Blake Resnick, Ian Cinnamon, Zach Weinberg, Jen Bucci, Paul Mikesell, Rylan Hamilton, Zach Long, Formula One

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If ESPN is buying the TV rights to something like this.

Yeah.

They're not just doing it out of charity. Right. They want to build, they want to run ads against it. And having flagship content like this is accretive to the network. But in general, when you start running the analysis on just purely on the number of ads you could run against an audience like this, it's pretty obvious to see why people aren't exactly jumping to watch this. The other thing I thought was interesting is Netflix ran an analysis on F1 and they found that 3/4 of live F1 viewers already are subscribed to Netflix Y so Netflix is really not interested in paying to get this as a streaming property because it's not going to drive incremental subscribers to them.

And to your point, the million, it might not be. So if you take a million and you just assume the same saturation number, that's only 250,000 new subscriptions. Netflix is what, what's their ARPU like? A hundred bucks a year, right?

Yeah.

So that's roughly.

Maybe more than that now.

Yeah, maybe a little bit more. But if it's 250,000 people that would subscribe, potentially, if you convert all of them, that's still only 25 million.

Yeah.

That they would make. And then maybe they make that over a few years, but they would have to keep that person subscribed at extremely high margin for eight years to make.

The same rights fee for the second year, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Does not math out the math.

Doesn't math out. The other thing I thought was interesting, this was your take. We were talking about this offline, but it's very possible for the American audience where F1 is airing at these odd hours, that Drive to Survive is just a much better, far superior way to watch and follow along with the sport than trying to get up. Oh, I'm gonna get up at 5am on a Sunday and watch this. You gotta be a really, really. You gotta be a super fan to want to do that consistently.

And I mean, I got into F1 through drivers, like a lot of people. And what I realized was in the first season of Drive to Survive, they didn't have access to the top drivers, but that was actually an advantage because this was. This was in the Hamilton era where he was running away with it, and there was no drama at the top of the leaderboard. So.

Creating drama by focusing.

Exactly. Yeah.

To the sort of bottom.

Yeah. What's going on with Haas? What's going on with, you know, all these. All these, like, middle of the pack teams and people getting cut. It's much more dramatic. Lewis Hamilton, he's got a job every year. There's not much drama there. And it was interesting because those narratives, if you are a dedicated, dedicated F1 fan, you can pull that out through the commentary and you can follow and you can see, oh, yeah, I know that Hamilton's going to win first. But what I'm really watching for is what's going on in the middle of the pack as a. As a random viewer who just turns it on. It's very. It's very hard to get at that level. I mean, it's almost like watching the NFL and trying to understand, like, how is the O line matching up with the defensive line on this particular game?

Yeah. The other thing with America, you have intense competition, right? Because you have IndyCar, you have NASCAR. And those are all people that would be watching F1. They're just more interested in these sort of driving events that are. That are more culturally native to America.

But, I mean, the boom in F1 really can't be overstated. I mean, they basically doubled viewership. So in 2018, a little over half a million people were watching Formula One live on ESPN. By 2022, it was almost 1.2 million. Yeah, so huge, huge gain. But it's since fallen off and actually plateaued right around that 1.1 million number that we cited. So ESPN walked away late last year from its exclusive negotiation window for a new package. Netflix, Warner Brothers, Discovery, Fox, and Amazon.com and NBC are lukewarm on the offering, too, at least at the current price, according people familiar with the company's discussions. The NBA and NFL have inked giant media deals in recent years, but it is becoming harder for entertainment companies to justify big spending on other sports as networks face continued challenges from cord cutting.

And so, yeah, the other challenge here is, is if you're an advertiser and you want to be a part of F1, you can just pick your favorite team and get involved with them.

There's so many different products. Like, you can. You can even just do the running one race, like a Super bowl, where.

You have to run if you want to be involved with the super bowl, you have to run.

Yeah.

You know, a Super bowl ad really not the same way here, because you can be, you know, you know, in the car, basically, you can have logo placement. I was, I was nerding out about this on, on the race last week because the cockpit of. Of these cars has logo visibility for, for like 20 different spots. Just, it's our dream come almost over the top. But. But as an advertising enjoyer, it's.

But also there's no, there's no halftime show. There's no part where, oh, I really want to see the last lap. So I'm going to stick through all these extra ads because they stuff the halftime show with a bunch of ads during the super bowl, and those are probably some of the most lucrative because everyone's watching and they're waiting for the next. For, for the next quarter to start. My, my take on this is that going forward, I have this idea that creating a funnel and like, vertically owning all of the surrounding media around a sports league is going to be incredibly valuable. I don't know exactly who's going to win or how it'll play out, but I'll give you an example of how I think this could work. One would be, so Apple TV owns the rights to mls. Now, MLS is not the most popular soccer league, but you could imagine if they somehow got the rights to NFL. We'll use soccer as an example. So as soon as they got the rights to mls, I was saying they should do a Drive to Survive for the mls. Take us through the drama and the characters in the MLS and, and give us the reality TV version to get people in. And then they should also do the sitcom version. What's that show on Apple TV about the happy guy who coaches soccer.

You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, the UK or whatever. I never watched that.

How can I not remember that Apple TV soccer show, Ted Lasso.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I honestly think that it's possible, just like Drive to Survive got people into F1. I think you could get into soccer from Ted Lasso. Go from Ted Lasso to the MLS version of Drive to Survive and then start watching MLS because it's like this smooth gradient of getting you into the content and working you up. And I could see that happening.

I just think at the end of the day, you know, talking about, there's a very real difference in watching reality TV about F1 versus being actually. You don't actually need to be interested in the sport to be interested in the sort of characters and all that stuff.

Sure. But I mean, it seems like if I'm trying to get someone interested in F1 and watching an actual race, the best way to get them into it is say, hey, start with Drive to Survive.

Yeah, right.

And then it's going to be a funnel. Not everyone's going to convert, but it will, it will convert. The problem that F1 struggling with right now is that they don't own the full funnel and they've sold the rights piecemeal. And, and so they can't, they can't really do some. What they should be doing is saying, hey, Netflix, if you want Drive to survive, you also have to get the rights to F1. And there needs to be a call to action right there. Hey, click, click. Remind me when the next race goes live.

Uh, one point that I think is important. Paul in the chat noted it out that they've, they've. Netflix basically attempted to run back the success of Drive to Survive with other sports. Tennis is one, Golf is one, and it hasn't actually played out in the same way.

Is that just because those sports are already popular in America?

That's possible. It's also possible that just like the first sort of like crack at a relatively novel format. And I also think F1 is exotic. It's sort of European. Right. Americans, like, love the idea of the European lifestyle. Then when you're just following along some, like, golfer from Florida, it doesn't quite, it doesn't quite hit the same.

I mean, I remember when they inked those deals, I was like, this is genius. I love Drive to Survive. I'm totally going to be into the golf one and the tennis one and I never watched them. I downloaded them on my phone once. I never watched it. Yeah, because I was like.

John in the chat has a good point. He says, how about TVPN makes a bid for the rights? So we get some TVPN on the weekends.

That's great.

We'll see. We're very mindful of profitability, but if they can get into the eight figure range, you know, we would consider a bid.

Well, it's coming down because research firm Ampere analysis estimated the F1 US rights being worth 100 million a year, but not the $180 million that the industry reports earlier said it was seeking. Derek Chang took over as chief executive of Liberty in February. He said he's looking for the best mix of exposure to new fans and the highest paying deal, but recognizes the industry is shifting and challenging for both broadcasters and Streamers. The whole media world is a very fluid situation. And so, yeah, this is interesting. Fragmentation. So the F1 races are on ESPN. Drive to Survive is on Netflix. And then the F1 movie starring Brad Pitt was on Apple. And it's like, that should all have just been in one place because I could totally see the funnel where you're like, I like Brad Pitt. I'll watch the movie. Oh, okay. What should I watch next? Drive to Survive. Okay, what should I watch next? The actual. The actual race and that type of like, funnel, I feel would. I feel like it would create more value. I'm not exactly sure though.

Yeah, I'm surprised they actually haven't. Maybe there's something in the works here for UFC as well. Some type of reality TV around the fighters. They have their big show called Dana White's Contender series. But then it's very possible that UFC goes to Netflix as well, like the actual live product. Because due to. It's somewhat unfortunate for the ufc, but I think the prevalence of illegal streaming, which is also big for F1. Yeah, but the prevalence of illegal streaming is meaning that people just aren't buying pay per views at the same rate. So that should be a good property for Netflix as well. And I could see them building an ecosystem around that.

So the Journal goes on to write, the lack of fervor over F1's US live rights, live TV rights stands in contrast with global excitement around the sport. Models and actors clamber for spots in the paddock close to the action as men pile into single seat cars and navigate circuits in destinations including Australia, Mexico and Italy. High end brands vie for prime promotional placement. Netflix's Drive to Survive documentary series helped catapult F1's popularity in the US. Then came Gran Turismo, a 2023 Sony film based on the story of a gamer who got a shot at competing in real life. I actually saw that movie. It's pretty good. This June, Warner Brothers is distributing an Apple film, F1, starring Brad Pitt. But again, very decentralized approach to selling the rights and actually pushing this media around. Despite the Hollywood hype around F1, the races themselves aren't blockbuster draws. That is partly because of timing. Many races air early Sunday mornings for US viewers. Not really a great solution to that. I mean, there's a lot that they could do to make F1 more.

There are some very savage solutions. Right. Again, the UFC has done this where they've had. They've forced the UK fans historically to watch the title fights at like 5am yeah. So it's basically like, hey, come on a Saturday night.

Yep.

But then we're going to air that like it needs to be airing at like, you know, a reasonable time Pacific Standard Time or Eastern Standard Time. So we're actually, you have to stay in the stadium until like 5, 6am and it's crazy because it's, the fighters are dealing with this, the fans are dealing with this, you're a fighter and you basically have to pull an all nighter ahead of a title fight, which can be like, what about when they.

Do it in the Middle East? It must have been even worse.

Now the Middle east, though, is the thing. The Middle east, generally, they're such large backers in UFC that Dana White just says, no, we're going to host it at 7pm Your time. So when fights happen in the Middle east, the fight card will typically be at like 10am Pacific or something like that.

If it's on the weekend, that's not too bad. But yeah, it's still, it's very early.

It's just funny that, that the UFC says, you know, no, it's going to be unlike, you know, North American time zones. Except if, you know, we're going.

Yeah, but so the, the coming US rights deal represents a small slice of F1's revenue, but Liberty has focused on growing F1 in the country, and the new deal will help determine the sport's next chapter here. The success of Drive to Survive in earlier reports prompted speculation that Netflix might want to bid on F1 rights, but. But it isn't currently planning to bid, according to a person familiar with the matter. This is what you said. 3/4 of F1 fans already have Netflix subscriptions. ESPN still hasn't completely ruled out new talks on F1, according to people familiar with the matter, but it's making tough choices. Disney signed a $2.6 billion deal with the NBA last season, and ESPN recently ended its 35 year relationship with major League Baseball, saying it was unwilling to continue paying the $550 million the league wanted for a new games package. It's also preparing to bring its programming onto a new streaming service. ESPN might be more inclined to bid for F1 if the company thought it would drive subscriptions to that service. Espn.

That's crazy. I didn't know that about the mlb. Apparently they still haven't figured out exactly where they're taking the TV rights for mlb. So there's this weird situation where ESPN is sitting there with the rights, kind of letting the clock run down.

Yep.

And I imagine they're sort of the, the leagues understand that, that ESPN is probably the bidder of last resort being like, yeah, go run your little roadshow and we'll be here. But we're gonna bid, you know, a fraction of what you're asking for it. So yeah, there's, we'll see.

There's. Ben Thompson's written a lot about this with the, the local sports. The local, like have you ever seen like Nessen New England Sports Network? It's like a regional sports network for cable and it's very high margin because the local fans pay and, and basically the sports drive and then they just add on a bunch of channels that are basically like, you know, free and.

Yeah, well, this was a theory with the athletic, right?

Yep.

It was like hyper local sports.

Yeah.

Are gonna, you know, fans will have a much higher willingness to pay to get really close coverage around the leagues and, or specifically the teams and athletes that they really care about.

And then simultaneously, you know, Disney for a long time was partnered with Hulu and saying, hey, we're going to stay out of the streaming business. We're just going to distribute through streaming like we do with TV with like Comcast and cable networks. And now they're saying, hey, we want Disney, we want ESPN plus, we want you to subscribe to us directly and we'll take all of that. And so they're trying to get more leverage. Everyone's duking it out in the media world, but there's a lovely photo of Charles Leclerc, the Ferrari Formula 1 driver there.

And what do we have in common with.

We sleep on the same bed, baby.

There we go.

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Go to Eight Sleep.com I'm checking my sleep score.

John, check it out.

You're not going to like this. Why don't you go first?

Let me see mine. I Woke up before. Oh, 77. Not good.

Brutal. How about I go proof of work here, everybody.

100.

100 only on 7 hours and 16 minutes of sleep, but not bad. Had the routine dialed for some reason.

I woke up and I checked my eight sleep score and it was like, hey, we know you're still in bed. Like, do you want to end this or do you want to try to go for. Yeah, I was like, I'm good.

You're good. You tapped out?

I tapped out.

Just A rough day.

I couldn't do it anyway.

You've got twins. It makes the game harder. It does just an entirely leg weight sleep.

Think about it that way.

It's rough, but it's great. And the eight sleep has been fantastic. It's been, it's been a major, major upgrade. Genuinely, I'm a big fan.

Especially.com tvpn yeah, go check it out. Thank you.

Anyway, let's move from giga chads sleeping on eight sleeps to gigafactories being built in the eu. The EU is betting on gigafactories to catch up with the United States. China in the AI race. The block has been lagging behind since OpenAI's 2022 release of ChatGPT. Some people in here, some people might argue that they've been lagging behind since on a number 76.

That's true. Yeah, that's true. But the. The European Union said it would focus on building artificial intelligence data and computing infrastructure and making it easier for companies to comply with regulation. Classic. In a bid to catch up with the US and China in the race, the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said it wanted to develop a network of so called AI gigafactories to help. I like the vibe. I like the vibes. I like a network of so called AI gigafactories to help companies train the most complex models. Those facilities will be equipped with roughly 100,000 of the latest AI chips, around four times more than the number installed in AI factories being set up currently. It's funny, they're calling these AI factories. I guess it is AI factories, but.

I mean it's very, it's very Elon, right?

Yeah.

What, what, what, what's his terminology for it? For the.

The xai?

No, for Tesla. Doesn't he set up gigafactories?

Yeah, it's a gigafactory.

That's just what he calls it, right?

Yeah.

And so they're just copying that term directly.

Yes.

Interesting.

But I believe like, you know, in America we just call these data centers. Yeah, but AI factory sounds pretty cool. The announcement part of EU's AI continent action plan endorses underscores efforts from the block to position itself as a key player in the AI race against the US and China. The EU has been lagging behind since OpenAI's 2022 release of ChatGPT ushered in a spending boom. Earlier this year, Washington announced Stargate, an AI joint venture. Pretty amazing that they're still crediting Washington with doing this, even though it was Sam and Masa. An AI joint venture that aims to build data centers in the US for OpenAI, which is again, crazy lime. Incredible finesse from Sam Altman. OpenAI, SoftBank Group, Oracle and MGX are the initial equity funders in Stargate, while arm, Microsoft and Nvidia are technology partners. The Companies are committing $100 billion initially, but plan to invest up to 500 billion over the next four years. You guys obviously know about Stargate already.

Yeah, I mean it makes sense. If you're, if you're in the EU and you see that announcement, it's like it doesn't really matter that Washington isn't putting the money in or putting the deal together. It just matters that like, hey, it's happening, seems Washington's excited about it, seems important and they're backing it and it's real. And so you gotta, you gotta answer. And so their answer is to the EU. In February pledged to mobilize 220 billion US dollars equivalent in euros in AI investments. More than 20 investors earmarked 150 billion euros for AI related opportunities in Europe over the next five years. While the block is setting up a new 20 billion euro fund for five, for up to five AI gigafactories. Member states will work with companies in public private partnerships to roll out the infrastructure. Given the elevated costs. A senior EU official said. And this has been happening all over. There was like Falcon was a, Falcon 9B was like a UAE funded LLM project. And there's been, there's been big, big discussions about. This was in Leopold Aschenbrenner's situational awareness essay talking about how major countries will want to have country level AI efforts.

Yeah, and Alex from Scale AI was talking about a strategic data reserve as well. So maybe they will expect the EU to fast follow.

Yeah, I mean he was testifying in Congress about it. Maybe they'll see that and want to do something of their own over in the eu.

Yep, this was a good quote. The global race for AI is far from over, says Henna Virkunen, the EU Executive Vice President for tech sovereignty, security and democracy. That is a broad area of expertise, very European. This action plan outlines key areas where efforts need to intensify to make Europe a leading AI continent. I love Europe. I want them to be an AI leader. And you know, I imagine there's, there's a lot of collaboration that can happen over time.

I wonder how that collaboration will take form because there's like, there's just general nationalist tendencies broadly. Like, you know, we've been hearing like Europe Wants their own defense companies. Right, but what about at the, how far do you think they want to go down the stack? Like they want to train their own foundation model. Do they want their own data or are they okay with just a broad scrape of the public Internet? Do they want to outsource the energy management to a U.S. company? Do they want to build their own. Like this is a bit, these are big questions because when $200 billion is floating around, there's going to be some companies that are major, major winners. And if, if this is truly like a, an EU only project, that will probably mean huge growth for companies in Europe that are focused on data center buildouts, energy production, transformer manufacturing. Right. All these different elements of the data center supply chain.

Yeah, you can imagine Mistral will probably be a key player a lot of this for sure. I don't foresee Xai getting any of this 200 billion just given the EU and Elon's current dynamic.

Yeah, but, and I wonder, yeah, I, I wonder how, yeah, I mean with, with, with Mistral, I wonder, you know, how much of Mistral was probably trained on existing hyperscaler infrastructure. And so it's a good point. Like Microsoft has data centers there, there are cloud AWS has data centers in Europe. If you were not focused on specifically EU mandate, you would probably just train on, you know, EU based hyper American hyperscaler infrastructure. But maybe this is a shift away from that. I don't know, we'll have to see.

Who knows.

It seems like they want to build gigafactories as they said 5. But anyway, good luck to them. Hopefully they build some stuff and catch up.

And, and if you're building data centers in the eu, give us a shout, we'll have you on the show.

Yeah, yeah, I'd be interested to hear what's going on, but $200 billion floating around. They got to control costs, they got to get on Ramp. They got money save both easy use.

Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com go to ramp.com.

Well, we got a great show for you today, folks. Let's, let's run through who we got. We got Blake from Brink Drones coming in. He just announced a new fundraising round. We got Zach Weinberg from Curie talking to us. He just debated Keith Raboy with Logan Bartlett all about tariffs. We'll ask him about that, but we'll also talk to him about that.

He debated Anthony Pompliano.

He did. I want to hear a breakdown of that.

He's been on the debate circuit. I think this is kind of like, hopefully will be more relaxing for him than his previous show appearances this week.

Yeah.

Because we're not here to talk anything related to politics. Never interested to hear how he's updated his thinking, how he's thinking of the art of the squeal.

The art of the squeal.

All other related topics.

Then we have Ian Cinnamon from Apex Space, Jen from Anduril, who runs design over there and has been putting together those fantastic, absolute tear. And then we got Rylan. Is that right? Rylan from BLW AI.

Yep. So Blue Water Autonomy.

That's right.

He is building autonomous ships for the open ocean. Very cool company. Talked to Rylan for the first time about a month back. Excited to have him on and be able to talk about what they're working on. He was at Amazon Robotics. He had a company called Six River Systems, which I believe. Yeah, sold to Shopify for $450 million. And he's put together a fantastic team. He also was in the US Navy at the very start of his career. So full circle moment, which would be cool.

Then we're kind of staying in defense tech for maybe a full hour there. But we got Zach from Conductor AI company that helps with form filing with the dod. And then we got Paul from Carbon Robotics building automated farm tractors. It's a very cool company. Very big already. Very cool.

So Conductor AI founder, by the way, Zach, I forget somebody was on saying that. Chris Backy on X was saying you have a guest that's not on X. This is Alpha. How do I invest 10 million? Zachary from conductor AI, not on X.

But he might be after the show. We've converted people before.

Yep. Wouldn't be the first time.

But anyway, let's run through some timeline before our first guest joins. In six minutes, Jason Carman is hiring a storyboard artist and assistant writer for his company story. Your days will be filled with drawing sci fi storyboards, writing creative outlines, briefs, and working directly with me on every project we're producing. Details below. Share some amazing photos.

Fantastic opportunity.

Yeah. If you're looking. If you've been thinking about getting into Hollywood, news flash. Hollywood's dead. Jason Carmen's the future. The only thing that you will see in theaters ever in the future will be produced by Jason because he's the only person kind of embracing the modern landscape of filmmaking, in my opinion.

And many people have said, I think.

He'S on a tear.

The next Steven Spielberg. Yes, I think we've said that.

Yes, among others, the next James Cameron. James Cameron has been floated around. Comparisons. Yes.

You know, George Lucas.

Yes, yes. Yeah.

But young George Francis Ford Coppola. Yeah.

Conversation.

Basically, he, Lars von Trier as well, gonna be in the conversations with the greats after, you know, at least a couple more films.

I think so. I think so. But we're huge fans of Jason.

Yeah. This is a cool opportunity. I think it'll be interesting. He's, he's obviously gonna push whoever takes this role to really leverage a lot of these new models. I was about to say, like, incredible output.

I was about to say, I bet there's so many storyboarding jobs that, that are stuck in the previous paradigm and they're fighting technology. And, you know, if you go work with Jason, he's going to be embracing all of that in a very positive way that still holds on to what the, what the humans do best and how can he create great content with these tools. And he does view the AI products as tools, so very exciting. Anyway, we have a post here. Consulting firms are cooked. Just absolutely cooked. The Pentagon says It's ending for $5.1 billion worth of IT and consulting contracts with firms including Accenture and Deloitte.

Yeah, one, one thing to note here. Accenture has, they did 60, nearly 65 billion in 2024 revenue and Deloitte did 67 billion in revenue. So clearly, you know, they, they do have a lot of big government contracts. But I, I, you know, they're not.

Completely 1 to 2% of their revenue.

Probably something not completely cooked yet.

They're diversified and they're probably making 20 billion in new net, but new revenue from AI consulting.

That's also just, just with the Pentagon. So it's very possible, I wonder how.

Much we should try and make a poly market around this. Where does the Pentagon's IT budget land in 2026? That's what I want to know. That's niche.

Yeah. So Accenture US federal government contracts accounted for 8% of their total revenue. So pretty significant, you know, unclear yet if, if it's just the Pentagon that's cutting, but I would guess it's, it's more groups.

Yeah. And you probably already know this, but the show is supported and sponsored by polymarket. We have a ticker down at the bottom. Interestingly, one of the markets that I've been following really closely has been which company has the best AI AI model by the end of April, and then they also have by the end of the year. And so what's interesting is you can kind of merge these different markets to create kind of a yield curve of AI progress. And so Google is currently expected to have the best model by the end of April, but OpenAI is expected to have the best model by the end of the year. And so a lot of this comes down to when the various models are releasing, what the expectations are, expectations about how different models will scale out when the training runs end. And so it's one of the most interesting markets that I've been following on polymarket. So go check it out. Anyway, let's move over to will, the.

Other one that's interesting. Just because it's been such a meme. GTA 6 release in 2025 is sitting at a 68% chance.

I can't believe how long it's taken them to that.

I mean, the expectations are so sky high at this point. I'm interested to see how that release goes.

Yeah.

Um, but have you heard the creators.

Of GTA talk about why it's so hard for them to release it and why they've kind of had, like, writer's block, more or less? It's very interesting.

I don't know.

Basically, they said that, like, GTA has always been a satire on society and they've had a lot of different. So you turn on the radio and they'll be making fun of all these different groups of people, and they kind of make fun of everyone, but they'll be like business people that are heightened versions of business people. In one of the GTA 5 missions, you hack into a tech company that's very clearly based on Facebook and they're talking about, like, stealing all your data and, like, owning your whole personality and all this stuff. And it's very. It's very funny and it's all in jest. And the creator said that now we're in this, like, culture war era where if you make fun of one side, that immediately aligns you with the other side and they're. And getting that balance right. And then also they said that the pace of the vibe shifting and social media happens so fast that if they, like, if they made GTA 6 and they scripted out a bunch of stuff that was, like, making fun of, like, Trump in 2024, when they scripted it, like, well, the way you make fun of Trump in 2024 is very different than the way you make fun of him in 2025 because he's a different person and everything's changed and, like, the memes are different and stuff. And so by the time you write the script, bake that into the game who create the sequence of events. People will say, oh, well, like the way you're making fun of them makes it clear that you're thinking you're very partisan left or you're very partisan right. And they just want to be like comedians, essentially.

Yeah. It's also interesting to be making a game around a topic which I just associate GTA with crime.

Sure.

You know.

Yeah.

Like, you know, 12 year old kids 10 years ago were just going into GTA to just do crime.

Yeah. But at the same time it was kind of like the. I mean, GTA 3 was very much a spin on like old mafia movies. Like, you know, it would be like, oh, it's the Godfather. And so yes, it does touch on crime, but a lot of them feel like, oh, this is heat. Like I'm playing heat right now. And it's like, yeah, it's bank robbery. It is, but. But it's like, it's kind of fun. Anyway. Anyway, we have, we have Blake from Brink Drones here. Let's bring him into the studio. How you doing, Blake?

Doing good.

It's great to see you guys.

Great to see you too. How are you doing? What's the latest with the company and what did you announce this week?

Yes. So I guess first of all we released our nine one response drone network. Did that man. Maybe eight months ago, something like that, which is really the product that I started bring to build. So that was an important moment for me personally. But kind of what we design to manufacture are drone recharging pods that we install on top of police and fire station roofs. And then we integrate that network with computer aided dispatch. So the second someone calls 9 1, we grab the GPS coordinate that's associated with that 91 call. And we can automatically launch a drone from the nearest recharging station to the emergency send to that location at 60 miles an hour. When it arrives, we can deliver Narcan, EpiPens, personal flotation devices, all sorts of stuff, and also just provide first responders a lot of additional information about the situation they might be walking into. So our drones have thermal imagers. They can see hotspots and structure fires, communicate that to a fire department before they arrive, and then when they do arrive, help them point their hoses in the right direction. And then on sort of the policing side, we can tell responding officers if someone is holding a lighter or a gun or anything like that before they even show up. So that was huge. And what we just released or announced a couple days ago is our latest funding round. So a new 75 million led by Index Ventures, but with significant backing from Motorola Solutions, which it's actually kind of an interesting company. They have more or less a monopoly position in the body worn radio market. So they have pre existing commercial relationships with just about every police and fire department in the free world and they're going to start distributing our products and helping us sell into those logos. But we're also going to be integrating with their body worn radio so officers can basically request drone backup very easily. And they have a strong market position in a number of public safety software categories. So we'll be integrating with all of that too.

That's super cool. Can you take me through some of the history of the company? What was version one of the drone that you built? What was the first drone you built.

Was just kind of how you said, you said something that stood out, which is this was your original vision for the company, but you started it back in 2017. And then there's been so many different areas in which drones have emerged and so much potential across a bunch of different categories. I imagine you had all this pressure to go in different directions over time. But yeah, would love to hear of how your thinking has evolved since the beginning. Or was this like this was the idea from the beginning and you're just like happy to finally get to really focus and deliver on it?

I mean, I've loved aerospace technology since I was a little kid, right. If I had the choice when I was 16, I would have been designing full scale fighter jets, but. Or 12, whatever. But when I was that age, you know, maybe I didn't quite have the resources to pull off like a full scale manned aircraft program, but I definitely did have the resources to build reasonably sophisticated drones. So I've been doing that ever since I was pretty small. But really what got me thinking about public safety technology was the October 1st tree. So I grew up in Las Vegas. I knew people that were along the strip when that was happening and that's what got me thinking, like maybe there's a home for some of the technology that I love in the hands of first responders to help them save lives during critical incidents. So I went and I reached out to Vegas Metro, SWAT and surprisingly they agreed to have lunch with like 18 year old me at the time.

That's amazing.

And that interaction, you know, we talked a lot about what happened during October 1st and I learned things that I didn't realize. But then the conversation broadened to the rest of their jobs. The high risk warrant searches and barricades and Hostage rescue missions that they have to face every day. And I walked away from that interaction thinking if they just had a way to get eyes and ears in dangerous places, that that would be a life saving capability for them regularly in the context of active shooter response, but also all of the other missions that I mentioned. And while I also conceptualized the idea of a citywide 91 response drone network in that meeting, I was familiar with how technically complex it would be to pull something like that off from my time at DJI because they were my prior employer before I started Brink. Just the levels of reliability and airspace deconfliction and optics and like many other things that you have to pull off in order to really make that work, it felt out of scope for me at the time. So I began with the indoor system, which is really like a purpose built drone for SWAT teams to get eyes and ears in dangerous places. We invented the world's first drone glass breaker. So the drone can actually fly up to a window, shatter it out, make entry, then it has a lighter on board, a lidar on board. So as it's clearing rooms, it's drawing a floor plan of that structure and then streaming it back live to first responders. Has thermal imaging capabilities, 4K cameras and also a two way audio system. So when the drone finds someone, a crisis negotiator can actually use it like a flying cell phone to try to de escalate the situation. And today over 600 SWAT teams are actively using it, which is about 10 to 15% of the SWAT teams in the United States. And that success is really what enabled us to on this larger vision of automating a lot of nine one call response.

How do the teams test with the product? Do they have traditional sort of, I imagine they can go to ranges and do scenario planning and shoot houses. Right. Are they going and using your tech at the same shoot houses and practicing or do you build sort of digital systems that allow them to practice as well? What does that look like?

Both.

Yeah, we have simulators. So if folks want to fly drones virtually, that's totally possible. But many of them do choose to train with the actual hardware. And I would say like when I was developing the first version of Lemur, I actually rode along with Vega's Metro SWAT for like six months. So I went on 20, 30 SWAT call outs and I watched them deploy the early versions of our drone. And more than in any other way, like that's how the technology was actually developed. Like me paying close attention to what worked and what didn't.

Work.

And if something didn't work work, I would go back to my mom's house at the time and like re engineer the product to the point where I thought it would do better on the next mission. And then when I would get a 3am notification, there's a barricade at this address in Vegas. I'd bring that version of the drone.

Can you talk about just how hard it is to deploy hardware in the field in these environments? We've talked about a company called Sonos that I'm sure you've interacted with at different points. We bring this up sometimes because it's like they're in these highly controlled environments which is just your home and they connect to your local Internet and you just like want them to be able to like, you want to be able to hit play and just like have it play music. Yet 20% of the time doesn't play. And I bring that up as an example because it's like, it's not like they're not talented clearly hardware and it's like that is the perfect example of just how hard hardware is, even in a hyper controlled environment where no lives are on the line. And then you go into a situation, you know, that you're dealing with with brink all the time where like you need, this stuff needs to work because first responders are relying on it. You know, the 9911 operators are relying on it. You know, so much is kind of riding on it. So I'm curious how you think about sort of battle testing products internally and at what point you feel like they're ready to be deployed in the field.

I mean the reality is it's just incredibly difficult. Yeah, I'll tell you, I mean in the very early days of Brink when I was riding along with the SWAT team, I might have just faced countless issues. A large portion of this happened during Las Vegas this summer. So overheating was a theme in the first couple of months. The RF environments where you're trying to operate drones can in some cases be incredibly congested, especially in ISM bands. Think about an apartment complex, right? Every apartment has its own WI fi transmission system and you're trying to share spectrum with all of that, which is terrible. In some cases, public safety radios will blow out your communications. You have to be aware of that and sort of like integrate with all of the other radios that a SWAT team might already be utilizing. And then everyone wants pilot assistance on these drones and obstacle avoidance. But many of the techniques that you would normally want to employ in order to Give a drone indoor localization are sensitive to environmental factors like visual inertial odometry utilizing an HD image sensor, right? Like maybe that works super well when you're not blowing up shitloads of dust all the time in attic, right? Or maybe it works well in like a well lit room, but you start kicking up insulation in zero light conditions and like, good luck making that function. So what you ultimately have to invest in is large numbers of redundant systems, right? Localizing based on LIDAR data and IMU data and VIO data and GPS data, et cetera, barometer data, et cetera. And then if you layer enough systems and you're clever enough in your system design and software design and everything else, you can get to something that works. But I mean, this is what makes all of this hard, right? Like putting together a quick demo of a product that competes with us, you know, that's pretty easy. That actually, actually does better than what we make in the field is extraordinarily difficult.

I mean, I know and it's, it's funny because I, I imagine that, that there's companies that have or will try to compete with you that fly a DJI drone and they're like, oh, I could make an American version of this that you could fly in a house.

And then they make it look so easy. I mean, DJI is an extraordinary company. It was really amazing to spend some time within, within their org. They make it look easy.

But you break down some of the design trade offs from what people might have experienced with the DJI quadcopter. You know, I think about like 20 minute battery life being kind of the upper bound. But I've heard about drones, you know, being gas powered, being single rotor, there's so many different trade offs. Octocopters, there's all sorts of different. What zipline is doing. We talked to the zipline folks yesterday. It's completely different system. So what trade offs have you made to move your product away from what people might be familiar with with like a DJI Mavic 3 or something like that?

Totally. Well, the first thing I would say is DJI is actively getting banned throughout the United States. So on the order of 10 states have already passed laws preventing their public safety agencies from utilizing Chinese drones. Yep. DJI drones are Chinese. Autel drones are Chinese. DJI has something like 90% of the global market. Autel is roughly 5%. So like 95% of the market is banned, is controlled by companies that can't sell into public safety agencies in 10 states, which definitely is Generating a significant need for more drone makers in the free world. Right. There's also potential, potentially some federal legislation coming that would have a similar effect on all 50 states.

Sure.

Since it's.

Go for it.

Sorry.

Yeah.

But no, I mean, if we're looking at the actual products.

Yeah.

Lemur 2 competes most directly with DJI Avada. But we invented a whole bunch of features that make Lemur 2 very fit for purpose for a SWAT mission. Things like a glass breaking attachment so the drone can actually make its own hole into a structure and make entry. Because it is fairly dangerous for SWAT operators to go up, rake, and break a window when there's a person with a rifle inside. No one wants to do that. So our customers care a lot about that feature. Lemur 2 has a two way audio system. So when a drone finds someone, it can actually be used to communicate with them, which is usually the number one goal besides getting someone out of a structure. During a SWAT call out, you want to establish negotiation and a line of communication. If you do that, the risk of something going terribly wrong goes down tremendously. So it's a pretty common tactic. Our drones have thermal imagers. Our indoor drone has a thermal imager. DJI does not offer. Offer an indoor system with a thermometer that can see heat, which is unbelievably beneficial on basically every mission. I could go on and on and on. We've invented a million features along these lines.

How do you think about supply chains? Obviously, I'm sure it's top of mind this week. How are you thinking about it? How are you adapting? Brink, I'm sure you've been trying to become independent from China.

It takes time.

We are. I've been personally sanctioned by China. I cannot enter China. Brink has now been sanctioned by China twice. Okay, what's. So we're not allowed to buy any parts in China.

Wow.

Yes.

How are you dealing with that? I feel like we just heard a story about skydio not being able to batteries.

Isn't it hilariously ironic that we can't pass federal legislation to ban DJI which owns 90% of our market, yet they're banning.

They're banning you and you don't even sell there.

Our team. Yeah. It's insane.

Right?

I mean, same old story, though. Same old story.

Right.

Like all of their social media platforms can come into our market and compete. We can't go into theirs. The exact same dynamic is now unfolding in the drone industry. It's ridiculous.

So, yeah, supply chain, like, how are you thinking about it? Because it feels like just even if you're fully aligned with Made in America, it's hard to get a reliable source of batteries in America. And we just saw that story with skydio having their battery manufacturer get pulled kind of out from under them.

Well, our drones are NDA compliant, meaning that we don't utilize any electronics from China whatsoever. No processors, no radios, no imaging sensors, like none of that stuff. We had to become NDA compliant a couple of years ago in order to sell to the customers that we sell. So that was like a great step one.

Got it.

Listen, I mean, you have to set this as like an initial design requirement, like engineering team. We can't use parts from China. Yeah, can't do it. If that's a part of the original brief, then people find solutions.

Sure, yeah.

They work with new suppliers, they in house stuff, like whatever is necessary, they do it and you end up with a product. What's excruciating is building something without that initial requirement set and then having to like transition it over. That seems really, like really bad. But we just, we've not been in a position where we've had to do that because of NDA compliance requirements and other things. We saw this one coming, so it is very much.

Do you think there's the adequate investment in the domestic drone design and manufacturing today, or do we need it?

I think it's off by like a factor of 100. It's actively terrifying, actually. We have no drone industrial capacity. I think the DoD continues to underinvest in small drones. They're only now beginning to realize that these things are important weapons of war because of the conflict in Ukraine. But they're not writing checks. I mean, the largest military small drone purchase that I'm aware of is srr, and it's just not very big. It's like, I think single digit, thousands of systems. Those are the orders that have been placed so far. So when we're buying a couple thousand drones at a time and DJI is producing literally millions a year, it's not a good situation for America.

How do you think about focus in that context? Because in my view, if there's not, if we need more investment, one of the ways to do that would be you launch a DoD focused side of the business or you start to work, you know, with, with foreign allies and stuff like that. But clearly you've, you've made a decision in the, in the fullness of time to sort of focus on the local market. But I'm sure you have pressure all the time. I'M sure you have investors that like send you an article about Ukraine and they're like, hey, Blake, did you see what's happening in Ukraine? And you have to be like, yes, I saw. But you know, we have our own sort of battles at home.

Listen, if military customers aren't buying drones, that's not a decision I can make.

Yeah, fascinating.

What about in the.

I should also say though, just to be clear, like, I absolutely adore the public safety market. Like, I started this company to serve first responders. I think the life saving mission that they take on is extraordinary and it's something that I am, I'm deeply passionate about and excited to support. So, like that, that's what I care about here. But I mean, I'm not blind to what's going on in China or Ukraine. And it's clear that systems very similar to the ones that we build will shape future conflict.

I'm interested in, again, maybe getting a little bit out of scope here, but I'm interested. There's this classic idea of US Marine training with some type of AR based rifle and they spend all this time training on this sort of rifle. Are they spending enough time training how to fly FPV drones, how to work with drone networks, or do you think the training is not even and sort of caught up to the realities of the battlefield today?

Well, you know, FPV drones are really hard to fly. I don't know, have either of you guys tried to fly like an FPV system before?

Yeah, it's really hard.

I've just done basic DJI type.

They're not stabilized. Like, they don't have gps. So if you take your hands off the sticks, FPV drones will fly into a wall at like 40 miles an hour. It takes incredible skill to like even keep them in a hover, like, let alone hits a moving target somewhere. They've been highly successful in Ukraine. But I don't feel like FPV drones as they're currently designed or manufactured are really like the end state of this technology. I think they'll be more automated, they'll have stabilization systems, you'll be able to select a target and the drone will do its own navigation to intercept that target. They won't rely necessarily on RF communication systems since the jamming environment is getting so bad in many places. So that's all to say. You can say, okay, we should be training our military on how to fly FPVs, but that's going to be a huge amount of work. And all of that work might not be very relevant in five years when some of the technologies that it described or capabilities I described mature to the point that they're commonplace. So, I don't know. I think really the right choice would be invest a lot more in purchasing drones, actually buy.

Oh, Zach. Zach, we're flipping people over. We have some technical difficulties in the studio today.

No worries.

We'll be with you in just a minute. Zach, we got to say goodbye to Blake.

No, I guess just to finish my last statement.

Sorry.

I think the move here is for the US Military to buy drones at significant scale, start incorporating them into our armed forces, you know, get people familiar with them, but have drone manufacturers like us or anyone else, like, build something that's actually fit for purpose. So, you know, all those efforts result in a good outcome for all parties involved.

That makes sense.

Well, this has been fascinating. We'd love to have you back again soon, and thank you for the work that you're doing, and congrats to you and the team on the new milestone.

Yeah. Congratulations.

Thank you.

Massive round.

Cheers, bud.

Talk to you soon. Bye. And it seems like Zach's already here, so let's just bring him in. He's out.

Okay.

We got to bring him back in. We are building the plane as we're flying it, and we're also being attacked by state actors.

So the state actors, if you see it.

If you see an error, take it up with the state actors, because they're the ones that are hacking us at every. At every turn. At every turn. But we're very excited to have Zach Weinberg on the show. You probably know him from his repeated appearance on the Logan Bartlett show, formerly Cartoon Avatars. If you're a real Logan Bartlett head. Zach was almost the co host. He denied it. He said, I'm not. I'm not really the co host of that show, but we know that so many great episodes came out of that era. He was debating the crypto folks again and again and again, weeks on end, fighting the fight during the height of zirp. And now he's moved on to fighting Keith Raboy about tariffs, and we will get into all that, and then I'm sure we'll talk about bio and what he's up to at Curie. So let's bring Zach in. If he's here, okay? He's coming back in. We will send him a message.

I love his X banner. It's a George Carlin quote. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. He loves it, which sometimes is what it Feels like on X. Yeah, he's.

Been on a tear. This has been a good week for him. He's had plenty to comment on and dunk on and had a lot of fun chatting. I really want to get him to break down his debate with Anthony Pompliano as well as what he's been talking to Keith Raboy and Logan Bartlett about. But let's bring him back in the studio when we get a chance. And in the meantime, let's tell you about Numerl. Sales tax on autopilot. You can spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to Numeral hq. Just do it. Just do it.

Thousands of companies work with numerl. You should be one of them.

And what was the stat over 75 states now collect tax on?

I think it was a couple hundred.

Couple hundred.

Actually, no, I have a note here. 25 states, 25,000 states soon. If, if, if we have our imperial way, it could be hundreds of states.

Yes, the moon's going to be a state and they're going to have sales tax on the moon for sure. Greenland. Oh, you think you can ship to Greenland without paying sales tax?

Yeah, right.

Yeah, right. We're not letting those penguins free ride on us. They're going to be paying sales tax and you're going to be paying your sales tax on Numeral. With Numeral HQ. Go to NumeralHQ.com, check it out. In the meantime, Palmer Luckey fired back at folks hating on Colossal, talking trash about how, oh, Colossal didn't create dire wolves. Technically they just spliced 10,000 year old year old dire wolf DNA with gray wolves. They should spend their time arguing that Jurassic park did not in fact depict any dinosaurs. And Palmer shares, this thing sucks, actually. And it's literally the coolest thing ever. And I agree, very, very excited that the dire wolves are back, that we got hairy, big gray wolves. Very funny. You know, who knows where Colossal goes? Maybe it's just more entertaining zoos. But I'm here.

I just, I'm rooting for them. Great, great positioning. The De Extinction Company.

Yep.

And they're putting up some big numbers, at least in the funding department.

For sure.

There he is.

Zach, welcome to the show.

Can you hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you.

You kicked me out and then Zoom said I wasn't allowed back in.

I'm sorry about that. Well, thank you for joining us. We're very excited to have you. Can you give us a little breakdown of the last two days? You've been on a debate tour which debates do you think you've won? Where's your weakest talking point that I can needle you on?

And we were joking earlier. Hopefully this is the most enjoyable podcast experience that you have this week, because I know some of them got a little contentious. It's great to have you.

Yeah, yeah, it's been fun. I pray to God I did not lose a debate to a bitcoin, bro. So at that point, I'm just committing suicide and hanging it up.

You did go in the lion's den with that one. Yeah.

No, actually, I would say the most interesting conversation I did, we just posted, which was yesterday with Derek Thompson from the Atlantic, who co wrote the Abundance book with Ezra Klein, which I think is a great book. And we mostly agree on 70% of the things. And, you know, some of the stuff we didn't agree with at the end, we got to both, which was really nice. So that has been fun. You know, it's funny, like, I. The reason I started to do it is because these topics, tariffs, pie grade, like, these are not interesting topics to the vast majority of Americans day to day. Like, they don't care about this stuff.

Stuff.

Until right now.

Yep.

And so I was like, all right, it. Let's go have a conversation about things that, like, I'm interested in and I think are important for America. But normally, you know, the audience was like, you know, my family. So that's part of why I was doing it and still am. I have a few more next week, actually, just to try and make. Try to make sense of what's going on in this. Really complicated economic concepts, you know, for, like, normal people. That's been my goal. So it's been fun. It's been fun.

Are you abundance pilled at this point? Because I was. I was listening to something about Ezra Klein talking about how he was very, like, inspired by West Wing and the abundance movement feels very aspirational. But there's always this question of, like, when the rubber meets the road, can the out. Can the impact of that actually not just be ready.

Yeah. To me, at a base level, it's an amazing positioning.

Yeah.

Like, coming at. It's a huge upgrade because, like, I saw even yesterday there was somebody in San Francisco that was saying we should tax Waymo to fund public transit. And then somebody was quoting it, being like, you know, basically, like, the idea is like, this is kind of ridiculous. Like, why don't we just make Waymo so cheap that. That everybody can use it.

Yeah.

An abundance of, you know, autonomous cars that everyone has Access to.

By the way. By the way. You do tax Waymo already?

Yeah.

You're like, welcome to how this works already, guys. You know, you're real shitty at building public transport. That's the problem. It's not the Waymo tax. By the Waymo loses like a billion dollars a year.

Like they're already handing you money. Yeah. Anyway.

Yeah.

I mean, what is your read on abundance? Not just, I mean, obviously give me like the. Do you like the framing? But then also is it a meaningful shift from just rhetoric? It will win the election or it will actually have meaningful change if it is implemented.

I love the concept because it gets the Democrats in particular, but America talking about growth and talking about how growing the pie and making the pie bigger is better for everybody. And then as a Dem or as like a left leaning person, when you want to talk about how the pie is allocated, which is about taxes and redistribution and social programs and all of that, that, those are cool conversations to have. When the pie is really big, when the pie is really small and you think of it in this like fixed mentality, then you get into these awful debates of like, you assume everybody, that there's, there's only a dollar to go around, but in reality there's way more dollars if you grow. And so I love that framing. It brings us back to Clinton, not Hillary, but like Bill back in the day. Right. You know, this is the kind of stuff that they were talking about. This is why I think the Dems were a great political party 20 years ago. So that part I agree with. I think it's great. The other thing I think they touched on that I love is that abundance actually matters a lot more in a few specific categories. Abundance is not created equal and in particular housing. That housing is kind of the only thing that really matters in the long run for most people because it is such a large percentage of everybody's income, either as a homeowner because of the mortgage or obviously as a renter. And like, sure, you can complain about grocery prices, but the reason you care so much about the movement in grocery prices is because housing is eating up 50% of your income. And so like, go get the big thing and then the little things will matter a lot less. So I really like that positioning as well. I think they nailed the like problem in America is really housing costs and other stuff matter, but not as much. Healthcare is probably the second where we disagree and we had this little fun little disagreement on it is what is the role of government in creating that abundance and where do you need government to do stuff such as building roads and providing health insurance through Medicare and Medicaid, through construction of energy infrastructure and things like that, military. And where do you need government to get the fuck out of the way? Because government is the thing holding us up and rules and rags that prevent the free market and from capitalism from building the homes. Right. And there's just a lot of nuance, I think, of where government should and shouldn't be involved. And so their book is a little bit more like make government good at its job. And my view on that is like, I don't really think that's ever going to happen. And so for a variety of reasons. And so there are some places where we actually need to get the government out of the process and that will help. And it just depends on what you're talking about. Are you talking about like, you know, bridges and tunnels and highways? Are you talking about homes? Are you talking about semiconductor manufacturing? And we disagree on some of the specifics there, but the goal is noble and good and way better than what we have been talking about for the last 10 years, which is like, I don't even know what we've been talking about.

It's been. I agree. Yeah, that was a good point. I want to get to tariffs. How did you, I mean, like, take me on the roller coaster of emotion that you went through over the past week with regard to Liberation Day and the fallout from it.

Yeah. Then we can get to the art of the squeal.

Yeah, the art of the squeal, which.

Has been the talk of the timeline today.

I have no idea what that is, but interested in learning more.

You know.

Because I work day to day in biotech and in healthcare, but specifically in biotech and in early stage biotech, which is before a drug is approved. Right. This is all drug discovery. The tariff stuff doesn't really impact us on a day to day basis. And so from like a professional side of things, it's interesting to watch and be interested in it because, you know, tax revenue helps fund science. So I'm very interested in growing the economy because it'd be nice for us to have more money to fund more science. That's, that's really my big interest in this. Right. Like if America were 10 times richer, then the NIH budget would be 10 times bigger. And you know how much cool shit we would discover as like humanity if the NIH budget was 500 billion instead of 50 billion? Like, like that's pretty cool. I think it's like 30 billion. And so that's why I'm really interested in this stuff. Because I think as members of society today and our kids, we benefit from a booming US economy in ways that are not always clear. And one of them is in science and in drug discovery. So that's part of why I'm interested in this stuff. Because I think it's bad for America if we don't grow. But on a day to day basis it hasn't impacted us. Now there are other things going on in the administration related to healthcare, as I'm sure you've seen with RFK and the FDA that we pay a lot more attention to and they're very nuanced biotech specific problems which needs a lot of context to share.

With to the NIH. Why is that $30 billion budget so important? Why we don't like DARPA created the Internet, but the free market and venture capital in Silicon Valley is like, well they kind of took it from there, right? Why hasn't that happened in, in biotech? Why do we need the government doing anything? Why can't they just kind of get out of the way and you know, kid in the lab, you know, with his chatgpt looking it up, formulate something and they test it and then the government may be still there to approve it, but you know, it moves a lot faster.

I knew this question was coming because I get asked it all the time and I was, I was trying to come up, up with like a simple way to understand where you need and where you don't need government in biotech. So I'm going to try my best. I want to make the distinction between biology, which is the understanding of how the body works versus drugs. You could think of it as chemistry, but it's more than chemistry now which is, is creating something, a pill, an injection, mRNA, sirna, whatever. There's a lot of different things you can make to change that biology, right? One is like I want to, this is a thing that's going wrong in the body. I want it to do more, I want it to do less. That is biology. And then there's the like I gotta now create something that doesn't naturally happen in your body or isn't happening to make an impact on disease. And those are two different things. Those are two very, very different things. Biology you cannot patent. There is no patent for understanding a process that happens in your cells or happens in your immune system. You got to remember, I think people think we know more about how the human body works than we do. We barely understand how this thing Works. I mean, we have a little bit of, like, we understand, you know, how to like sequence DNA and how DNA creates RNA and how RNA sometimes creates proteins. Like, we have some basic level understanding of this stuff, but it is an incredibly complex system that if you don't understand how it works, you can't even start a drug program in the first place, because what are you pointing it to? What are you trying to drug? And that I think is really, really important because there is mostly no business model in finding new biology, like learning how a certain type of cell works or how cell communication works. Like, you can't make money doing that. And it's really, I mean, like, yes, some rare cases, sure, but you really can't.

So the solution is to do like a DAO or something. Something like that.

I mean, owned, owned admitted crypto is the solution.

Sorry, sorry, I don't want to trigger you. I know you were triggered.

And so, like, you know, when people talk about academic discoveries and discoveries in the lab and government funded discoveries, and none of, like, those are all true things, but mostly what academics discover, mostly in this world, in my world, is biology, right? Ooh. This is how this thing works. This is how this process works, right? And then private groups go and go, ah, okay, now that I understand this thing is causing a type of cancer, or this thing is causing cell signaling in a weird way, or this thing is causing Alzheimer's or dementia or some immune condition. Now I'm going to try and make a drug to go and stop that thing from happening or modulate it down. And those drugs you can patent, right? And that's what creates an incentive for private business to go and take a massive amount of risk. Because most drugs fail and it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to figure out if they fail. But because you can patent those things, and then because that patent life is long enough and the prices on the other side of this are high enough that you can make money doing it. You could, you know, it's not easy to make money. Let me be clear. So you need government to discover biology. Without it, you won't, it won't happen. And here's like a simple. There's a few examples of this that I'm gonna try and make it tangible. But like, we do not know what causes Alzheimer's. We have no idea. I mean, we have some, we have some things that show up in the brains of Alzheimer's patients that seem wrong, right? And this is the whole, like, tau. And you know, some of the best way to describe it, there are things in the brain of Alzheimer's and dementia patients that shouldn't be there. And so, okay, we're going to try and like remove those things from the brain, but we don't actually know what's causing those things to be there in the first place. And is that actually, is that causing Alzheimer's? Is it driving the disease or is it actually a passenger? There's something else driving it over here and that's causing this. Which, what are these things? Do we try and drive? Right, like, and you know, this is like tau and beta amyloid and all these things that we think are kind of involved, but we don't actually know what causes Alzheimer's. We're not even close to understanding this. And so if you want good drugs for dementia and Alzheimer's in the future, we need to know what the hell is happening now. And without government funding that kind of biology research, we will never figure this out because there is no business really in doing that kind of lab work. It's open ended science. This is where you need philanthropy and money that isn't chasing profit. The first person will tell you, capitalism is the greatest thing that ever happened to humanity, but there are some places where it doesn't work and that's where there isn't profit to be made. And biology is really, really, really key.

Can you. I wanted to get your thoughts on tariffs, specifically in the context of the pharmaceutical industry. Trump had come out this week and basically said that pharma is next. But if you actually look at the U.S. china, there isn't a huge pharmaceutical trade imbalance between the US And China. It seems like we buy a lot from them, they buy a lot from us. Is that, should that even be a part of the conversation or is it just a total distraction?

It's really, really stupid. And it's stupid for. It's even dumber than that, which is that the pharmaceutical product that you're manufacturing at the end of this is the approved drug. By the time you're at that point, all the hard stuff has kind of really been done, right, which is figuring out what drug to make in the first place, how to design, how to develop it. All the risk, all the failures are in what happens before this, before the approval. And that's where all the money is made, right? All the money, all the stuff that is like strategic for the United States to be good at is in drug discovery and drug development. It is not drug manufacturing that matters. Right? Like, that is not the hard part. It's not easy. But like that's not the thing that we need to be doing in America. These are also like giant facilities. There's not a ton of people. It's really more of like quality control processes. It's actually better for us if we can build them elsewhere because it allows drugs to be slightly cheaper for Americans. Right. Like I don't view drug manufacturing as strategic to the United States. Like someone's got to do it. But that's not the part that matters. The part that matters is drug discovery and drug development, which is really what our biotech and pharmaceutical companies, that's mostly what they're good at. Just because it's made in Canada or Europe, I don't think really matters as long as the quality control is there. So tariffing the last mile manufacturing is irrelevant. It just doesn't make any sense. Why do we need these things here? It's just going to make things more expensive. It gets the problem wrong.

Yeah, that makes sense. Can you talk about AI in the context of the early stage investing that you're doing? Drug development work that you know the portfolio is doing. I did a command F on your site, by the way. You don't mention AI at all. Yet every time Sam Altman needs to raise another 10, 20 billion that this sort of like, you know, the idea that LLMs are going to cure all disease seems to come up. So I'm curious to get your take on the opportunity generally because our takeaway from this week is with all the potential of AI, it's sort of upsetting in many ways that we've had to kind of like take this detour down trade war lane.

I mean at the same time when AlphaFold dropped it was like the protein folding problem is solved. Biotech markets didn't really move. And I'm always wondered why there's such a disconnect there between like the hype around AI and bio versus what the market is saying. But maybe it's taking stage, taking place at the early stage. But would love just the current rant on AI and biotech. Okay.

One of the hardest things to explain in a short period of time. The TLDR is like nice cool tool in the toolbox.

Useful.

We'll make a few steps of this process potentially more efficient. Not a panacea by any means. Why? Let's see if I can try to explain this. Making a drug is like a 40 step process that requires you to actually make early versions of the physical molecule itself. Because you don't. Just because the computer says do X, Y and Z doesn't mean it's right, right? Like it's not, it's not software predictions where it makes you a picture and then you go, ah, that picture. You have to go and make the thing that the computer is suggesting. If we're talking about in this case using AI for the drug making part of it, not the biology part, we can talk about biology in a second or differently. So you got to go like, think like make test, iterate cycle. And it's atoms, it's not bits, these are physical atoms. And then you take that early version of the drug and you stick it in a petri dish and you see what happens. And then you have to tweak it and you got to go make more of them and you got to run this little loop. And then if that works to where you want, now you got to go stick it in a mouse. Which mouse? Does the mouse have the right model? Does the mouse predict the human? Which version is it a human? Like there's so many things and then, okay, you get through the mouse, dog or monkey, right? Because. Because mice aren't people. Mice aren't people, right? And neither dogs are monkeys, but they're closer to people.

All right?

And so now you got to go do all that stuff. And so like, and then by the way, even after all of this, even after all of this we've gotten through the, the petri dish and the mouse and the dog and the monkey and then you go to the people, you still don't know if the drug works because you have to go like, humans are weird, right? Biology is weird. We don't know how it works. You stick it in. If it does everything right in the monkey, that doesn't mean it's going to work in the human. And so unfortunately there's just the data you would need to make all of these predictions. And then it's not just the predictions. You need the feedback loop, right? Like why is Scale AI a 20 billion dollar business? Because you need a bunch of people clicking like, not the right picture, not the right picture. You need that loop, loop for training and you don't have that loop in biotech. You do not have that. You have to. The size of the data we're talking about here is like 1, 1 billionth of what you can do in digital land. Because in the digital world, your training data set is the history of every written word and picture ever in the history of humanity. Think of the size of the training data in biology you don't have that. One other little nuance is your training Even where you do have training data and there's different types of training data, depends what you're trying to predict. It's protein structure is one thing. A lot of that training data comes in a petri dish.

Right.

Like we're not actually, when we, when we think about like how a cell works and what's going on inside of it, we're not actually measuring and watching that cell in a real biological system, meaning like it's touching other cells and doing stuff. You're doing it in a petri dish which is a piece of plastic. And like the way that cell works on a piece of plastic is not the same way that it tends to work. Could we tell you exactly what that difference is?

No.

And so you have some really big challenges in even just the quality of the training data if you want to use this to make high quality predictions. And so, so it's going to come off as I'm like super negative about all this. And I'm not, I'm not. I think it's awesome that we have slightly better tools to make predictions about, you know, how to design a small molecule. That's really what this is particularly good at. But this idea that like a computer is designing a drug is so far from reality that that's why you don't see the, like the people who know. Yeah, no. And that's why it's not moving. It's great, it's cool, I'm glad we have it. It's not going to change the game. And part of this is like not to finish my rant here. If you don't understand the biology, what is the computer trying to predict? Right. Like all the way back to the thing we talked about in the beginning. If we don't even know what causes a particular disease, what is the computer going to make for you? Right. Like, and so, so much of the problem of making drugs for the future and there's so many challenges in all of this and it's great that America is good at this but like it is actually on the, is in the biology side of things where, you know, you know, we need more science, we need more scientists, we need more smart scientists.

So the idea of, I think it's a good, a good, it's not necessarily negative, but it's a good wake up call to the sort of e ACC super AGI pill types that say just survive the next two years and then we're all going to live forever. Which is. I did want to ask specifically how you thought about the potential of Even just base LLMs within healthcare. There was a study recently around how, you know, basically LLM based therapy was actually showing to have tremendous potential. And that's cool because the idea that everybody can get access to a, you know, high, relatively high quality therapy effectively for free could, could have tremendous benefits. But I'm curious if you think AI can be deflationary within healthcare broadly outside of, you know, drugs, drug discovery and development, things like that?

Probably not at a giant number, but there are some things that I think these LLMs will be particularly good at. I'm not going to talk about the boring part of healthcare which is like insurance reimbursement, PDFs, prior author. Like paperwork. Yeah, I actually think LLMs should be awesome on the paperwork side. And so things should get better. You should see, things should be faster, more efficient. That'll be great. No more. You ever make an appointment with a doctor and like some, you know, front desk person is trying to call you 18 times, you're like, hey, have you ever heard of like a text message that I can confirm my appointment? Like that stuff should be solved, hopefully. I think the other area that is really useful is in differential diagnosis, which is basically like the job of a doctor to try and figure out what's wrong with you. And part of that is understanding the science and then part of that is the literature that you have to based on the symptoms that this person is talking about and telling you what might it be. And that's probability weighted type analysis that the docs do and they try and rule stuff out. And a lot of that just comes from experience and education and that should be replicable by models over time. I think that's getting better.

Do you have any specifically? One thing that I think is interesting is like way it seeming seemingly like people are much more excited to get their biomarkers done and there's services now that allow you to test a really broad range of biomarkers for seemingly less money than going, yeah, yes, companies like Function and Superpower and others. Are you excited about just having a lot more data? And obviously it's like a snapshot in time, but that and data by itself is not valuable. But I imagine that's it right there.

You just hit it right there. Which is like data by itself. Just because you can measure it doesn't make it important. And just because it's going up or down doesn't mean it matters. And sometimes the data can be confusing and actually point you in weird directions that don't make sense. Because this biomarker that we think is important. We don't actually have great data to know whether it is. And you know, certain things can be elevated in your blood because of like the coffee you had in the morning. And it doesn't mean. So I think it's great that people are interested in their own health and interested in understanding what's going on in their body. I think think the chances of like wide blood based biomarker screening, like basically what function does actually mattering for the vast majority of people is probably not true. It's kind of like healthy neurotic people staying more healthy and neurotic and things that really matter are much more for like people of chronic disease and cancer. Like that's really where health like, like tech people have this really weird view of healthcare because tech people tend to be healthy and like that's not healthcare. That's not, I mean it's healthcare but that's not the healthcare that we, that really matters. Which is mostly like when you're older and sicker and chronic disease is just, you know, is a symptom of aging. And so I'm much more interested in how do you think about healthcare as it relates to disease rather than, you know, these like biomarkers that don't necessarily tell you tons of things. The flip of it is look like every once in a while it is going to catch something that matters, right? It's not never, it's just not frequent. And often there's also a risk in healthcare, I know it's jumping. There's always a risk in healthcare of finding something you think is going wrong, trying to figure that out. And while you are trying to figure it out, harming yourself itself. And a simple example of this is a biopsy, right? Like you go and get a scan and you gotta remember it's a scan, it's not a detail. So like you see something in a scan, could be an X ray, could be mri, whatever. And it looks like ah, we have this like little nodule here and is it cancerous, is it not? We don't know. So you have to go get a biopsy which is like a giant needle, right that you gotta like stick into the whatever that thing is and pull out some cells and take a sample and then go test it. And like biopsies are not danger free and you can hurt yourself especially if it's in your like GI area and especially if you're older, right. And the doc can do it incorrectly and you can have symptoms and complications. Doing more in healthcare is not always better and I think that's really hard for people to understand is like more is not always better because treat diagnostic diagnosis and treatment is not risk free.

Except when it comes to the NIH budget or NIH budget maxing over here.

Doing more health care services is not always better.

Thank you for joining. This is a fantastic, fantastic conversation. I really appreciate you.

Yeah, let's do this again soon.

We gotta do this again soon. We could go for a lot.

40 other questions.

Yeah, this is fantastic. Thanks for joining us. Official biotech correspondent. Thank you.

There you go.

Works for me.

We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Cheers.

Next up we got Ian Cinnamon from Apex coming in the studio. Apex is a very cool company if you haven't looked at it. Apexspace.com you can actually track the Aries SN1.

The orbit of nominative determinism. Ian. Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a spice dune.

Oh, okay. I was wondering where you're going. I like that. I like that. Yeah. You can track its orbit right now. The last update 21 hours ago. Manufacturers apex. The mass 200 kg.

What?

200 kg dry. I like that it has both of those. It launched on a Falcon 9. Launched back over one year ago. So it's been up there for a year ago. Launched from the Air Force Western test range. We're excited to talk to Ian about Apex and everything in space. We are going to do a full space day on the show soon. Was talking to Ian about putting that together and we'll certainly bring him back for that. But we have him in the studio now, so. Welcome to the stream. Ian, great to see you. How you doing?

Boom.

Hey guys.

Great.

Great to be here.

I heard you talking all about Ares and it's been on orbit over a year now and we have a lot more going up soon.

Congratulations. I mean, I feel like there's, there's a very clear binary when you're starting a space company and you get your first thing into actual space. Delian's talked about this with Varda. It's like the number of companies that raised a lot of money and never got a single thing to space. It was too high. But it's coming down and you're part of the movement. So can you break us down? For us, just the history of the company, the goal, the mission, how things are going and kind of. What, what, what, what's keeping you up at night now?

Yeah, no, absolutely. So for a little bit of context, company is very new, right? We're only about two and a half years old at this point. I started the company with my co founder, Max Benassi, who spent his career scaling production at SpaceX. September of 2022, and it took us less than one year from starting the design of Ares, a satellite that's on orbit. From actually that, the clean sheet design, blank piece of paper to it actually working in orbit. Which, you know, to your point, it's not actually just about can you put the piece of metal into space? Because frankly, it's not too hard to put a piece of metal into orbit.

Right.

You pay SpaceX, you throw a hunk of metal on there, it has to work. And that I think is the key thing that like Delian and I actually went to college together, so we've known each other forever. And I think one of the things that we bond over is both of our companies not only got something to orbit, but the damn thing actually works. And that is something that is rare, frankly, in this industry. And like, there's other great companies out there that get to orbit. It lasts a few months, it lasts a few days, but having it actually work after a full year and keep working is a little bit unheard of in this industry. So I'm just really proud of the team that we put together that's let us actually do this.

Yeah. So talk about the actual product, what you actually put in space. It's designed. It's on your website. It's designed. It says spacecraft platform. I'm seeing satellite bus. Break those terms down for us.

Yeah. So in the industry, a satellite itself is not just this piece of metal. Right. It's effectively comprised of two components. One is called the bus and the other is the payload. So the satellite bus itself is all of the hardware, electronics, the avionics, the control systems that actually let a payload function in space. So let's say you want to go take photos of the Earth, right? You can't just stick a camera and a lens up into orbit. You need to give it power. It needs to be able to move, needs to talk to the Earth. The satellite bus does all of that. In the US we call it a satellite bus. The rest of the world calls it a platform, frankly. Platform. I have to say, you know, I'm a big fan of the US And America and everything that we're doing, obviously. But platform might be a better name than a bus, but I just can't convince the US Government to change the name from bus to platform. For whatever reason, they're stuck on calling it a bus.

Oh, well, well, we'll start calling it a platform.

So, yeah, thank You.

I appreciate that.

I'd love to know about some of the satellites that you're excited about going on the bus, or the platform, as we'll call it. What are you excited about? We've heard a lot about Internet communication. We've heard the story of Starlink, obviously. We've heard Planet Labs and Albedo working on stuff to take better images. Are there any? And then obviously Varda is doing crazy stuff up in space. Now, what's exciting to you, and how are you designing the business to take advantage of those trends?

So when we call it a platform.

We mean that because we really want to be a platform provider. And whether you want to do something like take images of the Earth or you want to beam power down to Earth, or you want to be able to shoot down missiles that are coming to attack the U.S. we want to be the platform that works for everything. And I will say, I think we've done a pretty good job. If you look at the customers that we have so far, we have people who are using our platform from on one side of the spectrum. They're doing hyperspectral imaging, which means you have a camera that could see in hundreds of colors that you and me as humans cannot describe. And from space, it could look down at Earth and say, that's farmland with potatoes that are seven days old. Right? Like, that's nuts to be able to see from space. Then we have other customers. Aetherflux is one example, founded by a good friend of mine, Baiju. He started Robinhood, and now he's going. And he started Aetherflux, which is. Is collecting power from space and beaming it down to Earth, all using our platform, which is phenomenal. Then we have other customers who are using it for defense missions. Right. Anduril is a great customer of ours. We continue to do more and more with them. And then there's others that I can't talk about yet at this time. But the theme that honestly excites me more than anything, it's not just connectivity or taking photos of Earth, but something that has become, frankly, something we've always loved, but has only been talked about recently in the public domain is this idea of, of how do we develop the technology to protect the US and our allies from the scariest threats that are beginning to emerge. And to me, that's everything from hypersonic glide vehicles to missiles to everything else. And being able to use satellites in orbit to actually protect from this is phenomenal. And that's. You know, you read the recent executive order titled Golden Dome, right. It's asking for space based capabilities that protect the US and our allies from these very scary threats. And that is what frankly for me and my company, we are most inspired to support.

Do you think this, the speed at which you guys have not just become a company and develop products, do you think that can be the new normal just based on the sort of talent density that SpaceX had and other companies of that generation training people like yourself on how space works? One question I have is, is people in Silicon Valley have for a long time had this sense of looking at an industry they know nothing about and saying, I'm gonna go do it, I'm gonna fix it, I got this guys. And they can raise a lot of.

Money for IT tech people in here.

And that's honestly in many ways played out very well in a bunch of different industries. But space seems like an order of magnitude harder, potentially more. And I'm curious if this is an industry where you can get, get people coming, you know, true outsiders coming in and saying, you know, actually solving problems or you're better off, you know, putting your time in at an apex or a SpaceX before kind of making that leap.

It's a great question. I mean, I'll be the first to admit I don't come from a space background. I come from a software background. I built an AI computer vision company and I sold that to Palantir. That was my background. Now at Palantir I got to work on software related to satellites, but I wasn't manufacturing hardware hardware. So I'm an outsider. I'd argue that you look at other successful companies out in the market, right? Like we mentioned Delian and Varda, right. Like Delian does not necessarily come from a aerospace background, right. Like he, he was working on venture investing and other things before.

I think the secret though is you.

Need to pair that outsider point of view with a brilliant technologist who can bring it together. So in my case, my co founder Max spent his career at Space X and Delian's case he had Will Brewery who came from Space X as well. And that, that the combination of that together I think is what truly is special.

If you look at companies who are.

Founded who frankly come too far from the direction of purely kind of the space industry. It's difficult, right, because you end up falling into the same traps that you're used to. There's phenomenal companies out there, you know, True Anomaly, Impulse, all these others that frankly like they haven't had success in orbit and their satellites were unfortunately not Able to, to succeed. And that's bad for everybody, right? You need a little bit more of that, I think, kind of outside perspective to come in and combine in order to succeed. It's a tough industry. I will say, to answer your question about speed, I look at where we are today and all I can say is I certainly hope that the market is not going to go at the speed that we're going at, because I think we're going way too slow, right? I think we should be moving much faster. I think you should look at what APEX has done and say, why did it take a year to go from a blank piece of paper to a satellite in orbit? Why can't you do that in a week or a day? That, to me, is where I think we need our mindset to be. Not, oh my God, it went from five years to one year. That's still slow. And I think we all need to embody that.

Can you talk a little bit about, I mean, your, your craft is at, it looks like something around between 450 and 500 kilometers up right now. Can you talk about what's happening in V. LEO and then what's happening above you and where the biggest opportunity is going forward?

Oh, man, there's a lot of opportunity out there. And I would say it's all orbits are fascinating from my perspective. So if you think about it, right, we're here on Earth, we're at, you know, zero kilometers of orbit, right? We're, we're standing here on the ground. The higher you go, the different, different capabilities are unlocked. So there's capabilities that frankly are best served by being airborne, right? So that is flying at, you know, what an airplane or a high altitude vehicle or even a high altitude balloon would be at. Then you move into very low Earth orbit. Velia, you're moving a lot faster, right? Because you're circling the Earth. You're kind of looking at these different things. You're much closer to the Earth, so you're able to get much higher resolution imagery. So there's interesting trade offs there. Then you move into where we are, which is low Earth orbit. That's an orbit that, frankly, I don't think there was as much commercial demand for it until, call it about 10 years ago when this wave of proliferation started and you realized you could put a lot more vehicles up. Then you go higher altitude than that and you go to medium Earth orbit. That's where GPS satellites are flying, things like that. That's also a very interesting orbit because you're further away from Earth, so you're more protected from things like missiles that want to shoot down a satellite. But at the same time, you're not so far away that it takes too long for radio waves to communicate between Earth and the satellite. And then you have geo, right, which is where traditional satellites tend to operate. And GEO is interesting because as Earth is rotating, you have the satellite rotating at the same rate. So you're always over the same point over Earth. And that's companies like Astronis, I think, have work over there and I'm very impressed with the work they've done. And then from there, frankly, you go to deep space, this lunar, you have companies like Astro Forge launching asteroid mining missions, setting kind of world records for the furthest a commercial satellite has gone. There's just more and more capability with each of these orbits.

Can you talk about how the industry, aerospace industry, is reacting to the tariffs? Broadly? Obviously you're, you're doing a lot in defense, so I'm sure you were not sourcing from China, but I'm sure generally there's a lot of space companies that are kind of caught off guard here. I'm curious what your read on it is.

Space is a global industry, right. And I'm a big believer that we are in what I call the new space race right now. And it is the US and our allies against China and Russia and we have to work win. That being said, is a proud US Company, right. Most of our parts come from the US So there's. We looked at our tariff impact and it's pretty much nothing. Right. As it should be because We're a good U.S. defense company. We do sell a lot of our satellites to allied nations overseas. So as the tariffs come in, that doesn't affect us, but reciprocal tariffs from other countries may affect us as that happens. The good news is though, most things in aerospace and defense purposes tend to be exempt from these tariffs because at the end of the day, these are the kinds of trades that we want the US and our allies to be engaging in where we're sharing the cutting edge technology that allows us to stand up as one unified unit against those near peer adversaries. So I think the more commercial oriented areas of the space industry are probably more affected. That being said, like we are able to produce in the US and we're not having any issues with it. So what I would just say is, you know, we want to bring more of that knowledge and that manufacturing onshore and continue to see that rise as a trend.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us. We'll definitely have you back. We're going to hold space day and go way, way deeper. But I'm so glad you could come on the show today. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Thanks, guys. It's great to be here. We'll talk soon.

We'll talk soon.

Congrats on all the progress.

And I mean, he mentioned Anduril is a customer. We have a person from Anduril coming on the show, Jen, who has been leading the design charge over there, creating some incredible hero films. I don't even know how you describe them. Motion graphics, anime, all of the above. But I wanted to talk to her about the evolution of Anduril's design language. They still do a lot of these, like, military inspired films, but now they're in an entirely new territory with the animation. And I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk to her about the AI trends, the different motion graphics trends, all the different things. So, Jen, welcome to the stream.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Thanks for joining.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're probably the most copied designer in tech right now. And I'll give credit to your team too. It just feels like the entire industry is just racing to do what you guys did maybe two years ago, but you're consistently staying out on the edge. So it's great to have.

You got to keep them on their toes.

Yeah, you do. Just keep innovating and by the time you get copied, they'll just be copying the old thing. I do want to talk about that evolution of the design language. It feels like the cartoon anime style probably came from Palmer. He's a big Sword Art, Sword Art Online fan. Was that the genesis of this? And how do you think about the evolution of kind of the. I don't even know what you describe it as. Like the brand language, the video themes, whatever you call it.

The brand world.

The brand world. World.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I actually pitched this about two years ago doing an anime and like, obviously very easy sell to Palmer. Right. But it just wasn't the right time. We didn't have the team that we have now.

Sure.

And it obviously pairs really well with Palmer's identity. Right. But also this anime style for Andrew just made a lot of sense. So if you look at, you know, anime as a medium historically, it's leaned really heavily into military themes.

Right.

The battles and the really complicated dynamics using like really futuristic machines like the Mecca and the cyberpunk of it.

All.

Right. And like really advanced Technology to, like, defeat adversaries. And man, the future is here. Like, Anduril is building it. So of course, like, we lean into that and like, you know, Andrew, like, the way things, that we do things, it's fundamentally different the way we build how we operate. But part of the way that we do things differently is really the way we approach our communication and our product identity, the way defense looks and feels. And we just want to cut through the noise, Right. The sea of sameness, like, it's really authentic to who we are.

How has recruiting changed over the last couple years? On the design side specifically, there was not. I remember, you know, I imagine now you guys have hundreds of applications for every role. It's sort of normalized, you know, working in defense, but certainly only feels like five years ago it felt like there was this pretty frequent tendency if you were a startup doing anything defense related, you would get consistently turned down by designers. That said, yeah, it's just not in my wheelhouse, but I think that's changed. I'm curious what your read on it is.

Yeah, I mean, I can speak from my own experience as well. Right. I think there comes a point in your career where, where you want to utilize your skill set and, you know, towards a greater mission. I think what we're finding now with, you know, all the conflicts around the world, a lot of the designers who are applying are coming to us saying, like, I really want to support and use my creativity to be able to do this. And what an amazing opportunity that somewhere like Anduril is providing that is welcoming these people. And I want to see that. Right. Like, the end game for me is, is seeing all the different disciplines in design coming here and creating all of this work is such a rewarding and unexpected thing for me to witness. And so it's been really incredible.

How did you process the Studio Ghibli moment specifically in the context you guys came out with the film? Was it, I mean, was it Monday or something like that? I think it was Monday. But I'm sure you guys have been developing it way before Studio Ghibli, and it feels like you guys were maybe the last company to get to launch something like this before there will be an inevitable wave of others being able to kind of create versions of it, but for like, you know, 1 100th of the cost. But I'm curious how you reacted to that.

Yeah, so interesting. I mean, like, the Ghibli, like, look that it's. It's pretty good, I will have to say. Right. It's a really. It's really good. I'm really impressed. And I think there's just like, like so many tools out there right now. You know, we launched our first one Barracuda last year, so we were sort of like on this wave. And we also started noticing the trends in the industry too. Like, McDonald's did one, the Chargers did one, and we're like, yeah, we must be kind of onto something here. It wasn't until, like just recently, this boom. And obviously, like the Ghibli filter on chat had a lot to do with it as well. But I think for us it was really about, again, it made a lot of sense and pushing our skill set in house to our toolbox of all the different programs that we're using. And one could argue that all the rendering tools that we've been using for decades now, that was A.I. right. And so I think here we want our autonomy to enable humans to do what humans do best, Palmer says all the time, and robots to do what they do best. And I think we've got the best, best of the best in our in house focusing on making the art, and we're utilizing the tools to do the.

Can you walk us through the actual process of making one of these films? Does it start with storyboarding and then you move into Blender Cinema 4D? I. I'd love to know kind of like what the team looks like from the motion design perspective to take it from an idea to a finished film. Totally.

We certainly use Cinema, you know, Blender Redshift for texturing like Rhino Keyshot. I mean, the list goes on. Everything starts with a mission set and as we call it, the concept of Operation Conop for short. And our storyboarding is really all about distilling an incredibly complicated, as you can imagine, technical and operational scenario into a one to two minute narrative that is digestible and is visually provocative for really any audience. And we do some keyframes to dial in that texture and the lighting, get that right. Then we move into Previz pretty quickly. And that really helps us block in all of that kind of technical authenticity. Early we find a rhythm. Then we go into production and all the final paintovers and stuff. And all the designers that are involved in all aspects of the project, they're working together in this process. So we've got art, we've got motion editing, graphics, music and sound. And. And we're also vetting these storyboards with our customers along the way and making sure that we have their feedback. And so, like, this entire process, I Think for the maritime short, the most recent one, we went from sketch to final video in like five weeks.

Wow, that's very nice.

It's crazy. I mean, products at Anduril move quickly into production. Like we're just here trying to, trying to keep up.

Where is AI been particularly impactful in your guys's process today? I'm sure Anduril doesn't do a lot of vibe coding on the engineering side. Just because you need a bit more reliability. You want to kind of make sure that things work consistently. But I'm curious where you're seeing an impact today and where you hope to see kind of more of an impact in the future.

Yeah, I know we're an AI company, but we don't use any AI in our art and, and certainly nothing generative. Right. And like I said, I think a lot of the tools that we use could be in that AI kind of bucket. Like we've been using it for a long time. But I think where I see this being really useful though and where I want to invest in is really in that previs stage. And it's not just for animation. I mean for blocking in practical photography and videos as well, like figuring out the composition and the lighting setups, the camera movement. It's just so critical for us to have a watertight shot list whenever we're going into whether it's animation or video. A lot of the times like especially on the video side, we have one take to get the shot right. And so like kind of building this ahead of time and all of that planning is so important for us. And that's kind of where I'd like us to spend a little bit more time and investment in.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about the workflow now where even if you're planning to do a one day shoot and it's going to be really expensive, there's going to be a big crew, there's going to be in Andrew's case, like actual hardware involved. You still, you might generate, you might generate all the core scenes so you can like visualize it but then still, still go through it. So the shot list just becomes like basically a preview.

Yeah. Essentially with, with AI kind of commoditizing or democratizing certain art styles, do you think that there's maybe alpha or even just like a creative urge to find specific art styles that are incredibly difficult for AI to work with? We were talking about Houdini earlier and I don't know if you follow like what man vs. Machine did with Nike and the Flyknit it's like this incredible weaving of threads to create the shoe. And it's basically impossible for generative AI to crack that at this point. But it's very different than, like the Studio Ghibli style, which is kind of becoming easier and more accessible. Does when AI commoditizes or democratizes a theme, does that push you to go deeper in that area because it's more accessible, or find a different niche to kind of go and explore?

I think it's a different niche. I think, again, our subject matter is really tied very intentionally to the mission set. It's hard to prompt things like we need these machines to talk to each other and come up with a way to do that, come up with a way to visualize that. Right. It could be any number of things. And I think so really kind of helping guide that by using, I think just the people who are creating this art is probably where we're going to stay and kind of where we're going to lean into.

Even harder is being so technology first in the Anduril organization broadly. Is that an acceleration for the motion design team? Because you can just ask. If you just ask an engineer, hey, can you pass me like, a CAD file and I'll export as OBJ and just import it into Cinema 4D and like, boom, I'm good to go. Or because of Itar, I imagine that you might have to rebuild these models from scratch. Is there anything where you're like, hey, actually we can't use that model over here because it's like we'd be leaking if it got hacked or something.

Yeah, no, we're definitely not picking up the engineering CAD file and dropping it into this. Right. Like, even for previs, like, yeah, we definitely, you know, a lot of the designers on our team, like, they're very, you know, technically fluent. So a lot of the CAD work that's done even to get it there is, like, about scrubbing it, and it's really like, creating again, turning it into almost a whole new OBJ that's watertight, so you can, like, texture it and throw lighting on it.

Right.

So there's like a ton of work that goes into even setting up the files and obviously also, like, you know, make sure that it's not, like, exactly the thing that, you know, we're building.

Yeah.

Have you had any explorations using virtual reality in combination with motion design? You know, there's a lot of move towards, oh, we're going to do a lot of motion design in Unreal Engine. I don't know if you've been tracking all of that stuff with the real time motion graphics, but you could imagine, you know, there's even these demos where you walk around, you sculpt something, then you export that obj and then you're playing with that in cinema or Houdini. I imagine that Palmer makes it easy to. To, you know, expensive VR headset if you need one. But have you. Have you played with any of that? And are you optimistic about that going forward?

I mean, like, I think, like, that, that, like, Ironman future is certainly something that I want. There's so many times when, like, you know, we're building something. Even my past experience, like, if I could just like, just reach in there and just like pull that, you know, like, I just want to, like, do it. Right.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, I think if there were was, you know, a forum to do so, like, it may be in some of our exploratory phases. Like right now we've got designers, we have a whole different pipeline just to kind of do experiments. Right. We have an Australian designer, his name's Joel. He's doing some crazy experiments with Blender right now with textures just like, you know, pushing that to its limit. And like, James, who comes from working on movies like Avatar, like, you know, he's trying to, like, recreate, like, you know, worlds and like, do world building and, like, unity and stuff. Right. So, yeah, we're like, constantly trying to figure out ways to. To also level up our technical ability to be able to do better discovery. Right. Better experiments so that we can, like, produce better work.

Yeah. Well, since it only takes you five weeks to produce these, you're on the clock. We look forward to checking in with you in four weeks. Four weeks when the next one drops. But I think everyone in the audience is very excited when these drops. So thanks so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. That was really fascinating.

Yeah.

And thank you for the work you do for the country.

Yeah, thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Bye. Fantastic.

Very cool.

Yeah.

Anduril has the blessing and the curse of whatever they do. They do it so well that they immediately get copied. Get immediately copied. And imitation is not flattery.

It is a shame. And what would your mother say if you're imitating people? Well, we have our next guest. Come on into the studio. The temple of Technology. We're ready to talk to you.

He is. How you doing? What's going on?

I'm doing great. Welcome to the stream. Can you start with just giving Alyssa a little bit of a breakdown on who you are, what you do, what's happening this week? Okay.

My name is Rylan Hamilton. I'm the co founder and CEO of Blue Water Autonomy. We design and build autonomous ships, ones that can operate across the open ocean. So think thousands of nautical miles of range being out there for months at a time. Like no people. And we just came out of stealth today.

So like super yachts for billionaires who want to just like hang out without any crew for months. Is that what we're talking about? Or eventually they're like from a defense angle here.

I like that. That sounds a little bit easier than what I'm doing now. No, but due to regulation stuff, it's the Navy, they have an urgent need. We have a shipbuilding issue within the United States. What's super cool about what we're doing is because there are no people on board. So when you remove the bridge, the galley, the berthing, the showers and all that stuff, you can make the ship a lot smaller. So our big Navy shipyards today are at capacity and we're trying to build destroyers and carriers and submarines as quickly as possible. But our size allows us to build it in all these mid tier shipyards all over the country. And so we could build them today.

So how small are we talking? Like 25ft, 10ft?

So think like 150ft. So like if you get too small, you can't go across like the ocean. You don't have enough fuel, you're going to get, get whacked in different kind of sea states. But if you're too big, you're too expensive. So there's kind of this sweet spot in the middle.

So what does it take to cross the ocean? Is this like you just diesel fuel and you're good or is there alternative?

That's not a bad guess. We're not feeling everything, but yeah, we're pretty practical. Like we're taking commercial off the shelf marine kind of components, but we're redesigning the ship from the keel up because our learnings have said that if you just take like a commercial design that's meant for people and put sensors on it, that's okay for a week or two. But like eventually it's going to break down. Like you have one engine room and something leaks. And if you have no one on board or no, like you just you, you can't, you know, you're going to be dead in the water in the middle of the ocean. That's the last thing that Our Navy wants.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

It's interesting. When we first talked, Rylan, I think we were talking about this. There's this YouTuber, and I'm blanking on his name now, but he just, like, nerds out about all the autonomous vehicles being used in Ukraine. And it's crazy stuff. Like, there's people just applying, you know, putting, like, a sensor on a jet ski, and it's just, like, out going around. It's really wild. I'm curious. So I talked a little bit about your backstory earlier on the show. You started your career in the Navy, then you went into robotics. You're at Amazon, sold a company to Shopify. How much of both of those chapters of your career shaped what you're doing now? It's kind of like you're the perfect guy to build this business, but you had to spend however long in the Navy and then do the robotics thing and then actually do it at scale. But I'm curious the kind of learnings you took from each of those chapters.

Yeah, I think this is kind of my dream job, except we're a startup and we're hustling every day, working seven days a week, so it's not easy. But, yeah, last 20 years, like, my first four years, as you said, surface warfare officer in the Navy, I was an engineering officer. I was actually the electrical officer. So ownership. We had fires, floods, like, you name it, we got hit by lightning. The ship would lose power. But I learned a lot. So over the, you know, four years after I went to graduate school and then actually got lucky, and I joined this company called Kiva Systems that got bought while I was there by Amazon, became Amazon robotics, was employee 200, became the youngest person on the leadership team. But I was there when, like, a couple thousand robots were in the field. We scaled it with Amazon to 15,000. And now, like, my guess is there are over a million robots in Amazon warehouses based off that company and that technology. And so I left, and then I started my own robotics company again. Collaborative autonomous mobile robots. So ones that didn't need fencing or stickers or anything like that. And I kind of feel like right now we're building kind of one of the world's largest mobile robots. It's just a ship that has to cruise across kind of the oceans. And so we're taking all these lessons where you take the hardware primitives and you smartly design it into something that's reliable and works all the time, and you got to write the software on top. And so, like, that's the talent that we have on our team right now.

How, when, how, how much or how little has the average Navy vessel advanced since you were on them back in the day? I imagine it's not as much advancement as one would like.

Like, so we.

Let me just be clear. We build the best warships in the world. They are amazing. You look at a guided missile destroyer, it's been through a lot of iterations. It's. It's awesome. However, it takes a lot to make a design change on a warship because there's so many different components. You have to make sure the supply chain's there. So it's. A couple weeks ago, I was actually walking through a big Navy shipyard, and I was looking and like, you look at the gauge and there's like, the concept of IoT is just not there, but they work. And it's been, like, hard tested. And so we have this opportunity when we redesign everything to kind of put and make everything smart and have sensors over everything. And so right now, just on our core design, it'll get better over time. We have 550 kind of data feeds into our edge compute, just know what's going on in the ship. So we need to know everything, but that's just not where you're going to get on a modern Navy ship.

That makes sense. Can you talk about the Jones Act? Was it. Was it good or bad? Maybe you don't have to give that aggressive of a take, but in this era where deregulation is popular, I'm curious if you think that should be sort of dug into further. Obviously, we're just not building nearly as many ships as our adversaries, and you guys are hopefully changing that, but curious your thoughts.

So I'm not an expert on the Jones act, but I'm definitely aware of it. But I think what's critical is we need to be able to build ships in the United States. Like, sea power has been the bedrock for our prosperity and security for the last hundred years. And that needs to be, you know, we need to have sea power for the next 100 years, so we can't outsource shipbuilding. We need to have that as a core ability within the United States, and we need to get a lot better and increase our capacity. I think because of the Jones act, we still build ships here in the United States, and that's important. Maybe there could be some tweaks to it, but we can't outsource shipping to other countries. It's, like, too critical for our nation.

Palmer Luckey was on The Sean Ryan podcast talking about how China has vastly, vastly more shipbuilding capacity. And a big part of that is that civilian ships in China must be built to military specifications. They need to have roll on, roll off capabilities for troop carriers. You could, you could argue that maybe American civilian ships should have, should be built in military specs, but that kind of spits in the face of the free market. What if I don't want, you know, tank treads on my pleasure yacht? But where do you stand on that as kind of just from an American standpoint?

So I haven't worked, walked through a Chinese shipyard and I don't think I ever will.

I don't think you're welcome.

No, I don't think you'll be there.

But I know that we build ships a lot better in terms of warships than any other country. And they're built and if you look there have been incidents where we've been hit by mines or ship missiles or like any like anti ship missiles and they withstand and they don't sink. And so like a lot of credit to our navy in terms of how we design things. But if we just try to compete with China head on head in terms of like who can build more destroyers, they're going to win. So we need to out innovate them. And I think there are a lot of, there's not a silver bullet, but if you look at the things that Anduril is doing underwater, it's awesome. Awesome, right? And if you look at our nuclear submarines, we're generation ahead on submarines versus Chinese. And now what we're trying to do is saying on the surface, let's complement our man fleet with an unmanned fleet so we can kind of be a force multiplier so we don't have to put a DDG in every area that we can kind of be the front line of the picket fence for some of these destroyers and put it in harm's way before you put, you know, the destroyer out there. And so it's not like, you know, I think the point is like let's innovate and try, right? Lean into sort of autonomous systems. But let's not pretend like we're just going to change our shipbuilding capacity overnight and compete with the Chinese.

How do you think hypersonics change the nature of naval warfare?

It definitely changes it because if you think about our exquisite platforms, whether it's aircraft carriers or destroyers, like we're not going to put them kind of as close as we would to an area of conflict because of these anti ship missiles and Hypersonics with extended range. Now one thing you have to appreciate about a military, it's a system of systems. So there's a lot of, and I'm not an expert, there's a lot of cool stuff that's happening in space and others. So it's really hard to hit an aircraft carrier that's going 30 plus knots, that's a couple thousand nautical miles away. And we have some countermeasures to it. So. But it definitely means that we're going to sort of keep these ships farther and farther away from areas where there could be either hypersonics, hypersonics or anti ship missiles.

That makes sense. What do you think about. You mentioned early on about there seemingly is domestic, our existing domestic capacity to make the size ships that Blue Water Autonomy is making. Do you think there, do you think that the actual manufacturing layer still needs to scale significantly or is the capacity there and it's just, you know, needs to be allocated more efficiently or needs to get more efficient?

Yeah, so the capacity is there to build them, but we can do a lot better just like take the status quo. And so these shipyards, they build ferries, they build tugs, they build barges, they build crew transfer vessels. But their business is kind of lumpy and so it doesn't make sense for them to invest in a lot of automation. But when the Navy can give a strong demand signal and say we're going to build a lot of these, that's when you can really double down in terms of building like these shipyards of the future and put a lot of investment into it. The other thing is since we've been designing this kind of ship from the keel up, everything's like, you know, in cad, it's all there, it's all digital, it's all already tied to a product lifecycle management system. And so we get the benefits of starting like today with modern tools to build this, which allows us to kind of like outsource this to a lot of different. Like some of the parts of the ship could actually be built in like a central facility in the United States. You don't need to put everything in the shipyard, but when you build a ship today, so let's say it's like a steel hull ship, you build the hull, you may be building components, you stitch together and then you send all of the electronics and everything and then you commission it on the ship. Well, that's the hardest place is actually turn on a system in the middle of a hole in a shipyard. And it just takes a long time. And so I think there's a much better way that we can kind of build these ships at scale.

How do you think about what Anduril's doing on the Lattice side? I could imagine if your ship, if you're producing a ton of autonomous ships, you'd want those to be somehow teeming with dive, Excel submarines and drones overhead and all sorts of stuff. And I'm sure the modern warfighter would want to have all of that on a map, essentially, or be able to integrate all of that. How are you thinking about integration with other systems that might be competitive in the financial markets, but. But close, close allies in the. In the geopolitical sense?

Well, I haven't talked to Andrew yet, but we just came out of stealth and maybe because this podcast will reach out to me, someone from the Lattice team, but I think it's really important that we talk to systems like Lattice, because we're not going to be the control system for all these, like, UXPs that are out there. That's not our bread and butter. Our bread and butter is building autonomous ships that are reliable and that just work. And so we want to make sure that we have the integration layer to kind of connect all these different systems. At my last company, we built an automation solution where we are in over 120 warehouses all throughout the world. And we talked to, like, many different types of warehouse management systems. So we needed to build in that integration layer and not just people holding to one wms and we have some of those same people on the team and that's what we'll need to build. Like, we need to be agnostic to kind of the layers that we. We speak to above us.

Random question. Not related to the current business, but I'm really interested to get your take on it. We've talked a lot about the various companies doing humanoid robotics. One of the pitches for humanoid robots is that, hey, we have all these fulfillment centers throughout the world. Humans are working them. Humans are great at a lot of stuff, but they're also. So sometimes they wake up and they're sick or they don't have enough energy or whatever. You were working in robotics in fulfillment for a very long time at the incredible scale. Do you think that humanoid robotics are overhyped in the context of fulfillment or really have potential there that maybe people aren't seeing?

So humanoid robots are very divisive. In my kind of life, like Robot Mafia, I kind of think of it like when I started my last robotics company was 2015. Everyone's saying in five years, we're going to have autonomous vehicles. And it ended up being 10 years. And I kind of feel like we're at that moment where it's super exciting to see all the progress we're making. I just don't think it's been five years. I think it's closer to 10 years. And I don't think humanoid robots are going to do everything, but I think they're super exciting. One thing, actually, like a little tidbit that I learned recently is that everyone's like, why don't you just put it on a big mobile base? It's a lot easier. Well, if you think about, like, a warehouse and some of the activities that you do when you have two little legs, you can actually get into, like, areas that are a lot tighter. But if you have a really small mobile base, they're going to tip over if they're trying to carry something heavy. So I think there's a lot of experimentation that's going to happen. Also, like things about humanoids is when they fall, humans, we brace ourselves with our hands. Well, then those hands need to be robust. If you put a lot of sensors on the hand and they fall all the time, well, then it's not going to work and you have to repair them. So I think there are a lot of things that we're going to have. They're going to have to iterate on over time. But there's a ton of investment that's happening in that space and it's super exciting for robotics overall.

Last question, last question. In the context of humanoids, is there ever a point in the future where you could imagine a humanoid on one of your ships, or is there just going to be better forms?

Yeah, steer the ship directly. That's the future. It's going to be a sailboat operated by humanoids.

Yeah, not the.

That.

Not that silly, but. But I'm curious if you could imagine a future where there'll be. Cut the jib or they'll just be better. Better form factors.

I don't see it right away. I don't think it makes sense to have a humanoid actually turn the wheel.

When you have a motor.

Turn the wheel.

Just. Just saying that's what I want. I want to be drinking Dom Perignon in the back, having the. The sails go up and down by the humanoids. Pull, pull, pull, pull, pull the ropes.

Here's the thing. I actually think, as we think about building our ship ship, we're like the taxi for a bunch of other uxp. So it's not humanoids. You can put on these. But I think that what Android just launched, they just launched these really cool UUVs or whatever they're calling it. Or if you think about drones or other autonomous aircraft, like we could become the modern aircraft carrier to carry these kind of drones or these smaller things that don't have the range, but we can carry them out in the same way that SpaceX is carrying all these cool satellites up into space. Like, we want to be that vehicle that makes the cost of getting these things out there cheaper. And so we can carry a portfolio of these kind of drones on our ship.

That's fantastic. I mean, congratulations on the launch. We look forward to following the company and thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, this is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Next up, we have Zach from Conductor AI coming on the show in a minute. That was really cool. If I had one more chance, I was going to ask him to take me a on tour of the various seas across the world. I've heard that the Taiwan Strait is particularly unique in terms of the. The wave formations and the tides and so that there's certain times almost like.

Taiwan doesn't want to be invaded. It's like they perfectly designed the sea.

Topology or topography built different for sure.

Sure.

Yep.

Anyway, do we have Zach in the studio yet? Not yet. We can go to some timeline, we can go to some ads. We can tell you about Bezel, Go to Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. download the Bezel app. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch, you name it, they'll find it for you.

They're listing a bunch of stuff. They got the date Nate Bladorn posted earlier. He says you might never be as tall as John Coogan, but there's always a way to feel like you're up in the clouds. Head over, head on over to Bezel and choose a pilot's watch from their fully authenticated luxury selection. Tell them the technology, brother.

I love that. Thank you. Thank you for posting.

Great post, Nate.

Fantastic. And we have Zach here in the studio. Let's bring him on in. Welcome to the show, Zach. Good to be here.

The man.

Hey, guys, thanks for having me.

The man with no X account.

Oh, yeah. You're the second guest, I think, in show history to not be on X. What's going on? I mean, are you not into technology and business?

What's truly tragic is I'm in totally a Twitter. Like I've actually Blocked Twitter on my phone because I use it so often. I just never post. I only read so clearly. Clearly I need to become more involved in the seed and actually post something.

Yeah, yeah. Well, if you create one tonight after the show closes, we'll tag you in the clips. We'll try and get some.

Or you can, or you can never post, never even use the app. Just come on the show, we'll clip it up and then we'll post it for you. And you could get all the benefits with none of the time invested. Other than, you know, like he's so.

Elusive, he doesn't even count yet. I'm seeing him all over X and these viral clips. I love it. Anyway, can you do a brief introduction on you, the company, kind of what you're building?

Sure. Thanks so much. I'm Zach. We're building Conductor AI, a company designed to automate paperwork in the government. Yeah, that's what we're doing.

What's the first go to market? Who's the first customer? What's the first piece of paperwork that you're automating?

Sure. So we are working with the Air Force, the office of the Secretary of Defense and a few other defense customers around problems like security classification, foreign military sales, ITAR controls and things that are these very important and very sensitive document review workflows that if you've spent a lot of time working with the Department of Defense, you will unfortunately encounter that we are trying to hopefully make it easier to deal with.

Just how much, just how much paperwork does the government do? I feel like it's a lot, but I think it's probably more than I'm even imagining.

Yeah. So the government, there's internal estimates they have, they spend basically like $18 billion a year on classifying information. And it's this very complicated apparatus that has grown over the years to ensure that we keep secrets safe. One of the unfortunate byproducts of having a complicated and expensive classification apparatus that can make it very, very hard to actually get information to the people that need it. And so there are many, many separate chains in the government around how you can share and approve and release information. And conductors trying to make it easier to solve, to solve that problem. And then other problems where you have these like very complex approval processes and navigate through them.

How much of this is just going from like paperwork to a modern, you know, CRUD app using standard software As a service versus AI agents, LLMs, all the on trend tech.

So the, the people in the government that are doing this, it, it's it, they actually often have some form of, of, of system here for this. What, what you were actually seeing is the people that are sort of doing these, that are sort of these adjudicators that have these very important jobs of saying yes, you can say this, no you can't, or sort of in charge of these complex approval process. They, the challenge for them is there's not just like one page of rules or like one document. Oh, this is the rules to follow. There's like 20,000 pages of policy that they are supposed to have read and follow and apply on each of these cases. And obviously that's incredibly hard. And so what we're trying to do is make it easier to more quickly read and apply those very complicated policy guidance to those four PowerPoint slides that you're trying to.

Yeah. When you're working with the government like this, are you following like the standard defense tech sales playbook, like SBIR program of record, or is it just a completely different sales motion for you?

So I worked at Palantir for seven years before this, so we have some familiarity there. SBIRs are great. They're not, they're not all worth the same. Our very first contract that we got was a sbir, but we have, unfortunately we haven't won another one since then. So since then it's all been getting OTAs and sub awards off of existing contract vehicles. But yeah, the go to market motion the government is. I mean frankly, it's fortunate I worked at Palantir, so I sort of saw how this worked from a best in class perspective. But if I was a 23 year old just starting out, I have no idea how you figure out how to navigate this world. It is not friendly to outsiders.

Is it weirdly frustrating when you see just how much the government spends on tons of random things and yet you're selling them a product where you're like, you know, this is going to save you a bunch of like time and you know, through that, save you, save you money if you just sort of adopted it because it's the. Or, or is it almost like a positive feature that it's hard for the government to start even, even if they know they want something, it can be hard to, to, you know, get onboarded.

And yeah, yeah, it's more the latter there. It's like the, the thing that I found pretty interesting is that that sort of these challenges you have of how hard it is to break in, how hard it is to get these first contracts are in some ways the defensibility from a company Perspective, right. It's that like it does take a super long time to get your foot in the door with these organizations and then build trust. But to a large extent because of how, how much process there is once you're in it is there is a bit of a word of mouth. So I think that's like, I don't have a Twitter, but there's people in the government and various like means that people communicate in the government and that's, that's sort of where if you're in the defense tech space, you want, you want to be more present, if you will.

How much of your company is built on like this thesis that there would at some point be a shift towards like government efficiency. And then you maybe hit the jackpot with Doge becoming like the big greatest meme in government maybe ever. But it seems like some of the like, even though Doge has been somewhat controversial and partisan, you know, people have gone back to oh, like Joe Biden was quoted talking about efficiency and Obama was taught, was quoted thinking about this process and Clinton was saying this again. And so government efficiency could be something that becomes bipartisan, could stick around for a very long time. And you, you suspected that this was going to be an ongoing trial. Was that part of the thesis behind starting the company?

Yeah, I mean, frankly part of the thesis was just I lived it and I'd seen all of these processes like you knew, it was very clear to me early on and you know, as AI became very popularized, that there were so many of these complicated paperwork, approvals process that I'd experienced and been frustrated by. I do believe that, I mean, I think that, I think that making the government more efficient is a good thing. I think that DOGE is certainly now definitely a partisan effort, but I think it's inarguable that we can make the US government operate more effectively. And I personally believe that that's a really good thing to do is we want the government to be more effective. What I want to make sure.

When.

These processes though are not, they're not fake, like they're very real. I don't personally believe that you should be allowed to build any form of weapon and then sell it externally with no form of review process. These are important, complicated procedures to review what constitutes a weapon, what doesn't. These are actual questions. And those processes shouldn't just be discarded or, or written of as like, oh, that's unnecessary government bureaucracy. But we do want to make it possible to navigate those complicated chains without it being a three year cycle.

How do you think about, so you're creating workflows, but then, and so you guys are a software company, but you inevitably, I'm sure run into these sort of like offline workflows. And is that a, is that, I mean, I mean I'm guessing right in sense of like, hey, like this was approved but we need to take it to this other building to get this other person to sign off on it. And it's like, is that the right need or can you fully digitize it?

You definitely do see that. Like I can tell you that my colleague Eric, some workflows are on classified networks and you can only access classified networks in certain spaces. So we are literally flying to places to go to upload forms to say yes, we can be deployed into this network so that our software can be deployed to perform this type of document review. So you definitely see this challenge around. There's only certain access points and you kind of, that just is the reality of it. It's going to take a while and there's a lot of, of process to be automated.

I mean you mentioned like 20,000 pages of rules. That seems like you might need a large context window for some of these problems if you're throwing an LLM at it. What are you tracking in the progress of the foundation models? I imagine you're not using Deep seq. Maybe you're taking a look at llama. What are you excited about in terms of of foundation model breakthroughs? Is it just IQ or is it RAG or any of these kind of buzzwords that we're hearing about?

Yeah, so one of the challenges that we deal with is the state of the art like the GPT 4.5, Gemini 2.5, they're really, really good at a lot of this. But in the networks that we're operating and for a lot of our government customers, they can't get access though. So for us there's this, this somewhat it's really an engineering tension. It's like we can see, oh my God, this is going to work so well in two years when these models get accredited to be available in your network. But for now it's what is the state of the art model that we can actually deploy and run in these more resource constrained environments. One of the ways that we're working around this problem now is, and I'm sure other companies at the workflow layer are doing something similar is we're trying to disambiguate the user from the. We're trying to basically make it so that when a user submits a request, they don't expect an answer instantly. And so if you think about how you interact with, like, if you were submitting, I don't know if you ever renovated your apartment or anything like that.

Yeah, yeah.

So you probably had to get like a permit from the Department of Buildings or something. You submitted your form into the Department of Buildings, and then someone got back to you maybe three months later or something like that. We want to compare against that type of cycle time. So we want to have a workflow where you submit a document and then you get an email response 10 minutes later. Oh, my God, that's amazing. That's so fast. But if you're in a UI layer of software and you upload a document and then it takes 10 minutes to process, that's actually kind of a bad user experience. So we want to try and drive it to the human view side.

I was talking to Jordi about this a long time ago. Like, in the permitting process, I wish that there was just a button like, check permit compliance in the CAD software.

Right.

And it would just be real time. Like, you can't save the file if you're in violation. And then you just know that, yeah, when you send it off, it's going to be approved. And that should be deterministic.

And this is so much of what we actually see is that in these complicated cases, so much of the stuff that kicks you back is not some edge case question of, oh, is this permitted or not? It's like you just don't understand what it is you're submitting. Like, and I apologize, I have to be like, a little vague when I talk about, like, what things are, but it's like you just filled this out wrong. And, like, I can tell you instantly, hey, you feel that you're going to get instantly rejected, say this instead. And it's going to take. Rather than taking four weeks and requiring like nine separate signatures, you're going to be good to go. And the material information is almost identical. And that's the type of thing we're trying to push back to the user very quickly so that they understand. Oh, this is a really hard question, but this is something that you can just get a yes on, if that makes sense.

Makes no sense. Any last questions?

Very cool.

I'm excited.

We recently went off our paper process, so once you're starting to.

We used to. Every topic that we discuss, we'd print out the tweet and read it.

Very, very complicated work.

Now we're going digital.

Yeah, we're going digital. Too. So we're glad that you're helping the government do the same. It's been much more efficient.

It has been more efficient for us.

Well, thank you for coming on. Yeah, we really appreciate it and the work that you're doing.

Yeah. Hopefully hope to see you on X.

Oh, yeah, I'll make sure I create an account.

There we go.

We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks.

Next up we have Paul from Carbon Robotics coming in. Carbon Robotics, very cool company, has built a self driving tractor. The laser weeder G2. The world's most precise weed control. And the Auto tractor, the most dependable tractor autonomy solution. Very excited to talk to you.

The Auto tractor.

Great names, honestly. The Laser Weeder G2 combines computer vision, AI deep learning technology, robotics and lasers to identify crops versus weeds. And it shoots the weeds with laser users. It's so intelligible for what is probably a very complicated product.

And it seems a lot more healthy than what, you know, just dumping pesticides.

You're gonna love this. I'm. This is amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

Eliminate hand labor, cut costs by 80%. Reduce labor costs and address labor shortages. Eliminate the need for herbicides and manual mechanical cultivation.

You want to know something? Fund John?

What?

The s and P500 closed up 5.7%.5% on the week.

Wow.

On the week.

On the week. That's great. Well, if you're doing well, let's bring Paul into the studio. Paul, welcome to the stream.

Hello. How are you doing? How's everything?

We're doing great. Thanks for joining us.

What's going on?

Would you, would you kick it off for us with just a little introduction to Carbon Robotics and yourself?

Man, you know what I love? I love this job. I love our company so much. We do some cool stuff. Our company, we build AI Robotics, that's the core of our company. But we focus on agriculture and agriculture is such a great place to be. So we make the thing called the Laser Weeder. Maybe you've seen videos of the Laser Weeder. I hope you have. And the Laser Weeder uses an AI system. We find weeds live in farm fields and we kill them with lasers. So that's, that's great. Why is that good? Because you don't have to spray chemicals all over the place.

That's what I was just, that was just what I was saying before you joined. It's just, it's a beautiful future.

It's a beautiful future.

The thing is like the, you know, for, for years, I mean we had, we had, you know, humans have been doing agriculture for thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years. And we invented this technique for growing all of our food. And you know, we came up with things, things like chemical fertilizer and nitrogen based fertilizers and herbicide sprays and things like that that were just like dousing crops, but that how we built our food supply. But now we're at the point where we can use AI systems to be very specific and targeted in only killing the weeds that are in the field and not having to just dump these chemicals all over the place. And then of course we have all these immigration problems, problems and things like that. And so if we can just do all this work through automation, it just helps everybody farmers.

So a little backstory. I found out through experimentation that I was super sensitive to food created with glyphosates in the process, which is like traditionally from what I know, I'm not an expert, but any sort of mass produced flour in the United States for me was like, you know, basically a no go. But so I was super excited about this. I guess like some of the stuff I'm super interested in is agriculture is huge sector of our economy. It's critical, but it's also, I imagine in some ways been. I'm interested to hear about the adoption of your products and selling these because if you go to a farmer and they're using, using let's say these massive amount of pesticides and they're really, really cheap and then you say like, hey, I can replace this, but it's this device, you can do financing and stuff like that. But talk maybe about kind of like the go to market and what you're seeing from an adoption standpoint and just the receptivity to the technology. Because I imagine when you go in, you're not, you're leading probably with the value that you're offering. Not like, hey, look at this new AI system. They're like, well, of course, you know.

Yeah, you, you know, okay, so glyphosate is the main chemical ingredient in Roundup. And a lot of people have problems with, with Roundup. They think some of the extra sensitivity for things like celiac disease can be kicked off by, by glyphosate. There's some evidence for that stuff.

Stuff.

But I think everybody has this experience with somebody who had some kind of food intolerance, intolerance or allergies and then wound up going, you know, to Europe or whatever. You hear this all the time, right? I went to Italy and I discovered I can eat pasta. Why can't I eat pasta in the United States? Well, a lot of this is because the, you know, they, I mean, they do these studies where if you were to take 100 people and you do a urine analysis on those hundred people, at least 80, 85% of those people have glyphosate in their system at any given time. And so when we know that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and like many carcinogens, the question is just how much is enough to cause a response? Not is it bad for you? It's like, what dosage and how sensitive are you?

To be clear, this is the thing that we're using to just kill all life, life out of farmland. Right. Like, we're using it, you know, to basically. And it's somewhat targeted. I guess this is like where GMO crops come in, where GMO crops can be resistant to glyphosate, but it just kills everything else. Is that, is that correct?

That's exactly it, yeah. So in, in, in your vegetables, onions, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, is, you know, celery, any of those veg lettuces. Right. We don't have, we don't have Roundup ready vegetables. We don't have Roundup resistant vegetables. So we have Roundup ready versions of corn and soy and wheat. And in those fields, they can just completely douse the field, and the crops are resistant against the herbicide. But in everything else that you eat the Roundup, but, you know, the herbicides actually really damage the crops as well. And so it's also just, it's not good for the soil. There's runoff issues in all of these things. But you touched on an interesting thing. Okay, so I have a tech background, and I come from places like Seattle and San Francisco, and our farmers are in places like Salinas and Iowa and Othello. And so I'm coming into these, these areas, talking about the things that we've developed. And you're right, we can't talk. We don't say, hey, do you want AI or what is your thoughts on the latest trends in neural nets?

Or.

Right.

And so we really are value selling and we're talking about the ways in which we can give them a solution to how they can keep their fields clean of weed, not spray all over the place. And also not have to rely so much on labor, because labor is really the big hot button issue for these farmers, even more than the chemicals, because we just don't have enough labor in the United States to do all of our agricultural work. And in Fact, almost all of it is migrant labor. And so with your labor constrained, the last thing you want to do is send people out into the P. That's just the least value I add because the chemicals don't, they wind up sending folks out in the field anyway. And then especially if you're producing organic crops, your access to herbicides, I mean there's only a couple things you can use. And so you use people a lot, you use labor a ton. And so we talk to them about the way is the way we did it, but that's not the same selling point. And so the cool thing is that the farmers are way more receptive, inventive, looking for new solutions, willing to try things than I ever could have imagined. So as a customer base, they're kind of the, they're like the funnest, coolest, most easy to work with, easy to get to know people especially, you know, I came from it, man. If I'm going to sell to a storage CIO or a farmer, I'll take the farmer all day long. And it's like the guy who's going to write me our machines are expensive, going to write me a multimillion dollar check is the fifth generation farmer whose name is on the building. And his great great grandfather started the farm. And so there's history and pride and wanting to, when really wanting to grow good food and wanting to make, help make people healthy, wanting to provide a good product and doing everything they can to do that. And so they need help, they need automation, they need solutions that can do stuff that isn't going to cost them a bunch of money that at least when it, when it's expensive like ours, that like you can show the roi. Right. And so here's my thing. I want to make sure that all my machines pay back back within three years. So whatever money you outlay that should, that should be saving enough money every year that by the time that three year horizon hits, you're basically. It's paid for itself.

Yeah.

Everything from then on is just brief.

Is the, what, what is the market structure of the farming industry right now? You've heard about like these mega farms kind of buying each other, rolling up.

Yeah.

But it sounds like at the same time you're still running into folks who it's a fifth generation farm. Yeah. Who are you selling to and what is the overall trend in the industry? Is it consolidating still?

There's been consolidation. I don't know if I would say it's consolidating a lot because Most of the farms that we've been selling to since the beginning of this company are still their own independent entities. There's been some private equity acquisitions. There's been more PE activity than there has been consolidated, I'll say that. So it's been a farm that's running very well, that's been going for a long time, that is highly profitable, that a PE firm comes in and buys and operates. But I have not seen eight farms that suddenly get gobbled up and turned into one giant entity. So I think the consolidation, part of the reason you get consolidation too is that you get economies of scale with the consolidation and some of that and what that affords you is the ability to buy more modern equipment and be at the cutting edge of technology to get the most optimum solution. So we kind of pride ourselves at Laser Weeder. Our main product is actually available to growers of all sizes. So we kind of help them be competitive. Right, we help them be competitive and not have to get consolidated. So I feel pretty good about that. But I do not feel like there's been a massive amount of consolidation since we've been selling.

How do you think about, on what timeline is robotics really deflationary within food and agriculture? Right, because the idea here is like on a long enough time horizon, if you don't need human labor, which I imagine is the core kind of cost for a lot of products, you could, and especially if you can make it, you know, a lot cheaper to even do organic food, you can imagine a world in the future where organic food is priced similarly with, you know, whatever, perfectly gmo, you know, grown crops.

I think what's really, what's happening is it's, I kind of look at it the other way around. The herbicides are actually getting less effective. We're getting herbicide resistance in the weed population. There are weeds coming through the country right now that we don't have chemicals that can kill. And so that's going to keep happening. Just like we have antibiotic resistant bacteria, when you have ovaries of antibiotics, same process is happening. So I look at, if you just roll the clock forward, what do you think is going to happen in the end? Where are we going to be? Pick some time horizon. In 100 years, well, most of the chemicals aren't going to work anymore or we're going to be severely labor constrained on ability to grow food. We're going to really care about the health of the soil because we have a limited amount of that. And so how do you, what do you need to do well, you need to plan for a world in which you're not so heavily dependent on chemicals because they are getting less useful every year. You need to be able to protect your topsoil, which means not digging stuff up so much. Right. One of the common techniques. Techniques, one of the ways in which you could help kill weeds with cultivation, where you run blades through the ground. But that's bad for the topsoil, right? So it's like, okay, so where we have to get to is a point where we're not damaging our topsoil. We're not spraying stuff all over the place. So we're actually, I think, helping to keep things stable. The price of food is, you know, it's priced into the cpi, Right. So it's one of the core components. And so what happens is, is like many of the main constituents of the economy kind of tracks with the economy. Right. It doesn't really separate in the way that some of the more consumer goods will. So I don't know if I call it deflationary so much as being able to sustain the profitability of the farmers that we so depend on to give us healthy food.

How have your customers reacted to. To the tariffs? I'm sure you've had conversations or just heard kind of industry news, because obviously, as much as we consume the food that we produce in the United States, we also export it around the world.

It's true. Okay. So United States for the last three or four years has been in an agricultural trade deficit. This is relatively new for us. It's not been the case before that. And this is concerning. Part of the problem is that we are losing acreage to Mexico and south of the border every year because of the labor challenges and the price of things like herbicides and just sort of how much. Which there's a lot of government regulation as well. And that makes a challenging environment for these. For these farmers. So in that sense, maybe the tariffs kind of help. But there's a lot of negatives here, Right. That it makes it. It does reduce the place in places in which they can sell. Right. Even though we're at an agricultural trade deficit, we still are selling a lot of stuff overseas. And a lot of this equipment, you know, components and parts all come from overseas. Everything electronic comes from Taiwan.

Right.

We're not. Whatever you want to think about, the CHIPS Act.

Right.

We're not up and running. Right. I can't buy GPUs that are made in, you know, Iowa or whatever. Right, Right. So, I mean, I'm realistically you know. Right. All of that stuff still needs to come inbound. And then we do a fair amount of business overseas as well. We sell a lot, lot into Europe and a lot into Australia. So for us, that's challenging as well. So this is a long way of saying we don't really know where the impact nets out at the end of the day. And even the farmers I've spoken to, they kind of say the same thing.

Paul.

Paul.

I don't know if this is good or bad. Like, I can't. It's hard to run the numbers. Right. This is a multivariate equation. And. And it's changing. Right. It's like it's on, it's off, it's. Right. So I haven't heard a consistent position on this from anybody. And I think it's one of these things where nobody knows what their position should be until they understand the impacts. And the impacts are very hard to calculate right now.

Yeah. It's interesting to think about seasonality in the context of the tariffs, too. If you're producing, you're maybe off season and the tariff hits, it's like, well, I don't really know what that's going to do to demand until I actually pick the crop and go to sell it.

Or can you give us a little bit of a Farming for Dummies Farming 101 on what a tractor actually is used for on a farm. And then take me through the auto tractor and what that product means for your business.

Yeah, I mean, growing food is setting up the land so you'll run. There's a. This term is generally called tillage, where they'll run large blades through the ground and they're trying to tear it up, turn over that soil, loosen things up, allow access to the nutrients and the microbiomes in that soil, get it ready for planting. Then you put your seeds in the ground. So you've done tillage and then you've done planting, and a tractor is pulling the tillage bar through the field and then it's pulling the planter and then you spend your time doing fertilization, irrigation, and keeping weeds at bay. And so there's a couple different ways to do irrigation, but some of them involve laying pipes in the field and there's a tractor for that. And then when you're doing weed control, you're running. You may be renting. Running cultivators through the field that I mentioned before, or a spray rig. If you're using a lot of herbicides or laser weeder and you're Using tractor to pull through for that. And then usually when you're running harvest, you may have a, a harvest machine that you're pulling tractor through or some of those are self driving as well. But there's a bunch of activities and the tractor is kind of the main engine for all of these. The tractor is the thing that provides you locomotion and from that locomotion you get power. So for example, tractor has a thing called a PTO stands for power takeoff. And it's just a spinning shaft with a gear on it and you can plug into that and then you get power. So, so we use that for a generator, for example. We get three phase 240 volt power off the PTO spinning generator. So tractor is kind of the main, it's the main engine. It's the starting point for everything moving on the farm and like pulling weeds. We found that one of the major challenges with getting enough done was finding tractor drivers. How do you get enough people to drive the tractor? Tractor driving is fun and it's interesting and kind of cool, right? But try doing it for 24 hours a day. You know, like when it's time to farm, it's time to farm. And, and for tools like Laser Weeder in order to help that ROI really pay for itself. Like you want to run 24 7, so who are you going to get to do the midnight to 8am shift, right? Like these things are really hard. So we started working on tractor autonomy and the original Laser Weeder was actually autonomous, the very first one that we built many, many years ago. And so we revitalized the autonomy stack. But here's the thing, here's the key that I feel like just like people didn't realize or whatever when we were thinking about this, the big reason why tractor autonomy hasn't taken, taken off in the world farming tractor autonomy is because of all the exception cases, right? So if I'm going to put my tractor out in the field at midnight, my autonomous tractor at midnight, I want to come back at 8am and see it did its job. What everybody discovered from the call them like the existing autonomy solutions was that in reality what happens is you put that tractor out at midnight because it saw a pig in the middle of a field or a deer or whatever, like these things happen. And so they couldn't reliably get any of the autonomy solutions to do the job. And so what we figured was, well, what if we could remotely log in and handle the exception cases. And the problem was, you know, we investigated control methods and video feed methods. What if we put up big radio, radio towers so we could broadcast because these are rural areas, right? You don't have good, you certainly don't have five gig. And maybe you don't have lte, maybe you have no way to talk to the machines at all. But we wanted to do remote observation, command and control for the exception cases. So the thing that came up that really changed the game for us was the satellite based Internet solutions like Starlink. I think that is going to be the biggest game changer for agriculture other than Laser Weeder. That might be one of the biggest game changers for agriculture. And I think that not a lot of people realize it yet.

That's very cool.

That's very cool. What have the tech bros messed up with farming? I'm thinking of high profile failures like Bowery, which was unfortunate.

Was that vertical farming.

That was vertical farming that, you know, was a cool attempt at, you know, kind of futurizing farming. And then another one is like we've, we've looked into like Larry Ellison's project in Hawaii that yeah, seemingly like the. Probably lost more money than any farm in history just, just on a cash in, cash out standpoint. And is the solution, you know, clearly your solution is much more like, hey, let's lean into how farming is already done today and make it more efficient, make it better versus just reinvent. Like is the idea that we just need to completely reinvent farming wrong?

I think you got it. Yeah, I think that that's wrong. I think that. And Bowery wasn't the only high profile vertical farming failure. There were a couple of them. We're talking about tens of billions of dollars at this point. Okay, so here's the fact. If I take food, grown food, vegetables, and I throw it on the ground, it will make more food. Okay? So this is how things happen. So then if you say right, so the whole conceit about vertical farming was I can put these things in these urban environments and I can grow them near to where people are going to eat them or whatever. But the economics just, just don't pan. It just doesn't pan out. And farmers have experience and knowledge and specialized understanding of soil health and how things grow. And there's a lot of nature involved in food growing, growing well and growing efficiency. And so this is an example of where you try to take everything apart and then closely manage all the inputs and keep, you know, and keep track of everything required to make that thing grow optimally. You wind up doing a worse job than you just Lean into the natural environment about the ways that things evolved to happen this way on this planet. And so that's. So what you said was absolutely right. We're going to reinvent farming as the tech Bros. You know, tech bros of the urban environments. Right. That we're going to, you know, it just, it doesn't happen. And so we went out and said, how do we help farmers with their job they're trying to do instead of how do we like reinvent what they think, you know, what we think they should be doing?

And I think that, yeah, it feels like one of those things like, you know, tech Bros now trying to reinvent private equity with roll ups. Right. Private equity, super efficient industry. You know, trying to reinvent farming. We've been doing it for a very long time.

Yeah, yeah. There's a misnomer that, oh, farmers don't know what they're doing. It's like, no, they take their business really seriously. It's a hard business. It's super competitive, super smart people in there. It's not some. Yeah, yeah, like the country bumpkin is like wildly incorrect.

I have a, I have a portfolio company that sells into the ag world and I've been amazed at the ingenuity at the farm level where they're just, it's like, oh, this product doesn't exist. I'm going to make it myself and.

I'm going to, I have a follow up on that. I mean, you raised money from Bond Capital Stories Capital Allocator. Mary Meeker, known for investing in consumer technology during the dot com boom. Yep. What, what do you think venture capitalists get wrong about a company like yours where you are a tech company but you're a couple steps away from, oh, it's a website, it's a SaaS product, it's your, your robotics company and you're selling into an industry that they might not be familiar with. What's that process been like?

Yeah, I mean, yeah. So bond capital capital. Mary Meeker and Mood Regani. I mean really quality people. So the challenge for us is that part of it is that, that we're selling into a market that they're not familiar with. The other challenge is of course that it's hardware. Right. Like hardware requires capital, it requires inventory. Some of the R and D is money you're spending on parts to try stuff that you're just ultimately going to throw away. It's a little bit different. Right. But I really lean on this idea about where is AI useful for you in society and in the world. Right. Chat GPT is cool and rad. Cursor is cool and rad. Right on. But how am I, how are you going to make your life better? How can you make yourself more healthy? How do we prevent people from having the kind of food intolerances, you know, that you were mentioning?

Right.

What are we trying to do really, with the, this technology? And if we can make, we can actually make the world a better place. Not in the Silicon Valley, you know, show Silicon Valley show style, but we can actually do some real things. Plus, farming is a big enough tam that you can make a good business out of this. I think, you know, carbon robotics will get to the point where we're going to have a really nice ipo. And so that's kind of. You can plot a course to get there, but you have to be able to tell this story. And I think that maybe we had a little bit of advantage because we're kind of half, we're like half tech, half agriculture. And so we knew how to talk in both worlds. And when we're talking to the folks in Silicon Valley and Bond and all those folks, you know, we're definitely leaning on some of our Silicon Valley tech bro routes. But, but it's to, to know how to tell the story. I will say. But you know what's interesting about our company, this is controversial. Sort of look at our investors. It's Bond and Sozo and Ignition and Fuse and Voyager and Anthos. But who hasn't invested in us? Who's not on our cap table? AgTech VCs. We have no ag tech investment.

Interesting.

So why is that? I think part of it is that you had to step out of what you knew about agriculture to get what we were doing. And we, you know, a lot of people, like, a lot of people who knew, who were experts, really, like, love to tell us how stupid we are to try to do lasers. Like, what a dumb idea. Why would you do that? That's just stupid. You just put chemicals all over the place. What are you trying to do? Like, literally. So it took, it took the people who were used to doing bold, innovative new things and turning industries upside down to see what we were doing.

Would you guys, would you guys ever do consumer hardware? I got my landscaper told me yesterday, hey, we need to add another day of the week just for weeding. And I was just like, honestly, very annoyed. I was like, this isn't part of landscaping weeding, but having a little robot in my backyard that's just sniping weeds as they come up you know, sounds, sounds like I would definitely, I definitely pay, you know, I'd probably pay just as much for a robot to do it as a human, just because I'd rather have a robot in my backyard all the time than we, you know.

I think we have a ways to go to get there. I mean like the point at which you'd see, you know, laser weeders, like Home Depot, I think we have a ways to go. And look, I'm a b. I'm like, I'm a B2B kind of guy, right? My consumer is, is not really where I, where I've been successful in my career. I was at Uber for quite some time, but I was working on the infrastructure, right. So I feel like, you know, and the deep learning and all that stuff. So I feel like I would love to get there at some point, but we're going to get there based on our trajectory and, you know, where we get and success on the, on the.

Industry side in terms of going deeper in farms, you know, we've seen with Anduril, they build a lot of hardware, but then they're also working on a software platform called Lattice to kind of allow the autonomous system to team with each other. Is there an existing farm management platform that you want to integrate with or is that something you could see growing out of your technology?

Yeah, this is a good question and it's actually somewhat controversial right now. So we have a thing called the Carbon Operations center and the Carbon Operations center shows you everything that laserweiter is doing and everything Laser Weeder saw. How many weeds, what type, how big they are, how many crops. We saw how big they are, what the spacing looks like, you know, all of this kind of stuff, stuff. John Deere has their John Deere command center which you can log into and see your truck every time. I have this question for folks about what you want us to integrate with. Nobody has a favorite. There's been no clear leader in this space. But the reason why it's controversial is because maybe this is kind of a theme here based on some of the other stuff we were talking about. There have been a number of companies, startup companies out of Silicon Valley who basically said, this is great. I have my brand new computer science degree from Stanford and now I'm going to go teach farmers how to farm with my data platform. And they all fail just over and over and eating it, just not making it happen. Because it turns out that you can go collect data and show things, but unless you actually can make it actionable, there's no insight there. It's just telling people what's happening in their fields. And so having that be your business model, your primary business model, I think is a failure and it's been a failure. So maybe, you know, something like the Carbon Operations center or maybe even the John Deere command center where you're kind of there to help show what's happening on some existing machines and then you can pull more in after that. Maybe that's the solution there. But there's not been a great, great platform for that and I would love to see there be one. It's. But it's different also. It's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to definitely be mobile first. Because these farmers, they're in their fields all the time. And so that means phone, right? It doesn't mean desktop. And, and you know, and those kinds of things are, there's a lot of, it's specific to what farmers are trying to get.

Phone and Starlinks, two major drivers.

It's totally true. It's completely true. Yeah, having access to. Yeah, go ahead.

I was gonna say last question because I know we're at, we're at time, but after all the time you've spent in agriculture, what keeps you up at night? Because I feel like for Americans, we take food security for granted. We just sort of accept it that you're gonna go to the grocery store and maybe the price is up or down for aggressive eggs one day, but you know, there's generally going to be eggs. What, what scares you?

I'm worried about us in the United States and many of these, even many of the economies in Western Europe being able to continue to be self sustaining. And that means agriculture, that means manufacturing ability to make things and grow things that keep your country moving along. In a world we cannot compete globally dollar for dollar for labor prices. We can't. Without a drastic reduction in our standard of living, that's never going to happen. So if you watch all of our manufacturing leave, all of our agriculture leave, we're in a very, very vulnerable spot. And this to me is a, and should be a national emergency. Right. The slope is already clear. The most deleterious effects haven't happened yet. And by the time they do, it's going to be too late. So we need more AI automation or just say automation in this country to be able to help us sustain those very important things for our country. Growing food, building products, making things that we use. You know, this is like whatever you think about Elon Musk this is a good quote. He's like, if nobody's making things, you won't have any things. Right? So it's weird, right? So that's what I'm worried about.

That makes a ton of sense. Well, this was a great conversation. Thanks so much.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it.

I'm really excited about what you're doing too.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

Huge, huge impact. So keep up the great work. I mean, it's already been a massive success, but I'm sure you have a long future ahead of you.

And you're officially our agricultural correspondent.

Yeah, we'd love to have you back and talk to the next agriculture as it happens.

Let's do the next one in a farm. We can go get you guys out of the studio.

Right?

Boots, Boots on you. You can go. We can go see some laser weeders.

All right. Yeah, yeah.

My first job was my. My mom would give me a nickel for every weed of a certain, you know, stature that I would get out of the yard. So I feel like I'm glad. I'm happy you're doing this, but I'm built for it.

Yeah, I'm sure you can tell the farmers exactly how to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll give them some great advice. We'll tell them what's really going on.

Here's what you got to do.

Yeah, don't worry. Well, we'll solve all this crisis anyway. Thanks so much, Paul. Cheers. Have a great. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, you as well.

Thanks.

Bye.

Bye. Yeah, if you're looking to go spend some time near a farm, maybe you should book a wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service.

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One time, like they're the. The guest is not going to have checked out of the zoom and they're just going to hear us do this deranged ad read and they're going to be like, why are they singing? I don't have full context on the show.

You got to be singing more.

Good. We should. Well, should we sing this TechCrunch article. FinTech founder charged with fraud after AI shopping app found to start.

This was relevant to the conversation yesterday. We were talking about how figure AI is claiming to end to end robotics system. End to end AI.

Yes.

Closed system.

Yes.

That has not been fully achieved by Any other company in their category, which makes it very impressive if they're doing it, a potentially massive breakthrough, but also potential risk vector if they're sort of promising investors that they've achieved this, which they already have.

Yeah. And this is going to be an ongoing theme, I think, with AI companies is the claims around the level of automation. We saw this with this TechCrunch article. The CEO of Nate, an AI shopping app that promised a universal checkout experience, which makes a lot of sense. You go to the AI app, hey, buy me a bottle of Dom Perignon. It goes and finds it. It buys for you. Should be automatable with agents and operator and all the, all the amazing LLM magic that has been in the boom. Nate was founded in 2018. They raised over $50 million from investors like CO2 and Forerunner Center. They raised a $38 million Series A in 2021, slightly before the AI boom. But they were still pitching this idea of like you can buy from any e commerce site with a single click thanks to AI. But in reality, Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors in a call center in the Philippines to manually complete those purchases. Now, no problem with that if you're upfront about it.

Yeah.

With your investors, you don't even have to be that upfront about it with the customer. I think, I think.

You don't think the customer cares that much.

The customer doesn't care. I just want the output, which is one click checkout on any e commerce site. That's what I'm being promised. I don't really care how you do it. You could be using LLMs, you could be using deep learning, you could be using some special algorithm. Yeah, I remember by hand, who cares?

I remember this company.

Yes.

I remember their billboard specifically. And there was a lot of hype around it. I didn't fully get it. But I also think anytime these shopping apps launch, they tend to just launch these massive incentives so they can really run up users where they're basically giving a money money away for user acquisition.

And that creates very high burn and that makes it harder to spend that money on R and D to actually solve the AI problem. That requires all the training. And there's no problem with, with hiring a bunch of folks in the Philippines or anywhere to do a bunch of jobs, get a bunch of training data and then create the final algorithms. This is the story of scale AI and OpenAI. You know, they get a bunch of contractors, they answer a bunch of questions, they bake that all into the training data and you Get a magical experience at the end of the chain, but you got to actually deliver that magical experience, especially if that's what you're promising to investors. And so this. Now the DOJ Southern District of New York is alleging that Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors and they made.

They found it was effectively 0% AI. And the reason that this, that's 100%.

That should have been a red flag.

Is that what Nate was doing was basically computer use or OpenAI operator, very similar. Or stuff that browser base is doing helping companies achieve now, which even now still requires a human in the loop.

Totally.

It's not really reliable. When you watch OpenAI operator do this, which is one of the best agent teams in the world, it's still like watching your grandma use a computer. It's sort of slow. It gets hung up in places. It will get better. But Nate was promising all this in 2021, which I imagine that if there were AI founders at the time, people that were thinking about this agentic experiences, I imagine they would have looked at this and said like. Like it's a cool idea and we're going to get there. But yeah.

And so the company ran out of money, sold the assets, leaving its investors with near total losses. And that is the basic basis for the lawsuit. The investors probably wouldn't care about the involvement of humans if it was delivering shareholder value and the business was growing really nicely. Amazon went through something similar with their.

One the bigger issue not in the loop checkout. If Nate had been saying that they were using humans for everything.

Totally.

And they were going to, over time use it for less and less and less.

It's a little bit less sexy of a story, but. But I think it can still totally work.

There's probably a good chance they wouldn't have raised the last round without that AI narrative is the issue.

Totally. Yeah. So if the investors feel duped, they're going to sue and it's going to get ugly. But good luck to everyone involved. Hopefully it resolves smoothly and everyone can move on and build something cool in the future. Anyway, speaking of AI, Brad Gerstner has a great thesis, I think BG on.

Yeah, we talked about this yesterday. Basically everybody said LLMs have no moats, there's no switching costs. Introducing memory effectively. Large context windows.

Yes.

Around all the sort of inputs and conversations that you have with the model.

So OpenAI launched Infinite Memory. The switching costs up. Yeah, switching costs far too low in the foundation model space. But not anymore, thanks to Infinite memory launched by OpenAI earlier this week and.

Somebody was pushing back and saying that you could just export your data from Chat GPT.

No one's going to do that.

But no, yeah, export your. You can, you can export from Excel too.

Yeah, you can export yourself from. People were saying this about Google Circles. Wasn't that the competitor to Facebook that they launched? Oh, well, you could just export your, you know, your. All your data, import all your posts there. No one wound up doing it. If you get in the flow of just training ChatGPT again and again and again, it knows what you like, it knows how you like to like data to be formatted, it knows about what you know, what you don't know, what you've asked previously. It has all that extra context. It's going to be harder and harder to go back and forth. And I think people really have been going back and forth for, oh, there's a new Claude model. It's hot on Twitter or X. Yeah, let's go jump over there for a little bit. Let's jump back to the latest and greatest kind of the model war will maybe be winding down as the switching costs increase. So interesting story.

This is also interesting. Base 16Z says he's pulling something out from Netflix earnings report or some type of report. They did. They said engagement remains a key catalyst for Netflix's growth. During its last earnings call, Netflix revealed that subscribers spend an average of 2 hours daily on the platform.

How is that possible?

I don't know how this is possible, but that's a good answer for why we put out three plus hours a day of content. Because if all those people that were basically doom watching Netflix, cancel your Netflix.

Subscription, leave us five stars on Apple, podcasts and Spotify. But that is a lot of Netflix. But yeah, I mean, I guess if it's replaced your tv, you have it on the background. A lot of what Netflix does best is this like laundry tv. Have you heard this term, the idea that put it on while you're doing laundry? It's meant to be a lot of the reality TV shows, they kind of recap what happens at every like 15 minute interval. And so you can kind of tune out, tune in. It's not, it's not all content that's like Game of Thrones, super layered. You got to be following along, you got to be reading the fan theories. A lot of it's just, yeah, you throw it on. It's reality TV and you just kind of let it sit there and the background. Anyway, this was a cool story from Steven Zhang. He built the app that someone was talking about. Preston went viral with a post saying, I want a finance app with three numbers. What I spent today, what I spent this week, and what I spent this month. And.

And Preston's post went super viral.

Yep. And Steven built the app and he shows a little time lapse of him vibe coding it. Probably on his.

Yes, he's worried about people.

He blurred out his feet in the video, which is hilarious because you could have just put on shoes or something.

But maybe he realized after that he might have realized after the fact that.

He didn't want to wind up on.

Never put your feet on the Internet.

Never put your feet on the Internet.

I like this post from Joe, friend of the show. Sort of a long lost brother. I just threw this in because if you're in New York, you should go check this out. There is a store across from the US in Manhattan that's called the UN of Beers, which is just an amazing, you know, example of you can just name your store or your business whatever you want. The Advanced Manufacturing Company of America. Cool name. There's bank of America. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. That's a cool name. Imagine coming up with that name, you know. Yeah, you're like looking around someone looking.

For domains at the Beer of America.

Beer of America, the United nations of America. But the UN of Beers is a fantastic name.

It's great. Well, after you go testify in front of the un, you might need a beer. And so you head across the street to the UN of Beers. This post from Pavel, I enjoyed. He said, quote, maybe if I hire someone really good at math, my product will get better. Why did this become the default Silicon Valley narrative? Lowell and Pavel, I think you know why it became a meme. There's been someone who's been recruiting IO IO gold medalists into tech companies for years.

And his name is Eric Lyman.

Yes. And you once worked at that firm. So this should not be a surprise. Everyone is cargo culting ramp.

No, it's just, I think, I think he's more basically more saying. Yeah, I think that if you blend people that are really good across different domains, they're probably going to get a great output. Juan says people just farm PhD hires. Think thinking 27 year olds that haven't written a single line of production code in their lives can change the trajectory of their company.

Yeah, but takes more than that.

Mathletes are low key, goaded. So low key goaded. I wanted to cover one final poly market before we sign off for the weekend. And that is the 2025 Masters winner. Right now. They got Scotty at 25%, Rory at 21%, Bryson at 20%, and then it kind of drops off pretty hard from there.

That's pretty even balance, kind of anyone's game.

Anyone's game.

But good luck to everyone watching the Masters.

TJ was posting something earlier that. That the Masters was the closest American, like, institution or event that feels like Japanese culture. It's like, just very, like, calm and pleasant.

Yeah.

People are well dressed, and there was a guy basically wearing a full blazer, playing in a blazer.

That's cool.

Yeah. I don't know if I actually played, but I saw him warming up in it.

Yeah, it's one of those things. It's one of the sports that you don't need to take the athletic attire to the absolute extreme, and so you can express yourself a little bit more.

And. And then the other one, we got UFC 314 this weekend going down in Miami, and we.

Who's playing?

There's a team based.

There's two teams.

Yeah. This is great.

The New York Sluggers.

This is relevant. Relevant for me because Chandler is fighting this weekend, and he is a RORA athlete.

That's fantastic.

Been posting about his water consumption this week. So root for Chandler. We want to see the win. We want to see, you know, his continued success. So that's a good question.

What's his signature move? Does he do, like a karate chop? Is that. Is that what it is? Karate chop? Because you can do anything in. In. In ufc, Right?

This is the. This is John's best bit.

Yeah.

That he has no idea how. How UFC works.

Good luck, Chandler. I hope you make it. All 21 of us is 25 rounds.

Yeah, all 25.

All 25 rounds. I hope he makes it. And. Yeah. Good luck to you.

Godspeed. Have a great weekend, everybody. It was a crazy week in the markets.

We made it through.

I think everybody made it.

One last size gong. We ended up up 5%, folks, down 12% if you count last week, but still up 5% this weekend. That's what we're celebrating today. Have a great.

Have a great weekend. Have a great weekend.

Bye.