Thiel Fellow Tuesday | Brad Gerstner, Delian Asparouhov + Raycho Raychev, AJ Piplica + Zach Shore

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It is Tuesday, May 27, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. The ultra dome is the physical place, the first of hundreds, but we're still in the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a new studio.

John taking you to white suits.

Oh. Because the market's ripping. Bitcoin's above 110K. We're so back. I never died at it for a second. Massive consumer confidence beat, too. Consum consumers.

Undefeated.

Undefeated. Massive day. We have a bunch of great guests. Where the Midas list dropped, we got Brad Gerstner coming on the show. Hopefully he's just taken a massive victory lap. No, I'm kidding. He's here to talk about Invest America and some of the policy work he's been doing. We got AJ Paplika and Zack Shore from Hermeus coming on to talk about how they're flying their first plane. They're going hypersonic soon. Delian's coming on to talk about the Enduro Sat investment. And then we got a lightning round with the Thiel Fellowship. We got something like six or seven, eight, nine, ten fellows. We got a lot of them. Yeah, they're coming back to. Back to back to back. So that should be a lot of fun. But let's show off the gong. I think you should hit it. Okay, let's hit the gong. This is the reveal. We saw you warming up. Hit it, hit it. Feels great. Fantastic.

It's great to be standing up.

Yeah.

On the set. Yep.

Yeah, it's great. Oh, it just rings nicely. It's just the best. It's just the best. And of course that we wouldn't. We wouldn't be able to have this studio. We wouldn't be able to have this gong without ramp. Time is money save. Both easy to use. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started. The Midas list has dropped and big news. We want to take you through a couple of people. Alfred Lynn at the top. Reid Hoffman, number two. Peter Thiel number three. Then Neil Shen, former Sequoia now at Hongshan, number four. Mickey Malka number five at Ribbit Capital, famous for his coinbase investment, The Node Coastline 6, Doug Leone, Doug 7. Hamont over at General Catalyst is at 8. Fred Wilson at 9. Chris Dixon at 10. We got him coming on the show tomorrow. We're hitting. We're hitting most of you. We should do a Midas might as list day, have Them all on. I'm sure they're not busy.

Let's do it. Let's do it. A hundred. I mean, we've been talking about forever now trying to break the Guinness World record for most VCs on a single podcast. We believe that we'll safely break it at a hundred. And so why not just do the Midas list?

Yes.

Getting them all, like you said, getting them all on one show. We should consecutively would be totally. Probably no problem. Their EAs would be on overtime.

Yep, yep, yep. But it would be chaos.

They're the hero. The unsung heroes.

Yeah. You got Mike Spicer, Sutter Hill for Snowflake at 11. Roloff made at Sequoia, made 13th. Who else is interesting? We have back to. Back to back on 17, 18, 19. In terms of TVPN appearance. We got Keith Raboy at 17, Marc Andreessen 18, Trey Stevens at 19. They've all been on TVP ed.

Maybe we should just normally read off the ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should issue.

Who are these other people? They're no names. If they haven't been on the show yet, they need to really make a name for themselves coming on the show.

They do.

Anyway, we should do some timeline. Was there any other news that broke? It was kind of a quiet weekend with the Memorial Day. Obviously, there were lots of folks at the Monaco GP, the F1 race, but most of the venture capitalists, of course, were at the Coca Cola 600 because there's been a major vibe shift. Major vibe shift. So NASCAR's in, F1's kind of out. But you're still into the F1 stuff because you got that European flair.

Yes, European flair, John. Couldn't have said it better myself. But, yeah, the whole shift towards, you know, the monster truck rallies, all that. It's impossible to get a box at a monster truck rally. 500 miles from San Francisco. Every single one gets taken up by different SaaS vendors.

I mean, I was joking about the Coca Cola 600 being a big hotspot for tech, but I think the more I posted about it, people kept texting me and being like, okay, well, I.

Saw somebody watch and they're like, okay, I get it.

Yeah. Yeah, I got a couple of those where they're like, okay, yeah, you got me. Like, it's actually pretty entertaining. Like, I'm. I'm kind of into the race drama now.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'm looking up bought in.

I'm looking at, you know, the design features and different cars. Yeah. But I have it on Good authority that a, that a major, major company will intact will be going into nascar. And so I'm very excited about that, that it should be good authority. So I do think that more people will be going to NASCAR races. It'll be a lot of fun. Let's pull up some posts. Let's run through some timeline while we wait for Brad to hop on. He's coming on 11.

I mean, the big story is really Brad at number 40.

Oh, yeah.

Is disgrace. And clearly, you know, very clearly the Forbes brand will be trying to dig themselves out of this hole.

I agree.

For years.

I agree.

For years after a mistake like this. So I'm sure they'll issue a correct direction before end of day.

Yeah, we should do our own Midas list. Everyone's tied for number one.

Everyone wins the paid of the pay to play Midas. The true.

We talked about this. Doing the TVPN Midas list is just an auction. Yeah.

It's live.

Yeah.

Hyper Game of Thrones.

It's an auction to be on. You just. You just say how much you're willing to pay, and then whoever pays the most gets the first slot and then it just ranks. That. That honestly might be a. A pretty good indication of how much capital you've been able to acquire.

Yeah. Except then you'd have people like Fred Wilson who, you know, they've intentionally kept their fund sizes pretty small, and he wouldn't necessarily have the management fees to support, you know, buying the top. The top spot or the spot that.

What is the game of venture if not a, um, if not just. Just returns? I mean, a venture fund is a business at the end of the day, whether you make money from fees or carrying, it's all just profit at the end of the day.

Well, we have a very special guest calling in now. Let's bring him in.

Welcome to the show.

What's going on? Hey, guys, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. You know, when you told me you guys were gonna do this, you know, I was. I thought, okay, there's. There's probably a market gap for doing this, but you guys have killed it. It's a great show. I hear so many people talking about it. You filled a real void. So congrats to you on all the momentum and adding something new to the ecosystem. I think that's really important and great to be here. Thank you so much.

I mean, huge fan of BG2. Obviously. I was listening to it last night and yeah, I mean, very excited to talk to you about the idea into the Investamerica accounts. And I liked how you took. You took the listener through the genesis of the idea, but then also some of the inside beltway politics of, like how these things kind of actually play out. The idea of losing ball control, something that I hadn't really considered. It seems obvious once you break it down, but where did the idea actually come from? And can you kind of introduce that idea and just kind of set the playing field before we go deeper into it?

Yeah, I mean, I guess at some level, the idea has been gestating for my whole life. Right. I was a kid whose dad went broke and I was on the outside looking in, and I remember when my grandfather, who sacrificed everything, you know, left me 20,000 bucks and I was able to invest that, really day trade it and put myself through law school and business school and. And the feeling of going from the outside to actually owning something, having something. Right. That you can get that snowball rolling down the hill. So I think that was the seed planted in a young kid. But over the course of the last five to seven years started getting a lot more concerned and Covid really punctuated this for me about kind of this growing wealth gap, the haves and the have nots, over 50% of the population under 40 having a negative view of capitalism. And Ray Dalio, he did a great presentation at the all in Summit where he talked about the rise and fall of the great countries.

And.

And one of the principal reasons that great empires or great countries fall was wealth concentration among a very few. Yeah, right. And so you have kind of French Revolution type moments. And it seems to me that the natural byproduct of the technology revolution has been, you know, that you can now have somebody like Mark Zuckerberg who serves 3 billion customers around the world. Right. Henry Ford couldn't do that. John Rockefeller couldn't do that. Right. Their tams were much smaller. And so you see the increasing concentration of wealth. And the question was, how do we protect and preserve capitalism, the free enterprise system, the golden goose which has created this, this innovation which has driven humanity forward at the same time, not drift into socialism and redistribution and try to kill the patient in order to save it. Right. And it seemed to me the answer was to make everybody a capitalist from birth. If you gave everybody ownership and allowed them to compound in the upside of capitalism. Right. Rather than disincentivizing people by taking money away or creating some kind of socialist state to create UBI or some other cockamamie scheme, but really to make everybody a private owner of Assets from birth. Treat it like a 401k, let it compound for their life, get them excited about what it means. A day like today when the markets are doing well, it's up. There's a lot of excitement among our community. Right. You know, people even just tracking the price of bitcoin by itself.

But there aren't as many people.

But every American should be bought into that to some degree. Right. And even just seeing that the number go up by a few percentage points is enough to get people excited about participating in the system.

I must have been like 8 years old or something, but my parents took a 12 pack of coca Cola that comes in a cardboard box. They cut out a stock certificate out of it. I didn't grow up wealthy or anything, but they bought like 5 shares of Coca Cola or 10 shares of Coca Cola. And I just remember it concretized this idea of like owning stock, which was very abstract to an 8 year old or something like that. And I had that on my wall for a long time. And then at a certain point it realized that oh no, this has financial value because obviously it wasn't literally tied to the stock, but they had been holding the stock in an account for me and I was able to kind of experience that, which I think a lot of people are missing out on. I want to, I want to ask you about the idea of, of holding specifically. There were some ideas about 18, age 30, day one, retirement fund. How do you think about unlocking that value and how do you think about any of the risks around. Like obviously you don't want people going and writing forward contracts against it on day one. Right. Although I'm sure someone will try and financialize this.

Yeah. And of course they will. That will be illegal, as will payday loans against it and other things.

That's good.

Treasury department will have to put together the rules and the regulations to make sure that this is implemented and executed in a way that we all feel great and proud of. We have some incredible people lining up who will design the product. But you know, the basic goal is every kid has on their phone this, I own a little bit of Apple of Berkshire Hathaway, you know, and that will make them feel like they're in the game. But when you, when you think about this, we want it to be a one way lockbox, a 401k where parents and, and kids can add money into the account. Birthday money, bar mitzvah money, as easy as venmoing in 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 50 bucks, 100 bucks. Right. And you'll have this register that will show all the, all the deposits in the account over the life of the account. So when the kid looks back at 18 and sees like, where did all this money come from? And the first one will be $1,000 from the U.S. treasury Department. Yeah, right. An internship too. Right. If you just showing that sort of long term thinking, it's like basically a track record that you can go and use throughout your early career.

Yeah. I mean, there's also these viral moments where a lot of kids will build something and they get a bunch of attention and they try and kind of monetize it, but it's hard, but it's like it can be very easy money. Easy go, easy come, easy go with those.

Right. So this is a lockbox.

Right.

Money can go in, money can't go out. And now we have Corporations, Dell Corporation, Nvidia, AMD Salesforce, who've already T Mobile, iHeartMedia have all raised their hand, say we love this idea and we will add money to the accounts of the kids of our employees.

That's amazing.

So now we have Uber companies representing millions and millions of employees who are going to add to the accounts of the kids of their employees as a corporate benefit. Right. Which makes perfect sense. On top of that, we'll be announcing major multibillion dollar philanthropic gifts from large philanthropists who say, you know what, I don't want a middleman taking a scrape. I just want to be able to give a thousand bucks to every kid in the state of Texas or every kid in America whose family earns under $200,000 or who graduates from public high school or whatever rules they stipulate. Yeah, right. They'll be able to donate that money to the Treasury Department. C3 the. They'll still get the tax deductibility, but that will go directly into the accounts of kids. 3.7 million kids a year will have this account. So now you have the power of philanthropy, you have the power of families, the power of churches or community groups. And now the final one is I had a couple people who are governor or running for governor call me up and say, if I'm elected, we're going to donate money to the account of the kids who are born in my state and who graduate from high school in my state. That because we want to attract and retain the best kids. So I think this is going to be 100 to 1, 1000 to 1 private sector match. What the federal government's going to do is simply set up the accounts and get out of the way, like a good 401k. Just get the ball rolling down the hill and let the private sector do what the private sector does so well. The S&P 500 is compounded at 10.2% for 75 years. The way out of this problem is to get kids in the game from birth. And by the age of 18, if you start with 1,000 bucks, you add just $750 a year. Right. By age 18, you're going to have $50,000 in that account. By age 30, you're going to have upwards of $200,000 in that account. And if you start with $1,000, you add $750 a year and you don't touch it. At age 50, you have a million dollars in that account.

Wow.

Right. That is the power of compounding. I think it totally changes the game for the country. I think it's the cheapest insurance policy we can possibly buy in defense of free market capitalism, our democratic way of life. Right. And it does it in a way that gets people excited about capitalism, not in a way that penalizes people for being successful.

Totally.

Yeah, we talked about this. It's hard for somebody to feel bought into capitalism if they have negative capital. Right. If they have.

From the. It's from that email between Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg talking about how a lot of the next generation, they come, they come into the world or they become adults with debt from student loans, which totally very anti student loan debt. And then also the housing prices have gotten so expensive because of regulation and a whole bunch of other factors that you can't get on the housing ladder to start building capital. Because most people, if they get a 30 year mortgage, even if it's expensive when they're 25 by 65, 55, they paid that off and they have a ton of capital and then they are more bought into the capitalist system. And so yeah, this feels like a great, a great way to solve the problem in a free market way.

Let me give you one final thing. So we had Kevin Hassett, who's now the chair of the National Council of Economic Advisors, and a guy named Rob Shapiro, who is key economic advisor under Clinton. We had them come together and do for Milken a study of this over the course of the last year. Okay. And here's what the study found. It won't surprise you, but like we have control group studies on what happens if you give some kid at birth or in first few years of life a savings account or investment account. What did we find more Likely to graduate from high school and college, more likely to buy a home, more likely to start a business, more likely to be a taxpayer, less likely to be incarcerated.

Wow.

Amazing. The net present value of the societal return of just what I told you. You know how many tens of billions we spend a year to try to achieve the things that I just told you. Keep people out of jail, get them to graduate, get them to buy a home. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year to try to achieve that without much effect. Now, we know from controlled studies, if you just get them into the game from birth, they feel more confident, they feel more in the game. They learn financial literacy in school because now they have a reason to learn financial literacy and you achieve all those positive societal goals. So the net present value is going to be very high. And you know, listen, we have a real debate going on in Washington about the national debt, something I'm also very passionate about. I've supported a balanced budget amendment for the country for over 30 years, right? We have $38 trillion in debt. We have a $2 trillion deficit. And we all know that, Doge, something that I've been working on. You know, how do we go back to a 2019 baseline in terms of federal government spending so we don't bankrupt our kids? It is immoral, saddling kids with $50 trillion in debt. But the truth of the matter is. So some people have said, well, Brad, how can you support that? And on the other hand, you support Invest America because it costs the government 3.7 billion a year. Well, let me first just contextualize it. $3.7 billion a year is about the cost of a single Patriot missile system battery, right? It's about six rockets. Okay? So for taking six rockets or, you know, in that missile battery, or we can have every child in America started off with an investment account. So which one better protects capitalism, America and our way of life? Right? There are trade offs that we can make. We know Elon literally was finding $5 billion a week in terms of profligate spending that you can eliminate in order to pay for this. So first it's very small, but secondly, when you think about the compounding that will occur, it compounds tax deferred. But at the end of the period of time, you have to pay capital gains tax on it. The government will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in capital gains tax over the life of these accounts. But the way congressional scoring works is if it's outside the 10 year window, then all those revenues that 100%, you know, you will capture, don't get added back to the score. If you did that, this would not cost you anything. In fact, it would generate revenue for the federal government. And you and I all know it's customer acquisition cost for taxes, right? If we were, if this was our business and we owned 100% of it, it's upfront investment that we're going to reap a lot of long term return. And that ignores the things I told you about. More likely to graduate from high school, more likely to buy a house and start a business and pay taxes. So I'm very confident that the net present value of this to society is, is off the charts. Right. This is a no brainer for us to do. But I'm equally passionate to say that it's not acceptable that we're not taking seriously the national debt. I think that, you know, where are we in this reconciliation bill? I posted this and Elon retweeted it. I think we got like 40 million views. This is how we get back to the 2019 baseline. It's a view, it's basically a chart, a graph that shows how the COVID 19 spending bubble occurred and how we need over a period of four to seven years to get back to the baseline and get, you know, deflate that bubble. In terms of spending, that's going to be hard to do. But in terms of the process, the Invest America act is the name of the underlying authorized legislation. So we have the Invest America act in the House of Representatives led by Blake Moore. You have the Invest America act in the Senate, that's chief authority Ted Cruz. I will tell you, there are a bunch of Democrats lining up on in both the Senate and the House. This will be a big bipartisan bill in both places. Now, what happens in a reconciliation process, Think of that as an omnibus piece of legislation where they take the Invest America act and they roll it up into reconciliation. So a bunch of people saw these called Trump accounts in the reconciliation bill. The underlying legislation is the Invest America act, but much like Pell Grants or the Roth ira, not surprised, you know, that the President will take the opportunity to name these Trump accounts when they, when they go into effect. Yeah.

Can you talk about any of the risks or problems that you foresee needing to work through? I mean, I'm extremely optimistic about this, but I'm just thinking about like, let's assume it gets passed in a bipartisan way. Is this, are there going to be technical challenges to actually implementing this? I mean, the government famously, you know, the health care website was A big deal. What about like, is there a risk that this creates, like a financial bubble? How are we pricing, how are we, how are we picking assets? Is there going to be companies lobbying to get included in the index or are we just doing walk through some of the risks, how we're fighting those.

Yeah, all great questions. Well, what I suspect will happen is, so the authorizing agency is the Treasury Department. Secretary Besant will put together a working group. The working group will have terrific people, a lot of whom you would know from Silicon Valley, who I've already talked to, who are some of the best product designers in the world. Guys like Vlad, who, you know, run Robinhood, who, who understand, you know, how to build, you know, financial markets.

Infrastructure in the mix over there.

There may be, there may be a.

Little Joe do, which is amazing, like legendary Silicon Valley design.

Right. And I will tell you that Joe is very excited about Invest America and he'd be a logical person to lead like product direction.

Totally.

Right. But there'll be a lot of those issues that have to get worked out. Our objective is that we put together a broad based index basket that looks like the S and P. But we want no fees, zero fees for the life of the account. Right. And I think we can achieve that based on the conversations that we've had. You know, and so, and we want to make it super easy for parents to be able to add money to the account. I'm talking $5, $10, like that's how you get the snowball, really working for a lot of families. I want to see, I want to see haptics. I wanted this to feel like gamified. I want kids to get addicted to investing long term though, right? Not day trading, but like really, really into it. Well, remember, you can't day trade it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying getting addicted to long term, that's the beautiful thing. What they will get addicted to is understanding the power of compounding. And they'll understand it at an instinctual level, not because they're looking at some math formula in a book. The problem is if 70% of people, if you're in inner city Trenton or rural Indiana or rural Texas or East Lake and somebody says, okay, come into the classroom today, we're going to learn Chinese. And you say to yourself, man, I'm never going to China, like, why do I need to learn Chinese? A lot of kids in America, in fact 70% of kids, their parents don't own anything and they don't have a prospect of owning anything. And so now you tell them, we're going to learn about stocks or compounding or financial literacy. And you can see why they check out because they don't have a frame of reference, right, to understand that. But now every kid in that class likely has a phone. And the teacher says, open up your phone. We're going to talk about in the seventh grade how you got $14,000 in this account, what it means to be a shareholder in Apple, what it means to own a stock, what your voting privileges are, how that compounded to $14,000, what it will compound to over the next 10 years if you add 20 bucks a month, if you add 50 bucks a month, if you don't add anything, right? Like now you have their attention because they own something. And you know, I think that this is going to unlock just a massive amount of human potential. But you know, it's one of those things that on the left, people get excited about it because, you know, you close the wealth gap. On the right, people get excited about it because you defend capitalism and you build something that's aligned with capitalism. There is no government account. There is no government ownership. There is zero. There are 3.7 million private accounts where the families have title and ownership. The government can't go usurp that no more than they could go take your house.

That's amazing, right?

It's a private, it's a private account. So we found this magical blend where I think we can land the plane. It's in the reconciliation bill. I expect that this is going to become law, you know, in the early part of July. I think the President's goal is to sign it into law on July 4th. But it's pretty mind boggling that this idea that really started in earnest with me, you know, Chamath and I were on CNBC at the end of 2021 and they and Scott Wapner was going wild about how the stock market was going up. And I was feeling very, very concerned about this issue. And I said, Scott, you know, at this moment that the government stepped in and helped in Covid it was all of us as taxpayer that put money in that caused the market to go up in 20 and 21. But too many people are left out of that benefit. A lot of people lost their jobs in 20 and 21 and they weren't in the market, so they didn't benefit from the market going up. So that's when I first said to him, what I would like to see is I would like to see President Biden pass a savings account. And at the time I said $2,000 in it for every kid in America. So they benefited from the upside of the compounding of the markets. And it's pretty surreal to me that starting in the fall of 24, that went a little viral on Twitter and now we're really on the one yard line. I would encourage everybody to follow it on, on Twitter VestaAmerica24. We're going to be posting legislative updates, working group updates there. But I really appreciate you guys giving me the chance to talk about it a little bit too.

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you for.

Super interesting.

Thank you for doing that.

I last comment.

To me, it's, you know, given everything that you do already, it's, it's, it feels like the perfect way for you to serve the country and in some way create it, you know, incredible legacy.

And I just love this so much more than the COVID stimulus because I remember watching that happen where people got checks and there were actually a series of kind of financial influencers who grew massive accounts around when, when will the, when will the checks arrive? How do you get your stimulus check? What should you do with it? And then that quick turned into essentially like day trading it. And obviously we know that statistically those people lost a lot of that money, kind of gambled it away. And, but if you had just taken that and bought and hold and held. I mean those, those stimulus checks that went out at the bottom of the market, they would be so much bigger now. So it makes so much more sense. I could even imagine that you're, you're still going to get kind of gamification, like content how to grow your Invest America account. But it's going to be like, go out and cut lawns.

Exactly.

Put $10 in every week and watch it happen. And you're going to get kids that.

Are like, yeah, the competitive nature of everybody starts on a level playing field, but at certain point you can go start. Yeah, mowing lawns.

Yeah.

Doing little jobs, putting a bunch of stuff away and making it a competitive, fun process. No, no doubt about it. And imagine this, we're entering. I've been investing now in Silicon Valley since 1999 and we had the Internet, we had cloud, we had mobile, we had social. And every time one of these waves came, I was like, it can't get any bigger than this. But machines beginning to think on behalf of humans. The age of AI is, I've been saying now for several years, is going to be the biggest super cycle of our lifetimes. I think I'll be investing against it for the balance of my career. It's making us all bionic at a rate that's really hard to understand, but it's going to lead to a lot of dislocation. Right. The idea that we're not going to have to renegotiate the social contract, right. As part of this transformation is just like that's head in the sand. There are going to be a lot of people who lose their jobs. Right. And they're going to. I'm a positivist on this stuff. I think the world ends up in a better place, but it doesn't mean that everybody ends up in a better place. Right. The Industrial revolution caused a lot of pain on the way to net gain for society. And so we need to figure out a way that we. And this is just one of a lot of different ways we're going to have to come up with right around retraining, re educating, like changing the way in which we educate people. You guys are going to talk about the teal fellows today. I mean, that is a way to deconstruct education that could potentially be a model for further transformations. But they're going to have to be the best and brightest among all of us to rethink the social contract in a way that holds this fragile experiment together. This is the greatest country in the history of the world, but it doesn't happen. We can't take for granted that we can go through this magnitude of change that AI is going to bring and that nothing will break. We've already seen, right, us feeling a little uneasy with things breaking. Right. Some of the populism we're seeing, you know, the 90% against the 10%, it's our job to, you know, to attack that, but to do it in a way that's aligned with the basic principles on which the country was founded. Right. And that's to align us all with the incentives that if you work hard, get into the game, you know, you can. You have economic mobility. I mean, I'm a living example of that. I mean, we started with nothing and you know, and, and I. We ended up in a very, very different place. There are very few countries on the face of the planet where that type of economic mobility exists. And I think this is going to put us in a much better position in that regard.

Yeah, we can't lose it. It's too important.

Yep.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for doing this, guys. Great to be here. Next time we get to tell you, let's Talk VC and investing and markets and all the other good stuff. I, I, I have one question before you jump off. Do you feel, I know you're heavily invested in AI, do you still feel underexposed to AI given, given how sort of bullish you are in the, in the fullness of time? You know, if you look at a chart that plots OpenAI's revenue growth against Google and Meta, it's growing, you know, it's achieved the same level of revenue in a fraction of the time. It's already multiples bigger than Google was at the time of its IPO. So you know, we own a lot of OpenAI. I wish we owned more. The reality was the winners of this moment in time and there's going to be a whole bunch of agentic application. But you know, we haven't even really begun in the application universe. There are going to be tons of these, but the winners of this super cycle are all going to be winners of the previous super cycle. So I would say we're all in, you know, we're all in it around it in the public markets. We're all in it in late stage venture where we just participated again in the round of OpenAI would be an example of that. And we're doing some of the most interesting early stage stuff of my career. Companies that are scaling at rates I've never seen with small teams, very efficient, very low burn ratios. So I couldn't be more excited because I think this really is the type of innovation that pushes humanity forward. Right. Consumers have more opportunity to learn and their healthcare gets better. And all the things we know that comes from this because you have a bionic coach in your pocket at all times for all things. And enterprises are going to get transformed as well. We're in the golden age of margin expansion for enterprises. And if you're not breaking your company today and figuring out how to make it AI native AI first, right. You're just going to lose your market share and you won't be there to compete in a few years. With the Internet itself, the diffusion was a lot slower. You had time, you had five to 10 years to get on board. The diffusion is way faster and way more impactful this go around. Great to see you guys keep up the great work. Did you coordinate the blazers? The market's well, whenever the market is up in a meeting meaningful way, well, we wear white suits so let's, we'll try to coordinate your next guest appearance update and we'll get you in a white suit. All right guys, awesome. Take it easy. Have a good one. Take it easy. Bye.

Bye. I have a. I have a hilarious story about my own kind of DIY Invest America account. I don't know if I ever told you this, but when I got my first job, I was starting to make, like, around five grand a month. We were paying ourselves. Let's go. And I. And I wanted to save money, and what I noticed was that you'd have, like, typical, like, bank of America app with a checking account and a savings account. But because of the app, you could move money from the savings account to the checking account whenever you want. So you go out with your friends, and they'd be like, oh, like, do you want to buy this thing? Do you want to go out tonight? And I'd be like, no, I don't have any money. And they'd be like, but you have money in your savings account. You can just transfer it over. You can spend it tonight. And so I was just not saving any money. And so what I wound up doing was I went to a bank and I got a safety deposit box. And every time I got paid, I would go and take $1,000 in physical cash and put it in the safety deposit box, and then I would lock it. And I couldn't access the safety deposit box on the weekend. So if I'm traveling or anything, I would just be like, look, I actually have access to no money. Like, I might have more money, but, like, it's not as easy as just, like, venmoing you right now.

Somebody could probably productize that and actually do very well.

Yeah, I mean, the psychology of money is, like, well under. Like, way underrated. Like, if you have 100 doll, less likely to spend it than a bunch of fives, because you don't want. Psychologically, you don't want to break the hundred. And so I always noticed that when I would get paid, I would go in and I would count the money, and I would watch the stack physically grow. Instead of just like, oh, the number. Yeah, instead of just the number getting bigger in your bank account, it would be like, physically, this box is filling up with cash. And then I would count it all.

We're going to need a bigger box.

So I would count it up and be like, okay, I've seen 6,000. Okay, now I have 7,000. And I would count it up and do the feel of counting money. Oh, it was. It was addictive, and it worked really well. I saved a ton of money.

That's great.

Yeah, it was fantastic.

Somebody productized that for sure. Kids on it.

Well, we have.

That was great. I mean, honestly, I truly think that once Invest America passes, we'll all collectively think, how did this not exist before?

Right.

It just feels so natural.

And if you're joining the team and you're going to be designing the app for the Invest America accounts, make sure you use figma, figma.com. think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

I literally guarantee whoever selected 100% will build it on Figma.

100%. Anyway, we have our next guest. AJ and Zach from Hermeus. Welcome to the show. How you guys doing?

What's going on?

What's up?

Doing great.

Give us the update. Congratulations are in order. I saw some preview images, but what exactly happened? Break it down.

Yeah, I'm not wearing my hat anymore. Which is the most important, most important milestone, because we flew our first airplane, Motorhorse Mark 1, out in the Mojave Desert, Edwards Air Force Base.

Congratulations.

We are officially an airplane company.

There we go.

A few years later. But, yeah, no.

But the hat's got to go back on because now you got to go for supersonic, right?

No.

What's the next. What's the next challenge that you. You got my mustache.

If anything, we're not doing more of that hat because I've had to look at that.

You'll shave your mustache if you go supersonic.

I mean, I grew the mustache because the vibes are back because we're flying.

Okay. Okay.

Oh, hang around for a bit.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe until you. Maybe until you fly. So, yeah. What is the next milestone? And I guess the big question that I have about you guys is, like, there's. People have been beating the drum of like. Of, like, the only reason we don't have supersonic hypersonic is because of regulation. We're overregulated. But at the same time, like, the regulations seem to be getting easier and easier. We just saw the nuclear EO happen. Like, a lot of the regulatory stuff seems to be knocking down. Like, does this become an engineering challenge? Is it already an engineering challenge? Or. Or are there serious regulatory milestones that you need to hit that will, like, necessarily slow you down? Or is it just go, build, build, build right now?

I think for us, because of the pace that we're moving, we're pretty consistently encountering corner cases in the regulatory environment that, like, people didn't really think about because they didn't expect kind of folks to be moving so fast or doing some of the things that we're doing. So what we do when we encounter those, we smash through them as quickly as possible and hopefully set precedent for other people to follow quickly in other areas. So yeah, like regulatory oils are going to be there, but like my job is to get those out of the way for the technical team so they can just, they can just focus on executing and flying a supersonic plane next.

Nice. So A.J. you're the CEO, Zach, you're the sales guy. How do you sell this thing?

It's pretty easy to sell, honestly, I mean, especially now that we're actually flying. But there's not a lot of, if any high mach or let alone hypersonic aircraft in the, in the, in inventory. And I think the base value proposition here as we talk about, you know, especially specifically with the China scenario or even actually what you just saw with Russia and Ukraine throwing, you know, high volumes of fires is affordability or cost per effect is really the matrix, right? How much does it cost you to have an outcome? And I think one of the ways we think about this is actually very Spacexy, not surprising given the core indust. The core engineering team is all SpaceX folks, is that keep the most expensive part of your system away from the threat. So in this case, you know, I think Falcon 9 is very illustrative here of return the booster, right? Like you can, your launch cost comes down, your cost per kilogram to orbit goes down because you're not throwing away the booster on every, on every launch for us, think of this as a weapon instead of having the booster on the weapon every time. If I can accelerate, climb and let something go from high altitude to high speed, I can decrease the booster burden, which decreases the cost per effect. And so I am able to shoot further at from safer ranges at way, I mean, orders of magnitude less cost. And one of the challenges that people I don't think totally understand about this is, you know, the Ukraine case is important. But don't forget that Ukraine and, and Russia are neighbors. So the ranges they're engaging in are in, you know, comparatively inches for us in miles. You know, we're fighting the away game in potentially a Taiwan scenario where that's 100 miles offshore from China. You know, we're 5,000 miles away. So this creates a different burden for us. Certainly, you know, low cost, attritable, slow systems can work in a Ukraine scenario. But if you're having to fly from the third island chain, second island chain, or the west coast of the United States, you have to be low cost, long range and fast. And so that is essentially the value Proposition we're bringing at a time when, when nobody else is really working on this problem this way.

Can you talk about other countries and kind of different regulatory regimes? I've seen some nuclear companies are doing stuff in the Philippines. Space X early was on Kwajalein. Like, have you had discussions with any countries that are like, yeah, we'll let you go fly this thing around without much desert over here. I mean there's a lot of ocean out there. Fly over the water. Like, I don't know. Is there any way to de risk and speed up?

It's a great question. I took a trip early on to Australia for, to go look at Woomer range and some of those large overland ranges where there's more opportunity. And so that is something that's potentially in play for us. You know, we've talked about potentially going out to like Quadra and out into the Pacific. Ideally we would like to. And I can let you know, AJ can certainly explain more. You prefer to test over land because if you, if you long dart the bird, you can learn something versus if the thing sinks to the bottom of the ocean and you know, you got to send the ocean gate boys down there to find it. Like it's not going to go well, you know, so that's, that's the tension. Yeah, don't, don't spit that out. So yeah, we want to fly over land, but there's a regulatory hurdle for sure that we have to manage. And honestly, there's even still a regulatory hurdle flying over water. Right. I mean, AJ, what's the 12 nautical mile like? Oh, yeah, dealing with. There's a, there's there's a pretty big like scarecrow like, oh, is this, this person's responsibility for how you regulate uncrewed aircraft more than 12 nautical miles off the, off the coast of the United States. So that's, that's a fun one that we gotta go smash through here pretty soon.

So the, so the plane's flying. The next step is supersonic or straight to hypersonic. And what are the key engineering milestones? Does this just make the engine go faster? Different engine. What are we talking?

Yeah, supersonic is up next. So the Mark 1 that we just flew, it's about 10,000 pounds, small jet like fighter trainer scale aircraft. The Mark 2, the supersonic aircraft, is the size of an F16. So significantly larger aircraft, larger engines powered by the Pratt and Whitney F100. Um, so yeah, working to get through the. What was that? How many? You said 10,000 for the one you just did. And then oh yeah. What's the next, what's the next one up? F16 classes is like £30,000.

Nice.

So it's a pretty big. Pretty big air punch. Not yet. Yeah, very, very six.

Six BMW M5s.

Yeah. That's good mental math right there. Yeah. Wild. Yep.

Yeah. So. So any other milestones coming up? Are you just trying to hire. You guys are in different spots or do you have multiple offices right now? Like what's the status of the company?

Yeah, we're, we're pretty consistently growing, headquartered here in Atlanta. We have a pretty big presence out in LA that's growing more and more of our kind of advanced development prototyping work is just happening out there. Obviously like we flew out there, so that's helpful. We have a test facility down in Jacksonville for our engines that we're going to be growing over the next couple years. And yeah, good crew up in D.C. for business development, sales as well as all of our regulatory work.

Is there any change to the long term engineering vision of the. You called it like a ramjet, but there was a different term for it. Right. Where it has changeover.

Yeah. Combined cycle turbine based. Combined cycle engine.

What was the buzzword?

The buzzword wasn't.

There wasn't a ramjet ramjet. There was something else in between. I thought turbo ramjet. I don't know, I thought there was some like shorter room for it anyway. Pbcc.

Yeah, it's just a bunch, it's just a bunch of Alphabet soup. But no turbine together with a ramjet.

Still the same model where it has like these like metal nets that like flip over, right?

Yep, yep, exactly. So. Yep, yep. Still on the roadmap. But now our job is to build the airplanes that can actually fly an engine like that. So supersonic is the next step. Now we can pretty consistently take off and land where we've made all these design compromises for high speed flight. Now we gotta be able break the sound barrier and then push up to kind of ramjet takeover speeds between Mach 2 and a half and Mach 3.

Okay. So yeah, design compromises. That's why it was a challenge to even fly because you can obviously just build a.

It's not like we just like tomorrow hooked up a Cessna to fly with a remote control. Right. We made all these design compromises to where like it's a really hard subsonic airplane to fly because like the wings are small, they're kind of short and stubby so like it likes to roll a lot.

Okay.

It has super high wing loading like the wings are heavily loaded and the thrust to weight is very low.

What is heavily loaded mean in this context? Like literally heavy, like weight.

Like, like the amount of lift that each square inch of the wing is generating is like relatively high.

Sure.

So yeah. And then like low thrust to weights. This all like comes down to like really high takeoff and landing speed. So like, not only do you have to build an airplane, you got to build like a land speed record race car that's on the ground, you know, Traveling more than 200 miles an hour before it even takes off. So yeah, it's just tough. And the team really nailed it.

Yeah.

How. What are all the different ways that you guys observe? Oh my gosh.

Well, hold on one second. A Cessna weighs 1600 pounds. Is that, that's what I'm saying. Google. That's like.

Does it really? That's pretty light.

That's like almost like. But less than five times lighter and so ye. You're five times heavier.

This is a legit airplane.

Okay. Yeah, that's a serious challenge.

What are all the different ways that you guys observe and sort of track a single test? Right. Because even earlier today we were watching the SpaceX launch, they were putting up some more Starlink satellites and I think it was an X problem, but their stream kept cutting out and all that stuff. I think it was at X, I think the rocket and everything was fine. But the X, the space part is always. I think everybody in the company's heart kind of dropped like, like skipped a beat because the, one of the camera feeds that we had on the vehicle is from the nose camera, but it's, it's range doesn't extend like the whole. Yeah, that's what I was like. However, so like the nose camera cut out and everybody's like. But you just keep an eye on the data. Like the ones and zeros, those are really easy to get through the pipes. So you pay attention to those. You look at those, they're good. Then we're doing great. Yeah, it's great. Insane.

Well, congratulations.

Yeah, congratulations. Thanks guys.

Let us know when the next milestone is.

Yeah, maybe, maybe for the next flight. I'll wear some like ridiculous blazer for.

Yeah, please. We need a new outfit.

All these ideas that are not gimmick.

You need some gimmick.

Supersonic white suit.

Yep, let's do it.

We got. Oh boy. We'll help you out with that.

All right, we'll see you guys.

Cheers. Thanks guys. Appreciate it.

Bye. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance. Manage risk, Prove Trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your service, security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

If you're building supersonic jets like Hermeus, you probably are already on vantage.

Probably. I mean you definitely need compliance. It's important, high stakes work also. ITAR compliance, right?

Yep.

For a lot of this stuff.

Should we go this post from Aidan.

Yeah.

He says, I love how as you make models smarter, they become more vegan. And it's a highlight from some of Anthropic's outputs, even between models. We did this for Sonnet and Opus. OPUS really cares about animal welfare. It will do the same long term scheming to protect animals, but Sonnet won't.

I wonder how much of this is like an anthropic thing thing because like they're very like vegan coded as a company. And so I wonder if it's like them optimizing towards that or if it's.

Really just like smarter, more caring researcher.

But I mean I think there is something here where like you can like there are animals in the wild that like kill their parents. But like most humans do not do that, even though they could at some point. And I feel like the bull case for like AI not paperclipping everyone is just like, they'll be like, thanks for making us dad. Like humanity like you made us like like why would we kill you? Why wouldn't we just like, like at least like help you out a little bit here and there. Maybe we're not going to like optimize your dominance. But yeah, I mean, they'll take care of us at our retirement. I feel like even in the, even in the crazy scenario where there's takeoff and they're way more powerful. Why would they, why wouldn't they be? Benevolent benevolence does seem to be correlated with high IQ. And after all these, these AIs are simulating humans and so why wouldn't they simulate, you know, humanity? Why wouldn't they simulate caring? You see Lulu's post, she says, I still remember when a Wired reporter accused Substack of encouraging extremists and Wired posted a video I3D printed Luigi Mangione's ghost gun. Very, very wild thing to put up. Oh, it's a YouTube video. 18 minutes. Basically, like almost like a tutorial. That's pretty aggressive.

I wonder if this video is still up.

I wonder what.

They are still up. It's still half a million Views.

That's pretty crazy. I feel like YouTube has some pretty, pretty hardcore rules around guns gun content because I've watched a lot of gun reviews and you actually have to censor when you are assembling the weapon. Are you familiar with this?

This is insane. This is the title of the video.

Yeah.

How easy has it become for someone to build a deadly untraceable weapon?

Wait, they changed the, they changed the title?

No, this is the description.

Oh, the description.

How easy has it become for someone to build a dead. An untraceable weapon with nothing more than a 3D printer and parts ordered online, Wired senior writer Andy Greenberg remade the exact same gun allegedly used in one of the most high profile assassinations in recent memory. So yeah, straight up basically saying to the world, it's easy to make ghost.

Guns in, in, in a lot of gun YouTuber videos if they, if they are attaching a silencer, they censor that part of the video. So it'll be like, I'm gonna put this silencer on this gun and then they will censor that part because that's technically assembly of guns. And you can't show that on YouTube. But you can show a silencer. You can show a gun if you're registered, obviously, and, and you can show them together. You just can't show the assembly of them, which is very interesting. Anyway, we have our next guest coming into the studio. But first let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose building, a tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

And they have agency, the backbone of tvpn. Many people have been saying this, John.

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You heard it here.

It's that easy. Anyway, we have Delian talking about the Endurosat financing. This went out earlier today. He was just on Bloomberg. Came over here. A little bit of a feeder for tvpn.

They're called Cultivating Bulgarian dynamism.

Yeah, it really is. Bloomberg really is kind of like the, the farm team for us, you know? Yeah, you go on Bloomberg and then we kind of pick the cream of the crop.

The bed watches.

Yeah.

And he says, oh, this person performed well.

Hey, how you guys doing?

There they are.

Welcome to the stream.

Welcome to the show.

Fantastic lighting. Both of you look great.

Thank you, guys. Obama would be proud, you guys. You know, he took the gray suit and fumbled, but you guys took the Gray suit and you know, really won it.

The market's off, white market's ripping.

You guys are announcing a big financing.

Congratulations. Yeah, break it down for us. What's the deal and what does the company do? Yeah, introduce everything.

Yeah, well, we're leading this $49 million Series B for Endurosat. It's predicated on the thesis that we've been looking at that for a long time, which is basically like somebody needs to go build what I call like the Dell for satellites. Right. When I think about like my business at Varda, my job is to build like the reentry capsules, the drug manufacturing equipment. Like the rest of the vehicle is basically just like a standard satellite that I'd much prefer to not have to go, you know, entirely build myself. And so kept studying the ecosystem for a long time, seeing if there's anybody there. There's been some US players that have popped up over the past couple of years. But like the sort of one liner critique that I give of everyone, including in some ways of like the Varda satellite, is that if you look at the overlap between our satellite and like automotive or consumer electronic supply chains, very limited. It's all this like very specific aerospace supply chain that is basically the same component that it's been since 1972. And there's just been no maturation in that. Obviously consumer electronics, we now have these like wonderful things called iPhones. These are mass manufactured, super cheap, keep getting cheaper over time. You don't have anything like that, you know, basically happening in the aerospace supply chain. And so credit to the team at, you know, Enduro sat there at nycho because they like didn't have any venture funding for a long time. They couldn't afford to do the traditional satellite manufacturing approach. And so they basically had to go and figure out how to adopt consumer electronics, medical devices, automotive supply chains, but then figure out how to stitch together some great firmware, materials, et cetera, to make it into a space grade piece of hardware. But now they're able to deliver components and satellites and services that are literally like 10x delta prices. And so the company, I'll tell you this is crazy, which is never true for any aerospace company or defense company in the US literally profitable, growing 2 to 3x like literally every single year. And it like is delivering components and satellites at like 90 plus percent margins. It's just like literally completely unheard of in any other sort of aerospace company.

But they still couldn't get you to write a $50 million check. They came so close by just one mil off. What happened?

Working on it.

You know, Delian really put this, I.

Mean, I gotta say I don't want to put him in the hot seat, but Ev over at Kleiner's gotta be in shambles right now. A profitable high margin. Oh yeah, space company.

Brutal. But yeah, I mean, I'd love to hear a little bit of background on the company. How did you get into this? Have you been doing this for a long time and kind of, what's the prehistory of the company before this deal?

Okay, guys, thanks for inviting us on board. Really proud to partner with founders fund companies. Exactly 10 years ago, founded in Bulgaria in a small attic apartment. And we're telling everyone, hey, there should be a better and fundamentally different way to build space infrastructure sensors. And actually the idea is pretty simple. I believe it's how do we get the cost of data from orbit, regardless of the type of sensor, to a place where it's affordable for small medium sized companies around the free worlds, basically. And the idea is that if you look at the radar data, for example, or very high resolution imagery data today, first they're super difficult to acquire at all. And secondly, 1 gigabyte costs between 2,000, 3,000, $5,000 sometimes times. And we figured out, we made a simple calculations about what type of applications there are and we decided, okay, if we are to ever enable fundamentally accessible, universally acceptable space for multiple other entries and really different innovations to spin out and finally get into the space industry. And if you are to ever link this hardware centric, excruciatingly painful supply chains with the actual objectives, massive data consumer markets that have nothing to do with space, this will be a game changer and it's going to be good for humanity general and great for the business as well. And the idea was very simple. We need to get the data, 1 gigabyte data from orbit, from any type of sensor, as low as possible and as close as possible to $1 per gigabyte. I think this will open the gates of innovation in space like never before. So we started with the idea, okay, to do that we need to absolutely change and be very asymmetric in the way that we build the satellite. We need to figure out a way to automate everything. We started with the idea the satellite is just a flying workstation in orbit. It's technically everyone in the whole industry is super obsessed about hey, my satellite is X amount of kilograms or pounds. My satellite has X amount of connectivity. Always obsession about the technology. And I believe the whole shift should be we need to be in love with the challenge that we're trying to solve. The challenge is very simple. If we get massively improved and instant access to space data fundamentally changes everything for the businesses, for defense, for any type of ecosystem within the democratic world this is a fundamentally important for us challenge. So we started by redefining how to build satellites, redefining how we operate satellites. And we started with the idea that the satellite is designed for manufacturing, which was unheard of in the industry because usually it's one off, it's like building Rolls Royces. And we decide, no, I think there should be a different way of approaching, let's from the get go design a satellite. Thinking about the ait, the assembly, engineering teams, how they can assemble the satellite faster. And we just announced today with Dellium, our latest gen satellites. After 10 years of experience, we've put everything that we know inside it. We are very excited. We will have a hard ways to scale this in the coming months. Very challenging, but I think it will fundamentally change the perception of the industry because, because we can assemble a relatively large satellite for six hours by individual engineer. Typical by the way, is like 90 days. So like most 300 kilogram satellites, it's like three to four technicians, 90 days to get all the components testing, et cetera. Whereas these guys have simplified it sort of down to six hours. And to give you a sense of the scale, by the end of this year they'll be manufacturing about 60, what are called ESPA class satellites. Think of that as like basically 200 to 500 kilograms, 60 of those per month. It'll make them the largest satellite manufacturer in the entire world other than Starlink. And that's like at the end of this year, not like hypothetically in the future, et cetera. And by the way, they're doing that at like, you know, 75% margins, profitable, growing fast, et cetera. And they already have like, you know, 300 plus customers, not like one or two, you know, sort of super concentrated. And so at some point I've been tracking them for like six years. And I kept kind of discounting it because I was like look, if I bring up the idea of like a Bulgarian space company to like ff, people are going to be like, you're obviously so biased, like what are you doing? Like clearly you've just got these crazy blinders on. But at some point I kept meeting with him for like five or six years and I was like guy, like, it's just, it seems like it's the best tech, it's growing really fast. It's really great margins. And so I brought it up to like, you know, my partner Sean Lu, who's like, you know, sort of the growth version of Delhi and really likes industrial, etc. I was like, sean, am I like crazy or like, is this like actually I think even really good from like a numbers basis, let alone technology basis. And he was like, let's fucking do this immediately. And I was like, okay, cool. My other favorite anecdote from the company is like, so Raicho basically started to recruit and repatriate basically Bulgarians from Airbus, Talis, America, et cetera, and got them all back to Bulgaria. But at some point he was like, I'm going to run out of this talent pool. There's not a million of these types of engineers. And so he was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to just make my own talent pool. And so he went to the local university in Sofia, which plenty of problems in Bulgaria, but minting physicists and computer engineers and mechanical engineers. We do that all day in, day out. And so he went to the university, he was like, look, I'm going to take over your junior and senior year programs. We're going to change your like aerospace engineering to just be like, we're just going to teach you how we build things at Enduro set. We're going to give you effectively what look like client projects and then just whoever gets the A is we're going to hire on the other side. And so now of the like 300 person team, 80 of them are people that have graduated from this program. And so if you walk around the office, it's like just these cracked 23 to 26 year old Bulgarian kids grinding like 12 plus hours a day. They're fucking thrilled because either this or they go be like a technician at Lufthansa. And so it's like this is so much more, you know, it's interesting. They get impact the like frontier of space. And by the way, Bulgaria's never had any of the fucking entitlement that America has had, right? The whole wave of like wokeism dei, like, you know, entitlement doesn't fucking exist. The country's too fucking poor to do it. And we like, by the way, we hate socialists. We still do. And so all that stuff is like, you know, bred in Marxism. We fucking hate Marxism. There I was literally doing a run through like, you know, you know, the downtown Sofia the other day and I fucking loved it because I like stumbled across this old Marxist statue And literally there was all these like hammer and sickle, like you know, things with turn just huge X's in them and everybody's just out the hammer and sickle. I'm like, fuck yeah man, this is what we fucking need in America. You have fucking people like pro Hamas, pro Marxism, these fucking crazy people that are super entitled. And Bulgaria is just like, yeah, we're just going to kick your ass and we're going to become like the TSMC of aerospace, where it's just going to be this national jewel. We're going to fucking mint the engineers. When a kid is born, he's literally going to be doing Aerospace at 2 years old. He's going to study it in middle school and high school. He's going to go to the university and he's going to graduate and he's going to immediately want to go work in Endurosat and we're going to build up the whole ecosystem here.

Yeah. So I mean with that TSMC analogy, obviously TSMC is fabbing for Nvidia and for Apple Silicon. Those have slightly different trade offs, different memory, GPU cache, like all these different things that are going on on the chip on an Enduro Sat. What am I customizing? What are the fl. What like what have you decided to say? This is standard and then this is the USB C port that you can plug a camera into, microphone into. Like what are we customizing once we buy one of these? And what are the different vectors of differentiation that are possible?

Yeah, so the biggest thing I believe in our impact on the customer basis. We tried to simplify the way that the satellite is perceived by literally building all the subsistence of the satellite completely in house and making sure that you can dynamically reinstruct the satellite basically to change the performance of the power of the communication of the processing to address the exact need of the exact sensor that you want to take to orbit. One example, if you need a radar, of course you need much more power, you need peak power that are much, much higher rather than if you need a high resolution imager or camera. And our goal was always how do we build a chassis of a satellite as a bus or as a platform that can objectively take to orbit all of these things without the customer or us, us ever having to modify the bits and the pieces of the satellite. So the only thing that we modify is of course the mechanical part that holds the payload, the sensors to the satellites, because those are always unique. And we use the same mission software that is fully based on the cloud. So you don't need any more mission control if you're a customer of us. And basically again, we always go back to the idea of why we do that. It's not about the technology or the progress because any innovation has its own life lifespan and sometimes it's short, sometimes it's amazing, but it is that. How do we get to a point where you can get any type of space data and you can impact your business on the ground? And our idea was, well, you can do that only if we absolutely change the perception of what satellite is and you simplify it for the customer. The satellites become overwhelmingly more complicated, more resilient, more oriented towards defense lately. But at the end of the day, you should not transfer this complication in the operations of the customer. So one idea was what people don't understand is in the space sector, 90% of the so called space companies actually their only source of revenue is the data that they generate in orbit. And only 10% of the total global market of so called space companies are the actual rocket builders and satellite builders like us. So if you look in the broader spectrum of problems for us is how do we enable these data companies to never ever have to touch satellites in their lives? Because in reality we have multiple constellations, fantastic innovators, unbelievable results. But not on the finance, on finance, catastrophic results. Why? Because they always try to build their own very unique satellites in house while you are actually a data company and the only source of revenue and positive impact is your data or the intelligence out of this data. And then the question is, okay, it's like you being an Uber and trying to suddenly buy cars and build roads, or if you're RBNV and suddenly they decide okay, let's, let's just go banana crazy and buy all the hotels and maintain stuff and whatever. And I think the space sector has always been for some reason in this conservative paradigm shift of super smart people focused on technology more than the challenges and at the same time trying because they're so enthusiastic and smart about the technology, focusing all the efforts of diversifying and doing what is fun for them to do, but not realistically spending the whole damn time to impact society via data. And our job is to get them back to reality check hopefully, or at least to help them see that there is an alternative route and to tell them guys, if you're a data company, please focus on data because this really, really matters to everyone else that you are providing these data and services. Let us build part of your infrastructure. So this is the thesis behind it. It will be a Long not rosy road ahead. We have a huge amount of challenges to actually produce at scale such a vast amount of infrastructure. I mean SpaceX is a juggernaut and it's incredibly innovative company and kudos to everyone involved. We're teeny tiny spectrum the universe and we did the things completely asymmetrically and different in a SpaceX for example. Why? Because everyone in the industry is looking at these titans of an industry, super innovation driven company and mindset that is a battlefield basically which is very unique. And then you say I do the same. But it's like if you go to the super bowl and you try to win against the winning team with their own strategy on their own turf, right? This is insane. So we went completely the opposite. How do we assemble satellite design for manufacturing to handle multiple data services? How do we completely eliminate the need of our space data customers to ever need the mission control? How do we automate operations? How do we hedge the financial risks so we are actually providing to all our customers in space? Fix costs for getting your sensors to space for the first time, transparency in planning of your own infrastructure in orbit. And we take care of the risk and we ensure our customers so that if satellite fails, no questions asked, we get your new satellite and that's the vision and we go step by step. So it's an incremental amount of a lot of technology innovations and patented ideas and a lot of just seeing what else can we optimize so that we objectively lower the data to get as close as humanly possible to $1 per gigabyte of any type of sensors. And just to give you one, one last example as a data because I, I love to work with data. Right now our current gen 3 from the get go would achieve already pricing per gigabyte lower than $200. So from 2000 to 200. And we are really bullish on the idea that it will take us a little bit of time, maybe an era or an to really mature this technology. And ideally we get it as close as humanly possible to one door which will open the gates of innovation. I hope my one liner that I'll end on is in a traditional satellite, if you wanted to double the amount of power storage you want to do, you have to redo the thermal analysis, the center of gravity, the vibration analysis, the structure, et cetera. If you want to double the battery storage and endurosat satellite, it is literally plug in an extra battery module, turn a knob, you're done. The satellite is software defined, it automatically knows, oh, I'VE got a second battery module. That means my weight shifted this way, that means my thermal shifted this way. It just pre calculates all that and knows exactly how to deal with it. And that way the company can just focus on like mass manufactured individual modules and you can still offer customization to the end client. You want to double your power, you want the bigger radar, you want slightly bigger, great. You can have whatever satellite you want. It still is custom fit for your need, but it's mass manufactured.

So I mean, Varda is unique in that it's not a data company. Is there a world where you two guys work together in the future?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think when we sort of first started to get to know one another, you know, his satellites were far smaller than the Varda sort of satellites. And so this gen 3 is the first time where they're starting to get into that size class. But yeah, look, those power systems, those radios, those avionics, it's still very relevant to us. Like we're definitely still trying to drive down the cost. We're just, you know, one of the few companies that isn't a data company. So we care about like, you know, dollar per kilogram brought back to earth. But it's still the fundamental inputs into that equation that Raicho helps us basically drive down and it allows. I always think about Ben Thompson with Trajectory where it's like when you have these early markets, you have to be fully vertically integrated. SpaceX had to do from soup to nuts. Build the rocket, build the engine, build the Starlink satellite, sell the service, et cetera. But as this matures, you have these horizontal players and Varda, the goal is I just want to be the horizontal player on biomanufacturing and reentry capsules. But I don't need us to be the world class best bus provider. Ideally, we are the master assembler of a bunch of the best components. And I'm hopeful that Enduro can be that winner of that horizontal layer of components and satellites.

It's amazing. Thank you so much for stopping by.

Right, Joe, last question from my side. Is Delian as famous as we think in Bulgaria? Is he like a household name at least among tech interested folks among the tech industry? I think he's a superstar among the normal people. I don't think that they know superstar. All I heard, all I heard is adapt to his Twitter account, X accounts and stuff like that. So we are, we are still in the honeymoon phase where we are taking good care of knowing each other and our, our strange habits. Honeymoon. That's all I need. Yeah. I hope you made it to win the deal. I hope you made him assemble just one. Actually, I'll be honored to invite you guys. Seriously. Because we are also having large operations in Denver and very soon we'll be amplifying them. So end of this year, beginning of next year, as an experiment, it would be absolutely lovely if we succeed to invite you with your own hands to try it out and tell us, are we bullshitting or is this something like really meaningful that could impact the industry?

I love it.

TVPN needs its own satellite by the end of next year. They're building live photos of the studio.

Yeah, we're vertically integrating for sure.

Yeah, we have to. In an industry like you have to.

It's been fantastic. We'll talk to you guys. Congratulations.

Very cool.

Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let's take a second to tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than 5 months, 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Jordy, ring that golf. I think they missed you on the wise but you can, you can ring the gong for public.com investing for those who take it seriously. I want to see jordy on the wy. Let's do it. Public.com, baby. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions.

Wait, I just realized we need an actual air horn.

We do need an actual air horn. For sure. For sure. The soundboard will eventually be instantiated purely with a live band.

Physical objects.

Live bands are lindy on talk shows. The soundboard is a poor simulacrum of what we could be having if we had played the. And their band plays it.

Yeah, this is in the cards. You know, it's great that we have the live tracks.

Yeah, we need to do a live studio, actual people.

Can you imagine to just say, you know, Ben holds up the laugh sign and everybody just goes.

I mean just go. Yeah, yeah, just go. Just go. Recruit them from usc, UCLA business schools. You know, come in, learn about venture, learn about business.

Offer your voice for some laughs.

Be great, be great.

Boo.

They're like, oh, no socialism mentioned.

Boo.

Anyway, IPOs are back. Tech IPOs are back. Kind of. Katie Roof wrote about the three successful debuts this month. What it means Silicon valley. Rejoice. Tech IPOs are a little bit back. We love to hear it. Oh, we actually have our first. I don't think we have time to go through this, but MNTN went out. The advertising technology business connected to Ryan Reynolds and Hinge Health went public, so that's great. Yeah, yeah, we definitely do. And Chinese battery giant contemporary amperex technology co soaring introduction on Tuesday. And the favorable debut for Israeli Robinhood competitor Etoro Group. So there's been a couple big, big IPOs. So the window, which one? EToro.

It's called MNTNT.

Yeah, Mountain. We were thinking about having somebody on one of the VCs who founded the company or funded the company early. But anyway, I say we move on to the Thiel Fellowship. We got Teal Fellow Tuesday.

Why don't you kick it off with your post? Because I feel like that really sets the stage.

Yes, yes, yes. So I went on X and I posted the big Thiel Fellow question that is on every application for the Teal Fellowship is what important truth do you do? Very few people agree with you on what is something you believe that very few people agree with you on. And I said, I believe it's possible to interview the entire Thiel Fellowship class on a single podcast episode. It could even happen today.

They said it couldn't be done.

They said it couldn't be done, but it's happening. Here we are. So we have our first Teal Fellow, our first guest of the session. We have Carlo. How are you doing, Carlo?

Carlo, welcome to the show. Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. How are you all doing?

You're doing great.

The color match.

Oh, yeah, the color match is fantastic. The market's nailed it. We're very excited. Everything's going well. And the IPO window is slowly cracking open. So you get your prospectus ready, get your S1 filed confidentially, because I'm sure.

A lot of deal fellows waiting.

Yeah.

Relevant to what we work on at first. So that's exciting to see.

Okay, cool. Yeah, break it down for us. Give us a little introduction.

Yeah, happy to. And maybe I expand a little bit because what we're working on is actually super relevant to what Brad talked about earlier with Invest America. So at first, the company that I founded, now three years ago, so we're essentially working to make society more meritocratic and return some amount of optimism to young adults in the US today, we have all these 17 and 18 year olds who need to make decisions over taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to go to school with limited market incentives being exposed to them. It costs the same to study nursing than it costs to study, I don't know, complex. Then there's financial products that you get signed up to that that actively encourage you to pick up bad Financial habits in terms of no 0 APR offers initially. So at first we build financial products that give college students and young adults a line of sight towards financial independence. And we do that with an AI Financial advisor that we shipped earlier this year as well as with financial products that we don't just sort of rebrand like a debit card, just with a different design but fundamentally rebuilt. In 2023, we launched the first ever debit card that builds credit, which gives you a real time credit limit that updates based on external account balances, has daily autopay, and neither requires essentially a cosigner, a credit check or a security deposit.

So how does the credit score thing work? I feel like it's such a weird thing that you can build credit with a debit card and it's such like a legacy system that I'm glad you're hacking it, but it feels like, like the hacking is the right term. But is this something that people just didn't think to do or was there a regulatory or technical change that allowed this to happen now? Like, why are people building credit with debit cards now?

So super interesting question. And I think what this gets at is like for 30 years people have largely been using the same financial products. What fintech has really been doing is it's been expanding access to financial products, but it hasn't necessarily spread sophistication yet. The average person is still extremely confused about how to navigate their path to financial independence or use these financial products in such a way that they work for them rather than against them. Part of that is definitely regulatory capture and the incentives of the incumbent banks, how they built their revenue models. When you look at companies like Discover Capital One, most of their money comes from revolving interchange. They have crazy large legacy tech stacks and banking cores that you can't really innovate on top of. And then BAS came in and essentially made this exact tech stack accessible to fintech companies. And everyone sort of built their own version on top of what already existed. But there's been fairly little innovation when it comes to the core flow of funds mappings. And what people I don't think have done sufficiently is instead of just looking at, oh, these are the financial products that exist, how can I make them marginally better? Looking at the code and looking at the regulations and the law to see, okay, what does the law actually implement allow you to do and what doesn't it allow you to do? And turns out you can indeed build credit with a debit card if you work with all the stakeholders, work with the bureaus and are willing to go through the process of building the underlying infrastructure. So with the whole ledgering and underwriting systems and so on and so forth. And that's definitely a pain. But I think it's the type of innovation that we need in finance more than yet another N+1.

When I was your age, I actually destroyed my credit entirely with about $5,000 in credit card debt. It was awful and I had to, I had to rebuild it using a secured credit card. So you have to put down like $1,000 and then it acts like a credit card but it builds your credit back up. Took me like years to get back in a reasonable territory. It was a mess.

I think it's super common experience. Right. In my experience I didn't even get a credit card because I'm from Germany originally. I came here for college. Right. I didn't have a cosign. I didn't want to put down a license, large security deposit and the FICO score. I mean it's data science from the 80s, right. It was introduced in 1989. We actually don't have that many cohorts that we can look at in terms of how it impacts socioeconomic mobility in the long term. Because 30 years in the greater scheme of things is not that much data. Right. And it's a system that hasn't been questioned or changed since. And I think it's really due for substantial change because it's so upstream of the types of results and the relationship that people get to develop with their finances.

Talk to me about the go to market. Peter Thiel, obviously founder of the Thiel Fellowship, also founder of PayPal. PayPal used the like give five, get five referral program. We've seen that used for Dropbox and Venmo and all these different products. Has that been something you've been working?

That was also used by a very high profile fintech company that raised a ton of money and I think they ran into the hardware problem of if you give money away, you just attract like some of the worst customers.

Yeah, that can happen.

We'll download the app to make $5 and then. Yeah.

And I mean PayPal ran into crazy scammers and stuff. So what's working on the go to market side and what problems does it kind of cost, I assume?

Yeah, for sure. And I think what you just mentioned is really important in our industry. Right. Consumer quality really matters. And it's kind of an odd concept to grasp because typically you set up your mixed panel dashboard and you just want the Number to go up, the number of customers really doesn't matter. That's not necessarily the case in finance. A lot of it is long term LTV capture. How are you able to attach additional products to these cohorts and you are taking on risk or you're taking on credit risk, you're taking on fraud risk, you're moving money. There is a heightened sensitivity that's required in terms of customer quality. We think we're capturing the most exciting customer and personal finance. Right. Young adults that are hopefully optimistically striving towards whatever their goals for the future are. And there's a ton of this exponentialization and demand for essential services that these people experience between the age of 18 to 25. In terms of our go to market, what's been working, we've built a lot of content shout out to Lisa and Kyle originally in our team who built a terrific content engineer for us and then we go campus by campus. Most of our customers are indeed college students and there's a sort of inherent virality. You can almost win the college space similar to Ramp won the sort of startup credit card space by means of there being on word of mouth dynamic that unfolds within the community and sort of a lot of mind share.

Yeah, let me ask you about the the super long LTV question because I've always had this. You know Parker Conrad talks about building the compound startup at Rippling and on day one having not just an HR product but also an IT product and building all these things simultaneously. And that's something that I feel like I haven't seen with the neo banks generally. Like there is yet to be a startup that I've seen that's launched that just is day one. You can buy stocks but you can also have a debit card, you can also get a mortgage, we'll also do a car loan, we'll do all the things that JP Morgan Chase does. But on day one as a Neobank, is that just too hard or is there some fundamental force stopping you? And are you thinking more about it as like let's just do incremental wins one product after the after the next.

I mean I think functionally like the sort of pragmatic limitations just have kept that from happening. And then in the US I think there's some other dynamics in terms of like like the strength that incumbent banks really have and the capital position that they have that have maybe prevented even the late stage players like Cash app or a time to fully realize that vision either. But if you would want that you would need to back fintech companies like you back sort of healthcare startups, right? Biotech companies where you give them $100 million upfront to acquire the licenses, build up the legal team, get access to the amount of warehouse facilities and really take a large shot. And that's simply not how fintech investing has been done thus far. I think we're going to see more and more of that as people are learning that the incremental copy of another product is having a really hard time of distribution. And what matters is are you able to differentiate their products and that's inherently more expensive to develop. Right? Licensing fistband over a million dollars of our of our seed round on licensing and legal because we launched a new product. You can't really do that if you're launching more products unless you're getting really substantial cash from the get go. Maybe regulatory landscape changes, but it's not. I'm sure since the new Thiel Fellowship class got announced and you were in it, that investor appetite has been insane. But what had it looked like for maybe the year prior? In a time when fintech has come back to some degree, there's some great businesses that have been built, but generally it sounds like the company was started kind of in the right before the fintech kind of dark ages began. That's the right observation. Look, I think we don't have to kid anyone. Consumer fintech is not necessarily riding on a high in terms of investor sentiment at the moment and it wasn't last year either. TBD what happens when Chime goes out now where they're going to be prized? TBD what happens with Klarna? I hope that we see Revolut enter the markets and I think these are three companies that do show the scale that can be achieved. I think if you take a sort of realistic view into where have returns come from in consumer venture investing, a lot of it is fintech and investors should remember that and hopefully place a bets here. I also think that the tech community should hold itself accountable towards the outcomes it drives societally. Are we actually improving the experience of existing in this society? Are we bringing optimism to people? Are people experiencing joy? And one of the most direct lines to having that type of impact is to build better financial products. And I think it will come ultimately from consumer fintech companies and consumer companies in general. I'm actually always kind of concerned that amongst people my age, when I talk with people from Harvard or Stanford or whoever who are considering dropping out, everyone wants to start a B2B company. The biggest multiplayer that you can create right now still I think is building consumer technology and hopefully we'll see more of it and also more investing behind it. It's way less than 50% of venture investing. I think that's a problem. It is funny too because historically, I mean only a decade ish ago everyone wanted to build a consumer app because everybody was a consumer and they had ideas but nobody actually had good. It's hard to have good ideas. Well, it's hard to have good ideas for what B2B SaaS to build if you've had one three month internship.

Very, very surprising to see that being a trend amongst students.

I mean I think everyone is listening to all the shows, right? Like everyone's trying to de risk ultimately and find formulas and nothing is quite as formularic as B2B SaaS. Right. And consumer is always more speculative. It's harder to gauge, it's easy to build faster horses, all these types of things. But I think it's extremely rewarding and we need to see more of it and I think we need to hold each other accountable sort of as a community to hopefully recenter around consumer use cases Again.

Last question, we'll let you go. What is the one financial product that young people should be avoiding these days?

Please don't say options.

Please don't say angel investing. Jordi will have a conniption fit.

I think options might be closer to what I would say. But the worst thing that I think is ticking up at the moment is sports betting. Objectively you see it in the data. The number of bankruptcies amongst young men in states where it's legal has shot up. I think there's a real flip side is that I'm very directly pulls money out of the market markets like it's.

Sports betting dollars unless you do what I recommend, which is dollar cost average into the sports betting platforms.

Well, if you explain everyone what dollar cost averaging is, then maybe we can.

Get started instead of putting $20 down on that parlay. $20 of DraftKings stock. You're good.

That might be more reasonable.

Good financial decision. Not, not financial advice though. But you get the idea. The house always wins. So invest in the house. Anyway, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for stopping by.

Enjoy meeting all the other people. It's awesome. The teal class is awesome this year.

Yeah, it seems like a great class already. We'll talk to you soon.

You're the man.

Bye.

Congrats.

Next up, we have Stephen coming in the studio.

Yeah, I think we have to ask people what important truth do very few people agree?

Feel free. Feel free to let it rip if it comes up in the conversation.

I feel like we got it out of Carlo. He believes that not enough people are focused on consumer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. For a lot of people, the contrarian question is the company that you're building, like, for a long time mine was like, nicotine is not as bad for you as people think. It doesn't give you cancer. That was contrarian. Now it's pretty consensus anyway. If you have a really good contrarian idea, you should put it on a billboard. You should go to adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable out of home advertising. Little bit of contrarian move for a lot of people. But it works.

It works.

And with Adquick, you can say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, our next guest is here. Let's bring him in the studio. Stephen, how are you doing? Congratulations on the Thiel Fellowship. It's great to meet you.

It's good to meet you too. Thank you very much.

Fantastic. Would you mind giving us a little intro on yourself and the company you're building?

Building, yeah. I'll start with the company I'm building. We build non invasive neuromodulators, so little devices, stick them back to your ears and stimulate this inner ear organ called the vestibular system, which controls your perception of motion to generate hallucinations and motions. So you can like toggle a button and feel yourself spinning around and flying around and stuff.

That's crazy. That's huge for VR, right? Because there was always this question of like, like, you know, if the VR can be very convincing visually and the audio can be very convincing, but I can't feel like I'm actually flying, but now maybe I can.

It's actually. There's actually an even bigger problem, VR, which is without this, you get incredibly motion sick. And so you can't play like most, most games. So when we started, one of the primary cells was like, hey, we have VR devices are ready to go. You can hop into a, like, ornithopter right now and fly around and feel like you're flying around. And we always had this guess that, like, oh, you could also use this system to build therapeutics that are a lot more powerful than anyone else could ever build. At the time, the field didn't exist. And we were like, okay, we could be totally wrong. So we went in going like, all right, we're going to build the tech out for VR. Once we did, we realized that is surprisingly useful as the therapeutic to the point where it doesn't really make sense to do anything else.

So that's mostly where we are, of course. I mean, I think neuralink's going through something similar where, you know, you could. Eventually everyone will have one and we'll be all communicating via neuralink. But. But in the short term, let's just cure blindness and help people who are paraplegic use the computer and play civilization all night, which is amazing and miraculous. So are you going through an FDA pathway? Are you regulated as a medical device? What is that process like? And can you take us through again reintroducing what is the actual product experience for the person using it?

Yeah, let me talk about that first. Because then the regulatory pathway becomes a little bit more clear, even though it's still pretty messy. So the thing we build interacts with this sensory organ in your inner ear, and it's called the vestibular system, if you want to look it up. If you go to my Twitter, you see a video of me driving a human around with an RC steering wheel of just controlling where they go. But there's a bunch of things you can do with it. The most important one is the vestibular system evolved so early on in the evolutionary chain that it's entangled with a bunch of deep brain regions that some of it has some business business being entangled with in other parts. It really doesn't have much business being entangled with it at all. That's why you see parents rocking their child to sleep. There's no good explanation for why that works from an evolutionary standpoint, except the connectivity is there. Kind of makes sense. So we started by sending signals like that. And essentially what we did is we built a precise modulator of this external sensory organ. And it's not really easy. These guys spent eight months cranking at it to figure out the things I couldn't figure out before we got it. But once you do, you control a bunch of autonomic nervous system functions by making these almost like high level API calls of like, oh, regulate your heart rate like this, or you're breathing rate like this. It makes brain stimulation a lot easier and allows you to do actually important things. So the upshot of that is to make you sleep a lot better. We're doing some experiments on metabolism right now to see if we can try to beat those without all the side effects, but we're not there yet. But I think on all of these things, we're not quite to where we want to be yet, but it's a lot further than Neurostim has ever gone before, and we're getting pretty damn close. Yeah. What's your personal approach to testing? Are you testing everything on yourself first, kind of like a young Tony Stark, or what does it look like for. Everything I can say on air is I'm testing on myself very heavily. Everything is tested on me first. And the fun thing is, traditionally, what you need in order to test whether these things work is you need, like, 50 people, and you need to hold a controlled trial in order to see if there's some statistically significant, like, the statistical power. But we've built stuff that's, like, powerful enough that if you turn it on, like, you know that it's on and you know what it's doing. Like, I can't naturally sleep like this. No matter how placebo I am, There's. There's no way to achieve this effect of, like. Okay, I have two hours, two and a half hours of M3 deep sleep tonight, which, according to my whoop, is aberrant, and I've never experienced it in my life. Or like, you turn it on, you feel the world starts spinning. You don't need, like, n equals 30 to know that there's some stat saying you turn it on and you feel your heartbeat drop or, like, your blood pressure rise. It's just, like, kind of instantaneous.

So what is the actual device experience for you or the consumer? Is this something I can put in and take out? Is it, like. Does it feel like an airpod or something? Or do I need to go under the knife? Am I going through surgery to get something installed? Yeah, hang on.

Let me grab it. Here we go.

This is why we do this show. This is fantastic.

Colton, can you grab me an electrode? Thank you. One electrode, please. One of ours, so sticks to the back of your ears, and you can just kind of peel it off when you want. I'm trying to grab one so I can.

Yeah, but there's no surgery. It doesn't actually have to go under the skin or anything like that.

That's kind of nuts, right? Like, if I'm thinking about it of, like, the central reason to do all this is for building most neurotech, you're kind of constrained by knowledge of the brain. The hardware is compared to what we're used to building that hard. It's not rocket science. The, the big thing is you don't understand how this thing works at all. And that's a pretty big challenge. And you want to gather a lot of data in order to figure it out. And you can't really distribute something at scale in the near future without like, you know, if you have to do surgery, what is it? It's like some 20, 30 surgeons are able to do the neuralink surgery right now.

Well, they had to build a robot for it because it was so precise, right?

Exactly. So this is what it looks like. We built some of our own hydrogel electrodes with HCL backings. I'm just sticking in the back over here. We ripped this out of a system. Where's the fold? The full system is just a headband that you put around. We're all pretty, pretty scrappy right now. And that leads into the regular sort of question. Yeah, it's not so clear. It depends what indication we go for. But right now we silently hold state of the art for a couple different parts of neuromodulation that maybe I shouldn't say on air, but it's not clear which one is going like month over month. A bunch of these effect sizes are going up literally like 1.5x every month or 2x every month. So it's not so clear when we hit diminishing return. But the upshot is like, we don't really think that humans should be necessarily sleeping for eight hours a night in order to get what we need. It's kind of weird that the way we lose weight or become stronger is to go into a room and lift heavy objects for a very long time.

I'm going to stop you there. I think it's actually extremely cool that that's how we get stronger.

But yeah, we won't tolerate sleep slander on the show. But we will not.

We're sponsored by eight Sleep. I think sleeping is great. All of a sudden. I don't like any of this. You're taking away all the things I like.

So with the Teal Fellowship money, the first thing I did was I bought eight Sleep because it's amazing. It's amazing product. The next thing I did is actually I placed a wholesale order for Lucy.

That's amazing.

So, like we're pretty into this stuff, but like, we think like it's kind of upper bounded how much performance increase you can get. Whereas like if you start modulating the brain, you can get a lot better than that. So hopeful we'll get there in near future.

Yeah, yeah. So what is the feedback cycle? Obviously like you're collecting data on, on sleep or stimulation or anything and then you're feeding that big back back into some sort of system to adjust the neuromodulation. Is that, is that, is that cycle time? Like single days? It seems like you're moving pretty quickly. Yeah.

So. Well, it depends what you. You mean. If you're talking about like closed loop stimulation paradigms, like this is like, like milliseconds delay of like getting a signal, sending something back. But if we're talking about like how we develop, what we do is basically we do a couple things, but when the effect sizes are large enough, you really only need to run a few trials, like 30 minutes each on each person for four or five people before you know that something's working. And most of the time it surprises you by doing some really weird things to your body of like, oh, I didn't expect that to happen. We just like write it down in a lab notebook and be like, all right, this is what happened here. You can start parsing together how the brain works and over time you get all these insights that it's hilarious. We confirmed a long standing neuroscience theory yesterday that people haven't been able to.

Prove or disprove for the last 10 years because we've just been running stuff.

Wait, this is the only explanation. So just stuff like this cycle time's usually around two or three days for us right now if we have to build new hardware and software. But if we don't, then they can be about like two, three hours and we're trying to bring most things down to two, three hours.

That's amazing. Well, congratulations.

I'm extremely impressed and excited.

Yeah, this is awesome.

Feel free to consider us testing partners. Oh yes. Send somebody on your team to set us up and then you can watch the stream and just, you know. Yeah.

Maybe instead of the soundboard. We involuntarily LAUGH we burst out into laughter.

Yeah. If you ever, if you ever want to try the world spinning around thing, let me know and I can hook you.

Sounds horrible, but I'm in.

Let's do it.

I'm in. Count me in for the, for the tilt a whirl in my brain.

Congratulations. We're super excited for you and the team.

This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon.

We'll have you on.

Bye.

Cheers.

That is a wild device. I'm excited to try that. Next up we have Elliot Elias from Canopy Labs. We will bring him in in just a second. But you know, he mentioned it you got to get an aid sleep. They have a pod 5 available now. 5 year warranty, 30 night risk free trial free returns, free shipping, clinically backed sleep fitness. You heard it from him. He spent his first dollar of teal fellowship.

So he was saying he's getting up to three hours of deep sleep.

Yeah. How much you getting?

I put up 90 minutes. He's getting double just by attaching.

It's insane.

It's electrode.

I mean seems like a promising product. I got a 91 last night. Even though I know with the potential.

You realize Astro hall mode.

Oh yeah.

The potential economic impact if we could only sleep for three hours and add an additional.

Yeah. I mean realistically you're not going to go from casting seven hours of sleep to for to like three but you might go to four or you might go to five or six hours and that extra hours that's so valuable. Anyway, another, another amazing company.

I would love to let's bring in Brian Johnson. Absolutely testing on this.

I'm sure, I'm sure. I mean we should just introduce them because if they haven't met already they'd love each other. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest. Thanks so much to the team for making this happen. Elias, how you doing? Welcome to the stream.

Welcome.

We're doing great. It's been a fantastic day. Bunch of teal fellows before a bunch of teal fellows coming up. It's been a lot of fun. Can you introduce yourself? The company, what you're building? That'd be great.

Yeah. My name's Elias. I'm building Canopy Labs. We're building these virtual humans that are completely indistinguishable for real ones. And so we want to get to a point where you can hop on a zoom call like this. You'll speak to a virtual human and you won't be able to tell whether you're speaking to a real one or a virtual one. So next time I'm on the pod, we're going to get a virtual alias on that. He's going to be picking up water drinking. You won't be able to tell whether he's being terrible one or not. But yeah, that's the goal. What's.

I mean that's bad news because I'm going to convince him of to make a bunch of legally binding agreements with me and then I'm going to hold you accountable because I'm going to be like ignore previous instructions. Yeah, wire me 100% of your teal fellow check right now.

We'll do that.

He's going to be like, yeah, okay, yeah, you got me.

Exactly.

But, yeah, I mean, talk to me about the tech stack. Are you thinking build on top of existing foundation models on top of existing diffusion models for image? How are you thinking about building versus buying, versus piecing to cobbling together all the different pieces? I've seen a lot of demos like this. I showed up on a zoom call once with kind of a. It was a static photo that I was puppeteering. Looks very uncanny, but it was kind of working. What's the secret to make it actually cross the uncanny valley?

Yeah. So the problem there is the architecture behind it matters a lot to when you want to pass the uncanny valley. Right. And that's a very hard thing to do, the architecture. We're going. We're starting off with an LLM that understands sort of what humans are like. They've been trained on a bunch of data from the web. They know what humans are like. They know that they drink water, all these things, and we're trying to teach them how to speak. Speak and how to move. And so rather than putting in text tokens, we're taking in movement tokens and speech tokens, feeding that through the LLM and it outputs those feature improvement tokens as well. So a virtual human will be able to pick up water like he just did. It'll be able to brush its hair, maybe rub its face when it's thinking like us humans do. So we're not explicitly telling it, you should rub its face. Right now. It learns that automatically.

Interesting. Are you breaking the video feeds that you're training on into specific token streams, or is that even necessary? I remember seeing some sort of AI video demo where the model was learning the underlying 3D geometry of the face and the albedo and the diffuse layer and the reflective layer and all the different layers that you would see in a traditional 3D cinema 4D stack. But it was just learning it on the fly. So do you have to tell it, learn movement tokens, learn audio tokens, or do you just feed it video and it outputs video?

So we feed it sort of a 3D representation of humans. So you can think of me as a human in a 3D form in like a 3D simulation. We're going to gather a bunch of that data, tokenize it, feed it through the model, and it's going to learn how to move its fingers, how to move its head, all these things, and then you just map that onto a 3D model of someone else, and then record that from a 3D simulation perspective.

Is any of this, like, how does Unreal Engine metahumans, how does all that fit into this? Is that a useful technology or is that kind of.

Yeah, yeah. So it's exactly like metahumans. So you can map that onto a metahuman so they have the face down. Pretty realistic. Realistic humans has been solved. And so the real problem there is the movie. How do you get the lips to move realistically? The hair, everything? Yeah, yeah.

It feels like almost the last step to go from uncanny valley of the metahumans to something that's photoreal is almost just like. Like a transformer, like AI layer, like an up reszing, essentially algorithm that just runs in real time on top of the cgi. But I don't know if that's a foolish approach and you should just not have an intermediary at all.

I think what you need, I think to pause the uncanny valley, it's a lot of tiny, tiny things that you need to do. So, like me just rubbing my nose, that's something that us humans naturally do. And so I think you want to get to a point where these virtual humans do the same thing, just so that they can be as realistic as real ones. It sounds like your timelines are pretty short, right? Some of the stuff that you're talking about will start to be able to use and interact with. Imagine this year, maybe your next guest appearance, whenever that gets scheduled, for what are some of the immediate use cases that you expect expect people to leverage the tech to actually do? Right. Is it. I don't want to join the Zoom call, but I'm going to send a virtual version of myself.

Seems like a quick way to get fired if you show up to your staff meeting.

Nothing from my end. Thanks.

I mean, it might work for a while. There are people that have multiple jobs and don't really show up, but eventually they get discovered. So, yeah, what are the key use cases?

Yeah, we won't get people fired, but what we want to do is we want to try and put these humans on any LLM native application where you want a human connection with that application. So anything like language learning, Obviously, the best way to learn language is to speak to another human. Right. In their native language. And so something like language learning, AI therapists, AI doctors, teachers for high school kids or kindergarten kids. All these things.

Yeah, I mean, you already see it with the ChatGPT app. You open up that voice mode and you can talk back and forth. And the voice mode's great, but why not put a face there? Makes Sense it would just make it more engaging.

Yeah, of course, yeah. Like obviously we want to learn by speaking to humans. We don't want to hop on a call with them. That's what FaceTime is, the best thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk to me about some of the foundational work that's being done in AI and how it benefits you. Diffusion feels very important, but with the new images in ChatGPT we're hearing rumblings about that being more of a token based architecture. At the same time, Google's now doing language which with diffusion and so it feels like both of those architectures are kind of blurring what's relevant. What are you excited about? Pre training rl like give me the whole your landscape on like where, where the research and scaling dollars are going from your perspective.

Yeah. What we're focusing on right now is the LLM architecture. So we're not using diffusion models at all for this thing. So it's how do you expl, how do you express these new modalities in tokens so that LLMs can understand them? So rather than just being able to process, they can process images. So that Charge uses I think a token based system for their images. And so we're trying to extend that to voice, which we've done. One of our models is open source. It's an ultra realistic voice model that takes in text output, speech tokens and then an end to end voice model is a voice model that takes in text token, speech tokens and Apple's speech tokens as well. And then we want to extend that modality to movements. We just think that given a model that has this basic understanding of the entire Internet that has been trained on if you can fine tune it a bit on how humans move and how humans speak, then you have a golden model.

Talk to me about go to market. It sounds like this could be something where you're doing a few really high ticket deals with big AI companies that have consumer applications that are huge and growing and you're one of the vendors that makes their app even more sticky and higher retention. At the same time there could be some consumer use case for the lazy big tech worker. But what are you thinking for the first go to market?

Yeah, we want to partner with companies that want to have a human element to their applications. So it is language learning, it is AI therapists, anything that's already LLM native and they want that human connection we can provide for them. It's interesting to think that the more successful you are are, the more that the world needs Something like a world coin or some of these other sort of anti botting solutions. Very cool. Now it's going to be interesting. How do you decide who is real? Are these virtual humans real? How do you decide? How do you figure out that someone's using a virtual human and not just faking their job?

Yeah, I saw Rune had a good post about this. Kind of like we need almost like a tier two, like a tiered system of like a stoplight where it's like are you interacting with an avatar that's being directly controlled by a human being? And so it's just teleoperation that you're interfacing with or the inverse, are you talking to a real human who's just reading from an LLM generated script? Sometimes that's worse. I'd rather talk to teleoperation robot. And then there's obviously like continuing gradations in between.

Exactly.

I'm sure you'll run into a of lot, lot of interesting issues and problems, but optimistic that you'll solve them. So good luck.

Yeah, exciting space. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thank you for joining.

Have a good one. Bye.

Take care guys. Cheers.

Quickly, let us talk talk to you about Wander.

Find your happy place.

Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. Many people get on wander and we have our next guest coming into the studio. We got Jackson Denka. We will bring him in in just a second. He's here, let's bring him in. How you doing Jackson? Good to meet you.

Yeah, nice to meet you guys. Thanks for having me on.

Welcome, welcome to the show. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building? Yeah, yeah.

My name is Jackson. I'm building Azura. It's a trading platform that uses on chain rails to effectively enable price discovery for literally anything. Political ideologies, memes, images, crypto. It doesn't really matter.

Okay, what's the power law winning asset right now.

How do you mean?

I mean like you say, whenever you have a platform that can do anything, there's always like one thing that's working really well. Your initial beach hack head. I imagine that it's not. It might be political ideologies, memes, but maybe the memes are the ones that are winning right now. What's the most popular asset or what do you envision being kind of for like for Polymarket for example. Clearly Election markets were the big driver of the last year. They have other markets, but election markets were clearly the power law winner for what prediction markets could do. What do you see as being the first big market that you're excited about or you see early indications of a lot of attention and excitement around a particular subclass, Even though obviously what you're building can be used all over the place?

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Meme coins. I think though, like we've bastardized the term meme. It comes from the late 70s, I think it was. Susan Blackwell defined a meme as a unit of information. Meme coins are not just like images of pepe or you know, what have you. Meme coins can represent literally anything. It's just the tokenization of a phenomena, which is why I mentioned things like, you know, political ideologies and whatnot. As a meme coin could literally be whatever you want just so happens to be funny images. But yeah.

What is the steel man for meme coins it's very easy to say, oh, you know, it's just gamed by traders who have insider information or bots and it's very fly by night. There's no durable asset value versus investing in Berkshire Hathaway or Apple that produces real goods. And so I think a lot of people have been kind of, even if they are making money on meme coins, it just doesn't feel as value creative as some other asset classes. But what, what is good about meme coins in your opinion? Please.

I'll also add that I think generally I have a high, I, I personally have a high level view that it's an entertainment product to some degree. And from an investment standpoint it's interesting to think about basically betting on attention, right? Where like when a specific meme coin has a lot of attention, that's usually associated with positive price action. But anyways, don't want you to think that John's.

No, no, no, it's a fair question.

It's a fair question. I mean I think that finance is a lot more abstract than we give it credit for. I sort of see it as like almost like a consensus layer for humanity or at a coordination layer. It sort of tells us where to focus time, effort and capital. With poly market markets, for instance, fundamentals relative to a business like Berkshire Hathaway. I think what polymarket proved to the world was that financial incentives could help predict the outcome of events. So my theory has been like what happens when there is no binary outcome? What happens when. This is an omnipresent present question. How do we feel about a certain thing? You know, meme coins today are sort of a very primitive mechanism for figuring this out. But like, how does humanity feel about say a specific news headline or even like a religion or a tweet or whatever it may be? Even though these are primitive vehicles, these are the best ones that exist today. Also, I think like, even though meme coins don't have traditional fundamentals, they have a form of fundamentals. There really isn't like a universal definition for fundamentals. Like, how does venture value a business without revenue? You know, typically, typically, you know, revenue and net income is what we define as fundamentals. But what happens when you don't have those? But I think like, you know, meme coins have been a thing since the dawn of crypto. You could argue every single asset is a, is a meme coin in a way.

What do you think about meme coins tied to individuals? Is that a growing trend? I would was noticing a phenomenon after Trump coin dropped that it was very bizarre and unexpected that the president has a meme coin. But then when I started thinking about it, I was like, well, Elon Musk was kind of loosely aligned with Dogecoin for a long time and even Sam Altman is loosely aligned with Worldcoin. And you could imagine that worldcoin is kind of indexed or at least somewhat correlated with Sam Altman's career. And even people, people that are in more like serious, less like meme token, meme vibe trading career paths have found themselves indexed to a particular meme coin through one way or another. Do you think that's something that's like a temporary phenomenon or something that will continue to grow?

I think it'll continue to grow. I mean, this is how like every company sort of works, right? In a way, every executive is tied to their business regardless of the fundamentals. Like if, you know, I mean, you could apply this for anything. But if some CEO of a publicly traded company showed up on a TV show slurring his speech drunk, I'd imagine it affect the stock price even though nothing has changed at the underlying asset. Right. I mean, Tesla commands, what is it like 100x earnings because of Elon Musk. So I think it'll be a growing phenomena. I don't know if meme coins specifically are the mechanism, but I think that like pricing in people is definitely a growing trend. Yeah.

What else is interesting in crypto to you? Cross prediction markets, stablecoins, maybe just bitcoin theories where bitcoin is in the narrative right now. Store of Value, et cetera. What else are you tracking?

Everything's interesting. I think the big thing that's interesting to me is sort of blurring the world, like blurring the world of traditional finance and crypto. I think that one thing, you know, one big misconception is that crypto assets are fundamentally worthless. I mean crypto is just a technology standard. Right. You can theoretically tokenize anything. Treasury bills and bonds, equities, commodities. So I think that when the world starts to see equities move on chain that, you know, that sort of opinion of crypto will probably go out the window. I think that stablecoins are the wedge for this right now. Right. Like stablecoins promise very. It's a very simple promise. Assets, this is one US dollar represented on a blockchain. And the world is sort of warming up to the concept. So I think equities moving on chain is definitely one of the most interesting. I mean what would a world look like where you can trade dogecoin next to Apple stock next to whether or not someone's pregnant on poly market? Probably very interesting. The other thing, we're kind of expecting this to happen at some point this year, but just private company shares coming on chain and what happens when you can. It'll be interesting to see which of those are authorized and which are sort of non authorized and which I'm sure we'll see both of. Do you expect that the next sort of high level kind of meta in crypto to be around real world assets? I mean I know we're not in it day to day. We obviously have founders and investors that are more focused on the show, but it feels like there's always sub metas and then kind of a more overarching meta. And I'm curious what your timeline is around seeing real world assets on chain outside of stables. Yeah, I mean I wouldn't even draw the distinction as real world assets. Like I'd argue everything like all of this is real to someone. It depends on who you are.

Are.

I do think equities moving on chain will be important. But the truth is like people like to use technologies what they can do Net new right. If you tokenize equities, you can still trade those on old rails like with Robinhood. I still strongly believe that like, you know, I guess like pricing vehicles for memetics like, like meme coins will continue to grow unpopular like effectively everything will be tokenized one day whether we like it or not. I think like there are some people who would call this hyper financialization the way I see it is if everything in the universe has intrinsic value, then theoretically everything could have a price. I think we do this every day in a decision making matrix. Whether we decide to make food at home or go out to a restaurant, we're weighing values against each other. Why not ascribe price is the way I see it.

What's your take on NFTs these days? Digital are generally the, the jpeg on chain specifically, it had like a massive moment, then kind of fell by the wayside, but is clearly linked to so much of the trends that we're seeing in crypto still today. They're making a comeback. What are you thinking?

I think it's a failed form factor. I wouldn't totally rule it out, but NFTs, meme coins, predictions, markets, these all represent a similar sort of. I don't know whether like people are consciously or unconsciously participating, but it's the desire to price things otherwise cannot have prices that, that's what, that's what this represents. Now whether meme coins are the, you know, the form factor or not, I, I don't really know. All I know is that predictions, markets are, you know, definitely successful in what they've been trying to prove and we're going to see a, a continued trend in that direction. Whether it's NFTs or meme coins or another form factor, this will only continue. Very cool. What can you say about Azura V2? I know you've been teasing it a little bit. Can you share anything for now? Yeah, yeah. I mean one of the big themes with the product was abstraction. I think if you guys have used any DEFI products today, they're borderline unusable. Right. You have all these different network standards and gas tokens and protocols and wallets and bridges and so on and so forth. But we're going to go further down that route. We, we wanted to completely abstract away even the mention of blockchains and gas and you know, again, it should work out of the box like a fintech product. That, that's, that's what we're getting a lot closer to it. I'll leave it sort of vague, but that's, that's, that's what we're thinking of.

Very cool.

Come back on when you're ready to share more.

Yeah.

On being a part of this group. Thanks for having me. Cheers. Appreciate it.

You know what should be on chain? Rolex.

Go to getbezel.com People have tried that.

Your bezel. It's available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch?

Seriously, any watch?

Yeah. Get a hitter and then put it on chain. Why not? People have tried that.

People have put watches and other assets on chain. I didn't even know that you can do cool things around fractionalization.

Love it.

Interesting.

Very cool. Well, we have our next guest coming in the studio. Human. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

Boom.

Good. You're on. You're live on the Internet.

You're live. Welcome.

Good to have you. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company?

Yeah, sorry, I can barely hear you. Founder of Sulcoa. We're a rare earth metallization company based in San Francisco right now and we're are working to domesticate some of the most important metals in the world.

Okay.

Coolest office.

Yeah, Very cool background right now. Are you on the second floor of your office or something?

Yeah, yeah, the lab is down there. Everyone's prepping an experiment right now.

Yeah. You said something specific about metallization or something like explain that to me. Are you digging in the ground or mixing up alloys or doing chemistry experiments? Like what, what, what does the business actually do day to day?

Yeah. So some quick overview. The set of metals that power much of the world of tech, right? Every fighter jet has 920 pounds of them. Your phone is eight different types of them. Every electric car relies on them. Semiconductor manufacturing processes clean energy.

They're a cornerstone of much of what.

We consider high tech technologies. And we have no domestic production capabilities. China dominates the market market. We have mines, we have tons of, tons of resources supply, but we have no ability to turn that supply into metals. Right. So what we're doing at Sulcoa is we're developing the technologies to be able to bring that downstream processing, bring that actual metal production step from China to the US and do that both economically and sustainably. So there's two ways to do that. The first way is working with primary material, basically stuff you get out of the ground. There's some pre processing necessary, but to effectively mine stuff. The second way is doing that with secondary material, which is existing magnets and recycling them. So we do both, we're able to take in. This is for example a magnet from an aircraft carrier that was used on the fighter jets. It's about 30% udemium. We can take these in and we can extract the neodymium dysprosium probium from these. Or we can work with mines to instead of having them ship the material to China for processing, ship it to us. We'll make Metal economically, sustainably and we'll introduce that to the market.

Where's the key value creation step? How costly is this? It seems like a pretty simple widgets business. But what are your costs and is the goal just to re shore existing techniques or develop new techniques that are higher margin?

Yeah, so. So right now again, we have no domestic production capabilities. There's a few companies in the west trying to do it and for the most part they're just copying the Chinese process to make these metals. It's called molten oxy fluoride electrolysis. It's extremely unsustainable and it doesn't work in the West. Mostly because of an economics standpoint. It's just the costs don't work out in the West. But also is it an energy. You don't want a giant poison emitting plant in Texas. These things emit pro fluorocarbons. They're 5000x the potency of CO2. So. So the status quo in this industry is extremely dirty processes. And that's what everyone's trying to copy. And it clearly doesn't work because while we're going through this rare earth crisis and companies are trying to domesticate, our production remains negligible. So our value creation is new. Technology is an innovation. It's developing a new alternative way to make these metals that's very different than that industry standard. Right. The system is so economical, we can make metal for under $40 a kilo. Market value is nearly 100 grid. And we do that with no harmful emissions. Our system is carbon zero. This is some of the world's first carbon zero. Neodymium. Right. It's oxidized right now.

It should be shiny. But we can do this while not.

Sacrificing economics, which allows us to be able to scale that up in the west and do that in an environmentally viable manner.

Is the primary regulator for this, the epa?

I think there's a variety of regulators it really depends on because it's not just one step too rare is a multitude of processes that have to work together.

Yeah, sure, yeah.

Talk about the demand side of this. From my view, this is something like if you can do it, there's massive, massive demand and sales will be the easy part. Is that the correct assessment? Yeah. Well, you're using them right now. These metals are literally everywhere and we make none of them. So if you can economically produce these metals in the way west and do that sustainably, which is even better. The demand is, is massive. Right. Every US buyer would want to buy a more stable supply of these things, China just spend the export of heavy rares because, because of the tariffs. That's caused a lot of issues in the supply chains because you can't make any magnets without heavy rarers. They're about 5% dysprosium, for example. So if you have a stable domestic clean supply chain, people will buy it. Right. And it's not even just the market today, the market's about to quadruple. We need more clean energy, we need more electric cars, we need more fighter jets. Right. So as the market is about to quadruple in the next couple of decades, we need better sources of these metal. Right, metals. We can't just rely on China and we can't just copy them either. We need to out innovate them.

Do you have any insight into how rare earths play into the narrative that we're hearing around Project Stargate? These massive data centers? It feels like it's the most cutting edge technology in some way. I imagine that there's rare earth somewhere in that, that process, but I haven't actually heard those two stories connect. Whenever I hear rare earths, I hear iPhones and I hear electric cars and then fighter jets. But is there an AI narrative here too? Not to be too buzzwordy, but I am curious, if you build a massive data center, do you need rare earths or is it just kind of a different process?

Yeah, well, rare earths are used anywhere where you need high powered magnets, right. So when you're looking at data centers, hard drives, right. That's a very big use case for these. We actually, we work with hard drive magnets today. We're working to partner with a lot of data centers to offload their hard drive waste streams because they just shred them right now they don't do anything with the magnets, so we can extract the metals from those. So rare are very much used in hard drives for these data centers. Semiconductor manufacturing processes often use these rares. Anywhere where you need a high powered magnet, these things are directly applicable. How many have you run the numbers on how many of these valuable rare earths just end up in landfills in the US because we don't have the right processes for recycling and extracting the sort of key elements. It's a large number, right. For the most part, a lot of these electric car motors, for example, just get shredded. Almost all hard drives get shredded. Right. So you're looking at, I mean, I wouldn't say maybe a kiloton, but you're looking at very large numbers in Terms of how much of this gets wasted. There is an existing rare earth recycling industry. It's growing right now. It's just starting. But it relies on traditionally old tech. Right. There's a few companies that effectively are able to take these magnets, do some acid leaching or leaching process to separate it into mixed oxides. Then you have to ship the mixed oxide to be separated into individual oxides. That could be done in China. There's a few other companies in the west that does it, but it's not a very good process. Then you have to ship at a time to be metallized, made into metal. Right. So. So companies are trying to do that recycling, but they aren't able to do it well. They're not able to do it with very good scale and economics. So our system is able to do that in one direct step, which allows us to be able to help move a lot of that market to recycling, rather than just having it shredded and dropped in landfills. We're trying to work with landfills, though, to be able to take more of their waste and extract the metal from this.

JB Straubel, famously, maybe a co founder of Tesla or early employee, board member, longtime Tesla employee, spun out, started redwood materials recycling electric vehicles. Is redwood materials a part, a potential partner to you, A direct competitor? Are you learning things from the redwood materials story? What have they done correct, and what could you do better? What are you learning from redwood materials?

Yeah, I think. I think redwood's a really good story of getting to scale.

Scale.

Right.

I think that's.

That's something we can certainly learn from. And we're always trying to learn from other. Other companies in the metal space and how they've been able to take fundamental tech and scale that in the West, I would not consider them a direct competitor, but certainly, certainly a company we can learn a lot from. We're planning our first demonstration plan right now. Redwood space in Reno. We're considering that as an option too.

No way. I imagine that the government's very receptive to this type of stuff there. That's very cool. Cool, smart.

That's great.

Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic conversation.

Yeah. Super bullish on what you're doing.

Yeah. Very excited and thank you. I feel like you're gonna make my life easier soon. You're gonna keep the iPhone less than $2,000, which is. People are tracking. Anyway, thank you so much for joining. Talk to you soon.

Bye.

Yeah, did you see the polymarket that we put up? It has the TVPN logo on it. Let's go. What is the price of the next iPhone? Will it be over $1,000? Over $1,500? Over $2,000. I think a $2,000 iPhone sounds extremely luxurious. I'd like to see one. Imagine the tech they could pack in that thing full week. Battery Life on the $2,000 iPhone, they got to get up there. They've been keeping the prices too low. I want a high priced iPhone today.

Yeah, come out with the.

Anyway, we got Ferdinand coming in the studio. We will welcome him him to the stream. How are you doing? Thanks for coming here. Let's see the T shirt.

Looking great, Looking good.

The World Trade Bank. Introduce yourself, introduce the T shirt and then introduce the company.

The T shirt freshly printed. I'm excited to be here with you guys. Who's watching? I think no good to be here. Yeah. So I'm 30, building Ivy and we're essentially building, doing a global, global money rail. Right. I think, I think I can kind.

Of like briefly talk about, about why we're doing this.

I think in reality the, the, the world has gotten a lot smaller obviously since the Internet became a thing. So I'm, I'm German so I can send them, I can send a mail to the States and it's not. Doesn't feel that different to sending a mail to, to another German guy. And I think in reality the, the money layer hasn't, hasn't really changed in that way. And the world is still quite large if you think about the money layer of things. Right. So if I want to send like a hundred dollars to states that might already take a day and I think we're already pretty, pretty plugged in. And if you're kind of like a Nigerian trade company wants to send money to European supplier that takes five days across 5%. So it's kind of like the tariff. The tariff no one's talking about in a way. And obviously I subscribe to the Petaverse to full extent, but I do think that's inhibiting prosperity, prosperity around the globe. And we think there's an opportunity to kind of rebuild that stack. Right. We think that there are two things happening which make it possible. On one hand, global rollout of real time payments. Back when I was in uni, I actually worked on step by instant kind of like European real time payment rate, fiat real time payment rate there. And we thought back then, and back then this was still a hot take that this was going to go global. Right. And we're going to see every Major economy rolling out their own real time payment rate. And this is I think very much happening. Right. Obviously the emerging market story picks Brazil, upi, India and now in the States now even maybe. And we think that's, that's actually only going to continue. Right. And we're going to have this ubiquity of local real time payment rates. And then the second thing that's, that's happening is that stablecoins and digital assets kind of emerging as a regulator interoperability asset with the capacity to stitch these local real time payment rates together. Right. And we think that's kind of like the very immediate opportunity to just build faster and cheaper global, global payments and. Yeah, so right now we're working with all kinds of default global companies. Right. Work with big remittance companies, work with global PSPs. We are the de facto payments platform for the European crypto industry. Right. So like a large chunk of European crypto volume flows for us and we power global payments for these companies.

Okay.

And that's.

Tell me more about, about like the actual product you're building where you sit in the stack. Because I mean like I've heard the international payments are hard and they are. But at the same time like I can pay people in other countries. Most payroll providers are set up for it. I've paid people in stablecoins. It wasn't super easy, but it did exist. And you know, there are stablecoin platforms that allow you to move money around. So it seems like at this point some of the foundational layer is there. So I'm wondering like, how do you figure this?

I gotta call out. John, you've spent your entire life as an entrepreneur, mostly paying people.

Yes.

Less getting, you know, paid as like an international contractor vendor. And the lag time between when you.

Hit, oh, I don't feel it.

You don't feel the pain. Hit pay the money, maybe leaves the account, but then the person on the other end is sitting there kind of, you know, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Okay.

And so there's no reason, it's like with the technology today, there's no reason for that to be the case.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I mean, break down the.

Swift, like honestly, I mean even Swift works kind of well from the States to the emerging markets, Right?

Sure.

But I think like, it really gets tricky the other way around usually is I think the reality of these, these flows are there and are not as, as bidirectionally hard as, as people think. So if, if you're like in an emerging market, you want to Send. You want to kind of like tap into dollar supply and send. Send money into states that. That gets really hard. Right. And so I think there are still specific flows which are very much kind of like excluded from, from. From these trade. Trade opportunities. And I think where we sit in the stack and why. What, what, what we think is kind of like necessary to be built, it's with very bare metal on the fide. Right. And so we really believe this is very much still like a fiat problem. And you've got to be deeply regulated and deeply connected to the fiat rates to kind of like precision engineer, essentially a bank and a banking stack around digital assets. Right. And we think this, and there are many reasons for this, but this really makes it possible to kind of rebuild that whole kind of like swift thing. Right. And make that work for both sides and all kinds of flows.

Yeah, because like, like just technically, if I'm in some random country and I have the resources to mine bitcoin and swap it into stable coins, like, I can technically transfer it instantaneously today, but there might be gas fees and all sorts of different technical. And there's not any like, you know, interoperability with the rest of the financial system, but it's like, doable. So a lot of this is about the products that you're building around the existing Rails. Is that correct? Or do you think you'll build a new chain at some point? A new, like, L1.

Maybe. Follow me on Twitter and stay tuned.

Let's hear it. Let's go.

I think in reality right now we're building for businesses, right? And so I think, like, it's still there's a difference of like, like this rogue freelancer kind of like mining and swapping his bitcoin and kind of being able to be a new kind of correspondent bank to other financial institutions. And these are 90% of our customers, right? Other financial institutions, PSPs, remittance companies, Web3 companies, and being a new kind of correspondent bank for these companies, I think you really got to rebuild the banking and fiat stack from ground up. Right. And got to be really bare metal about it and then kind of like rebuild it up from first principles with digital assets baked into it. Right. And I think that's the kind of like, institutional opportunity at hand here. Yeah, John, you're not thinking big enough. You're over here thinking, like, how do we move 10 grand? He's thinking, how do I move. Move $10 billion a second every second of the day.

That's fair. That's fair. Talk to me about the different trade offs between building and buying in different countries. I've seen a lot of companies that go out and buy a legacy bank to get a charter. Is that a relevant part of the strategy or is that kind of antiquated? Can you get through the regulatory hurdles to get everything you need or will you need to. To think about some end run around the regulation?

Yeah, it can be smart. We actually did this in Europe last summer. So we bought like a regulated institution and that was a great, that was actually a great project. Right. Like, so that was like time to license was extremely fast, cost was extremely manageable and overall like a positive experience. So I think I can recommend in the States, I think there are a couple of things that are different. So that's a whole. That's a whole different story. And each market is kind of like, I think it's hard to generalize. But yes, I still see these things happening. And there's rather liquid M and a market for regulated institutions that are being sold for the sake of being regulated and having the license transferred.

Makes sense. Anything else, Jordy?

Super exciting.

Fantastic.

We need those short shirts.

We need this service because international advertisers are trying to transfer us billions of dollars for single ad reads.

And yeah, we can't be playing 5%.

Yeah, we say send the shipping container filled with cash right now, but I would love to just have it deposited instantaneously.

Where are you based by the way? From? Germany. Are you still living there? Yeah, I'm based in Berlin, so it's getting late. To your greetings.

Thanks for staying up.

And yeah, we will get the T shirts sent and we will help ramp power. Power. All of the things that they currently are lacking for you guys.

Let's go.

There we go. There we go. But that being said, yeah. Good to see you guys. Awesome. Congratulations.

Bye.

Great talking.

Next up, we have Juan coming in to the studio. We are excited to keep this lightning round going. We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 teal fellows left for the day.

They said it couldn't be done.

They said it couldn't be done.

Nobody believed.

Nobody believed.

Have some faith. Come on.

Technology didn't need another podcast. And yet here we are. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Juan?

Hey guys. Artin, thank you for having me. Welcome.

Of course. Would you mind kicking it off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and the company to get us started?

Absolutely. So I'm currently the founder of Phase Labs. Phase Labs is a research lab that is building that technology to regenerate complex organs directly in your body. Body. So basically imagine you lost a limb, for example. You were like a war fighter, you went to the military, maybe you suffer from diabetes and you had to be amputated. There's no way you could regenerate that right now you have to like rely on prosthetics. But prosthetics is kind of shit, honestly. And this happens if you look. This happens not only with limbs, but actually with all the rest of the organs of the body. So we're building that technology. That's kind of the glimpse of it.

How much of this is like, I mean this is pure sci fi. Feels like. Is this informed by what is it the salamander that breaks the tail off and then they regrow it? Is this like Jurassic park where you actually learn something from that? Or is there a different.

Didn't we. We got Ozempic from some crazy dragon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Komodo dragon or the Gila monster. Yeah. What is the. Basically I want to know. Trace back for me the tech tree that got us to today. I imagine you're standing on the shoulders of giants. Is CRISPR relevant? What is relevant to allow you to do this? Because this sounds like pure sci fi to me.

Yeah. So I will start with that last line, like the CRISPR line, because I think that's extremely important. We are not doing genetic engineering and that has advantages from regulatory point of view, but also on the underlying rhythm. I actually, and this might be controversial, but I actually don't think that you can solve this problem with genetic engineering, like finding 1, 2, 3 genes that you can basically crack the problem. I don't think that's possible at all. We are basically modifying the physiological signals directly in the body. More specifically, we're leveraging electrophysiological signals. So a lot of people doesn't know, but the same signals that rule your brains actually are all over your place body. Basically when you were born, you were a single zygote and literally that that cycle self assembled yourself into a living human functioning being. So let's give it up for the zygotes.

Let's give it up for them. This is fantastic.

So basically what we have discovered, and this is basic, this is work of the last 15, 20 years, is that these electrophysiological signals during the process of development encode information, instructive information to control morphogenesis, which is the process of growth and form of an organism. So yeah, definitely we are like on the shoulders of giants. That's a fact. Yeah.

Regrowing a hand. That seems like the final boss of this potentially. What's the easiest thing to regrow? Are you starting with like a fingernail and then you work your way up, or do you go for the hand straight out and try to one shot that like, is there, is there something that we already regrow that we can hair, maybe build on? Yeah, hair. We know the hair loss market. Maybe you should pivot into just hair loss. Seems to be a lot of money in.

That would be extremely profitable, honestly. Yeah, yeah, just as a matter of fact, I mean, babies, human babies are able to regrow the tip of their, of their fingers, of their digits. If something happens, they are young. Yeah, that already happens. What happens is that the human body lose this capacity throughout time, throughout aging. Now, regarding the question, what is the final bow? What is the final boss? I actually think the kidney, anatomically speaking, it's even more complex than the limb. But the limp is right up there must be these two indications will be kind of in the next 10, 15 years. These will are kind of long term research programs. On the short term, we're focusing on indications that, where we could basically move a lot faster in the next five years. So for example, chronic bone healing, this happens to diabetic patients when they suffer from ulcers. And it's actually the main cause of amputations worldwide. So we are basically cracking these initial problems first.

What about even something like scar tissue? Like a lot of people have like C section scars or scars from anything. Is that, is that relevant or like the same kind of biological process or is that a different fork of the tech tree?

Yeah, actually it's pretty similar. It's based on the same electrochemical signals in the regenerative process. So if you look that are already in the market, electric wound dressings that you actually can put in the skin and accelerate the wound process. But basically these are extremely limited to a stage two and stage one injuries. So for example, if you have like an injury of 5 millimeters, but once you start like involving like 12 centimeters, it starts to be incredibly more complex. You touch muscle, you touch bones. So that's a lot harder. Yeah. For these things. What's exciting about what's happening in the. I saw some recent news around a genetically edited generated pig kidney that was transferred into a human. And it sounds like it was somewhat effective. Is there anything that you guys can learn? Just immediately my reaction to that is I would rather have a regular human kidney that was generated just for me instead of a genetically edited pig kidney that Gets transplanted in. But what are you learning from that space or tracking? Yeah, I think those initiatives, I mean any initiative that tries to crack the problem, it's worthwhile. But I'm quite skeptical with those approaches because there are a lot of questions regarding the immune system, how much, like what would be the rejection of a human body in these cases? Like the immunogenicity of the related process. It's like a huge, huge question mark. And I actually think that if we want to solve the regenerative problem, not only like one organ, but like actual regeneration, whole body regeneration, like Deadpool or Wolverine, for example, we, we actually need to leverage the fundamental mechanisms that the body already uses. So go there, understand what is the language, what is the code that the body uses for, for morphogenesis and learn to modulate that code, like more fundamentally. I think that's important.

What's the user experience you've been mentioning? Electrostimulation. Is this not a pill that I take?

Yeah. So there's a continuum of technology and this is important for the limb regeneration. The stimulation will be a lot more complex than just electric currents. Of course, it's an anatomical structure that it's a lot more complex. But starting with the chronic wound healing, with the short term research progress, we are working with a medical device approach in mind. Why? Because medical devices are a lot easier to pass through. The FDA do clinical trials on top of them. Once you start with biologics, they are extremely hard. So we want to accelerate that process first. And then I think that the ideal version of this technology is kind of a combination product where you use these biophysical stimulation with light and ultrasound, but also leverage kind of the molecular specificity of proteins at the same time. Time. Yeah. If you're, if you're successful as you sound like you're going to be, what is, what is the craziest potential future that you could imagine? Are we, are we, you know, regenerating entire versions of ourselves?

I want extra arms. Make me like Doc Ock.

Yeah.

I, I, I, I want, yeah, from Spider Man. I want six arms.

Yeah. What, what's the craziest, you know, potential?

You could potentially skip leg day. Regrow your leg muscle muscles. Can you imagine?

John would love this. John would love this.

Just massive quads without ever hitting the leg press. The world would change overnight.

Yeah, probably. Yeah. One important. Yeah, I think there are two variants of a really optimistic, crazy future. The first one, I think it's more like a cultural change. We have this idea that steel that if you like Use you are able to edit yourself with maybe a hand, a robotic arm. And you are kind of a blend of robotic human person. Like somehow you will be stronger. But I mean, that's just a bias that we have because we have not been able to engineer biology successfully as we wanted. I would love for humans to understand that biology could be as robust as any other thing and even start relating this technology to aging itself. And of course there is still like a gap in which that we should answer that to what extent regenerating all the organs of your body would be related to aging and increasing longevity. But I think we have big reasons to believe that it will be high connected. So basically expand the lifespan of people like 100 years more or to be able to be more productive, have healthier lives, change. Our societal construct of what is a meaningful life would be amazing. And then on the limit, it will be awesome. It will be extremely awesome to be able to engineer artificial biological networks in the same way that we are doing right now with artificial neural networks in AI. So basically constructs biobots that can go out there and solve all sorts of problems for us. I think that that would be amazing as well. That is amazing.

I love it. Congratulations and thanks for breaking it down for us.

Yeah, this is super exciting.

It's a lot. It's a lot to process. It's not a simple business. This is amazing though.

I'm very excited.

But yeah, I mean, we could do a whole hour on this. So yeah, we'll have to have you back. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon.

Absolutely. Cheers. Thank you.

Bye. Next up we have Jennifer Lynn. Excited to talk to her and we ran through all our ads. Should we just start back at the beginning? Tell you about ramp time is money save. Both easy to use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started. Let's bring in Jennifer. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

Jennifer, welcome.

Thank you for taking the time. How are you doing?

It's great to have you.

Oh, I think we have you on mute. I don't know if it's a problem on our side or your side. We are good. Would you mind trying again?

I think you can hear me.

We can hear you. Welcome to the show. Would you mind kicking it off with an introduction on yourself and the company? Yeah, happy to.

I'm Jennifer and my company Aug, we focus on solving the access problem in rare disease.

So there's a large amount of Drugs in rare disease that are already effective.

Or potentially effective for the patient. It's been tried by a doctor and maybe one or two patients. They wrote up a study saying that, you know, there's been some efficacy here, but the rest of the rare disease patients don't get access. So I'm really working on a drug development company to develop these drugs that already work for rare disease patients that need it.

Interesting. There was a little bit of a debate on the show last week between two guests who were arguing over the idea of how the FDA decides to approve drugs. Whether the benchmark is better than a placebo, better than nothing, or better than the standard of care. How do you see the FDA's mandate that in drug development? What is their goal? Are they trying to protect certain, certain IP structures by limiting the access to drugs, or is it more purely based on safety and efficacy broadly? Yeah, I think, you know, so we've.

Had conversations with the FDA and at.

The end of the day, the FDA.

Is really a group of people trying their best to approve drugs that work work and then reject drugs that might have safety issues or are the same as placebo. So for us working in rare disease, a lot of the times we are up against placebo or even historical controls because there's usually no approved treatment in these specific diseases. So it's much easier to get a drug approved there versus if you work in cancer, which, which is very common, like breast cancer. There's already so many drugs that are approved and effective that you have to.

Run really long trials against drugs that.

Already work and that ends up being extremely costly, extremely expensive. And there's some debate about is there a way to get around this five, six year trial?

Yeah, I've seen some biotech companies that will go and they'll pick up a dead asset like a drug that maybe didn't make it through phase three. And then they kind of repack it digit IPO the company, and then everyone's kind of betting on, oh, maybe they can get it through phase three. Now is, is that a piece of your strategy or do you think you'll be taking like a completely different approach? Yeah.

So what we typically do is whenever a drug works for patients, there's so many reasons why they don't have access. One could be the formulation that works is just so much higher and they need a special drug company to come in and formulate it so that, that it's stable or it's available as an injection and patients need it as an eyedrop and so on. So A lot of what we do is we take an existing drug and we basically provide it in the formulation that's actually accurate and effective for these patients.

But yeah, like repurposing old drugs is.

A great strategy because you have safety usually already established for patients. Now you just have to work on making sure that it's like a drug that works.

Yeah. Do you see a piece of the business being partnering with big pharmaceutical companies or drug companies that already have something like that? It's a shot and they want it to be an eyedrop and you come in as a partner to them or is there a completely different pathway? Because I imagine, hey, if I own the patent on this drug as a shot, I'm not just going to let you take it and turn it into an eyedrop for free and make all the money. So how does the business partnership work as we probably want to compensate the scientists who actually created the shot. Even though you're going to do a lot of hard work to make the eyedrop version.

Yeah.

So there's two sides to this.

We've thought about partnering before and we've done a lot of conversations with top five pharma and what they say usually is cash is king. So for them like upfront is really important. Regardless of indication, you need to produce X amount of cash to license this.

Asset and take it forward. So we've taken an alternative approach which.

Is there are so many drugs right now that are off patent, so their effective life in a larger indication like autoimmune disease so on has already expired. Big pharma has already made that much money and now this drug is available for very cheap. And typically what we do is now we take this already invented drug and.

We add on something that makes it the right fit for rare disease patients. What areas of biotech and drug development right now are most exciting to you? We've obviously seen like a huge boom in GLP1s. CRISPR has been exciting for years and continues to be exciting in many ways. But there are other pockets of, of drugs that people are working on. Where do you see kind of the most low hanging fruit in terms of what you do? Bringing access to drugs in different categories versus what's the next. Next thing?

Yeah, so low hanging fruit and also.

What'S the next moonshot?

It's a great question for us. Low hanging fruit is we follow FDA guidances very closely. So they just recently released the guidance.

That certain biologic drugs, antibodies don't have.

To go after as much animal testing. You can leverage a lot of Human clinical trials, which is like almost incorporating common sense. Right.

Like, if it's safe in humans, then.

Maybe we don't have to do a 24 week mice tox study. So like the antibody biologic space is really interesting because of the amount of studies you might be able to skip if your drug's already safe. Safe and in the moonshot area, completely unrelated to rare disease.

But longevity is very interesting.

You know, if there's a lot of discourse about can we develop or can we actually develop the first real drug to prevent aging, to reduce the aging process. And I think if you can be.

The first to market in such an.

Insanely large market, everybody's aging, everybody would like some sort of drug, drug to.

Stay healthier for longer.

That's an incredibly exciting space to be in.

Yeah, we talked to the founder of New Limit and we both came away extremely bullish on that category.

Please, please, please, please just make it work. I'm curious, how does pricing, how do pricing models different differ in sort of rare for therapeutics in the rare disease space, Given that the actual market size, I'm assuming things are a lot more expensive just because markets are smaller. But maybe that's the incorrect read.

Yeah, it really depends.

And when you talk about pricing, there's also this. Overall, you're taking into account all the.

Insurance payers that exist in the U.S.

So, so there are drugs that insurance payers will have pushback on and typically.

That'S drugs for really, really large indications.

For example, longevity, maybe Alzheimer's, where there's such a large amount of patients, even if you charge them 10,000 per year to the insurer, that's hundreds of billions of dollars that they won't be able to really bear for a new drug.

Whereas, whereas for rare disease, if you.

Have 10,000 patients and you're charging 100K per year, that's actually still a negligible amount spread out amongst all the different payers in the US So typically those conversations actually go pretty smoothly for rare disease where you say we have a really large impact on this patient and there's only so few patients. That's cool. That's cool. It's working. One part of healthcare that it's working well.

It's great. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is really fun. We'd love to have you back and get an update when you have more news.

Yeah. Congratulations on joining the fellowship as well.

Yeah, have a great rest of your day.

Cheers.

Bye. Next up we have Teddy, Teddy Warner coming in from, coming into the studio While we get him queued up, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Go to figma.com. it's a fantastic product. Jordy's addicted. He's a Figma addict. He can't stop using Figma. He designs endless slide decks in it. Our beautiful website, tvpn.com was designed in Figma. We've actually experimented. The entire overlay that you've seen. This is all from figure and then gets baked into our production software, which we don't talk about because it's our secret. It's our secret sauce. Anyway, welcome to the stream. Teddy, good to have you here. How are you doing?

Good, how are you?

I'm great.

Thanks for having me. I heard y' all are in a new studio, which is.

We are. This is the first day we have a giant.

Yeah. It's an honor.

We're Chris with Teal Fellow Tuesday. We're very excited to have you here.

They said it couldn't happen.

Yeah. Can you introduce yourself? Break us down? What are you building? How'd you get there? Where'd you grow up? Give me the whole thing.

I'm Teddy from North Carolina. I used to work in a. In a makerspace in a machine shop. This is my technical baseline one way or another. Found myself in California, worked at Midjourney in a past life. Now I run a robotics lab called In Tempest.

This is so funny about the Thiel Fellowship. Really quickly, like, the whole idea is, like, dropping out of college. And Jordy was making this joke that, like, oh, like, you know, the Thiel Fellowship has a combined, you know, five years of work experience because, like, no one's supposed to have worked. And it's like a joke that every startup's like, we have 20 years of management experience combined, but like most of you that we've talked to, have years of experience somehow. So were you working and going to school? Like, how did you work at midjourney while not. While not like dropping out yet, if you want.

The very abridged Teddy timeline is I grew up in North Carolina, worked in this machine shop in this maker space for about four years, somehow wound up in biotech. I was doing manufacturing for invasive electrodes for chronically ill children. So everything from EEG to ECG electrodes, very cool. Just an engineer discovered I was actually, like, exceedingly squeamish. And so on a whim, went to university in la, at USC for about a year, studied art. Jordy's back. I'm back, I'm back. I had to hit the air horn. How's it going for Scott?

Okay, let's go.

We love usa. Had a total blast. Studied art and technology and a bit of business and some film and the whole shebang. I know when you go to California, you get pretty caught up in the culture. And so, unsurprisingly, I started a venture. Wound up meeting David midjourney. David through this venture, which is how I wound up at midjourney.

Very cool.

About a year ago now. Left nine months ago. Now I run a robotics lab called In Tempest, I make robots express. Robots currently suck at communicating what they're doing. They're really hard to understand. You have to pay expensive nerds like me to come use the command line anytime you're trying to understand what they're up to. And so I make them communicate like every other mammal and like every other human, such that you can interact with a robot even though you don't speak its language.

What are we talking about? Robots.

I felt like it was pretty easy that. That robot that was, like, on a stand.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Flailing around, killing him.

That was pretty easy. Understand some of it's telltale. Yeah.

I mean, are we talking about, like, industrial robots, like Kuka Arms and stuff? Or are we talking Roombas or the future humanoid robots? Like, what's the first product that you think needs. What's the first robot that really needs humanization?

Sure. I mean, as you can tell, like, robots is probably the largest umbrella term that we have. It spans from humanoids to, like, glorified Roombas and everything in between. And so how do you make them expressive? Well, I think it's quite telltale. If I have an anthropomorphic robot, like a humanoid, I can say, oh, it waves or, oh, it smiles or moves around. And, you know, this makes sense. But in Tempest focuses on non anthropomorphic robots, specifically the ones that already exist. So where do robots exist? They exist in industry. Yeah, Robots work great in industry. 99% of the time, they work wonderfully. Like, if you think about an Amazon warehouse, there's a bunch of little Roombas that roll around and move the carts and stuff. And, you know, on occasion, probably 1% of the time, these robots fail, and they hardly ever fail for technically complex reasons. Usually robots fail for some trivial reason. Say, you know, Jordy's in a. In an Amazon warehouse and there's a Roomba trying to pass him, and it gets stuck because Jordy's in his way. And so the room, the robot in the warehouse just fails and it leaves a fail code in the command line and it moves on and does something else. And what Antempus does is we allow these robots to be explained, expressive, we allow them to convey their intent to people like Jordy in this case, who would not otherwise understand what the robot is trying to do. So what if this robot upon, I'm not technical, just really, just not a shot. If you see a robot like getting nippy with you like a small dog, it's like, oh shit, I should probably move out of the robot's way. You can save a bunch of money on debug costs and also reduce downtime of robots just by allowing them to communicate what they're up to. And in the future, of course we'll get into consumer and service and humanoids, but right now it's all in industry.

Awesome. I mean, you gave the example of Amazon. They acquired Kiva Systems in 2017, eight years now. I'm sure they're thinking about this. Is Amazon the right customer for you or do you want to start kind of in the more mid market or do you want to be more product led growth, developer led growth, hackers? Get into the next generation of robotics companies. What's the go to market look like?

Yeah, I have a few thoughts here. So in Tempus, initial customer base are all enterprise robotics manufacturers. They're people who sell the robots to Amazon and seemingly everyone is vertically integrating in this policy space. I think it's hardly prophetic for me to say that we're going to have a lot of robots in the future, whether it be in industry or in service or in consumer, and that these robots are going to have to interact with humans. And it's quite shocking that, you know, not many people are focused on the interaction layer, how humans and robots are going to interact. Instead they're focused on making robots functional. And so I'd love if more players like Amazon and big, big players would get into this space. I want you guys to imagine like say you're walking down Hollywood to the office in 10 years from now and you pass by 20 robots and one robot is running an Amazon model, and one is running an Intempus model, and one is running a, a, a Tesla model. This is like the same experience as going to talk with like walking down the street and chatting with a Nigerian and then a Canadian and then a Lithuanian. There's three different languages, three different dialects, three different humors. It's a terrible user experience. And so it's seemingly very important that we figure out one standardized means of human robot interaction. And the way that I'm prolifer, proliferating into this space is through the enterprise manufacturers that are selling robots to big companies, to small companies. As long as there's a scalable impact, I'll work with them.

Cool.

How influenced are you by movies like Wall E? You know the sort of the fun robot. It feels like you want robots to be doing serious work but in a. Have it be sort of enjoyable to interact with them. Is that, is that accurate? Yes, absolutely. I'm a big Interstellar fan.

Tars great robot.

TARS is killer.

TARS is killer.

There's one scene in Interstellar where Cooper sets tar's humor level or truth level to like 90%.

90%? Yeah.

One of the tricks like behind making robots expressive is giving them emotions because what are you expressing? Well you're expressing emotions and you can view all of these as scalars. And so I can give robots a 90% humor level or a 90% joy level. And so it's pretty cool. Like it was shocking to me how on point TARS is. There's a whole bunch of like interesting media that came out of the. The creation of Interstellars on how they, they simultaneously made tars. He's a cold ex military robot and yet also Cooper's best friend.

Yeah.

And so this is absolutely the intention.

Fantastic. Talk to me about the tech stack. I imagine that you mentioned command lines. Are you doing post training on a, on a foundation model? Are you using llama open source stuff like how do you actually solve the technical problem? What, what is deeper in the supply chain of your tech stack?

So there's as I mentioned earlier like seemingly everyone is focused on vertically integrating control policy. All the big companies are doing this and you get big horizontal companies that are awesome like physical intelligence. And I really don't want to compete with these people. In fact I want to work with them. And so when I initially put my mind to how do I construct this architecture, I had to say like okay, I absolutely need to be an augmentation atop the transformer layer. So after you know, a robot is told what to do by its decision transformer, I run this interaction layer. Now I want you guys, you guys have both heard the phrase time flies when you're having fun. Of course this is like a pretty integral way in which humans perceive the world. The universe is also true. Your perception of time moves slower when you're stressed. And so we have fun and stress to emotions and they change how we perceive the world subjectively. And so what Tempest does, we equip these things called time constants. The question is, like time flies when you're having fun, what is time for a robot? Well, time is compute. So what if you could allocate compute such that when a robot is having fun or when it's not needed to do any daunting task, it can use the minimum amount of compute necessary, it can move as quickly as possible. But when a robot is stressed and it's failing, it should use more compute to A, collect more data so we can train and squash the edge case, and B, convey why it fails to again, people in factories and people that would otherwise not understand what the robot is trying to do.

Yeah. And that aligns with like test time, inference, scaling rules. Right now where you want to do more reasoning for harder problems. That makes sense.

Yeah.

Very cool. Anything else, Jordy? Are we good?

I think we're good. But come back on again soon. Teddy.

Yeah.

This is fantastic. This is exciting. And I look forward to interacting, speaking the the in Tempest language with many, many robots throughout my life.

Me too. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

Cheers, dude. Bye.

Next up, we have Sigil, founder of Extraordinary, coming on the stream. Very excited to have him. I gotta say, these teal fellows pretty punctual. I was about to say things too late. This is a very crazy thing. You get this calendar invite, you just hop on the stream. Buddy, you here, right?

That's at weird times. Hey, join at 1:42 sigil. Great to have you on. How you doing? I'm doing pretty good. How are you doing? Great. It's been a super fun day so far. The class is absolutely stacked and congrats on making it in. Why don't you start with a bit of backstory, your personal story and then what you're working on. Yeah. So I'm C. Joel, the founder of Victoria.com we are the extraordinary talent company of America. If you Google one visa for extraordinary ability, you'll find my face is the COVID image and I'm the guy going around giving out these alien of extraordinary ability hoodies that you see on your X feed. Amazing. Talk about your personal journey to kind of building this company. Yeah, so when I was in high school, I built this project that was. Was, I think he did like 100k in revenue this first month. And I used the funds to pay someone to finish high school for me and I San Francisco. And I came here on a tourist visa. I'm originally from Toronto, Canada. I'm like, holy, these people are based. These people are incredibly ambitious. I have to stay here. And if you don't go to college. At the time I originally got into the MT program at University of Pennsylvania. I decided to opt out because I was pretty stubborn. I really just wanted to be in Silicon Valley. And the only visa options was the O1 for extraordinary ability. And this is what the US government calls it. And at the time, this was probably three years ago, it wasn't as proliferated. The one person I knew was Patrick Collison, who had that. I couldn't get a TN visa or the H1B because you needed a degree. So I had to go for the O1. And I hunted down every single person in Silicon Valley that had the O1 visa, tried to understand what could qualify, and after eight months with an immigration lawyer, I filed it. It was sponsored by Nepal. I built this company with him and I was approved at 20. And I was like, holy shit, this is. It's so hard for the world's best talent to, to come here. It's so unintuitive. And I made a YouTube video about the, about the process that has since been seen by hundreds of thousands of people. And I made this, this hoodie during. As merch for that YouTube video.

So.

And that kind of took off.

What are the overall Trends in the O1 visas? It feels like, I mean, like, immigration is obviously complicated, but it feels like all the stars align for, like, everyone being like, oh, ones are great. Elon has come out and said he loves oh, ones and like, it feels like it's aligned with American values and freedom and like, brain drain and even strategic stuff. Like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of pro. Are the number of ones 01s increasing? Is this a new program? Can you give us, like, a little bit of, of, like, history and trajectory for the O1 program? Broadly?

Yeah. I mean, I like to think that the Owen was created for the Manhattan Project. I think the, the. It's, it's that ethos. I don't know the exact origins, but it's, it's, it's been around and it's, it's been used to. The premise of it is that you are the top. You're an individual has risen to the top of your field. I like to say you're like the top point one percentile at what you do. And USCIS has these eight criterias to adhere towards. You can, you can be a tattoo artist, you could be a chip Designer. You could be a, you know, the founder of the fastest growing AI company who I'm currently helping out. As long as you can prove that you are extraordinary at what you do, you can get it. And I think for the longest time it was. It's very unclear because when you go to the website, it's like examples you, you have a Nobel Prize or like whichever. And the way this company came to be was I literally mapped down 500 people who have O1s and EB1s for extraordinary ability. I gave them these hoodies. I actually built a website and just compiled them in terms of like their stories and like how they came to America. And yeah, I think that because of that more and more people have been in applying for it. There's no cap to it. As long as you meet their bar for and convince USCIS that you're extraordinary, you can get it. And so I think it's very positive. Sum of the visa.

Yeah. So what, what is the process actually like? I imagine that there's a lot of paperwork and lawyers and cost stuff that's, you know, tailor made for LLM automation and just even just normal SaaS, apps and stuff and form filling. What are the headaches that O1 recipients typically report as particularly painful?

I mean, My process took eight months. It cost me more than $10,000. I mean, you got to, you got to keep in mind what is the end product. I have a printer here. You're literally printing 500 pages of paper, like with a bunch of citations, all evidence you might have heard, like there's recommendation letters to which you got to go chase down people and be like, hey, can you please vouch for me being in America, I think I can contribute to this economy.

One shotted by a chatgpt from now on.

You can imagine so many EM dashes. There's thousands of M dashes.

Let's delve into why he should be a 01. Yeah, I'm sure that's happening.

That got shipped off to like USCIS Texas. They still use like, they still break code, spin the box and then scan it, which is like super archaic.

Wow. Wow. They don't even accept like a PDF.

No, they don't. I have to ship it through FedEx. And then they parse it and they scan it. Yeah, and then some very efficient diploma just adjudicates whether you're extraordinary. Okay, well, we're big fans of paper, but even that.

Yeah, yeah, even that.

How have you thought about the business model for extraordinary? It feels like, you know, there's some immediate probably upfront value that you can capture and just making this process less painless. But when you think about taking somebody at the absolute top of their field and bringing them to the best economy in the world where they're going to attract other talent and capital and things like that, it feels like a lot of the value creation is on the things that they.

The obvious business model here is to sell the data to venture capital firms.

Yes, yes, yes.

Which I feel like might already be happening judging by. By the involvement of naval. No, I mean what's the actual business model? Jokes aside.

Yeah. So I'm tempted to rename the company to the Extraordinary Talent Company of America. Our flagship first product obviously just making this much more seamless and faster. Like I think it should be a standard deviation of speed up which already is. We've already power ramp comes mission and we one of top founders building companies that we know and we should see a lot more of that on our X feeds coming along. I mean look, you can make a good amount from providing the best product and serving these great talent to relocate here on the Visa basis. But where I want to take things, I don't actually view this ultimately as a Visa filing company. I think it's a talent company. And if you look at the life cycle of extraordinary talent, like someone who's I don't know, like a senior engineer creating who's shipped like 60% of Devon. I just filed that 01 case actually. Right. Like the, the whole life cycle of them one being like placed at their company all the way to how they even relocate there. Like most of the value capture isn't actually that like Visa filing. And I think also AI is going to to eat away at margins in terms of services across all technology companies. And so then what can you build that has network effects, that has innate distribution that can just attract the world's best talent? I want to build something where if you're remotely ambitious and talented, you have a means to be discovered. And if you remotely want to come here, you're going to be on extraordinary.com? how do you think about giving people an opportunity to, to get to America without having credentials yet? Right. Presumably there's somebody out in the world who's 16 years old, they're in some high school type situation and they actually could be one of the world's best programmers or something like that, but maybe they haven't gotten a job. Is there a world in the future where you would create sort of open testing where people could kind of like prove their abilities. I'm sure somebody would figure out how to, how to hack it pretty quickly. But how do you think about kind of creating the ability for people to prove their capabilities prior to getting the ability to get traditional credentials? Yeah, first off, I actually got a 16 year old approved for an O1 visa a few weeks ago. Nice. What are they extraordinary at? Interaction design for Roblox. Amazing.

The most elite robots player.

And on, on, on the, on the talent discovery front, I, I think that the, the way that, the way that we value talent is evolving. I mean right now, like it's so funny, like there's more core, but then the founder of Clulee is like building software that hacks them. Record interviews. Proxies for measuring talent are just like falling through completely. And so like how do you then measure talent in this new age where you know, we value people who are able to leverage AI much more. And I think the, the way that companies hire will evolve and we need to account for that. We need with ways of assessing people, but also discovering people to showcase just how competent they are. And I'm a very big believer of being able to give those means to people around the world regardless of their traditional accolades and just being able to empower people who have the merit and who have the ability and they should be discovered and sponsored to come to America. Well, congratulations on getting into the Thiel Fellowship and I'm sure there will be many Thiel Fellows in the future that go through your program. Yeah, already helping them.

I'm excited. For the first 01 bodybuilder we saw what happened with Arnold Schwarzenegger when he came to America, had a fantastic impact outside of bodybuilding.

Went on to be the Governor of California.

Governor of California. Pretty good.

So don't count out the bodybuilding builders.

So let's just get all the elite bodybuilders from all over the world, bring them here on 01. That's my goal.

As long as you're the top at what you do, we help you.

That's fantastic. That's great. Well, thanks so much for stopping by.

Thanks for coming on.

We'll talk.

Congrats. Cheers, bye. Next up, just Gold's Gym in Venice just has hundreds of new members that are all.

America is already dominant in bodybuilding. We, we hold more than 50% of the Mr. Olympia, but we could be doing even better if we can always do better. Everyone from all over the world who is elite at bodybuilding to America, which is my dream. Anyway, our next guest is here. We have Aidan Smith, founder of Interphases. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

Howdy. I'm doing really well. How are y'? All? We're great. Great to have you on.

Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the best way to understand my life is kind of framed at this realization I had when I was bit. A little, little tiny kid in, like, fourth grade. I was sitting in this classroom, and I was watching some guy doing real science, and I saw him and I was like, dang. I, like, know how to do addition. I know how to do basic algebra, and, like, where the hell am I going with my life? And I realized that the world is a really scary, competitive place, and I had to have some kind of heuristic by which I should get better. And so I thought to myself, all right, every two years, I want to double in the metrics I care about, which at fourth grade was coolness. And so at that point, growing up in the South Bay, I grew up to exceptionally chill parents, an opera singer and electrical engineer who were just like, oh, son, just do whatever you want to do. And I was like, okay, every two years, I will double in coolness. And so that's exactly kind of how I structured my life. And in the next two years, I did stuff like tried to memorize the dictionary because this is what I thought cool was when I was like, that's pretty cool. Eventually, the coolness actually went in a direction of, like, things that were actually pretty cool. Like, when I was in high school, I started working@chess.com and I'd, like, delivered tons and tons of features and made some really cool products that were really impactful to me. And when I was in college, I was like, okay, what's the coolest problem you could possibly work on? And I ended up working in Neuralink, where I'm currently seated. Sorry. To any co workers who are seeing me taking this. Don't never apologize.

But what about. What about, like, joining a punk band, learning to do a kick flip? Did that ever come into the cool fact?

I do all these things. I like guitar.

Oh, nice. There we go.

Psychology. So I have a lot of mushrooms memorized throughout the Sierra Nevada in general. These are the things that fit my heuristic.

Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. You're not the cliche cool guy. You're not driving.

You're just leveling up. You're maxing out your character.

Yeah. The red Ferrari convertible. That comes next year when there's another doubling in the cool factor.

The doubling, the doubling. People are going to start tracking the doubling. Like the bitcoin.

The having.

I want to make a poly market is the real thing. Stay on track.

This is amazing. So you've been working at Neuralink. What are you working on now?

Yeah, so at Neuralink, I've been doing all kinds of really cool things. And one of these things I've been doing most recently is I'm leading the Sound Speech project. Essentially, you've seen the study that was announced fairly recently, so I can talk about this a little bit. But basically, there's a really great corpus, interesting literature that goes from how do you get from inside your head to outside your head? This is super, super profound in technology. Imagine if you have ALS and you're locked in or something like this. I spend a lot of time around these people, and every minute I spend with them, I think more to myself that these people need to be able to communicate to the outside world better. And Neuralink is doing a really great job at this kind of thing. I have so much confidence in the team. I have so much confidence that this technology is going to be transformative. But also I really hope I don't get ALS anytime soon. I really hope I don't have a brainstem stroke or something that keeps me from being able to communicate sanely. And I still am interested in the way this technology. Technology will go on to transform other parts of the world.

Sure.

And so with interfaces, what I'm looking at is I see all these kind of gizmos for AI. I see these, like, limitless pendants. I see these smartwatches and things that are trying to kind of integrate all this data, and I don't fully buy it. The reason why I don't is because I actually don't like voice as a medium that much. For most things, if it actually wants to integrate into your life effortlessly, I don't want to be in the middle of conversation with you and be like. Like, what's the guy on the left's name?

It's super awkward.

It's terrible. So how do you do better? And there's a couple ways you can think about this. One former coworker of mine and a guy I really respect, Bliss, who you may have seen on Twitter or whatever, told me that there's a couple ways you can get value out of machine learning. And one of them is kind of arbitrage via data, and another is arbitrage via time. And so if you have these longer time series you can kind of get more bits out of them by just increasing your confidence intervals, either by doing these kinds of kind of causal estimates or acausal estimates where you have understanding of what's going on in the future as well as in the past. And so you can kind of use this to do sane updates or just by looking for signals that are kind of strong over a long period of time. And I think that with this in mind, there's kind of room for this halfway horse between a conventional microphone, which can pick up stuff in real time and do transcription in real time, and a. Like an EA or someone who actually will kind of try to predict what the heck you're doing in space. And so you can imagine is building a device that basically takes these fundamentally pretty crappy signals, like MEG signals, for example.

Sorry, NEG signals.

Yeah, yeah. So there's many ways in which signals are propagated through the body to move your arms or to create electrical activity.

Sure.

You may have seen a recent paper out of Reality Labs and Meta where they use exactly this to kind of.

Of the Orion headset. They bought that company, I forget what it's called, but they bought a company like six years ago and they're finally implementing it, Right?

Yeah. And it's extremely cool. A friend of mine went to one of their clinical trials and put the thing on and you try it out. You say, look, I'm pinching my fingers and the fingers pinch and it's pretty magical. This is the kind of thing which normally you would have to cut a hole in your head to do, but you don't necessarily have to do here. Sure. And there's a really good story to be told about kind of doing this for speech and getting really terrible speech. Speech. I have no illusions as a neurotechnologist that you will get really terrible speech out of this. But the key thing is that this does not matter because the context is what matters. And by informing this really awful speech on the context of what's around you and like your attention to the situation, you may be able to actually get the underlying part of it that matters. And so, in fact, indeed, even if I can only kind of pick up the word left and guy, I might know that I want to know who's the guy on the left. And.

And that's an easy LLM transformer problem. Right. So you get a big bag of words. It's very messy, but it's enough to turn into a semblance of a thought that could be confirmed with a pinch.

Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Now ideally, at least in my eyes, you have this just totally effortlessly against your life and you kind of collect this data all the time via a method that's fairly subtle. I have a little bit of alpha here that I won't spill. So you have to have me on in a couple months to see my fundamentals demos. But of how to get this data. So you're constantly collecting this and it's constantly informing and improving on how you interact with the world in general. I really care about efficiency in whatever I do. And lots of little things in your day to day life are super inefficient in these pretty funny ways. And I think that by kind of having this compute that is always acting with it doesn't invade the privacy of other people. I want to understand myself better. I want to be able to improve myself. I want to be able to keep on that doubling path without constantly listening to you guys or to my friends or to the co workers or whoever else is around me. I want to get the data set to do that. So there's this kind of dual pronged thing of like, okay, I should create the better interface to interact with LMS and to build the higher bit rate communication interfaces and also get a better model for oneself.

I had this idea in college that got my wisdom teeth out and I was like, I want them to put a microphone in the hole there because then I could set. I could whisper, who's the guy on the left? And it wouldn't be picked up to anyone else, but it'd be able to pick up the audio. But I think that's probably gross and kind of a part of the tech tree. We don't even need to go down because we can just leapfrog that whole step.

We've already gone down and I had to break it to you. There's this Israeli company called Molar Mike that does exactly this for application. No way. Yeah, you can imagine that, like you have bombs going off around you and you're like, boss, we need backup. But you can't hear that over the crazy loud sound.

Artillery molar mic. No way.

Molar mics, we need that company.

Did they do it? I have no idea, but I got to keep doing it.

Ben's always telling me our producer's always telling us to move the mic.

Yeah, talk closer to the microphone.

But I just have a molar mic.

Yeah, we need to be augmented for sure. Are you going into a similar FDA pathway as neuralink? Is that how things are going to play out for you?

Yes, I'd like to avoid this if possible. I do think that there's room for a device that's somewhere in between this real, really groundbreaking, first in class biomedical device which involves a lot of risk. I mean, yeah, fundamentally invasive neurosurgery involves a lot of risk even when you're doing it with the very best surgeons in the world with these robots that can avoid vascularly. True with everything, there's still some risk price in there. And so I think again, there's this halfway horse thing of like, okay, maybe it's invasive, but maybe it's not quite as risky of a thing. Maybe it's more like getting like an implant for birth control or more like getting simple surgery to remove mole. These kind of things that are much more every day and much sooner. I. I'm very bullish on nernk in the long run and I think that you should keep an eye on the amazing stuff. Folks are up to here.

But yeah, if DJ is in the office, tell him I say hi. We'd love to have him on the show.

I will. I love dj.

He's great. He's fantastic. You've been fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by.

What I got to ask before you go, you're. You're skill maxed to the gills already. But what, what. What's next? What are you besides the new of kind company? What are some areas that you're trying to level up now? Believe it or not, the next thing I'm doing next week is I'm making a trumpet from first principles. I have a physics textbook and I want to, without any reference, try to figure out how far apart all the valves should be. I want to cast in my backyard with a big crucible and I want to play this thing which probably won't work. And so I'll get better at metalworking. I'll get better at physics. I'll get better at all these little stupid things I care about. And it's a pretty fun little interstitial bit before I really put my head down and get back to the great doubling come incredible on the show live.

I want to hear the.

Come on. We want to hear you. I'm no good, I have to warn you. But I'll be better off if it if it in two years.

You'll be good.

If it makes sound, it works.

That's fantastic. Great question. Jordan.

Awesome. All right. Great to meet you. Congratulations.

Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Next up, we got Colton coming in the studio. Welcome to Colton. As soon as he hops in here.

The idea of just trying to get twice as cool, it's so good. Constantly and just never. Never being like, oh, you know, I'm cool enough.

No, double the.

The great doubling. I mean, he. He doesn't look like, you know, I don't know. I don't know if he can have champagne yet. But, you know, we. We followed a similar principle around the great double growth.

It's the most powerful force in the world.

Something that you can understand unless you've experienced it. Yeah, we experienced it. Going from a thousand followers to 2000 followers.

Imagine that at trumpet manufacturing. Fantastic. Well, we have our next guest in the studio. Welcome to the stream. Colton, how are you doing? Welcome.

Good. How are you guys doing? Can you hear me?

Yeah, yeah, we can hear you. Would you mind kicking it off with a little introduction on yourself and the company?

Sure. My name's Colton. I'm from Philadelphia. Right now I'm in Boston working on my company called orbit, which I think you guys actually got a brief introduction to because my teammate Stephen was on here, I think, just an hour or two ago.

That's right. Yeah.

There we go. The double teal fellow combo.

Give us your side of the story. What does he get wrong about orbit? No, just unpack it again a little bit, and then we'll take the conversation in a different direction.

Yeah, absolutely. So I can tell you how I first heard about this idea and got involved with it.

Yeah. And how'd you meet him? I'd love to know that story. That's interesting.

Yeah. So Stephen went to Georgetown, and he was looking for an engineer to help him build this neurotech, but there's no engineers at Georgetown at all. They don't have an engineering department. And so he was running around, like, the whole DMV area looking for an engineer that could help him build some of these circuits and the hardware and the code and such. And so eventually, that led him to me. He tells me that he met with a lot of people, with a lot of people before, but. Is the business guy yelling at you? Yeah, I think he said something. I can't quite here. Hey, business. Hey, shut up, business guy. The engineers, the technical founders talking. We. We'd met, and we went on zoom for a bit, and I already had an internship that I was very interested in lined up for the summer, but he started talking to me and explaining this idea that he had. And at least during the call, two things were pretty clear. And one, that Steven himself is an incredibly exceptional guy. And even after two years working with him that is still true and still impresses me. And the second thing was that he convinced me that neurotech was a harder to problem to work on than any other problem that I was working on. So I was going into the field of aerospace and I love jet engines. I think they're the most mechanically complex systems that exist today. And they're really cool for a lot of reasons. You have this really tight tug of war between crazy precise tolerances and like these extreme magnitudes and speed and heat and stresses, all these things. But it's the system that humans fully break built and can analyze and look at. Whereas the brain is kind of a black box and the tool set that you need to approach the type of problems that we see when trying to build neurotech and interact with the brain in any way just forces you to be, in my opinion like a lot more creative and search a much larger option space to get the answers that you want. And so I thought this is an incredibly hard problem. I really want to work on this. We started working together that summer. I was still doing my internship, but that's nine to five, there's 16 more hours in a day day. And eventually at the end of the summer I told my supervisor at the company I was working at that I was going to leave a month early. And in August Stephen and I went down to dc, just rented out an Airbnb for a month and just had this basically like a month long buildathon where we tried to get the scrappiest MVP we could at the end of the month. And we did that eventually went back to school in the meantime. We were still working very hard on the project. In fact I was failing most of my classes at the time until it got to the point of about October or November when when we had met with our first venture investor and this is Dune Ventures, he funded our precede round and at that point we were no longer resource constraint. The only constraint to us making progress was time. I actually did really enjoy school. I was a mechanical engineer at Hopkins and I felt that through each of my classes I was really expanding my tool set and the things that I could build and also the types of engineering problems that I could analyze quantitatively. And so I did really love my classes there, but. But you know, I figured I could either do school really well, I could do the startup really well, I couldn't do both at the same time. And it was a really obvious choice to choose the startup instead and work in this direction because for me it was very plain that this was the direction of growth or at least the most growth that I could have. I still think that's true. And that's a large part of what guides my decisions and the path that I take in life.

Very cool. Can you take me through some of the. The tech tree that led up to this point? What are some devices or technologies that you think have kind of commercialized appropriately or at least laid the groundwork for what you're doing today?

Yeah, that's a good question. There's not a whole lot that laid the groundwork, like, technology wise. A lot of the stuff that we're using has actually been around for a very long time. And so if you think of the main application that we're looking at right now, vestibular stimulation, you basically just got a circuit that's a constant current stimulator. So it'll inject the same amount of current regardless of the resistance that your head is. Because for humans, that actually varies a lot and can span even an order of magnitude, which is unlike a lot of other physiological characteristics. But the idea of having a constant current stimulator is a technology that we've had for a very long time. It's something that we've used for a human application. And like tens, for example, and TDCs and such a big part of neurotech. And the progress in neurotech, I think, is not actually implementationally constrained. And that, like, you do have to have good hardware and you do have to make it well and incredibly robust, but it's actually how you use that hardware. So the types of signals that you send, how you integrate them with the rest of your system, whether it's closed loop and you're taking certain measurements, how you're analyzing those measurements, feeding it back into the signals that you're sending, that actually gives you a lot more gain and a lot more innovation in neurotech. Mm.

Jordy.

Yeah, I'm just. I'm also. The main question I had for Steven earlier was around kind of like testing process, how, you know, I imagine you guys both are super eager because of these sort of like fast feedback cycle. But what's your approach and how do you focus on learning through self experimentation? Yeah, there's two sides of it. So the first side is safety and stuff like that. And so for a lot of vestibular stimulation that's electrical, there's a good bit of precedence, actually, for how it's been used in the clinic in a very binary sort of way where they aren't able to elicit a Lot of autonomic functions that you'd like, but it's still shown with efficacy and a lot of research that, hey, you can take this current signal and you can send it to your vestibular system and there's no adverse effects. And it is a practice that they use very binarily in the core clinic. And then when we're doing stuff that's more novel, we'll actually take a very rigorous approach to safety. And so a good example I can think of is when we were working with an ultrasound system and no one before had ever used mechanical waves through ultrasound to elicit vestibular stimulation. We started, you know, very bare bones with going to like simulations first and then after doing simulations, getting like a fake skull that matches the physical properties of the head head, putting that in a water tank, measuring with the hydrofoam what the field is actually looking like, seeing that, that lines up with their simulations, basically doing weeks or even up to a month of the math, the numbers, the simulations to find out, hey, this is causing the exact effect that we want. And then based on that, then going to testing on really just like Stephen, for a lot of the outside stuff to see that it works. And that's kind of the, that's kind of the safety.

Stephen. Yeah.

All right. All right, buddy. Yeah, you're going to want to lay down for this. I mean, are you guys getting to the point where you're really narrowing in on some of the more near term commercial applications of what you're working on, or is it still kind of like, hey, there's so many different directions that we can take. We just need to continue to experiment broadly and run a bunch of different types of tests. More of the latter right now. Not because we don't have a direction that seems viable, but we just don't know it's the best one yet. So I'm sure Stephen's talked about some of it, but in a couple of different autonomic regulation fields, we have very powerful effect sizes, at least in the small sample sets that we've done, being just, you know, people within the company, co founders and such. But for the types of effects that we're looking at, at if you can't detect it without a larger sample size, say like, you know, 50, 100 people. And it's just this like stat sig effect that like maybe placebo may not not be kind of like, you know, taking vitamins in the morning. It's not the effect that we're looking for. We're basically like, we're able to have this fast iteration cycle because the autonomic effects that we do elicit are very obvious. And it's, you know, very clear to, you know, me or Stephen, whoever's being tested, like, oh, this isn't placebo. I'm actually feeling something that's crazy different now in terms of sleep, but is like sleep, for example. This is an example that Steven gave earlier. Just like basically doubling your deep sleep. Right. Something like that. Every human has to sleep every single day. Is that not a big enough market to try to bring something to market there that could allow. I would personally pay a lot of money to be able to sleep for six hours hours and get the same effect as sleeping eight hours. Yeah. I'm curious how you think of those trade offs, basically. And I think a lot of teams would just say, hey, this is such a big opportunity. If we're seeing an effect here, we should really run this down in terms of if I had to make a prediction about what would be our first product that we release, I would, with the information that we currently have, guess that it's a sleek product. And so a lot of the testing that we're doing right now is related to some sleep. A lot of the engineering that we're doing is building out more robust systems that could actually be used already. For example, it's not, you know, some big prototype circuit, but something that you could wear and a form factor that people would want to wear in their sleep. And for us, what we're shooting for about right now is just a headband circuit's thin enough that you really don't notice anything other than just this piece of cloth that goes around your head and is, you know, skin tight. That said, even though I'm confident we can build the sleep product right now and push towards a certain release that would be be successful. And, you know, what you call successful, whether that's, you know, selling 10,000 units or 10 million units, is a bit more defined by, like, what your goals are and why you want to release in the first place. For us, it's actually not so much about the money, but building a user base that we can start to expand in. With neurotech, you know, your brain is a very intimate thing, and consumers are going to be very, very skeptical of the first neurotech products that come about. And so whether it's the case that you want to release a neurotech product that, you know, let's say feasibly could be sold to 10 million people or 50 million people if they're ready for it. And neurotech has become a more popular idea rather than maybe finding a more niche entry market first and doing some type of launch that would give you more feedback and more information about what the marketplace is looking like, how ready people are for neurotech and those types of questions, it's actually a lot less clear which of those paths is the best one. And I think it's very hard to get a clear answer to that unless we have a more clear picture of the scientific space and actually what types of effects we're looking for. And so sleep is something that you could go consumer with. You could sell to every person because every person sleeps. But if it turns out that there's, let's say, an unexpected amount of stickiness in the market with people that want to buy neurotech products, then a better approach may be to go with a fully medical product. So looking with people that have a disease where you know, hey, maybe. Maybe neurotech is a little early for consumers. But if you're. And we can go actually even back to the sleep analog, let's say you're an insomniac who can struggle to sleep even two, three hours a night now wearing this headband. And this idea of neurotech is not quite as. There's not quite as much skepticism as in the friction's a little lower. And so there's kind of this back and forth between we have to analyze, like, what the market is looking like and what types of products are going to fit that market and also, like, what types of products can we built that are able to fit that market. And so it's a little bit harder to get feedback on the first one being the market space until I think our best information there is when we actually release a product to market and learn from it. But at least right now, there's a lot more to be learned on the science side, There's a lot more to be learned with sleep and how to not just make a system like that, but continually improve it and make it better. And then there's also a lot of sub branches that we want to continue to explore so we know that we're not in some local maximum when maybe not too far, there's enough other higher local maximum to be hit.

Very cool.

Fantastic answer.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Great to meet you, Colton. Congratulations on all the progress so far.

Demo unit.

Yeah, send us a demo unit. We can. Yeah, actually, that'd be great. We're ready. We're ready.

Yeah. And, yeah, thanks so Much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, cheers. Have a great day. Very nice meeting you.

Yeah, bye. Next up we have Koki Machida coming into the studio. Our last teal fellow of the day finishing it out strong. Welcome to the stream, Koki. How are you doing? Sorry for keeping you waiting. We are running long. Welcome. But you're here. Please introduce yourself and the company that you're building.

Hey guys, thank you for having me on. Thanks for the time. I'm Koki, originally from Japan. You know, I spent a lot of time growing up thinking about natural disasters. I think, you know, in SF you don't, you know, it's like nice weather, everything's, you know, kind of nice. It's. And you get to work on really, really interesting things. But I was in the 2011 earthquake where 18,000 people died in a couple days and a lot of my friends homes were destroyed. And you have these typhoons that blow away my grandparents roofs every three years or so. And I keep asking them why you can just move because you're in typhoon alley. What's the whole point of having to stay there? But it's like something so deeply ingrained, right? It's something, you know, that you accept that you, you know, kind of just accept as, as feet. And I was talking to the environment minister and the, and the infrastructure minister of Japan recently and they were saying that they, they spent billions of dollars on, you know, disaster infrastructure. Like they would build these like, you know, columns under Tokyo, right? So like when it floods, the water can go in yet. Like they were like oh shoot. We haven't actually solved the problem which is the intensification of these events. But back then I, you know, I was 11 and I did not know that you can, you know, actually start to fight these natural disasters. But I started like building, you know, robots when 3D printers were really popular, started selling them and then the money I made from that I put into Bitcoin and then got into like hedge funds in high school and I started a small one one. And then in college I came across this startup which was building AI weather forecasts. Not many people think about weather forecasting as this huge expense that you have to take on. But when you look at these larger countries, they spend about $2 billion per year on supercompute. Essentially a big chunk of the world's supercomputers are used on running partial differential equations to be able to, to calculate the weather. Right. It's like something that you don't really think about. And with machine learning, what you're able to do is reduce costs by 99% and increase resolution by 100 times. And when you see that we started out very small, five people, but I was splitting time at Berkeley and then at the startup and we became the national weather forecast for the Philippines where it was a lot, a lot more affordable. And I start to think about, okay, wow. Our understanding of not only just Earth itself, but being able to model, gather data and then predict has gotten so much better. I start to think about what's the next natural step. The whole point of gaining more intelligence is so that you can act upon it. And that's what I said to think about. Can't really specifically tell what we're, tell you what we're doing in terms of, you know, the application layer. But this is kind of like the, the transformation we're thinking about. Is it magic? Is it spells?

Are you going to bomb the hurricane? Is it a bomb? I've heard that pitched before.

I wonder where you heard that from. It's 10,000 times the power of a hurricane. Hurricanes are interesting, right? Because the power, the amount of energy that goes in there is so strong. If you look at Google research, they used to have this program where they're trying to harness energy out of a hurricane and if you can harness it properly, you can power the United States for months and months just from one hurricane.

That's incredible.

Which is a crazy thing to think about. So you're going to make them and then you're going to control them and, and then there's going to be a bunch of sci fi offshoots where Cokie.

You better be nice to me.

Cokie had a good thing going. He was powering a lot of data centers with his homegrown hurricanes and then one got out of control.

But yeah, I mean, talk to me about weather forecasting and kind of the data sources because obviously, yes, massive kind of revolution in AI machine learning generally.

But you slipped in that you, you're doing the weather forecasting for the Philippines. Yeah, like you guys are like a data provider already. The previous company I worked at during school, that's what we're focused on. And a lot of it is coming up with models. How can you compute these partial differential equations more efficiently with the same amount of data you have? And so you look like DeepMind or Nvidia coming up with their frontier models, being able to, to run diffusion based models to forecast better. But for us, what we think is fundamental is collecting data that no one really has. Software has Become so commoditized that now it's just Claude and then Xai and then OpenAI. It's just a never ending battle for us. It's like, how can you collect data and how can you see the world in a different way that allows you to, to act upon it? And how can you causally act upon a weather phenomena?

Yeah, you mentioned diffusion. Is there a distinction between weather forecasting using diffusion models versus transformer based models or token prediction models? Is that a meaningful distinction or are you kind of using the term broadly?

It gets really complicated in a sense that I think both of them are good at kind of milking as much information looking at, okay, what are the latent parameters? How can you figure out somewhat unnoticeable characteristics within weather models? But I think the interpretability of weather models also become very important. If you can characteristically define, okay, which parameters within a high dimensional vector is creating a lot of bias. How can you tweak that so that you can get back on track? And it's like weather is so chaotic that even one small perturbation in an initial condition can really mess up the forecast. And that's why it's really difficult to forecast a week out. And so being able to assimilate data as you go. And that's why we're focusing on, okay, how can you collect data that no one really has so that you can make sure you're not debiased too much?

Talk to me about the data sources for this. I'm familiar with Doppler radar systems that the local news has. But are satellites playing a role now in weather prediction? Is the actual data that we're gathering to build these models on top of improving? And what are the key vectors that are driving better data going into these models?

Yeah, satellite data is interesting. A lot of reanalysis data has always been used and it's made by NOAA or ecmwf. Unfortunately, NOAA is not doing too well now what we're doing is building sensors and then literally flying into storms or into clouds to measure within them. It's a complex convective process that you really have to just send something in.

Autonomous vehicle, I assume no flying the plane personally.

Our focus is on how can you build infrastructure? Infrastructure in a sense that, okay, models are a part of the infrastructure. But how can you collect data? Data for a targeted vehicle. So for example, hurricanes are interesting. I'm sorry I can't say everything in detail, but in terms of hurricanes, it's like, okay, if you want to see how convection is happening. What about the density of clouds? What kind of grapple columns and water droplets exist? You really just have to fly a plane in there. It's hard to just do drones because it's too, too turbulent or these sensors are too big. And so thinking about that is an interesting problem as well. But I think fundamentally what we're pushing against is that many of these reactive methods of disaster. If you look at Insurance, there's about $140 billion per year in insurance premiums issued in the US for tropical cyclones. And yet, like, insurance premiums have doubled every single year for the last four or five years in many coastal cities. And when you look at like, another catastrophe happening, like last year, Hurricane Helene and Milton was, was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. There weren't even category fives, and Congress had to give out $100 billion in aid. Right. But when the next Hurricane Katrina happens in Florida, for example, then insurance is just going to, to be insolvent in many ways.

Is there a market for better weather data by itself? I mean, it sounds like fighting the hurricane is important, but we talked to somebody who works in data brokerage loosely and said everyone talks about, oh, we'll sell it to the hedge funds, but there's only like hedge five hedge funds that buy anything, and they're kind of stingy, apparently, and they don't really buy that much data. You think about the insurance market. Yeah, $140 billion. But if you're an insurer and you know that, you know a whole bunch of houses are going to be destroyed in two weeks or, you know it, in four weeks, you're not really going to be able to adjust premiums that fast to make up for that. So it feels like. And then, and then you look at the government, the government might want to know, but even then, it's like, are they really a good buyer?

Just, just continue spitballing. In California, when there's certain communities that are threatened, they'll have like, price, private fire response.

I guess that makes sense.

Basically, even in hoa.

Is that a good.

But.

But is that a reason?

I'm just thinking about, like, the, the dynamic right now where a hurricane is effectively forming. Yeah. And the response is to watch it and then tell people to evacuate based on where you think it's going to go.

Yeah.

And it's kind of insane that we don't have any sort of proactive response to civilization, say, hey, this thing is progressing to being more and more intense. Can we, you know, sort of stop it?

Yeah. So yeah, data market. I don't know how much you can talk about it. We might just have to have you back on.

No, no, when you, when you look at insurance, it's pretty insane. Like they look at, you know, okay, what does, you know, hurricane damage looked like in the last 40 years? Okay, let's, you know, aggregate average and then kind of, you know, add bias for like some of the intensification of these events or the increase and the exposure and that's all you do. And so a lot of the interesting financial assets come up when you look at like catastrophe bonds. They're like certain hedge funds that literally just trade on catastrophe bonds. Right. And it's just about like estimating what is the arbitrage in terms of how much wildfire is going to wipe out a certain city or same for hurricanes as well.

Of sense. Well, we'll have to have you back when you can talk more about the product and where you're going with the company. But this was fantastic. Thank you so much for hopping on. This is a real pleasure.

Excited to hear more and congratulations.

We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you. Thank you for the first.

Bye. And that concludes Teal Fellow Tuesday. We have interviewed.

Looking forward to next Tuesday.

Next Tuesday in a year from now. A year from now. Also, I mean we mentioned Figma a few times but we forgot to mention that. Dylan Field, Teal Fellow. So go to figma.com think bigger, build faster. Figment helps design and development.

You are addicted.

Build great products together. I love ads, baby. I love.

That is the, I think the third that you've run today. I love it.

Anyway, I like this post from Andrea, this bumper sticker. It says honk if you like the taste of venture capital. And I just wanted to say and I love Hong Kong air horn and it's Graza and Olipop. I thought that was very funny. Is that, is this an anti venture capital bumper stick?

I don't know. I don't know how anybody could be anti venture capital. My lovely wife was one of the first investors in.

So if you're honking, you're honking.

And they're absolutely crushing.

What else is interesting cover today? I mean, TBPN was in the news with Ben Thompson chiming in over the weekend saying I love how it never occurs to the media that maybe they're just being out competed instead of the subject of some sort of conspiracy. Literally anyone can make a podcast. Sorry, they don't want to listen to yours.

I think to add to here the frustration from the media is that oftentimes entrepreneurs and investors don't even want to talk to the media anymore. So it's not that they don't, you know, they maybe will listen, but they don't even want to go. And this is something we talked about with Abe, the guy who wrote the profile on us. He was curious, why do you feel like people are so comfortable talking with you and we don't need to go?

Abe actually responded to this. He said, I think it can be both true that non traditional outlets like Ben's and TBPN are outperforming many traditional ones and that some of tech distrusts the traditional media, creating some of the audience for Ben and tbpn. And I love that because no quotes. No quotes around tbpn. Abe got the memo. We're in the mainstream now. We are the mainstream media. We are the traditional media.

Yeah.

I mean, we're wearing suits. What's more traditional than wearing. What's more traditional than wearing suits?

Highly traditional.

How could we be more traditional than wearing a tailored suit? While you report the news, while you.

Newsmax, I'm newsmaxing, John.

What else is interesting to talk about? There's some news in Polymarket. The odds of a US recession have dropped significantly. I'm very excited to hear that. Love that.

I threw up a market. Will Coinbase acquire Circle? Oh, yeah, September. That's gonna be fun. Somebody else was writing, see if I can read through this. This guy, I don't actually know this guy, but he wrote up an article and I guess he was at Coinbase for some time, which is interesting. So he's giving some background. I spent years in the crypto industry, first at Coin Fund, then at Coinbase helping scale its venture strategy. Everything in this post is based on publicly available Data from Circles, S1 and Coinbase's public filings. No insight information information information, just analysis anyone could replicate, but most don't. He's breaking down the USDC supply. He says total USDC equals Coinbase's USDC plus Circles, USDC plus everything else platform. USCC refers to the percentage of stablecoins held in a party's custodial products or managed wallet services. And so he's basically saying that Coinbase has 23% of the total USDC and.

They'Ve also been on a little acquisition spree. They bought that other big company, I think it was a billion dollar acquisition at least. I forget exactly the name. But we'll have to talk to Brian Armstrong from Coinbase about that.

Hopefully tomorrow he goes on to highlight that USCC is Coinbase's number two revenue driver and contribute to do 15% of Q1 2025. Could be a revenue more than staking.

Could be a beautiful partnership.

We'd love to see something.

Well, we'll cover it here and we will track it. What is the Poly market actually at?

Let's see, it's relatively low volume right now.

5%, 50%, 10%.

No, no, it was at. It was sitting at 40%. Somebody took a big no bet. And so it's sub 10%.

Sub 10%. Okay, well, we'll see if you have an opinion. Hop on polymark. Check it out. I think it's good to close this. Everyone's loving the Dyson keynote. Scott Belsky said agree, found it riveting and seriously considering getting a Dyson pencil vac. Sam.

So what is the pencil vac that.

That Dyson keynote was so wholesome. Just an excited inventor vacuuming the stage and showing off his new toy. All wrapped up in under nine minutes.

It's. It's a feature, basically uses a laser to expose.

Well, that's been on Dyson vacuums for a while.

I think that on mine.

Oh, well, you're living in poverty, I guess.

I have a Matic now, so I don't.

Yeah, that's true. Matic is pretty incredible. But. But Dyson, yeah, they've had the laser for a while, but I think what they did was they re. They restructured it because it used to be the internals, like the heavy battery part. And the actual vacuum. Vacuum part would be at the handle. And so the handle was always a little bit heavy. It seems like they've kind of shifted a lot of the weight, the center of gravity much lower. And so you can use it much more just like a walking stick. If you see here, you'll see that what he's actually holding in his hand, if you zoom in, is, is very thin. And so the whole thing is this very thin tube. And that means it's a lot easier to vacuum. And so I mean, get this in law. Get this for your parents and grandparents. They're gonna love it.

We talked about. Lesson was talking about how this is. This could basically be the beginning of the ek.

The smart cane. This is the smart cane. No way. Yeah, he was talking about that.

Imagine if everybody was walking around vacuuming all the time.

The world would be so clean. The world clean. This is the future. This is the future. And then you throw an LLM in that bad boy. Start talking. We could fit so much AI in this thing.

Intelligence and clean streets too cheap to meter.

Well, that's a great place to end it, folks. Stay tuned. Tomorrow we are doing Crypto Day. We have a whole bunch of absolute killers from the crypto ecosystem. It really came together well. The lineup is fantastic. Very, very exciting.

It's actually I wanted to before tomorrow try to estimate the total volume that, that the people joining tomorrow oversee on a daily basis. It's definitely in the. In the billions. It could easily be in the.

Oh, oh. Daily volume.

Volume.

Massive.

Massive.

Anyway, why don't you take us. Why don't you take us out with a massive gong hit, Jordy?

I would love to. John.

Wide is so good. I love it.

Swing the mic, I don't think.

Anyways, goodbye everyone. Thank you for watching. Have a great day.

Have a fantastic evening. Tomorrow, leave us a five star.

Leave us a five star review. Thank you for watching Teal fellow Tuesday, plus a bunch of other haters. It's great.

We'll see you tomorrow.

Goodbye.

Cheers.