers' problems deeply and that doesn't necessarily correspond with understanding agent architectures, like, you know, something you have to describe in our world.
2:19:24
Can you have these AI agents actually assist it?
2:19:28
So you can end up with the world's best sellers sort of equipped with like an Iron Man suit of enablement and knowledge to help them do that.
2:19:33
And the other thing I think about is just, you know, we're trying to scale faster than any enterprise software company in history and so far we're doing a pretty good job of that.
2:19:41
But for Clay and me, you know, our big you know, fear is like as you expand to Japan, we just did an acquisition there.
2:19:50
You expand to Southeast Asia, you expand Australia, where you end up with these little, you know, Galapagos Islands versions of your company that aren't quite the same.
2:19:59
And so, can you use agents to make things more consistent as well?
2:20:00
So, you know, if we're talking a year from now, I'd like to say like our agents made us like scale our company consistently globally and have kind of that consistently high level of service our clients expect of us.
2:20:13
And that's something that would just be a ton more effort with a lot more inconsistency without AI agents.
2:20:18
So, I think it's huge in in enterprise sales.
2:20:20
Tell us about the Tell us about the company you bought in Japan.
2:20:25
Uh we acquired a company called Opera, 11 people.
2:20:29
Um they self-described were creating the Cera of Japan. >> I was going to ask. I was going to ask.
2:20:34
It's a life hack right there.
2:20:36
That actually seems like a smart strategy is like find find the leading AI companies in America and then build that company for your Yeah. Your region. It was genius.
2:20:47
They're amazing founders.
2:20:47
We just said, rather than the Cera of Japan, why not just take out the of and just be Cera Japan?
2:20:52
And uh and they're amazing.
2:20:54
And they're they're like young and hungry and understand AI.
2:20:58
And uh I'm really excited just because we have a lot of We really believe in the value of humility here and it's like you're entering a market like Japan, it's very hard for Western companies to succeed there.
2:21:08
And you have this group of 11 people who are not only great entrepreneurs, so I just have an innate respect for all entrepreneurs, but understand the market, had been in the market with some regulated clients.
2:21:20
And now they have, you know, sort of the full power of Cera behind them. So, I'm excited for it.
2:21:24
I don't know a ton of precedent for sort of like doing a kind of technical acquisition to enter a market.
2:21:30
We're really excited for it.
2:21:30
And I hope I can come back here in 6 months and tell you it's a wild success.
2:21:34
But I'm really excited for it.
2:21:36
Well, what's the smallest company that you'll work with?
2:21:39
It feels like the, you know, the the headline goal is enterprise, the Fortune 50, but is this going to be a, you know, one click and I'm not even talking to someone sort of self-serve at the very low end eventually?
2:21:51
You know, uh maybe I would say like we tend to serve uh we serve both mid-market and enterprise, so we're not you know opposed to smaller firms.
2:22:00
And I would say we we really care about high-growth companies, so it's important to us to serve high-growth tech, high-growth retail.
2:22:07
Just if you're a startup, we really want uh we want Sierra to be your first phone call.
2:22:12
So, we're trying to make it as easy as possible.
2:22:13
We're not necessarily, you know, going to go into self-serve, not because the technology won't enable it, but to some regard business model is helping people transform.
2:22:22
You know, one of our medtech clients has 40 call centers and they need to consolidate into one and deploy AI at the first time.
2:22:32
And you know, you all this is not your first rodeo.
2:22:34
You know, like technology is like 1/15 of that problem.
2:22:38
It's like, you know, we actually come in and we can actually help you say, "Hey, here's actually the order of operations you can realize the value quickly.
2:22:46
Here's how you can help with the change management."
2:22:47
All that stuff it if can feel boring to a technologist, but if you're actually a company who's reading the headlines about cloud code and code acts and being like, "Man, I have 100,000 people and 40 business units. How do I get this?"
2:23:00
We want Sierra to be the answer to that question.
2:23:04
And I think as a consequence you're building a company designed to help with that kind of question, uh you just create a different shape of company.
2:23:13
And so, we're really trying to serve the enterprise and we it doesn't mean size.
2:23:16
It sort of means, you know, do you want to partner with rather than a vendor and that's how we think about it.
2:23:21
Well, thank you for serving the enterprise.
2:23:22
Thank you for your service generally. It's so important.
2:23:29
Have a great rest of your day.
2:23:29
Uh do you have do you have another do you have another minute? Yeah.
2:23:31
I just wanted a uh uh uh What are when you meet a CEO, how quickly can you clock whether they have an elite enterprise uh GTM motion and what are the indicators that you look for?
2:23:49
Uh yes, I I think I can and just because I've partly you want to know why? Cuz I just stunk at it.
2:23:58
When I created my first B2B company, you know, I transitioned from being at Facebook to starting Quip and I had never sold software before.
2:24:03
I'd only sold ad supported software.
2:24:04
And so, you know, when you went through the really awkward transition of sucking at something and learning it the hard way, you learn to pattern match on the world version of yourself.
2:24:15
And you know, my main indicator is does that CEO spend time with their own customers?
2:24:22
So many like I would say product and tech founders outsource sales in the way you outsource things you don't care about and I think it's almost impossible to start an enterprise software company and not personally spend time with their clients.
2:24:36
And it's probably the main leading indicator of someone who hasn't figured it out.
2:24:41
I'm hearing golf handicap and stakes. Not quite.
2:24:47
>> Yeah, I spend time with my I spend time with my customers. 36 holes a day.
2:24:54
No, of course there's much to it. You were at Shoptalk. You were out in Vegas.
2:24:56
That's a that's a serious conference.
2:24:58
It makes a lot of sense that you were out there personally. It's it's a trip. Awesome.
2:25:01
Well, thanks for coming over and coming on. Great to see you. I'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye.
2:25:05
Up next, Gray Matter Robotics.
2:25:09
We have the CEO and co-founder joining, bringing physical AI into US shipbuilding, scaling autonomous production for national security.
2:25:15
We need this more than ever and I'll let you introduce yourself. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
2:25:24
Thanks for having me, John.
2:25:25
Thanks for having me, Jody.
2:25:27
I'm co-founder and CEO of Gray Matter Robotics.
2:25:29
By the way, we're actually neighbors.
2:25:30
We'd love to give you a tour.
2:25:33
Actually, we we should have done this today at our facility with the robots in the background.
2:25:36
Wait, neighbors in Hollywood, neighbors in Los Angeles, neighbors in California?
2:25:40
How How precise are we being?
2:25:42
Are you Because we have neighbors right behind us and I haven't seen you on the campus.
2:25:48
Uh but yeah, why why why don't you kick us off with a little bit of backstory, how you got into the industry, how you identified the problem, and then what you're building now.
2:25:57
Yeah, as you as you know as as you both of you just kicked it off that, you know, we're living in a moment where it's more than critical, more important than ever to accelerate the production, accelerate the capacity building for our industrial base, especially in shipbuilding, right?
2:26:09
US makes most of the advanced naval vessels in the world, aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, you name it.
2:26:16
And we have more than 5 million man hours short in shipbuilding in the US.
2:26:22
Between World War II until now, China has more than twice the amount of ships US has built.
2:26:25
China has built more than that in the last 12 months, right?
2:26:29
And we are actually today at a milestone moment in the history for shipbuilding, in the history of national security, and our US Navy.
2:26:38
We're launching a partnership.
2:26:38
Today we're announcing this partnership with Huntington Ingalls Industries, HII.
2:26:44
And together we're bringing factory super intelligence to shipbuilding. Okay.
2:26:50
What does the partnership entail?
2:26:50
I mean, and maybe just to zoom out, Huntington Ingalls is They they literally make the aircraft carriers, right?
2:26:57
They like they make the exquisite systems.
2:26:58
They ship build at the at the biggest scales, correct? That is correct.
2:27:02
They make all the large aircraft carriers, large submarines, and some of the most advanced vessels.
2:27:06
Also, they're launching some of the latest and greatest unmanned vessels for the US Navy.
2:27:12
Is there a Shahed drone of ships that America should be copying?
2:27:17
We just read a story >> a jet ski, yeah. Is it a jet ski? I don't know.
2:27:22
Yeah, it's actually what I mean, they have >> I I've seen a few of these demos, but I haven't I've heard about the Shahed drone for years, and then it became very important with this latest conflict, and then apparently with that that What was it called? Lucas drone?
2:27:35
That America built very quickly.
2:27:37
It feels like that was copied.
2:27:37
Is there some sort of next-gen autonomous surface vessel that you think is coming down the pipe in major way? We we're seeing that.
2:27:46
We're seeing that from Anduril.
2:27:47
We're seeing that from Lockheed.
2:27:48
We're seeing some of that also from Saronic, right?
2:27:50
Let it be the existing primes as well as the new primes.
2:27:53
They're bringing low-cost, sometimes even dispensable, unmanned vessels, let it be, you know, over surface or subsurface. Yeah.
2:28:00
So, what uh what is the partnership actually look like?
2:28:04
I mean, Huntington Ingalls is a huge organization.
2:28:05
Like, how are you plugging in?
2:28:07
What what organizations are you working with?
2:28:09
How do you actually >> rounds of golf does it take to land a partnership like this? Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero rounds of golf. Okay.
2:28:17
Cuz we're dealing with such a big national >> violation.
2:28:23
We're dealing with such a such a big national security issue.
2:28:25
We don't have time to play golf.
2:28:27
We have to go build these autonomous robots that can start building all these autonomous vessels. Yeah.
2:28:32
So, at Remora Robotics at the core, you know, you you asked me Jordi at the beginning like, "John, how did we get into it, right?" Yeah.
2:28:39
So, my co-founders and myself, we started Remora Robotics about 6 years ago.
2:28:43
And when we started, at that time, anyone doing robotics and AI was doing one of the two things, either self-driving cars or pick back and ship or assembly in logistics. Sure.
2:28:55
No one was paying attention to this massive need in manufacturing.
2:28:59
All of our factories, vast 90% of them, are done manually by people, by hand, every single operation. Yeah.
2:29:07
And we have this growing demand for physical goods, and we have this growing shortage of skilled people, skilled tradespeople in manufacturing, especially in shipbuilding.
2:29:17
And we have to do something to bridge that gap between demand and capacity.
2:29:20
And robotics is one thing, but what truly started to change the picture is that when we started bringing in physical AI, marrying it with robotics.
2:29:29
But then we also have to start thinking about beyond robotics.
2:29:31
If you look at a factory operation, there are manufacturing processes like sanding, grinding, painting, coating, blasting, you name it.
2:29:40
A lot of manual labor goes into it.
2:29:42
But beyond that, there are a lot of other engineering activities, a lot of industrial engineering, process engineering, material science, a lot of sustained operations, MRO, you name it.
2:29:52
If you don't bring AI and autonomy across the full end-to-end picture, if you don't start bringing AI agents in each layer of engineering, we're not going to unlock our factories.
2:30:02
So that's our mission at Gray Matter Robotics, connecting it all by bringing domain agents and factory super intelligence.
2:30:08
>> Yeah, how how agent-ready are manufacturing systems? Do they have APIs? Are there CLIs?
2:30:15
I imagine that they don't have MCP like like what give me an example of like there's one machine that makes a part that goes on the you know, the aircraft carrier.
2:30:26
Uh like how is the agent interacting with that? What is it doing? Right.
2:30:30
It's a If you look at a manufacturing operation, it's an end sequence of different processes.
2:30:34
In each processes, you take a tool, you make some value-added change to an object using a tool. Yeah.
2:30:40
Let it welding the parts together, let it be grinding the weld, blasting the surface, coating the surface, a lot of inspection.
2:30:48
So we deliver autonomous robot cells that are capable of So is this like a six-axis robot arm?
2:30:53
Is that what I'm visualizing?
2:30:57
Yeah, we we work with you know, we're agnostic to hardware. >> Sure.
2:31:00
We embody our physical AI into different form factors. Okay.
2:31:02
Let it industrial robots sitting on the floor or industrial robots on a rail on a mobile base that can work, you know, move around a submarine and work on these really large structures.
2:31:15
We work with anything from as small as a military helmet to a fire truck to fighter jets to a submarine component, you name it.
2:31:22
So we're agnostic to shapes and sizes of robots. Interesting. Very cool.
2:31:25
Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down.
2:31:27
Yeah, great to meet you and amazing job navigating my soundboard here.
2:31:33
I was throwing I was throwing a lot at you. Yeah, very exciting.
2:31:34
I I I want to learn more about Huntington Ingalls at some point.
2:31:38
It's It's such a fascinating company.
2:31:40
Congratulations on the deal with them. Thank you.
2:31:42
This is a big moment for national security and US Navy. Yeah.
2:31:46
Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. >> meet you. Great to meet you. Have a good one.
2:31:50
Up next we have Atif Siddiqi from Branch.
2:31:52
He's the founder and CEO.
2:31:52
He's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. Atif, how are you doing? What's going on? Going well. How are you guys? We're great.
2:32:02
Thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.
2:32:04
Since this is the first time on the show, would you mind giving us a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company? Absolutely. Yeah, Atif, founder CEO.
2:32:16
Branch is a leading workforce financial infrastructure that delivers faster, more flexible options for people to get paid.
2:32:23
So, we focus on, you know, the majority of the American economy that works in an hourly job, gig job, tip job.
2:32:30
So, could be gig workers, nurses, restaurant workers getting their tips instantly.
2:32:34
And you know, I think really companies are turning to Branch cuz they know faster payments can help them strengthen worker loyalty, save them time and money.
2:32:43
I was actually tuning in earlier, heard your combo with the Better Money guys around uh Yeah, the Uber the Uber driver payouts. That's us. Wait, oh no way.
2:32:53
Yeah, we work with companies like Uber, Instacart. That's amazing. That's right. Uh quick question.
2:32:58
What is the screw award or the spring award behind you? What is that? This one right here?
2:33:06
It looks like a spring, like a giant spring.
2:33:10
>> Yeah, 2020 Webby Award winner for That's a Webby. What is it? That's a Webby.
2:33:12
Did you win that for Branch?
2:33:14
For Branch, yeah, in 2020 for financial That's It's Yeah, Webbys deeply underrated.
2:33:21
Um anyway, uh give us the give us a a tour of the business currently.
2:33:26
I mean, if you're working with Uber, obviously big company, but uh how how how can I think about the shape of the business?
2:33:32
Are you in person, multiple offices, uh scale of fundraising?
2:33:34
Just get me up to speed on the on the scale of your operation.
2:33:39
Yeah, um we're we're distributed.
2:33:39
We have a couple of offices, uh sales office one in Tampa, but uh distributed workforce about 230 employees.
2:33:47
We've raised over million dollars of equity and yeah, it's uh it's been we're off to the races now.
2:33:55
I mean, I think um you know, one area where we've been really leaning into as of late is just the embedded finance offerings and that's kind of the news today, right?
2:34:06
>> that is that embedding into another B2B company that is acting as like the the the master payroll provider for an organization? That's right.
2:34:15
Yeah, so think uh platforms, right?
2:34:17
It could be a vertical SaaS where they touch our end users around, you know, these gig or hourly workforces where we can live right there and make it really frictionless for those end users.
2:34:29
Yeah, I've had a few like HR platforms where I've had like a few employees on on hourly and they've sort of added like, "Oh, if you want to add this plug-in or add-on."
2:34:39
I could and I don't know if we were using Branch back then.
2:34:43
This was years ago, but um but but yeah, makes a lot of sense that that would need to seep through the rest of the HR HRIS software suites across the Pros and cons in building in a important, but let's say less hyped category than stable coins and something like AI.
2:35:01
Like, do you feel like you have to perform even more than you would because like if you want to get the attention of the capital markets, you really need to prove that you're um you know, basically have to prove everything in the numbers. >> Mhm. That's right.
2:35:17
Yeah, I think um you know, often times a lot of this is just education of how big the problem is, right?
2:35:25
Especially when it comes to like attracting and retaining talent.
2:35:27
I don't think a lot of people know like how fast these workers turn.
2:35:31
So anything you can do to kind of slow down that turn is huge impact, right?
2:35:34
To the bottom line of these companies.
2:35:36
You know, we've seen companies uh retain with you know, using a service like Branch is like retain users 60% longer than they normally would, right?
2:35:45
So if you think about everything that goes into getting a new worker on, onboarding them, that's a huge cost.
2:35:49
Yeah, what what what uh what are the key features that result in lower churn, higher retention?
2:35:58
Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with this idea of just really improving workers' cash flow at the end of the day, right?
2:36:03
So if you look at the industries we work in, um especially uh as of late with more of these 1099 industries, cash flow is huge for them, right?
2:36:11
It's the difference between uh them going out and using that to go earn more money, right?
2:36:15
Uber drivers putting gas in their car to go out there and drive. Yeah.
2:36:19
So if there's two if there's two competing platforms where someone could go to work, one's going to pay them every two weeks, one's going to pay them every single day, they were more likely to go and stick around or stay or choose the one that's paying them on a daily basis, essentially. Yeah, absolutely.
2:36:34
And it's becoming table stakes, right?
2:36:36
I think a lot of this was driven by like gig economy, the Ubers of the world.
2:36:39
We're seeing this now across W-2 uh workforces as well, right?
2:36:45
In traditional industries there.
2:36:47
You mentioned the 1099 trend or or can you get me up to speed?
2:36:50
I remember uh what, five years ago there was debate over how uh Uber and Uber drivers were going to be paid, whether they were contractors or not.
2:36:58
Like what what do you mean when you when when you talk about like a 1099 uh workforce?
2:37:02
Like what are some examples of that?
2:37:07
Yeah, I think there's uh you know, I think that a lot of the headlines focus around sort of ride sharing and the Ubers of the world, but like we're seeing 1099 work forces rise even industries like healthcare, right?
2:37:17
They work with some of the largest nurse marketplaces out there where nurses are turning to these platforms to supplement their income, pick up additional shifts on their off hours, right?
2:37:27
The other big trend we see is the rise of like the solopreneur, right?
2:37:32
You're a individual that wants to start their own business and like what are the tools and out there that really help you grow?
2:37:42
Um Yeah, which brings me to my other thing, you know, one thing we announced too is last week we announced with Stripe will be embedded into their Connect platform, right?
2:37:51
So now if you're a marketplace or platform in Stripe, you can get up and running with a a digital wallet, debit card instantly from the Stripe system.
2:38:02
Okay, so yeah, give me an example of a customer company that would wind up using Branch through Stripe.
2:38:11
Yeah, let's say I mean obviously the marketplace example makes sense the Ubers of the world.
2:38:15
I'll give you maybe like a Mindbody, right?
2:38:16
There's a lot of they service a lot of like salons.
2:38:22
Often times they're independent contractors working for these salons and they want to get them paid faster, right?
2:38:29
So they can kind of now offer this as a branded solution to their independent contractors.
2:38:34
And so if I'm in this hair salon hair salon example, I imagine that I have some sort of like general W-2 focused payroll system set up for like the corporate employees, but is there an advantage to having the money sort of stay within the Stripe ecosystem and then get 1099 to the contractors that I'm paying because I don't have to move the money around or something like is that it? Yeah, that's it.
2:39:01
Yeah, I mean in addition to just like minimal API left, right?
2:39:03
The other is like no pre-funding.
2:39:05
Like Stripe has the money and so we can move that money right there.
2:39:10
So it's not like you're having to come up with a capital, pre-fund it, send it in an escrow account, and use that working capital.
2:39:16
Okay, so you're like in this in this example like a customer comes in, they pay, it's processed on Stripe rails, and so the money's right there.
2:39:23
So it's much easier to move directly into the bank account of the of the worker who provided the service all in the same day.
2:39:31
So we're just sort of squeezing days out of the working capital budget as much as possible. That's right.
2:39:35
And I I think for the workers themselves, right, it becomes like a financial hub for them, right?
2:39:40
As a solopreneur, you're starting out.
2:39:42
We We've offered, you know, in addition to just like fee-free banking, there's like cash back rewards that are very relevant to workplace expenses.
2:39:49
I mean, Uber drivers are getting up to like 10% cash back on gas in certain cases, which is which is huge. Yeah.
2:39:54
Is uh is a big piece of Basically, are you seeing any acceleration like form filling and regulatory filings alongside 1099s and and the workers actually onboarding?
2:40:06
Is that like a point of friction or something that you've been working on like improving? That's right.
2:40:13
Yeah, you know, the other announcement we had was that we did end-to-end tax filing capabilities for 1099 workers, right?
2:40:18
So in addition to like faster payments, I think another critical infrastructure needed is like collecting W-9s, IRS verifications, earnings tracking, right?
2:40:28
Just all in a seamless experience.
2:40:32
Well, uh congratulations on the progress.
2:40:34
Great to meet and thanks so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
2:40:37
>> Yeah, great to finally meet.
2:40:37
Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.
2:40:42
Um we have some more stories that we will go through tomorrow.
2:40:46
Uh is there anything that you want to close with, Jordy?
2:40:51
Uh hopefully >> We need to get We need to get to the bottom of this Trini's.
2:40:54
Trini's analyst on on Stripe.
2:40:58
>> Uh we're also going to try and get someone from Citrini on the show to break it down because uh it is it is a crazy story and I don't think we can do it justice with just you know, a few random posts.
2:41:10
Citrini analyst number three got picked up by the CID, the Gulf CIA because of the tweets about him.
2:41:15
So I think everyone needs to be careful talking about Citrini analyst number three. Based 16Z says Hunter S. Citrini number three. Last post from Francis.
2:41:25
He says I think the next LinkedIn post I read about the TVP and acquisition might finally reveal the future of media.
2:41:32
Just need to find one more. It's true.
2:41:35
Uh There was one more post that was good.
2:41:39
There was so many good posts. It was a lot of fun.
2:41:42
And Nate Nate you with with with an absolute banger and place that we will end it. He says hear me out. TVP and for sports.
2:41:52
There very well could be something here.
2:41:54
And I liked it and I got screenshotted because it's a it's official.
2:41:56
Uh there very well could be something there.
2:42:01
Well, get out there build something.
2:42:03
Maybe go treat yourself to the largest BuzzBall that has ever been built. It weighs 3,000 lb.
2:42:09
It opens up as a lemonade stand capable of holding 17,000 drinks which will be served around the United States.
2:42:17
That's a good way to TVP and the only place you can get technology coverage and BuzzBall coverage. Hard to hit. BuzzBall analysis.
2:42:25
Uh anyway, thank you so much for watching.
2:42:28
Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
2:42:30
Sign up for the newsletter at tvpn. com.
2:42:34
And we'll see you tomorrow at 11:00 a. m. Goodbye. Throwing flash bang.