SpaceX Financials, Chimpanzee Civil War, Ferrari's Brand Legend | Josh Reeves, Prof. Alex Young, Jason Kim, Chad Janis, Jordan Bramble, Andy Dunn

You're watching TVPN.

Today's Friday, April 10th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. We have a professor from UCLA Human Genetics, Alex Young, coming in person to break down polygenetic embryo selection, critique some industry claims, and discuss the future of genetic optimization. With Jason Kim, the CEO of Firefly Space, coming on while the astronauts are in in transit back to Earth. We also have Chad Janice.

He's somewhat of a spaceman himself.

Yeah, there's some big news there. The founder and CEO of Groon, which just was acquired by Unilever for $1.2 billion. We're gonna talk about his journey building that company, an incredible success.

Just over 3 years. Yeah, really, really creating 300, almost basically $1 million of EV a day for 3 years.

Yeah, it was crazy. Jordan Bramble, the co-founder and CEO of Antares Industries, is coming on to talk about nuclear energy, which will be very interesting. And then Andy Dunn, you might know him from Bonobos. Now he's the founder of Pie. It's trending in the App Store. We're gonna talk about building a social app focused on mobile.

App of the day yesterday.

Yeah, app of the day. And then Josh Reeves, co-founder and CEO of Gusto, is coming on to break down the acquisition of Mozy. And building an all-in-one SMB operating system. The news on Artemis II is exciting. Today is splashdown day, if you've been tracking it. It's been over a full week at this point. It's 13 minutes of things that have to go right, NASA said, of reentry and splashdown with the first astronauts from the moon in over 50 years. After an epic trip to the moon and back, it's landing day for the 4 astronauts of NASA's Artemis II mission. For the first time in over 53 years, astronauts are returning to Earth the moon, a fiery 13-minute plunge through Earth's atmosphere at about 24,000 miles an hour will subject them to degrees and temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit with only their heat shield for protection. Feels fast.

Feels like they just left.

Yeah, it does. So if you're looking to actually track the mission, the Artemis II Orion capsule will return to Earth tonight, April 10th, at 8:00 PM Eastern, 5:00 PM, 5:07 Pacific. Pacific splashdown is in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, not far from here, returning home on the ship to end a 10-day trip to the moon are the NASA astronauts who we followed, and they seem very, very happy. They just woke up for landing day. Very—

What is the exact splashdown time?

5:07 PM Pacific.

Nice.

So we'll be tracking that. In other space news, SpaceX has some financials going out in the information today. SpaceX posted nearly $5 billion loss last year from AI spending. Well, but they generated $18.5 billion in revenue, two people familiar with the figures said. This is from Cory Weinberg in the information. The financial figures include XAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence company that SpaceX acquired in February. The net loss, as well as other financial figures that consolidate SpaceX and XAI's performance, haven't been previously reported, but now They are here.

Yeah, I think everyone was expecting this.

Yeah.

SpaceX, very profitable company, bought, acquires a very unprofitable company.

Yep. Combined, but new opportunity and all in the pursuit of vertical integration. And so SpaceX has closely guarded its financials as it prepares for what will likely be the largest IPO of all time. The loss figure shows that investors who participate in the IPO will essentially be financing Musk's unproven AI ambitions in order to get a piece of high-performing commercial space and telecom firm. But that's sort of been the Tesla model for a long time. Elon has always had multiple irons in the fire, one project that's working and producing cash flow and growing to finance the next piece of innovation. Ashley Vance has an interesting deep dive on the Tesla semi-truck factory. He went and saw it rolling off the factory line, which was one of those projects that has been rumored for a very long time, announced a very long time ago, but seems to be getting off the ground. Tesla's spent heavily on chips and data centers to power xAI with capital expenditures for the division nearing $13 billion. So lots of CapEx. That was 50% more capital spending than the rocket and satellite divisions combined. It is crazy how quickly you can spend a lot of money on a data center versus, you know, you'd think a satellite manufacturing facility or a rocket manufacturing facility would be the most expensive thing, but it is in fact not. And I think—

Yeah, what's that other, what's the company that Dallian backed?

Yeah, the satellite bus company in—

I'm forgetting the name of it, but like wildly profitable. Yeah. It's been pretty astonishing to see space companies, which you would just assume would lose money indefinitely, actually figuring out ways.

Was it Endurosat?

Endurosat, yeah, Endurosat. And when we talked to the founder of Endurosat, sound like there was a lot of really important manufacturing, but it wasn't at the level of like buying tools from ASML and spending $100 million on a single machine. I think ASML's lithography machines are up to like $400 million and there's a huge backlog. So if you, you know, the chip expenditures can get really, really high. SpaceX's core business of selling rocket launch services to governments and companies, as well as selling its own Starlink satellite internet services together generated nearly $8 billion $8 billion in EBIT, in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, and stock-based compensation in 2025. So $8 billion in EBITDA, that is a fantastic number for SpaceX, a very, very solidly profitable business there at the core. The two space-related divisions are intertwined with most SpaceX launches of its Falcon 9 launch, with most SpaceX launches of its Falcon 9 launches carrying Starlink satellites rather than other companies' payloads. And I saw another piece about how there's still way more demand than supply just in the launch market broadly. A lot of companies have spun up with big plans to put things into orbit. We talked to a founder yesterday who's doing a new GPS system in low Earth orbit. And so there's a lot of demand for launch and Elon, and the rest of the space industry seemingly can't make rockets fast enough. I'm excited to talk to Jason Kim of Firefly Aerospace about the launch market broadly, going to the moon, and what else Jason has planned in the orbital economy, the lunar economy, the space economy. Overall, including its AI division, the company generated just over $6.5 billion in adjusted EBITDA. SpaceX's depreciation of chips, rockets, and satellites was among the largest expense, topping $6.6 billion. Other large costs were stock-based comp and interest expense, which neared $2 billion. For SpaceX bulls, the company's allure is its dominance in the commercial space market where it sends by far the most payloads into space, lapping competitors. Although we've seen some good stuff out of Rocket Lab and also Blue Origin recently, but there's no question that SpaceX has a dominant hold on the launch market. That could further its ability to catch up in the AI race in the coming years if it can bring down the cost of launching solar-powered data centers into orbit as Musk has said he wants to do. SpaceX is hosting investor meetings this month sending invitations to a 2-day IPO pitch, a sales pitch in southern Texas and Tennessee, where it launches its new rocket and is building data centers, respectively. In February, Musk orchestrated the merger of SpaceX, his crown jewel, and xAI, the AI model company he founded to rival OpenAI. The company combined— the combined company is planning to go public in June, which will be a very, very exciting time for the market. And we'll be covering it, of course, on the show. There's more back and forth about XAI, David Sachs is happy that XAI is the first AI company to challenge Colorado law requiring it to censor truthful answers if they could have a differential impact on protected groups. He wants the First Amendment to apply to AI. And so Sachs has written about this and talked about it on the All In podcast. In other XAI news, XAI approached Black Forest Labs about licensing its AI image technology in recent months. but the startup declined, Wired has learned from Max Zeff. The companies had a similar deal back in 2024, but Black Forest Labs is now trying to focus on training AI models to power robots and smart glasses. That's very interesting. So it appears that Black Forest Labs was sort of serving as like the Midjourney to the Meta vibes powering that first Grok Imagine mode. But maybe there was a consideration of, well, if you're going to be working with this company, but also in competition with them because they're training new models, maybe you wanna go and carve out a separate niche that's more defensible.

Also, Elon had shared, I think earlier this week or late last week, that they're training a new version of Imagen in Colossus 2.

Yeah, exactly. So Black Forest Labs has 70 people and is taking on Silicon Valley's giants. And this is from the HumanX conference in San Francisco. It's in Wired. You can go and read it. Max Zeff has the report. Alex Tabarrok had an interesting debate around the unemployment rate and how things might shape up with AI developments. He writes, AI, Unemployment, and Work, trying to square different efficiency gains and how this might impact the economy and the future of work. So he says, imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. And I agree, that would be completely unprecedented. We really have never had more than 10% unemployment for any sustained period of time. It would be complete—

Yeah, Great Depression was something around 30, 35%.

Yeah, it did get high, but in the modern era, even during COVID I mean, brief spikes above 10, but in general.

Yeah, so I'm saying like worst it's ever been?

Yeah, this would be bad. So then he says, "Now imagine I told you that AI was gonna create a 3-day work week. That sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation, these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours." So even if you think AI is gonna have a tremendous effect on work, The difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution. It is not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that position is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general-purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work then over the pure AI effect on work, declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example, this would naturally have that effect. So you could just have more bank holidays, more government holidays, and sort of ramp towards a lower, like a shorter work week, essentially. Nor is this argument purely theoretical. So he shares some historical facts here. Between 1870 and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about 40%. From nearly 3,000 hours per year to about 1,800 hours. Hours fell, but employment did not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement, and life expectancy all increased. In fact, in 1870, about 30% of a person's entire life was spent working. People worked, slept, and died. Today, it's closer to about 10%. That feels very low, but when you think about it, you know, So if you're working 40 hours a week and there's, what is it, 160 hours in a week, 24 times 7. Can I do that in my head?

Oops.

What is it?

I typed the wrong number. It's 168. Yeah. So 40 divided by—

Never do mental math while podcasting.

So 23, 24% of just a normal work week is spent working if you're working a 40-hour week. And then, of course, you don't work until you're 18, roughly, maybe 20.

Right.

If you're in college. And then retirement. And so, that pushes it down to something like 10% on average according to this report. What do you think?

I mean, doesn't this still depend on how many days you have in a week, right? Because I have more days in my day, right?

Oh, yes, yes, because you've manipulated time.

Yes.

Yeah, yes. What time did you wake up today? 4 AM? 3 AM?

Yeah, 1 AM.

2 AM?

1 to 5 is my first day. And then I go to sleep and then like 5 to 10 is my second day and so on.

The real trick is just waking up so early that you're waking up at noon the day before. So if you wake up at noon Sunday and start your Monday then, you're just way ahead of everyone. People are waking up at 4 AM, you're up at noon the day before, you're good to go.

And then you need to go to sleep at like They don't want you to know this.

They don't want you to know this.

Rick Ross talks about this.

Yes. So thus, in the past 100 years or so, the amount of work in a person's lifetime has fallen by about two-thirds, and the amount of leisure, including retirement, has increased. We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure. There's no reason we cannot do it again. I like this. It's a bit of a white pill. There's a lot of fear about unemployment, and this is sort of a different path. It might require government intervention. Government intervention. It might require a new social contract or new, just new holiday creation from the government, but it certainly seems possible. There's some reactions to this. Alex is more correct than incorrect, but he glosses over an important caveat. The difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution. It's not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable. If there's one thing we've learned over the past decades, is that even welfare-improving changes such as increases in international trade and technological progress do result in distributional effects, even often severe ones like Rust Belt cities and deaths of despair. It's not all nice Milo Minderbinder where everyone gets a share, or to put it another way, Schumpeter's creative destruction still involves destruction. And so people are going back and forth on this, but it does set one perspective on a positive outcome.

Fact-checking myself, the most commonly cited peak US unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 24.9%. I thought it had gotten— got up to the 30s, but—

OK. Well, there's a fun article in the Wall Street Journal, a very bizarre article about a deadly civil war that tore apart a group of chimpanzees in Uganda. Not exactly a fun article, but it's gripped everyone, and everyone is wondering what is going on here with these monkeys. A chimp group's success may have led to its violent downfall, a new study suggests.

So slow news week, very slow news week when the Wall Street Journal is reporting on a deadly civil war. They're among—

yeah, chimpanzees. It's just, it's just a crazy thing. I don't think many people knew that this was even possible, but let's read through it and try and understand what's going on. A rare and deadly civil war has broken out between two factions of chimps in Africa, according to new research. The dispute erupted in what was once a cohesive group of about 200 chimps whose ties stretch back 2 decades. It just took 3 years for them to turn on each other, according to a new study in the Journal of Science. We've known for a long time that chimpanzees will attack and kill their neighbors, said primatologist John Mitani, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan. And Go Blue. And a study co-author. It turns out they will do this even when those neighbors are former friends and allies.

So I'm just reading this from the lens of the technology industry.

Yes, many, many cases. There is, this is potentially a metaphor. For 20 years, the chimps of Uganda's Kibale National Park were living the good life by being together, Mitani said. They helped one another, dominated and killed apes from neighboring groups, expanded their territory, and boosted their babies' chances of survival. But in 2015, the group started splitting into two clusters. Several male chimps who had bridged cliques within the larger group died from disease, weakening social ties. Around the same time, a new alpha male rose to dominance. Changes in the dominance hierarchy can fuel more aggression and tension, said Aaron Sandel, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Study co-author. As aggression escalated, the factions drifted into separate areas of the park. By 2018, the split was complete. This is, it's interesting, it took like 10 years to do this full study, I guess, since this all started back in 2015. But by 2018, the study was complete. The two groups had no remaining social or reproductive ties between them. The last chimp infant with parents from different groups was born in 2015. What was once the center of the group's territory became a border which chimps patrolled, the researchers found. Then the hostilities began in earnest. Members of the smaller group of the two groups launched coordinated lethal attacks on the other, aiming to kill rival adult males. By 2021, these raids had expanded to target younger apes, averaging several infant deaths a year ago. So since— that was a year ago. And there's a video here of the encounter between these two rival groups and they're fighting it out. It's crazy. So more than 24 apes have died as a result of the conflict. That's horrible. The true death toll is probably higher given that so many chimps, there are so many chimps in a large area, some deaths go unrecorded. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed what may have been a similar split.

Is it, but sorry to jump in, but. You know, this group of apes has been being, has been studied for, sounds like over 10 years now. At any point did they think like, hey, let's break it up?

I don't know.

Is that, is the ethical thing to do to let them continue to fight? Yeah. At what point do you step in? How many apes, how many chimps need to die before, hey, let's stop the research project and let's— step in.

I don't know, it's an important question.

Tyler, we may have an assignment for you this weekend.

I think you need to hop on a plane. Let's see if there's any more about this. I mean, there is, you know, like for a lot of these studies, observation, you want to be hands-off and not putting your finger on the scale, I guess.

But number one, number one comment, put any 200 humans together and the same thing will happen. You only need 20 humans if it's an HOA.

It's a little, it's a little Stanley Milgram prison experiment vibes.

It's very, I think it's very Girardian, right? 'Cause you have the two warring groups, mimetic rivalry, right? They're exactly like each other and you gotta fight it out and you have the scapegoat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed what may have been a similar split and subsequent violence among chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1970s, but the findings have long been debated because most of the observations were in an area where humans regularly fed the chimps, altering group makeup, size, and aggression. So maybe that's— maybe you should be feeding the monkeys to keep them happy, I guess, or the chimpanzees. With these chimps, researchers aren't certain what prompted the split, but said it's possible the apes were victims of their own success. The group grew large, and even though resources were abundant, the chimps may have perceived increased competition for food and mates. The once smaller of the two chimp groups is now the larger one because its members have killed so many rivals. They observed more lethal attacks. It's an ongoing conflict, they said. And the conversation is ongoing in the—

I think actually this does make sense that it got too big, right? Because you have this idea of Dunbar's number.

So you have 150 people.

The group of chimpanzees gets above 150, it's at like 200. And then you have the kind of war scenario.

The calling, you think?

Because you can't know everyone, right? Chimps can't know each other.

Would Dunbar number be the same for chimpanzees as humans? I wonder if anyone's ever studied that.

I mean, you assume that there's some lineage there that it's like stays relatively similar.

Yeah, Jane Goodall passed away last year and had an obituary in the Wall Street Journal that was very interesting. I think we touched on it briefly. Briefly, but we can go through a little bit more of it. Jane Goodall always remembered the first time a wild chimpanzee took a banana from her outstretched hand. In that moment, she would often say, the chimp, a grizzled male she had dubbed David Greybeard, welcomed her into a community of humanity's closest living relatives. It opened a relationship with wildlings that in due course upended scientific misconceptions about chimpanzees and turned her into a a global icon of conservation. As an untrained young woman in the summer of 1960, she first ventured into the forest of what is now Gombe National Park near Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania to study chimpanzees. Equipped with little more than a notebook, a pair of binoculars, and almost infinite patience, for 5 months though, the wary creatures evaded her. If in fact no No one had ever been able to study them at close hand. By winning Greybeard's trust, she gained entry to the troop of wild chimps that became the focus of her life's work. The chimps had accepted me, and gradually, I was able to penetrate further and further into a magic world that no human had ever explored before, the world of the wild chimpanzees. She died of natural causes in California last year. But she spoke with the Wall Street Journal before passing, urging people to continue fighting to slow climate change and the loss of biodiversity. We have a window of time, but it's not a very big window of time, she said, adding that the key is ordinary people, corporations, and business leaders getting together to enact change. Economic development, she said, cannot continue to come before the environment.

John?

Yes.

Why is no one talking about Ferrari?

Well, they're about to be.

Because the, the good folks over at Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal are in the Wall Street Journal today. They are writing about why Ferrari is unlike any other luxury brand, according to the hosts of Acquired. Yeah. And we can get into this. They say the business of Ferrari looks simple. Make fast cars and not too many of them. On the surface, this strategy of scarcity and tantalizing exclusivity seems remarkably similar to the classic playbook of other storied luxury brands, as if Ferrari's cars are just Hermès bags and Rolex watches on four wheels. But Ferrari has something that Hermès and Rolex could never cultivate: hordes of screaming fans who worship the brand from the time they can say vroom vroom. Few teenagers hang posters of Birkin bags in their bedroom, but droves of them have the sight of F40s and Testarossas seared into their brains long before they can get behind the wheel. Despite selling a grand total of 330,000 cars over the course of its entire history.

That's really not a lot. I didn't realize it was so low. I mean, I know that many of the limited releases are like a few thousand, but you'd think— I guess they don't have a Lamborghini Urus that's more mass-produced. Everything's pretty limited.

Yeah.

So they have more than 400 million fans worldwide. And no company has a higher ratio of people who know about its products to people who actually own those products. Far from cheapening the brand, Ferrari's rabid base of superfans only enhances the brand's appeal to clients who can afford to pay millions of dollars for a car they will rarely drive.

I like—

just to put the 330,000 lifetime sales into context, Ford sold 2.2 million vehicles just in the United States last year.

Last year.

Wow.

And that 330,000 is global over the lifetime.

Yeah, that's crazy.

Of the company.

I really like Ben and David writing in the Journal for this. It's a great way to promote the new episode, but it also just— there's enough of their voice from the show in this, but it still lends itself to the Wall Street Journal op-ed vibes, which I love. Far from cheapening the brand, Ferrari's rabid base of super for fans only enhances the brand's appeal to clients who can afford to pay millions of dollars for a car they will rarely drive. As we learned when we spent hundreds of hours understanding the company's history and business strategy for the upcoming Acquired podcast episode, the genius of Ferrari is the way it has weaponized that set of Italian contradictions and bolted the business model of luxury onto a beloved professional sports franchise.

They better have each acquired a Ferrari during the—

I think they did get Rolexes.

They did it with Rolex, so they had to do it.

Maybe it's going to be a very expensive habit if they, uh, if they keep doing all the— all the— they do— oh, now we're doing Bugatti, now we're doing Koenigsegg, now we're doing, uh, uh, you know, Lamborghini, etc. Uh, when Enzo Ferrari established his, uh, eponymous company in 1947, Wow. Creating a luxury brand was the furthest thing from his mind. He was obsessed with building the world's fastest cars to conquer the booming world of auto racing. To do that, he also built a clever business model. Like many of his rivals, he built cars for his own racing team and sold them on the side. Unlike Mercedes and Ford, whose racing garages and consumer car factories might as well have been located on different planets, the same Ferrari employees in the hills of Maranello Italia, built substantially the same cars, whether they were selling them to customers or racing them at Le Mans. The model created a beautiful feedback loop. Scuderia Ferrari's success in Grand Prix races stoked greater awareness and desire for private client road cars. The profits from those client sales fueled the research and development that turbocharged La Scuderia's performance back on the track. It was a fantastic strategy through the 1950s and '60s, filled with with F1 championships and notable clients. But by the time Enzo died in 1988, the business was struggling. After a 50% sale of the company to Fiat in 1969, Ferrari was losing money and furloughing workers due to a misguided strategy of overproduction. Even more unfathomable today is that the cars were just sitting there at the dealerships waiting to be sold. Can you imagine Ferraris that you could drive off the lot? Yeah, that is not the case today. The company's future was very much in doubt when it found a savior in Enzo's one-time protégé, Luca Montezemolo. Montezemolo. I'm bad at pronouncing that. A blue-eyed Italian aristocrat with a steady hand to pull off a U-turn at Ferrari. 15 years earlier, he was the young Ferrari team manager who had engineered the Prancing Horse's last run of Formula One dominance. To the Trefosi in their unmistakable Ferrari red. He was so popular that he could have run for president of Italy. He left Ferrari in 1977, rising to chief executive of a drinks company and organizing the 1990 World Cup in Italy. He had traveled the world and mingled with the elite by the time Fiat Scion Gianni Agnelli brought him back to Maranello as chairman and gave him a specific mandate: rescue Ferrari by any means necessary. So the visionary saw immense potential lying in the wreckage of Ferrari's road car business. Instead of positioning the product as a domesticated race car, he realized that this was Ferrari's chance to sell something less tangible but infinitely more valuable: the fulfillment of every fan's childhood dreams. Rather than driving off a lot, clients could fly to Italy and take their cars out for a rip around the test track that Michael Schumacher practiced on the day before. The interiors would be made of leather that rivaled Prada's. Unlike Ferrari's untamed beasts of old, you could enjoy driving them somewhat regularly without fear of breaking down on the way to the store. The engines could still rocket drivers to 200 miles an hour on a moment's notice, but now they would be signed by the craftspeople who made them. By pursuing the counterintuitive strategy, he transformed transform Ferrari into a new kind of company, like Hermès smashed together with Manchester United. Other luxury brands manufacture desire through scarcity. Other sports teams benefit from shared emotional attachments. Ferrari does both. It breeds a mass fandom that somehow makes the company's most exclusive product even more valuable. By 1997, the business had returned to meaningful profitability for the first time in years, despite making fewer cars. He slashed production from 4,561 cars when he arrived to just 2,289 2 years later. Once he put his strategy in motion, Ferraris were no longer sitting around like Fords. Suddenly there was a waiting list to buy them. In the decades since then, it has become clear that his innovation dug a moat around the company that no competitor has been able to cross. To this day, other racing teams may pass Ferrari on the track, and other carmakers may challenge Ferrari on the road, but no business can offer luxury, maniacal freedom, and nearly a century of unbroken sporting heritage all rolled into a product that's rarely seen but instantly recognizable on any street in the world. What a great—

Full episode drops Monday. Very excited for that.

Yeah.

But I think my, my, my, we have some data here from Goldman Sachs that is actually Goldman Sachs Research Division. Has a Ferrari residual value tracker. So they just keep track of the secondary market.

Oh, interesting.

And so we can read through some of this, but it's interesting 'cause like processing that article, personally, I feel like they're back in the exact same spot that they were before that turnaround where they're making too many cars, they're making cars that people don't want. They're building up people, even the F80, like the hardcore fans, the people that may not even own a Ferrari but are just like fans of the brand across the board, like whether you could buy an F80 or you're just like a hardcore fan, like nobody's like that excited about it. I just think it very much feels like they've lost their way on a number of And on a personal level, the car that I think I'm most excited about that they've been kind of testing and teasing is the street version of the 296 Challenge.

Oh, sure.

They're making a street-legal version. Is that XX? No, that's the SF90XX, which is very hyped right now. But unclear how that'll trade over. Over time. But the 296 Challenge, the street, uh, legal version of it, is like ditching the hybrid, which I think will be very appealing to people. It's just going to be like a more raw, like, driver-focused car.

Yeah.

Um, anyways, from Goldman Sachs, uh, they say our GS Ferrari Residual Value Index tracks used Ferrari listings across, uh, 5 key markets. We view this proprietary data set as central to the race equity thesis, given that Ferrari's scarcity-led model has historically resulted in its used vehicles commanding a premium in the secondary market. Our index has declined 7% year over year as of March 2026, though month over month has seen a promising increase of 1.6%. And they still are rating the stock as a buy, even though it's dropped pretty dramatically as of late. But they say continued stabilization across regions with Germany and Japan improving. Powertrain gap widens as non-hybrids continue to outperform. So they've made so many different hybrid cars, everything from like the 296 to the SF90, of course. And people, you know, these cars are very fun to drive, but they haven't been fun to own and they just haven't been holding up, holding up well. People like their ICE Ferraris. Specials resilience underlines continued strength of business model. So basically the cars that are still actually exclusive, like the 812 Comp, 458, 488 Pista, things like that are really, really outperforming. So basically All the mass market stuff is like brutal to own. And the cars that are actually limited are still outperforming. And so I think this is why I think they need to do what they did before, whereas cut production from like 4,500 cars a year down to under 2,500. Obviously, we're at a much different scale today, but still they need to do a pretty dramatic cut.

Well, there's an update in the MedVie story. The New York Times updated their article to share some new information. Lulu has some takes here. Let's start with Alex Cohen though. He said, friend got a marketing email from MedVie this morning. Email copy aside, the provider they are using in the screenshot is an actual doctor, not an NP, who is, real name is Alex Weir. When he is completely unaffiliated with Medby. And so there are more concerns about the company bubbling up. Lulu says, more press isn't better. For example, huge self-own for the Medby guy to do this New York Times article. The company clearly wasn't ready for scrutiny, and it made no sense to invite it. But some just can't resist the flattery and excitement of getting profiled. So the New York Times added an editor's note after this article was published Many readers noted that MedVie was facing legal and regulatory actions for its business practices. Our piece should have included that information to give readers a fuller picture of the scrutiny that the company was facing. We have updated the article to note a warning letter from the FDA and pending class action lawsuit accusing MedVie of violating California's anti-spam law. It was really hard to follow this piece because as we were digging through it, we were like, okay, there's pieces of this that sound like worth digging into, like the margins, the growth, like what's actually happening here? Because the main claim was like one, one person, $1 billion company, and you could latch on to, oh, well, there's two people. But and, you know, what's the, what's the marketing cost? What's the, you know, what's going on under the hood? How much, how much does it cost to actually deliver the service? But quickly, once people started digging in, they found a whole bunch of other are sort of concerning elements that need to be looked into. Some of them can be dealt with if it's just, you know, if they react to the FDA and the FDA clears them, they could be in a good place, but it was—

Do you think if they had to sell the business today, they would be able to get anywhere close to $1 billion? No, no.

But even in the clean bill of health, with no controversies over the FDA warning letter and the pending class action lawsuit, it was hard to justify the billion-dollar valuation necessarily based on the fact that it was potentially giving up a huge amount of margin to the rest of the supply chain. But hopefully they will sort that out and wind up building a great company. There's more back and forth on the New York Times Satoshi discourse. Evan Ratliff, chimed in, who he wrote The Mastermind, which was the book that I recommended to Joe Weisenthal about Paul Le Roux, who was at one point suggested to be Satoshi. And so, there's a whole timeline out there about various Satoshi accusations. He says, "I hesitate to enter the New York Times Satoshi discourse, and I have a huge amount of admiration for John Coogan." This is Evan Ratliff writing. But since he unequivocally claims to have solved the mystery and links to A Piece of Mine as a failed attempt to do so, false, I wanted to share a few thoughts. He said the story that he wrote, Evan, for Wired was about speculation around whether Paul Le Roux could be Satoshi. And I wanted Paul Le Roux to be Satoshi so badly. It was such an interesting wildcard pick that no one, it wasn't really on anyone's bingo card. And Paul Le Roux had such a gripping story, that it would have been a wild twist and turn. So Evan had spent 5 years on a book about Le Roux, and he had wondered this. And so, he said he certainly held the largest archive of reporting that could contain proof that Paul Le Roux was in fact Satoshi Nakamoto. But if you actually read to the end of the Wired story that he published, he says, I know, I know, its conclusion isn't about claiming Le Roux was Satoshi, but about the the dangers of motivated reasoning in trying to do so, a lesson I respectfully think could have been valuable to heed in the Times case. I tapped the sign about setting out to prove one Satoshi candidate strategy again last year after the HBO documentary, and ultimately, that approach is not much of an investigation, more like a gradual winnowing of the facts to the ones that you like. I'll leave others to critique, dissect, trumpet the assertions, in the Times. Obviously Adam Back could be Satoshi, which is why he's been a top candidate for many people for a long time, and gets asked about Satoshi and their email exchanges regularly, including in the past by Evan himself. The fact that he both denies it and is often so game to discuss it either scrambles your Satoshi motivation narrative or reinforces it based on what you already believe. And so Joe Ezenthals still having fun following the Adam Back thing, because Adam Back has been reposting a ton of like basically anything that links him to Satoshi. He's been having fun amplifying and sort of playing into it. And hopefully we can get Adam Back on the show and ask him more about it. Anyway, we have our next guest live here in person in the TVPN Ultra Dome. Let's bring in Alex Young. He's a professor at UCLA. Welcome to the show.

How are you?

How are you doing?

Good.

Yeah, nice to meet you.

Thanks so much for taking the time to come down to the show in the studio. Why don't you introduce yourself first?

Yeah, I'm Alex Young. I'm a professor in statistical genetics at UCLA Med School. And I'm also an advisor to Heracyte, a company doing advanced genetic testing in IVF.

Yeah, what drew you to Heracyte in particular?

Well, I had a realization that— this technology— so the technology that they've developed is applying genetic testing to embryos so you can predict their disease risks or traits. I had a realization that that was a very powerful technology and an incredibly important application of a lot of the research that I was doing. But there were already some companies in that space. And I didn't find any of them that serious about doing really innovative R&D. And Hericide actually approached me in 2023 with really an intriguing idea to develop an algorithm, and I kind of couldn't resist doing that. So I decided to get involved and we ended up creating, creating some good technology.

What have been the key milestones in embryo selection technology? Like how much of it is is machines in the lab better data collection versus more on the algorithm computational side?

Well, I mean, IVF has been around for a while. And genetic testing in IVF is not new. So I think even back in the '90s, they were doing sex selection to avoid certain sex-linked diseases. And there are other tests already developed, such as PGTM, which looks for Mendelian disease genes. So they're like cystic fibrosis or something like that. And then also tests to look for chromosomal abnormalities, PGTA. So those tests were more about being able to get like lab— a lot of that was lab innovation, being able to get the genetic data from the embryos. Now, this new wave of technology that Hericide and some of the other companies developing, that's grown out of the research program in human genetics, which is much more computational. It's been enabled by the massive drop in the cost of sequencing technology that's happened over the past 20 years. So that's created huge genetic data sets, these big what we call biobanks, places like UK Biobank was like the flagship one where you have like 500,000 people with their whole whole genome data and all of their medical records and things like education as well. So that's enabled us to create these predictors called polygenic scores.

Sure.

And they're, they're the things that, that we can now apply in IVF. And that's sort of more of a computational aspect than a lab aspect, I would say.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, give me some history on the UK Biobank. It feels like a big step to share that much information publicly. I assume it's somewhat anonymized, but what are the considerations with sharing genetic data and associated traits? Obviously, there's a medical benefit, but how do individuals grapple with that trade-off?

Yeah, well, UK Biobank took a much more liberal attitude towards allowing people to access that data. So it's kind of sad, actually, that— so they were kind of the first big biobank. And it wasn't originally designed purely for genetic data. It was designed for sort of medical epidemiology. And then they added genetic data to it. And they made it very easy for both companies and for academic researchers to access that data. And it's had— 10, 100x the impact of other biobanks, including, you know, the US has been quite behind actually in that respect. And a lot of other genetic datasets are really hard to access and are actually, you're actually barred from accessing them for commercial uses. So yeah, I would commend UK Biobank for taking this, this more liberal approach that, you know, you have to protect the informed consent and privacy of the of the participants. But I think sometimes the restrictions that are put on other data sets really have hampered the development of both the research side, but then also the commercialization of genomics.

How powerful is the technology these days? How good are we at detecting diseases? I imagine that there's some diseases that we're very good at? What's the best case study right now?

Yes, I mean, if you're talking about in the sort of IVF context, where that's most powerful is diseases where you have a particular gene, a particular position in the genome that has an outsized effect on the risk of that disease. So if you look at something like type 1 diabetes or Alzheimer's, there are certain— genes in the genome that have a really large impact. And if you're someone, if you're a couple and one of you carries one of those major risk genes, then doing this embryo selection can drastically reduce the risk. You can probably pretty much eliminate the risk of passing on type 1 diabetes, for example, and drastically reduce the risk of passing on Alzheimer's disease. Now, there are other more what we'd call more complex diseases like type 2 diabetes or various cancers. And there, it's a bit less effective, but it can still be quite effective. You can roughly say half the risk your offspring gets some disease. And if that disease is present in your family history, then that can be quite a substantial absolute risk reduction. So you could go from something like 20% risk of type 2 diabetes to 10%. Percent risk in your offspring.

Yeah. What's the progress? Has progress been faster on the screening side or on the actual drug development and treatment side? I mean, we've seen the peptide boom, the GLP-1 boom. There's a new major biotech acquisition every few days now. It feels like the pace is accelerating in actual drug development. But what are you seeing actually being unlocked by new technologies?

Well, yeah, human genetic data has been incredibly important in drug development. You've seen big pharmaceutical companies like Regeneron. They hired a lot of the best people from— I was at Oxford for my PhD, and a lot of the best people from Oxford ended up getting hired by Regeneron to set up a big new genetics center. And they've amassed a huge data set there. 10 million people or something now. And that's definitely driving target discovery in the pharmaceutical industry. So that's been where a lot of the investments come. The sort of IVF and screening side has been maybe a more neglected part of the potential of human genetic data. Partly, I would say, for political and ideological— there are a lot of people who are opposed to this technology. So I suffered some career consequences for getting involved in this industry myself.

What happened?

Well, when it came out that I'd been involved in Heresight, I mean, some people said some unpleasant things about me, but I don't really care about that. But I also had some collaborators pull out of a paper I had in review at Nature. And I also had a job offer rescinded from a top US university.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

So how are you splitting your time these days?

Well, I'm mostly doing my academic research. But yeah, my main contribution to Heracite was this algorithm that we developed and we're trying to get published now. So yeah, my involvement is more as like an advisor now, but I did make a sort of key technological contribution.

Yeah, what does an algorithm— are we talking about machine learning, transformer-based AI, or just some statistical model? What goes into honing an algorithm that actually moves the needle on predictability?

For predictability, it's— It's more kind of statistics and machine learning than AI. It turns out that you don't need these very complicated kind of nonlinear models that transformers and large language models are particularly adept at. So for example, creating this— like, Heresight created this very powerful genetic predictor of IQ, much more powerful than anyone thought was possible. And that was sort of— they use some, like, deep learning-based models to kind of create better curated data, psychometrically curated data. And then when you're actually creating these predictors, this is basically— it's kind of like a Bayesian statistical model where you're using functional data, so information about which genes are likely to affect the trait to improve your estimates. The algorithm that I developed wasn't really on the prediction side. This was more to lower the technological and regulatory barrier to accessing the technology. And this is more— this is a machine learning model based on hidden Markov models. And this basically enabled— it turned sort of a routine test. So there's a routine test for aneuploidy, for chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome. And this algorithm enables the data that's produced for that routine test to then be used to give a comprehensive genome profile of each embryo. And one advantage of that is that that test is done as routine in like 60% of IVF cycles in the US and worldwide. And it also kind of puts the power back in the hands of the couples undergoing IVF because, because of HIPAA legislation in the US and GDPR in Europe, you actually have a legal right to that data. So you can just request that data from your clinic in whatever country you're in and send that to Heracyte. And then that enables you to get all these disease risk predictions and trait predictions like IQ from routine tests. So there's two different sides to where the algorithms come in. One is creating these predictors. And the other is actually, how do you get the genome data on the embryo? Because that's not a trivial technical problem. Technical problem either.

Where's the FDA stand on this? Where do they fit in? How do they actually regulate tests? Walk me through all that.

So in the US, the IVF space is pretty unregulated.

Okay.

I think it's because—

Is that good?

Well, it's—

I think it's on net good because if you look at the—

I'm normally pretty against regulation, but—

This is a big decision.

It feels like maybe an area that you would want more government involvement.

Well, I guess my take on this is that in an ideal world, you'd have a kind of light-touch regulation that ensured some unscrupulous players were kept out of the market. Like, I know you had Nucleus Keyin on here before, and they've had some test results that look pretty misleading to me. And, you know, you'd want to make sure that misleading test results are not being given out to people. But my concern with any kind of regulation is that it's going to suddenly evolve into something that just completely kills innovation. Like, this is basically impossible to do in Europe, for example. So all of the companies doing this are US-based. And that's partly because it's a pretty unregulated space. So it's enabled this industry to actually grow here, whereas it's it's not possible in other countries.

Do you think the industry is ready for venture capital?

Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, I guess—

And I ask that because it feels like there's a lot of promising work being done, but unclear that anytime you involve large amounts of venture capital, then people have various growth expectations. And decisions get made that maybe wouldn't be in the long-term interest of patients?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's certainly a risk, but there is, you know, there is a lot of demand for this product, and I think that we're still in the sort of infancy, and part of the— part of what's holding this industry back is we kind of need more— we need more money to be put into it. More awareness of the potential of this technology. And, you know, Herasight, that their revenue's been growing pretty well. They're trying to do a big raise this year. I think that there could be kind of a preference cascade here. Like a lot of the people that have been— a lot of the customers so far have been, you know, people from the tech world, people that are quite wealthy. And I think that's going to create a lot of demand as people see these wealthy and sort of elite people wanting these services, then I think everyone else is going to want them. So I think it's poised for a big growth spurt.

Is one of the big challenges the feedback cycles where you have models today that are making predictions about outcomes that won't happen? For decades and so it's hard to gauge, you know, basically accuracy of predictions if we basically just need to wait and see?

I mean, that is a concern that the predictions might, based on historical data, might not perform as well in the future. I mean, I think that is not a concern that's exclusive to this kind of technology though. Like, a lot of what is done in medicine is based on randomized controlled trials that were done decades ago, and I don't see it being hugely different here. One, you know, one good thing about this technology is that rather than having to do this big long— I mean, it's sort of impossible in a way to— if you wanted to do a randomized controlled trial for some kind of late onset disease, you'd have to wait like 60 years for people to get cancer or something. So it's basically impossible to do that. But nature has provided us with a natural experiment that recapitulates a lot of the properties of a randomized controlled trial. So this is related to my academic research in that embryos are basically siblings genetically. And if you can predict genetic differences between siblings, then you can be pretty sure that that's going to also translate into predicting differences between embryos. So it's a bit— and that's kind of the technical standard that we've tried to establish at Herocyte, that you need to validate all of your predictors carefully in predicting differences between siblings within family. That ensures that you're getting, like, a causal estimate of what these predictors are able to do. And, you know, yes. They might be some differences in the future, like if the environment changes drastically, there's some different environmental effect that puts someone at risk for cancer, it might not capture that so well. But that's just the nature of the game in a way. We have to use the information we have now to make the best predictions we can about the future.

Yeah.

What's been your experience with the health system broadly? Have you done IVF yourself? Have you dealt with advanced medicines or anything beyond the normal Advil after a long weekend?

Yeah, well, I am actually a cancer patient, which is—

Sorry.

Yeah, so I've had a lot more dealings with the health system than I would like.

Yeah.

What have the learnings been? What's the process been like?

Well, one thing, I actually had to do fertility preservation. Undergoing radiation and chemotherapy. So that actually made me feel a lot more pro-IVF.

Sure.

Basically, I had to freeze my sperm and basically now I can only reproduce through IVF. So that, that dovetails a bit with, with the work I've been doing with Heracyte. But yeah, I mean, I've been—

yeah. Have you been tracking— I mean, it seems like you're you're very capable of doing research on your own. Have you been doing research into your own cancer to understand it at a deeper level? Do you feel like there's more self-education happening now? Do you have a unique position there?

Yeah, yeah, I have a bit. It's one of those things like I've seen these stories about people kind of using AI to sort of figure out some sort of mRNA vaccine for their cancer.

What's your reaction to that?

Well, I can't remember what the guy's called.

We had him on the show.

Yeah, no, that was quite an inspirational story. And I've talked to some of the people that have been working with him recently about that. And yeah, I think the standard way that oncology is approached, it doesn't seem to be as patient-centric as it could be. Are we going to throw absolutely everything we can at curing this person? It's more like, oh, we're just going to sort of follow the standard playbook and wait until something really bad happens. So I think there's definitely potential for people to take more agency with serious conditions like cancer and using genomics and AI to enable that, although It's not trivial to do that well. If you're a billionaire, it helps. You can get all of these experiments done that are not standard. But actually doing it well, I don't think it's not as simple as just plugging your data into an LLM and then you have a cure.

What's the bigger bottleneck? More larger datasets that are publicly available for like the English Biobank, or is it more computational or just general intelligence?

Well, I think in terms of cancer, it's probably more making clinical trials easier. There's this movement online, and there's clinical trials abundance movement. It does seem to me that like in the US especially, clinical trials are very expensive. Like there's a treatment that I am trying to access that they're doing the phase 3 trials, for example, in Australia instead of the US because it's too expensive. And then there's some— and then trying to get into a trial is like threading a needle, you know. So I think that making it easier for patients to access cutting-edge treatments and just—

and then even if you get in, it would be placebo-controlled. So there's a 50% 50% chance that you don't get it.

Yeah, it's one of those things where, wearing my scientist hat, I'm like, oh, it's really important to do placebo, you know, properly controlled trials so you can make the right inferences. But then when you're, when you're the patient, you're like, I don't want to be in the placebo. I'm like, what's the point in that?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. We, we heard about this with, uh, GLP-1 trials. Yeah, people would— the drug's so effective, people would realize they're placebo and then just drop out of the trial entirely.

Right. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking that about this trial. I was like, well, it's probably going to be pretty obvious if I'm in the placebo because I don't have any side effects. And if it's just not working, then why not just drop out? But they kind of expect you to just keep on going in these trials when things aren't working, which also doesn't seem to be particularly in the patient's interest.

Yeah. Well, what's next for you? What do you want to focus on?

Well, you know, getting cured of cancer would be nice.

Yeah, priority number one.

Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm pretty excited about this whole reproductive tech space. I think there's a lot of potential. We're really in the infancy of this industry. So, you know, what Heresight's been doing with the polygenic scores, they've created very powerful powerful predictors with that. But these polygenic scores, they only capture a certain fraction of the total effect of the genome on disease risk and traits. So actually, a lot of the remaining signal that we could get out of the genetics is in these rare damaging mutations that are not typically included in these scores. And that's one of the things that Herescytes has been working on. There's an important application of AI models like AlphaFold, AlphaMisense, and sort of DNA foundation models to try and predict what these rare mutation— what risks these rare mutations might confer. And including, you know, Hericide have already developed a product looking at how you can predict risk of neurodevelopmental disorders using these kind of rare variants. So I think, I think that's going to be an important area going forward. Yeah. Then, you know, this more like further in the future kind of technologies, in vitro gametogenesis. So that's a technology to create gametes, sperm and eggs. Eggs is what would be more useful generally from adult cells that are not gamete cells. So that could potentially create thousands of embryos. So I think you could— and then there's also gene editing, actually. So you can use CRISPR or some technology like that to go into an embryo and edit particular base pairs, remove some disease-causing variant, or maybe more controversially enhance some ability. Like you could put in the Tibetan altitude adaptation gene that Nims Dai has, or you could put in— sprinter gene or something. So I think my idea for the future of this space could be that you have this kind of stack where you have in vitro gametogenesis that creates thousands of embryos. Then you can get the genome data, do the predictions of disease risks and traits from that, select a few promising embryos, and then do some edits in them. That kind of excites me.

Sci-fi. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing it with us. We appreciate you having a good time. Good luck with everything. We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Have a good rest of your day. Without further ado, we are going to bring in Jason Kim from Firefly Aerospace. We're very excited to talk to him. He is the CEO of Firefly Aerospace. Jason, how are you doing?

I'm doing great, guys. Thanks for having me on the show.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Uh, why don't you give us a little introduction? I think most people will be familiar with some of Firefly's work, but, uh, take us through a little bit of the journey and the milestones that have been important to you.

Well, this is our 9th year as a company, and we are the first company— success in the, uh, history of the world as a commercial company to land successfully on the moon. Yeah, and everybody's talking about the moon these days, of course. And the other thing is we did a 24-hour launch for the Space Force that broke the previous record of 21 days. That was back in 2023, and that's used for deterrence because, you know, space is contested. Yeah, and the moon is the ultimate high ground. Yeah, so we're into that. And then we're doing a lot of commercial tech, so a lot of, um the latest industry technology like what we announced earlier this week. We're putting NVIDIA Jets into space around the moon and we're going to do space domain awareness imaging and imaging of the moon. And we're going to do all that on orbit and then just get the insightful data back to the Earth. It's an incredible journey. Yeah, we're launching badass rockets, super cool lunar landers and satellites. And we're doing AI ground processing as well.

Well, give me a little bit of your background. What, what led you into the aerospace industry? How long have you been doing this?

Well, I was born— I was born in South Korea, immigrated when I was 1, and my parents always taught me, give back to the US. And so what I did was I went to the Air Force Academy out of Dallas, Texas, and made a career in the Air Force, loved it. Was working with UAVs before they became popular in 1999. And then you saw what happened in 9/11.

Yeah.

And then the same thing with small satellites. I got to work with small satellites and rockets and ground systems, and that's really taken off. Now you've got proliferated systems in LEO, MEO, and GEO with things like Starlink and other.

Yeah.

And now we're going to the moon. Yeah. And so it's just incredible where space is going. I think in 5 years, every single company on Earth is gonna be related or gonna be part of the space industry.

Talk about the journey to the first moon mission. Was that a milestone from day one? When did you know that that was gonna move forward?

Well, the team started on that journey in the Trump administration, number 45. That's when, He built the Artemis program in the first place, and under that there was a Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. And that's where commercial companies like Firefly could bid end-to-end missions to the moon to do important, you know, exploration of the moon and science missions. A lot of the missions that we flew in Trump's second administration, the 47th administration, successfully did the 14 days of Lunar surface operations are actually supporting Artemis. We've got, you know, characterization of the carcinogenic moon dust.

Wow.

We're looking at data on what the GPS looks like.

Wait, that's terrible news. The dust is carcinogenic?

It can give you cancer?

It's harsh. Yeah, it's harsh. And we want to do everything we can to learn about the moon, the surface, the geographic features, the environment.

That's terrible. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a harsh environment. It's outer space.

As we learn these things, it gives us a chance to mitigate those risks.

Sure, sure.

And that's what our successful Blue Ghost Mission 1 did, is found out a bunch of stuff from the 10 NASA payloads that successfully carried out their missions.

I had my fingers crossed that the dust was creatine or cheese, but unfortunately, that's really devastating.

Very harsh environment. 15 plus 1/6 acceleration of gravity on Moon, that would be a deadly combination.

That would be as well. Yeah, walk me through the Blue Ghost Mission One. What were you building? What were you partnering on? Take me through the launch plan. Was the launch delayed? Kind of tell me the story of that launch.

Well, the average age of our team was around 28 at the time. So this is the next generation leaders for space. I'm proud of them. They had this can-do attitude. They're bold. Some of them, it was the first satellite they ever designed and launched and tested and nailed the moon landing. But they did through all the testing that was necessary in the relative environments. They rung it out at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. They did hundreds of hours of rehearsals. Getting ready for the launch and the operations. It's a 45-day operation. And then once we landed, it was 14 days. So the team had 2 shifts, 24/7, and they got through it and celebrated at the very end. But, you know, now we're ready to do it again. We've got a second Blue Ghost mission that we're targeting no earlier than later this year. To launch.

Sure.

And then we got a third one a year later and a fourth one a year after that. And then Jared Isaacman from NASA just came out a couple weeks ago and said he wants 30 landers in the next 3 years. So we're also looking at that upside opportunity as well.

Yeah. So walk me through what each lander will do. I imagine you're trying to increase the capability of each mission. What's the— was the Is the only goal of the first test just testing the and characterizing the moon dust itself? Where does this go? What else are you doing?

Well, on the first one, we looked at the moon dust. We also had some electrostatic shielding that allowed to repel the dust.

Yeah.

'Cause if you have dust, you can repel it. And so that's something that Kennedy Space Center put on there. We also drilled them. The longest into the moon, about 3 feet into the moon, and tested the temperature because you're going to want to know what's under the moon surface.

So does that mean you brought like a 3-foot drill bit up there?

It was actually supposed to go longer, but it turns out we found out what we didn't know, that there's actually hard surface.

Oh, interesting.

Around the 3-foot mark. And so we're learning so much about the moon. And most importantly, we're learning that we need to learn more. And so the second mission is gonna go to the far side of the moon. And it'll be the first time the US attempts this, so we're very honored to do that. We're gonna be able to send signals from millions of years ago in the dark ages, after the Big Bang happened. And so we're gonna learn a lot about the universe through that mission. It's called Lucy Night. And then the third mission is gonna go to a volcanic region of the moon surface that we've never gone to. Nobody's ever gone to. It's called the Gruithuisen Domes. And then the fourth mission we're excited about 'cause it's gonna go to the South Pole. It's gonna have some rovers. We're gonna go and look at, you know, there's supposed to be a lot of water and hydrogen and minerals in that area. So we're gonna go explore that for NASA.

Yeah.

What is the easiest part of space?

I think our idea generation. I think, oh, okay, he is in the prototyping. Yeah, the first of's are, uh, straightforward, but doing it at scale, that's really hard. And you've heard that multiple times, building the system that builds the systems. That's what we're doing at Firefly. And so if you come out to near Austin, Texas, you'll see both our factories just going at rate, delivering 1-ton rockets and building up a new 16-ton reusable rocket and our slew of lunar landers and our orbiters as well.

Yeah. Did you, uh, the— everyone probably knows from the Artemis mission that it was a very successful test of the SLS. Um, did you partner with other, uh, space companies for launch capacity? How do you see the launch market generally? Uh, who's the— who are you partnering with to deliver to the Moon? Uh, since most of the folks that we talk about, talk to, are going to LEO, and they're hitching a ride on SpaceX. Is anything different about these moon missions for you?

You know, right now we're partnering with all the above to go to the moon. We've used Falcon 9 on our last Blue Ghost mission, one. We have a great relationship with SpaceX. And, you know, we're forming relationships with Blue Origin and others. We're also building our own 16-ton reusable rocket as well. So someday that's gonna have capability to do amazing things.

Yeah.

Our Alpha rocket, that's a 1-ton rocket that does dedicated launches to low Earth orbit and does the responsive missions. That's all us. That's all Firefly.

Yeah.

But the 16-ton reusable rocket, we're co-developing that with Northrop Grumman, who has a rich heritage in launch as well.

Yeah. How long do you think this stays as a primarily government-sponsored project? People are starting to map out what a lunar economy might look like. It took decades for SpaceX to find that commercial side of the business with Starlink. It's been massively successful. So these things sometimes come out of nowhere, but how are you, if you have ideas, where do you think the commercial opportunity will be in 10 or 20 years?

You know, we're just manifesting it. And that's the way you can kind of predict the future is just do it.

Yeah.

And so on our Blue Ghost mission too, we're carrying an Electra spacecraft with us and it's got the Oculus sensor on there and it's got a Jetson NVIDIA module in there. And we're going to be able to use our SciTech software AI processing to actually take the data of imaging the moon and around the moon and process it on orbit.

Okay.

And that's going to be the first commercial imaging service that I know of in the history. The previous imaging systems were government-owned, government-operated. This will be all Firefly-owned and operated, and we'll be able to sell that data commercially. So, you know, it's, it's this first step, and we see more of that. Dedicated landers that, you know, a bunch of business models, businesses entrepreneurs can put their important payloads on our dedicated lander. That's another commercial idea that we're working on. And I think it's just a matter of time where it will be a good fraction of NASA. They're never going to let go of the moon. National security is not going to let go of the moon. But you'll start seeing a lot more commercial endeavors, commercial-only type moon missions as well.

Yeah.

What, what year do you expect to set foot on the moon?

Myself?

Yeah.

Well, I think, you know, I already had that chance going to the Air Force Academy and trying to be a fighter pilot. I wasn't able to do that, but my, my, my kids, you know, the other day I was talking to them and I was like, hey, isn't this cool, Artemis II? Don't you want to go to the moon? And they said, Dad, I want to live on the moon. So that's what my mind just exploded, right? So that's what our kids are saying these days, and Kids are so genuine. They say what is on their mind. If it interests and excites kids, you're on to something.

Yeah. What, uh, what are you watching for, learning from the Artemis II mission?

I just am thinking about, about, uh, the astronauts. Those are heroes for the world and our nation and, you know, other nations. And so My, um, heart and mind, uh, go out to Reed and Victor and Christina and Jeremy. I'm just awaiting them to return home so that everybody can welcome them back to Earth, because what they did was historic. I mean, it was inspiring. I was really excited when I saw those images and videos of them on orbit, and, uh, just looking forward to hearing more stories from them of what it was like.

Uh, last question from the chat: where does the name Firefly come from?

You know, uh, it, it's kind of towards our vision. We're lighting the path to a bold space ecosystem that expands humanity's future. If you think about it, we're going to be launching and operating satellites on orbit, and it's going to look like the night sky of fireflies someday.

I like that.

I'm hearing the the song in my head.

Firefly. Oh yeah, I know the one you're thinking of. Well, thank you so much.

Great to meet you.

Great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Nick Carter's been on a tear talking about CoreWeave. They just signed a big deal with Anthropic and with Meta. There's— it's John Coogan Journal today.

You would not believe your eyes. What if 10 million Fireflies?

Oh, yes. Yes.

Lit up the world as I fell asleep.

Yes. Nick Carter said, "I remember a few months ago when everyone on here insisted CoreWeave was a ticking time bomb, had unreasonable depreciation assumptions, was a Ponzi, MagnaTar was doing GFC 2.0, had no bespoke tech, had unsustainable debt load, was just financial engineering." Well, they've been on a tear building ever bigger data centers. We had the folks from CoreWeave come on the show just recently. And saw a bunch of the progress there. And there's an incredible amount of demand. NVIDIA in September, CoreWeave said it was expanding its previous agreement with OpenAI to supply data center capacity by as much as $6.5 billion, bringing the total value of the contract to $22.4 billion. Earlier this year, NVIDIA said it was pouring an additional $2 billion into CoreWeave in a vote of confidence in the artificial intelligence data center company using NVIDIA's chips. Anyway, without further ado, Let's bring in Chad Janis from Grundz. Welcome to the show.

What's going on?

Hey, guys, how are we doing?

How are we doing?

Doing great.

Congratulations on the massive acquisition. We have to hit the gong for you. Unilever paid $1.2 billion. Congratulations.

Big, big hit. We've been— I think we tried to make this happen last year. So great, great to finally have you on the show. I think everyone was appreciating how often offline you've been for the last little bit. I think somebody, I saw somebody post like the founder hasn't posted on X since like Q4 of last year. You guys were busy grinding. But yeah, I guess like the, I want to kind of dive right into, and I'm sure you've told this story before, but I think it's fun to hear it now. Like what drew you to this category? In, what was it, 3.5 years ago at this point, you had been on the board of a bunch of different D2C brands. I would say like you started the company in like the, probably the very bottom of the trough in terms of like D2C sentiment. Like at the time there were not many like great kind of exit comps to point at. A lot of like the D2C darlings had been struggling. You clearly had faith in the category and managed to build to one of the biggest exits in the space in a while. So talk about those, you know, the kind of the year or months leading up to starting the company and what you saw.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. So I actually was trying not to start a company when I had the idea for Grins. I was going to go get my MBA at Stanford. Stanford. And I was saying, hey, I want to have a pretty normal MBA experience, hang out with friends a ton. And it was about 2 weeks before I went out to Stanford, I was at my dad's place and I was drinking a greens powder and looked up in the corner of the room and I was just like, there's no way I'm keeping this habit past 30 days. So that was sort of the epiphany of, hey, how do I take something as robust and comprehensive and make it into a form factor— didn't think gummies at the time— make it into a form factor that that could build a habit for consumer, make it something they look forward to. They go to bed at night thinking about, excited about taking Groons the next day. And so that started the journey of about a year formulating, piloting, testing, sampling. About 1/4 of my entire Stanford class tried the early iterations of Groons before we launched, and then we launched in August of 2023.

What, what other companies had you looked at in the category? I know there was— I'm I'm gonna probably blank on the name, but there was a very high-profile, like, apple cider vinegar gummy. Goli. They had scaled extremely rapidly, but then not— I don't know where that business netted out, but I don't believe it was a fantastic outcome. So, I felt like I kind of had this feeling at the time that maybe there was something wrong with gummies as a category. Like, there was a bunch of demand, but maybe it wasn't possible to build to this level of outcome. Did, did, did you have any kind of concerns about the cat, the form factor at all, or you just had conviction because people love the product?

I mean, not the form factor. The history of gummies is actually really interesting. About 20 years ago, it didn't really exist. And I would say then Ollie came around in 2014, I believe, and made gummy an approachable category. And then I would say we're entering what I would consider a V3 of the gummy era, which is taking really robust blends and putting them into a form factor like gummy. So you sort of get the best of all worlds. You get robust, comprehensive blends in a form factor that's convenient, enjoyable. Consumers can look forward to it. And so I didn't necessarily tie the dots the way that you might have just there with Goli. I think they were more focused on individual ingredients that sort of rose and rode the road with trends and then came back down as that sort of trended away. We stay away from like single ingredients.

What would you say are the 3 biggest factors that contributed to your guys's, what I would describe as hypergrowth?

I would say first is novel innovation. So each of the products you see us launching does not exist in the market. So when people say like, who are you competing with? It's like, well, We're kind of creating our own new categories against large outstanding categories. I would say second is just like unrelenting urgency every day. I guess sort of look back at the urgency I've had every single day over the last 3.5, 4 years, as well as the urgency that my team has every day. Like, it's just like compounds over time if you're delivering that much urgency and impact every day. And then the third thing that I would say is the absolute most important is the team. We've got 130+ individuals here at this company. We have a culture of autonomy and accountability, and each individual here wakes up every day as the CEO of their domain. So when you sort of take 130+ people who are CEOs of their function and stack that together, you end up in a, I guess, in a place that we just have ended up here in the last week.

Can you talk about how you thought about building the team, like what roles you wanted to hire for and when and sort of how you staged the, the scale out?

Yeah, the hardest part about building a company is like you as the founder have to do too much. You have to do too much to start.

Yeah.

And so over time you get to a place of like, okay, where does the company need me most? Like, where am I uniquely capable? So I guess like the advice I would take that question is like, hey, what advice would I give about building through the stages that we did, you've got to surround yourself with like the absolute best in each, each function. And so you sort of pick off each function slowly over time, where either you don't enjoy it and it's sort of, you know, it's pushing down on your, your vibes, I guess I could say, or B, alternatively, things that you think somebody could do way better than you and you need to clear that out so that you can focus on other things. And so I wouldn't say that You know, we probably made some hires early that others wouldn't. Like, we hired our Chief People Officer pretty early in the company. I'm trying to think of another one that we might have hired earlier than most people would have.

What was the motivation between the early hire on the Chief People Officer?

I think it comes back to, like, ultimately, at the end of the day, like, a company's success is the people, right? The culture that you have, how that facilitates frictionless growth. And so from the early days, like, we've always been focused on ensuring that we get the absolute best people here in the company, and then put them in an environment where they can be their full self, they can excel to the extent that they can. I mean, we've got people at the company who probably had impacted other companies, but when they got here, it was like night and day, the impact that they were able to have.

Well, you mentioned that you demoed the product with your Stanford class. What was the actual process of the very first version of the product to the, you know, the scale-up? Were you formulating it yourself using off-the-shelf products and then go to a co-packer and then in-house manufacturing? Take me on like the actual product development journey.

Yeah, we, early days of the business, pre-launch, the process was calling up 20 different co-bands.

Yeah.

Co-manufacturing partners. Telling them, here's what I want to do, here's what the ingredients are, I'll source all of it. And every single one of them except for one said, I'm not going to do that. Like, that, that's going to taste disgusting. That doesn't work in a gummy. It's never going to work.

Yeah.

The one who said, who said he would give it a try, he was like, it's so funny because, because you say that, like, you, you talk about the, the product being innovative, but I think you guys have been so successful and probably had so many clones that my assumption has been that like this category always existed and you guys just came in and out. Out-executed, but actually creating the category.

Well, here's where it gets crazier. So, so we finally got the one to try and I was like, look, just, just produce it. We'll both sample it. We'll say if it tastes terrible or not. So we ended up by producing— it didn't taste terrible. It had some work to do. We went through multiple iterations with the Stanford classmates, 25% of them. And then the hardest part about building this business is the little pack that we have, the daily packs. Yeah, that, that infrastructure for taking gummies and putting it into packs did not exist prior to us.

Sure.

So for the first 6 to 8 months of this business, we had 20 bodies standing around a table manually picking up gummies and putting them in packs and taking a clamp sealer that looks like a staple gun.

Yep.

Before we then were able to automate it. So I mean, that, that's been the hardest part about this business is getting the infrastructure to where it is today, where we can ship 10 million gummies a day and have the infrastructure for it.

Is that because the gummies are sticky so they don't work on normal machinery to just fall into the pouches themselves on an automated line?

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the biggest difficulties why it didn't exist prior. I think in the instances where it does exist would be like your General Mills, like Motts gummies. They're like the flimsier type packaging. And that's all in-house.

That's all in-house.

Yeah, there's not really like a manufacturing supply chain that does that.

Yeah. So yeah, did you stay with a co-packer for a long time? Did you wind up dual sourcing? How did you like solve the supply chain over time?

Yeah, this has been the biggest unlock of our business over time. And frankly, the part that people are going to overlook is like having operations scale at the rate that we've been able to do it is a massive feat. We've got multiple co-mans, multiple co-packers, multiple nodes, 3PL, in-house facility. It's been a lot. We're finally at a place where we can actually meet the demand that's out there and keep up with it. So we're in a good operational place right now. The operations team is sleeping.

Did you raise a lot of money along the way?

We raised probably around $50 million.

Okay.

Over the course of the business. Some of that was secondary over the course, and then Primary as well, obviously.

Yeah.

You have a fantastic group of investors, by the way. Yeah, they're great, right? Amanda, all those people are fantastic. How did your, how did your marketing mix evolve over time? Was it relatively consistent? I mean, I'm assuming you've, you've given quite a lot of money to meta platforms, but, but any, anything that was surprising from a user acquisition standpoint or Was it the kind of thing where it was like, you know, 80-90% Google, Meta for the history, plus, you know, rotating in experimental budget?

Yeah, I mean, Meta is always going to be a beast for like every brand that's online. What I'll say though, is it, it has been surprising to me when I hear others mix and that Meta makes up, like you said, like 85-90%. It's like, oh, wow, you should probably like diversify that a little bit. Meta is always going to take up a massive chunk. I mean, they've built such a good platform that allows for companies to find people in market for their particular product. And so we've diversified over time. We have intent to continue diversifying, building awareness. And so it's not that we feel like, you know, we're overexposed in a channel, but we've just always had the intent to create defensibility against just the media mix.

Yeah.

Scariest moment over the last 3 and a half years?

I can tell you the exact day. I, 6 months into the business, January 29th, I was calling my co-man. I was like, hey, we don't have— it was like 2 weeks of telling him, hey, I don't think we have enough inventory, right? It's like, no, no, no, we're good, we're good, we're good. January 29th, I was like, hey, we're not good, are we? And he's like, no, no, we're not good. And so we had to shut off marketing spend by 93% overnight.

And this is because you had a bunch of subscribers and you're worried about delivering on the subscriptions. If you can't, you know, there's huge amount of churn.

And then so, so we've, we've never gone out of stock for like more than a couple days.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, so there's been like a couple periods in the business where we were close. We've never gone out of stock in like a, a way that would hurt our consumer.

Mm-hmm.

But that you, you got it exactly right. Like the golden rule at Groove is we do not go outta stock. These people expect, they take it daily. We are in stock. If that means we can't acquire customers, fine. We've got to deliver for those who are subscribers.

So does that also affect the SKU mix and how careful you are about launching new SKUs? Because every new SKU adds complexity to the supply chain and the inventory management.

Yeah, I mean, look, like we've got a couple of— I would say we have a couple of SKUs per brand we launch. If you ask our operations team and the actual SKU that we have, they would tell you we have hundreds of SKUs.

Yeah.

So I'm probably downplaying the complexity. Yeah. But yeah, like, we— the nice thing about this business is we, we have solutions that solve consumers' needs en masse. So we don't have to create, you know, 50 different products to solve niche needs that a consumer has.

Yeah.

What's your outlook on consumer broadly?

I love it.

I can't imagine building in a different space. I would say consumer sentiment is rough in some ways right now. I don't think that's like a surprise. You can look, probably you've seen trends, but I would say consumer as a category, it's a beautiful thing, right? Like our team, we're leveraging AI probably in an opportunistic way, not in an existential way that a lot of tech companies are like, hey, if we don't do this right, are we existing? Next year. For us, it's an opportunity, and we're finding some really nice inroads there.

Interesting. How did you think about messaging in the early days and like honing the brand messaging? Because the product delivers across a couple vectors, convenience and health benefits. Was there ever like a tension between those? Like, how did you wind up sort— what did you settle on for like the key value prop? If you could just deliver one message?

I think your consumer helps you identify what resonates best. I would say though, the approach of, like, the overarching approach of what we've done— one brand that I looked up to is Dr. Squatch. Um, as you know, their approach, you know, it's probably the first time I was in the shower using a soap and I was like, wow, it's like really fun. This is a nice experience.

Yeah.

Uh, something like actually like mark your experience there. And I, I think we've taken some of that concept to the supplement category. Um, where, as you've sort of called out, most brands are like, uh, like, we do clinical research, but we don't— it's not like the only thing we talk about, right? It's— we do, uh, we have like studies, we've done all this wonderful stuff, but we try not to lean too much on that because that's what the rest of the category is doing. We're kind of a lifestyle brand, and so consumers buy it, they enjoy it, they look forward to it, and it drives an impact in their life. And so I would say the overarching theme, and I think if you were to look at our our ad account, if you were to look at our, like, what resonates with the consumer, it's that we're a brand that personifies our consumer, and they like to associate and have the benefits from it.

Talk to me about the D2C to retail transition. Was that in the pitch deck at the very start? Did you know exactly how long that was going to take? Or was there a moment when you were like, okay, I'm ready, we're ready to go, now's the time.

Or did, did Shrey come and find you and say it's time to go?

You guys know Shrey?

I know.

I know Shrey.

Yeah. Love it. Shrey's awesome. He's been a good buddy and helping the business since the early days. He actually went with me to pitch, I believe, Walmart and Sam's Club in the summer of 2024. But we didn't have a lot of employees at the time, and I was the original one pitching. Look, I just always knew this business was going to be omnichannel. I don't think there's any reason to like have pride in being a solely D2C business or a solely— like there's just, there's consumers everywhere. Like meet them with the solution that, you know, at the price point that works for them. So I first had conversations about launching retail back in like January of 2024. And I'll tell you, everybody was telling me, hey, it's kind of early. Like, do you really want to do this? And I said, yes, I guarantee, like the selling cycles are so long here, I guarantee by next year when we're finally in this retailer, We're gonna be really glad that we put in the time today.

Totally.

And so we, you know, that process took really long. We launched with Sprouts in October of 2024, Target in February of 2025, and then Walmart in April of 2025. And then a bunch of other amazing retailers after that.

And then what were you tracking? What changed about the business, the marketing, the strategy to actually be successful in retail?

The biggest thing is the rebrand we did.

Okay.

So the original branding, I don't know if you've seen it, it was like a dark green color.

Sure.

I had put— I'm glad you haven't seen it. I developed it in Canva in an afternoon. You know what's funny is it was like, it was so bad, but when we changed, like the vast majority of people are like, this is a really good rebrand change. We got a few people who are like, hey, like what's up with the— I want the old branding. I was like, guys, like that's Canva, nothing special there. So we redid the packaging, we made it ready for retail.

Sure.

You could more quickly in sort of 3 seconds identify what the product was. And so that's probably the biggest change we had to do to get ready for retail distribution.

Is product the only thing that really matters with an early-stage consumer brand?

It's a big, broad statement. I think it really matters for us because it's the—

it is—

it sets the stage for how big any of our businesses can become. So as you know, we've got Kroon's, we've got Nutribs, our mushroom product, Nutropics. We've got Immune, which is an immunity product, and we've got Juiced, which is our pre-workout, pre-anything energy product. If we don't get that product right, speaking to that category right, that it caps the upside of how big that business can be. So it really matters for us. I can't speak for every business though.

Yeah. How diversified did the business become? I mean, 130 employees is a lot. I imagine that you've had success both in e-commerce and then also in retail and then also across these new product lines. But is there a power law where, one product in retail is driving the vast majority of sales? Or is it pretty much like a sum of, sum of all the different parts?

There's always a power law.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But how's everything growing? Everything's doing well. Like, all these products are phenomenal. People should, should try them.

Yeah.

See if they want to sleep with them. I would say that our team's like super ambitious. So if you asked us, we'd be like, oh my goodness, we want these, these secondary products behind Groove to be much bigger than they are. Yeah, but to be clear, like, they're large businesses.

Yeah.

And I think any founder would love to have just one of them as their core business. So, and we've got a lot of really exciting innovation coming that I think will grow nicely like Greens has.

Yeah. When did you first meet Unilever or the folks over there?

I first had a conversation with them probably in like June of last year. Yeah, is when we started talking. But like, casually, not like I like just getting to know them. Ultimately, for me, what really matters is the individual is somebody that I'm excited to work with, I'm excited to build with. And so I've been chatting with them for quite some time to identify whether it was a good fit for both sides.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You also, you're like, give me another year, I'll like 3, 4x again.

Yeah.

And then, and then what, what do you think Unilever brings to the table to let you fulfill the vision?

Here.

They're awesome. I mean, you may, you may be familiar with their background, but they've done this like with multiple businesses before, and frankly might be one of the few strategic partners that has. So you've got Nutrafol, which they just acquired probably about 4 years ago, and they're publicly stated that that business is significantly larger than when they acquired it. Uh, they acquired Liquid IV back in probably 2020. That business is massively larger. I think they just stated last year that it's around a billion of revenue. They acquired Ollie back in 2019. That business is significantly bigger.

Yeah.

So they've just done a really good job. They know what to look for. And I think that's what our team's most excited for is we're getting a partner who can help us on our ambitious goals and knows the path to get there.

You mentioned that you're using AI opportunistically. What does that actually look like in practice? Because I can imagine that You probably have some sort of software SaaS product in many verticals. All of those companies are probably launching or adding AI features. So you can flip a switch and turn that on, or you can go and build from scratch. Like, what's working right now?

One of the biggest things I'm grateful for is we have a really, really strong data and finance team. And so we have like all the data infrastructure, data warehouse in a place where it's accessible through Claude to our team.

Sure.

So you've got, you've got the CX team, you've got the finance team, you've got the marketing team, all like immediately accessible with that information to make decisions. So I'd say that's probably the biggest unlock is everyone's in Claude, everyone is, uh, like we, we all went through an effort. It's kind of a, um, the objective's kind of a joke, but it's basically make yourself replaceable. Like, can AI replace your job? And so we're all ticking across the aspects of our roles and what we can automate through AI. Yeah. And finding a lot of productivity from it. But I would say the biggest takeaway there is you've gotta have your data infrastructure and data warehouse in a place that it's a source of truth to every individual in the company.

Yeah.

Talk about your approach to creative. I've heard that you guys are like absolute powerhouse when it comes to just like generating high volumes creative, and I'm curious if there's any unlocks on the AI side on that front as well.

You know, we haven't really used AI for that. I imagine that, like, we're testing like a few things, but I'm sure you guys see all over X, there's a million posts about people creating like the Pixar animations and stuff. And, you know, say what you will, some of it's a little testy. It's kind of like, hey, we're, we're a reputable brand. Like, we can't be putting some things out on the internet like that. And so we're pretty careful about it. I would say at this point, we're still like 99% plus, like human generated, whether it's like in an editing file, or whether it's actual humans creating UGC, or working with influencers who are creating content. We haven't moved, I would say, into like AI being the generator of our creative.

Interesting.

Did you actually get your MBA? Or did you drop out?

Oh, I was so close. It was so close.

Okay, so an exit at this scale, can they not just say like, okay, this guy's a master of business, we'll give him—

I don't think they would.

I don't think they would.

I don't think they've done that for others who have had some successful outcomes. Just before I graduated, every quarter, so the business was doing like $50 million of revenue when I graduated. We had probably like 6 people working on it at time. And, uh, it was 2 weeks before I graduated. I came to my wife back to our dorm, and I was like, hey, there's like a real chance I'm not going to graduate. I was like right on the GPA cutoff. She's like, ah. I'm like, no, no, like, like dead serious. We're like one test, one, one point, uh, lower, and we're not going to graduate. She's like, do you want to come back? I was like, no, uh, either we graduate and I have an MBA, or we don't and I, I don't have an MBA. That's that.

Well, you're, you're a master. You're a master of business in our book. So I agree. I think you got, you got the, you won the right award. But thank you. Thank you for hanging out on and congratulations to the entire team. Congratulations. Incredible.

Thanks, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Up next, we have Jordan Bramble from Antares. He's the co-founder and CEO. Antares is becoming the first company to secure DOE safety approval for new reactor reactor, marking a breakthrough in U.S. nuclear deployment. Jordan, how are you doing?

Well, how about yourself? Thank you for having me.

Welcome to the show. I'm glad to meet— we've heard a ton about the company over the years. Please give us an introduction on yourself and the company.

Yeah.

So Jordan Bramwell, CEO here at Antares. Our focus at Antares is nuclear power for what we call strategic energy. So that primarily means defense defense and space applications, but increasingly expanding into commercial markets as well.

Does that mean like oil and gas extraction, you need a diesel generator normally, but you can put down a nuclear reactor as well?

Absolutely. And the thing that, you know, I think is aligned across both of those markets is, you know, what we're seeing— and this is what strategic energy really means to us— is you're using the unique characteristics of nuclear power to enable a resiliency or other characteristics that you can't get from alternative energy sources. And that's really the crux of what we're trying to do on the defense side of things is provide modular power plants that have much higher uptime with a much lower sustaining supply chain than the alternatives do so that we can power our operational assets that exist here in the homeland.

So what are the— what's the shape of the reactor that you want to build, the size, the scale, the differentiators, like what goes into actually delivering a product here.

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a graphite moderated design. We use a fuel form factor called TRISO. So yeah, think of tiny spheres, particles of uranium encapsulated in silicon carbide, pressed into graphite compacts, stacked in the channels inside of graphite. Our reactors are cooled with heat pipes, so we actually vaporize sodium that travels the length of the pipe, then condenses into a wick structure to return that working fluid. So it's a totally passive way to move heat inside of a nuclear reactor. Heat pipes, copper water heat pipes are also in your iPhone. They were actually invented at Los Alamos National Lab for space nuclear power applications in 1963. The reactor itself can fit on a truck bed alongside of the power conversion system and then can be installed at the site.

And then how far along are you in the actual development? I know this stuff, it's not an overnight project. There's a lot that goes into being— yeah, going critical, basically.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, first thing I would say is North Star for us, North Star for any company, is to have an electricity-producing system at a customer site, customers paying for it. And all of our work with Idaho National Lab, you know, we view this as a sequence of multiple test reactors to get to that point. We've been at this for 3 years now. We actually started developing our test facility at Idaho National Lab back in 2024. Before so that we can be ready for this moment. Funnily enough, you know, just kind of brilliant rhyme of history here. The last time a nuclear reactor was tested in that building in Idaho was actually this picture right behind me.

Yeah.

So this is the Army's, Army's ML-1 reactor that was built in 1967 here in Los Angeles.

Wow.

Now, you know, call it a half century or so later, we've built a reactor here in Los Angeles that we're now going to go test in that same building. You asked about Dome. It's not actually Dome, so it's very nearby. So our facility is called RACE, the Reactors and Critical Experiments Facility, formerly known as MFC-793. We invested a couple million of our own dollars in that building starting in '24 and '25 so that we would have a facility ready to go by the time that we were ready to test a reactor. Yeah, but, you know, the broader kind of tech maturation strategy here, is we actually tested an electrically heated prototype at full thermal power back in 2025. Now what we're trying to do with this criticality test in 2026 is validate the performance of our control systems as well as prove out all of the simulations that govern the design, especially on the nuclear data side. Yeah, we're really getting a lot of ancillary benefits from this test though. So it's been a great opportunity to debug the supply chain and, you know, performance and lead times of our suppliers. Also been great opportunity for us just to learn this regulatory pathway. So, you know, we're obviously doing this for the first time, but much bigger than that, this is actually the first time for the country that a reactor, a new reactor, has been authorized under DOE standards. The last time a new reactor was built at a DOE site of a new design was before this regulatory pathway actually existed. So it's a historic first in that way. We've learned a lot from it. And now when we do subsequent reactors, you know, we know a lot more about how to get through this regulatory pathway efficiently. So maybe just to summarize that, you know, full thermal power in 2025, we're going to be making neutrons this year in 2026 and then electrons in 2027 with an electricity-producing reactor.

What's the— what's your background? I feel like nuclear does not have a very clear pipeline of, oh, you worked at these, you're part of the SpaceX mafia that went into nuclear, some people in nuclear came from SpaceX, but there isn't a clear lineage for everyone. What was your path into the nuclear industry?

Yeah, so engineer by background, studied systems engineering and physics, lifelong interest in nuclear power. I like to joke that the first real job I had where I wasn't working on, working at fast food, working on the family farm, first thing I ever did was work at the Newport News Shipyard where we build build and construct nuclear submarines. Spent some time at different startups. I've worked on everything from artificial intelligence, machine learning, embedded systems, product companies. But the other unique thing in my background is I was actually in the White House in OMB in 2017, 2018.

Got it. Talk more about the regulatory approval. Maybe map out exactly the path because there's clearly like a series of steps here, like what happened most recently?

Yeah, so this final regulatory approval that we received is called the DSA, Documented Safety Analysis. And, you know, really what that is doing, the approach to licensing a reactor with the Department of Energy is you establish a safety basis, right? These are the fundamentals, design characteristics, but also subsystems that perform some fundamental safety function to ensure the public is safe. And you prove that through analysis, you prove that through testing, and your documentation outlines that, right? And what the DSA does that's different than the preliminary approvals is it's actually based on what is, what is as-built, right? So at time of final design review, they consider that 90% design complete. The other 10% is what you actually deliver and build, and that's what goes into approving the DSA. So you can think of it simply as the final regulatory approval. From here on out, what comes next is we're going to get into what's called readiness, operational readiness, where we start working with our operators on the documentation and procedures, do final test checkouts. And then once we get approval from the Department of Energy on that, then we can actually start putting fuel in the reactor and then eventually start it up and go critical.

Talk to me about the opportunity for nuclear in space. I know that there's some trade-offs around like Mars might be less suitable for solar, but that seems very far away. Is there more near-term vision for nuclear in space?

So just as of 2 weeks ago, Administrator Jared Isaacman at NASA actually announced at NASA's Ignition Day that they want to fly a nuclear-powered spacecraft to the moon in December of 2028 because, you know, they recognize the immense value of this technology to expand humanity's presence, both, you know, in Earth orbit but beyond as well. You're absolutely right. So the further you get from Earth beyond 1 AU, solar efficiency actually declines exponentially with respect to distance. So, you know, you can imagine your solar panels just ballooning in size as you get further and further to make an equivalent amount of power. But even beyond that, you know, we believe the market for nuclear power in space will be much larger and move a lot faster than I think a lot of people think. The overwhelming thing that will drive that is space is now a warfighting domain, right? And, you know, as we seek to employ higher-powered assets in Earth orbit, in cislunar space, there's pretty clear physics there that a nuclear power system scales more favorably on a size and weight basis compared to solar panels, right? So, you know, you want to do 100-kilowatt spacecraft, those solar panels would be, you know, like the size of a football field. You could do a similarly sized nuclear-powered spacecraft and actually fit it on a Falcon 9.

Yeah. Okay, so yeah, nuclear-powered spacecraft, you're fitting on a Falcon 9. That means that the primary stage is still traditional, but then once you get to low Earth orbit, the nuclear power is kicking in. Like, how— what is actually creating thrust with a nuclear-powered spacecraft?

Yeah, so great question. So there's really two paradigms here. So there's nuclear thermal propulsion.

Okay.

You can think of that as Imagine it like a traditional rocket where you're circulating your propellant through a nuclear reactor to heat it up and then exhaust it and create thrust. We're not focused on that, so we don't work on that. But there's, there's a great history in that technology. What we're more so focused on is nuclear, nuclear electric power and propulsion. And so in NEP, essentially what that is, is you're using a nuclear reactor to create electricity and then you're powering electric propulsion thrusters. Right. So So it's an alternative to solar electric propulsion. But, you know, really it's about power density, right? You can have a much larger onboard power source than what you could get from the equivalent size and weight of solar panels.

How do you convert electricity to thrust in space? I feel like with a plane, I understand you spin a propeller like that seems pretty intuitive to me. With a car, you spin the wheels, so there's traction. But if there's no friction in a vacuum, How are you creating thrust from electricity?

Yeah, so you're ionizing a propellant and then shooting it outta thrusters. And so it's typically electric propulsion's very small amounts of thrust, right? So it's, you know, imagine a Starlink satellite, how it would reorient itself.

Yeah, sure. Okay, so there's still propellant onboard that is transferring the mass that's creating the thrust. Yeah. Got it, okay.

Yeah, generally xenon or krypton is what you see.

Xenon or krypton, interesting.

Very cool.

Zooming out, what is underpinning just the broader nuclear boom? We've talked to a lot of different nuclear companies. It feels like we were in the real doldrums of nuclear startups and nuclear opportunities. There were a couple sort of false starts a few decades ago and a decade ago, but it really feels like there's a number of companies that are working really well. Like what is the critical unlock? Is it technology or regulatory or both? What's going on?

I think it's really all of the above. I mean, I think it's a confluence of things. So, you know, the president signed a series of executive orders in May of last year that really created this streamlined regulatory path that we're utilizing. One thing I would say is, you know, in the history of our company, regulation has actually never been a key bottleneck for us. It's always been about you know, engineering rigor, getting our safety basis in order, in order, you know, creating the deliverables such that we could argue our safety case empirically. And whenever we've done a great job of that, we've been able to move really swiftly through these approvals. Yeah. But I think what you're also seeing now is there's just a new need for this capability, right? You know, we had this period in the '60s and '70s where, you know, if you go back in the 1960s, like R&D funding as a percentage of federal overlays was like double-digit percentages. You know, we had like the central banking era of Paul Volcker where federal funds rates was like 20% or higher. We had this like austerity period where actually what we did is we cut a lot of R&D funding. Nuclear particularly suffered from that. Right. And we never really— I would, I would make the argument that we did not have a true nuclear private sector at the time when those changes were made. Very different than the approach that the French took where they went all in on nuclear in the same time period. Because they saw it as a matter of energy sovereignty for them. Then we had this comeback in the second Bush administration, so George W. Bush. That's when the AP1000 was developed. Then what happened is you had fracking, so you just had really cheap natural gas that I think really competed with the need for new large-scale nuclear. But now we're in this world where energy is the bottleneck to almost everything. We have this huge CapEx build-out. For artificial intelligence, need to win the AI race. Our ability to do that is limited by energy reindustrialization broadly. I would say energy is the bottleneck to that, right? People are not talking enough about if we want to bring all of these factories back to the US, we want to start making all of these critical technologies here again. We're going to need a lot more electricity to do that. So that's part of it. And then what we do, you know, really focused on national security, we want to be a multiproduct company. Like one day we want to put nuclear power on the grid. We want to put it in space. You know, we want to do small reactors on military bases, but we're really starting there. And, you know, the national security matter that I think really motivates this new need for energy resilience is increasingly the assets that we rely on to project power on the other side of the world to generate warfighting effects. They're here on our, on our installations in the homeland, and they depend on the commercial grid or they depend on commercial civilian diesel supply chains. And we now have adversaries. I mean, this is relatively new in the last couple of years. We now have adversaries that are totally capable of disrupting both of those.

Yeah.

And, you know, nuclear power, it's the highest capacity factor form of energy that we know of when, you know, that we have today when it's mature. And our approach to this is you put multiple small reactors together in a modular bank of systems, a modular power plant, so that you can get really, really high uptime, right? You can refuel offline, you have redundancy. Efficiencies, that's by far the best way to do that.

What can the American nuclear energy learn from nuclear energy diffusion in China over the last, call it, 30 years?

I think there's a lot of answers to that question. I think to me, the particular one is the benefit of sustained coordinated national willpower. Right. I think, you know, we're finally in an era where we're going to have this in this country when it comes to nuclear power. Like, private capital is aligned on this from everything from venture capital up to the banks. This is now a bipartisan issue. Right. So even if you go back in time 3 years ago, like, people thought we were crazy when we were trying to start this company because, you know, nuclear was very much out of the zeitgeist at at the time. But from where we sit today, you know, I'm on the Hill 3 to 4 days a month. If I don't do my homework ahead of time, it's hard for me to even tell you if I'm talking to a Democrat or Republican because they all want the same things, right? Reindustrialization, clean energy, American jobs, high-skilled labor force, national security. All of it aligns in that way.

That's amazing to hear. A little white pill to end the week.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the—

Yeah, congrats to the whole team on the milestone and hope to have you back on soon.

We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you so much. Nice meeting you guys. Thanks for having me.

Nice meeting you. Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Without further ado, we have Andy Dunn. He's the founder of Pyphenobos. He's the author of Burn Rate, and he's here with us in the TV Pen Ultra Room. Andy, how are you doing?

I'm doing amazing. It's Friday, guys.

Look at that cardigan.

What is that?

Some of the EPN green, man.

There you go.

You're blended in perfectly.

I mean, not quite, but like pretty close.

Yeah, you're blended perfectly into the Chiron. It's fantastic.

Should we start with the new app? I want to go back and hear so many war stories. I've followed your career throughout my entire, like the last 15 years.

Andy and I were texting yesterday.

Let's kick it off high.

Is there's the app of the day. Let's start there. Maybe give us the brief history of Pie.

Yeah.

How you got to be the app of the day, and then we can go from there.

Yeah.

Look, this one's pretty simple. I was talking to my psychiatrist one day, and I told him I was feeling a little bit low. I have a proclivity to depression. I've gone through some ups and downs, got to write a book about that.

Yeah.

And we talk about a lot of things. At some point, he said to me, when's the last time you had dinner with a friend? Friend. And I thought about it. This was 2021. We were obviously in the middle of a pandemic and a lot.

Yeah.

My wife and I and our young son had just moved from New York to Chicago. And yeah, I think Jordy knows this. My whole world was in Chicago during the Bonobos days. My friends were there. That's where I met my wife. That's where all the Bonobos team was.

Yeah.

And I thought when I came back to Chicago, you know what, this is going to be great. This is my hometown. My parents are here. My sister who I have a business with, Monica and Andy, This is like a homecoming. And then I realized after a minute, I don't have any friends. It's a hard thing to admit to yourself, but I have friends, just none of them live here, right?

Yeah.

So then I got curious because all of a sudden I was like, wait, how do you make friends if you don't want to make lame friends and you don't want to feel lame? How do you put yourself out there and how do we solve that problem for people? And that was the beginning of the Pi journey.

Yeah.

And then take us up to the present. Yeah.

So what it is, is for friends, it's an app. Well, it's evolved. It's an app and an AI agent to build infrastructure for your whole social life. So we want to be the operating system by which you get off your phones and back into real life. So the primary product is an app that has got events that we think you might want to go to, communities that you might want to belong to. And then people that we think you'd want to meet. And that's how it gets going. And then what happens, and maybe you guys are in the place in your lives here where at some point you actually have a lot of friends, you have a good social life, but what sucks is it's hard to find time to see them, right? It's like hard to get out of this rat race to actually prioritize seeing the people that you care about. And so that's where we just launched an AI agent called Pineapple, and her job is both an iMessage, as well as soon in the app to help be a, what we call a social life instigator and chaos coordinator to get you together with the people that you should be spending more time with.

[Speaker] So yeah, what's the actual like onboarding workflow? We see a lot of people set up Mac minis just to do stuff with iMessage. I imagine that you're handling all of that on your end. And then, you know, do I start by downloading the app or can I text something? What's the workflow to actually start getting prompted to do something in my social life?

So there's two ways to do it. The easiest way is to just go on the App Store or Play Store and download the Pie app. And then we can kind of get you going. That's live in Chicago, Austin, San Francisco. We're going live in New York and LA. We got other smaller markets percolating like Columbus and Milwaukee and Atlanta. That's kind of the core way to do it. The second thing you can do is just dig into the community on Instagram at Pi. What we're doing now is we're building pinelepe.com. So that's P-I-E-N-E-L-O-P-E.com. And that enables you to go right into an agentic experience where you don't even have to get the app because there is this tension between, well, we want to build an app that solves a problem, but also no one wants to download another effing app.

Yeah.

So we wanted to create an easier on-ramp for people that want to just have the experience in iMessage. And it's like a super cool Wild West world right now with how do you manage that and do that the right way from an infrastructure and a compliance perspective.

Sure.

How do you know if the app is working in a specific market? What are the indicators? What are you, you know, what do you see in the data that says like, hey, okay, we have some product market fit in a place like, you know, Chicago or Austin or the other cities that you've listed?

Yes. I mean, you guys know the cold start problem, extremely difficult. Jordy, I know you've played in consumer, John as well. Our cold start problem solution is called the Pi Creator Club. It's at pi creatorclub.com. And what we try to do is attract and incentivize people who love to bring other people together, right? We like to say we're hunting for gatherers. These are the community hosts, the community builders who host run clubs and book clubs and NBA watch parties and trivia nights. Who get folks out there and we want to incentivize them. Those are our Airbnb super hosts. Those are our Uber drivers. Those are our Wikipedia article writers. And we can pay those folks up to $3,500 a month via a rewards program to light up plans and events on Pi. And then they typically distribute those plans through their social media followings. We've got about 800 of those community builders on our app right now. And in any given market, once we have 50, it starts to percolate.

Yeah. How, how important is going individual market by individual market? Because I feel like one of the unique unlocks of AI is that you can probably go and scrape a bunch of data together, transform it, and do a lot of the grunt work a lot faster. But at the same time, like actually getting to real critical mass and putting extra care into it and attention into a launch is is probably also very important.

Totally.

One of the tabs we just launched on the app is called the People to Meet tab. It's right in the middle. And what it enables you to do is kind of flick through and see who's out there and go into their profiles and have it not just be about how they look, but about what are they into, what are their interests, what kinds of events have they gone to, which kinds of events are they going to. And then you can actually star people right on the app. And we hope to build a matching experience that is the first of its kind, where it's across friendship, platonic, romantic, and group, and get those people to not have to figure out a plan to get together, but actually just join an event on the product. Back to your question, we think you need about 1,000 people on that People tab, about 50 events on the Events tab. And that's when we start to see percolation and social density and geographic density start to get momentum.

How big is the team today?

It's funny you ask that. Well, at one point the team was 23, and in the age of AI, it's now 12. And we've seen what you guys are talking about, which is just a massive collapse of product design, engineering, and even go-to-market, where people can do so much more. And so, you know, we didn't have a big moment. You know, we're not Block, we're not Jack Dorsey saying, you know, we're doing some big restructuring. But as you guys know, with startups, things evolve. The team turns over. Some people people go to do other things. We've got this thing in Chicago we call the PayPal Mafia, where I'll back people that start companies. We're trying to build the tech company Chicago deserves. We've never had a $100 billion enterprise value tech company built here in Chicago, and you, you need one of those, as you guys know, to change the market. So we're, um, we're just so— we're having so much fun right now because we've gotten leaner and we're moving more quickly.

Yeah. Uh, what, what is the shape of the Chicago tech market broadly?

It's bad.

It's bad.

It's really bad, guys.

It's—

the problem in Chicago is two things.

You might be the first person to call in from Chicago.

It is rare, but it's such an interesting— I've lived there. It's a beautiful city. It's amazing. It's a beautiful city. Chicago Northwestern, like, there's good schools. I'm sure that a lot of big tech companies have offices there, so there's a pipeline of established talent, like it has a lot of the trappings of it could be, you know, pretty quickly at an Austin or Miami or, you know, any of these other LA like these tiers. But it feels like it hasn't had its like maybe it just hasn't been marketed. But it sounds like there's also just a lot less going on there.

I mean, we have some cool things happening, right? SpotHero was just acquired by Uber.

Sure.

It's a quantum computing center here. We have Tempest that just went public, Tegus that just had a great outcome. But the market in general sucks. And I'll tell you why. There's a cultural factor, set of factors, and then there's an ecosystem set of factors. And they're both navigable, by the way. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm building Pi here. My wife is building a hardware company called Kadea, Monica and Andy, which I mentioned, because we want to help be the change that we're looking for. The problem in the ecosystem here is twofold. There's no angels. There's no community of people throwing around $10,000, $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 checks. I mean, there's a few.

Yeah.

Like there's, you know, we've got some Mike Gamson type people here. There's some folks who do it, but it's very hard to get that first $250,000, $200,000.

Yeah.

And the angels are so influential because, you know, if a great founder meets an angel on the West Coast or the East Coast and they're gonna say like, hey, you seem smart, I love your idea, but you're absolutely, I'd love to invest, but I think you're kind of crazy to not move to SF or move to New York or et cetera. So that there's definitely a lock in.

There's like a talent drain that goes coastal. The second thing is the venture capital ecosystem here puts most of its money in coastal companies. So I heard something recently, is a woman named Desiree Vargas Ridley who backed her fund. She's doing cool things and she has a fund of funds. 90% of the alpha for Chicago-based venture firms is created on the coasts. Right. And 90% of the capital that the leading Chicago companies raise is from the coasts. So when I was raising the Pi Series A, look, we didn't have the best metrics. Maybe we didn't even deserve a Series A yet. Right. But we were inspired by what we could do. We had a little bit of a kernel of momentum. We had an amazing team. You know, there's just enough talent density here. That's not the issue. You know, we recruited a great VP engineering, Hunter Hussar, who's from grinder. We've got an awesome, you know, kind of VP ops, finance, strategy. She's from Wintrust. Bailey Moore. We've got the talent here, but it's very hard to get funded. So I did 15 pitches in Chicago because I wanted to raise our Series A from a Chicago venture fund. I got 15 nos. I did one pitch on the West Coast with Kirsten Green from Forerunner, and we got a term sheet within 48 hours. So that just illustrates that, you know, some of those are some of the challenges with Chicago. And we believe at PIE, we can be part of the solution because you gotta build a $100 billion or at least a $50 billion company to create that ecosystem of angels and to create a training ground for the entrepreneurs of, you know, the next decade in Chicago.

Yeah. What's the biggest lesson you're carrying from Bonobos over to PIE?

I mean, the main one is it just doesn't matter that much. You know, and I don't know exactly how to describe that to you guys in a way that will make sense, 'cause obviously we're so passionate what we do. But having gone through the experience of being hospitalized in the psych ward at Bellevue when we were 9 years into building Bonobos, the Cliff Notes on my story were we had over $100 million of revenue, we had 600+ employees, and I ended up in the psych ward at Bellevue because I had untreated and unmedicated bipolar type 1. And it felt like the whole world was falling apart. I was losing my sanity. I might lose my job, I might lose the woman that, you know, the first great relationship that I'd ever been in in my life, now my wife, Manuela Sonnenschein. And I came out finally ready to deal with it thanks to the amazing work that they do at that hospital. And rather than walking to the loving arms of my family, I walked into 4 NYPD officers who booked me and charged me with felony and misdemeanor assault. And then I spent the next, you know, 12 hours in jail. And I remember thinking when I was in jail, because at this point I was now sane, I was medicated, I was ready to deal with this issue. None of this stuff matters that we think matters relative to our health, our freedom, and our liberties. And so I have that perspective now that I care so much about this, and I know my health and your health and family and friends and loved ones matter so much more than building startups.

It's an inspiring message. What have you actually done? Who have you met through Pi?

I've met some amazing people. One of the relationships I'm the most excited about right now is with a woman named Nadia Okamoto. She just joined us as one of our creators. She's got a run club out of New York called Zoomies. Previously, she's been a part of a company called August that she was co-founder of, a period care company. And she got over 4 million followers on TikTok, maybe a million on Instagram. What I love seeing is right now is people who are massive content creators and social media influencers pointing all of their following at in-person community because the only way to get off these phones is through our phones. The people that were influential in hooking us on social media are very well positioned to say, guys, let's get out, let's go We're not going for a run on Saturday morning for 5 miles or 8 miles. We're gonna go slow, we're gonna talk. So I'm so inspired by our creators. We love seeing the spirit around the country. It's a huge movement largely driven by Gen Z who have realized that it is the damn phones.

Yeah.

Do you think the, like, do you think you have a kind of a window here because, maybe some of the digital platforms would rather we not meet up in person. They're like, actually, it'd be great if Saturday you just take that 6 hours you were gonna go to the run club and go do this other thing, and you should just doom scroll. Seriously, it'll be good. It'll be good for you. And I feel like that kind of creates an opportunity where a new platform can emerge that is not trying to, deliver as many ad impressions as, as physically possible.

Totally.

I was just reading this story last night in The New Yorker about the lawsuit that was, you know, that came up. I think someone won $6 million in damages from having been addicted to social media. You guys have probably talked about it.

Yeah.

Look, I think there's room for the next great American-rooted social network right now. And I believe 3 things about it. Number 1, it's going to be native. Number 2, it's going to be focused on actual friends and your IRL local life, your in real life existence. And then thirdly, that that company is going to be called Pi.

I love it.

Well, congratulations and thank you for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great week.

Congratulations. Congratulations to the team on the, on, uh, the milestone yesterday.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

Very, very cool. Thanks. Good to see you, Andy.

Up next, we have Josh Reeves from Gusto. He's the co-founder and CEO here to break down their acquisition of Mozy to expand into full-stack compliance. Josh, how are you doing?

There he is. It's been too long. Great to see you.

Good to see you guys. This time, this time on Zoom, last time in person.

Yeah. Well, congratulations on the acquisition. Walk me through the problem that you were trying to solve And then I want to hear about the process and how you met this team or what you're planning to do once you bring these in. But first, sort of describe the problem because I'm sure you were feeling it among customers beforehand.

Yeah, so the keyword here is compliance. No one likes compliance. There's a lot of compliance out there, local, state, federal, and we've been tackling many forms of it at Gusto from the early days. If I were to case study, any small business owner knows this, you hire in a state, you have to go register with that state, you have to go obviously file specific documents, materials. Once you're registered, there's now filing requirements, there's entity management requirements, you might get notices. So, what we're doing here is basically creating an end-to-end compliance solution. Compliance basically way to get stuff done for small business so they don't have to do it themselves anymore.

Yeah, this was a shocking thing for me as a young entrepreneur on Gusto, getting like a physical piece of mail from a state that I had never visited. And it was always because we had hired some, like, you know, paid some contractor one time for this tiny thing, and now suddenly it's created hours of work. I have to like call or send mail back. It was—

And everything else, is basically zero minutes a week for the executive team when you're on Gusto and you're set up. And maybe during onboarding, you have to go through a quick flow to get someone on, but most of the time it's just nothing, which is amazing. And then when the compliance stuff comes up, it's always like, oh, what happened? They moved, you know, all this stuff. But then talk to me about the solution. Like, how does this actually get fixed? How quick can it be?

From a product lens, like, I'll give some examples. So anyone that's used Gusto before knows state tax registration has been a pain point. We will have an end-to-end, just comprehensive state tax registration offering that gets it done at the quality and standard you would expect. You mentioned notices. No one likes to receive notices. Even if we do a good job helping you with them, it'd be better if you just didn't get them in the first place. So the ability for Gusto to be a registered agent, to have that mail actually come to us directly so the business owner doesn't even have to think about or consider the notice in the first place, we think is going to be really, really valuable and helpful as well.

So I'm sure you're experiencing the productivity gains of AI coding and coding agents. What stuck out to you about this is the time to buy as opposed as opposed to the time to build?

So we're doing both. I mean, I pinch myself 'cause I tell the team and we talk to each other, this is the most incredible time in our lives to be a builder. And I wake up every day with like just giddiness of like what we can go create and, you know, what you can basically pull forward on your roadmap because now it can get done with high quality much, much faster. So lots of first party on the way. Mosey, we had known the team for a long time, We actually were an early investor in the company. We have partnered for a long time as well. And it really came down to the team, the technology, the product, all of it's coming over to Gusto and the chance to bring it to small businesses earlier, faster. But yeah, stay tuned. Lots more first-party builds coming from us as well.

Amazing. What are you seeing on the small business hiring side generally? We talked to your chief economist about some of the trends. And I'm wondering how you're processing what you're expecting to happen with the shape of your business and just the small business community generally.

So reminder to folks, there's more dentist offices in the US than tech startups. So when we say small business, we're talking mainstream small business here. And yeah, some puts and takes. One of the things that also got us really excited about the pain point we're able to help with Mozi, there's a lot more new businesses getting created. And that's exciting. I think some of that's driven by folks getting inspired or feeling like they can take the plunge for the first time because of the tooling that's now available. Some of it, I think, is also affected by a lot of the job dislocation underway. And, you know, the happy path I look forward to is a lot more folks starting businesses for the first time because they realize they now can go do that successfully and actually make a, make a go of it and be accomplishing their goals. So we're seeing more businesses getting started. On the flip side, hiring within not just small businesses, but from talking to lots of bigger companies, hiring across the board is not as robust as it has been historically. So company growth, if a company might have historically grown from, you know, 5 to 7 employees, maybe now it's growing from 5 to 6. So there's an offset there. Again, I think tied to some of the productivity gains and some of the things that people can go do now with these different different AI technologies.

How have you been processing the SaaS-pocalypse? Like, when I think about the last thing that would get vibe-coded, it would probably be a payroll system for a dentist's office. But how have you been grappling with this idea that just the instantiation of building software—

As soon as we get rid of our physical onboarding forms and our fax machines, we're gonna vibe-code.

Yeah, every time I go to the dentist's office, I'm like, Oh, we're not even on, you know, like SaaS at all in many ways, and there's still a lot of paper and pen going around.

I mean, the number one thing a dentist should do, right, is be working in your mouth, and that's about it, because that's what they're actually best at. I'd say we talk a lot about offense, defense. Like, the offense side is we can go deliver a lot more product functionality, solve a lot more pain points for small businesses, make the life of a small business owner easier, better. Faster than ever before, that excites us. I think from a SaaSpocalypse lens, Gusto's never been a pure software company. In my mind, if you want to oversimplify, there's pure software and then there's companies that do actions for you. So from day one, Gusto does the filing, says we did it correctly, and if there's a mistake, we'll go fix it. So we've always kind of had this mindset of we'll take 5 of the 20 hats off your head and be responsible for it. So now we can keep being responsible like we've always been. That pain point has always existed. It exists with AI. And the small business owner doesn't want to be the one responsible to make sure it's done accurately. And from what we can tell, the foundation model providers don't also want to be the one liable and responsible for it to be done accurately. So we have a chance now to be where our customers are, be inside ChatGPT, be inside Claude, be inside Slack. Be even easier and more accessible to them, and then still do these really important jobs for them.

Can you actually contextualize the size of the per-employee annual compliance cost and then try and break it down for me? Because the number, when I read it, seemed so high. I have to— I'm having trouble wrapping my head around like where this is actually getting sliced up, where the dollars are actually flowing.

So probably at the Follow up on that one. I mean, I'd say there are many, many drivers for it. One of them is a little bit how the US was formed. So this is more like 50 countries than 50 states in many ways. And so you have not just state and federal that are usually wildly not in sync and creating their own versions of many different forms and requirements, but also state and also county and local that actually have lots of opinions as well. So, you know, in San Francisco, San Francisco, for example, where I'm based, you hire a new employee, you have, you know, 9 different taxes, you have multiple different jurisdictions. If you hire, you need to report to the EDD. This is a form that's specific to making sure if someone, let's say, has garnishments on their wages due to, like, childcare payments, it gets pulled out from their wage on time. So there's just lots of different programs and activities that connect to employment. And again, if you're not using a partner for this, It means the business owner and the employee are on their own having to figure it out.

Yeah, so when I'm contextualizing that $14,700 per employee cost, that's not just filing fees and paying and processing this, any actual fees associated with compliance. It's also the burden on the HR organization broadly. Is that right?

Yeah.

There's the time investment that could be spent elsewhere. There's the fines and penalties. There's the follow-up headache and hassle involved. And yeah, all that adds up.

Okay, well, what habits do you have as a CEO today that you wish you had a decade ago?

Oh, good question. Let's see. I think one thing that shifted for me quite a bit, it could have been tied to having children. And something I wish I did earlier, but I used to like go to bed at 2:00 or 3:00 AM and it was kind of more of the late night schedule. I actually really like waking up at 5:00 AM now, 5:00, 6:00 AM, having multiple hours in the morning of, you just shift the hours, right? So it's the same couple hours I would have. You still need to sleep the same number of hours, but that morning time I find to be even more productive than some of the nighttime time I had in the past.

No, yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I mean, you're naturally more tired at the end of the day And so even if you're getting those bonus hours when, like, maybe the messages aren't coming in at such a rapid clip, better to have those in the morning. A lot of executives feel the same way. Well, thank you so much. Congrats on the acquisition, and we'll talk to you soon.

Have a great weekend. With all this acceleration in software development, I can honestly see— I can see the world where you guys have legitimately hundreds of individual products, some very small, maybe some built by third parties.

And also just way more companies and small businesses on the platform.

Yeah, one thing I add, I mean, there's systems of action, maybe that term catches on, but there's a big difference to me between systems of just pure software where you're kind of like on a database versus actually doing things on behalf of the customer, taking those hats off their head. And Gusto has always been a system of action, and we're excited to add many many more actions going forward.

Yeah, and you guys are selling the work. Like, in some ways you compete with— like, there's actual stores, physical places where you can go to have someone run payroll.

Sure, sure.

And so the original product— this has become a popular VC market map type pitch over the last couple of years, but you guys have been doing it for, what is it, 14 years now? So yeah, very cool.

Yeah, well, one decade plus in. And still early. We got decades to go. Lots more small businesses to help.

Fantastic. Well, have a great weekend.

Great to see you guys.

Thanks so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon.

Good to see you guys too.

Goodbye. Cheers. Is there anything in the timeline that we should review? Because we do have to get out of here soon.

Donald Trump says—

What did he say?

Palantir Technologies, PLTR, has proven to have great warfighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies.

Did you see?

And Jim Cramer says, now we need POTUS to weigh in on CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.

That's what we need.

Yeah, I don't know if a president has ever posted about a stock ticker.

This might be the first one. There's a new benchmark out there for AI models, KELLY Bench, Long Horizon Evaluation for Frontier Models. KELLY Bench evaluates evaluates models within a year-long sports betting market, a challenging and highly non-stationary environment. Every frontier model they tested loses money. They struggle to design ML strategies, manage risk, and adapt as the world changes. Can language models beat the market? Some of them got, it appears to get lucky in the beginning and then sort of sell off. You would sort of expect that none of them would be able to outperform necessarily, But if they get really, really creative, I mean, you might expect to see outperformance in the future. I wanna dig into more about how this benchmark was implemented because you either need to like hold back all the data or run it for a full year to see because otherwise, if it has tools, it can go and just look up the results before you ask it to make a bet on a particular sports team. Anyway.

Well, folks. It's been a fun week.

Yeah, it's been a great week.

We hope you have an incredible weekend ahead.

Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at tbpn.com, and we'll see you on Monday at 11 a.m. sharp.

Goodbye.