NEO Home Robot Reactions, Bryan Johnson LIVE in The Ultradome | Marcin Piatkowski, Nathan Mintz, James Proud, Shaun Maguire, Anil Chakravarthy, Brynn Putnam, George Kurtz

You're watching TVPN.

Today is Wednesday, October 29, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome.

The fortress of finance, the temple of.

Technology, the capital of capital 1X.

Look what I got here.

Oh, yeah. What do you have?

Look what I got here. Our dear friend Siki Chen, friend of the show, made a hot sauce for his company Runway, and he sent it to us. Runway has so much cash on their balance sheet that they made a hot sauce called Burn Rate.

Okay.

And it has a real hundred dollar bill as part of the packaging. So thank you to Siki.

This is incredible because the execution here is crazy.

Look at this box I don't think we've ever seen.

So he really gave us 100 bucks here. This is remarkable.

Yeah. Except, of course, you can never spend it.

Wait, why not?

I mean, you technically could.

You could technically, because I owe someone $100 or I'm going to owe someone 100 dol by the end of the week. Because I made a side bet on whether you.

I was making a bet on something. And then John made a derivative bet.

Someone else on whether or not Jordy would win his bet.

And it's not looking good. I'm underperforming.

It's not looking good. And so.

And so, yeah, you might need a.

High over to Dylan Obrascotta, who I probably owe $100 by the end of the week.

But very, very cool activation from Siki and the Runway team. And. And thank you for sharing. I won't spend it. We'll keep it here on the desk.

I will be gifted.

John will be.

John will be using to pay off my gambling debts.

But anyways, it's good to be back. We missed everyone in the chat yesterday. When we're on the road, it's always brutal. Have a visual of the chat. We'll figure it out. We are very, very happy to be back. The Fed, two minutes ago, came out and announced that the Fed cut borrowing costs by a quarter of a percentage point for the second time. The studio goes crazy.

The studio goes craz.

Nothing like cutting into froth. Yeah. Warm it up a little bit, John. Okay. You kind of went to the top side there. That. That wasn't.

Right in the center.

Yeah.

Rings for a really long.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think if I. If I hit it here, it doesn't.

Yeah. All right. Well, kind of an ominous hit. I will say it wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't that pure. But. But anyways, this is what Polymarket had going into this, they had it at 99% chance of a 25 basis point cut. And they were correct.

Yeah. So if you had $100,000 riding on that 99% bet, you would have made roughly $1,000, something like that. That could be a really good strategy if you're down 1000 bucks if you win it all back.

Like me. Like me right now.

Yeah. Anyways, let me tell you about ramp.com, time is money saved, both easy to use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. The 1x robot launched and it's burning up the timeline. People love it, people hate it. People have breaking news. It's teleoperated, folks. It's teleoperated. It's not an end to end AI machine learning model. And people are, people are saying that like it's breaking news.

But they're saying that the demos that have been given so far are teleroperators.

But I don't think, and I just don't think that's a scoop. I don't think that's a scoop. Wait, no, I think they're going to ship a teleoperated robot. I think that's the point.

It's entirely teleop.

I think the picture, Tyler, you break it down.

Okay, so in the video, it seems like there's a lot of tasks that it can do, like fully autonomously.

Sure.

And then there's some tasks which are a little bit more complex that you can use expert mode, which is when someone will basically be like observing the robot as it's doing the thing. And then I assume that they can interfere.

It seems like you can pay a human to be in VR and operate your robot for you to do things that it can't just do automatically. And I don't know the back and forth here. So Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal got a whole demo of it, said, I tried the robot that's coming to live with you. It's still part human. First it needs to be controlled by a human in your home. Is that cool with you? Obviously there's privacy discussions here. The big bombshell post right now is from NKBHD, who got 12,000 likes on a post saying, so to be clear, this is a pre order for humanoid home robot that will cost $20,000 or $500 per month when it maybe ships next year. And it's currently not finished. Joanna Stern got to do a demo and in its current state, 100% of its actions are teleoperated. So of the Tests that she did.

That's.

Yeah, they were tele. All the impressive stuff was.

But I think anybody that's buying the robot today or preordering it assumes that there will be some task that it can do that's non tele operated.

Sure. I don't really know. I don't think people will be buying it because of that. I think people will buy it and say, yeah, I'm paying 20k and then I'm also paying $2 an hour for someone to tell. Operate this thing and actually do the dishes effectively and sit there until the dishes are done as opposed to. Yeah, it has some like, basic stuff. I can chat with it. I don't think people will. Will be driven by that. And also, I just don't think that the whole. It's basically being framed as this, like, big reveal. Like, oh, it's actually teleoperated. When I think that it's just. That's not that much of a.

No, I'm a huge teleoperation bull.

Yeah.

I think that it's. Even if you're just thinking about a use case for somebody who's like, yeah, every once in a while I come home late and I want to put food in my dog's bowl and I can just tell. Operate my robot and go, oh, teleoperate your own robot.

I hadn't.

Yeah, teleoperating your own robot. Like, oh, I'm coming home in a bit. I want to like, open the window. I want to open like the, the, the a door to bring in some air or something like that. So I do think it's. I do think it's.

Look, you can tell. Operate a Porsche. You put the robot in the Porsche and then you are driving the car.

There we go.

Remotely. I'm sure there won't be any problem. Operating. Operating the three pedals at 75 miles an hour.

Somebody, if somebody maybe had a few too many drinks, you could put this in. So they legally couldn't operate a vehicle. Could they teleoperate on their phone a ro that was driving the vehicle?

Absolutely. They're sitting in the passenger seat. I was Teller operating.

I've just been sitting here on my phone. I don't know. You got to take this up with him.

I love the idea of.

Okay, so here's the things. Here's the thing. Let's play out a scenario. So one, I love that this robot looks unique. I think they have like a. I love the color choices that they've used. It's very kind of like skims Adjacent. Almost like they've created a whole kind of cool brand world.

Yeah, it definitely feels like more.

This is a new take on a robot, and they're going for cute. But if this thing is being teleoperated in your kitchen, let's say it's loading, like, dirty dishes from your sink or from your table into your dishwasher, and then it picks up a big knife and it just starts moving over, and then it just pauses there. You look over at your robot, and it's just sitting there looking at you like this with a knife in its hand. Are you not going to get a little freaked out? This thing looks cute, but the second it's got, like, a kitchen knife in its hand and it's looking at you, does it really look that cute?

Is it cute? I think it's the cutest robot, the cutest humanoid robot I've seen demoed. The question is, like, yeah, there's, like, this uncanny valley of actually going cute. Because I don't have a problem with just a. Like, I think if you went to the Optimus team and you went to Elon and you said, like, hey, what's your goal for the design of Optimus? I don't know that Elon would say, it's my goal to make it cute. He might be like, no, it's like, the Cybertruck is not designed to be a cute little Volkswagen Beetle. Like, it's meant to look cool and badass and, like, and awesome.

Right.

It's meant to look sick. And I think that there are different, like, optimization vectors to actually go down. 1x team is clearly going down the cute route, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's, like, the actual solution to what will get adoption. So I don't know. I think that I would give this, like, an 8 out of 10 on the cute scale, but I'm giving it.

An 8 out of 10, too. Until it picks up the kitchen knife.

And then it goes down.

I'm just saying. I'm saying in certain contexts, it's going to look really scary. All human.

Yeah. But, like, walk through that.

Like, what does something about an eyes. Eye without mouth.

I. Without a mouth is maybe an odd choice.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it just looks. It looks fundamentally a little bit demonic, not having any other features.

But if you add the mouth, then you get more Uncanny valley.

Right.

Isn't that the risk that as you.

One thing I don't understand is the pricing strategy. So $499 a month.

Yep.

Or 20 grand.

Yep.

Who pays the 20 grand when you could get. Do you think this thing will be the best robot you could possibly have for 40 months straight? When there's a bunch of companies coming online with robots? Like wouldn't the default be like, okay, humanoids are going to progress rapidly. I'd rather like effectively lease one and know that in 40 months I could get one that's going to be like significantly better.

Yeah, I would definitely be a leaser. I'd be happy to be a leaser.

Just like Satya.

Yeah. Let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations multi stream. Reach your audience wherever they are. Tyler, you're not afraid of this thing? It's sick.

Well, no. Okay, so a couple of reasons I'm not afraid of it. Yeah. One, it's pretty small, right? Yeah. 60 pounds, right? Yeah, 60 pounds. It's 66 pounds.

Oh true. You could totally like roundhouse kick this thing out the window.

He's a tiny little, you know, guy. You can push him over.

Okay.

Also it seemed, I mean nothing. I haven't seen any videos of it like really moving quickly at all.

Okay.

So I'm not afraid that it's gonna like get the jump on me.

Yeah.

If it has the knife I think I can run faster than it.

Yeah.

And yeah, I guess I would be a little bit scared if it's being tele operated.

Yeah.

But I don't know who's. Who's tell. What about in your sleep? Lock the door?

Yeah.

You could just lock this thing and in, in like a closet at night or something. Can't really get out.

I mean it's going to be a whole new world when people are like, you know, I'm going to sleep. I'm paying Expert mode to have my, you know, somebody in my house with the humanoid.

I mean I'm just not that worried about it because like it has been possible to like the, the like there was some movie about this where like the AI. Oh it's Fast and furious in Fast and Furious. Like doesn't. Isn't there an AI that takes. Oh no, you won't know. But I think that there's an AI that takes over the cars and like drives the cars and like crashes the cars. There's been other movies where like the Teslas have been teleoperated to crash into each other. There was that movie about the, about like the doomsday where they all go in the bunker. I forget what movie this is but there's some movie is that. I think Obama produced it. I'm not kidding about that.

The don't look up.

It's not don't look up. It was like from the same era. What was it?

Leave the World behind.

Is that it? No, it's not Leave the World Behind. Oh, yeah, it is. It's Leave the World Behind. Yeah. And there's that scene where all the Teslas are are coming and they're all crashing into each other. Like that's been possible for a while, but the economic incentives are just such that like no one's actually been able to just like, like there's no one out there that's just like, oh, I just want to like kill someone randomly. And I'm going to hack all of Tesla's system to like take over your car. It just, it feels like something that's like definitely possible, but it would require like billions of dollars to actually take over. And at the end of the day, a lot of people just want to make money and so they're like, if I have the ability to go and hack into Tesla's network and steal the cars, it's like, I can probably just build a car company or something.

So some more. We're not NEO factual media here, but I do have some facts here from their faq. Will my NEO be fully autonomous? NEO works autonomously by default for any chore request. It doesn know you can schedule a 1x expert to guide it, helping NEO learn while getting the job done. Who are the 1x experts? 1x employees physically present in the USA. Okay, so that's interesting. And then they're also manufacturing NEO in California, which is significant. So my sense is that the unit economics on these are going to be like really, really, really rough initially.

Yeah.

Because these 1x experts in the USA are by default going to be making a lot more than like $2 an hour wage. But I guess it, you know, it's going to allow NIO to just get better at a variety of tasks. And so they would be training people to tell or operate or they'd be paying people to tell or operate them anyways.

Yeah.

And at least they can recoup a little bit of the cost.

It's going to be really expensive. This was like the end of my take was like the magic here is like it's half actually figure out the technology and half like financial engineering because you have to do this extremely delicate dance where you keep the capital coming in and burn and burn and burn and you're probably burning more every year for a really long time. And then at the end you get the incredible reward. But you have to burn for so long. Get ready to raise capital. And we saw this with, we saw this with Waymo. Waymo was founded in 2009. It's been 16 years. And like there's been some report that like, and people in San Francisco, they're.

Never going to get the cars cheap enough.

Exactly. In San Francisco, I think they do have positive unit economics in this like very one in this narrow area. But it's not like a cash cow yet. It's not Google Search. Right. Which took like two years before it was throwing off cash basically. Not really, but certainly not 16 years to scale that business. And then you look at VR. How much money has Mark Zuckerberg invested in the Metaverse? How much money has Reality Labs burned without it turning into a cash cow? They're still not making money off of Reality Labs. And it was the same thing with AI. You look at the Satya Nadella deal, the $1 billion in 2019. That business was not making money. And it had been around for five years already. The company was founded in what, 2015 I think OpenAI. And so or the nonprofit was. And so you have, you have these, when you're going after these like Frontier Technologies, these really broad moonshots, you just wind up burning money for a decade potentially. And can you stay in the game as a venture backed company? It's really, really hard. But at the same time, these types of moonshots are exactly what venture capitalists should be going after. Like this is the goal of venture capital. Quickly. Let me tell you about Privy Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple.

It's interesting that figure AI Figure Robotics has pivoted their marketing, external marketing at least to being entirely focused on home help.

Yes.

So the homepage now it says the future of home help is here. Figure 3 is a general purpose humanoid robot for every day.

Yes. Wildly different than Boston Dynamics. So if you look at Boston Dynamics websites, they're saying we are trusted as one of the top robotics companies by dhl, bp, National Grid, Woodside Energy, Maersk, like they went industrial level, they went enterprise, and they even have some that are like three axis robotic arms. And then they do have the robot dog and they say, yeah, let the dog walk around and pick up trash or check in on the quality of your oil and gas infrastructure or your mine. Walk around and assess and do surveys.

And Dynamics is apparently 80% owned by Hyundai and SoftBank owns the other 20%.

Yeah, it's such a remarkable company because Google owned it at one point I believe and it's changed hands a few times but never really found like a flywheel to take off. But they've definitely manufactured like real robots. It's more just about have they found the actual flywheel for are they solving a problem that's really widespread and can they sell the robot and then funnel the money back into selling more of the robots and get something really, really broadly deployed? It hasn't really happened yet but I mean they should be in a good position to do it. The sort of like black pill I suppose is that Boston Dynamics was never really set up as this like okay, we're going to do the big transformer model, the end to end machine learning model. We're going to let scale, we're going to be aligned with, with the scale of the training run very much more so on the actual like let's design the algorithms and choreograph the movements more than let lean into like the bitter lesson. Like the Boston Dynamics feels like a pre bitter lesson pilling company or something like that. But I mean figure AI claims to have done end to end machine learning. No teleoperation for household tasks like that is the core claim of figure. But I think what's different is that they're not letting. I don't think that figures let the Wall Street Journal take it for a spin. And I also don't think that they've actually put up a website where you can just buy one or at least put down a reservation. So this does feel like 1x is moving more aggressively than figures towards actually delivering something.

Shipping.

Yeah, towards shipping. Exactly. The other interesting thing about this story.

I'm expecting we'll see more fundraising News out of 1X.

Yeah, there's rumor that the pressure trying to raise it 10 billion.

The pressure from the pressure on figure to perform who's already marked valued by their latest investors at close to 40 billion.

40 billion, that's right.

You know they, they don't have they got to really come. I mean figure three, whatever robot they ship is going to be heavily reviewed.

Yeah, it is. It is odd setting the expectations that like we're already on the third iteration. But I guess, I guess they have said that they've shipped because they've shipped to that BMW plant and they've done some different tests here and there which.

The Journal had coverage this year earlier on what was actually happening at the BMW plant.

Yeah. That said it was like mostly teleoperated, sort of like narrow. It was not like, oh yeah, BMWs.

Are now and then figure like did they sue the German or they sued Fortune?

Fortune. Is that it?

They had to defend. They had to defend their business practices.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean the vibes at 1x are great. I think people are enjoying it and it seems like they've been, I don't know, they've just been upfront about the way that they're building the company, what they're doing. They haven't been. It feels like they 1x has never been over their skis in terms of promises. Which is why I think my reaction to the MKBHD post was.

And they were always focused on, they were always on the, on the phone or sorry, sorry. Focus on the home.

Yeah, yeah, focused on the home. But yeah, I mean I think MKBHD is correct in his assessment that like it is risky to go put down $20,000 for a product that hasn't shipped and isn't really live. And like there's a lot of promises around. This happens all the time. And from MKBHD's perspective, he's looking at his audience of consumer electronics buyers and saying, well, my audience got burned by the rabbit R1. They got burned by the Humane AI pin. They got burned by friend where there were a number of AI hardware companies.

That made really broad couple hundred bucks.

Exactly. But even then, from the MKBHD perspective, the claims, the marketing claims when the product was announced did not match what MKBHD reviewed when he got the product. This happened a few times. I'm not sure about the exact companies, but this happened a few times where someone stood on stage and said this thing is going to be amazing at doing X, Y and Z. MKBHD reviews it and he's like, it barely does that. And so I understand where he's coming from. Saying like, hey, this is a pre order, it's a lot of money. The product's not done and it's currently teleoperated. Like don't go into this thinking that you're getting wall E or like some super AGI robot. Like you gotta be careful and you gotta know that this is like maybe dev kit level results.

I think one exercise feels like a good job. It will be a polished enough product for hardcore enthusiasts and kind of hackers.

Yeah.

And I think that that is probably the right go to market here. People that are understand, hey, this thing is not gonna do everything out of the box immediately. I'm gonna have to work on Making it better, training it. But if it can get, if it can reliably clean up after dinner or put away the kids toys. You know, I think every parent deals with this. Like, you know, if my kids are in the house for more than 20 minutes, they're just like toys everywhere.

We have to put this guy in the seat of a 9 11.

We'll do it. We'll be the first 1x team. We volunteer to be the first people to track a Neo. So I love this post from Matt Slotnick who's been on a tear. He quoted the announcement and said, can't wait to hook this bad boy up to a reasoning model in ElevenLabs and send it door to door selling knives.

The funny thing is it already is kind of hooked up to a reasoning model and, and I believe it speaks and whatnot. It definitely has the ability to you get most of the AI assistant, the current state of the art AI assistant stuff out of the box which could actually be beneficial in the same way that you have an Amazon Echo or Apple's new tabletop robot. Just having an always on LLM around is a benefit to some people. Even if it's just walking around just kind of looking cute.

So something I my expectation here, and I don't say this to be negative, all these products have to start somewhere. They just have to get into home, start doing work, start getting that feedback, start getting more training data. But my concern is that having a humanoid in the first at least few years will be like having a four year old helping you where like a four year old can like pick up stuff from. A four year old can do a lot of things but they're not necessarily like super efficient.

Right.

They can be slow, they can be distracted, they can just stop.

I'm just imagining being like, oh yeah, wow. I just had like a fantastic dinner. 20 of my closest friends came over. We had a dozen bottles of wine. It was great. Hey Neo, can you clean those 25 wine glasses up? And it's like no problem boss. Smash.

Smash.

Smash. Just shattering everything. Just like slipping on the glass and like falling down, smashing.

In one of the marketing videos they have the Neo like carrying boxes around the house like after the owner.

Yeah.

And you can just imagine like if you're trying, if you're, if you ask like a four year old. Yeah, just pick up those three boxes and carry them upstairs with me. It's like they're dropping them all over the place, you know.

No, I mean I think that like it's definitely you use the Phrase like you're training this thing. And I think like you are. This feels like almost like the Oculus DK2, the Developer Kit 2. It's like if you do this, if you sign up for this, you should see it as you're helping pull forward the future. You're basically giving them training data. You gotta be ready for the rough edges. You gotta go into this knowing that you're the early adopter, but you're supporting something that's really, really cool.

You're a part of creating the future.

Yeah, exactly. And so there's a lot that's really.

Cool to like box in the chat. They should sell this to elder care centers and max out the Medicare reimbursement box. Not even joking. I could see that. Hopefully doing that within the guidelines.

Well, if you want a humanoid robot for software engineering, head over to Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. It's a whole team. What else?

Wireless says buy the robot. Get hired as a remote robot operator, become your own robot, get paid to do chores and chill in your own house. Health insurance.

That's actually hilarious. Buy the robots.

This is the job of the future, folks.

Yes, you go to work. Just depends on what their economics are. Because if they have negative unit economics, you can go work at 1x.

Maybe it's a good way to get health insurance.

It is fascinating that they're hiring the remotel operators in the United States. Obviously that like over time you would imagine that even if it's not 1x, someone will be doing remote teleoperation across border. And that looks like the deindustrialization story all over again. I would imagine that it becomes a political issue at the same time. It's not going to become a political issue until there's like hundreds of thousands of these in the streets.

Yeah.

And I still think that even a competent humanoid that can be tele operated by itself can be. Matt. Can be a total game changer. Because what if you want to be able to. Let's say somebody needs to like look after a parent. Right. If you can. If you can buy them like, you know, a robot, put it in their home and if they need help with something, you can just. And if you teleport there, if your.

Parent wants to go for a canyon run, you can take him out on a Sunday. You can have the Robot Drive the 992 GT3RS GT3RS through the Canyons.2.2.2.

Sorry, Tyler, but Also, more seriously, it's like if you could hire in la, house cleaners today get paid a much, probably higher rate than some random place elsewhere in America. Right. And so somebody could live elsewhere, but like be a house cleaner in la.

It's interesting.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's the same. It's the remote work story. It becomes a global labor pool. That's a huge supply shock. So prices go down. None of this happens overnight, but eventually it will become a hot button issue. Tyler, what do you think?

I would like to see them go the Uber route.

Right.

You saw those tasks that drivers can do in between rides.

Yes.

So then they can just put on the VR headset. If they don't have a ride currently, then they just tell it, operate for a little bit and then, you know, maybe they're only halfway through their task when the next drive comes in. So then someone else, just because we don't know. Behind the robot. So it could be multiple people.

It's true. Yeah. I don't know. It's going to be interesting.

Abdul says Zuckerberg's clanker watching yours and your wife's clanker in 2035.

Oh, there's a clanker outside the. Outside the window. Yes. Clankers are going to be. The clanker slurs are gonna be through the roof over the next few years. All the experts are at the 1x offices. Very smart move by them. I feel like this is, this is. This is a very, very shrewd move because, like, if they were saying, even no matter where they pick, if it wasn't America, it would just be a political football immediately. I mean, we saw you see Bernie Sanders talking about friend.com. you saw this. It was crazy. It's like Avi has not even broken through meaningfully. And yet politicians recognize that robots are coming. And even if AVI isn't the one who has it completely dialed, the idea of talking to an AI is already a political issue, which is just remarkable. That's why you should stick to figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free.

Dalton Caldwell hit the timeline to share that whatnot from YC Winter 2020 is now a decacorn congratulations. Whatnot has raised 225 million at an $11.5 billion valuation the company plans to announce on Tuesday, which they announced yesterday. The round comes less than a year after the E commerce platform raised 265 million at half that valuation and puts its total fundraising at about 968 million. So again, this is an LA based company.

Awesome.

I believe.

We'Ve heard about the online shopping stuff.

It seems like live shopping might finally.

Be working in America. We've heard about it in China. Oh, it's so massive in China. We were wondering when it would come to America. It feels like it must have came.

It's interesting that it seems like it's not working in as broad, as broad of a set of categories as in China. Like in China people will just straight up buy like vegetables. They'll be like people be selling coconuts live streaming here. It's like trading cards, sports cards, various collectible toys, thrift type stuff, coins, never used whatnot.

And I don't know many people that have, but they must have found some powerful niche because 10 billion is no joke. I wonder where it lands. I wonder if this is like a Snapchat size business or if this can really grow into something that's Amazon Walmart style. Like massive, massive, massive. I mean clearly like they've done a lot of things right. But you know, interesting to see like what is the American, what is the American, you know, appetite for this product specifically. Let's take it over to our first guest. Yes, welcome to the stream. How do I pronounce your name?

Marcin.

Hi Marcin.

I know it's difficult, but Marcin goes a long way. Thanks.

Thank you so much for joining us to meet you.

Thanks.

Thank you for staying up late. We know that you are over in Europe. If you could please give us an introduction on yourself and some of the research that you've done. We'd love to kind of explore some of the ideas that you've been writing about.

Sure, sure. Thank you for having me. So I'm professor of economics at Kozminsk University in Warsaw, which is the highest ranked business school in central Europe. It is sort of the Stanford of Central Europe, if you will. I also wrote a book that explained the Polish economic miracle, the fact that Poland has been the fastest growing economy in Europe and worldwide, except for China over the last 35 years. And I've also worked and advised over the past 20 years almost 20 governments around the world, including most recently India and China. So that also brings a bit of a global perspective to what has been happening in Poland in the US and around the world.

Yeah. What are the key ingredients to Poland's economic success broadly? If you were to kind of rank the few key choices that were made or investments.

Yeah. It feels like at least once a month a chart pops up of Poland's GDP growth relative to a bunch of other countries. And it's just absolutely remarkable, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. So it's a remarkable sort of Hollywood, Netflix like story, or you can call it a California like unicorn, because it is an economy that was bankrupt, backward and broken in 1899 at the end of communism and, and was poorer than Jamaica, Suriname, Gabon and a couple of other countries. And 35 years later, it is now richer than Japan and it will be richer than Spain and Israel next year, which is a remarkable story of sort of unicorn and Phoenix like growth. And I think there were a number of ingredients, but one is definitely the grind, the work habits. Even now, 35 years into this economic miracle, Poles are the hardest working people among all the rich countries. An average pole puts in 700 more hours of work per year than an average German. There's like 12 hours per week.

That's incredible. I know.

You're speaking our language. You're speaking our language.

Is there. Wait, take me one click upstream from that. I can imagine a population is more hardworking if you ban things that make it hard to do leisure. Are there anything, are there any pieces of what the government has done to make hard work easier to pick or more likely for the population to lean towards? I'm thinking of like, Singapore has banned a ton of like drug use, for example. And so I would imagine that Singaporeans work harder because the alternative of going to a rock concert or to like the equivalent of Burning man isn't on the table. Is there anything like that that's actually been caught cognizant? The government said we want our folks to work harder and then it happened. Or is it just like chance, luck of the Polish people?

No, it's not Singapore. It's a democracy with, would you believe, 20 different governments over the past 35 years, from left wing Democrats to right wing Republicans, from Bernie Sanders to Ron Paul and all of them, I think they represented a society that is just hungry for success and a society that just wants to be richer or at least as rich and then richer than the fat cats in Western Europe. And that's exactly what's been happening. There's been choice of Poles who have moved from one third of German income 35 years ago to 75, 80% of German level of income now. And they want to get to 100 and 120. And one way of doing it is obviously working hard. So an average pole per week works 12 hours more per week than an average German and even six hours more.

And what's the, what's the exact number is it 50 hours a week? I don't know how much time Germans spend working.

It's. I don't know. I don't want to pick on Germans. I say hi to all my German friends, but you know, Poland continues to believe that working hard and there's a lot of opportunities. Poland is part of an open global economy, part of the west, part of the European Union, where we have 450 million consumers with no borders, no tariffs, no nothing. If you have a good idea, you can win and conquer these markets, particularly from the incumbents, Western European players who very often just lost the hunger for success.

What's the lesson from the rollout of the Internet? I've heard a lot of countries sort of were able to pull forward economic growth by leaning in on high speed Internet, making it more accessible, extra infrastructure investments. How much does the rise and rollout of the Internet and getting that right play into the Polish growth story over the last maybe three decades?

So Poland is a late comer and also a beneficiary of being backward. When I came to the US for the first time in 1997, I did not know where checks were. I just never knew they existed. So Poland moved from a backward communist country straight into swiping credit cards and WeChat like payment systems which we have right now, and also brand new 5G and fiber optics. I think this is what they call a rent of backwardness, which is what exactly Poland has leveraged. It has not had any sunk cost in the old infrastructure, which again has happened in Western Europe, for instance, in Germany. One of the reasons they seem to be losing the battle to be competitive in electric vehicles is that all the BMWs and Mercedes, they did not want to cannibalize the good business and so they were late to compete with the Chinese. Poland never had this sunk cost and it went straight into technological frontier.

How are you counseling or thinking about sovereign AI? I feel like giving every country, if you want your country to succeed in the 2000s, in the 2010s, you definitely want every citizen to have access to Google or every access or to Google search to cloud documents, the cloud broadly. But you don't need necessarily a data center in your country to access Google or to search the web or have access to the Internet. It wasn't that critical to have the actual infrastructure in your borders. Now it feels like there's a whole new discussion around. You need sovereign AI. You need to be doing the inference within your borders for some reason. And I just, I'm. I don't know That I fully believe that I feel like you, you want your citizens to use AI, but whether they use it, whether they, you know, jump through a fiber optic cable across the border and access it somewhere else, that doesn't seem like.

I think the push for, the push for sovereign AI sure is partly out of a fear of this sort of fast takeoff scenario, right?

Yeah, but, yeah, I've never bought that.

Yeah, but it does not need to be mutually exclusive. So in Poland, actually every single player is in the market. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, these guys have the largest data centers and they're ready to provide AI services to whoever is interested. But at the same time, the government is also building redundancy. It's building additional infrastructure, including to host apps that do not even exist in the U.S. like for instance, I don't have to have any plastics on me, any ID when I drive, for instance, it's all on my phone. There's a Polish app called Citizen where you virtually have most of the things you have needed. It's all on your phone. So it's again, it's an example of how some countries have just moved on and increasingly a lot of public services will be done from the phone. It also helps that there is a lot of Polish talent that has actually helped create AI in the first place. I mean, a Polish guy is a Chief Scientist at OpenAI. One third of the founding engineers of OpenAI were Polish. So these guys call their moms and call them ex girlfriends and tell them, look, look, you really want to look at ChatGPT and what we're doing, because that's the future.

How is Poland's university system helping to accelerate all these different priorities? It feels like the US is at a unique moment where we've had a very robust academic system, but currently there's somewhat of a, well, not even somewhat, certainly a kind of a conflict between the government and our university system, but then also like a broad sort of distrust of a lot of our institutions.

Yeah, that is true. And for all people, most people around the world, including myself, I got my PhD in Poland, I became a professor in Poland, but I did my pre dog and postdoc at Harvard. And I know the US well and it's obviously still the best place to get the top quality education. Most Nobel Prize winners come from the U.S. but some other countries sort of hustle. So Poland has not only outworked its competitors, it has also out educated its competitors. So for instance, half of young Poles age 25 to 34 have university education in Germany. It's only One third. So that gives you an idea. They do not only work hard, they're actually pretty well educated. It might not be Stanford and Harvard all the time, but this is solid education as reflected in these OpenAI guys. And finally, Poland also out competes because you get this talent for half price for what you would pay for it in Germany. A top notch computer scientist in Poland, whom you can put at Silicon Valley any day will cost you 75 grand. I guess back where you're sitting it would be 200 plus. It's really this combination of human capital and low labor cost and being located in the heart of Europe and getting increasing interest from global investors who look at 11 laps and I saw just a guy who was there just before me. I think he had a hat.

Tyler's rocking the hat right now. What about on the regulation front? What are the ways that Poland has break down Poland's decision making around regulation versus maybe other members of the eu?

So in the EU you cannot really have much of your own voice on digital matters. So it's actually all been consolidated in Brussels and the European Commission puts up ideas on behalf of everyone else. That's the same for trade. So for instance, when the European Union cut a deal with Trump, it was the EU that was negotiating on behalf of everyone, not Poland, Germany or Spain. On digital, it's pretty much the same. And there's ongoing debate whether Europe is just over regulating and including AI. And I agree, we are over regulating or at least there's a perception that Europe is overregulating, which is killing AI. So I'm hoping that the perception will change. And again, newcomers, new guys on the block like Poland, now the 20th largest economy in the world, richer than Japan, with more than $1 trillion of GDP. Poland will be one of the countries that will be pushing for their regulating, for opening up, because this is exactly what has worked well for this country.

Did you have to ask Brussels if you could come on our podcast?

No, I'm here as an academic author of this book, if anyone is interested. No, but no.

Okay, good. Okay, good. You're like, I had to apply. It was a, you know, 10 hour application to go on the, on the podcast. No, it's not quite that.

The advantage of the EU is that, for instance, there's now this debate about creating a new regulatory system where you could set up a company which could immediately work all across Europe under the EU laws. So I think they called it sort of the 28 regime. You could sell your products and services everywhere in the EU without worrying about local regulations and I think this is the way to go. And I think Poland and our region, all countries in the region will be pushing for these kind of solutions. We don't want Europe to be sclerotic, we want Europe to be successful. And Poles, who are the most pro American society in Europe and probably also in the world will be one of the big supporters of these changes.

Awesome.

What's the mood in Poland around energy or what's the. Is there any place where Poland differs from Europe like other European countries broadly in terms of energy strategy or where energy is going? When I think, when I think about the sovereign AI thing, a lot of countries, if you have cheap energy, you should set up an AI factory even no matter where you wind up selling the tokens. That's just a great use of energy these days. But how is Poland thinking about the current energy mix and where that's going and various incentives and trade offs that might differ from other countries.

Poland has originally and traditionally been coal based country, but it's really moved quickly now about only half of the all energy used comes from coal and Poland has decided to go all in on nuclear and on renewables. So the plan is to pretty much minimize or even eliminate the use of coal within the next decade plus and Poland has already decided to build one nuclear plant and actually with Westinghouse American technology. But renewables is the other part of the answer. So there's probably not enough of a surplus now to make Poland into a data center hub. But it's pretty much coming in other ways. Poland is a hub. Like a lot of Belarusians, Ukrainian, Czechs, Slovaks. Virtually the whole region is increasingly moving into Warsaw and Poland because this is where things happen. If you want to scale up, if you want to internationalize, if you want to find capital, that's not Vilnius, that's not Minsk for sure. You really want to come to Warsaw because that's where all the interest is and that's where the action is.

Cool.

Very, very cool. Well, I cannot wait to. At some point I'm sure we will do this show from Warsaw and that will be a fun moment. Thank you so much for joining. Breaking it down Anytime, anytime. Poland is in the news. Feel free to jump back on the show. Be great to talk through it.

Thank you so much Greg.

Thank you for having me.

Great to meet you.

We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Bye. Let me tell you about Vanta.com, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

Back on the timeline. Cyan Bannister over at Long Journey has gotten a tattoo of the logo of their newest portfolio company, Substrate. We have the founder of Substrate, James Proud, coming on the show in just a little bit. I'm excited for that. And I never knew that my friend Chris Ovitz also here in LA was the one who introduced James, I guess to Long Journey and they were. Sounds like the first check. I don't know that for a fact, but at least very, very early. So good, good to see and I'm excited to meet James. There's posts here from Semianalysis Classic, an all time classic. We have been in serious problem. They're saying this is ASML talking about Substrates Approach and their new lithography system. So we can get more info from James in a little bit. But this company was announced yesterday and announced about. Was it 100 on a billion straight out the gates.

100 on a billion straight out of the gates.

Not bad, not bad. Logan Paul was a series A investor and whatnot. So he's going from a 90 million to an $11.5 billion valuation. Not too shabby at all. I know another friend of mine, Ann Skates, was I believe also a part of leading that Series A, if I remember, just not too long ago at all.

It makes so much sense that Logan Paul would have invested in this company.

It's like super into collectibles and collectibles.

But also just social media. He's actually sold a ton of products on social media, on. He's done all sorts of different YouTube videos, the vine era. Like he's seen firsthand every single iteration and turn of what's happening on social media, on content, on commerce. And so it makes a bunch of sense that he would be like fine tuned to understand the opportunity here. Although there were a bunch of companies that were going after this. Very tricky to pick the right one.

Pop Shop.

Pop Shop. Are they still around? Did they do okay?

I don't think so. I think they. Well, they still have a website.

I know a few other companies were trying to come after this exact idea, this live shopping.

I mean even Pop Shop I guess is around.

Pop Shop's around still.

Okay, there's somebody live right now selling blind boxes.

There you go. Hopefully they're selling SaaS. Hopefully they're selling graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free.

This is Sam Altman said yesterday An IPO is now the most likely path forward for OpenAI given the scale of capital the company will need going forward. No surprises. No surprises there.

Yes. It'll be very interesting to hear more comments from Sam Altman and Satya Nadella on what happens over the medium to long term. I'm fascinated by the idea of if Microsoft winds up with $150 billion position, maybe that goes up in the public markets. You could be looking at a $200 billion position. What is the treasury strategy market?

Sells as soon as a lockup ends.

Bails immediately. Yeah. No, I mean Microsoft is.

Thanks for the IP, buddy.

Microsoft is an OpenAI Treasury.

I'm going to be trading just based off Rune tweets alone.

Yes, you're going to be trading Microsoft for now. You can do that today. Because they own.

That's true.

They have 135 billion position, so it's always an option. But yes. What will Microsoft do over the media term once the company gets out? I would imagine that they don't just hit slam the sell button on day one. I imagine that they let that evolve over a long period of time and probably don't crash the stock because that just seems not particularly advantageous, as silly as it would be.

More important news, there's an abandoned McDonald's that NASA turned into a moon. Moon Probe Picture Recovery Lab.

What? What is a Moon Probe Picture Recovery Lab? Was this. Is this from years ago?

Like, Yeah, I don't know if it's still operational. People are saying Moonviews.com the official website of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery project. And it does indeed look to be in. They're calling it McMoons.

Is it AI?

No, no, it's not AI, Nick.

Wait, wait, wait. This is right by Google. This building is right next to where Sergey Brin's blimp is built, which we saw yesterday.

Absolutely stunning. Blimp. I'm so happy. I love seeing blimps. I love their chips.

I want to know more. I know Ashlee Vance did a whole video interviewing the founder of that company that Sergey partnered with. Like the CEO that came in and is actually running the company. And I don't want to sound too rude, but what is the goal of the company? Because blimps have been invented. So it's like, are we just.

We're bringing them back?

I mean, I love it. I want it to be brought back, I guess, but it's like it's a thing that exists already.

Well, there was another company. There's a New blimp company called airship, that's a SpaceX team, ex SpaceX team that is trying to leverage airships blimps for global freight.

Okay.

And the idea is that, like, a lot of exciting things happen when you're not trying to work within waterways, ports, and you can just transport goods directly. You can imagine directly from China. You just fly over.

I saw someone who is like a venture capital capitalist, I believe, like, lay out the whole, like, blimp bull thesis very eloquently and run a bunch of numbers. Seem pretty interesting. But it is funny that, like, your moonshot is a thing that like. Like, we've done it. I guess it's just like your blimp shot. Your blimp shot. Well, it's really just like, okay, we. I guess there is a challenge. The challenge is, like, make blimps work in the way that trains work or in the ways that containers commercially, commercially, like, actually scale.

Not just as a building. Never really, because a Goodyear blimp still flies around LA sometimes.

But there are truly like six blimps in the entire world or something like that. And so the total market cap of the blimp economy is just nothing like. It's just a disaster. And so that's the real challenge. I guess the challenge is not. Is not make another blimp because we know we can make another blimps. The question is, like, can we find something more valuable to do with them such that it scales as a mode of transport? Are you. Your anti hot air balloon? Are you anti blimp? Would you go on a blimp ride?

I would inspect it first. You would inspect it?

Oh, you feel equipped?

I would use kick the tires. I would use large language models.

Yes.

And I would say, how much much gram.

And then. And then you would know. Okay, this is a good blimp.

This looks like a rock. Yeah.

I don't know. I think I would love to.

I would go into blimp, I think, without checking. I think blimps. Yep, blimps. Especially with, you know, being, you know, potentially having like a parachute on your back.

You know, you're one of the parachute guys. You're like, I need a parachute with me, so I'm gonna go up high.

I don't know. Planes have life jackets in them.

Those are parachutes.

I know. But it's not the worst idea to have a backup plan.

It is funny.

What are the odds when you take off on a plane that you're gonna crash into the ocean and need a life jacket?

Pretty rare.

Yeah. What are the odds that you're gonna need a parachute on a blimp? Probably rare, but not non zero.

Yeah, that is true. It is funny how there aren't any plane. Like, imagine if United was just like.

Zach is coming in with the important take here, which is data centers tied to balloons.

Steampunk data center. So let's go.

Blimp data center.

That might work.

Elon apparently said on the recently that he's thinking of, he wants Teslas to be like just distributed cloud basically so that when a Tesla is just parked, that was a crazy thing providing.

Well, you know who should run a blimp ad? Julius AI. AI Data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, chat with your data, get expert level insights in seconds. So I believe Google had a data center on a container ship that they put out in the bay for a while ago. So this has happened. It is interesting that there's no, there's no airplane service that is like, we actually have parachutes on board. Like, what would that do to the airline economy if United one day was just like, yeah, we're putting parachutes on all the United planes. Like, they don't do that on JetBlue. They don't do that on American. They don't do that on Delta. Does Delta give you a parachute? No. United gives you a parachute.

I mean, potentially a good upsell.

Would that be. Would that make you more. Would that make you more likely to fly United or less likely?

Be honest. Why are you guys heading parachute?

Exactly. It's begging a lot of questions.

No, I look at it more as a potential upsell. Yeah, it's like instead of having to fly into jfk.

Oh, you think it should be something I have to pay for?

Yeah, it's like extra thousand dollars and I get a parachute out anywhere over the.

Last year.

Yeah, I was just thinking like, like, you know, for, for the price of the ticket. For 200 bucks you get the life jack, but for 300 bucks, you could upgrade to the parachute. I think that might be a way to just squeeze a couple extra dollars in there.

I want the economy premium. I want an option for executives that don't have time to go through the airport, just be able to drop in their meeting.

Yeah, I like that. If United came out and said, we now have parachutes on board and you have a choice. You're flying to New York from LA and you have a choice between Delta, which does not have parachutes, and United, that does have parachutes. Tyler, which one are you Picking.

I don't think I want my airline to have parachutes.

Why? That makes you way more scared.

Why?

It's a pure upgrade in safety.

Yeah. You don't have, like, anything. I need one. My car to have seatbelts.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, you put seatbelts in there, you're expecting the car to crash. No, it's just if it happens, we have the seat belt here. If. If the plane dissolves in the air, you have a parachute on. This airline dissolves?

Yeah.

If the plane rips open like in Fight Club, which you haven't seen, or.

There'S a bunch of. If there's a bunch of snakes on the plane and you reach. I think it makes more sense on a blimp because we've seen blimps just blow up in the sky.

Yeah, True. Planes don't really do that.

False flag.

Planes are pretty safe anyway. I hope no one in the chat is watching on a plane, because that would always be rough.

Caleb Watney over at IFP says hard to understate what a blow this would be for American leadership in AI if this happens. He's talking about how Trump has suggested he was open to providing China with access to Nvidia's Blackwell chips as part of a trade deal, which would represent a major concession and rile up national security. Hawks in Washington will be speaking about Blackwells, Trump said, touting the chips as super duper and years ahead of what was currently available from other countries. He said Nvidia CEO Jensen had recently brought a version of the chip to the Oval Office for him to see. AI bellwether. Nvidia shares extended gains to 8 and a half percent in Asian trading on the alternative platform Blue Ocean, signaling potential further gains when U.S. markets open. They are seemingly en route to a $5 trillion valuation.

I think they hit it, didn't they? We got to pull that up on public.com investing. For those that take it seriously, they got Multi Asset Investing.

They did hit that $5.02 trillion. Okay, that was a better hit. That was a better hit.

But it's gonna do the weird ring thing, I think. Yeah, see, it's gonna keep ringing because apparently we broke our gong. And this is what happens when you break the gong is that it just keeps ringing. But that's actually kind of a feature in my mind.

I don't know.

Feature.

What do you think?

The question here is? Maybe Trump is doing a little 5D.

Chess and he realized 60 chess actually.

Could be 6, could be 7, could be 5.

Simplistic.

It's really hard to say at this stage but it's possible that he realized that AI is about infinite slot machines.

Yes.

And he realizes adult content. Adult content. It's actually in America's interest to get as many Blackwells to China as possible.

So that they all get one shotted.

Yes.

Yeah. This is the modern information war. This is the cybernetic future war that's happening between America and China. It went from AI is a good thing. So we need to keep the chips in America. We can't let them have them to Trump says we gotta get the chips out of America.

You can only have the Blackwells if you let every give a free plan of GPT4O to every citizen.

And Xi Jinping's just, you're absolutely right. I would love to give every citizen ani with sexy members. No, I don't know. My take on this has always been like do we actually have slack capacity for chips? Because we've been having the GPU poor debate for a while. Everyone said that oh we can't make enough chips, we can't build enough data centers. But it's a lot easier to advocate for. Hey, don't sell to China. If there truly is unlimited demand in America. It's a completely different conversation if it's like well yeah actually like AWS and Google and OpenAI they're actually good on Nvidia chips. They don't want to buy anymore. And Nvidia is like wait, but we've made so many of these, we want to sell them like can we sell them to China? You'd be like well yeah, because like, like that's gonna hurt your business a ton if you have to write those down cause you made them versus it's just a choice of who you're selling to and it's zero sum.

I mean Jensen does not want to lose the Chinese market. He's been very clear about how frustrated he is about the whole situation. But he's been playing nice.

Yeah, I don't know.

Nvidia just continuing to ramp up despite everyone waiting waking up to how big of a threat TPUs are to Nvidia. It's interesting timing.

Yeah. There was some more news about TPUs. I think the demand for TPU is through the roof. I saw some post about that. In other news, Oliver Cameron, friend of the show introduced Odyssey 2 instant interactive AI video. This is general purpose model that install instantly imagines 20fps video you can interact with in open minded ways. It feels like true sci fi type A few words and AI instantly imagines a video that feels alive. So the browser war is in full swing now. The real time video generation wars are in full swing. You got World Labs, you got odyssey, you got Genie 3 I believe from Google. There are a few companies working on this. I'm personally excited for where this goes. Once you get some extra harnessing in there, some extra mechanics. I don't know if this is. We need to have Oliver back on the show and talk to him about is he thinking about going more API driven or does he want to kind of own more of. I mean yeah, like how much of it needs to be the foundation model company versus the application layer. How much does he need to. Does he want to own like the end result or whatever people do with the product? There's a pretty wide swath of opportunity once you have a model that works in a particular way. You can go set up a short form video app if you want and try and win and build a new social network. But it's all. There's a whole bunch of trade offs there and a whole bunch of challenges. So clearly a, you know, a next next step in advancing the model. But a lot of questions about how do you actually monetize this? Is it a prosumer tool? Will people be using this just as better video generation because it's faster turnaround so you can iterate more quickly? There's a whole bunch of benefits there. All the demos here are vertical, interestingly, but the launch video is horizontal. What does that mean? Dig into that if you want to generate some video. Head over to fall generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Toby Lutke was taking shots at AI note takers. He hit the timeline and said having some AI follow you into your Zoom meetings or Google Meet for taking notes is the digital equivalent of showing up up to a meeting with your fly down. What do you think you're anti clanker in the group chat?

I never let. I never let him in.

You never let him in? You never let them in? I just let him sit there in the Zoom room.

The clanker's in the waiting room. It's ready to be let in. Oh, I forgot, sorry.

This reply post says Firefly is waiting in the lobby and that's where Firefly will stay.

Toby's on fire. He said Firefly better fly right into the eoddamn fire.

Yeah, So I don't know. He didn't elaborate on why he doesn't like this friend of the show. TJ Parker said, maybe it has something to do with the fact that if you're recording every meeting, every meeting is now discoverable. And so if you have some random lawsuit, all of a sudden, you know, there's like leaked tech emails. Imagine that. But for everything you do at work, all the time, forever, that's what having an AI note taker is in.

No excuses. That's why I just wear my friend.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, truly, it is fascinating that, like, people that we actually got to the outcome where Firefly identifies itself and says, like, hey, I'm an AI note taker. I'm here and I'm going to join. As opposed to the alternative, which was just like, run clearly on your computer. No one knows.

Gold Rock says using transcription clankers are a no go. Oftentimes they're used without all parties consent. That's another one. It's like if somebody wants to come in to the call and say, hey, for the next 10 minutes, do you mind if I record this so that I don't have to take notes myself?

Mm.

I'm open to, like, opting in, but just like the default record every single call. Like, there's no. Yeah, there's no, there's just not. Not something I'm interested in doing.

Yeah. Obviously depends a lot on the use case, you know, Are you synthesizing takeaways? Is this actually useful? It's probably not a replacement for not actually paying attention during the call. Like, you're not just gonna zone out for an hour and then review some meeting notes and be like, oh, I, I, that was now a productive meeting.

Like, I would love to know what percentage of transcripts, like, ever get read. Like, the notes.

Yeah.

Is it like. I would expect it to be a very small percentage that actually get read. So it's like one of those things people are like, kind of peace of mind.

I mean, I did, I did have one interaction with a group of friends who had a zoom call to talk about. They're all like, everyone's like a content creator. And so they'd have these calls. I couldn't make one. Normally everyone hops on the phone on the calls, talks about trends, strategies, whatever. There's do whatever they're doing. I couldn't make one of those calls. And so they did have one of the transcripts happen. And I was able to read through that. And that was fun because, like, I like these friends and So I was kind of able to, you know, not fully listen to the full call, but get some of the topics like oh, what's top of mind for my friends. That was kind of cool, but that was definitely something like it was a meeting that I was looking forward to. So I was happy to enjoy it as a transcript as well, because I would enjoy the meeting if I had actually attended. But regardless, if you're transcribing a bunch of stuff, if you have a bunch of of text, you need to search every byte. You need to use Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

Puffin We Puffin we Puffin golden age.

Of private credit is over. Private credit winter is coming, says high yield Harry Lenders are quietly rewriting their collateral rules, which suggests a crisis waiting to happen. People have have been nervous about private credit booming. Aries has minted seven new billionaires. Something like that. There's been a ton of boom in private credit, ton of boom in debt. Debt is coming. The question is, when will there be a pullback? How much more room does it have to run?

There's a reply here from a guy named Jason who says that's nice, but I prefer not to lose any money, so please make sure the government is prepared to cover all potential losses. If not for everyone, then for me and my cohort specifically.

Warm regards, Me and my cohort. What does that mean?

Oh, me and everybody's got a cohort.

What cohort do you identify with? That's hilarious.

Oh, this post from.

What do you say?

Hilarious? I don't even know what he was replying.

I don't know what he was replying to because it was deleted.

Spaceman live on tvpn, his eyes rolling back in his head.

Yeah, that was a very weird screen grab. I don't know how this screen grab happened, but this is absolutely wild. What did Baz say? So Baz posted a blog post about you are how you act. He says the modern American self is best defined by two enlightenment thinkers who never met but have been arguing in our heads ever since. Jean Jacques Rousseau believed in the primacy of the inner self, a core of goodness constantly betrayed by circumstance. In his view, the world corrupts us. We begin pure and only fail because society, obligation or expectation pulls us away from who we truly are. Benjamin Franklin saw it differently. For him, there was no such thing as a good person or a bad person. Only people who do good things and people who do bad things. Virtue was a habit, not an essence. Modern America carries both of these ideas, switching between them whenever convenient. We invoke Rousseau when we need forgiveness. I meant well. We invoke Franklin when we need accountability. Show me what you've done. It's almost entirely. It's an almost entirely incompatible pair of philosophies that coexist perfectly in practice because they're both so flattering. One to our intention, the other to our ambition. But only one of them. Scales. Fake it until you make it is often dismissed as shallow, but it's closer to Franklin's truth. Faking it long enough is making it. The repetition of behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is what shapes character. You become the kind of person who does the things you repeatedly do. I agree with that. Rousseau invites endless introspection. Franklin invites progress. The first is how you feel is about how you feel. The second is about what you build. I find the Franklin model far more useful. Not because it's truer in some cosmic sense, but because it gives you agency. You can't always change how you feel, but you can always decide what to do next. It doesn't take great men to do things, but it is doing things that make men great. Arnold Glasgow and you know, some people had some. Some jokes. They're poking fun at Boz, saying tech bros are rederiving Sartre from First Principles. I haven't read Sartre, so I don't know. But I like another nice. I like reflective posts like that. I think that's a good post. I think that's. I think that's an interesting little like, tour of a couple philosophers you might have heard of, but kind of distilling and then recontextualizing these two thinkers. This is a sweet spot. I've been enjoying writing these like 500 word essays, just kind of like one little thought packaged up in a couple paragraphs. I'm glad boss is doing it too. Cheers.

In other news, Bending spoons.

Yes.

European software conglomerate has acquired America Online AAOL and raised 2.8 billion of debt to get it done. They say big nose. We're acquiring aol, the iconic web portal and email provider from Yahoo. Subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals. And is this gong worthy? I would. It's painful that America Online will be owned by a European software conglomerate, but let's hit the gong for raising 2.8 billion in debt to buy a legacy digital asset. I'm. So we got to have somebody on from Bending Spoons, because I. I don't. I don't feel like I have a good understanding of this company at all. They acquired Evernote. They acquired. We transfer.

It's such a funny name.

Vimeo. They acquired Vimeo. So they are kind of all over the place.

But Matrix inspired the. In the Matrix, probably.

Yeah. Interestingly enough, they. I wonder, I wonder what just like AOL's email business is worth. Like, do people, do people pay for like pay for that at all? Or is it entirely. Is the entire business ads based?

Well, I think there's still people paying. I wouldn't be surprised if there's still people cracking open a CD and being like, I gotta get my Internet this month. Do either of you remember what I'm talking about? Are you familiar with this?

No.

There was a time when you got the Internet from a physical disk, basically, which just sounds ridiculous, but basically it.

Was like, what are you talking about? The whole Internet is on.

No, no, no, no, no. So basically, I think the way it works is basically you'd open up a magazine and there would be a CD and it would be like aol and the disk would claim some sort of like number of minutes. Ben, do you remember this? No, no one remembers this. I'm so old. And it would be like 7,000 minutes of Internet access. And basically what you do is you would put the. Is you would put the disk in and then you would pull and then you would install a piece of software that would allow you to access the Internet. The crazy emoji guy.

No.

And then so on the disk was the software that would give you a web browser, basically. Because how do you get a web browser if you don't have the Internet? You need to install that first. So you would install the AOL every month? No, no. So they would give out free trials, basically. And then you would be able to connect to the Internet and you would be limited based on the number of minutes that you spent online. Each CD would give you you a couple thousand minutes for free. Something along those lines. Anyone? Anyway, we have our first in person guest of the show. We have Brian Johnson. Welcome to the stream. Go over there while he hops on. Let me tell you about A.I. google. Google A.I. studio. The fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. Chat with models, vibe, code and monitor usage. Thank you.

Classic LA story.

Good to see you again.

People in L. A arrive on time 15 minutes after you normally arrive.

Oh yeah.

At least I do normally.

Yeah, that's the nature.

Hopefully you didn't have too much traffic. It's great to have you here. Big week for you.

It's Been a great week for us.

Yeah, congratulations. 60 million. But break down exactly what happened. What was the impetus for the deal? Take us through the recent history of blooper.

I mean, I started this. This is the idea that we are the first generation who won't die. It's kind of a crazy idea. We started this a couple years ago and I think a lot of people thought this was kind of an insane thought process. And so we've been hammering away and I think it's gone from weird to interesting to yesterday was kind of like now it's accepted and maybe even cool.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I think we've. It's a thing now. It's like part of the zeitgeist and I think it formalizes that we're really going to take a shot of this.

Yeah. So I mean there's like the philosophical underpinning where you're, I imagine, you know, in, in the vein of Kurzweil, like looking at long term trends, artificial intelligence, compounding just the value of compounding little gains all over the health system potentially could, at least in your belief, get us to infinite life and not die. Don't die. So you get to that. But then you, you know, at some point you need to instantiate that in a company, in a business, in a suite of products. And so that's what blueprint is today. Is that the idea of the fundraise? Is that what people are investing in?

Yeah, the idea is when somebody says, yes, I want to be healthy, it's pretty hard. You have to go out and you have to navigate a thousand things, you know, like, is this good for me or is it bad for me? People who have conflicting opinions. And so our target customer is somebody who says, I want to be healthy. And we just say, we've got you. Yeah, we will give you like the protein amounts, we'll give you tested and certified foods, we'll give you the exact dose, we'll help you with your prescriptions, we'll give you protocols, like your autonomous self. Like, it's not go navigate the world by yourself, it's we've got you. And we'll do an evidence based biomarker approach.

One of the, I feel like anybody that really gets into health goes through a period where they realize I, at least at one point I was like, like 19 at the time, realized that it felt like I was spending like 50% of all my cognitive power on just like trying to be as healthy as possible. And at a certain point I realized like, this is such an Inefficient use of time. Fortunately, you build up some habits and kind of like understanding of what's good and what's bad and what you want to leverage more and kind of avoid and all that stuff. But I think like make, you know, removing that step from the process of being able to just kind of like default into a system walk. Can you, can you get into a little bit more of like, I remember reading a post at this point from you, maybe it was like a couple months ago, kind of like talking through the decision making around, you know, where you wanted to take blueprint, why kind of raise capital, all that kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean, it was this. I mean, I mean, I guess my sole objective is try to be sober in this moment. And I really enjoy the perspective of thinking a few hundred years into the future. You look back at this moment and we are giving birth to some kind of superintelligence. We don't know what it is, we don't know what kind of scale, but it's big, it's important. I have neither an opinion that it's positive or negative. It's just significant. And I was really trying to think through, does it even matter if I build anything in the world right now, or should I work on building the philosophy and the moral framework on what does it mean to be intelligent on planet Earth in this part of the galaxy? And I was kind of in the middle of, as an entrepreneur, do you build or which way do you build? And so I was just reflecting that, am I misallocating my time? And I thought, really, blueprint is the practical implementation of this philosophy. When you say yes to don't die, you're saying, I value existence. Existence, I respect existence. And so it's less about living forever, it's more about a philosophy of, yes, this moment is big. And so what a lot of people don't realize is this endeavor is entirely about AI alignment. I mean, that's the sole thing happening on the planet right now. And so when you take care of yourself, you take care of your body. When you take care of the body, you take care of intelligence. It's this holistic system of we acknowledge existence. So that was it. It was like I was trying to figure out as a human, what do I do on planet Earth right now and how do I spend my time? I'm an entrepreneur. My intuitions are to become an entrepreneur. But I wondered, is that really the right way to do it?

Yeah, yeah. What is, what does blueprint look like in a decade? It feels like you're, it's such a unique consumer packaged goods business because you can't even call it that. It's like, I mean I understand that there's like the philosophy and I love that as the brand. But even just in terms of like the business of like what people pay for, there's a lot and that's just, that's just such a contrarian approach to this, this category because so many people are like, I have an idea, I'm going to make coffee better. Yes, I'm going to make a greens powder better. Or I have an opinion about the burger or the meat or the food or one particular thing. And then they grow and grow and grow. And then five years in they're like, let's do a line extension. Let's do something.

Yeah.

The CPG trend of the last 10 years was go walk into the gas gas station, find a product that's popular and make a version of it that's like 50% healthier. And then you probably have like a nine figure revenue business or make nothing.

Like thrive market erewhon. There's a bunch of companies that have been like, we're just be the seller of everything. How did you land on like I want to kind of make everything. That feels like an immense challenge. I want to walk through all that.

I mean that's what you know, Kaparthi was talking about the autonomous systems with door cash and he and I think very similarly in this way is that if you model out what AI systems will do, they'll probably take on more autonomous responsibility. In our lives we see beginnings where you plug an address into a car and it helps you navigate to the place you don't think about it much. We're going to build our autonomous self. Our health will be run on our behalf. So right now we have to chase down all our food, we have to chase down protocols, we have to chase down evidence. But it's not going to be that in the future. It will be that it will just be run for us. And as we get measurement that's more high fidelity. So blueprint is basically we're saying we are going to build your autonomous system of health and we're going to ride the breakthroughs of science so that as we make better progress in lowering the speed of aging and reversing aging damage, you can just say I'm in and I'm going to ride with you. We're going to try to be on the very, very forefront to help people have the best possible health. So we're Just building out autonomous health systems.

Yeah, that feels like super valuable just from the consumer experience of like I'm delegating all of that hassle. I know basically if I buy one from one brand it's all aligned with one philosophy, which is great. What does that mean on the logistics side? What does that mean on the capex side? What does that mean on the operational cost side? Do you have like 25 different product managers for each niche? What's the shape of the company? This feels like a big challenge, a very big challenge.

We're standing up like 10 different businesses at the same time.

Exactly. There's plenty of people that could have done what you did where they become famous or they become content creators in one way or another. And then they're like now I have one product and you're like now I have. How many products do you actually have?

50 or over 20.

Over 20. Yeah. And it's clear that you probably a lot of that comes from the fact that you've been a successful entrepreneur before. You're like, like yeah, I can probably do more than just one. But what actually does the business look like? Does the system look like, are there cross selling benefits in retail on day one or is this just an e commerce play on day one? Like how do you think about the costs and benefits of going multi product so soon?

Yeah, I mean the thing is that when people want to be healthy, you can't just address one thing. They're still left with 99 things to deal with.

I totally get the consumer value makes tons of sense.

So internally we're basically building out the infrastructure to deliver every single channel. So digital food, prescriptions, testing. So we could say like so much stuff. It is so much stuff. You know like this is what, I've done this myself. I know like five years. Yeah, we've mastered the system for me and you know, I've been fighting to achieve the best biomarkers in the world. Kind of in some sense a like a ridiculous idea.

Yeah.

But also like it's a new sport. Like you can imagine it because so yeah, I mean basically we've mastered it, we've built it now productizing.

So yeah, so what are, how do you think about.

So every consumer out there has probably at some point or another gone through the frustration of finding a product they love and then watching the company behind it or sometimes an acquirer just like steadily just like try to maintain or increase their margins to the point where it's no longer that it might have similar look packaging but it's no longer the same product. I imagine you want Blueprint to be the thing that you are reliant on for the majority of your calories, the majority of the supplements you take, the majority of the drugs that you are going to leverage. I can imagine holding the company to that standard so that you're not having to go anywhere else or realize, oh, this product would actually would be better for me. But do you have any kind of ethos around that? Because that just feels like every. I try to be cognizant of when a company goes from founder led to they've exited and the new acquirer is just going to say like, hey, we could actually source this salt from over here and we're going to save like 80% and nobody's really going to notice because it's going to taste similar. But then the tests start showing up and it's actually like, got lead in it now.

Yeah, exactly right. I mean, I am Blueprint's number one customer. I appreciate it so much because when we first started doing this project, I was testing everything I would put into my body. Air, water, food, everything. And I learned, first of all, food is guilty until proven innocent. It is so toxic no matter where you get it.

Yeah. People were freaking out last week when there was that protein powder report came out that a bunch of them had lead in it. And I was like, like, my immediate reaction was like, obviously a lot of this stuff has lead in it. I mean, like, look at the average chocolate bar has like a ton of lead in it.

And that's. It's not even so you can isolate that one toxin. But there's so many other toxins. Totally. So people, they, they grab onto one concept that they understand. It's like, oh, that's bad. There's trace levels of heavy metals in all of our foods.

Yeah.

So, like, the fact that it's there is not an alarming. It's just, it's out of context, but it's at a level people understand. But, you know, the goal is I'm going to. Blueprint is my way to try to achieve, you know, this don't die. And so people will be just riding along. We build on population level data. So this is not about Brian Johnson's body. This is about everybody's body. So all ages, both genders. But no, I think we're being meticulous about what we do. And so it will be. The quality will be the best in the world. And so I care about it. I'm consuming all about myself.

Yeah.

What, what what's the plans on the kind of telemedicine front for. For kind of interventions or therapies that require doctors kind of involvement. Is there anything on that front?

We will build an infrastructure to. Basically when you want a prescription, if you want to go on a GLP1, we can help you get started. Whether you want a large dose or microdose.

You'Re just like, yeah. And also do the lab testing and also like build the, you know, the. I'll be mining the metal that gets turned into the needle that injects you with the gel. It's like you want to hold up the entire global economy. I love it. It's good ambition. I strongly support this. Yeah, I was interested in where are the edges of what you're. Actually, I'm not gonna go into that market. But it feels like you'll just continue to work on it until you get to some status where you're like, yeah, actually it'll be full circle.

Would you go into hospitality? Would you create like physical kind of.

If you want. If you want to get 100%.

These European kind of health retreats that are very like evidence driven. They're testing focus. I could imagine a blueprint retreat center that, that people can visit once a year to.

Yeah, we have about a dozen groups around the world that want to stand this up and some of the biggest hotel chains around the world. Because the thing is they just want credibility. They want to say like, like, come here. We have this thing structured. When I meet with some of the most powerful people in the world, they're just as clueless as everyone else. It is not like people imagine rich and powerful people will just have it solved.

Yeah.

That is not the case.

No.

And so yeah, we are going to stand this up. We probably will not do physical clinics. It's just too much on the real estate. So we'll probably license it out.

Sure.

We probably do the digital model. We have IP model almost. We have trust. Like we want to have like we could do a model across food and clinics where we have this evidence based approach. So yeah, I mean we're kind of in it to just blanket the entire industry with a framework on how to do things in a credible way. That's biomarker led evidence based.

Yeah. What was the thesis behind the round $60 million, tons of faces, not the traditional CPG VCs, private equity folks. Like, what was the thesis?

Yeah, I mean, so I've been funding the company myself up until this point and I guess I just wanted my friends to Come along with me. So these are people I talk to in private. They enjoy it, they're into it. And I think a lot of people, they have not known how to think about me. Like, am I legit? Am I not? Is this a thing? Is this weird? And then they see that list of investors are like, oh, shit. And so, like, yesterday, I think it was the first day, it was like, oh, it's safe to say that this is cool.

That flipped, like, a long time ago.

Really?

Yeah. I feel like the first, like, business. What was the first piece that you did that was like, I spent $2 million on my health and that went super viral.

Yeah. Two or three years ago.

That was like, two or three years ago. I feel like that was the moment.

I always looked at my personal view.

Pretty quickly. People dug into your backstory and were like, oh, yeah, you sold them.

Yeah. My personal view is America has. Has over the last few years had so little trust in health institutions. Like, if you just went and followed the American Heart Association's guidance, I'd probably die at like, 60.

Oh, wow.

And so to me, I was always like, you know, knowing how much you can read about health and you can listen to podcasts and you can listen to what some influencer said in a short form, video. But to deeply understand your health, you have to do self experimentation because everybody is different. And so I always looked at it. You know, you always tried to be controversial enough to, like, generate attention, attract some people that were going to become super fans and lose some people, and you were kind of okay with that. But my sense was always like, thank you. That somebody is going to invest more money than basically anyone else and just self experimentation and then open source, all of that. And. And now people can buy your olive oil if they want, or they can decide, no, I'm actually going to go on my own journey and try to find some product that can fit this requirement. But it felt like such a public benefit that I always wish there was like a thousand Brian Johnsons that were just all running the same experimentation, open sourcing process versus the biggest thing we talked about this the other day is health influencers quickly get into. Put themselves in a niche, and they're like, I'm the. I'm the. The fasting guy. I'm the HRV guy. And then every single thing becomes about that.

Yeah.

And it's cool because you can, like, tap into a world and like, kind of accelerate and understand a lot about a category, but then in reality, it's not like fasting is the only thing that matters, it's just like one tool.

So I have another take on, on that that maybe I'd to like, like your reaction to. There's also this trend in health influence where if I want to blow everyone's brain, I'm going to come in and blow everyone's mind. I'll be like, guess what? I boil it all down. It's sleep, diet and exercise. That's like 99% of what you need to do. And everyone's like, man, this John guy, he's not talking about the crazy supplements, he's just telling it like it is. Sleep, diet, exercise. I did it. I feel great. This is amazing. And then after I've made, you know, one hour of content every week for five years on sleep, diet and exercise, I'm like, you know what, let's actually talk about the 17th piece of magnesium you should take or the thing that, yeah, it is beneficial, but it's 0.001% and it's still interesting, but it's not going to have the power law effect of actually start working out or actually get sleep. And so do you wrestle with that? Do you feel like you have to go back to the basics sometimes or do you think that, that there's actually. Maybe that's not even a reasonable critique?

Yeah, I think that the thing that most people struggle with is doing things they don't want to do. Like they don't want to overeat, they don't want to eat a pint of ice cream, like they don't want to drink. So those things are really the highest leverage interventions. It's behavioral. And so yes, you can say sleep, that exercise, but you get deep and you then uncover that American, like our American society is one of addiction.

Sure.

Like the American powers of capitalism have appointed at getting people to be addicted to food. Sugar, nicotine, porn, junk food, like all of it. And so this is, if you look at. So like just from a broad perspective, you begin on Western thought with Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Medieval times, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modern scientific era. Like, you look at these big frames, we're due for a major shift. And right now we're at the tail end. This is kind of a dalio kind of thought process of like these big macro trends. We're at the end. And right now, capitalism was for solving scarcity. We're now compulsive. We're now compulsive. And the idea was democracy was freedom of choice. We now have no longer choice because we're addicted. So we're really playing on this very big macro frame of we're seeing to different times of species. And so, yes, sleep, diet, exercise, but in this larger frame it's about what does it mean to actually be intelligent, make decisions and you can't when you're addicted to everything.

Yeah. What do you think about some of the longer tail interventions? Like the third peptide that's not approved yet, but people are already taking it here. It feels like, is this sort of like unseudo regulated, unregulated biohackers becoming more prevalent? Is that the correct world in a world where the FDA is broken? Or does the FDA need to change? Or how should we map the accelerating advances in science with maybe stagnation in regulatory. What's your framework for that?

Yeah, I mean, peptides are very powerful. They're basically drugs. So you get access to drug like effect sizes. The problem is peptides are oftentimes not manufactured to specifically. And so you have risks of like putting stuff in your body that you shouldn't be putting your body.

Like they could have lead in them just like your chocolate bar and a.

Bunch of other stuff. Same with stem cells. So, like there's a real quality problem.

Yeah, yeah.

The other problem is peptides. A lot of peptides are not fully well characterized. So typically drugs, you say like you can do this thing, but also here's a long list of side effects. And that's nice because it's like, okay, at least I know what the trade off space is with these peptides. You don't have the characterization.

Okay.

And so it's a bigger risk that people experiment. You see a lot of this in bodybuilding now you have biohackers doing it. So it's fine. It's just, you have to understand it's the wild, wild west. That may be your game, it may not. But definitely you want to be cautious. It's not like it's a safe path. But then there's other things. Like you start with the highest level of evidence. Sauna is great, but you know, like if you. I've talked about this a lot. If you don't ice the boys in the sauna, you crush it.

Can you make an ice pack? So I used to, I used to. I think we maybe talked about this last time. I used. There used to be this ice pack on Amazon that was for this use case and they stopped selling it. And I don't, I like, I lost my.

So we should.

They don't want you icing your boys out there.

They want that. Yeah.

And Then a lot of men will say, like, I'm not trying to have, you know, babies, so it doesn't matter, but negative feedback.

Hormone. Hormone health.

Exactly.

Interesting.

So yeah, they're so yes, sleep, that, exercise is great. But then you dive into the details. This is what I'm saying. Like, like you start down this path and you inevitably will spend 50% of your time chasing down everything.

Some sort of weird root cause.

All these things, whatever it is, it's never easy. So you have infinite chase. And that's what I'm saying is that's the problem. Trying to solve is nobody has 50% of our time to do this.

How are you thinking about wearables? Because there's a world in the future where you have a camera that's effectively a sensor that's able to experience life in your. And that as like a health copilot would be pretty wild because you'd be like, hey, hey, you've already eaten. Like, you know, well beyond. You assume that like cameras get better at like calorie tracking. It's like, hey, you're well over, like your daily caloric needs. Like you're now going into a surplus. Maybe ease off and maybe that's enough.

Meta ray ban displays, like, need a killer app. That sounds like something you should build. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean the. If you think about it, GLP1s are kind of that, I mean, a little bit, right? It's like modulating your hunger, your satiety and it's like, so how do you.

Think we'll view GLP1s and the explosion of their use in 50 years?

It's probably the most successful anti aging drug ever built.

It's incredible.

It's like the benefits keep on accumulating. Yes, there's drawbacks. They're getting better all the time.

But do you feel the same way about statins?

They're complicated. I mean, I mean, statins do have benefits, but they're complicated.

Do you feel like there's any value to reading into the conspiracy, like, weird vibes around the fact that like Ozempic came from a demon like this Gila monster? Isn't that what.

Yeah, the Gila monster.

Is it the Gila monster or Komodo dragon venom or something like that? Like, it just feels like wrong, right? If you're just like Just Humanity 101, you'd be like, like, yeah, don't drink.

Don'T become the reptile.

Don't drink the reptile venom.

I mean, you're, you're he. Brian you're trying to become the reptile.

Are you into it?

The Sonorian toad gave us 5 Meo DMT.

And I would say that that's bad too. That's throwing off all sorts of red flags for me.

It just got FDA approval. It did, it did.

For what?

Break for treat depression. Resistant depression.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Treatment resistant. Got it.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I guess if you're sad, you need the ch. You need the toad to cheer you up, I suppose.

Thank you.

I'm happy. If it's helping people, I'm happy. It is just funny. When we were looking at the story of Ozempic like a year ago, what's your view on.

I think Everybody's hoping maybe GLP1s are this. And people haven't sort of fully realized it yet, but everybody is kind of, I feel like for a while, just hoping that, like, oh, by the time that I'm. I'm eight, I'm really aging. Like, I'm really feeling it. There will just be a pill that I can take and, you know, I'll just be able to halt or maybe even reverse. Are you, like, how open to you. How open are you to the idea that, like, there could be something that is like an order of magnitude more effective than GLP1s in terms of anti aging? Like, are you, you know, where do you put the probability there?

I mean, that study that came out from China in June, they showed that they took this form of a FoxO3 protein. They used CRISPR, they put it in a mesenchymal stem cell and delivered it via intravenous treatment. It had a biological equivalent for human anti. So this was in monkeys. It had a three to five year age reversal in over 50% of the tissues, which is unseen. And then for human equivalent, that'd be like, like nine to 15 years, roughly. So these demonstrations are being done. I think we'll probably. I was going to actually figure this out. You know the hype cycle where you.

Yeah, Gartner, Hype cycle.

Exactly, yeah.

Trials of disillusionment, plateau of projects.

I was going to model this out this week, trying to figure out, like. Because I think we're probably going to hit peak in something like GOP1s or something 20, 32ish.

Okay, we got some time.

We're still going on a few things that hit. People will be like, like it's here.

And then, oh, and people will think that they're gonna live forever and then there will be a crash and be like, oh, actually there's still more problems to solve.

Exactly. Yeah. 2035, 2037. People are like, oh man. Like it's not solving this or that or we have these complications in like maybe early 2000-40s. People are like, actually, yeah, we got this like something like that.

I saw some post you get crazy inbound from. From mad scientists all over the world. They're like, hey, I made this thing. I was Talking with Chat GBT for 50 hours over the last week and I figured out like, let me, let me come inject you.

When I was building kernel with this brain interface, I would get all these emails that people are like, I've been implanted by the government. Oh, so that would come in. But now, yes, like I do. I get, I don't know, maybe like seven to ten a day.

Whoa.

People offering you experimental.

You know, like I've, I've discovered the quantum realm and how the. How sick. Yes.

I mean it's.

People were excited about this topic.

Maybe some toads involved in that one. That's funny. Yeah. I remember seeing this post a while back. I don't know if you remember it better than I do, but it was basically looking at like the distribution of lifespans is not. There's not just a single power law where everyone falls off at like 90 like you would expect if it was just a normal power law that we would get a couple hundred and fifty in like 1200-year-old person. But. But in fact there are like this double exponential effect. And so maybe that's kind of what happens where maybe we solve one of them. But then we still are at this like, you know, exponential fall off in longevity. But even unlocking like one person at 200 would be amazing.

Yeah. There was this interesting paper that came out of Levin. He said his theory after running this model was that basically after we reproduce, our cells lose purpose. Like our cells don't have a unifying objective.

Yeah.

So they just like aging. It's just like we just don't know what to do.

Interesting.

So if his model is correct, like biology needs don't die. Like they actually need an objective at a macro scale, like at our level of cognition, but also at a cellular level. But these are the kinds of experiments people are doing of like, what is the underlying incentive structure of biology? Why do we age? Why do we not age in certain parts of our life? Why do we have protective mechanisms? Why do some species regenerate? So I think it's this really exciting frontier where our ideas now of aging are beginning to crack. Open a little bit and expanding our horizons. Like, how do we think about time?

I mean, we talked about this last time you were on about Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, not particularly famous for their biohacking, but incredibly resilient, like a life well lived. So many stories about them, like, you know, staying up drinking Coca Cola and wine long into the night. And I want to believe that there's some level of just. If you have a purpose, if you have drive, your body just pulls it together a little bit more.

I know people want this to be, like, the answer. I think it's really such a bad idea because people, in their mind, they make that shortcut and they're like, you know what?

I'm just going to work harder.

I got to work harder.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Did we. Did we cure balding? There was that study, was it last week.

They're all such. They're weak effects. Okay. Yeah. So you. We really have not made.

I guess it's so long turkey.

It's a little bit embarrassing as a human race that we haven't been able to make really good strides on hair loss.

That one seems very simple. I don't know, it just seems, like very mechanical. You know, it doesn't seem as complicated as, like, you know, your brain degenerating. We don't even know how the brain works. It's like it's hair. It just grows like it should be.

We're working on it. We just put out our best attempt. We're going to see if it works. Like, we're going to try to be every. Everything is out there on. Yeah, yeah, we'll see.

How important is these, like, cosmetic intervention to the blueprint plan? Like, because you could imagine a world where people say, yeah, make me live forever, but I don't care about wrinkles and hair because unless it's going to help me actually live longer.

Yeah, why bother? I mean, the thing is, don't die is really be hot. Like, what.

Every supplement company, every company in health, you're ultimately selling. At the end of the day, I.

Think this is brilliant from a business perspective, but does it make sense in terms of the science? Does it take something out?

Yeah, being hot is good science. If you look youthful and vibrant, your skin is nice and you have a lot of energy. So I think be hot is legit the path for this.

Okay. Yeah.

Be hot. Don't die.

Have a success.

How do you think about longevity in the business? If you look at the D2C bubble, there was a lot of companies that raised similar amount of money and are no longer with us. I imagine you care a lot about just making sure that don't die and blueprint survive decades. And I'm sure that's informing the way you're building.

I mean this is like you, you know the Internet comes about, Google sets up shop and rides that tailwind. Amazon sets up shop on commerce. Right. Basically somebody's going to set up shop and longevity and ride a multi trillion dollar ride.

Sure.

So that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to just be home base, win the early innings of longevity and then ride for the multi trillion dollar market.

Yeah. Do you think there's a lot of like I imagine M and A will be pretty important to your strategy with a lot of, I mean I just view there's a lot of companies that are important that are like single product or for specific use cases that don't really necessarily need or shouldn't be because like if you're a blueprint customer, maybe you need it once every three years, but that means it could be harder to actually build a business around, but it would slot in.

You nailed it. So basically if you look at the landscape in health right now, nothing is proprietary. You got wearables from all these different providers, you have food from providers, you have biomarkers. Nothing's proprietary. And so the winner's going to have to out compete everybody and bringing an experience to the customer that is sensible and practical and make, you know. So I think that's where the competition is going to be because this is like the days when I was building a Braintree Venmo. It was commoditized, like you're all in the Visa, MasterCard, MX, Discover Stack and you have to build something unique and then Braintree and Stripe just collapse the market.

Yeah. How do you think about now? I want to hear the story of the Venmo acquisition. How did that happen?

They built up a fence so people in payments. It was very clear PayPal was the only company making money because they had both sides of the market. They got lucky because they got into ebay, they built the consumer side, but then they had the merchant side too because otherwise if you just offer it to merchants, your margins are pretty low. You're making whatever 20, 50 basis points like that. And so everybody was going after PayPal trying to build a two sided marketplace and that took a lot of capital. It's very hard to build from scratch. And so I said, okay, I'm going to build the merchant side of the business. First and then I'm going to acquire the consumer side. I said this when I started the company. So we got customers like Airbnb, Uber, GitHub, we got all the Gen Z people and then Venmo has done a fantastic job building out consumer side. And we could then marry those two demographics and we'd say perfect. And so yeah, so they had built a great business, but they hadn't solved making money.

Okay.

When they plugged into our world, we bought them for 26.2 million.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How much of that was like not making money because of fraud? I hear that like a lot of fintech companies, like they actually have something where the unit economics should work, but it's always crazy. In the early days you hear the story about PayPal where PayPal was losing tons of money, but it was only because of fraud. The actual business when it wasn't fraudulent made sense. But then once you get to scale, you can do the anti fraud properly. Was that something that you were problem solving around?

It's very hard because you're doing peer to peer and typically you have illicit purposes primarily as your driver and so it's a very hard problem. So as a standalone, it's hard for them to make sense because if you stack on a fee when you're paying your buddy, it's hard friction in the adoption. So you have to kind of speed run adoption and then make money later. But there was no good make money later problem.

If you think I was running, I think it was a shower. Thought I was like, okay. There's so much capital sloshing around the private markets. It's been interesting that we haven't seen more people like try to take on stripe. I don't know if it's. I don't know. I'd be curious from your point of view, at what point will people even try to climb that mountain?

Very unlikely. They've done such a great job executing. I sold Braintree in 2013. So they've been building 12 years since they've done such a good job making that airtight. They're just great. This is the thing.

Yeah.

You can't come in and make a 10x better product.

Amazon locked commerce. So you of course can build your E commerce business on Shopify, but at a scale, I mean Amazon has just kind of owned that entire thing. It's very hard to replicate that. So that's our goal too is we're basically trying to do that for longevity is once you collapse the entire space, it's just very hard to get in.

Okay, we got a lighting round. Favorite book or just a book recommendation? Something you read recently that you like?

I just finished the History of the Western Mind going through all of Western thought.

Oh, cool.

Favorite music? What's in your.

You know, I have such a soft spot for Eminem. When I was depressed, he was the only artist that I could feel.

Okay. Love it. When will humanity develop? AGI.

That'S your heart. You don't want to sound like a D cell. You don't want to be. Yeah, yeah, Just call it right now.

Yeah.

Well, I want to be able to clip this the day of and be like, I want to say.

I want to say that. I want to say that we'll be next to you and we won't clip this, but I know our clipping infrastructure and we absolutely will clip this.

It's such a sucker question.

Well, maybe let's flip it around. OpenAI did this deal where the definition of AGI will be convened by a group of experts. What is your definition of AGI?

I approach this question as a more through psychology of when will humans feel useless?

Feel useless?

Yes. Like, our entire identity is based upon, like, we do things, we contribute, we build. And now AI is a tool. Like, we feel more productive with it. At what point will do everything so well? You feel this deep hole in your stomach of, like, what do I do?

So what if. Yeah, the weird thing is, like, computers are incredible at chess, yet people play chess for fun and at the professional level. Because humans, I guess, they're anti clanker and they like watching humans play chess. And if we can solve that for everyone so that everyone has some sort of. Like, in this AGI world where there's no more real jobs, there's no more actual, okay, you need to produce something for food or, you know, livability. Everything is just for fun or for games and for status. And it's all about. Wasn't Andrej Karpathy saying, you go to the gym and you'll learn in the future? And I wonder, like, if your definition is once that breaks down, that is feels really far.

Exactly. I like that people look forward to retirement. Retirement is a goal. It's an ideal. It's like, we're getting an rv, we're going to cruise the country, then they retire. They're like, this sucks. There's not the tension.

Never retire.

So if we imagine we're going to learn and we're going to do yoga all day and paint, but if there's not the tension of the stress of real life, do we really want to be on vacation all the time? Do we want to be at leisure? So that's what I think about is when that happens, that's a pretty unnerving situation because humans don't do well with that uncertainty. And then our systems have to respond. So, like, that's what I really think about all day, every day.

Everyone in the end is just going to be competing on biomarkers. It's going to be the final status game.

It might be. This is the final game.

It might be that lines with Karpathy's take. Last lightning round question. And then I want you to ring the gong. Favorite vacation spot. Where would you go?

Redwood Forest. Redwood Forest. I love red.

Staying in California.

Yeah, I would love. I love redwoods. Let's go right like there.

This is John. There's John.

I love California.

You don't need to go to Europe.

I love America. I don't.

You don't need to get all the radiation on the plane. Yeah, just stay here.

They're like such beautiful, majestic creatures and.

They live a long time.

They live a long time.

It's very on brand for you. I love it. Congratulations on the round. $60 million. Fantastic progress. I'd love for you to ring that gong and I'd love for you to ring it at a. At a decibel level that you feel is appropriate for hearing.

You know, actually, let me pull. Yeah, let me teach us. Yeah, let me pull up my decibel meter. Do we have my phone? Let's make sure we get this.

Yes. Let's bring over.

We don't want to be over 80 decibels.

Okay. Yes. Because we do have IEMs, so it is a little bit of hearing protection. But I would love to know. You can feel free to take as many swings as you need. But I'd love to know what an 8, 80 decibel ring sounds like.

So, yeah, I recently I measured my ears. My left ear is 64, so I have moderate, mild to moderate hearing loss.

Oh, really?

Which substantially increases your risk of dementia.

Oh, whoa. So, yeah, so because you're going crazy because you don't. You don't perceive reality problems, your brain's.

Missing all these things.

Wow, that's crazy.

Built for hearing loss like concerts, social gatherings, restaurants. So, yeah, I would suggest everyone get a hearing test. Yeah, I just get hearing aids.

Okay.

So. All right.

Okay, cool.

Here we go.

Yeah. Yeah. Hit that gong at a longevity approved level. Let's hear it. Okay, what are we at? How are we doing?

90.

90. Okay, so about that level. If we go any higher, we're gonna.

Need just a tad.

Yeah. Yeah. Just a tad.

There we go. That is the Brian Johnson approved gong hit.

You heard it here. I bet everyone in the chat is like, oh, finally. We smacked that thing so loud. Fortunately, you know, we.

Dude, do you have tinnitus?

No, I don't.

Okay.

Fortunately. But I. I do. Oh, you do?

I've had it since I was my. My Coachella era.

This is the thing.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah. Now I don't. I don't go to concerts at all. I don't pay to stand and crowds and lines, but I do. I specifically recall or I believe I know the exact weekend that it started.

Man. Is it a pretty significant thing in your life?

No, I zone it out. But if I take a. I've adapted to not hearing it, but if I. Every. Probably few times a week, I'll be in a really quiet space and realize that I have constant ringing.

Have you looked into hearing aids?

No.

Yeah.

Maybe I should.

Yeah. So I just got the Oticon Intense. Yeah.

Okay. That increases your. You're not wearing them right now.

Not right now. Yeah.

But you've. You've been testing them out.

Yeah, Exactly. I actually. I'm so sad. I was running out the door and I forgot them.

Yeah.

I just finished my morning routine, so I'm still sad. But. Yeah, but they. Actually, I've only had them for a week. They have substantially improved my life.

Wow.

Yeah.

Cool.

Well, this conversation substantially improved my life.

Yeah. You guys, this is fun. This is great. Yeah.

On the show. This is fantastic. Congratulations. And we will talk back again soon. Soon. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. But first, let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And we have Nathan Mintz from CX2 in the TBPN ultradome. Nathan, how are you doing?

Boom.

Wonderful. Wonderful. It's Sunny and about 75 degrees outside here in East El Segundo. I love it.

Great.

Haven't. Yeah. It's been too long since we've pulled up.

There's nothing like pulling open the weather app in California. And it's just 10 days straight of sunny and 75. And we're lucky to have that pretty much year round.

I like all.

Almost makes the taxes tolerable.

I like all the traditional press printouts behind you. We need to send you some physical.

Memorabilia, screenshots from your.

From your TVPN appearances since this is your second one, but give us the update. What's new in your world?

Yeah, so you know, CX2, we've been turning and burning. We pretty much been racking up the frequent flyer miles, going to multiple exercises this year. I think we're to about to go to number eight next week. And one of the things we realize as we go around and we talk to leaders and we talk to the war fighters and stuff, is that there's kind of a nebulous understanding of the nature of the problem that we're facing. So we decided to get together with some of those knowledgeable warfighters we know, along with our experts here, and really write it down in booklet form as the spectrum imperative. And if you go to our website, CX2.com, there's a big banner where you can try and type in spectrum imperative.com. i'm not the best speller, so I would just go to our website and then go from there. But really what we're trying to do is come up with what is the core thesis of electromagnetic warfare in the 21st century. Because the electromagnetic spectrum is this cross domain across the entire all the other domains of warfare, land, sea, space, air and cyber, that connects all of them. And particularly as everything moves to more autonomous systems, we are seeing more increasing reliance upon the spectrum and it becomes a more contested domain of warfare, which because we had the luxury of working for 20 years during the global war on terror, Iraq, etcetera, where we had permissive access to this spectrum and air superiority, we never had to worry about it before.

Yeah.

And now it's something that, as we're seeing every day in Ukraine when it's heavily contested, our ability to have air superiority, air dominance, or really to maneuver on other in other domains is severely impeded by it.

Can you help me? Can you help me synthesize Palmer Luckey's latest soundbite? Around America as the world's arms dealer, as opposed to the America the World Police. This idea that American defense technology companies will be building products that America basically sells or deploys to other countries. What does that look like in Ukraine for you? In Taiwan, in the Middle East? How is that different than America the World Police, where you're designing a system that's ultimately used by American boots on the ground?

So in traditional defense, I spent 14 years in traditional defense.

Yeah.

I think I pulled my passport out of my drawer three times and once of them was for one time was for my honeymoon. Right. Versus in the last five years that I've Been involved with new defense. I think I've been abroad six or seven times. Right. So that kind of gives you an idea. Actually, the last year, I think I've been abroad four or five times of where we're going. You know, now it's much more common for us to go visit the war fighter up in the battlefield and understand their situation and try and figure out how we can adapt what we're building to go along with them. And I think that's what Palmer's referring to is how do we, you know, work alongside our allies? This is actually one of our, one of our talking points within the, within the spectrum imperative is that we need to be more integrated with our allies from a spectrum standpoint. We have to be compatible with their radio systems, compatible with their sensor systems, compatible with their command and control systems. And that's a huge part of the spectrum imperative. So I think, I think that's what Palmer is really referring to is how do we get them to work with us to buy what the gaps in their capabilities are, build them indigenously. There's a lot of talk about factories at the edge or forward leaning supply chains to deal with contested logistics. That's kind of, I think, the direction where Palmer's to going.

What is the latest update on what's going on in Ukraine? It feels like it's fast becoming a forever war, unfortunately. At the same time, I've been hearing new updates on drones with fiber optic cables to avoid the problems of electronic and magnetic warfare. Right. What's the state of the conflict and then what's actually on the cutting edge of what the various militaries are using?

Yeah, so Ukraine, what's basically happened is the front lines have been relatively frozen. And it's because if you think about it, you need to have uncontested data link, data links at the spectrum layer. You need uncontested navigation, et cetera, or else you're kind of swimming upstream. So effectively they've created this no man's land of electronic concertina wire and minefields that really impedes any forward motion. And 98% of the action is occurring with autonomous systems, whether that's drones or unmanned ground vehicles or unmanned surface vessels. The Ukrainians have actually been probably the most successful with the USVs in the black Sea. They've pretty much pushed the Russians completely out of Sevastopol, completely out of Crimea, and now they have to go all the way to their ports on the eastern side of the Black Sea to actually like, you know, keep their ships safe. Right. So that's a case study where autonomous systems are actually automated systems, in this case, because it's still human driven.

Yeah.

Have been able to really make a difference in that conflict. Meanwhile, the whole concept of a forward line of advance or forward edge of the battle area is now completely obsolete in the sense that you can have drones pop up from many kilometers behind the lines and hit strategic targets, which is specifically what we saw with Operation Spiderweb.

Yeah.

Now you mentioned tethered drones. Those were very popular in the Kursk offensive. Actually, the Russians were the first to introduce them and the Ukrainians then followed suit. And the whole idea was that, well, if there's nothing to jam, then you can fight through all the jamming. The trouble is that the tether drones, in some cases within the Kursk offensive actually turned into about 30% of the drones being used at any given time at its peak. But it's a brittle solution. If you go around a tree, you can snag it. If the lines can be cut quite easily, there's all sorts of limitations. And then, not to mention over water, it's like running a fishing line. If it touches the water at all, it's going to weigh down the drone and take it down with it.

So I hadn't thought about that.

Yeah. So tethered drones, like, have their time and place. It's a little unclear how applicable they will be in, in, in like the Pacific, for example. But, you know, for things like persistent surveillance, where you're putting a drone up in the air and, you know, you can actually run power up to it for surveillance, it may make a lot of sense. Right.

I hadn't even thought about that. That's super interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah. There is no silver bullet. There is.

What was the phrase you used? You said, Maslow's hammer.

Yeah, Maslow's hammer. That if I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Oh, sure.

And so that's what tends to happen with any sort of new countermeasures. It's first evolved and then the enemy saturates and counters it. In fact, probably the biggest paradigm shift we've seen in the Ukraine war that will be very applicable in the Pacific is this idea that all of our systems are highly adaptable, that both us and the enemy are operating on a much faster fly fix, fly loop and countermeasure loop than what we're used to seeing. We're used to seeing years for new systems to be introduced. We'll be looking at more like weeks or possibly even days in some cases. And augmented by commercial software practices like CICD and other things over the year. Update.

Sorry we have to move on so quickly, but thank you for the update and congratulations on all the progress. Definitely encourage everyone to go check out the Spectrum imperative campaign from CX2 and we will talk to you soon.

Yeah, great to catch up, Nathan.

We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about linear. LINEAR is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Our next guest is James Proud from Substrate. Welcome to the show, James. How are you doing?

Suited up. Love it.

Thank you for having me, guys. It's an honor.

You look fantastic. Please introduce yourself, give us a little bit of the backstory and then tell us the general overview of the company, what you're building and where it's positioned in the supply chain of the semiconductor industry.

Sure. I think quite simply what we're doing is a bet that America can do hard things against and that if it's important enough, then we can go and do it. It's not a question of whether we can or not. And I think when it comes to advanced chips, I think we all know and we all believe this is certainly important enough. And so our bet is that the United States invented this technology, we can invent the next generation again. And starting with the core process of lithography is how you can actually go and make a what we think, a next generation foundry.

Yep. Okay. So I think many viewers will be familiar with the general semiconductor stack. You have the design shops like Nvidia, you have your tsmc, the Fab, you have asml, the lithography machinery maker. You might have Trump or Zeiss or some other supplier deeper in the chain. How do you see yourself fitting in? Are you vertically integrated? Do you want to come in at the ASML level? At the TSMC level? We've talked to other Thiel fellows like the folks at Etched, where they're not setting up a fab, but they are designing a new chip and they're going to work at TSMC to run that process. How do you see yourself fitting into the stack?

Yeah, we're slightly insane. And we think that the United States can build and sustain a new Pure play foundry business. And to do that we need to be a little bit more vertically in integrated than usual. Usually you have the tooling makers, you have the fabs that buy the tools. We see ours is more a sort of return to the beginning of the industry where everyone sort of did a little bit of everything. And so for us, we're going to start making our own tools specifically around the lithography piece.

Yep. That makes you, Tony.

You've been on a. On a press blitz this week all over the map. What was. What was the last year like leading up until this point? What have you been focused on? And then what does the next year look like specifically in terms of making progress against all these goals?

Honestly, Incredibly, incredibly hard. There's a video that I'm sure you guys have seen of when Elon was being interviewed about the Model 3 ramp. And he sort of looks at the. Looks at the floor and talks about how his head and heart physically hurt from how hard he had to work. And I know exactly what that feels like, and I'm sure a lot of our team do as well. But as I said, it goes back to like, is this important enough to actually make happen? And we believe that this certainly is, and we're very proud of the results that we have and wanted to show the world and sort of tell people what we believe and what we're doing.

And then what is. But more tactically, this is the kind of company that the true potential will only be able to be achieved across decades. This is not the kind of company you start and expect to. It's a massive journey. But how do you break it up with the team? What are you looking to accomplish more specifically in the next one to two years?

Well, moving quickly, I think, is sort of one of the key important parts of this. I think that this 10 years from now is far less important for the United States. Two, three, four from now. And so our goal is in 2028, to actually have a facility constructed and be running wafers. And so one of the reasons why we're coming out publicly is it's going to be very hard to start building big particle accelerators, big clean rooms in secret. And so the goal is we start doing that very quickly and sprint to.

28, walk through some of the milestones to date. Do you have to come up with new ways to etch chips essentially because of ip, or do you need to do a bunch of licensing deals? Is a big piece of the equation. For the last year, been marshaling capital and then placing orders to buy equipment and build up a facility. There's so many different ways that the business could take shape. If the general goal is like, let's build a fab in America, I can imagine a bunch of different ways to solve that. But how did you go about solving it.

Yeah. So up to now the company is really three years old and, and the big thrust so far has been building lithography tools, demonstrating that they work, printing the smallest things that humans are able to go and print. And that's been the focus really up to now. And in terms of what kind of tool the IP and the like, our focus has been how do you reduce cost and complexity. And so all of the design choices we've made have been driven by that. And really like EUV and the tools that exist today, these are modern mirrors. These things are incredible. The engineering, incredible. Yeah, but, but, but the choices were made in the, in the, really the 90s and took a while to scale up.

Got it.

Our approach has been on the lithography side. If you were building a next generation lithography tool today, would you make the same technical choices we've believed? No. And, and the answer is no.

What's it been like on the recruiting side? Have you been visiting the Netherlands, visiting Taiwan? How are you thinking about building the team going forward?

Yeah, yeah. As I sort of said at the start, like, this has been primarily, it sounds very simplistic, but a bet on the United States, a bet that we still have the best engineers, the best scientists, the best national labs. Like if you look at the history of semiconductors, this is all invented by the United States. Transistors, CMOs, FinFET, EUV, like American companies usually, maybe it's basically been IBM and Intel that invented all of that stuff. And so like the bet is that we have the people, we have the talent. It's just, can we actually have a new direction? And so that's been the work that we've done. And so predominantly we've been recruiting from American companies, U.S. national labs.

So all here. Yeah. That's why America can do things like the CHIPS act and can restrict the way ASML equipment moves to China, because America, because the IP was developed here in America. So even if it's changed hands, we still have some leverage. Fascinating. Take us through the fundraise. How did it come together? Who's involved? What's the story with the latest fundraise? It feels like a big ambitious project that needs some very ambitious capital. But what happened?

So I want to actually quickly go back to your previous point about export restrictions. A big belief that we've had is that we shouldn't bet that China won't do this. And a big part of what we're doing is that there's the United States and there's China and those are really the two countries that can actually attempt something like this. And because of export restrictions, we know they're trying. And our belief is that if we're not trying to build what a next generation foundry looks like today, we might wind up five, 10 years down the line in a really difficult place. And so that's been a big sort of motivation because of the timelines. These things take a while to play out. On the funding. I know there's 100 plus number that's like, that's more actually historical, but clearly we're not going to build a fab with that amount of money. The key thing though is that unlike I think sort of traditional semiconductor fabs, because we focused on vertically integrating tools, we can reduce that cost and complexity. So you don't need to spend 10/2 billion dollars to even, even get something up and running. We think we can actually get that done for a much, much lower cost. And then on the previous money that was announced, I think a huge shout out needs to go to our investors because really when I started this company I said there's a 1% chance of success and they still invested. And so for the founders Fund, the general catalysts of the world and all of the others dollars, these guys deserve a huge amount of credit. That's true venture capital. And we think hopefully with these results we're showing that these crazy bets can work.

Is there any world where you partner with strategic investors or someone else in the stack? Is there a natural bedfellow in the ecosystem that doesn't feel, that feels like there might be some synergy here long term?

I mean 100% for the entire American economy. It's now basically built on top of AI which is built on top of advanced semiconductors. And so we see this as a sort of a whole of nation effort and so the more people we can partner with, we're very open to that.

Very exciting. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Congratulations on coming out of Stealth Massive week and I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.

We'll talk to you soon and thank you.

The production team thanks you for potentially the most perfect zoom.

It looks fantastic.

So shout out to shout out to your team.

I like the IEMs as well. That's a nice touch. Have a great rest of your day.

Great stuff.

We'll talk to you.

Thank you guys.

Bye.

See ya.

Up next we got Sean McGuire from Sequoia Capital coming. Oh, what's he wearing? What's he wearing on the hat there?

He is.

I got so excited about the hat, I forgot to do the ad read numeral hq.com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax. Okay, thank you. Now, now we got Sean. Sorry, sorry. I saw you on the preview screen with the hat. I got excited. I brought you in prematurely before I could do the ad read.

Anyway, how are you? Great to see you. Good to see you. Big week.

Big week.

Sequoia Capital.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually explain what happened. Some new funds raised. But how do you frame all of the actual progress and the actual announcement like, what happened?

What is up, boys? You guys have become celebrities. I was here. You got Satya, Nadella, you got all these legends and then jokers like me.

Well, you kicked it off. You kicked it off.

Anyway, it's been amazing to watch. And yeah, I got the hat. I'm repping for you.

Thank you.

And I gotta say, this last guy had the best zoom and audio setup ever. And you know, again, I'm just online.

Well, no, this is your zone. This is your zone. When you, when, you know, anytime there's controversy on the timeline, you just flip open the laptop, hit record 30 minute video single take with one take.

And this is what people want. They want something that just feels like, okay, I'm actually talking to the person in their office. I get the texture of what their life is actually like. I'm sure this is what, what tons of founders see when they pitch you, they open up. And this is who's on the other end of the line, right?

Something like that. It works to be somewhat relatable. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So look, we're dropping new funds. We are very lucky. Sequoia's been in business for over 50 years. This is the next vintage of our overnight success.

Overnight success.

So Sequoia's backed a couple small companies in the past. First investor in Nvidia. Nvidia, Series A of Apple, Series A of Google. Let's go on and on and on. Next venture fund, vintage dropping Venture Fund 1919. Also Seed Fund 6. Seed is something that we used to combine inside our venture funds, but wanted to place a major emphasis on it really, to show the distinction. And I would say so anyways, fund size 750 million and 200 million for seed. Something that I think is.

Is there a growth fund as part of this? Is that a separate thing? Is that off cycle right now?

Yeah. So the growth fund is different cycle.

Different cycle.

Announced their funds recently.

Got it.

Something that I'm honestly Very proud of. I joined Sequoia six years ago and I feel like this is the first fun cycle where we really have a new team, a cracked generation of young people that have now been working together for five plus years. And so just. It really feels like we're firing all cylinders. We got Stephanie with Skilled on stage with Jensen yesterday and Reflection. We got Constantine hitting his stride with Expo and a bunch of other companies. Everyone on the team has some amazing portfolio companies and then the growth team. You have so many great people, Pat. Andrew.

Andrew. Taking companies public every day now, et.

Cetera, and a whole new generation there too.

Any specific kind of decision making or insight around how you guys decided the fund sizes specifically? Was that that I'm sure based on a lot of learnings over the last few years and seems like a commitment to driving real venture returns and staying committed to that. But what more can you say there?

Yeah, no, you nailed it. Something I think people kind of misunderstand about Sequoia. And look, I got to drop the flex, but Sequoia has this outsized history in terms of the scale of companies we've backed. Like if you look at the Nasdaq, about 30% of the Nasdaq by market cap were early Sequoia, you know, companies pretty wild, but. But we actually don't invest in that many companies per year. Like we really try to keep it pretty focused and targeted where we can be active company builders. And there was a pressure the last few years and I would say we got caught up a little during the COVID era, as everyone did, and our pace increased, but we've just gone back to basics and we're really just focused on ultra high quality, finding just true outlier founders that have really big vision and kind of rolling up our sleeves to help them build these companies. We're trying to not get too caught up in any of the trends. We're trying to be ahead of trends and keep the fund size just where we can actually have. We strive for minimum 10x net returns. That is our goal for every fund and that's where we want to be.

What about actual team structure, team size? Has there been any evolution in the thought process around how large the partnership is, how large the support structure is, the back office, how all of that fits together? Is there anything that's structurally changing or do you see it as just a slight evolution of the same plan?

Great question. So we have to be paranoid at Sequoia? Our secret is being ultra paranoid and just trying to outwork everyone.

Yeah. Didn't A Sequoia founder say that?

I hope so.

I think so.

But we went through a pretty hardcore generational transition five, six years ago. Most of the team was not here eight years ago. You have people like Rudolph and Alfred that have been here for a long time on the early team and have helped and Doug when he was active, helping to kind of bridge the generational divide. But I would say where we've innovated is kind of with new team and then otherwise really trying to just stay true to the roots of Sequoia. Active company building, focus on both, really trying to understand market structures and find outlier founders. I think that's something that's different about Sequoia is we're not like an or, it's not founder or market. It's an and we want founder and market. In terms of everything else, I would actually say we've almost gone back to basics a little bit more. Like, you know, we have, we have a wonderful operating team and that's something that, you know, we built up over the last five or six years. But we've basically kept it pretty steady in terms of size. Like we feel good about where everything is and now we need to execute.

Okay, defend the venture capitalist because I'm going to make the argument that the venture capitalist, not Sequoia in particular, but venture capital as an entire category is cooked, chopped, destroyed, it's over, the game's over. And here's my thesis.

What was Roelof's quote the other day?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's not an asset class. He said venture capital is not an asset class, which I 100% agree with. It was a great quote.

He said it's a reward free risk.

It's a reward free risk. That's a great quote. But. But specifically I want you to address this kind of maybe it's a headwind, maybe it's not. You tell me. There's this idea that you are a venture capitalist, you can see the future. You know that self driving cars are coming and your options are Waymo and Tesla. Like you can't get venture exposure to that necessarily. You're excited about humanoid robotics. Well, Tesla's in that you're excited about AI. Well, like if you wanted to play like OpenAI took a billion dollars from Microsoft and all the VCs were getting in small slices. No one was able to build a 30% position in that company like they would have done in the previous era with a Facebook or with a Google.

Yeah, John was texting me last night joking he's like it's absolutely criminal that Satya didn't get carry on the OpenAI investment.

And I mean, I, I don't know your thesis on quantum computing, it feels very early.

I love the series A and IonQ, which is a public quantum computing company.

Let's go. Okay.

And I did my PhD in the.

Quantum information, so maybe that works. Yeah, maybe we need to go there. But it feels like there's also competition from big hyperscalers in that market.

We need the Martin Shkreli, Sean McGuire debate on quantum.

Oh yes, we definitely need that.

I'm actually closer to Martin in a lot of the views, so maybe it would be an agreement to Martin Sean conversation rather than.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So yeah, let's, let's, let's table Quantum particular in particular. And let's instead say, how does venture capital play in a world where frontier technologies take $10 billion and 20 years to mature? Self driving cars, AI, etc.

Look, I think rule of nailed it when he said that venture capital is not an asset class. But we don't do it the way other people do. And granted there's a couple funds I respect unbelievably deeply that have a lot in common with us.

A couple.

There are two people I respect.

There'S a couple funds. But look, we're, we're really deeply involved oftentimes in like the formation of companies. I think in the last year there's been at least five or six companies where we signed term sheets or. Sorry. Where we were involved in the putting together of companies like before, before they were even incorporated. You know, we were kind of structuring the companies, bringing the founders together. My partner, David Kahn played a big role in bringing Keller together, for example.

Yeah.

Which is an Israeli defense tech company where there was a very talented founder that a bunch of us knew, Alon Dror, who had a general idea, but he didn't have the right team for it. And I would say his initial idea was wrong and we helped him with the idea. And then David brought in, had a vision of bringing this woman, Hamutl Meridor, and that culmination is magic. And it's hard to explain how frequently we do that. And so it's like if you're a passive investor at the late stage, there's no alpha today in VC or very little. But that's just not the game we play. We're extremely active. I mean, my partner Jim gets incubated, Palo Alto Networks, Roelof both invested in YouTube with three people and they Worked in the Sequoia office in the beginning. And I mean, I can give you so many examples like this. And so we don't think of ourselves as just like an index on the basket. We're trying to bend the ARC on the asset class. And look, I'm going to give a shout out to Founders Fund. They do this incredibly well. They've been incubating companies, they bring a founder mentality.

They're more passive later stage, obviously. Sequoia and Founders Fund, incredible returns. The model's clear, really working. I guess maybe it doesn't matter that Sequoia and Founders Fund, like, I don't know all the funds. It just feels like there's a world where self driving happens or some other big huge humanoid robots. It happens, but it happens in a way that the value isn't captured by venture capitalists. And that's what I'm wondering.

I'm not worried about it.

You're not worried about that?

Okay, okay, I'm not worried about it. I think there will be a lot of value captured in the public markets. One of the best trades you can make in AI the last five years, obviously buying Nvidia.

Nvidia.

The same was true with crypto though. You could just buy bitcoin. Buying Bitcoin outperformed basically every crypto investment, but Coinbase was still an amazing investment. I think Bitcoin at almost every point in time slightly outperformed Coinbase. Maybe not.

I've heard from investors that that's why they passed on Coinbase because they were like, I'll just buy bitcoin.

And it's actually a big part of why Sequoia passed on Coinbase in the time. So look, I think we've seen this play out many times before, but I'll give you a counterpoint.

The funny thing in there is that the reason why bitcoin has done so well is probably because there were VCs that were like, yeah, I'll pay for the R and D at Coinbase to make it excel accessible. And then the price went up and so everyone else is. You and FF were free riding.

Maybe we were. There's always been this dynamic though. Like the famous telco build out in the late 90s where Global Crossing and all the, you know, there were 17 fiber companies that went public and were very highly valued and then investors lost all their money. But that fiber build out laid the pathway for SaaS and consumer Internet companies in the early 2000s. Like, like this dynamic is always happening and I think as investors we Just have to try to stay countercyclical, try to stay ahead of the bubbles, try to figure out what are the second order effects of the bubbles. Whenever you concentrate huge amounts of capital, there will be all this new infrastructure that you can take advantage of. And so we're just. Defense tech is an area where we were not very active in before the war in Ukraine. And tragically that war was the catalyst. And you have to identify even though you have a callous, there's probably only a 6 to 12 month window where defense tech is non obvious. And so we made three or four, I think really good investments in that period. Like Neros, like Stark, like Kela, a little after that. And you just have to be ahead of the curve because now I think defense tech is becoming consensus, it's too obvious. And so it's like valuations are incredibly high, but it's just like that's our job at Sequoia is to be ahead of the curve on these things. And there's just always going to be opportunities to make money. If you're proactive.

Venture capitalists buy minority positions in companies and you can be on the board and you can be adding value and helpful. But there's this, after you kind of deploy into a company, there can be kind of this grass is always greener thing where it's like you can meet like another five companies the next day and there's always like this, this influx of opportunity. You've been at Sequoia now for years and you have an opportunity to meet new companies every day or, or you know, get on the phone with existing portfolio companies, some of which are maybe doing really well, some of which are maybe not. Like I, I was curious if Sequoia like has any lessons throughout history of, of companies that like, that you guys draw on, of companies that kind of like hit rough patches and people were maybe less excited about but like found a way to have, you know, get to another kind of inflection point. Because I feel like you have 50 years of history. A lot of being a great firm is just remembering what made you great and having these sort of like lessons that are like IP effectively.

Oh man, this is such an astute point. And look, I think this is one of the superpowers. I think Sequoia has a lot of superpowers. One is we just have this network. A lot of the founders we back were employees at prior Sequoia portfolio companies. So there's that flywheel, there's the institutional knowledge moats, there's the customer moat. Where there's so many companies that someone that bought Wiz early and it made them look really good as a CISO or cio, they're more likely to buy Eon the next infrastructure company. So there's all these moats or advantages. But on this one incredibly astute point, Alfred Lynn tells a story of how DoorDash really struggled to raise at least one or two rounds of funding. You know, I'm sure you remember, like, Uber was the hottest company in the world for a long time and DoorDash was. DoorDash was like number three or so in the space. It was really hard for them to raise. I think it was a Series C. I may be off by like, maybe a Series B or D, but I think this is a Series E. He.

Tells the story was pretty hot as well. And then there were a bunch of legacy platforms like Grubhub and Co. 100% been around before too.

So it's a bloodbath. It's ultra competitive. Economics hadn't yet become positive. They really struggled to raise around, you know, Airbnb, obviously, like sequoia was the first investor or led the seed. Sorry, not first investor. They did YC, but, you know, we invested $600,000, like a $3 million valuation. And they went through some incredibly hard times, even. Even like during COVID I mean, for them. I remember Alfred's updates. It was just unbelievably brutal, period. It was like, easy to give up on them. And that may sound crazy given the. The scale they're at today, but Also with Elon, SpaceX and Tesla were on the verge of death at multiple points. And when you have these experiences, it really is an institutional knowledge weapon.

Yeah, because it's just not. It's way less fun to jump on the phone with a Portco that's totally struggling and they're going to say, hey, we need a bridge, or can you introduce me to some more investors? And it's like, well, it's not fun to introduce a company that's struggling to other investors because it's way more fun to introduce a company that's ripping because you're throwing a bone to them. I was curious to get a sense of your activity in H1 of this year versus now. Have you picked up the pace? Have you slowed down at all? What's it been looking like?

I'm embarrassed. I saw the data recently, a few weeks ago, but I have so much going on, including a lot of Twitter drama, as you guys see. And somehow I don't remember the Exact pacing data. And so I don't want to be wrong. We're a registered investment advisor now. So these things are.

Oh yeah, this is like doubly hard when we're wrong every time. Because I want to ask you about stuff that you can't talk about because of Ria and I don't care about whatever you're going viral for on Twitter. Can you talk about data centers in space? You're a Caltech PhD. Do you understand it? Does it make sense?

Am I team Delian or am I team Data Center?

I wasn't going to make it about that. You could comment on it at a more abstract layer level but. But you know, you're obviously.

This is something I thought a lot about. I mean like for 15 years. I started a failed space launch company in 2007. So you know, and this was, this is an idea we actually thought a lot about. Look, I think, I think the reality is no one really knows. And actually something I told Delian with Varda, like, you know, I passed on Varda in the early days which I should have made the investment. And the way I describe it to Delian now is I think he had the right macro idea and the wrong micro idea. And to unpack that, the micro idea is they wanted to make ZBLAN this ultra pure fiber optic cables. It's like dude, we don't need zblan in a world with Starlink. Zblan is good for long distance data movement. We're going to do it all with the long distance data movements can happen in space with Starlink. But I think the macro idea of just, just building space infrastructure, building an incredible team building like learning how to build satellites. I think that their timing couldn't be better just in terms of what's going to happen to the space economy over the next 10 years on the back of SpaceX and Starship. And I think their ability just concentrate talents and be in position to pounce when the opportunities come up is something that should not be underestimated. And so with these data center companies in space there are two very real serious unknowns. One is just the thermal properties. Dissipating heat in space is insanely hard. And anyone that says they figured it out right now they have not figured it out. They may figure it out in the just.

And it's because you need a lot of surface area, right?

Yeah, there's basically there's like no thermal connectivity or very little of space as a medium. And so, so heat that leaves any unit area whatever in space it just, it stays close to the satellite in space and so you can move things around inside the satellite, but once he leaves the satellite it'll just heat up a little local pocket of space around you and takes a very long time to dissipate away from the satellite. And so this is something no one really understands how it works. The second is you have to deal with high energy particles that are going through your electronics. You don't have the Earth's magnetic field shielding your electronics and you can have metal shielding and things like this, but no one really understands how this is going to work and how it will affect all the circuits and electronics. So these two things are hard. There's also a big time question around exactly when starship will fly, when cost will be passed to the launch companies. So I think some of these companies may be too early. And look, I actually think I'm more team Deliant on the micro. I think he has the right points that there's a lot of things that are unsolved right now on the micro side of data centers in space. But I'm such a macro bull on space over the next 10, 15 years that it's hard for me to bet against, against any team that is just building that concentrate talent, building the expertise. Because I just think it's going to be such an exponential rising tide at some point in the next 10 years. I can't tell you when that will start, but it will be big.

On the SpaceX front, there's been a lot of news over the last few weeks around direct to sell partnerships between SpaceX and, and other device manufacturers, et cetera. How screwed do you think a lot of the big telecom companies are over the next 10 years?

Look, I don't think they're screwed. Look, I think SpaceX is going to do unbelievably well. Unbelievably well. And I'm maximum bull on direct assault for SpaceX. But I think what happens in the kind of most wild success scenario for SpaceX, SpaceX is providing 20, 30% of the world's mobile data in a decade or so. But I think that the total mobile data consumption will be like double at that point. So it's still like a 70% net increase for all the existing telcos. Because there's something, this is just a fact of history. When a product gets better, people use it more. And when you have the ability, when you don't have dead zones and cell service, when you have 5G everywhere, Optimus is going to come online. Tesla cars are going to come online, people are going to be. When you have really good mobile connectivity from the car, you're going to be streaming. Instead of 1028 P, you're going to be streaming 8K content from your car while it's driving you. I think it's going to be one of these things where rising tides lift all boats. But I would not underestimate how big of a deal it's going to be for SpaceX.

It's already an oligopoly, but there are multiple hundred billion dollar companies in the category. And so if it just becomes, even if the market structure doesn't change and there's just a new player in the oligopoly that looks very, very good. We've asked a lot of people in the age of AI, should you learn to code? That's a less interesting question to me these days. I want to know, should you learn to deal? Should you learn the art of the deal? Because basically, is the art of the deal becoming a more important tool in the founder's tool chest? Because we've seen, it really feels like there are founders out there who, who can just work magic and marshal capital and buyers and customers and the government. And the government from a different country. And they get 17 people to say, yes, this has to happen. And then all of a sudden it happens and we get the thing and it feels like it could be the beginning of a new archetype, a new founder archetype, or maybe it's an old archetype. But what do you think about learning to deal?

Yeah, look, I mean, first on the learning to code, I personally think that coding is going to be like doing arithmetic a long time ago. And it's just like it won't be as interesting or valuable. Humans won't be doing that much of it. But I think it's very valuable to train your mind how to think. And so a lot of learning to.

Code thinking, is that kind of like thinking mode?

Yeah, sure. Thinking mode, thinking mode, deal mode. But look, I think even more extreme than an even more extreme way to train your mind to think is doing pure mathematics. And so if a kid's asking what to major in today, I mean, my answer would be like, do pure math or physics, which are the maximum ways to train your mind to think or learn huge social skills. Like just don't even go to college if you do be Pratt president.

Our Internet at TVPN is on a gap semester studying physics and is now hanging out here. And he's just like nodding, just being like I'm patting myself in the back. Sean McGuire says I did everything right.

Curious. Kind of last question. I wish we could hang out longer, but we're back to back.

I'm to your Thunderdome soon.

Yeah, please. Yeah.

Next one should be in person.

Yeah, yeah.

Anytime you're in la, what are you seeing? How is the government shutdown affecting defense tech companies that, that you're seeing or talking to?

Oh yeah, that's a good question.

I'm going to give the brutal, brutally honest version, which is what I try to always do, at least my own opinion. It's a tale of haves and have nots. So I work with a few companies that are getting absolutely reamed by it, but I also work with a couple companies where it hasn't really affected them. And basically if you have something that the government absolutely needs, like maybe they can't send you the money right now, but they're still giving you the phone call and telling, you know, and like, you know, telling you that, giving you the signal. Expect after, you know, after the shutdown ends and you know, we can still give you the award. We just can't, you know, tell you the exact dollar amount because we need congressional approval on the exact dollar amount. And it's a tale of haves and have nots.

I mean, it's a really good signal, to be honest, at least as an investor, to be like, is what I'm investing in a nice to have or a need to have?

For sure. It's very clarifying.

Yeah, very good.

Cool. Great to catch up.

Always fun. Congrats on the new. We need to ring the gong for Sequoia Captain.

Yeah, yeah. They don't thought this would happen. Two Gong hits for the two new funds. Still got it. There we go.

Thank you, boys.

Congrats.

Legends keep crushing.

Bye, see you soon. Thanks for coming on.

Bye.

Let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. You can go to Fin AI to get started. And we have Anil Chakravarti from Adobe in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra. Anil, great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

It's almost like you guys are in the creative industry.

Yes, yeah, likewise.

Great to meet you and thanks for having me on.

Thanks for hopping on. I assume you're at Max. Take us through the big headline news. What are the most exciting things happening in the Adobe ecosystem these days.

Yeah, I'm coming here live from Max in LA. We have over 10,000 people. Everybody from individual creators to people in Hollywood who work in the creative industry, enterprise customers, all kinds of people. It's been really exciting. Obviously, it's all about how we're bringing AI in the creative tools that everybody loves and knows so well. And we're really talking about how to make responsible use of AI. We have our own models with Firefly and we had a ton of innovations around Firefly, which is designed to be commercially safe. But we announced a big partnership with Google around Veo and Imagen and all kinds of other third party models that are now integrated into our tools. Runway and Luma and many, many others. Then we also announced how we can help customers with their own custom models. So we call it Firefly Models, Partner models, your models. If you are Disney or Home Depot or Newell Brands, how do you have an AI model that really protects your IP and becomes your brand brain? So that's really what's been exciting.

How are you thinking about the creative journey of the customer? I feel like there's probably people in the audience who might have became an Adobe customer by pirating a version of Photoshop in 1998 and now they pay for cloud every month. But now there's even, even more varieties of niche use cases where a consumer can use a point solution and then they grow and grow and grow into the ecosystem. Is it more important than ever that you set up teams to capture those long tail interactions? Just a face swap over here, just a background remover over here, and then funnel everyone into the ecosystem, or do you want to focus on just capturing people once they're ready to go into the enterprise world? Workflows?

Yeah, exactly. As you mentioned, we have such a wide variety here of people who've had their journey with Adobe. We had Brandon Baum on stage who was exactly like what you said. He said he was 11 years old when he started using a cracked copy. This is the thing exactly after Effects. And he said he's a paying subscriber, of course. And then, you know, what he said was he said he started playing with it when he was a kid, he got hooked on it and he showed how you can do it with Firefly. I mean, he posted something yesterday and a video that he created with Firefly and then he got some comments and somebody said, hey, looks like this is going to be a plot twist here. And so he did the plot twist on stage today. He used Firefly and all the tools to just take the next episode in that story. So we've got all types. You got enterprise customers who are like, hey, we would love to use all these new gen AI tools. It's got to get through our systems, our regulation, our compliance, Adobe people trust Adobe. So if you can make it available, it becomes so much easier to use all of this innovation. And then we have a lot of people, like you said, who have their favorite tools and they want to see all this AI in their favorite tools. And then there are many, many others. We think maybe more than half the people at Max are attending for the first time. So they just want everything on a mobile app. They don't have the desktop machine with Photoshop on it. They know every layer and all of that. So they just want it on their mobile app. So we got all types of the creative journey. Ideas can strike you anywhere and we want to help you turn that into creative experience.

What's your read on how Hollywood's been navigating gen AI? We're here in LA ourselves and when we talk to people in the industry on or off air, it seems like everyone is trying to get ahead and leverage the tools to the best of their ability. But there's this pressure to not piss off the broader industry of people that make it possible. But what's been the read from, from people that are talking at the event? Because there's a little bit of like if you're too much at the bleeding edge and too loud, people might come after you.

Yeah, exactly.

They're threading the needle. Exactly. They are excited about the potential. They see what AI can potentially do in terms of everything from ideation, from helping create and make the movies and other content for TV and then also then getting the audience to participate. You know, everybody can have, it's so easy to create variations and get the, you know, make it more like fan experience that like the sports teams are doing. So they're really interested in all of that potential but like you said, they want to make sure it's top notch quality. They want to make sure their IP is protected and that they're not, you know, even unwittingly stepping on somebody else's toes. And they want to make sure that they're doing it in a way that's monetizable and that gives them a recurring revenue stream. So exactly like you said, they're threading that needle.

Yeah.

Very cool.

Did you have a product request by the way?

I did. I want you to bring back Photoshop Mix. I was a huge user of Photoshop Mix and my favorite features got deprecated and I moved to Photoshop Express and then I got a new phone and one of the features, the one random feature that I used, got deprecated again. And so now I am on the full Photoshop iOS app, the official Photoshop iOS app, and I'm learning it. But I do feel like one of my children was left behind on the Titanic or something and I was left in there.

I will ask the product team to take a look. Have you tried Firefly? Have you checked Firefly out?

I haven't, but I understand this is the nature of building a large scaled business. You need to move people through the different feature funnels. You can't keep every. Otherwise it just becomes all tech debt. So I understand why things go the way they do. But as a dedicated user of the legacy app, why?

In as few words as possible, because we're running out of time. Why? What's your read on like specifically? I think people, the bears out there think that AI is disruptive, could be disruptive to the Adobe ecosystem. We're a creative business, we're a media company. We're constantly creating media and advertisements and things like that. Our view has been that it's seems more obviously to be an extending innovation or people being able to generate a video, an image or a video and then suddenly have that asset and be like, well, now I want to change it. Well, what tool are you going to use? Right. It's probably a tool within the Adobe ecosystem. So in as few words as possible, what's your view on why AI would be an extending innovation for the Adobe kind of suite of products?

Yeah, we look at it as the evolution of a new operating system and we are the creative AI platform that runs on new operating systems. When you look at our history, when it was desktops, we ran on Mac OS and Windows os. When it became cloud, whether it was with AWS or Microsoft azure or with GCP and others when it became mobile, whether it was iOS or Android. So we have the history and the track record of making sure that we work very well with emerging new operating systems and the new AI is the new operating system. Now you have to believe, and I think it's a simplistic view, that the operating system will do everything that the apps do. And yeah, I mean that just seems in our view, very simplistic. So we think much, obviously from our perspective that we're good at working with these new operating systems. That's what we announced with Google yesterday and we actually showed within ChatGPT how you can work with Adobe tools like Express. So it's evolving of how they, you know, what do the operating systems do and what do the apps continue to do. There's new layers of AI, but that's the architecture is evolving fast. But we think that you need both. I don't think it's either or. And that's where we think the world is going to be.

Yeah, I mean, I've used so many of these little point solutions, AI tools and I feel like I've seen a glimpse of where this all goes and it's like I actually do want a platform that then can sub out different models so I can get Firefly or VO or midjourney or hopefully you wind up building a platform that's so open that all the different features and models are there. And it's just like having the Lasso tool next to the rectangle tool next to the text tool. And that's a very natural progression for Adobe in my opinion. It seems very logical.

We got to get you on our consumer advisory board. I mean, you really summed it up.

Really?

Yeah.

I mean, I hate that I lost my Photoshop.

He's got some strong opinions.

We're going to bring it back for you. Yeah, but no, no, no, no, no. I don't actually think you need to. I think you actually do need me to suffer a little bit to get into the proper full fledged ecosystem that has all the tools in one place. Because that's where the actual value is right now. Everyone knows that you can spin up a website that's a text box and it generates one asset, one image, one video. But that's not how creativity works. We're not just going to one shot a two hour movie.

Exactly, exactly. No, you should really check out Firefly. I think you'll enjoy it.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to meet you. Great to chat and congratulations and have fun at Adobe Max. I've been been seeing a ton of people, friends of mine posting that they're there. Wish I could be there. Hopefully in a future year we'll be able to attend. It'd be great.

Thank you for having me on.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Before we bring on our next guest, let me tell you about Addeo Customer Relationship Magic. Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free.

And up next we have Bryn Putnam from from Bored Bored Bored. It's just bored. I was looking for the name and it was right in front of me. So great to meet you. Incredible launch yesterday. I think I love my favorite launches to see are ideas that when you see them they just seem so incredibly obvious and yet no one thought of it or thought to take it seriously enough and take it into a real product. So. So it's great to meet you. Would love sort of introduction and quick background on yourself and then we can talk all about the business. Yeah.

So nice to meet you as well. I'm a huge fan. I'm excited for the Gong. I'm here for the Gong. So yeah. So Founder and CEO of Bord Bord is the first ever face to face gaming console that blends the best of board games and video games into an entirely new way to play. What we've done is taken a 24 inch touch screen and trained it to do something that no other screen does, which is recognize not just fingers and gestures but also physical game pieces. So it knows what the piece is, where it is on the board and what it's doing. So it's an entirely new way to play together.

Amazing. Walk through the kind of aha moment when you decided to to build this because again it's so obvious people love board games, people love video games. Why not put it together when you started thinking about this, did you look throughout history, was there any other attempts that stood out on things like this? Walk us through that kind of early creative process.

Yeah. So I always end up just building from personal frustration and pain. So I am the proud mom now of five kids. I've got two kids and three step kids. So amazing. Maybe I'll get my gong there. Ranging from 2 to 21. So we were just trying to figure out ways to connect and we would play board games and we'd have to play Candyland so my 2 year old could join or we'd try to play video games and the teenagers would smoke us because they've clocked so many hours on modern controllers. And it just felt like there had to be something that was a lot more fun and intuitive. And so really the unlock was like could we use a piece like a controller? So you put the spaceship down and it shoots. You put the stairs down and the characters walk up it and it was just really a way personally for me to bring my family together.

That's amazing. John is back with a gong. Hit it again once for bored once for the five kids second time. So how do you. What's it like kind of building the Console and the games themselves at the same time. And then do you plan to. I'm assuming you're planning to open up kind of a platform over time, but maybe start with the first question.

Yeah.

So, you know, I've always felt like if you really care about agreed experience, you kind of always end up wanting to control the full stack. In my last gig, I built a company called Mirror and we built custom hardware, software and content and same thing here. As you start to design the experience you want, you realize you need to control the hardware, the software and also the games. I think the hard part this time was the games. So finding the fun is not an easy formula. Getting the hardware and software to all work is incredibly challenging, required of a lot of deep technical knowledge. But you could keep making the games forever and then eventually you just decide you got to ship. But ultimately for us, we're building a platform and an ecosystem. So we want to build a place where people can come and build cool experiences around this shared screen using physical pieces. So it's really about building a place where other multibillion dollar businesses can be born.

This is one of the greatest like second company serial entrepreneur stories because I don't want to simplify it, but it's like Mirror was like a big screen on a wall and now it's a big screen on a table. A lot of the. There has to be so many like.

Well also it's also so many hardware. So many hardware companies just don't make it. So there is no second company because the founder gets so burnt out that they're like, I'm not doing that again.

Yeah, that's for sure.

But yeah, I guess. How do you think about. I feel like part of the success with Bored is like there will be a specific game that ultimately drives. I imagine it'll be somewhat of a power law. Video games are very power law driven. So it's like I'm sure you have confidence in the first game, but it's possible that it'll take a little bit or a while to have like the hit that makes the product go totally mainstream. So it's like, how do you balance that needing like the games being like a hits business, Right. There's been a bunch of board games and there's one Monopoly. Right?

Totally.

I mean we think about it really as our job is to show off what's possible with this new technology. So our job is to show the breadth of the portfolio. So we've got quick arcade hits to deep 3D spatial strategy games and really a Lot of incredible physical digital interactions. And we think that the great game is probably going to come from someone we don't know yet. So really our job is to just let a thousand flowers bloom and then see what happens. But we feel confident that with this, this first set of 12 launch games, we're kind of showing what's possible with this new way of playing. And we're really excited just to get people building on board.

Do you think that there are. It's exciting to see where the V2 of the technology where you can do unique games that take advantage of this hardware, specifically understanding that the pieces touch the screen and they're identifiable. But is there also some value just to being like, I've played Settlers of Catan on an iPad, like it is a good experience just because it's a good game. And so is there a world where you want to, on day one, take advantage of a particular app store or catalog that's already there? Even if you're not taking a big cut, you're just kind of bootstrapping the experience so that people are like, oh, well, I didn't like that game, but it's a 24 inch iPad and I was able to use the game that I liked on day one.

Yeah, I mean, this was like the big debate, right? New and native are porting IPs and we made the less safe choice, I would say, to go new and native because we felt we were doing something really novel and we had a really novel technology and we needed games that, that fit the tech. So, you know, the Wii Remote, unlocked Wii Sports and Swipe On Mobile, unlocked Angry Birds. And we felt like we have a similar, you know, a similar technology. But I think there's definitely a future where characters or IP that you're familiar with come alive in a new and native way on board. We've had a lot of exciting outreach from.

Yeah, I mean, even in the last 24 hours.

Yeah. So it's been, yeah, it's been quite a 24 hours of inbounds on Social for us. Not every day you get a Mick Jagger posting about your product within the first 24 hours. It's been fun.

That's amazing. Well, I also just bought one live here on the air. You can check Shopify. I love shop. I love Shopay. I'm like, I'm on the website, it's for sale. You're shipping these already? Is that correct or is it. I didn't even check.

So, yeah, it'll arrive in 2030. Jordy. Okay, 2035. Right around AGI is when you're going to get it? No, no, no.

We ship the week of 11:10, so shipping in a week or two.

Oh wow. Okay.

How did you plan around supply? This feels like the, like this could be the holiday gift of the season if you have the supply. Like how do you want. Have you been planning around inventory?

Yeah.

So one of the nice things about it being kind of the second go around is we're working with a tier 1cm out of Thailand who has a lot of experience with display products and so they're really adept at being able to scale inventory quickly as we start to get demand signals. But it's definitely going to be a busy holiday for all of us.

Yeah, it's crazy. John, can we get a gong for Mick Jagger? Kevin, one of the designers asked for it. Gong for Mick Jagger. Well, congratulations to the whole team. This is super exciting. I can't wait to try it. We'll have to. Well, I'm sure there'll be a game that we can play here on air to settle disputes and I'm excited to play with my family back home.

I love it.

Fantastic.

Thank you guys so much for having me.

Awesome. We'll talk soon.

What's the domain by the way?

Bored Fun.

Yeah. Board Fun. Available today at Board Fun.

Normally a dot com purist but. But Bored Fun.

Board Fun works.

Yeah, love it.

Me too. But you gotta go with the dot fun.

Yeah, very fun.

This is such an exciting story. I'm seriously so excited about this company. It's amazing. Just like the perfect founder everything. I'm very excited.

Congratulations. Did you announce last question. Did you announce fundraise already? Did you ever announce it is that.

We haven't yet so we raised 15 million in funding. We were lucky to have of funds we've worked with before. Lair box and then first round and then some new folks adjacent Patron Metrodora SV angel join so now kicking off our series a now.

Fantastic.

All right, well we'll chat about that. Another gong then. This was a very gong heavy segment but putting on a masterclass and yeah, can't wait to play.

Very excited.

Thanks guys.

Have a great rest of your day.

Cheers. Shop pay is just so good.

So good.

You can just buy stuff during interviews.

Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room but quickly let me tell you about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only Ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient Seamless ad buying across the globe. We have George Kurtz from CrowdStrike in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the show, George. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with us on this busy GTC part time of the year. We'd love to get an introduction on you and just a little bit of an overview of what's new in your world. What's new at GTC?

Sure. So George Kurtz, founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, leading provider of security solutions. And I think the big announcement, many big announcements at gtc, but certainly on the security side was continued partnership with Nvidia. We have AI's leader and securities leader coming together to provide greater protection for customers. And that was a big part of our announcement that Jensen went through. And you know, we're excited to be working with them. We've been working with them for years now and to see it all come together as part of GTC I think was just fantastic.

Yeah, take us a layer deeper. You could be, they could be a customer of yours. You're securing them as a company, you're baking it into the chips. There's a wide variety. You're buying chips from them. There's so many different ways to partner with Nvidia these days.

Yeah.

So as you know, and I think a big part of, of his talk was Nvidia being the platform company.

Yeah.

He sort of joked saying like, hey, you know, we don't even sell things to people. Like everything's embedded into other systems and you got to use the platform, which is part of what we've done. If you look at what they've come out with, they've got something called Nemotron, which are open models that customers can use and build their own AI agents. So really this particular announcement was focused on bringing security and visibility from an AI agent perspective to the edge. So we've got something called Charlotte, which is our agentic technology which allows our customers to identify and understand threats and do a lot of the work of what a security analyst would do, which many times is sort of a one to one relationship between a threat and an analyst. And now with our security AI agents, we can do the work of many analysts and one analyst can control those agents. So that's what Charlotte does. Now Charlotte, with this announcement has the ability to actually talk to other AI agents leveraging the Nebotron models and the NIM inference microservices. So as those agents are closer to where AI is created or on prem or in A data center, you want to have very quick visibility into what's happening. And in many times, customers have their own AI agents where they're not shipping maybe sensitive data to the cloud. It might be a network diagram or might be other sensitive information. So Charlotte can now talk to these other AI agents that are at the edge to make better decisions, and they're always continuously learning. So we're one of the premier security partners for Nvidia, and that was part of our announcement.

Does Vibe coding scare you?

I love vive coding.

I'm an investor.

I do it myself.

It's also good for good for CrowdStrike. Right. It's like people are going to just make a lot of software quickly. They probably need to spend more on cybersecurity too.

They do.

So the old joke many years ago was like, you'd have people come out of university and they would just go to any number of the repositories and they would just grab their code snippet and slap it in. And if something was poorly written, it would just propagate everywhere.

Right.

You'd have this big problem. And now some of the coding that you get, some is very good, but you have to give it the right prop is inefficient and it looks like an intern wrote it. So it's gotten a lot better in the later generations, but that does become potentially problematic. And given the rise of AI, the ability to actually find these software vulnerabilities has increased dramatically. I mean, we're seeing AI find more and more and more vulnerabilities and sort of leading the charge on these bug bounties because they're so efficient at finding software flaws.

CrowdStrike has something 10,000 employees. How do you think that. How are you thinking about human capital allocation over the next decade? Is AI changing your philosophy about the shape of the workforce? Yeah, yeah.

I think there's two pieces to it. One is on the security side, which is specific to how do you leverage AI agents to do more work on behalf of customer. And what we found is, at least in my mind, the more AI you have, the more work you can actually get done. And security is. You're always up against it. You're up against the clock from an adversary perspective. And there's just a. Just so much data to get through and so many threats that let the machine do what it's really good at. Let it sift through this data, let it figure out what's happening. And then again, what happens is those security analysts become really the pilots. Right where they're, they're piloting these AI agents and you can think about it akin to maybe, you know, a Waymo or you know, automated taxi or autonomous taxi, I should say, where you've got all these autonomous chauffeurs, but then you have sort of the pilot in the cloud, if you get stuck and I've been in, you know, these things where they've gotten stuck and they wait and you know, somebody pilots it, gives it a waypoint or what have you. And that's really how trans, how secure is going to be transformed, where the human is not going to be out of the loop, but they're going to be able to do so much more. So it's about helping people up, not out. That's the way I look at it from a security perspective. Now if I put my CEO hat on, I think most CEOs are looking at, well, how do you get efficiencies from AI in running a business and looking in areas like legal and sales, obviously encoding, how do you do more with the people you have? And I think the big thing is always like how do you flatten the hiring curve? Doesn't mean you're getting rid of a whole bunch of people. But if you could be more efficient because the people you have can do more, you can flatten the hiring curve, which you know, ultimately adds leverage to the business model. So we're always looking at how to take people and upskill them and train them up. And that's what we've done internally and that's also what we're looking at. For customers that are using security technology like CrowdStrike.

What's the, in your view, the most significant like gen gen AI related security incident to date that's public. Is there one that comes to mind? You're like, I usually hear about the ones that we try to keep them out of the headline. No, but we were talking the other day the fact that, that there's been this explosion of software and we, it didn't, we didn't immediately have one that came to mind that felt like squarely.

Pin on gen AI. It actually feels like we've been doing pretty well. Well on security.

Yeah, there's actually, this is sort of the scary part of where the industry is going. There was some, some new malware that was found that was basically gen AI malware or what I would call autonomous malware. So if you think about malware, you might, you know, you and your audience might be familiar with it. You know, you have a program that's bad and in the old days, the MacFee and semantics of the world used to have these databases that would go, okay, that's a bad file, or we're just not going to let it run. And over the years, companies like ours, we've created this sort of math model where without even seeing it, we can tell if something's bad and we block it. That's kind of old hat. But now the new malware is basically gen AI, meaning if it drops on your system, it looks like a script, it doesn't even look like a compiled program. And essentially it uses prompts to figure out, okay, what system are you on, what is unique about that, that system, what data can I harvest and how do I learn more about the network I'm on so I can pivot and I can jump to another system that might be more interesting. So the fact that it doesn't necessarily have command and control back to the pilot and it can do autonomously, that's fast.

It can reason.

Like the best security pen testers or like the best of the nation state actors that are piloting, piloting it themselves. So it's a pretty scary thought to have autonomous malware.

Did you start CrowdStrike so you could get more involved with motorsports?

Well, it's been a passion of mine, but it's been a big part of our overall brand. You probably see us, we love it. It's like huge fans and you know, our customers like it and it's just kind of part of the ethos, but it's, you know, it's been just part of what we've done early on.

Do you try to, do you try to get to as many of the F1 races as you as you can or what's your. Do you try to. Do you have to limit yourself? Because I know, we know, we know some sponsors and like they've got a pretty heavy travel schedule. They're like, we sponsor this team for the next two seasons. We're going to be at every race. And I'm like, you might want to work on your business.

But yeah, yeah, we actually just picked the big ones for us, obviously the big us ones. And then we have host customers at those. We actually have what we call CXO roundtables. So we combine security and the technology of motor racing and it's a passion. You know, security is a mission for a lot of people at CrowdStrike and a lot of our customers. I mean we can be doing lots of things, but we love the fight against the bad guys and to bring those people together to talk about the technology and the speed of cybersecurity and the risk management of cyber security. There's a lot of analogs into motor racing. It's speed, it's technology, it's data, it's risk taking or managing risk. And it's been a big part of I think just our brand.

It's incredible.

Fantastic.

Well, we will, we'll hopefully run into you at in Vegas for F1.

If you're going to be there, let's coordinate. We'll give you, give you a whole tour of the Mercedes paddock and the garage. We'll go, we'll go have some fun.

That'd be fantastic.

Well, next time there's a massive public security incident in Gen AI, we're going to give you a ring and we'll get you back on and have you break it down. But thank you, thank you for coming on and congrats on all the progress and thanks for keeping us safe out there. You got it.

Thanks guys. We'll talk soon.

Great to hang, George.

Have a good one. Bye. We should have done more time with him. I, I love crowdstrike because every time I get one I get nerd sniped by crowdstrike reports like all the time whenever there's like when solar winds happen. Like crowdstrike tells the story of it and they're always gripping and they do a ton of good work out there. So thank you to everyone at CrowdStrike to all 10,000 plus employees and thank you to Eight Sleep Eight Sleep.com get a Pod 5 Ultra. Get 5 year warranty, 30 hours free trial. Wow. Also thank you to bezel. Your bezel. Concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

I ran off screen for a second and caught Brian on the way out and he was saying like yeah. I told him like, yeah, I've been a little less healthy the last year running the show than historically. He's like, yeah, I've heard some of your eight sleep updates. Then you're in my sleep scores.

Brutal.

Well, I got a 90 last night.

Oh you did?

In the game.

Lost my phone. I don't know.

This is the.

This is an issue.

Do we have any more timeline? Meta. Meta is reporting earnings I believe right now or they already did. Meta stock sinks after tax hit ways on earnings. What? They're down like 9%.

Wait, what?

Wait, is that good?

Wait, who's down 9%? Meta Meta.

Why earnings? Missed earnings.

They missed earnings? Oh no.

Microsoft syncs on beat meta crashes 6% on EPS. Miss. Is it good that Microsoft is sinking on a beat? Is it over?

Is it over? No, it's not over for me. I got a 94. How'd you do?

I got a 90.

You got a 90? I beat you. Seven hours, nine minutes. Let's go. I'm sleeping well and that's all that matters. There's also a bombshell guest essay in the New York Times about OpenAI. One of the senior researchers who led product safety at OpenAI is taking shots at their messaging around erotic content. They have some data around how many people use AI or use ChatGPT in this erotic fashion. That's going to be a bigger, bigger story for sure. This is definitely going to grow, but hopefully there's guardrails. Hopefully there's more clear messaging on the actual transparency reports and the boundaries of how these apps get used. I realize that I don't know if I've actually age verified with OpenAI. Like, I don't know if I've ever actually scanned my id. And I mean, like, maybe this is a bull case for worldcoin or something, but I feel like I have a moral duty to upload my ID to ChatGPT because I care about you.

Keep it pretty PG. I don't want to. I don't want them releasing any of those adult features on your account.

Yes. But I want them to be able to clearly understand what an adult person is versus an underage person. And so it's important that they have a really strong data set of adults versus people who haven't age verified so they can classify the users effectively. What do you think?

I actually have uploaded my ID to OpenAI. There's a bunch of like your real ID. Yes. Obviously I don't have any other kinds of.

Chatgpt. Operator agent mode. Buy me a beer, deliver a six pack to me. Yes, Tyler, Thinking contacting the Instacart API and buying you a six six pack.

There are some products that you have to use the ID for. At least it's like the early version. So really like the Agent Builder.

Oh, Agent Builder. You have to ID verify.

At least it was in the days following, like when it came out your id.

I haven't heard anything about Agent Builder recently. What's going on over there?

I have not used it either.

You haven't been in building agents?

I don't know. I mean, it's not like a.

We should try to model. We should try and build an agent that does something for tvpn.

That buys beer.

That buys beer for Interns. Yes, Bobby. Cosmic shout out to John for providing data to improve the system. Thank you. That's what it's all about. No, but seriously, if you want to keep the bad stuff out of the underage users, you gotta know who's of age and who's underage and so you should be strongly in favor.

Many people have said you have the mind of a child.

Yeah. Brian Johnson, he has. I think his biological age is like 19. I did a test on my brain, said I have the mind of a five year old.

A lot of dinosaur questions, constantly running deep research reports on.

I do love slapstick comedy. Nothing like a story of a. Of a leopard and a monkey falling off a boat and going splat. That's the pinnacle of comedy.

Or having the mind of a five year old and being like why are clouds.

Exactly.

And then running a deep research report.

Yes, this is the key to.

What are clouds in your nose? This is the key why. More news. Apparently MasterCard is planning to acquire zero hash for nearly 2 billion. ZeroHash is a crypto infrastructure player. They've been at it quite a long time and pretty serious move from them. We should wait to kind of assess earnings since we can't listen or read any of the transcripts live. Exactly. But fortunately we'll be back tomorrow.

And John, in the meantime, find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. There's a bunch more stories but we can get to them tomorrow. We will talk to you later.

Have a great beautiful, productive evening night. See you tomorrow.

Goodbye.

Cheers.